Today the Man and the Woman experience the consequences of their disobedience to God (Genesis 3:9-24). It begins with a sad dialogue between God and the Man and the Woman. God is looking for them in the Garden, asking “Where are you?” God, of course, knows where they are, but he needs to elicit their confession of their sin. He does not get it, and we are left to wonder what the story might have been had they acknowledged their sin and sought God’s forgiveness. The Man says that they are hiding because they are naked. Nakedness now fills them with a sense of shame and guilt. They can no longer face their God. Their original innocence is gone, and from now on nakedness is linked to immorality and base desires.
God asks the Man: “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?” The Man and the Woman do not acknowledge their own sin but try to shift the blame onto someone else. First, the Man blames the Woman—the “woman whom you gave to be with me”—even God is being held partly to blame! “Yes, I ate the fruit, but she made me do it.” She, in her turn, blames the serpent for putting temptation in her way: The serpent tricked me, and I ate.
The Hebrew for the verb “tricked” is hiss’iani and suggests the hissing of the snake.
All now pay the price of their wrongdoing. God’s judgements, however, are pronounced in the reverse order. What follows provides explanations for the origin of some present-day realities: agriculture, prepared or cooked food, childbearing, family of husband and wife. The serpent is condemned to crawl the earth, forever eating dirt, hinting that in the original creation, the snake was once upright. He will be cursed forever among all the animals. From now on, a strange enmity will exist between the Woman and the serpent, and between her offspring and the serpent’s: “…he will strike your head, and you will strike his heel.”
Later theology would see here not just enmity between snakes and humans, but the serpent is identified with Satan, whose eventual defeat seems implied in the contrast between ‘head’ and ‘heel’. Later generations saw in the passage the first promise of a Redeemer for sinful humanity. The Greek version of this text uses a masculine singular pronoun (‘he’, rather than ‘they’), thus ascribing the victory not to the woman’s descendants in general, but to one Son in particular, and thus providing the basis for the messianic interpretation given by many of the Fathers.
The Woman will experience great pain when giving birth. She will have a strong desire for her husband, but he will ‘rule over’ her. Women’s historical subordination to the male is presented as a consequence of human events, not an ideal in its own right. Responsibilities of procreation will compromise the freedom of both genders. The Man will ‘rule over’ her, but he will need her to continue his family line.
In the garden the Man had just to pick the fruit from the trees. Now the tilling of the unfriendly and infertile soil will become a laborious and painful task, resulting often in brambles and thistles. From now on his life will be one of hard physical labor, until the day he goes back to the soil from which he was originally made. Agriculture was a major step in human evolution, but one beset with difficulty and hard work. Unlike the abundant fruit of the Garden just waiting to be picked. Bread, for instance, requires many steps and much human cooperation in its preparation. At the end, the Man will return to the earth from which he came—the first clear indication of human mortality.
In a final touch, we are told that God made skins for the Man and his wife to wear to cover the shame of their nakedness. Some see in this a new alienation between humans and animals, which did not exist in the Garden. Animals now were being killed by humans for food, clothing and other purposes—and humans were often being killed and eaten by animals. Later, the prophet would dream of a day when: “…The wolf shall live with the lamb; the leopard shall lie down with the kid; the calf and the lion will feed together… (Isaiah 11:6)
At the same time, the Man and the Woman were now able, like God, “…[to know] good and evil”. They now knew all the possible extremes, they knew about sex, mortality and moral distinctions of good and bad, right and wrong. There was a danger that they could reach out to the Tree of Life and thus win immortality. They therefore must be removed from the Garden and sent back to the earth from which they had originally come. They will have to settle for the modified immortality of succeeding family generations—a human family tree.
To the east of the Garden in Eden, cherubim and a flaming sword were placed to keep the Man and the Woman out and away from the Tree of Life.
Lastly, the Man now gave his wife the name of Eve, which means “bearer of life”. She would be the mother of every person to be born in succeeding ages. This second naming of Woman reflects the couple’s new role as procreators. Much later, spiritual writers liked to take the Latin form of her name Eva and invert it to read Ave, the word of greeting used by the angel at the Annunciation to Mary, our new Mother.
Sin upsets the order willed by God: Woman, instead of being Man’s associate and equal, becomes his seductress, while he for his part reduces her to the role of child-bearer. Man, instead of being God’s gardener in Eden, has to struggle against the now hostile environment. But the greatest punishment is the loss of intimacy with God. These penalties are hereditary. The doctrine of hereditary guilt is not clearly stated until Paul draws his comparison between the solidarity of all in the Savior Christ and the solidarity of all in sinful Adam (Romans 5). This is the ‘original sin’.
We should avoid taking a fundamentalist, literal understanding of all this, as if we were dealing with ‘real’ history. What is being said here is that the human race, as far back as we can go, has been infected with sinful acts against truth, love and justice and, as a consequence of its own choices, has suffered hardships of all kinds.
Today we have the second of two feeding stories found in Mark (Mark 8:1-10). The first, with 5,000 people, was in a predominantly Jewish area while this one, with 4,000 people, is in a mainly gentile territory. Jesus is reaching out to both groups. The meaning of both stories is both physical and spiritual.
Once again, we see Mark indicating the emotional response of Jesus. He is filled with compassion for the people in their need. “I have compassion for the crowd…If I send them away hungry to their homes, they will faint on the way—and some of them have come from a great distance.” They will collapse “on the way”, i.e. on the road. Jesus is the Way, the ‘Road’. To walk the road of Jesus, we need a certain kind of nourishment. This is what Jesus came to give.
The disciples, interpreting Jesus literally, as they usually do, ask: “How can one feed these people with bread here in the desert?” In the presence of Jesus, the question answers itself, but with the disciples the meaning has not yet clicked. In Mark’s Gospel, they are often shown to be without an understanding of just who their Master is—that is because they represent us.
The disciples are asked what they can supply. Seven loaves and a few fish is all they have. There is a strong Eucharistic element in this, as in the former story (with the 5,000). The people are told to sit down, and: “…he took the seven loaves, and after giving thanks [Greek, eucharistesas] he broke them and gave them to his disciples to distribute, and they distributed them to the crowd.”
Again, we note that Jesus himself does not give out the food the people need. It comes from him but is distributed by his disciples. The same is true today. It is our task to feed the hungry—both physically and spiritually. All were filled—4,000 people altogether—and even so, there were seven (a perfect number) baskets left over. This was another sign of God’s abundance shared with his people.
Then Jesus sends them away. “…Immediately he got into the boat with his disciples and went to the district of Dalmanutha. [i.e. back to Jewish territory].
Jesus was leaving no room for any misinterpretations of what he had done. The disciples, too, are quickly removed from the scene. There was to be no self-congratulation or glorying in their connections with Jesus, the wonder worker. Through the miracle, the teaching had been given and that was that.
May God Bless You and Grant You His Peace!