10th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Perhaps more than any other narrative in the Old Testament, the story of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden has exerted an enormous influence in shaping Christian ideas about sin, sexuality, shame and guilt. Down through the ages, this narrative has had a reception of being read as a story that delineates the fall of human beings from God’s grace. It is not surprising then that it has come to be known simply as the story of the “Fall.” The narrative of the “Fall” has loomed large in the history and development of Christianity and has led the Church to a discourse that has been far more effective in causing guilt-trips than leading to actual human transformation. You might be surprised to learn that this story was not always interpreted as the story of a Fall. Indeed, nowhere in the rest of the Old Testament is this story interpreted as a story that recounts the Fall of humanity. Considering how focused the Hebrew Bible is on sin and the consequences of covenantal infidelity, it is astonishing that the Hebrew prophets did not make a meal of this story to drill into their listeners the toxic effects of sin.

It was only really during the patristic period that the interpretation of the Fall became fully entrenched within the Christian imagination. For this, we are largely indebted to St. Augustine, who ensured that the “sin and fall” interpretation became the dominant one in the Western Church for the next millennium. Happily, there were other patristic writers who proposed a slightly more nuanced interpretation. St. Irenaeus of Lyons is one such Father of the Church whose reading of this story invites us to see it as a depiction of human maturation. St. Irenaeus suggests that God purposefully elected not to endow our first parents with the gift of perfection right from the start, but rather created them in such a way that they would have to journey to perfection. He adopts the metaphor of St. Paul by likening God to a mother who would not feed her children with solid food when they could only manage milk. Irenaeus concludes that God could well have created Adam and Eve perfect, but decided not to, since they were “as yet infants,” unable to integrate such perfection with their infantile nature. What supports the hypothesis that Adam and Eve were children in the garden of Eden is the fact that childhood is the only stage of our lives where we are unashamed of being naked. If Adam and Eve were children in the garden, this story that we hear in our first reading today is less one of a fall as that of a temporary stumbling on the way to growing up and becoming adults.

The interpretation of this story as one of human maturation is further bolstered when we turn our attention to the tree of tôb and ra. Traditionally this tree has been translated as the “tree of good and evil.” This translation has been influenced by the Fall narrative which has led to the use of the moral categories of “good and evil” to describe the knowledge that this tree imparts to those who part take of its fruit. It is possible to interpret this tree in a manner that eschews the use of moral categories. In chapter 1 of the book of Genesis, when God has created everything he looks at creation and finds it “tôb.” We are told that the fruit of the trees in the garden of Eden are tôb for eating. Used in these two contexts, it should be clear that the word tôb is not translating a moral category. When the fruit is described as “good” this is not a comment on the moral quality of the fruit, but rather that it is suited for eating. When creation is described as “good” this is not a comment on the moral quality of creation, for which the opposite would be evil. Rather it is a comment on the beauty and suitability of creation, for which the opposite would be “bad” or “ugly.” In this alternative interpretation, the tree of the knowledge of good and bad is all about Adam and Eve acquiring the realization that life is not just a bed of roses. It is about them coming to the knowledge that the thorns of life lie right next to the rose petals of life. Accordingly, God always intended for Adam and Eve to eat from the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and bad, but only after God had prepared them for the fact that often life’s best experiences come hand in hand with risks of getting hurt, that the paths that lead us to our deepest joys to be had as a finite humans are the same paths that can lead us to the deepest of sorrow and desolation. But before God could prepare them in this way, they jumped the gun, seeing only what was pleasant and good in the tree’s fruit, oblivious to the fact that the same fruit could also lead them to an experience of the ugly, painful and disappointing side of life. We might liken Adam and Eve’s actions to those of an adolescent who breaks the house rules regarding driving, alcohol or sex, fixated as he is on what he sees to be an experience of unalloyed joy and oblivious to the darker side of such pleasures. It is not that his parents intend to keep him away forever from such pleasures, rather the rules are intended to keep such experiences temporarily at bay, until their son has the maturity to deal with the risks and pain that come along with such human exploits.

It is important for Eve to know that on the other side of the pleasure of sex lies the pain of child-birth. Similarly Adam should know that the joy that comes with eating the fruit of the land can only be acquired through the burdensome toil of tilling the land. When God says to Eve “with painful labour you will give birth to children,” (v.16) and to Adam, “by the sweat of your brow, you will eat your food,” (v. 19),God is not so much meting out a punishment for sin as preparing Adam and Eve to face the harsher realities of life. Adam and Eve are growing up and as they mature into adults, they must now leave the sheltered protection of their childhood and go out into the world. Their growing up has happened faster than God wanted it to happen, and in many ways they are not entirely ready to face the world because they lacked the patience to trust in God’s plan for them.

Despite the forgoing analysis, to make this story simply a tale of human maturation without any reference to sin would not do justice to the text. Clearly, Adam and Eve disobeyed the command given to them by God not to eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and bad. The reason they did this is because they did not trust that God had their best interests at heart. They believed that God was just spoiling their fun, much like any teenager believes their parents don’t really understand them and just want to spoil their fun. What is lost in this story is the intimate trusting relationship that Adam and Eve had with God. When Adam and Eve eat the fruit of the forbidden tree they come to a rude awakening, realizing that they are vulnerable in so many ways to so many things that threaten their happiness, including their own stupidity at not trusting God. Their nakedness is a symbol of this vulnerability, of which they were blissfully unaware while they were children. As long as their parents are around, a child feels totally secure and safe. When Adam and Eve disobey God, they feel that they have lost God’s protection and favour, and they are ashamed and alone. They become acutely aware of their vulnerability, and so they hide. This is the tragedy that they hide from the one person who can heal them from their sense of shame and restore to them the feeling of security that comes with divine protection. For the truth is that they never really lost God’s favour and protection. Their shame and guilt is what caused them to mistakenly believe this was the case.

When they eat of the forbidden fruit they discover a whole other half of life, the pain, the misery, the disappointment that are all too often the flip side of our happiest experiences. They automatically assume that the same must be true of their relationship with God, that God can also disappoint them and mislead them, or at the very least be angry with them for having disobeyed God’s command. Indeed, they probably do feel that God has deceived them by not telling them that there was a flip side to happiness and joy. This again is the tragedy of our human existence, that when we mire ourselves in sin, we presume that the whole universe is set against us, including God. We believe that God is punishing us and has withdrawn the protection that we were so sure of in our state of innocence.

The moment we are tempted to hide ourselves away from God is precisely the moment that we need God’s loving presence the most. The point of this alternative interpretation of the story is not to wipe away all the drama of our sinfulness, but rather to allow us to realize that we are a work in progress and God is there to help us through this journey. The difference between a Fall narrative and a stumbling narrative is that we realize that managing our vulnerability is part of life. Sometimes we will choose to manage our vulnerability in unhealthy ways and this should be a learning process for us. Hopefully, having learnt how not to manage our vulnerability (disobeying God and hiding from God) we will then come to more healthy ways of dealing with our human finitude. We do this by realizing that our experience of pain and disappointment as humans are a pathway to trusting more fully in God.

Questions for reflection

1. Is my default response after sin to hide away from God?
2. How can I come to understand my sinfulness as a stumbling on the journey towards learning to trust in God?