At the end of the 3rd chapter of Genesis, everything seems to collapse. In our beginning, God brought forth creation from nothing except his Love and Word. All was beautiful, true, and it was good. On the sixth day, as the crowning jewel to this masterpiece, God created the human person. Different from water, the plants, and even the creeping animals and winged birds, man reflected something in God himself. There was a rational mind, an immortal soul, the design to holiness, and he was the steward of all creation.

In order that man might fully experience his love, God gave him free will. He had the capacity to act or not to act. To love or not to love. To obey or to rebel. This gift said something about the giver. If God were to deny the human person the freedom to receive his love or to reject it, it wouldn’t be a free gift of love. If God removed the freedom to rebel, love wouldn’t be a choice and then it wouldn’t really be love.

And in the 3rd chapter of Genesis, Adam and Eve, the icon of humanity’s first parents, rebelled. Their disobedience set a pattern of behavior that would become the plague on all their children. They sinned, they hid, and they blamed.

In the words of the poet John Milton:

So saying, her rash hand in evil hour

Forth reaching to the fruit, she plucked, she ate.

Earth felt the wound; and nature from her seat,

Sighing through all her works, gave signs of woe,

That all was lost.

Back to the thicket slunk

The guilty serpent; and well might; for Eve,

Intent now wholly on her taste, naught else

Regarded.

Intent wholly on our taste, nothing else regarded, all is lost.

Read in isolation, this story of the Fall is incomplete. It feels like a morality play that could have come from the folk wisdom of Greek mythology of Grimm’s Fables, especially with the talking snakes, forbidden fruit, and a God who walks like a man and seems ignorant of what Adam and Eve had done. But we aren’t meant to read this in isolation.

For Christians, all of Holy Scripture, Old and New Testaments, are read through the lens of Jesus Christ Crucified. Fr John Behr, a brilliant patristics scholar and Orthodox priest, has been very helpful in his writings reminding me that when the Gospels and Epistles speak of Jesus Christ accomplishing things according to the Scriptures, they are talking about the Old Testament. This is why St Paul says he desires to know one thing and one thing only - Jesus Christ and him crucified, for the Crucified Lord is the key that unlocks the mysteries of all Scripture. Calvary is the center of our faith and his truth radiates both to the future and to the past.

In isolation, Adam and Eve can feel like a cartoon. It can feel like the founding document of oppressive patriarchy that continues to govern the blaming of women for the faults of men. But it’s not meant to be read in isolation.

Paradise may have seemed to be lost. And things were bad, no doubt. Milton’s poem describes all of nature sighing. But all was not lost. In the very moment of judgment was the promise of redemption:

“The Lord God said to the serpent, ‘Because you have done this, cursed are you among all animals and among all wild creatures; upon your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life. I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will strike your head and you will strike his heel.’”