1st Sunday of Lent
March 5, 2017
Gen 2: 7-9, 3: 1-7
Ps 51
Rom 5: 12-19
Matt 4: 1-11
Holy Cross, Champaign, Ill.
“Thru one man sin entered the world, and thru sin, death, and thus death came to all men, inasmuch as all sinned” (Rom 5: 12).
The sacred Scriptures today summarize
salvation history.
We don’t read the opening chapters of Genesis
literally, as we do, for instance, the stories of Israel’s kings or the
accounts of Jesus’ ministry. But we do
learn from those early chapters that God created for us a good world; that he
created men and women in his own image, including the gift of freedom; that we
abused that freedom by choosing evil rather than good, and so we—not
God—introduced evil into creation: “Thru
one man sin entered the world, and thru sin, death.”
Did God have to create us with freedom? Of course not.
But he made many, many creatures that lack freedom: the stars, the trees, the rocks, the oceans,
the beasts, and the birds. They all
glorify God but have no choice about it.
They just are. Generally
speaking, if you have a dog, you know that it will love and be loyal to just
about anyone who feeds it and rubs its tummy.
If you have a cat—well, you’re
loyal to the cat, which is more interested in the song birds in your flower
beds than in you. (My family has had
lots of dogs and a few cats.)
God created 2 forms of creatures who do have
a choice because they’re free—so that their praise of God, their acting well,
glorifies God in a way that the stars and rocks and animals don’t. Those 2 creatures are the angels and human
beings. We don’t know how it was the
angels chose evil and became devils, except that they chose that course, and
some angels remained loyal to their Creator (since angels don’t have bodies,
obviously, no belly rub was needed).
There are various pious stories and theories about that, but no biblical
evidence and no dogmatic teaching.
God doesn’t have a body either. So if God created men and women in his own
image, it’s not on the basis of our bodies.
Which is probably a good thing! By
the freedom of our minds and our souls we image God. However it happened at the origins of
humanity, we used that God-given gift of freedom, that imaging of God, to
reject him and choose ourselves. Even
Greek mythology knew that was a bad thing—poor Narcissus was doomed because he
worshiped his own image reflected in a pool of water. According to Genesis, the 1st human beings
were companions of the all-perfect, all-good, and all-wise God; were in an
intimate relationship with him. But they
wanted something … less: “The woman saw
that the tree was good for food, pleasing to the eyes, and desirable for
gaining wisdom” (Gen 3:6): goodness,
pleasure, and wisdom, but not God. And
less than goodness, wisdom, and the deepest satisfaction of our souls is what
we got instead of God. We got evil,
chaos, betrayal, and death.
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The Temptation & Fall of Man
(William Blake)
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Adam and
Eve will decide for themselves what is good and what is bad for them, rather
than accepting the gift of God’s specification of good and evil. Egotistical, self-centered self-assertion is
the primordial sin. And in its
consequences—the quest for control … the quest for power … [imposing] my will
on my own life, on others, and on the world—self-asserting pride prepared the
ground for the rest of the catalogue of death-dealing sins.[1]
Some human beings actually find a sadistic
glee in evil, chaos, betrayal, and death.
Think of the monster dictators of the last century, or of ISIS or Kim
Jong-Un or drug kings or human traffickers today. Some human beings only lament
the evil and death of the world we live in, and hopelessly throw up their hands: what’re you gonna do? And some human beings go beyond lamentation
and cry to God for pardon and redemption.
So we hear the Psalmist plead: “Have mercy on me, O God, in your goodness;
in the greatness of your compassion wipe out my offense. Thoroughly wash me from my guilt, and of my
sin cleanse me” (Ps 51:3-4).
Traditionally, that psalm is ascribed to King David; its 1st 2 verses
are actually a title: “A psalm of David,
when Nathan the prophet came to him after his sin with Bathsheba.” David had committed adultery and murder, and
was convicted of his crimes by the prophet (2 Sam 11-12). God pardoned David, but eventually, like all
of us, he paid the price of sin: “the
wages of sin is death,” St. Paul states bluntly (Rom 6:23).
God’s original plan for men and women was
glorious. But we used our freedom to
blow up the plan. So God went to Plan
B: “the abundance of grace and of the
gift of justification come to reign in life thru the one man Jesus Christ” (Rom
5:17). If the rebellion of one man—Genesis
blames the woman, Paul the man—the obedience of another man undoes the crime
and restores humanity to God’s grace. The
name Adam, incidentally, means
literally “the human being”; in other words, Everyman. Jesus Christ comes as another Everyman,
embodying in himself the ideal human being—the perfect image of God; in fact,
St. Paul calls him “the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all
creation” (Col 1:15), i.e., of the new creation, as Adam had been the firstborn
of the old creation.
This new Everyman, this new Adam, makes all
men and women just again. “Just” means right with God, holy. God of course, didn’t have to pull out Plan B. He
could’ve done what you and I tend to do:
OK, people, you’ve made your bed.
Now lie in it. Go on killing,
lying, stealing, betraying, wreaking sexual havoc; and when your miserable life
is done, then go to hell with those rebel angels whose horrid voices you’ve
listened to.
Well, thank God, God’s not like us! Thank God, he sent his Son to become
incarnate, to become a human being, to be a new Adam, an obedient Adam, who
would take us along with him into a just relationship with God, as the original
Adam had destroyed that relationship.
“The gift is not like the transgression.
For if by the transgression of the one, the many died, how much did the
grace of God and the gracious gift of the one man Jesus Christ overflow for the
many” (Rom 5:17).
Lent is our season of preparing for Easter,
for participation in the sacred mysteries of the passion, death, resurrection,
and ascension of Jesus: for becoming part
of redeemed humanity or reaffirming our belonging. The Collect of today’s Mass calls all of this
“the riches hidden in Christ.” And it
prays to the Almighty Father that our “worthy conduct pursue their effects,”
i.e., the effects of Christ’s passion, death, resurrection, and ascension. What’s translated here as “conduct” is the
Latin word conversatio,
which would be more aptly rendered as “conversion of life.” We pray that a conversion of life may make us
worthy of the effects of Christ’s redemption.
And conversion of life means acting less like our 1st parents, who chose
their own version of goodness over God’s version, and acting more like Jesus by
resisting our own self-centered behavior, choosing instead to worship the Lord
our God alone, to serve him alone.
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