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The First Sunday of Lent (Year A)

Today is the First Sunday of Lent, a season that began on Ash Wednesday and lasts until the Mass of the Lord’s Supper on Holy Thursday: that Thursday before Easter Sunday. Lent is a Teutonic (i.e. German) word that originally meant: “spring season.”

It is time for our yearly, intense spring cleaning of the soul. We put our penitential lives in full gear (which should already be in gear as a part of our normal, day-to-day Christian life) so as to subdue our weakened flesh and put it to the service of the Spirit. We accomplish this with that healthy billow pad of penance - the three main forms of which are (1) Prayer, (2) Fasting, and (3) Acts of Charity such as Almsgiving.

Now that we have entered Lent, our Scriptural gaze in the Liturgy of the Word focuses specifically on sin, our redemption from the slavery of sin through the salvific events in the life of Jesus, and putting on the “new nature” (Ephesians 4:24) by fighting the flesh with the weapon of the Spirit whom we received in baptism.

Taken from Genesis 2 & 3, the first reading recounts how man was endowed from the beginning with sanctifying grace: “the LORD God … blew into his nostrils the breath of life and so man became a living being.” This was a significant part of man’s creation, which the animals lacked. It also recounts the Fall of Man, wherein humanity (this is what the Hebrew word ‘adam means) died spiritually and lost this abundant gift of sanctifying grace. Original Sin is essentially not a positive mark on the soul, but instead, an absence of sanctifying grace in the soul. Man must be reborn!

The responsorial psalm is taken from the famous penitential psalm of King David after “his affair with Bathsheba” (Psalm 51:2) wherein David repented with his whole heart. William James, a famous Harvard philosopher, once said, “I would sin like David if only I could repent like David!”

The second reading gives St. Paul’s exhortation to the Church in Rome, when he compared Jesus with Adam. In Jesus, what happened in Adam is undone: “For just as through the disobedience of one person the many were made sinners, so through the obedience of one the many will be made righteous” (Romans 5:19).

In the two-thousand year old Christian tradition (which is distinctively Catholic), when we receive the gift of justification won by Jesus through the instrument of holy baptism, this justification is more than just a mere acquittal in a courtroom setting… In fact, it is the very reception of sanctifying grace by which we are “made righteous.” That is what this holy season of Lent is all about. We focus upon repenting from our sinful ways and embracing the gift of God’s amazing grace.