“The woman that You gave me.”
It is remarkable how passive Adam turns out to be. The one who boldly named all of the animals now finds himself, or at least portrays himself, as a hapless victim: “You gave me…she gave me…and…I ate.” Already toil, thorns, and thistles have entered! “The sluggard says, ‘There is a lion in the road! There is a lion in the streets!’ (Proverbs 26: 13) Poor me!
“Who told you that you were naked?”
We perhaps hear God speaking in an angry tone, which is unfortunate, since the text indicates no such thing. The fact that no one answers the question should be taken, not as an indication of God’s ‘impatience’, but as representing fearful silence on the part of Adam and Eve.
Who told them that they were naked? No one, of course; they simply became aware of this terrible fact. They needed no one to tell them; nor does God need to find out. Again, I suspect that we tend to hear His following question (“Have you eaten…?”) as God piecing together the crime, but this is clearly absurd. Why, then, does God ask this?
God does all things for the purpose of teaching and forming His creatures toward fullness of life and understanding. Adam and Eve, pondering this question, would have to answer as we did above: “No one told us that we were naked. We discovered it after eating the fruit.” It is true: they now know good and evil for themselves.
“God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like gods, knowing good and evil.”
This is perhaps evidence of a primordial fall of ‘the gods’ (the serpent would also be evidence), the fall not recounted directly in Scripture, but referred to by Our Lord (Luke 10: 18). These ‘gods’ (the Hebrew word elohim can mean either ‘gods’ or ‘God’) wanted knowledge of the forbidden, ultimately so as to go beyond good and evil and establish their own rule against the Creator God. The serpent, speaking of their eyes being opened, knows of what he speaks. The fact that he seems not to be dead (at least in a literal, bodily sense) also supports his contention that disobedience will not result in (literal) death.
“Then the Lord God said, ‘It is not good that the man should be alone (ləbddo); I will make him a helper fit (kənegdo) for him.’”
Man’s ‘being alone’ is actually related to the important ‘separating’ (root bdl) that God does ‘in the beginning’. Man has been separated out, but has no complement, as light has darkness and the sea has the land. Therefore man’s definition is incomplete; he is an anomaly without a creature ‘fit’ for him. This fundamental incompleteness of the human person is at the root of the characteristic drive of desire to find one fitting for ourselves—one who, in being opposite to us, matches the aching loneliness and fills it. We discover eventually that this desire is for God, in Whose image we were created and Whose temples we are meant to be. In the present, the sacrament of marriage produces the best analogy to the union of God and the soul. At last, Adam rejoices in seeing not merely flesh of flesh and bone of bone, but subject to subject, desire to desire.
The rosary is a quintessential devotional prayer for Catholic laity and even for some religious, and has been for over seven hundred years. While at first glance, the repetition of Ave Marias can give the impression of the multiplication of words at the expense of genuine devotion, anyone who prays the rosary will tell you that the important activity is not the recitation of the words, but the meditation on the mysteries of the life of Jesus Christ. Busying the lips with familiar words allows the spirit to be freed up to attend to consideration of the meaning of Christ’s presence and action, how His very being communicates God’s love and our salvation.
This is in interesting contrast to a different type of devotion to the Word of God, also edifying in its way. At some point after the invention of the printing press, someone had the idea to set the words of Jesus in red. Most of us have seen such versions of the gospel. What stands out are the teachings of the Lord, and of course these can no more be neglected by Christians than the mysteries of His life.
It happens that the past century and a half have seen the rise of a view of Jesus of Nazareth that exalts Him as a great teacher of wisdom, without admitting to the traditional Christian claims of His divinity. While it would be an unfair exaggeration to say that ‘red-letter’ gospel editions are the cause of this emphasis on Christ as mere human teacher, they certainly offer support to the idea that what really counts are the teachings. The signs performed by Jesus, so important especially in John’s gospel, are muted along with the rest of the narrative material.
Yet the authority of Jesus is dependent on just these signs. De-emphasizing Christ’s mystery has the effect of undermining the legitimacy of the very teachings that the red-letter edition is meant to underline. Jesus Himself pointed to the necessity of the signs: “Even though you do not believe me, believe the works [that I do], that you may know and understand that the Father is in me and I am in the Father.” [John 10: 38]
Hence the importance of meditation on the mysteries of the rosary. Seen in this light, the addition of the Luminous Mysteries by St. John Paul II appears even more providential. Just those sorts of legitimating moments in the life of Christ are added, particularly the Baptism, the Wedding at Cana and the Transfiguration. These mysteries of light ‘illuminate’ the mind to ‘know and understand’ that Christ was indeed sent by God the Father. In turn, this illumination makes it possible for us to accept the ‘hard’ sayings [John 6: 60] and to grow in holiness, growing up to be true ‘spiritual’ men and women, not merely wise in the teachings of the wise, but sanctified in the Truth.
vayiytzer (Adonai) elohim et-haadam aphar min-ha’adamah
“And the LORD God formed man of dust from the ground.”
The action of forming, the Hebrew verb yatzar, is related to purpose. In later Jewish tradition, human beings were understood to incline towards a yetzer ra, an ‘evil purpose’, or towards towards the yetzer tov, the ‘good purpose’. Our deeds are judged not only by the objective fact of the deed, but by the intention of the one carrying it out. In some manner, we imprint our deeds with the mark of our intention.
God’s forming of humanity from the dust, then, is not merely about ‘form’ and ‘matter’, but means imparting to dust a new purpose, to be the material aspect of this new creature, the human person.
Today, of course, there is a great temptation to judge actions only by purpose. “I meant well” does not excuse the performance of an action that is inherently bad. Nonetheless, the Christian tradition, and especially, I think, the monastic tradition, insists that we take time to inspect our purposes for acting. Otherwise, we may very slowly be drawn away even from right action.
“And God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it.’”
When God creates the inanimate objects, He simply speaks a command and matter responds to His wishes. God speaks ‘impersonally’. When He speaks to man ‘in the image of God’, He says ‘to them,’ addressing fellow subjects, spiritual beings with the gift of understanding. The fruitfulness of human existence is not completely ‘natural’ in the sense of impersonal forces obeying laws inscribed in their very essence. Human beings have the choice of listening, obeying and cooperating with God’s blessing and creativity, or of disregarding the commandment. From the moment of creation, human beings have been given autonomy, the freedom of taking responsibility for their own responses or failure to respond to God’s offer of friendship.
Vayyibəra’ elohim et-hadam bətsalmo.
“And God created man/adam in His image.” This is only the second use of the specific verb bara, ‘to create’. So far, after creating matter, it would seem, God has been making use of matter to make new creatures. By a process of separation, He formed light and darkness, and by the process of ‘bringing forth’, the plants and animals sprang up. But when it comes to creating man, God must both ‘make’ (1: 26, Hebrew na’aseh) man, but also ‘create’ Him in His image. This indicates that man is a two-fold creature, matter and spirit. Chapter 2 communicates the same truth in the two-fold process of forming man’s body from the earth, but breathing in, from God’s own breath, a spiritual nature besides.
Way·yō·mer ’ĕ·lō·hîm, taḏ·šê hā·’ā·reṣ de·še, ‘ê·śeḇ maz·rî·a‘ ze·ra‘, ‘êṣ pə·rî ‘ō·śeh pə·rî lə·mî·nōw, ’ă·šer zar·‘ōw-ḇōw.
“And God said, ‘Let the earth put forth vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind.’” That God created plants ‘according to kind’ seems to militate against a strictly nominalist reading of creation. Genus and species are ordained by God, not imposed on reality by minds. We name them, yes, but the names allow us to abstract from the actual plants to the idea of the plant. This allows us access to God’s providential arrangement of His creation. Strict nominalists maintain that there are no ‘kinds’ of things. This is contrary to the Biblical worldview.
Vayyar’ elohim et-ha’or ki-tov vayyabddel elohim bein ha’or ubein hakhoshek.
“And God saw that the light was good, and God separated the light from the darkness.” Separation is an important concept in the Biblical view of the cosmos. Distinction is for the sake of the whole, as light and darkness are both good in their created relationship to one another. Separated but bound by their distinction, they create order, cosmos; mixed, they create confusion and chaos, at best dull grey. We should be attentive to this reality throughout the Bible: Israel is separated from the nations, but this is for the sake of the nations themselves. Similarly within the Church, religious and clerics are separated from the laity, but not in judgment on the laity or because the laity are unimportant, but precisely because both are needed to recognize the beauty of the other.
Lord, help me to imitate You by separating my thoughts, dividing them between light and darkness. May the Light Who enlightens every man rule over the day and over the night, and separate light and darkness upon the earth, that is, in my human nature.