In His Temptation and His Fast

 

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!

        “The serpent asked the woman, ‘Did God really tell you not to eat from any of the trees in the garden?’”

        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