Friday of the Fifth Week in Ordinary Time

Today's Mass Readings

I am so used to thinking that I “know” the story of the fall from today’s reading (Genesis 3:1-8) that I usually overlook how much of a tragedy it really is. The great tragedies (Oedipus Rex, Hamlet, King Lear) feature characters for whom things are (or at least once were) going very, very well – for a time. Then, due to a combination of fear, anxiety, self-doubt, foolish mistakes, flawed reasoning and, perhaps, a little bit of fate– things go very, very wrong. Today’s story in Genesis is a tragedy. In the first chapter of Genesis, we read that God created humankind in his own image and likeness, and we read further in Chapter 2, and even a bit in today’s reading of how close that relationship between God and humanity was. God was a close, intimate friend. In Genesis 2, we read that Adam and Eve are one, “bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh.” They have a close and intimate relationship before they ate the forbidden fruit. Things are going very, very well.

But then, the serpent shows up and asks Eve the niggling question, “Did God really tell you not to eat that fruit?” The serpent insinuates: perhaps you misheard what God said. Then, having played on Eve’s self-doubt, the serpent goes further and provides a possible reason for why God might have forbidden that tree: Adam and Eve would be like God themselves if they ate of the tree. The serpent insinuates, without really saying, God would be envious of you if you eat from that tree.

Eve thinks, “Yes, I have been wondering that myself. And what you say, Serpent, sounds fine to me.” Then things begin to go very, very wrong. Consider, when the serpent first arrives on the scene, Eve is able, very clearly and directly, to say why they cannot eat the fruit from that one tree. This is why it is so much more a tragedy then, when without careful thought about what the serpent says, or careful investigation of whether what the serpent says can be true, (even to the point of asking God) Eve, and Adam with her, leap for the answers that are most appealing and most easy and most self-fulfilling at that moment.

They eat the fruit and in that moment, the great break occurs. They hide from each other, wearing clothes because they no longer see themselves fully as “one flesh”. They hide from God, as well. Relationships are broken and cannot quite be put back together again.

All of this is why the gospel reading (Mark 7:31-37) is so important, however. Jesus heals a deaf man and thus symbolically overturns what the serpent did in the garden. Where the serpent suggested that Eve “misheard” God, Jesus offers full, clear hearing. Jesus proclaims, in his actions, that God does not want us to mishear. Quite the contrary, God wants for us to have a close relationship – the kind of relationship where, when we have doubts as perhaps Eve had doubts, we can ask God directly. It is difficult, of course, to gain a sense of clarity or to maintain it. Yet to take the serpent’s way, to say, “Aw, why not?” as Eve did, is to take the easy way and to avoid the difficult work of finding clarity. May we pray today for greater clarity in our Christian discipleship.

– Jana M. Bennett