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Sunday of Expulsion
"O Lord, who first gave the law of holy abstinence to Adam in paradise where he broke it by tasting the fruit and thereby tasting the bitterness of sin and death, grant us that we may taste the sweetness of Your commandments. We have been struck in our souls by the Enemy with wounds of sin, and we need You, the lover of man; to relieve our pain; therefore O Christ who loves man, heal us." (Sharagan for the Second Sunday.)
On the Sunday of the Expulsion from the Garden we encounter our own great sin: pride. Mankind (Adam and Eve) had all they needed in the Garden; their lives with God were complete. God asked only that they love Him, and obey Him as all sensible creatures would obey a loving Creator, since the Creator knows His creatures and their needs better than they themselves do. But in His love God made us free, and the tree from which Adam and Eve ate represents the free choice all of us must make.
We can love God and acknowledge Him as the Creator on whom we depend. Or in pride we can say, "I don't need God. I am my own lord!" And Satan (the serpent) tempts us by appealing to our pride. "Eat and by eating become like God," he says. So we turn from God's Lordship and instead set ourselves up as gods.
But then we find out: man by himself is weak, and without God can find only sin, shame, and death. So man, having chosen not to be with God, is sent from the garden into the hard world where pride reigns. It is a world where other hungers, like Adam's hunger for lordship, assail man.
Yet God's love never deserts us, and even in our stupid pride His promise is made, His plan of salvation begun. Another will come, and be tempted by Satan to eat. And He will answer that man does not live by bread alone, but by God and God's commands. This other, Christ, the "new Adam," will not succumb to the sin of pride as Adam did before.
During Lent we fast with Christ, not to punish ourselves but restore ourselves to dependence on God and not on bread alone. God Himself, becoming man in the person of Christ, shows us the way to this restoration.
The hunger our pride creates is truly devilish, for it can, never be satisfied. But the hunger for God which we experience with Christ during Lent will be filled to overflowing: that is the promise that carries on from the garden to the cross to the empty tomb to our lives this minute.
The day's readings (Wisdom 5:1-8, Baruch 3:31-4:4, Romans 8:28-39, John 10: 11-16) tell us of that promise which even persecution and massacre cannot overcome.
Sundays during Lent
The Sundays of Lent are guideposts in our journey to Easter. They take us through the history of God's relationship with us, from creation to today. Each Sunday has a theme and a sharagan, or hymn, explaining the theology of the theme. The Bible readings for each Sunday tell us what we should be doing at each stage of our Lenten life.
Sunday 2 |