During our Ash Wednesday liturgy, the day marking the beginning of Lent, a call to transformation was prominent: “Create in me a clean heart, oh God, and renew your spirit within me” (Psalm, 51:10). The invocation for the renewal of God’s spirit within us is quite prominent here. But what is the basis for this call?

In the sign of the ash we are reminded that while we are made from dust, we are created in the image of God; for at creation God breathed into us God’s breath of life.  It is in this image that Christ came to us through his incarnation. In Christ’s victory over temptations in our gospel reading today, the image that we ought to mirror is further revealed: beings in union with God through obedience to the will of God.

As Christians, we believe that God’s intention in creating us was so that we may be happy, and live in a close union with God. God created our first parents and provided them with all their needs, and they lived in grace and in union with God. Yet, sin entered and severed this relationship, the union between God and human beings. Thus this sin ended the closeness we shared with God.

In his triumph over sin, Jesus reveals that our true image is manifested in our choices for life, in obedience to the word of God. Adam and Eve, faced with a choice for good or evil, chose to reject God and give in to the temptation to “be like God,” in the words of the evil one. In the choice they made their eyes were open, not to wisdom and life, but to shame and death; a choice through which innocence and union with God was lost. The ‘knowledge’ they sought, in disobedience to the will of God, became the symbol of death.