FIRST SUNDAY OF LENT
26 February
2023, Holy Spirit Parish
Gn 2:7-9; 3:1-7
Rom 5:12-19 or 5:12, 17-19
Mt 4:1-11
Praised be Jesus Christ!
My suspicion is that for many people the
story of the fall from grace of Adam and Eve is sort of innocuous when in point
of fact (among other things) it is more than telling about human psychology
when it comes to sin and sinning. The forbidden fruit thing seems a bit of a
reach and that would certainly be the case for some if not for many people. The
problem with that judgment or attitude of skepticism about the teaching of Scripture,
which can move us to play down the gravity of our sins, to ignore God’s law or
excuse it from binding us, is exactly the point I’d like to make this Sunday.
For the last century and up until just recently, the overriding tendency
in many Catholic circles and especially among priests has been to deny or at
least play down our guilt for sin. For any number of misguided reasons, the
tendency is for sinners to refuse personal responsibility for their actions or
to ignore the lesson taught by the Book of Genesis and handed down to us by the
Church about the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the center of the
garden of paradise. People balk in their personal lives at the possibility of
their being accountable before God for their actions and omissions. They miss the gravity of the challenge to
God’s command whispered by Satan into the woman’s ear: “The
serpent asked the woman, ‘Did God really tell you not to eat from any of the
trees in the garden?’”
The point of the Genesis account and
what the Church teaches us about original sin and the human condition is that Adam
and Eve out and out challenged God’s authority when they ate of the tree. “For just as through the disobedience of the one man
the many were made sinners, so, through the obedience of the one, the many will
be made righteous.” We ignore that we were conceived in Adam’s sin and
fail to comprehend that life, eternal life, everlasting salvation can only be
ours in Christ, the second Adam (Hence the need for Baptism).
My point would be that in terms of personal sin, some of us follow the
pattern of the first Adam all the while harping about our diminished
responsibility for our actions. We refuse to acknowledge our offences against God.
We excuse ourselves claiming diminished responsibility for our acts and
omissions or stubbornly insist that we cannot imagine God as all that serious
about things we judge to be of little or no importance (as if it were up to us
to judge God’s law…). We turn our backs on Christ, failing to let Him into our
lives when He comes knocking on the door.
“But the serpent said to the woman:
‘You certainly will not die! God knows well that the moment you eat of it your
eyes will be opened and you will be like gods who know what is good and what is
evil.’” Oh, the vanity of it all!
Be merciful, O Lord, for we have sinned. That’s
a powerful psalm verse which too often through our own fault, through our
rationalizations does not strike as close to home as it is intended. Be
merciful, O Lord, for we have sinned. We deny that we can be acting in bad faith.
After all, how can you say I am denying Christ’s judgment on my sins which comes
to me through the mediation of the Church? How? Easy, because it is the truth. The
question would seem to be what role does the Sacrament of Penance play in your
life? How often do you go to confession? How do you see yourself there in
confession? Are you under constraint? Do you only feel anxious about the
experience? Do you brace yourself in a defensive stance for the priest’s words
to you? Can you see yourself there in Confession as truly kneeling before the
judgment seat of God seeking forgiveness and healing for things which are
indeed your fault?
As I said, up until recently, that has been the overriding tendency in
Roman Catholicism: to downplay our guilt and the possibility of serious or
mortal sin in our lives. Just take a rather obvious thing, the Church precept
which binds us to assist at Mass on all Sundays and Holy Days of Obligation under
pain of mortal sin! How many people miss Sunday Mass without a good excuse and
then march right up to Communion without first going to Confession? “The
serpent asked the woman, ‘Did God really tell you not to eat from any of the
trees in the garden?’” And of course it touches on any number of
traditional moral principles as well. In the last half century there have even
been some rather prominent theologians denying the need for Confession and casting
doubt on whether there is anyone in Hell and whether damnation for all eternity
is really a thing.
Our Gospel for the First Sunday of Lent always recounts His forty day
fast and the temptation of Jesus by Satan in the desert. The Church does not
require anything as stringent of us as the Lord’s forty day fast, but it does
ask us to identify with Jesus by doing some penance and uniting ourselves with
Christ in resisting, in saying No! to the temptations of the Devil. “At
this, Jesus said to him, ‘Get away, Satan! It is written: The Lord, your God,
shall you worship and him alone shall you serve.’”
St. John Fisher, Bishop and Martyr, the only bishop in all of England to
resist King Henry VIII taking over the Church in that country at the time of the
Protestant Reformation, in his famous commentary on the seven penitential psalms,
called his listeners and still calls his readers to recognize God in His
mildness and mercy and to do our part to respond to the Lord Who is ready to
forgive. St. John says that three things are required of us to scrub clean the
tablet of our lives smudged by sin: contrition, confession, and satisfaction. The
martyr saint classes contrition as something hidden. Our hearts must be filled
with genuine sorrow for how we have wronged our merciful Savior. Confession is
something concrete and tangible. We must confess our sins to the priest and
receive absolution in the Sacrament of Penance. St. John explains that satisfaction
is the third scrubbing of that tablet, which takes away, satisfies (hence the
word satisfaction) for the punishment due for our sins. The three classic Lenten
forms which satisfaction can take are prayer, fasting, or almsgiving. St. John
especially recommends prayer as something even the poorest people without money
can do, as something which even sick or frail old people unable to fast can do.
So pray for yourself and for the poor souls in Purgatory!
Look into your heart, look to the obligations which are yours as a
Catholic and especially in terms of your state in life! Stir up within your
heart true sorrow for all the ways you have ignored God’s or the Church’s law,
hurting our neighbor and offending God Who did not spare His only Son but gave
Him up for all of us. Then make a truly good confession this Lent and receive
Christ’s forgiveness through the ministry of the priest. Take seriously the
penance the priest gives you in confession and moreover give yourself
wholeheartedly to the discipline of Lent for your own sake. Your prayers,
fasting, and almsgiving can be that third scrub which will enable you to pass
directly from this life to seeing your loving God face to face without a stop-off
in Purgatory. Your prayers for those who have gone before us in death can
shorten their time of purification and bring them closer to seeing God as well.
“For just as
through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so, through
the obedience of the one, the many will be made righteous.”
Praised be Jesus
Christ!
PROPERANTES ADVENTUM DIEI DEI
