A Homily for the First Sunday of Lent
Readings: Genesis 2:7-9, 3: 1-7 Romans 5:12-19 Matthew 4:1-11
I am pride. I am the primordial sin. Indeed, I came before humanity itself. Why, the galaxies had not yet been hung when I laid low the angels, God’s first creatures. Amazing, really. They had only to be who they already were; everything was given to them. But I convinced them to desire the one thing they could never be: their own creator.
Make no mistake. The doctrine of creation is still reality’s deepest truth. Science itself is but an infant swaddled in its arms. Nothing is its own origin, its own end. Everything that exists revolves around something beyond itself.
I am pride. I am the primordial sin of humanity. You were easier to bring down than the angels. Pure, potent spirits; material creation still responds to their call. You are cruder, clumsier and infinitely more stupid. Nature has always resisted your voice, seeing that you are fashioned of its own stuff: seed, fruit and dung.
In Adam and Eve, God gave creation to you. You had to accept it as a gift, meaning that you had to acknowledge God as the giver. You had to admit that you are yourselves part of a natural world, a biological order, which is becoming spiritual. One that is neither its own origin nor its own goal. Certainly not its own center.
I am pride, the primordial, the potent, the great pretender. I chant into the hearts of the educated how much they know.
I am pride. I am the most potent sin. I require so little tinder to scorch all that I touch. Eating an apple is such a trivial thing, but therein lies my genius. I am pride. I am not a brute. I am subtlety itself. I do not labor at the level of objects or even actions. To accomplish my aim, I need only to infect intention.
You can reject the truth of your own existence with the most insignificant of objects and actions. Eating fruit, betraying a friend with a kiss, saying one thing while meaning another. Lord above! How I mock you! I have made it so that humans need not even speak to utter lies. At my command, they lie to themselves in the silence of their hearts: Others do not understand me; they underestimate me; they have done me wrong.
I am pride, the primordial, the potent, the great pretender. I chant into the hearts of the educated how much they know. I constantly compare them to the unlettered fools, who surround them, lest they look up, see a vast ocean of mystery, which they will never fathom, and humble themselves.
I am pride. I am a puzzle even to myself. Who else could make circumstances of birth a point of personal possession? Education, nationality, wealth: These are mere tools that I use to convince you, or at least make you forget that you are not your own origin, your own destiny, and that the world does not revolve around you.
I am pride, the pious. It is simple to convince people that they are the source of their own righteousness, that they have made the correct choices when so many others have failed.
I am pride, the pious. Religion is not my foe. It is my ape. I can so easily make religious people to accomplish my purposes. It is simple to convince them that they are the source of their own righteousness, that they have made the correct choices when so many others have failed. Why, God himself must be ever so grateful that they have chosen to come his way! That is what I whisper into their inflated heads.
Have you ever tried mixing religion with education? Allow me, Pride, to indulge myself. It is my finest brew! No need for academic degrees. Just let them read something that corresponds to their own prejudices. How many lettered religious damn themselves because they make mercy and righteousness so small? Heaven itself is too cramped for those who so overestimate themselves.
I am pride, the pinnacle. I am the one sin you can still commit on your deathbed, when your limbs and your bowels have failed you. You squirm in the sheets, yet you still look about and judge others.
I knew in the first chapters of the Gospel that the Nazarene would be my end. He saw through it all, saw right through me.
It is only faith that I fear, this throwing yourself into the arms of another, one whom you cannot even see. I knew in the first chapters of the Gospel that the Nazarene would be my end. He saw through it all, saw right through me.
He knew that bread was only a question of circumstance and that it is in the very nature of circumstances to change. He had already attained the purpose of learning: the knowledge of how little one knows. He did not credit himself for being one of the chosen because he knew that he had not been the one who chose. Religion meant only one thing to him: accepting the will of the creator.
If only I, Pride, had a creator! How I would indict the injustice that laid me low. I was duped. How was I to know, how could I have ever suspected that, in the person of the Son, the creator himself would insist that he was not the world’s origin or its pinnacle, that he did not stand at its center?
I had always envied the unity of God, God’s lack of origin, God’s freedom from all want. How was I to know that God was triune? That the Son comes forth from the Father? That Father and Son are compelled to pour out themselves in love of the other and into a third?
Father, Son and Holy Spirit: They stand forever beyond the primordial, the potent and the pious. Why, the real pinnacle is pure puzzle. That’s how it slays pride itself.
