Jesus entered the wilderness so that we might enter the gardenWe open our Lenten journey in the lushness of the Garden of Eden. It is there that we find Adam and Eve in the idyllic setting in which God placed them and which he intends for us. They are there, as God created them, in partnership with one other and with God. We then shift to the Gospel where we find Jesus alone, hungry and tempted in the barren desert.
The history of salvation is the story of this movement from Eden to the wilderness and back again. Tucked between these two scenes is the reflection of St. Paul which powerfully expresses the journey to salvation.
Adam and Eve are blessed by God with everything that they could need. They live in the plushness of the garden, where nothing is withheld from them. God walked through the garden every afternoon to be with them. His only restriction was they not eat from the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The fruit of all of the other trees of the garden was theirs to eat. Theirs was a life of total harmony, unity and peace. Jesus, in the wilderness, is everyman and everywoman. We struggle through life, seek a unity with God that can often be illusive, hunger for many different forms of nourishment, and never seem to be satisfied.
The one constant that ties the two scenes together is the reality of temptation. Yet, the temptations are markedly different. In the garden, temptation comes in concrete form. The serpent, one of the creatures in the garden created for and named by Adam, presents himself to Eve in a new and sunning way. The serpent’s observations are keen, its questions seem reasonable, and the temptation is subtle. Tempted with the specific fruit the lure of the serpent is amorphous and inviting: they will be like God.
Jesus faces a tempter who offers Jesus what he needs now – bread – and then the allure of fame and importance in the world as a contrast to the suffering and promise of an eternal kingdom.
It is precisely because of the events in the garden that the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness occurs. Paul instructs the Romans: “through one’s disobedience all became sinners.” Jesus stands alone in the garden as a direct consequence of the sin in the garden. God created Adam and Eve as son and daughter. They forfeited their respective relationship with God by succumbing to the allurements which the serpent promised would be theirs. Not only did the tempter deceive them, Adam and Eve lost even more than they imagined. They are banished from the garden and exiled into the wilderness. Their harmony and peace give way to shame and division, expressed in the making of fig leaf coverings. No longer do they experience intimacy with God. God no longer walks among them.
It is this condition, the result of original sin that characterized the moral and spiritual lives of the world from that moment forward.
It is through Jesus and his overcoming the temptations which Satan placed before him, that we can leave the wilderness and return to the garden. As St. Paul points out, “through one’s obedience, all shall become just.”
As we begin this Lenten season, we enter into a time of self-denial and penance in order that we might share more fully in the promise of salvation. The way out of the wilderness is open before us, may we not lose our way on the road to the garden.
Father Garry Koch is pastor of St. Benedict Parish, Holmdel.