Tenth Ordinary Sunday, Year B
Theme: “Evil” Rises From Within 「魔」由心生
I have to reason extremely carefully lest I would fall like our First Parents. Let me begin at the end, namely from the Proto-Gospel. “I will put enmity between thee [the Serpent] and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed, it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel” (Genesis 3:15 KJV）. The KJV translation is correct because the two “seed” words are singular. We call this verse the Proto-Gospel because this was the first time God revealed His salvation plan. Traditionally, we interpret the Serpent to be Satan/Devil and the woman to be the Blessed Virgin Mary. The BVM is not the Saviour. It is her seed, Jesus Christ, who bruises/strikes the head of the Serpent, meaning defeating the Devil. On the other hand, the Serpent would bruise/strike his heel, meaning Jesus Christ has to pay a heavy price, dying on the cross!
So far so good. Then we would start wondering who the seed of the Serpent would be! There are two probable candidates. The first group are spiritual beings similar to Satan such as fallen angels, demons and evil spirits etc. We can understand group intuitively because the Devil is a spiritual being and therefore its seed should be spiritual as well. Moreover, a single spirit may consist of many individuals such as the case of “Legion” (Mark 5:9） which consisted of 6000 unclean spirits! About the beings in the spiritual realm, we have to be humble to admit that we do not know enough! On the other hand, Jesus reveals another possibility. Once Jesus told the Jews the importance of knowing the truth. “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” (John 8:32 KJV）. However, they rejected the truth and wanted to kill Jesus. Thus Jesus continues, “Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it” (8:44）. Therefore, wicked human beings who oppose the truth can be the seed of the Serpent!
Let us take a step back and see how the First Parents answered God’s interrogation. “And He said, Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat?” (Genesis 3:11） The question consists of two parts and Adam answered accordingly, but it seems that he failed to defend himself subtly enough. He was honest and did not deny eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Indeed, what else could he conjure up to explain why he knew himself naked! As for the question of who told him that he was naked, the scenario would likely be that the woman had eaten first and became conscious of her nudity first. Then she saw Adam naked and alerted him of his nudity. What about other talking animals? Well, they had always seen them naked and got used to their nudity. They would not be intelligent enough to tell the difference from the outside. This awareness must have come from internal experience.
Here comes the tricky part. Instead of answering factually who informed him of his nakedness, Adam put the blame on the woman and God! Instead of saying, “The woman told me”, Adam took the first opportunity to pass the blame on the woman and God, “The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat” (3:12）. Adam had totally forgotten that the woman came out of him, “This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man” (2:23）. In passing the blame to the woman, Adam was actually incriminating himself! But this was only a minor sin. Adam was trying to pass the blame to God! He was in fact saying, “You started all these! Why did you create me in Your image in the first place? You could have created me like any other animals. It is all your fault, not mine!” How ungrateful! In contrast, the woman was truly an improved version of Man. Like Adam but being more sophisticated, she passed the blame onto the Serpent, without blaming God directly for creating this crafty animal (3:1）.
Was there a grain of truth in Adam’s defence? Was it all God’s fault in creating Man in His own image? We are treading into perilous waters because we are flawed and contaminated by concupiscence. Our reasoning would also be flawed and not water-tight. Let us entrust ourselves in the hand of Jesus Christ who is trustworthy because He is both divine and human at the same time. He knows both. Moreover, out of His free will, He suffered a shameful death for us, defeated Satan and came back to life. Let us hold on to Him and dive in.
Even though you have proven the human desire to play God, do human beings actually have the potential to become God? Jesus has given the answer. When the Jews picked up rocks to stone Him because they felt that Jesus had blasphemed, making himself God (John 10:33）, Jesus answered them, “Is it not written in your law, ‘I said, you are gods’? If it calls them gods to whom the word of God came … can you say that the one whom the Father has consecrated and sent into the world blasphemes because I say, ‘I am the Son of God’?” (10:34-35） Actually, the passage came from the Prophets and not from the Law. God was challenging the idolaters, “Let them [the idolaters] draw near and foretell to us what it is that shall happen … Or declare to us the things to come, tell what is to be in the future, that we may know that you are gods! Do something, good or evil, that will put us in awe and in fear” (Isaiah 41:22-23）. There have been in history seers whose predictions really came true down to the minute details. There have been mega constructions such as pyramids that puzzle scientists even today and we have invented many technologies that put us in awe and in fear. In quoting Isaiah, the Son of God endorses the message of the Prophet. Thus, by biblical standard, we are gods or at least we have the potentials to become divine because we are able to meet God’s requirements. In fact, by setting up those requirements, God intends us to be divine.
Should we blame God for creating us in His image so that we have an inert desire to play God and to become divine? A categorical no because we have proven that God intends us to be divine and holy like Him. He would be very much delighted to see us attain such a state. Then we come to a full circle to ask why God created the Serpent and allowed it to tempt our First Parents? Didn’t God see His Creation good in Genesis 1? How do we harmonize this goodness of creation with the craftiness of the Serpent in Genesis 3? We know that the narratives come from different sources, and yet the Bible is internally consistent and would not contradict itself. We cannot dismiss the contradiction as coming from different sources. Rather, we should interpret the craftiness in good light instead.
I suspect there is another possibility, namely that Adam, Eve and all humanity are carrying the Serpent all along within us. We have been oversimplifying the world by employing a dichotomy mind-set: black-white, good-evil, friend-enemy, yin-yang and life-death etc. In reality, there are infinite shades of grey between black and white. Goodness and badness depends on the overall situation. Friends may betray you one day and enemies may save your skin. There is yin in yang and yang in yin etc. Notice that I employ the term yin-yang instead of female-male deliberately. If we consider genders as a spectrum instead of two opposite entities, less people would suffer from discrimination. Alas! Learn from the mathematicians who discover that beyond the well-known integer dimensions, there exist fractals in the nature whose dimensions are not integers. The Tree of Life is surely a symbol. Beloved brethren! Are you able to see death, not as a punishment nor a containment of the spread of sins, but a portal to eternal life as demonstrated by the resurrection of the Son of God? Looking back, the craftiness of the Serpent can be part and parcel of God’s image. We should not start with a narrowly defined closed standard of goodness and evil. “O felix culpa, quae talem ac tantum meruit habere Redemptorem!” from Praeconium Paschale Exsultet, which we sing in Easter Vigil. Amen.
God bless!
Picture Credit: christianstudylibrary.org, d23.com
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