I want to begin today with a detail which belongs to every Mass, even though it is always, or nearly always, different every time we come to Mass. I mean the Collect. The Collect is a Prayer which comes fairly early in the Mass. Sometimes it is called the ‘Opening Prayer’, but that is not quite accurate, since we have often been praying one way or another for a few minutes by the time we get to the Collect. But it does represent an important stage in our Mass. In this relatively short prayer the priest brings the opening rites of the Mass to an end by addressing God the Father through Christ in the unity of the Holy Spirit. The Collect is the prayer which ‘collects’ or brings us together. As a part of the Mass, it is very ancient; not quite as ancient as the Eucharistic Prayer, but even so, some of the prayers we use as Collects at Sunday Mass are about fifteen hundred years old. Take today’s Collect prayer, a masterpiece in its own right: It opened with a call to ‘God, from whom all good things come.’ All collects begin in a way more or less like this, with some particular characterisation of God as He is: in this case, we address God as the author of all good things. This reminds us that all that exists comes from God, and also that it is good as it comes from him. So whenever we come across anything that is not good, we must wonder where that comes from. Is it from something other than God? Is there another power that brings evil things into being from nothing? The answer is, of course, No. There is no other God, no other such creative power. We have heard in our first reading this morning part of the 3rd chapter of the Book of Genesis, and it may remind us of the very opening chapter of that first book of the Bible, which, in all probability, you will have heard most recently at the Easter Vigil, when we were told that after each successive day of creation, God saw that it was good.
But the chapter we heard in today’s first reading is all about the coming of evil into that good creation; how our first parents were beguiled into wilful disobedience to God’s command given to them. The one responsible for that dire event, which we call the Fall, and the Original Sin, was Satan. He had been created good, an angel of light, but through envy of God and of God’s plan for creation, and most particularly his utter hatred for the plan God had for us, made in His own image and likeness to prosper, Satan became God’s implacable enemy, and strove to enlist us in his plan to wreak havoc in God’s good creation, and to spoil what was beautiful for no other reason than out of pride and envy. Hence Satan appears in today’s reading as the Serpent in the Garden of Eden, and he is so named again in the very last book of the Scriptures, the Apocalypse, as the ancient serpent, the evil one, God’s enemy even though he is God’s own creature.
We picked up the story of the Fall just now in the first reading after the temptation, after Eve had been beguiled by the Serpent’s treachery into disbelieving God’s good purpose when He had forbidden Adam and Eve to eat of the fruit of that one tree, the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and after Adam had been seduced into following Eve’s example through his own weakness. Note how Satan had come in disguise as a Serpent. Satan had deceived Eve by appealing to the attractiveness of the tree and its fruit. He had said that God forbade them to eat this fruit because God feared that it would make them into other gods, just as powerful as Himself. Eve was fooled by Satan, and believed him. She then seduced Adam into sharing this act of disobedience with her. We may well wonder what was so special about this tree, and why this command not to eat its fruit should have mattered? Well, God had said that if they did eat it, on that day they should surely die. Yet it seems that they did not die after all. Instead, Adam suddenly realised that he was naked, and hid himself from God because, as he says, he was afraid. Disobedience had introduced something horrible into the once beautiful relationship between God and humanity: fear and alienation. This is what death means.
Ever since that time, humanity has suffered a radical alienation from the friendship of God, and knows not purely what is good, but also what is evil – whatever is contrary to God’s plan and His goodness. This knowledge, which Satan presented as something desirable and liberating, has enslaved and deceived us ever since. This is what Original Sin does to us – it brings us into the world in a state of alienation from our maker, from the One in whose Image we have been created, and so it introduces not only fear of God, but in a sense also a lack of understanding of what and who we are. We no longer see ourselves as especially created by God in His loving goodness to be His friends. We no longer recognise His likeness in us; at least not unless we are given a radically new beginning in God, which we call grace, and which first comes to us in Baptism to renew God’s friendship, to restore His image in us, and to give us a new sense of our true nature, identity and purpose. This is the work of our Saviour and the reason why He who is Almighty God the Son of the Father, willingly came to be a man as the son of Mary, and so to transform our human nature precisely by living as one like us in every possible way excepting one thing only: sin.
But we should never think that sin is a necessary part of human existence; as though it is necessary to experience sin so as to be fully human. That idea is part of the fruit of the forbidden tree, in which we are given knowledge of good and evil. Knowing evil does not make us better, does not make us more sophisticated, but diminishes us, thwarts our true freedom, and makes us enemies of God, of each other and even of our true selves. This is why there is so much confusion in the world today concerning what it means to be a human person. This is why people hate what God has made them to be, and wish to be converted, or ‘transitioned’ into something else, anything else, so long as it is not what God has made them. This is why we live in a society which also believes that it is perfectly justifiable to treat some other human beings as problems to be got rid of, as for instance babies in the womb who are falsely denied their true human status by being referred to as things, foetuses, embryos, but not persons like you and me. All this has come about because the image of God is darkened in our minds and hearts through sin brought into our world and into our lives by Satan, who is no friend to us any more than he is to God who made him.
And so it is that we need God to untangle this mess into which we have been dragged by Satan’s hatred and envy. We need Christ to show us what being human really means. Hence Pope St John Paul II said that in Christ, He who is God made man shows to humanity what being human really, truly is. Hence the words of the Collect prayer today in which we prayed our Almighty Father to ‘grant that we, who call on you in our need, may at your prompting discern what is right, and by your guidance do it.’
This beautiful prayer helps us to understand something precious about God and us: first, that we need His help to discern what is right, for without Him that knowledge has become confused in the human race as a whole. For we no longer know naturally, simply, what is right, but have often been blinded by false principles like ‘the will of the majority’, as though the greatest number must always be in the right, or that the strongest should always prevail over the weakest, or as though might is right. Secondly, we learn from today’s Collect prayer that we need God’s guidance not only to know what is right, but also to do it. For we need God’s grace in all our actions as well as in all our deliberations. We cannot act rightly without God’s grace. So then may God grant us that enlightenment and guidance which only He can give, and also bring the whole human race to turn away from the false freedom brought us by the knowledge of evil. And so I finish with that magnificent prayer in full: O God, from whom all good things come, grant that we, who call on you in our need, may at your prompting discern what is right, and by your guidance do it. Amen.
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