With the beginning of
Lent, we interrupt the continuous reading of the gospel of Matthew. We will
resume it after the end of Eastertide. Lent has its own cycle of readings
sanctioned by tradition.
On the first Sunday, we
usually read the gospel of the Lord’s temptation, because it constitutes a kind
of institution of the Lenten Season. Lent would like to imitate somehow Jesus
going for forty days into the desert to fast. Jesus’ experience, in its turn,
is usually related to that of the people of Israel, who spent forty years in
the desert, where they were over and over put to the test and mostly failed.
Today’s liturgy, though, highlights a different parallelism: it connects Jesus
with Adam.
The first reading
talks about man’s creation and his placement into the Garden of Eden, and about
the serpent and the temptation of the woman, who, in her turn, persuades her
husband to transgress the order that God had given him, not to eat of the fruit
of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
In the gospel, Jesus too
is tempted by the devil; so, the desert of Judah, as well as with the desert of
Sinai, can be compared even with Eden. What Jesus is doing now does not concern
only the people of Israel, but the whole of humanity. Unlike Adam, Jesus
resists temptation and wins an overwhelming victory over the enemy. What is his
secret? While Adam disregards God’s command, Jesus uses the word of God as a
weapon against temptation. Have you noticed? Every time he is tempted, he replies
to the devil with a quotation from Scripture: “It is written…” God’s word is
his defense and his strength. Indeed, God’s word is his only food: “One does
not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes forth from the mouth of
God.”
The one who first made
a parallelism between Adam and Jesus is Saint Paul in his letters. In the
second reading, we have heard the most important passage where he develops this
analogy in the letter to the Romans. For Paul, Adam “is the type—that is, a
figure, an image, a foreshadowing—of the one who was to come,” and,
reciprocally, Jesus is the New Adam. In the first letter to the Corinthians, Paul
says: “As by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the
dead. As in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive … The first
Adam became a living being; the last Adam became a life-giving
spirit … The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second
man is from heaven” (1Cor 15:21-22.45.47 RSV). As you can see, Paul
emphasizes a strong opposition between Adam and Christ. The same opposition we
find in the letter to the Romans. Here Paul underlines the contrast between the
first man and Jesus through a series of features which characterize either:
sin, death, transgression, judgment, condemnation, disobedience for Adam;
righteousness, life, gift, grace, acquittal or justification, obedience for
Jesus.
Even in this case,
among all these oppositions, in my opinion, the most important is the last
couple—obedience and disobedience: “Just as through the disobedience of the one
man the many were made sinners, so, through the obedience of the one (per
unius oboeditionem), the many will be made righteous.” Disobedience was the
cause of our fall; obedience is the origin of our salvation. Jesus saves us
because he obeys the Father’s will. At the same time, he shows us the way to
walk, in order to be saved—obedience. That is the secret of salvation.
Q
