Homily for Wednesday
Week 5 of Ordinary Time
February 10, 2021
Gen 2: 4b-9, 15-17
Provincial House, New
Rochelle, N.Y.
“The Lord God took the man
and settled him in the garden of Eden” (Gen 2: 15).
The man won’t be given a wife until tomorrow’s pericope, but the word used in today’s reading is the generic man, “human being”: adam in Hebrew and homo in the Vulgate.
Human beings are formed
out of the clay of the earth by the hand of God; God is the supreme
potter. They receive their life from
him. If in the 1st creation story male
and female are created in the image of God, as we heard yesterday (1:27), here
they’re inspirited by God’s life-breath.
Human beings have a quasi-divine dignity in both versions of the
creation story.
In today’s
passage God has created this marvelous garden with various delightful trees and
abundant fruit for the man, and he’s put the man in the garden for a
purpose. It’s not so that he can lounge
all day, watch Netflix, and eat pizza—or even take pleasant hikes. “The Lord God … settled the man in the garden
… to cultivate and care for it” (2:15).
Even before the Fall, there was work to do, not as punishment but as
collaboration with God in creation.
As the Popes have taught
in their social encyclicals, work has a dignity by which we share in God’s care
for creation and put our own stamp on it, acting as his agents. Gerhard von Rad comments that man “was called
to a state of service and had to prove himself in a realm that was not his own
possession.”[1]
That the garden isn’t his
own possession becomes clear in the next verses. The Creator makes a gift to the man of the
fruit of all the trees but one, and the gift is a mark of freedom: “you are free to eat” (2:16). That he’s not the master but the recipient of
a gift is clear from the one prohibition, concerning the tree of knowing good
and evil (2:17).
This is foreshadowing, of
course. You know how kids are. You know how we were! Tell them one thing not to do amid a thousand
other possibilities, and what do they want to do?
The man has an almost
unlimited grant of freedom, a freedom that people regard as a birthright, a
human right—as we see in Hong Kong and Burma (the generals renamed the country,
and I don’t want to use their term).
What is the sure destruction of our gift of freedom? Knowing evil—not as an intellectual idea but as
an experience. In the gospel we heard a
long list of evils (Mark 7:21-22); we know that those behaviors are addictive;
they restrict our freedom. The God of
the Bible, like the mythical gods who addressed Pandora, wants to save the man
from destroying himself by learning evil.
In the garden under God’s rule, he’ll know only good and he’ll be free.
That seems like a
no-brainer. Yet we know our own
experience of dealing with evil and the misery it inflicts upon us. I don’t mean BIG evil like crushing democracy
or carrying out genocide. I mean the
everyday evils of our own lives. The
freedom of the children of God is laid before us, the freedom to acknowledge
God’s lordship and to do and say only what he’s put us into our metaphorical
garden to do: whatever garden it is that
we are charged to cultivate, and the human dignity we are to cultivate.
No comments:
Post a Comment