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What a difference a year makes! Who could have imagined last Advent the place we would find ourselves in at this moment?
The COVID pandemic, the presidential election, and the ongoing violence in our cities have completely changed and challenged us in unimaginable ways. The entire human race is hurting. We can see the power of sin and death all around us.
This Advent, I have never felt the need for prayer more profoundly or heard the longings of the Old Testament prophets more keenly.
We seek liberation. We desire a savior. We need Jesus Christ and all that He has to give us.Effects of Original Sin
The second movement of the kerygma, the essential proclamation of the Gospel, is the lost and broken place humanity finds itself in because of Original Sin.
God created the human person and the world in perfection, order, and beauty, willing nothing to be harmful or evil. He gives man and woman a soul, a mind and free will, so that we could know, love, and serve the Lord in freedom.
God knows that love cannot be forced. The fact that God gave us freedom, knowing full well that we would turn from Him and sin, is a remarkable testament to His overwhelming love for us.
Genesis narrates the drama of Adam and Eve, seduced by the serpent, choosing to eat the forbidden fruit and thereby bringing sin and death into the world.
God’s fundamental edict regarding the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is not arbitrary or whimsical.
Eating this fruit symbolizes humanity’s sinful desire to view God as a manipulative oppressor, not a loving Father.
In rejecting God’s commandment, Adam and Eve reject their dependence on God, shatter the beautiful relationship they enjoy with Him, seek to be their own gods, and live as they see fit, apart from the Lord.
The results of this Original Sin are disastrous. Adam and Eve fall into mutual accusation and reproach; the innocent beauty of their sexuality is corrupted by shame and lust; Cain murders Abel.
Friendship with God and each other is shattered by pride, selfishness, grasping, sorrow, and suffering.
As the wages of sin, death enters the world. Several years ago, I viewed a striking painting in an art museum in Phoenix; it depicted Adam and Eve discovering the dead body of their son Abel.
Their faces capture a complexity of emotion: Shock upon seeing a dead human being for the first time; sorrow as they look upon their murdered son; profound grief as they realize that Cain, their other son was the murderer; and guilt, as they understand that their sin has somehow contributed to this murderous crime.
Genesis teaches us some fundamental truths. God created everything good. Man and woman bear the image of God and are destined for an eternal relationship of love with Him.
Because love is fundamentally free, God gave us free will with the ability to reject the Good. Adam and Eve sin in a fundamental and radical way, seeking to throw off their friendship with God as a perceived burden or oppression.
Suffering the consequences
Because of this primordial wrong choice at the beginning of the human race, sin and death enter the world and every person born into it suffers the consequences.
We call this disordered state of things, “concupiscence,” the fact that we often reject God and what is good for us and desire what is evil and destructive to us and to others.
Our own human experience and even a cursory look at the world around us verify the insidious effects and power of sin and death.
Violence, war, poverty, injustice, hatred, abortion, euthanasia, racism, greed, exploitation, alienation, loneliness, broken relationships of every kind, and every other malady that afflicts us are all due to sin.
We are born into a world that has been warped and misshaped by hundreds of generations of individuals sinning. Additionally, we suffer the effects of death’s power in the form of natural disasters, accidents, illnesses, diseases, and pandemics.
In the end, we all face the mystery of our own mortality. Deep down in our soul, we instinctively understand that things are not fundamentally right with us, that it is not supposed to be this way.
We long for love, peace, health, relationship, abundance, and immortality.
Until we seriously grapple with the power of sin and death in our own lives, feeling their oppressive weight, rebelling against their insidious power, understanding that God envisions a different life for us, we will not understand the enormity of the gracious offer of salvation and forgiveness given to us in Christ.
Until I taste the bitterness of sin in my own life, feel the grasp of death, weep over the loss of a loved one, and become radically discontent with the injustice in the world, I will never fully know how much I need a savior.
Struggling with my own powerlessness, my inability to save myself or others, is a good thing because it compels me to look outwards and beyond, knowing that God will not leave us in such a sorry plight.
Even in the aftermath of sin’s catastrophe in the Garden of Eden, God sheds a ray of hope, foreshadowing the salvation to come. Speaking to the serpent in Genesis 3:15, God promises, “I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your offspring and hers; he will strike at your head while you strike at his heel.”
The Church Fathers called this passage the “Proto-Evangelium” or the “Pre-Gospel.”
We clearly see already in this second movement of the kerygma the ultimate unfolding of the third: The entire Christ event as God’s bold action to rescue us from the grasp of sin and death, as He defeats the power of evil.