1stSunday of Lent, A February 22, 2026
Fr. Alexander Albert St. Mary Magdalen, Abbeville
What’s the big deal? It’s just a piece of fruit. How can something as small as eating one wrong piece of fruit be so bad that it breaks the whole world, gets Adam & Eve banned from the garden, and causes human beings for the rest of time to become weaker, dumber, and doomed to die? Isn’t that a bit unfair?
Apparently not. Because God is just. God is good. If God, who is all-knowing, all-powerful, and perfectly good says this is the right consequence, then it must be. And if it seems out-of-proportion to us, we must be the ones missing something. To someone who is a skeptic, who is agnostic, who is unsure whether or not God is real and whether or not He is good, I can understand the frustration with that answer.
But let’s challenge that skeptical approach for a moment. It’s not that we can’t ever ask questions or seek understanding – God wants intelligent, thoughtful disciples who seek to understand – it’s that the way we seek understanding matters. In the Gospels, the Father and Jesus respond to different people in surprisingly different ways. Mary and Zechariah both ask questions when promised a miraculous pregnancy, but only Zechariah is punished; Mary just gets her question answered and some reassurance. What’s the difference? It’s the difference between faith seeking understanding and skeptics putting God on trial.
The truth is rich and deep and often complex. Sometimes, the answer to a question isn’t a simple statement. Sometimes, the question cannot be answered until the person asking is willing to change their perspective. Often enough, that changes the question too.
So what’s that got to do with fruit? Well, when someone asks “why is eating a piece of fruit such a big deal,” the problem isn’t the desire for an answer, it’s the perspective that it was “just” eating a piece of fruit. Intentional or not, putting the question that way reduces the event to less than the whole. The secular worldview does this all the time when it says things like “you are just a collection of atoms.” While it is true that we are a collection of atoms and it is true that Adam and Eve ate fruit, that isn’t all that’s true. The truth is that when a particular collection of atoms is organized by and connected to a soul, it is a person. When Adam and Eve ate the fruit, they also disobeyed God.
A skeptic can again reduce the reality of disobedience to smaller pieces to dismiss the importance. They’d say something like “why should I obey an arbitrary rule?” Or “why would God give Adam and Eve free choice and then get mad when they make their own decisions?” Nevermind that Adam and Eve were in a direct personal relationship with God. Nevermind that choosing to eat the fruit was a betrayal of trust. Nevermind that eating the fruit meant agree with Satan’s accusations of God. Let’s dismiss the rich tapestry of meaning and love bound up with this one action, let’s reduce it to the mechanical action.
No, the better question is, “what’s wrong with lying to God, slandering him, and disobeying him?” This reductive dynamic is behind most objections the world has towards what we call sin. They’ll say, “why does the all-powerful God care about what people do in the bedroom?” instead of the better question, “why does God care about the intimate action that is a divine-human cooperation which produces life and reflects divine love?” They’ll say “why does God care if you eat meat on Friday?” instead of “why does God care if you willfully contradict your commitment to him by disobeying the Church he established and you claim to belong to?”
It isn’t just eating a piece of fruit. It isn’t ever “just” a physical act or linguistic technicality. Whenever we make a choice, our actions are bound up with a whole network of meanings and commitments. Many things aren’t choices – feelings, instincts, random intrusive thoughts, things done to us – but when our will is engaged and we choose to act or not act, the only honest way to judge that decision is to pay attention to the whole picture, not just the smallest piece or most convenient angle.
So, when we approach God and his Church with a question about his teaching on morality or anything else, that openness to the bigger picture needs to be there. This is what it means to ask with faith. A person of faith says “I trust God is good and so I trust that there is an explanation even if I can’t see it. So, I’ll agree to it even while I still strive to understand that bigger picture.” A skeptic says “I don’t see the point and I refuse to trust you until you prove your goodness to me.”
Many people live in that skeptical mode and many of us go through it at various points in our lives, but we cannot stay there if we want to be Christian. God never completely proves everything to a skeptic. He will give them evidence. He might even astound them. He will show them how much they don’t understand. But, God is not the one on trial and he does not let humanity play judge and jury. If a person is sincere in seeking truth, he’ll bring them to at least see that faith is reasonable. Then, however, they have to choose to accept faith. The point isn’t to prove everything to the skeptic, it is to get the skeptic to stop being a skeptic and start being a believer.
This doesn’t turn off our brains, but it should shift us from the attitude of “prove yourself to me” to the posture of “I believe and seek to understand better.” There are still things we should be skeptical of even when we have faith. Charlatans and deceivers exist in and outside the Church. Still, a fundamental act of faith in God means we approach God and his revelation with searching faith rather than hostile accusation.
That contrast, the difference between narrow-minded-skeptic and believer-seeking-understanding is how we can understand Jesus’ resistance to the devil’s temptations. When Satan tempts Adam & Eve, he gets them to lose sight of the big picture of the garden and their relationship to God, to narrowly focus on a single tree and to be suspicious of God. Once they start thinking “what’s the big deal, it’s just a piece of fruit,” they fall. Although Adam & Eve were narrow-minded, reality is not narrow and the consequences are unavoidable.
But Jesus doesn’t fall for this. The devil tries to narrowly focus on partial truth. “You’re the Son of God, you’ve got power, and you need food. What’s the big deal it you make stones into bread?” Jesus counters the narrow skeptic with the breadth of faith, “One does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes forth from the mouth of God.” This choice isn’t isolated, but belongs in the context of obedience. God told him to fast, so disobeying that is not okay even if miraculously making bread appear would be fine in other circumstances.
So, Satan appeals to a different narrow truth. “Oh, you trust God? He promised to protect you, so test him!” Jesus counters, “I do trust God, which is always why I trust him when he tells me not to test him or take him for granted.” Then Satan appeals to a narrow idea of Jesus’ mission. Jesus is there to proclaim God’s kingdom, so Satan tries to narrow that conquering the physical, human kingdoms on earth. But once again, Jesus holds to the whole truth that he serves God alone, so no amount of good intentions justifies worshiping anyone else.
Christ’s fidelity widens the vision that was narrowed by the sin of Adam & Eve. As his disciples, we are charged with keeping that same breadth of faith, that same openness to truths greater than ourselves. That’s what Lent is about, what the whole of the Christian life is about: opening our narrow hearts to the breadth of God’s love. Since it was distrust and disobedience that narrowed them in the first place, only by trust and obedience can they be broadened again.
Our faith is reasonable. Our morality, our doctrines, our rituals… they are reasonable and good and true. But they are not on trial, we are. Even before Sin, the truth about God was bigger than Adam & Eve could grasp, how much more would those affected by sin struggle to see the whole picture?
So, if you don’t understand why something is a sin, why we believe certain things, why we do certain things, that’s okay. Thanks be to God, our salvation does not hinge on knowing and understanding everything, it hinges on faith and obedience. It is obedience that is thoughtful, not blind. It is faith that seeks understanding, but that search for understanding cannot be an accusation. Instead of a narrow heart defiantly asking “what’s the big deal?” a heart broadened by faith says “I live by every word that comes from the mouth of God,” and “I believe, help my unbelief,” and “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned,” and after the example of Mary who undid the defiance of Eve, it says with clear-eyed faith, “let it be done unto me according to your word.”