At the Threshold of the great season of Penance we can begin, perhaps, by anticipating where we hope to end up. It starts in a heap of ashes, but it concludes with the Paschal Mystery. How precious is it that the most wonderful reality can emerge from the least likely of places? May these coming weeks see our growth in that appreciation.
“Thou art dust.”
It sounds cruel to think God would ever tell a creature of his own making “Thou art dust, and unto dust thou shalt return” (Gen 3:19). But that’s no cruelty. The cruelty is in man and his having yielded to the cunning of the serpent rather than to the command of the Lord. No doubt God’s command “not to eat lest you die” imposed a serious obligation on man. But man, fully endowed and created already in the image and likeness of God, would have been up to the task. You don’t take the most beautiful of God’s creatures on the face of the earth, spoil it and then turn around and blame God. Yet that’s what we try to do. “The woman you gave to me gave me the fruit.” Adam implies that it’s God’s fault for having given him the woman to begin with. Not good.
But let’s splice the abuse of human freedom another time and instead, for now, focus on God’s response.
Man forfeits his life in exchange for yielding to the tempter to violate God’s order. The devil wrests the jewel from the crown of God’s creation by toppling man. Behold the man, now, betrayed, naked and condemned to death. Man receives the promised sentence, he shall die. But man’s sentence is immediately preceded and directly followed by two deliberate Divine orders. First, before sentencing the woman and the man, he condemns the serpent, “I shall put enmity between you and the woman, her offspring and yours, he shall strike at your head and you shall strike at his heel.” And second, immediately after sentencing the man and lest he live forever in his sorry, condemned state, God sets an angel to guard access to the tree of life.
God secures man’s access to the tree of life in order that he not live condemned forever. God also fixes enmity—declares war—between the serpent and his offspring on the one side and the woman and her offspring on the other. This war is a kind of civil war in that the combatants both share, in common the status as free creatures, made in God’s own image, capable of determining their own end. But this warfare which begins with the serpent’s own selfish abuse of the divine order and his subsequent beguiling man, will gain for man a protagonist from God who himself is both God and man, Jesus Christ, the eternal Word made flesh and born of the Virgin.
From the ashes of abused freedom, flaunted divinity and spoiled creation God rescues man. He purifies him by having him know that death and loss are the just merits of sin. And He reconciles him to Himself through the gift of our redeemer, one like us in all things but sin, loving, now, in us, what he loved in His Son by whose Holy cross has redeemed the world.