Adamant Eve

Not the apple on the tree, but the pair on the ground.

We may have all been missing something.

The Gospel reading at mass this Sunday was the woman taken in adultery. “Then I do not condemn you either. Go and sin no more.” God will forgive our sins if we are truly sorry.

My painfully bright eleven-year-old daughter picked up on this. So what would have happened if Adam and Eve had said they were sorry? Wouldn’t God have forgiven them? End of salvation history. Pre-emptive end for the suffering of the ages.

It seems to me she has to be right. Has God changed his nature for the New Testament? God does not change. So wouldn’t he have done the same then?

And no, the atonement cannot have made the difference. Jesus forgives the adulterous woman before the atonement. Jesus, being of one substance with the Father, is of one will with the Father. And he too was present then, at the Creation.

It seems we are generally focused on the wrong thing when we tell about the Garden of Eden. We think the critical thing was Eve eating the apple. It wasn’t. Given free will, sin is certain to happen. But God can forgive any sin. Nevertheless, when God came to Adam and Eve for an account, instead of admitting to sin, expressing regret and asking forgiveness, they hid in the bushes: childish denial. And when God, knowing of course what had happened, confronted Adam, Adam still would not repent. He said, “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit from the tree, and I ate it.” He immediately tried to blame Eve, and to blame God! Anyone but himself.

Then when God asked Eve in turn, she blamed the serpent. “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.” No repentance. “The Devil made me do it.”

This was the real sin.

It seems to necessarily follow too that Adam and Eve never repented, but went to their graves, and to Hell, without admitting their original sin. At least, never repented before having children. Otherwise the end times would have been in their lifetimes.

This explains how original sin, initially personal, can affect all subsequent generations: by parents, generation to generation, modelling this obstinacy in sin to their children. Kids learn so much from their parents. Adam and Eve seem to have passed this attitude on to their own sons, for Cain picks up the theme and accepts eternal exile rather than repent. His complaint to God that someone might kill him, and demand for protection, suggests a continuing lack of repentance. He is denying the justice of his punishment. Noah, for that matter, once he survives the Flood meant to wipe out all evil in the world, loses no time in remodeling the trait to his own sons. Caught drunk and naked in his tent, rather than finding any fault in himself, he curses one of his sons for noticing. And so the cycle starts again. It is the world-taint.

What we call original sin in each individual soul appears then to be our tendency, like our first parents, not to repent our sins, but to deny and double down. To err is only human. To refuse to admit error when we err puts us definitively in the Devil’s party.

And Jesus had to come to end this obstinacy. 

Condemned sinner at Last Judgement: Sistine Chapel.

This is perhaps why Jesus said the end times had begun, within the lifetimes of some of those listening. Because if any one of us accepts Jesus’s message of atonement and forgiveness, and repents, we have personally entered these end times. The eternal curse is lifted. The truth has set us free.

But necessarily, since the death of Adam and Eve, and barring another universal cataclysm like the Flood, it can only be lifted one by one. For if any one of us gets beyond this and learns to repent, that still leaves the taint with everyone else who was brought up in a human family. Not all families are equal—far from it—but no family is ideal, either.

Yes, at some point, the General Judgement, everyone will be called to account and all accounts settled. This is the said second universal cataclysm. One imagines it has been delayed until a larger portion of humanity has the opportunity to repent and not to be condemned.

It is so easy to say you’re sorry. And so few do it.