The biblical story of the Mass begins in the Garden of Eden. That may sound puzzling at first, but Jesus Christ came to atone for the original sin of Adam and Eve. He did so through the sacrifice of Calvary, and that one sacrifice of Christ is made sacramentally present at the Mass.
When receiving ashes on Ash Wednesday, we were given one of two exhortations. One is, “Turn away from sin and be faithful to the Gospel.” In the liturgically appropriate context of Mass, we are reminded of our own earthly mortality and our need for Christ’s salvific work. We are also reminded of our first parents, who tried to go it alone and earned the wages of sin. “Remember, man, you are dust and to dust you will return,” the sober words of the other Church-approved exhortation for Ash Wednesday allude to God’s words to Adam in Genesis 3:19.
Adam and Eve had a basic choice in the Garden of Eden: Listen to the devil and become “like God” (Gn 3:5) or listen to God and partake more deeply of His very life.
“You may freely eat of every tree of the garden,” God told Adam and Eve. “[B]ut of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die” (Gn 2:16-17). The devil, meanwhile, assured our first parents that eating of that tree would make them “be like God, knowing good and evil” (Gn 3:5).
True love necessarily implies freedom, while love coerced is no love at all, and so God gave Adam and Eve the power to say “Yes” or “No.” Would they be docile, obedient sheep, or would Adam and Eve be “independent-minded” goats and go their own way? (cf. Mt 25:31-46). The forbidden fruit of Eden, then, was a matter of trust. The Hebrew word “know” in Genesis 3:5 and 3:22 is yada, which means knowledge or understanding gained by experience. Would Adam and Eve trust God and the knowledge He gave them, or would they would seek independent verification on their own?
God provided our first parents an opportunity to choose life, and not simply by abstaining from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. He gave them various trees from which they could “freely eat,” yet He only bothered to name one: “the tree of life” (Gn 2:9). God told Adam and Eve that the forbidden tree would only bear fruit that brings death, so why didn’t they seek refuge in the tree that would apparently provide just the opposite — life (cf. Gn 3:22)? That remains somewhat of a mystery, though a lack of trust in God’s goodness and providence, as in all sin, played a key role (CCC 387, 397-98). We learn in Genesis 3:22 that had Adam and Eve had partaken of the tree of life they would have “lived forever” (Gn 3:22), reinforcing the gift of immortality they had received in their creation (cf. CCC 375-76). Adam and Eve chose to turn away from God and paradise was lost. To trust God is to demonstrate hope in Him (CCC 1817), but Adam and Eve turned away from God and disobeyed Him, reaping a bitter harvest from their original sin that would deal death to both them and all of their descendants (CCC 402-406).
Jesus came to restore paradise, to do what the first Adam failed to do, to give us another opportunity to partake of eternal life. He is the new “tree of life,” promising us that if we faithfully partake of his Eucharistic Body and Blood we will live forever (Jn 6:54-55). In other words, partaking of paradise is as close as the next Mass at your local parish. A very encouraging reminder to enter more deeply into Lent.
© Copyright 2005 Catholic Exchange
Thomas J. Nash is a Senior Information Specialist at Catholics United for the Faith. He is the author of Worthy is the Lamb: The Biblical Roots of the Mass (Ignatius Press). He is also a co-author of Catholic for a Reason III: Scripture and the Mystery of the Mass (Emmaus Road Publishing).
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