Breaking Open the Word - 1st Sunday of Lent, Year A

First Sunday of Lent, Year A – March 1, 2020

The Church began her “annual retreat” of Lent on Ash Wednesday, and today she presents her children with readings about a universal human experience: temptation. While Adam and Eve in the First Reading fell prey to the Devil’s trap, the Gospel and Second Reading show how Jesus Christ, God and Man, succeeds where they failed.

A Sister opened our discussion by pointing out an interesting and easy-to-miss detail of the reading from Genesis. While the forbidden tree is described in very attractive terms (“good for food, pleasing to the eyes, and desirable for gaining wisdom”), nearly the exact same words are used of every other tree in the garden (“delightful to look at and good for food”). Despite the presence of many wonderful and legitimate options, the serpent convinces Eve that the only one worth having is the one she can’t have! We can be the same way – God has filled our world with good things that He wishes us to enjoy, but the “logic” of sin can cause us to seek only that which God has forbidden. The solution? Do what Adam and Eve did not: call on God, and He will help to dispel the tempter’s lies.

We also discussed the serpent’s subtle initial question to Eve: “Did God really tell you not to eat from any of the trees of the garden?” By exaggerating the strictness of the command (“any of the trees”), he sows seeds of doubt in the woman’s mind. She thinks, “Would God really be so unreasonable as to forbid eating of the trees of the garden? Well, true, He only spoke of the one . . . but what makes that tree so different?” Of course, everyone knows where that dangerous dialogue led. Another interesting feature is Eve’s addition to God’s command: “we may not eat of it, or even touch it, lest we die.” Some have speculated that Adam, in relaying God’s word to his bride, included this phrase just as an extra precaution. Here we can see the danger of imposing extra regulations without accompanying catechesis – explaining what is directly from God, what has been added by man, and why it was added. Without such explanation, we run the risk of considering every regulation as equally important, and the Enemy of our souls can make use of such misconceptions to lead us into all sorts of errors.

Finally, we shared our reflections on the incredible reality presented in the Gospel – Christ, the Son of God, was hungry. He entered so completely into our humanity that He could feel this greatest indication of our poverty and vulnerability.  Great as we may think we are at times, the fact remains that we cannot live without God’s continuous gift of food!  One Sister spoke of how Jesus, by taking on our experience of hunger, showed us what this simple physical need is meant to do: lead us to total and trusting dependence on God. But why is this necessary? Why is it that even Adam and Eve, in all their original perfection, were such vulnerable creatures? One possible, and beautiful, answer is that God the Son wishes us to share His voluntary submission to the Father. This is not a submission of slavery or inferiority – no, He glories in doing only His Father’s Will, and it is His desire to show us this supreme joy of obedience! He did not come to redeem us by taking away our weakness, but by sharing it and teaching us how to use it to cling to the Father in complete love and trust.