Tuesday of the Twenty-ninth Week in Ordinary Time
Today’s first reading is from the Letter of St. Paul to the Romans. In this passage, Paul is explaining the good news of salvation in Christ by reminding his readers and listeners about the stories in Genesis. In Genesis 2 and 3, God creates Adam and Eve, who then disobey God’s one rule: do not eat of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. At first, God can seem a little capricious here: anyone who has children knows that specifically telling a child not to do something means that the temptation to do that very thing is inevitable.
The bigger picture, however, shows us that Adam and Eve weren’t just breaking any rule, but were grasping to make themselves like God. The serpent says as much to Eve, that God made the rule because God knew the fruit would make Adam and Eve rivals to God’s knowledge and power. In a moment of forgetting the great abundance God had already bestowed on them and the fact that they were already made in God’s image and likeness (Gen. 1:27). Eve and Adam (together) usher sin into the world in the form of selfishness and disrespecting the perfect order of Creation.
The good news of Jesus Christ, then, is that he is a new Adam, according to Paul: “If by that one person’s transgression the many died, how much more did the grace of God and the gracious gift of the one man Jesus Christ overflow for the many.” If the sin of Eve and Adam was to make themselves bigger than they were, a futile attempt at grasping at godliness, we have in Jesus Christ the perfect revelation of grace in the form of obedience and radical self-giving.
The selfish tendencies we all feel are turned upside down in the sacrament of the Cross, in Christ’s self-giving example. The true mode of humanity, the Gospel says, is to give of oneself. Though we continue to fall short, we are also continuously called into contact with God through the Sacraments to strengthen us for such radical self-giving. Christ is our example and our strength, and it is through him that we work to build up the Kingdom of God through our own self-giving.
- Katherine Schmidt