José Galarreta S.J.
The liturgical
year is developed in three years. There is an Ordinary Time, the normal Sundays
of the year, which can be up to thirty three. And two special cycles – usually
called “the heavy seasons” which are the
Christmas Season and the Easter Season.
We have just finished celebrating the
Christmas season. Now, after a few intervening Sundays taken from the Ordinary
Time, we enter the Paschal Season. Basically, we are always celebrating the
same thing, God the Savior with us, but during Easter, we enter more deeply
into the human and into the divine. The human is seen from its more disturbing
dimension:”man is a sinner”.
And God seen from his most hopeful
dimension: “made sin for us, obedient
unto death of the cross: died, risen, and triumphant at the right hand of the
Father.”
This teaches us once more, what God is like
and what the human being is like. We not only discover the love of God, the
Savior, but also the possibilities and the destiny of man. Just as Jesus did,
we go through the cross to the resurrection, from death to life.
The Season of Lent
The two ‘heavy’
seasons are preceded by four or five weeks of preparation. Advent prepares the
Nativity with a basic theme: prepare the way of the Lord who is coming. Lent
prepares Easter by symbolizing human life: we come from sin, pain, and the
encounter with God fully. It is very important to situate ourselves well: it is
not a matter of a season in which, so that God forgives us, we devote ourselves
to do penance for sins which we do not do the rest of the year. We are dealing
with a season in which we remember more intensely a fundamental constituent of
human life: to accept a Savior God, to emerge from darkness and death to meet
with the light and life manifested in Jesus.
Neither do we do
penance to obtain God’s forgiveness. It seems as if we were to buy the
forgiveness of God, and that’s not true. God always forgives us, loves us,
calls us. Neither is it a time of sadness; on the contrary, it is a time of
celebration and being energized: we celebrate the fact that life is a
meaningful struggle. We celebrate the fact the struggle , the overcoming of
sin, is the work of God for us, and has a glorious end. We celebrate the fact
that even though we commit errors, God is there to make up for them. And we
celebrate all this looking up to Jesus, who had a life of difficulties and
darkness like all of us, who died a disgraceful death because he was faithful
to God, and who is alive and triumphant because he has reached the height, the
first of all of us, the one who shows us that victory is possible.
Five weeks, forty days till Easter. For
forty years the Israelites journeyed through the desert: they were coming out
of slavery, the Lord was leading them in the form of a column of light, the
Lord went with them in the Tent, fed them with manna. They were going towards
the Land, the fatherland. What a marvelous image of human life, full of trust
in God, guide and strength for the way to the Fatherland!
Who is it that has robbed us of the
happiness of Advent and Lent? Who has reduced the message to penance before a
God sitting in judgment? Why have we forgotten that what we celebrate is “GOD
the LIBERATOR”? Who is it that has been left with only ashes and has forgotten
that it is God who gives life to ashes?
THEMES
THE TEXT OF
GENESIS
It is a summary
of parts taken from Chapters 2 & 3. Its author (whom we call the “Yahwehist”
because he calls God Yahweh) is taken up with the task of the creation of man
and of his condition on earth. He sees that there is suffering and laborious
work for the human being. He sees,
above all, that there is a dangerous
tendency to evil, to believe they are gods, to enjoy what they like against the
law of God. And he builds up this precious story to express all this: his
message is magnificent:
God has created
the human being. The human being is a living element of the earth, like all
others, but God has put in him his spirit, and has given him laws so he lives.
The human being despises those laws, believing himself to be wiser than God,
and thence come all his problems.
Of course, this is the account of something
that happened. Historically this is not how human life began, neither was there
ever a Garden of Eden. It’s a story invented by the Yahwehist author to send us
this magnificent message. The author isn’t interested in knowing out of
scientific curiosity what happened a million years ago. He is interested in
knowing what a human being is, and he expresses with this story, something
fundamental about his faith: with God you have light and order; without God,
chaos and misfortune. This will be one of the most important lines of argument
of the whole book of Genesis and even of the whole Bible.
The
Letter to the Romans
Paul makes use of
the text of Genesis and develops it. He accepts the symbol of Adam,the first
man, and presents Jesus as the “new Adam”. From Jesus we receive new life, the
life of sons. Adam symbolizes man subject to sin. Jesus is man, Son of God, who
triumphs over sin. Through him, through Jesus, we can all be sons, conquer
temptation, enter the Kingdom.
But this text is
obscure. It seems to indicate that Paul was using the story of Genesis, taking
it to be historical, or applying it as such. In short, it creates more problems
than it solves. I suggest changing it for Romans 7,5.
THE
GOSPEL OF MATTHEW
The
story contains much symbolism. It is possible that Jesus would retire, on this
occasion and in many others, to the desert, to fast and pray. It was a habitual
practice; it was so among Christians throughout history, and it continues to be
so. The text shows us also that Jesus suffered temptations in his life; this
confirmation of the temptations of Jesus
is very important to know him, and to build a proper Christology, in which the
humanity may not seem a mere appearance.
The story of the temptation is evidently
“staged”. The most profound temptations of Jesus are presented in a single story, the ones which he undoubtedly suffered
in his spirit during his whole life. Jesus was tempted like any human
being, as was symbolized in the story of
Genesis. Temptations to power, to use the Word for his own advantage, to serve
the powers of the world... Jesus shows himself as the conqueror of temptation,
able to conquer it to follow the Word and serve God alone.
We are overwhelmed by the human reality of
Jesus. He needs to pray , experiences temptations... This trend will culminate
in various stories in which Jesus “retires to pray” or “spends almost entire
nights in prayer”, and, of course, in the garden of Olives and in the vocal
prayer with which he fights his abandonment on the cross.
A significant fact: neither the temptations
in the desert nor the anguish in Gethsemane are mentioned in the fourth Gospel.
It would seem that in such circumstances Jesus would appear “too human” for the
author.
During forty days we portray the life and we
illustrate it with the Word. Forty is the biblical number for human existence
(400 years in Egypt, 40 years in the desert, forty days Elias spent on the road
to Horeb...) It represents “a “provisional time”; this is only a way; on the
way is the cross. On the horizon is the Resurrection, the Ascension, the
freedom, the fullness.
The first theme of our Lenten meditation is
our human condition. We are sinners. At times we simplify this concept giving
it the meaning of “we are guilty of disobeying God”. The meaning is more
profound. Our condition of sinners means above all that we do not know to
distinguish what is good for us, and that we feel strongly attracted to things
which seem good to us but which spoil us. All this is included in the concept
of “temptation” .
The
first temptation is to consider ourselves “gods”. Immediately after comes the second temptation: to live to satisfy our
likings, to pay attention to only what we like. In this way, we make this life
our final destination: making this life the most agreeable possible. Then we
turn to God to help us to make this so.
And since God does not help us in this, we think “God does not hear us, God
does not help me... there is no God.” The greatest temptation.
It’s wonderful the way the author of Genesis
represents all this. He has invented a story in which we feel ourselves
portrayed. The irresistible attraction for what is forbidden, the suspicion
that although forbidden it is not bad, to prefer what I think and feel to the
Word of God... The author of Genesis is a wonderful writer; he knows how to
create images that describe us perfectly; he is also a profound theologian. He
has been able to give a body to our
condition as sinners.
Quite often we have diminished these ideas
and these stories by giving them a historico-juridical dimension. There was a
first man, a first couple, who disobeyed God. Juridical dimension: God punished
them, and now all of us their descendants are paying the consequences. In short:
our parents lost their riches and we are born disinherited. It is a sad
caricature of the human condition. Our “original” sin does not lie in its
historical origin. We call our human condition original sin, drawn by what does
not suit us and deceived as to good and evil, which is the origin, the source
of all our errors, of all our sins. The story of Genesis does not relate what
happened, but represents the way we are, the most profound and obscure aspect
of our human condition.
And the Gospel shows that Jesus is one of
us: subject to temptation, attracted by apparently good things. Jesus had many
other temptations, and they appear in the Gospels. The most terrible one was,
doubtless, the one of Holy Thursday, when he felt himself abandoned by his
Father, the most bitter of all the temptations of the human being: “Are you
there? Is it true there is a Father who takes care of my life? Is it true that
all this makes sense?”
Jesus can conquer
temptation. From “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?”, Jesus can pass
over to “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” He does so after a long
period of prayer, of vocal prayer reciting psalm 22. God has not freed him from
death, he has not taken away from him the
chalice of the Passion. But he has given him the strength and the light
to carry the cross and to die.
Jesus does not conquer death by escaping from
it. Jesus does not use his powers to live well and escape daily life. Jesus
makes of his life and his death a triumph of the Spirit, that is, Jesus
conquers temptation, lives like a new man. Jesus, a man like us, but “a man
full of the Spirit”. The power of the Spirit makes him truly man, a man as he ought
to be. That is, that in Jesus we see the complete human situation : the human
being burdened with weaknesses and obscurities... and full of the power of God
which makes him conquer all that to fulfill the plan of God, which is
liberation. Jesus is also a pilgrim and experiences the seductions and the
terrors of the road. But the Spirit of God is with him.
A Christology
“from above” would read this like Paul: he stripped himself of the divinity”
(Philippians 2,7). “Made himself sin for us.” (2 Cor. 5.21).
The incarnation
is not to be taken lightly: love is a force that tends to identify those who
love each other. That is why the love of God makes him man, truly man, who
assumes the human condition totally.
A Christology
“from below” would read this like the Synoptics or the Acts: “who is this?” (Mt
8,28) Jesus of Nazareth was a man accredited by God to you ... handed
over... whom you have put to death
...God raised him from the dead and has received from the Father the Holy
Spirit” (Acts 2,22...).
All this is
presented well in the fragment of Paul. Everything is symbolic in the language
of Paul. The kingdom of sin leads to death. The son of Adam is “the old man”,
deceived and spoilt. Jesus is the First Born, the first of the “new Men”, who
build their lives attentive to the Word, conquering temptation, overcoming sin
that tries to seduce them. The language of Paul is very juridical, and seems to
understand the story of Genesis as history. It is not true. Within it we ought
to learn to understand the profound message. The relation of man with God
cannot be reduced to a juridical plane of guilt-satisfaction-pardon. It is far
more profound.
So then, we have begun Lent with a
consideration about our human condition as sinners. And we have been sent a most
important first message: “sinners” does not mean “guilty”. It means we have to
seek our life, and we are in danger of being mistaken, through error and
because the deceits of the road attract us. The Word of God is profound when it
defines the human being.
The concept of sin is much more profound than
the concept of “disobedience”. When God presents himself as Savior, Liberator,
he does not present himself simply as a bland judge, but as Light so that we do
not get lost, Bread and Water to journey with strength, Shepherd who leads the
flock to good pastures, Doctor who heals when we fall sick, or are wounded as
we journey... And all these images are far more profound and speak of the human
being much better than our concepts of “guilt”. “redemption”, “pardon”, which fall far short of and
belittle the human being and his relationship with God.
FOR OUR PRAYER
1.
Allow yourself to be
carried away by admiration. How magnificent is the author of Genesis, who knows
the human being so well, and how well he speaks of God! Two thousand nine hundred years ago, a man
knew more about the human being and sin
than us. In his words we feel the Presence of the Spirit of God, we feel God
speaking to us. Experience the Word in the very ancient texts and give thanks
to God.
2.
CONTEMPLATION
Contemplate Jesus on the pinnacle of the Temple, in the highest tower.
Before the eyes of his imagination appears all the attraction of the world:
kingdoms, power, pleasures, popularity, fame, glory. For a while feel the
attraction of the “world”.
Contemplate
Jesus: he smiles, he sees that all this is purely appearance. He does not allow
himself to be deceived. And he descends from the Temple, and begins to journey
along the roads preaching and healing. He has chosen well. Make an act of trust
in him. Jesus knows how to live, Jesus knows how to overcome temptation, the
very temptations that can spoil my life.
3.
CONSIDERATIONS
It is possible that many things bother and worry us. We have fears,
doubts... Bring them to the Father, one by one, in a spirit of sonship.. WE are
like a little child who is confiding in his Father. He always hears us. Ask
him, shamelessly, all that we believe is good. And end with the words of Jesus:
“ But not my will, but thine be done.” And give thanks to God, because we know
that his will is done.
4.
PETITION
For all human beings tempted by the appearance of good, for all those
who put all their efforts in enjoying this life as if nothing more existed.
For us, Christians, the Church, who have received so much light, who
know Jesus but who have not succeeded in trusting him and continue to be
tempted between the seductive attraction
of this world and trust in his Word.
MY WORDS FOR YOU
King David desired a married woman, Bethsheba. To gain her, he had her
husband killed. The prophet Nathan confronted him with his sin. In his
repentance, David composed this psalm,
PSALM 50. We make it our own. We too feel we are sinners, the condition of
sinners weighs on us. With the words of David, we ask God for liberation.
Psalm 50 Have
mercy on me, O God, in your kindness blot out my sins.
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