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| If you are the Son of God …” (Lk 4:3, 4:9; emphasis added), and
calls Jesus to serve him and not the Father. This is the very temptation that the serpent put before Adam and Eve. Adam and Eve believed the serpent’s lie that being obedient to God would make them slaves. Christ shows that obedience does not lead to slavery; rather, filial obedience is the path to authentic freedom. A Law That Sets Us Free To grasp this mystery that obedience to God actually sets us free, we must come to terms with the role of law in God’s fatherly plan. God’s law is not given for his good; it is given for our good. When parents tell their young children that they cannot play in the street, they are not limiting them or trying to be tyrants. Rather, such rules express the love of a father and mother seeking to protect their children. Have you ever noticed that more complicated items come with thicker instruction manuals? A car manual is much longer than the manual for an iPod, and the repair manual for an aircraft would be considerably bigger than both combined. Just like an iPod, a car, or an airplane, we too have a Maker, and we too come with an instruction manual: the divine law, as revealed in the word of God and the teachings of the Church. God’s laws are not there to limit or oppress us. The God who made us loves us; he doesn’t want us to “break.” A car engine has a certain nature. If you go against that nature, it breaks. You may like grape juice more than oil, but if you put grape juice in your car instead of oil, it will ruin the engine and you will not be free p 19 to drive your car. Analogously, when we sin, we often refer to it as “breaking” God’s law. But when we sin, it isn’t God’s law that breaks; it is our heart that breaks, and the hearts of others. The good news is that we can go back to God, our Maker, and be restored; but now we are getting ahead of the story. The Consequences of Sin and the First Promise of a Savior After Adam and Eve eat the fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, Genesis says that “the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked” (Gn 3:7). This is in marked contrast to what was said about their nakedness in the previous chapter: “The man and his wife were both naked, and were not ashamed” (Gn 2:25). Before they sinned, Adam and Eve loved each other without lust or selfishness. Now that they have separated themselves from God, they are afraid of being viewed as objects and not being loved as persons. Where there was once complementarity and love, now there is tension and discord. Once they lose trust in God, they soon lose trust in each other. If God cannot be trusted, who can? The Fall breaks the harmony Adam and Eve had enjoyed since creation, bringing not only tension and discord between themselves, but also with God, with the created world, and within their very selves. Instead of walking in the garden with God, Adam and Eve “hid themselves from the presence of the L ORD God” (Gn 3:8). Now there will be pain in childbirth (Gn 3:16), and Adam’s toil and sweat will bring forth thorns and thistles (Gn 3:17–19). After the Fall, not only is the life of the Trinity, the grace of original holiness, now absent from the human soul, but the intellect is darkened and the will weakened. Adam and Eve find themselves tending toward sin (i.e., concupiscence), struggling with an intellect and will that no longer work in harmony with one another or God’s will. With the entrance of the cunning serpent, conflict entered the story of Scripture. This duel between the serpent and Adam and Eve dealt mankind a mortal wound. In only three short chapters, the situation of humankind has gone from good and very good to very bad. With such a start, how can the story possibly have a happy ending? It is precisely this conflict of Genesis 3 that sets the stage for the plot of the rest of Scripture’s story. The fallen state of mankind and humanity’s separation from the God who loves them and desires to be with them is the problem that is p 20 worked out in the rest of the biblical story. Even at this dark moment, however, as Adam and Eve stand in the shadow of their sin, God, in his love, gives hope to Adam and Eve. In Genesis 3:15, God offers the first promise of a savior. He loves man and woman so much that he has crafted a plan to redeem humanity, free us from sin, and fill us with his life. In the midst of the punishment meted out for the sin that set creation in disorder, a profound promise of hope is made by God: the seed of the woman will crush the head of the serpent. The theme of “seed,” which is often translated “descendants,” is repeated throughout the rest of the story, for a descendant of the woman will enter the story and bring about the healing of this original wound, defeating the devil and reversing the curse brought about by sin. This “New Adam” and long-awaited savior will enter a garden and sweat blood, taking on himself the curse and sin of the first Adam, and his suffering and death on the wood of a tree will transform that wood into the new Tree of Life. Jesus’ faithfulness to God his Father and his rejection of Satan’s lies, even to death, show the way that the first Adam, and all the sons of Adam, were and are to walk. Adam and Eve must leave paradise. Exile is the bitter fruit of sin. God sets two cherubim with flaming swords to guard access to the Tree of Life. This last scene of the Garden of Eden reminds us just how tragic the fall of Adam and Eve is. While in the garden, they had access to the Tree of Life, of which they never ate. Now access to the tree is closed, and the story’s conflict will not reach its resolution until the fruit of the Tree of Life is once again made available to the children of Eve. A CT 3: T HE F LOOD tải về 6.33 Mb. Chia sẻ với bạn bè của bạn:
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