Felix Culpa

Painting by Sister Grace Remington, OCSO

Midweek Advent 3 Vespers

Propers: The Commemoration of Adam and Eve, A.D. 2017 B

Homily:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Scripture speaks of Christ as the New Adam: God’s New Creation, or re-creation, of humanity; brought back to God not in the Garden of Eden but in the Garden of Gethsemane. Christ is Adam returned to his pre-fallen state, and even elevated far beyond it. Likewise Mary is the New Eve, womanhood perfected, a human being preserved immaculate by Christ from every spot or shade of sin. She is what we were all meant to be.

To drive this home, the Church traditionally commemorates our first parents—the first Adam and Eve—in the week running up to Christmas. The New Creation lies hidden in the Old, while the Old Creation is revealed in the New. And so we take a moment now to discuss human origins, free will, and our tragic Fall from grace.

Such is the price of love, you see. To truly love—to truly give of oneself for another—that other must be free: free to accept and reciprocate the love so freely given. Thus to love is always to be vulnerable, in that the beloved has the power to reject that love, to spurn the lover.

Love cannot be imposed. Love cannot be forced. Love can only be given, or it is not love.

That’s what the story of Adam and Eve is all about. No matter how literally or figuratively you take it, Eden is the place where humanity became more than an animal, became a real person, a rational moral agent, free to choose right from wrong. No beast, no matter how clever, no matter how compassionate, bears the weight of moral responsibility that we do. If a dog is bad, it’s not the dog’s fault; it’s the master’s fault. But if a man is bad, there may be extenuating circumstances, but ultimately the responsibility falls upon his or her own free choice.

Adam and Eve were given the freedom, given the choice, to live in perfect bliss with God, or to reject God’s love, judging right and wrong for themselves, being, in effect, their own gods. The fact that God afforded them this freedom does not make God fickle or cruel. Even foreknowing how Adam and Eve would abuse their free will, God could not do other than to allow them the dignity of being wrong. He loved them too much for that. Even knowing that they would do wrong, God would still do right by them—and by extension, to us all. For who are Adam and Eve, if not humanity as a whole? We are all of us offshoots and derivatives of them.

It was their Fall that opened the door for grace to flow the freer. It was out of sheer love for us that God came down from Heaven and was incarnate of the Virgin Mary, pouring out for us His very life from the Cross, that we might all be gathered into one in Him. Christ did not come for the good or the worthy. He came for Adam and Eve—for all of humanity, wicked and fallen, broken and base, for every sinner who ever chose the devil’s fruit above his Father’s love and glory.

God took our wickedness, took our brokenness, and made it His own, took it all upon Himself, that even as we murdered Him, He ushered us into eternal life. In Jesus Christ, who is God become Man, and in His Mother Mary, who is Man raised up into union with God, our humanity is exalted far above all Creation, infinitely higher even than the greatest and most glorious of the angels. Thus is our final state far better than our first, and we have greater intimacy with God in the Chalice even than Adam and Eve had in the Garden.

We call this the Felix Culpa, our “Lucky Fault”—the Fall that made possible our Redemption, Resurrection, and union with God. Some cults and sects have gone so far as to praise sinners for their sin—to praise Adam and Eve for the Fall, to praise Judas for his betrayal—because our evil gave opportunity to Christ’s grace. But this is blasphemy. It takes things too far. God neither wills nor requires our sin. The fact that He saves us from it, in spite of it, and often even through it, testifies not to the necessity of sin, but to the lengths to which God is willing to go to expunge our sin from us. Grace should cause us to fling our sin away, not to revel in it.

What would history have been like, had Adam and Eve chosen love rather than pride? What would humanity look like, what would our world look like, had we never tasted forbidden fruit and been nourished solely by the Tree of Life? How much tragedy might have been avoided? What oceans of tears and sweat and blood? Surely we would’ve known union with Christ in some way other than the Cross.

Yet in spite of all that, the very worst of our evils could not stop Jesus from coming. He came. Somehow or other, He came just the same. And so our pride and our sins and our darkest wicked arts, all the hells of our own devising, have been melted down, pounded and purged, in the furnace of God’s relentless, all-consuming love, so that our very Fall has been re-forged, made anew, into Christ’s own glory and exultation.

The New Adam, through the New Eve, has come to save our fallen race, from our very first parents to their very last child: Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. Thanks be to God—not for our Fall!—but for the grace and love and Blood of Christ that have transformed the Fall of Man into our Felix Culpa, our Blessed Fault, through which the Son of God has come to save us all.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.