Sunday, February 10, 2008

Naked Truth


Message from Fr. Jose Koluthara, CMI

Lord Jesus, help me, merciful and loving God, to rely on you and to divest myself of the fig leaves, faults and failures that keep me from becoming a truer image of you.

How easy it is to read the biblical story of Adam and Eve and their fall from grace and to lay the burden of guilt for the human condition upon their shoulders. How easy it is to misconstrue Paul’s words to the Romans (5:12-19) and blame the disobedience of one man for the concupiscence, evil and death that all of us are made to suffer. How easy it is for us to read the account of Jesus’ being tempted in the wilderness and diminish his triumph by reasoning “After all, he was God, and the tempter is no match for the Source of all strength and goodness.” But Lent is not about assigning blame or guilt to others. Lent is not about diminishing the struggle against evil that Jesus willingly accepted as his own for our sake. Lent is about rediscovering God and uncovering ourselves before God by setting aside the fig leaves we’ve been hiding behind.

In today’s first reading from Genesis (2:7-9, 3:1-7) Adam and Eve are featured as sewing makeshift garments to wear when their “eyes were opened” and they discovered themselves as “naked” before God and one another. In the verses that follow today's first reading, their predicament is clearly enunciated. God has come in search of them. God, who called creation into being and then called humankind to be its steward, calls out yet again “Where are you?” The sinners’ answer indicts them “I heard… I was afraid… I was naked… I hid, I ate, I ate” (3:10-13). As Walter Bruggeman (“Genesis”, Atlanta: 1982) has explained, their former attentiveness to God’s call and to God’s directives have been relinquished. Now the preoccupation is “I”. Now the central focus of life is not God but me. The shift of Adam and Eve’s centre from God to self thrust them into adult consciousness; they recognized their sinfulness and feared the otherness of the divine. Trying to protect themselves from the reality of these truths, they hid behind fig leaves. The experience of Adam and Eve has also become the experience of each of us. We are Adam; We are Eve; we have sinned and are culpable before God. But rather than succumb to the temptation to hide behind fig leaves, we can take the time Lent offers us – a time in the desert, as it were – to make sure that the naked truth of who we are can be acknowledged before God and transformed by grace.

What fig leaves do we hide behind in our lives? What are those things that we must change or surrender in order to be clothed again with the white garment of renewed baptismal grace at Easter?

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