The LORD God called to Adam and asked him, "Where are you?"
Not that God did not know, but so that Adam could come forward and confess. God humored Adam in his imagining himself to be hidden so as to draw him out into his mercy. But Adam, because of shame, felt this need to be hidden so deeply that he was afraid, suspicious that he deserved only to be despised and condemned.
He answered, "I heard you in the garden;
but I was afraid, because I was naked,
so I hid myself."
Adam was suddenly aware of nakedness as a liability. He had previously lived with that vulnerability without concern, knowing that neither Eve nor God would see anything in him that they would use to exploit, abuse, manipulate, or despise. He had the comfort that though he would be seen, he would be seen and loved. He now lacked that confidence. He could no longer trust God with his whole heart and so he feared that even God himself could not love him completely and entirely, and that he would therefore inevitably regard Adam on the basis of what was fallen in him. And if God would not relate to Adam in love, the other options Adam was able to imagine were only manipulation and domination. This was now his temptation toward Eve, and he projected it onto God himself.
Then he asked, "Who told you that you were naked?
You have eaten, then,
from the tree of which I had forbidden you to eat!"
God does not draw us out in order to despise or to degrade us, but in order to show mercy and set us free. He does not want our excuses ("The woman whom you put here"!) but rather our admission, our owning our mistakes. Yet when we sin we too experience shame that makes us want to hide. It really does make us feel exposed, naked, and fallible. We implicitly internalize the idea that we have made ourselves unlovable, that we can now only approach God if we have something to barter, but can find nothing worth enough for the trade.
I will put enmity between you and the woman,
and between your offspring and hers;
He will strike at your head,
while you strike at his heel.
Because God fulfilled his promise to crush the head of the serpent, and because of the way by which he fulfilled it, we, unlike Adam and Eve, have a still greater assurance of God's intention to show us mercy, one that pierces through to the depths of the hearts of even hardened sinners. This is the assurance given to us by the fact that Jesus himself came and born all the curses we had earned (see Galatians 3:13), arduous work, thorns, pain, death, and burial in the dirt, in order to restore our wounded and fearful hearts. If we truly surrender ourselves to his intentions and allow him to do so he himself will give to us what was prohibited to Adam and Eve. We may by grace pass the fiery revolving sword, pass the cherubim guards, and come into the fullness of the divine presence in the true paradisical sanctuary in heaven.
They ate and were satisfied.
They picked up the fragments left over–seven baskets.
There were about four thousand people.
Adam wickedly stretched out his hand for the forbidden fruit and was left hungry, left with disordered desires impossible to satisfy. But the crowds who waited on Jesus, who sought thereby his Kingdom first, received all else besides, and were satisfied. They were the hungry that were filled with good things about whom Mary sang in her Magnificat. They were those who hungered and thirsted for the righteousness that Jesus along could provide, and were therefore satisfied. But they were only an image of the satisfaction that would be found by those who received the true bread from heaven, Jesus himself in the Eucharist.
Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me will never hunger, and whoever believes in me will never thirst (see John 6:35).
The fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is fully negated and canceled by the fruit of the tree of life, the cross. This Eucharistic fruit need not be seized, as though against God's will, but rather offers itself to us, and thereby invites us into its own dynamic outpouring of generous love.
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