November 2, 2022 at 2:09 p.m.
Creation renewed
Creation renewed
Of course, there is nothing new about this. Blame for the state of the world goes right back to accounts of creation found in ancient texts. It features prominently in the aptly named Genesis, the first book of the Bible. Careful readers will note that there are two creation stories. The first, from a Priestly source, runs from Gen 1:1 to 2:3. It contains nothing but good news.
God’s creation is good, humankind is created in God’s “image and likeness,” and God rests thereafter, very pleased with it all.
The second account follows immediately, beginning at Gen 2:4, and comes from the so-called Yahwist tradition. Here the focus is on God’s relationship with Creation and how the original order is disrupted when a third party insinuates himself into it, distracting Adam and Eve from God and turning them in on themselves so they lose both sight and insight of God and, very soon, one another. We know how it turns out. We suffer the same temptations that seduced them: to see ourselves and our resources more trustworthy than God, to attempt to outdo God and God’s Creation, only to fall flat and point fingers at one another, forgetting again and again that we are no different from Adam and Eve if we fail to avoid the same pattern that brought them down.
History — both that of all humanity, and most likely our own, personally — demonstrates that temptation and sin are very difficult, if not impossible to avoid, if we continue to rely on ourselves to overcome them. That is why our Savior comes into the picture, promised even at the hour of the Fall. Notice that God does not curse Adam and Eve, even while pointing out the consequences of their disastrous decisions, which darken their minds and hearts so that they begin to “see” themselves as objects, fixated on what makes them different from God and one another, something they never thought to question before in their original innocence. The mysterious words to the serpent, as God curses him, foretell enmity between him and “the woman,” she and her offspring who will crush his head, “while you strike at their heel” (Gen 3:15). Who is that woman?
God does not condemn Eve for the consequences of her sin, but rather chooses to promise who will ultimately be a new Eve, who will receive God’s ever passionate Love, which is never withdrawn from humanity — Adam and Eve and their progeny — through the bond of His own Spirit living in her. By the ineffable mystery of the Incarnation, God holds the new Adam, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, accountable for the sin of the old Adam by demanding complete obedience so that the human race may be freed of its bondage to sin.
Recall that Satan, the first to disobey God, seeks to recreate Adam and Eve in his image and likeness – proud, rebellious, angry and jealous before God’s goodness and love of these human creatures, which he deems beneath him. His contempt for them, and most especially the woman who will bear other human beings to increase God’s beloved human family, will be unleashed throughout the course of human history as he seeks to demean all women, and even motherhood itself, most beautifully embodied in the identity of Mary as the “Mother of God.”
Yes, Creation will be renewed through a woman who would not repeat the errors of Eve and, in the end, become the means by which Eve and her progeny would be saved from the grip of the ancient serpent, who hates them, and none so much as Mary herself. No longer slaves to the Evil One, the new Adam and the new Eve become the wellspring of a human race redeemed, reborn through the waters of Divine Mercy that reordered the chaos into which our first parents’ disobedience had plunged the created universe. Though we bear the wounds of the Cross as sisters and brothers of Jesus Christ, dead and risen, we live and rise unharmed in the joy of citizens of heaven, the new-testamentary heirs of God’s will to divinize us by adoption.
We might take a moment to reflect on the mystery of infinite divine patience. As many will be tempted to despair of the fundamental goodness of being perfectly human, as God created each of us to be, regardless of whom or what has alienated us from God, ourselves and one another, we people of faith do not lose hope. The sign of the Cross represents the depths to which God will descend, by sending the Incarnate Word, God’s only Son, into whatever humanity can sink to, no matter how base and lowly, “one like us in all things but sin.” Think of that! No matter how you or I or anyone we have ever known or loved may have been defiled, abused or humbled by life’s cruelty and adversity, the loving Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who leads us to call his Father “Our Father,” continues “to see and love in us what he sees and loves in Christ.” This really is creation redeemed and renewed.
What this can do is free us of discouragement, despondency and despair over the outcome of any human catastrophe — a divorce, an untimely death, or (ya think?) even an election. Our fate does not hinge merely on the seeming fortunes or disasters that human decisions may bring upon us, whether they tempt us to think they are saving or damning us. In the end, what the story of Creation’s fall and its renewal in the choices of the new Eve and the new Adam free us from is having to decide for ourselves what is good and evil, as Satan proposed to Adam and Eve (and us in the present), without having their best interests in mind. Instead, we have the choice to discern what is good and evil, by accepting what God has destined to be good for us, without falling into Satan’s deceptions. We can rely on God to tell us the truth and our ability in grace to live and delight in it. We can, after all, be perfectly human.
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