Homily for 1st Sunday of Lent

Homily for the
1st Sunday of Lent

March 1, 2020

Gen 2: 7-9; 3: 1-7
Holy Name of Jesus, Valhalla, N.Y.

3 days ago most of us were signed with ashes, and many of us heard the ritual formula, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”  (Others were told, “Repent, and believe in the Gospel.”)  The “dust” formula evokes the story of man’s creation, read to us a few minutes ago:  “The Lord God formed man out of the clay of the ground and blew into his nostrils the breath of life” (Gen 2:7).

Virtually all Scripture scholars today will tell us that this isn’t a scientific or a historical account of human origins.  For that, we have to rely upon paleontologists and other scientists.  None other than St. John Paul II stated that we may put a Christian interpretation upon the hypothesis of evolution.

That, however, isn’t the point of what the sacred author of Genesis teaches us.  Rather, we are to see that we are God’s handiwork—however it may have been that God made us—and there’s something divine in what makes us up.  In what we call the 1st version of Genesis’s creation narratives, ch. 1 teaches us that we—both men and women—are made in God’s image (v. 27).  The version that we heard a snippet of this afternoon says the same thing in different language:  God put his own divine breath—his spirit, if you will—into us, “and so man became a living being” (2:7).

Temptation and Fall of Man

(Michelangelo)

The Scripture goes on to tell us in story form how we sinned, how we fell from grace, how we spoiled the divine image in our souls.

That story is rich in human psychology, as we know from our own experience.  It’s also consistent with today’s gospel story about how Satan tempted Jesus.  The Gospel tells us bluntly that the Devil “is a liar and the father of lies” (John 8:44) and has been a liar from the beginning.  So if you want to be truly demonic, tell lies.

The serpent—Satan—begins with a lie posed as a question:  “Did God really tell you not to eat from any of the trees in the garden?” (3:11).  In verses omitted from our reading we read God’s actual command:  “You are free to eat from any of the trees of the garden except the tree of knowledge of good and bad.  From that tree you shall not eat” (2:16-17).  God’s plan, his wisdom, for human beings was that we should not know anything of evil but be surrounded and familiar only with the goodness and beauty of what he’d created for us, and with himself.           

Responding, the woman speaks a half-truth of her own:  “God said, ‘You shall not eat it or even touch it, lest you die’” (3:3).  But God’s command concerned only eating, not touching.  So the woman is misstating God’s command—even if it would truly be wise not to come near enuf the tree to touch its fruit and so be severely tempted.  As we all know, the longer we dally with a temptation, the more alluring it becomes.

The Devil, that liar, proposes a doubt.  Why would God keep this one tree, this one form of knowledge, from his creatures?  If he’s their friend, why would he not want them to know the secret of the tree’s fruit?  Could he be hiding something from them, or protecting his own power?  It’s a subtle temptation, isn’t it?

Then the serpent springs his trap, tells his fatal lie:  “God knows well that the moment you eat of it yours eyes will be opened and you will be like gods who know what is good and what is evil” (3:5).

There is the real temptation:  not to eat a piece of fruit, not even to amplify our knowledge—for God did create us with minds meant to seek and know the truth.  The temptation is to desire to be gods, to desire to rank with God himself.  That, incidentally, is Satan’s own aspiration.  His 3d temptation of Jesus involves Jesus’ worshiping him:  that Jesus should submit himself to Satan’s lordship rather than to the lordship of God his Father.

And that, brothers and sisters, is the lie that the Evil One ever uses to try to deceive us:  that our own wisdom is wiser than God’s wisdom, God’s plan for us as individuals or as the human race.

Satan lies to us about stealing or cheating in this or that case—such a small thing, who would care or even notice?  He lies to us about the goodness of pornography or some sexual escapade; or about the benefits of some drug or about the threat to our well-being presented by people who are different from ourselves or about the justice of getting even with someone because of a wrong done to us.  Satan proposes to us that we are godlike enuf in our wisdom to pursue our own goals and purposes, to make our own life-rules.

Satan has succeeded marvelously in so deceiving our society.  We’ve made ourselves into gods by deciding who is human and who is not, who is fit to live and who is not; thru our laws allowing abortion, euthanasia, and capital punishment and a culture that praises them as moral goods.

On the flip side, Satan has deceived into thinking we can be like God and create human life—manufacturing human beings in a lab thru cloning, in vitro fertilization, and other forms of technology, and that this is good.

Satan has deceived us into thinking we’re gods who may treat other people with disdain, as subhuman, because of their race, religion, national origin, or poverty.

Satan has deceived us into defying science and natural law by destroying slowly the created world God gave us, for the sake of an immediate economic profit; and by denying the biological facts of maleness and femaleness and denying the nature and purposes of human sexuality.

Part of the serpent’s temptation was, “You certainly will not die!” (3:4).  St. Paul shows that for the lie it was:  “Thru one man sin entered the world, and thru sin, death, and thus death came to all men” (Rom 5:12).  How can humanity thrive when we make ourselves into God, which plainly we are not, and seek truth, goodness, and happiness where they’ll never be found—in our own willfulness, in the worship of our own powers?

During Lent we’re invited to examine our lives, starting with our interior attitudes, to acknowledge our offenses, as the responsorial psalm (51) said; to take Jesus Christ as our model of complete fidelity:  “The Lord, your God, shall you worship, and him alone shall you serve” (Matt 4:10).  That commitment of Jesus is what compels Satan to leave him (4:11) and allows Jesus to give us “the abundance of grace and the gift of justification” and “to reign in life” thru him—to be redeemed, restored as images of God, children of God for eternal life.