Wednesday of Week 5 of Ordinary Time – First Reading

Commentary on Genesis 2:4-9,15-17

We have a very different creation story today. This section is chiefly concerned with the creation of Man, the human person. It is much older than the narrative from which we read yesterday (Gen 1:1—2:4) and comes from the ‘Yahwistic Source’ rather than the ‘Priestly Source’. It is not, as is sometimes said, a second creation narrative. Rather it focuses on the creation of Man as distinct from the creation of the world, and is only complete with the separate creation of Woman and the appearance of the first human couple.

Here God is depicted as creating Man before the rest of his creatures, which are made for Man’s sake. It is not realistic, but this is not history and it is certainly not science. The meaning is to show the priority of Man in the order of things on this earth.

In the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, when no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no vegetation of the field had yet sprung up—for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no one to till the ground, but a stream would rise from the earth and water the whole face of the ground—then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being [literally a living “soul”].

The picture is of God working like a potter moulding the human body out of the clay of the earth. In the Hebrew there is a play on the words adam (‘man’) coming from adama (‘the ground’).

In this version of creation, humanity does not—as in yesterday’s reading—appear at the end of a long process of creation when all the lesser creatures were brought into being first, but comes into existence at the very beginning before anything else, even before the plants necessary for his survival.

Only then did the Lord God plant a garden in the east, in Eden (note: the garden is not named Eden, but is in Eden). In this garden, he put the Man. In the garden he also placed every kind of plant that was pleasant to look at, and provided fruit that was good to eat. As well, there was the “tree of life” (a symbol of the immortality which the Man was intended to enjoy) and the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil”.

The name “Eden” is used here as the name of a region in southern Mesopotamia (southern Iraq today), but does not actually correspond to any known site. The term comes from a Sumerian word eden, meaning ‘fertile plain’. A similar-sounding word in Hebrew means ‘delight’, so Eden is understood as a ‘garden of delight’. Through the Greek translation of the Hebrew, we get the word ‘Paradise’ which literally means a ‘pleasure park’.

The man’s responsibility was to cultivate the garden and look after it. The man was also told that he was free to eat nearly all and any of the plants in the garden (including, apparently, fruit from the “tree of life”). The overall impression given is that life was easy and exceedingly pleasant.

But there was one special exception. The man was not to eat the fruit from the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil”. Otherwise he would be doomed to death. Eating the fruit, as we shall see, did not bring about instant death. After eating the fruit, they survived, but death would come as the end of a miserable existence of toil and sorrow. Sin, by separating us from God, can only lead to death.

The Man was master of his world, but with this one exception, it was made clear that God was master of the Man and that this relationship would be acknowledged by the Man’s obedience to this command of the Lord God.

The whole world is God’s gift to us, but we need to remember that we have to enjoy it responsibly and not do it harm. Also, we need always to conform our living to that vision of life that we have received from God through Jesus Christ and his Word. For us, Jesus and his Way is truly a tree of Life:

I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.
(John 10:10)

Read more

Wednesday of Week 5 of Ordinary Time – Gospel

Commentary on Mark 7:14-23

After defending himself against the accusations of some Pharisees and scribes about his not observing the traditions of the elders, Jesus now turns to the people. He enunciates what for him are the main principles:

• Nothing that goes into the body from outside can make a person ritually or religiously unclean.
• What makes a person unclean is the filth that comes from inside their mind and is spoken through their mouth or expressed in action.

This was a major issue in the earliest days of the Church and was dealt with by the Council of Jerusalem. The story is told in the Acts of the Apostles (chap 15).

The first Christians were all Jews who continued to observe Jewish customs. But when non-Jews began to be accepted into the Christian communities, should they also be obliged to follow these laws and customs? It became clear that, from a religious point of view, no food could be called unclean. This helped to break down the barriers between Jew and Gentile. It has been pointed out that, immediately after this, Jesus entered gentile territory, something he did not often do in his own ministry (see tomorrow’s commentary).

Even Jesus’ disciples seemed shocked by Jesus’ teaching (probably reflecting the reactions of some of the early Jewish Christians). Jesus repeats what he says in the light of the Kingdom he was proclaiming:

He said to them, “So, are you also without understanding? Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile, since it enters not the heart but the stomach and goes out into the sewer?” (Thus he declared all foods clean.) And he said, “It is what comes out of a person that defiles.”

Real uncleanness is in the ‘heart’—i.e. in one’s mind. Real uncleanness comes from within ourselves in the form of:

…sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, debauchery, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.

As Christians, we do not normally worry about clean and unclean foods on religious grounds, but we can sometimes judge people’s religious commitment by their observance or non-observance of purely external things—a nun not wearing a habit, a person not taking holy water on going into the church, or someone taking Communion in the hand versus by mouth.

We may have gotten rid of the problem of unclean foods, but there are many other ways by which we focus on trivial externals while ignoring the real evils, the places where real love is absent—in ourselves.

Read more