First Sunday of Lent Gn 2:7-9; 3:1-7; Ps 51; Rom 5:12-19; Mt 4:1-11 (year a)
‘The Lord God fashioned man of dust from the soil. Then he breathed into his nostrils a breath of life, and thus man became a living being.”
The Genesis account of man’s creation and subsequent fall is more than primitive speculation concerning the origins of human life. It is, above all else, our story: a description of our longing to live life in its fullness, and a confession of the sinfulness that frustrates such longing.
On this first Sunday of Lent the Scriptures invite us to pause, to rejoice in the gift of life. The very air that we breathe is a reminder that we are the creation of a loving Father, fully alive only when his Spirit lives and breathes in us.
The narrative of the fall, beyond its seemingly naïve simplicity, mirrors the tragedy of sinful lives. We were made for God and yet there is an insanity that leads us far from his ways. Like the man and woman, we surrender to the superficial attraction of sin. Our deepest instincts tell us what is forbidden, and yet, rather than paying heed, we foolishly make ourselves the arbiters of right and wrong. Experience opens our eyes, and we realise what we have become.
If the Book of Genesis describes what sinful humanity became, Matthew’s account of the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness foreshadows what we are becoming in Christ. In the desert, Jesus was invited to choose the kind of Messiah he was to become, the way in which he would live his life as the Son of God. Lent begins with the same question: how are we to live life as the children of God?
The choice of Jesus, to live not by bread alone but in obedience to the will of his Father, questions the superficial choices that have frustrated our lives. His firm resolve “not to put the Lord your God to the test” highlights the rash and sinful choices that have imperilled us and the lives of those we love. His insistence that we worship and serve the Lord God alone reveals the false gods that rule sinful lives.
We have all made wrong choices, frustrating what we long to become. That is the beginning of our story, but it need not be its ending. St Paul, perhaps more than any other, understood that in Christ, and in the power of his Resurrection, we are enabled to choose again. “As by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so by one man’s obedience many will become righteous.”
Let us begin this Lent by acknowledging where sinful choices have led us, and entrusting ourselves to Christ and the power of his Resurrection.
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