How did the Devil tempt Eve to eat the forbidden fruit? How does he tempt us today? Homily for the First Sunday of Lent.
When I was a young boy, my mum got a new TV for the living room, and moved our old TV, a massive boxy thing that today you’d find in a museum, up into her bedroom. A few days later some men turned up and installed a special satellite on the side of our house and hooked it up to the boxy-TV. This satellite had hundreds of channels, but Mum had bought it entirely so that she could watch only one: EWTN. The Eternal Word Television Network, a set up by a nun named Mother Angelica to broadcast wall-to-wall Catholic content. I have fond memories of sitting on my parents’ bed in the evening while Mum did the ironing, watching EWTN re-runs of black-and-white Fulton Sheen videos like the Hour of Power and Life is Worth living, and on Saturday mornings I would watch their dedicated Children’s programme The Knights of St Michael.
One long-running programme I remember watching was led by a priest named Fr John Corapi. Fr Corapi’s story is long and quite tragic, and not worth getting into now, but I remember a story he told on one of his spiritual warfare lectures. He was invited as a young priest to give a speech at a big Catholic conference in America. And he tells the story of sitting in the front row, listening to the speaker before him, an old Monsignor explaining to the audience that we Catholics don’t really believe in the devil or demons anymore. For that matter, he said we don’t really believe in Angels either. He said now that we’re more mature, we understand that they were just literary devices. Fr Corapi then relays that there was an old lady sitting in the front row next to him, who turned to him and said “I hope one of those literary devices comes down and gives him a good kick in the behind!”
Even today there are some within the Church who will say, we don’t really believe in the devil anymore: but the Church always warns us against this mentality! The great saints have always been aware of the presence of a real personal evil: St Paul, St John Vianney, and St Padre Pio all describe being physically beaten by the devil. The reality is that the devil is a real person, a force of evil. He is the definition of the phrase misery loves company: he has fallen from grace and wants each one of us to fall along with him, so we can share in his misery. And he is very, very crafty. Today, two of our readings show us exactly how crafty he can be.
In Genesis 2 we hear about the creation of the garden of Eden. Our translation confuses this a little, but in the Greek it’s clear that the tree of life is planted in the middle of the garden, with the tree of knowledge of good and evil next to it. Another thing we miss in this week’s reading, skipping from Chapter 2 to chapter 3 is God’s actual instruction to Adam and Eve. He says:
You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.
Gen 2:16-17
Two things then, we have to understand. The middle of the garden is the tree of life, and God says you may freely eat of every tree, except for this one tree.
This is the first of the Devil’s cunning tricks. He always knows to press where it hurts, to go for the soft spot, and to distort reality. He doesn’t ask Eve, what has God allowed you to eat, he asks her “Did God really say you were not to eat from any of the trees in the Garden?” Do you see what he’s done? He’s shifted Eve’s perspective, God gives the free gift of every tree except for one, the Devil wants her to fixate on what is forbidden. Unfortunately the trick works, Eve says “we may eat the fruit of the trees, but not the fruit of the tree in the middle of the Garden” – the middle of the Garden was the tree of life, but the devil had so caught Eve’s attention, so distorted her perspective, made her focus on the forbidden so much that she saw only the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
The Devil always wins by making us fixate on the things we desire, especially if they are forbidden: if we obsess over what we don’t have or can’t have we will always succumb and try to grasp them. He does this with the Church as well. How many people, if asked “what does it mean to be a catholic” would respond “it means we can’t do x y or z that other people do.” He tricks us into putting the forbidden fruit at the centre of the garden, into making our faith a Church of No, rather than a Church of God.
In the Gospel, he tries this trick with Jesus. He presents this prophet who had gone out into the desert with the three great temptations each one of us faces: temptations of the flesh, temptations of the ego, and temptations to power. He tries to tempt Jesus to feed his own body, to satisfy the desires of his flesh. He tries to tempt Him to force people to honour him by revealing his glory. He tries to tempt him to claim all the power in the world for himself. Unlike Eve, Jesus can’t be fooled. As the devil tries to make him fixate on and claim worldly things, Jesus instead turns to God.
Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.
Thou shalt not put the Lord thy God to the test.
Thou shalt have no other gods but me.
Jesus rejects sin, he rejects the worldly temptations of pleasure, honour, and power, because his life is entirely centred on God.
What is Lent about? Why do we spend forty days preparing for Easter? Lent is a time to re-centre our lives on God. The disciplines of Lent are not a diet, but a way of putting aside worldly things in order to re-focus on the supernatural calling each one of us has to know God, to love God, and to serve God more and more each day. It is a time to put God back at the centre of our lives.
The three disciplines of Lent are weapons against the three great temptations;
We pray, so that we can cast aside the temptations of our own ego and humble ourselves before God
We fast, so that we can deny the pleasures of the flesh and re-focus on our spiritual life
We give alms, so that we can put aside the worldly desire to accumulate wealth and property, to instead focus our time, talent, and treasure on the work of God
These next forty days are an opportunity to radically re-focus our lives, away from ourselves, away from the world, and entirely on God. So, for anyone struggling to come up with a Lenten programme, or wanting to make the most of this season, here is the challenge:
Prayer: begin every day with a prayer, offering the day and its works to God, and end every day with a prayer, thanking God for his blessings and asking forgiveness for the ways we have failed.
Fasting: Deprive yourself of something good, something you like, ideally something you have every day – and offer it for a purpose. Perhaps a friend or relative who doesn’t believe, or who doesn’t come to Church. Offer your fasting for their intentions.
Almsgiving: Take the money you would have spent on luxuries, or on the things you have given up, and give it away to a cause that glorifies God. Whether a Charity, or the SVP, or the Red Missio box. Set yourself a challenge. Ask how generous can I be? If you don’t have money, give your time instead. Give it away, not for praise, not for a social media post, but in service to God and the mission of his Church.
If we do just these three little things, intentionally putting God at the centre of our lives, we might find that after the next forty days, by Easter, our lives look radically different. We might find our happiness was in God all along.
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