1 Sunday

st

Cycle A
5 March 2017

Gen. 2:7-9;3:1-7
Rom. 5: 12-19
Mt. 4:1-11
INTRODUCTION:
We enter this weekend the holy
Season of Lent. Our 1st
Reading from Genesis 2 and 3
gives an opportunity to revisit the
Fundamentals of spiritual life.

LENT is a season to go back to bas

1
"The Lord God fashioned man of dust
from the soil."

Man is made of matter . . .

God glories in our physicality.
1
"The Lord God fashioned man of dust
from the soil."

But we humans are more than just matter . . .

for "God breathed into his nostrils a
breath of life.
1

This "breath of life" is

the ordering of our
deepest selves to God
as the absolute or
unconditioned Truth,
Beauty, Good, not just a
particular truth, beauty,
 1
The trouble of Secular
Society is it denies these two
dimensions of life:
matter or physicality
and the spirit or breath of Go
1
St. Thomas
Aquinas considers
human beings as
a kind of
microcosm,
containing both
physics/matter
and spirit/soul.
1
Knowing
and
honoring
both
dimensions
is the path
2
"The Lord God . . . put the man
he had fashioned in the midst of
a garden and gave them free
rein to eat all."
Unlike in Greek Mythology,
the God of the Bible is not a rival to
human beings.
2

"The glory of
God is man
fully alive.
St. Irenaeus
2

The Lord God caused

to spring up from the
soil every kind of tree,
enticing to look at and
good to eat, with the
tree of life and tree of
the knowledge of good
2
All kinds of trees in the
garden represents all that
makes human life full and
flourishing, including
politics, science, and the
arts.
This is the deepest
Humanism imaginable!
3
The first men on earth
were "to refrain from
eating the fruit of the
tree in the middle of
the garden," identified
as the Tree of
Knowledge of Good
What is this tree? and Evil.
3

It is the act of arrogating to

oneself what belongs in a
privilege way only to God,
not so much a particular sin
3
To make the human will the
criterion and arbiter of good
and evil is to act like God.

This is the basic, the original

sin/mistake of man to deify the human
3
The result of what Adam
and Eve did is "the eyes
of both of them were
opened and they realized
that they were naked."
3
This means not so much
shame or hiya as a deep and
pre-occupying self-
consciousness when we
recognize that our source of
value is inside us whereas in
reality
That is theit picture
is outside of us.
of Adam and
Eve scampering to cover
themselves after the fall.
 APPLICATION:

On the issue of restoration of the

death penalty in our Country, our
Lawmakers are acting like gods
keeping only drug addiction as the
sole cause for death penalty,
taking out plunder and others from the list to save
them from the Capital Punishment just in case they
fall into the same sin.
+ART
 APPLICATION:
When the self becomes
the criterion of good and
evil, even we ordinary
mortals, fall into the
same mistake too, not
just the politicians.

+ART
CONCLUSION: Go back to Genesis 3 and
discover the basic,
fundamental sin man falls
into that makes him so
unhappy!

+ART