The nature of sin: ‘I want to see for myself’

10th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
First Reading: Gn 3:8-15
Second Reading: 2 Cor 4:13--5:1
Gospel Reading: Mk 3:20-35

The background to this Sunday’s Readings is the “original sin.” The Bible describes it in “figurative language,” says the Catechism of the Catholic Church, but it really happened, and it has “marked the whole of human history.”

What was that sin?

God created Adam and Eve in a “state of holiness and justice,” says the Catechism. However, being created and not self-existent, they had “insurmountable limits” which they had to “freely recognize and respect.”

These limits are symbolized by “the tree of knowledge of good and bad,” from which God said they were not free to eat. “The moment you eat of it, you are surely doomed to die,” he warned.

We cannot imagine what Adam and Eve understood by “die,” notes St. John Paul, for they had never seen death. God was asking them, then, to trust him, like a mother warning a child who knows nothing of burning not to touch a hot stove.

However, “man, tempted by the devil, let his trust in his Creator die in his heart and, abusing his freedom, disobeyed God’s command,” says the Catechism.

What motivated Adam and Eve was not the pleasures of the senses, for there was no pleasure (including sexual pleasure) they did not already enjoy. Nor was it covetousness for earthly goods, for the whole world was theirs.

St. Augustine says it was the desire for self-assertion. God had planned to divinize them, but they wanted to be like him without him, before him, and not in accordance with him, says the Catechism.

“As a young man wants a regular allowance from his father which he can count on as his own,” so they wanted something that would be theirs, not God’s, says C.S. Lewis. From this, they would pay God “a reasonable tribute,” but they would be in control, planning for their own pleasure and security.

They stopped trusting God, said Pope Benedict. Tempted by the serpent, they began to see him as a “rival” curtailing their freedom. They tried to get rid of their dependency on him, to “obtain from the tree of knowledge the power to shape the world” and to make themselves gods.

“This is what man’s first sin consisted of,” says the Catechism. Similarly, “all subsequent sin” has been “disobedience toward God and lack of trust is His goodness.”

Deceived by “the serpent,” like Adam and Eve, we think “something is missing” in the life of a person who does not sin, said Pope Benedict: namely “the dramatic dimension of being autonomous.” To become “fully ourselves,” we think, we must occasionally say “no” to God.

For example, after I had told a child how Adam and Eve sinned, she replied, “But isn’t that the way it always is? Daddy says don’t go near the cliff, because it’s dangerous. But I go because I want to see for myself.” Children say, “Drugs are harmful; I’ll never do drugs,” but by their teens, they want to find out for themselves. After studying the commandments, a woman said, “I sometimes wish I had committed these sins so I would know for myself  they were wrong.”

No; we must trust God. C.S. Lewis said, “We must get rid of the idea (which surfaces in every temptation) that there is some place apart from him into which he forbids us to trespass, some kind of delight which he does not appreciate or arbitrarily forbids.”

Suppose you take a dog on a leash past a turnstile, Lewis said. “He tries to go through on the wrong side and gets his lead looped round the post. You see that he cannot do it, and therefore pull him back. You pull him back because you want to let him go forward.”

Similarly, he said, “God not only understands, but also shares, our desire for fullness of life, complete and ecstatic happiness. He made us for no other purpose.... However, He knows, and we do not, how it can be attained, really and permanently.”

We must acknowledge our dependence on God: not trying to seize for ourselves the temporary pleasures we can see, but trusting Him for the eternal pleasures we cannot see, as St. Paul says.