Feb 22, 2026 1st Sunday of Lent

Eve’s opening act

We, the hearers of today’s mass readings, find ourselves in a primordial garden this First Sunday of Lent, ear witnesses to the first conversations of mankind. After blowing life into the nostrils of man, God quickly follows with a prohibition: “You shall not eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil” …and it’s all downhill from there.

The mouth is a source of many and varied sins. The mouth, in fact, may be the cause of damnation more than any other part of the human body. The mouth of Eve opens wide in today’s reading from Genesis and closes again on a piece of fruit, changing the world forever.

That “opening” act was preceded by Eve opening her mouth for a different purpose – to jaw with the serpent. That superfluous exchange of words formed the glide path to the original sin of eating.

Mankind eats. We must eat. The necessity of eating is part of all animal life, down to bacterial life. Even amoebas eat, though not with mouths. The need to eat pulls man out of his home, compelling him to search for food, to gathering the material needed to nourish his body. This search for food is a fundamental reason why mankind engages with the broader world in the first place and becomes a social animal. While on the search for food, we cross paths with people we would otherwise never meet…at the market, the store, or the restaurant. Eve herself is in a garden looking for food when she runs into the devil himself. If she had stayed home, she may never have met her match.

And what does man eat? Anything and everything. We are omnivores. Our jaws, our teeth, and our appetites consume bark, clams, liver, mushrooms, grasshoppers, snake eggs, monkey brains, frog legs, and sheep eyeballs – the list of strange foods and delicacies is endless. We are greedy for food and devour almost all that the earth offers us.

Nearly all that our eyes behold is fit for consumption, especially when in dire need, except when our eyes fall on our fellow man. We see our cousin, our neighbor, even our enemy, and we know that him we cannot consume. Only the most primitive man, he most untrained in religious and human virtues, will consume his neighbor.

When I conclude that I cannot eat my fellow man I am also concluding something else – that my fellow man should not eat me. My neighbor is not edible for the same reason that I am not edible. My dignity surpasses that of a carrot, a lobster, or a cow. Eating, clearly, is more than caloric intake.

The pan-cultural prohibition against canabalism hints at an important insight – that there is a moral code embedded in our choice of what to eat and what not to eat. And if there are layers of meaning to so fundamental a biological function as eating, then it follows that there are also deeper layers of meaning to every human activity, especially those acts superior to basic biological functioning, activities like willed actions.

God’s commandment to Adam and Eve not to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil does what all moral codes do – it sets a limit. All morality starts with setting limits on our behavior or even on our thinking. These guardrails, and the effort to live life within these guardrails, forms the essential drama of every human soul, every household, and every community. Without limits, life is less interesting, and its deeper layers remain buried and unseen. The ultimate limit, or deadline, is death.

The final frontier of death, that dark curtain, gives all of life a sense of urgency and purpose. Our being towards death, our life as hemmed in by the constraint of our biological end, makes us pay closer attention to all of reality. An endless life on earth, after all, would be essentially without purpose, without punishment, without reward, and without moral drama. If Eve had not sinned our lives on earth would still have ended, just not through the pain of death, but through some other form of departure perhaps similar to Mary’s, the only creature who has never tasted death.

There are endless layers of meaning to the Genesis narrative. Its depths have been plumbed, its nuances have been unpacked, by many impressive and creative theologians, artists, and philosophers. As people of the modern west, we have been schooled in the suppositions of the Enlightenment, and biased by our hyper technological, democratic culture. So we are sensitive to any restrictions on our freedom, which we tend to understand as an ultimate good.

The seprent in the Genesis narrative today frames God as man’s enemy. But God is not our enemy. He’s not even our rival. God is not happy to the extent that we are sad. He is not pleased to the extent that we remain unpleased or unsatisfied. Our happiness, our fulfillment, is more likely when our will concurs with His. When our gift of freedom is exercised in accordance with His will, as expressed through the voice of his Son in the Church, we are more likely to live a kind of challenging self-fulfillment similar to the self fulfillment experienced by an elite athlete, a skilled craftsman, or an experienced musician.

These professionals bend and shape their wills over long periods of time to conform with the laws of their arts. And precisely in that curtailing of their own desires, of their own wants and needs, are they able to sing an aria, vault over a high pole, or shape raw marble into the serene face of a saint. If we refuse to learn from the saints, or see them as too remote or impersonal, let us at least learn from other elite warriors – the athlete, the artist, or the craftsman. They live in our world. They do wondrous things. We admire their works so we should admire their focus and disciple in going for the gold.

The fundamental temptation of all sin is the deification of the will. The conviction that my freedom, my expressed will, is superior to anyone else, or anything else, is the root of much sin. But my freedom is, in fact, not a royal decree. It can err. Freedom is also so conditioned by a thousand human factors that our choices are never pure and our reasons never as dryly rational as we like to imagine. Adam and Eve exercise their freedom poorly today, turning a garden into a desert. They become the focus of their own lives, realizing, suddenly, that they are unclothed. And they make this bad choice from a state of perfection, making our already fallen state seem ever hopeless.

But we have more helps than them. Perfect nature is bested by perfect grace. We have God’s son. We have the catechism. We have Mary and the tombs of the saints. We have 2,000 years of learning. We have processions and devotions and rosaries and ashes on our foreheads. We are well and fully arrayed to resist the powerful temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil. We are equipped to shape our will to God’s, to climb the podium at the end of our lives not to wear a small round medal of gold for a time, but to be crowned with eternal life for eternity. That’s our goal. That’s our mission possible. Amen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqyFWqnWaOQ