God created man in his image and likeness; with sin we lose God’s likeness, but we still retain his image. We are no longer as God created us; the sin of our parents has spread through space and time, profoundly altering human nature. Man built his own hell, typified by the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. The flood, to destroy everything and start over, with Noah's family, was the first plan to save the human race. The descendants of Noah soon returned to the sin of their ancestors.
"The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge" (Jeremiah 31:29). Without knowing Mendel's laws of heredity, the Hebrews were already aware that certain evils passed from parents to children. In fact, the sin of Adam and Eve corrupted them, not only existentially as people, but also genetically, so that the consequences would be suffered by the entire human race.
Usurpation of the criterion of good and evil
Man’s pseudo-emancipation, wanting to be like God, having usurped the prerogative of good and evil from God, was the origin of sin or the original sin, which is passed from generation to generation because it has modified the DNA of the human species. Evil has taken root within the human race in such a way that, as Jesus said in Matthew 15:11, "it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but it is what comes out of the mouth that defiles". It is, therefore, not a bad upbringing that makes a person evil; evil is already inside the person.
While the criterion of good and evil was in the center of the Garden of Eden, and belonged exclusively to God, earth was the Kingdom of God; there was peace, unity, consensus, because everyone was submitted to a single criterion. When man, wanting to be like God, placed himself at the centre, stealing the prerogative of good and evil, brought division, then war, subjectivity, arbitrariness, relativism and discord ensued. Everyone wants to be the center. There cannot be two centers; if I have the criterion of good and evil, then you do not have it or I do not recognize that you have it.
Nobody does evil thinking that he is doing evil; Hitler, when he killed 5 million Jews, thought he was doing humanity a service; suicide bombers who kill themselves, killing innocent people, believe they are sacrificing themselves for a greater good; Muslim extremists kill in the name of God...
We are apples with bugs
Parents who work hard to educate their children are stunned when they start lying, stealing and doing all kinds of mischief that they never taught their children. Evil is within us and does not need to be taught. As the psychologist Jung would say, evil belongs to humanity’s collective unconsciousness. Each evil act that an individual carries out is installed in that collective database in such a way that the individuals who are born after, are born with the ability to do all sorts of evil without needing to learn anything because we are all connected to the collective database where everything humans have done evil and good is engraved.
Many people, when they see an apple with a small hole in it, think that the hole was made by a bug when it entered the apple, when the opposite is true, the hole was made by the bug when it came out of the apple. The bug was an egg that an insect laid inside the apple when it was conceived, that is, when it was still a flower. We are all apples with a bug, evil is inside us and it only needs a certain situation to reveal itself.
It is not as the proverb says, "The situation makes the thief". Everyone, sooner or later, is faced with situations in which they can steal; we are all capable of stealing from the get-go. Stealing or not stealing is going to depend on the degree of education in human values we have at the moment of temptation. Only this degree of education in human values can counteract the innate tendency in all of us.
From Eva to Ave
There are two reasons why God came to us in human form: the first is to tell us, in a definitive way, what God is like, and the second is to tell us what human beings are like and what they should be like. Christ is in fact the measure for the human being, the template for humanity, the one with whom all individuals must measure themselves because he is the norm, he is the model, the paradigm. Christ is the man that God created in Adam, before Adam disobeyed; in fact, Jesus showed, by his words and deeds, that he remained obedient to God all his life.
Just as Christ is the second Adam, Mary is the second Eve. Ave is in fact Eve in reverse. Christ, the son of the Most High God, could not have Eve as his mother, after the sin; for this reason, at the moment of her conception, when the half-cell of Joachim joined with the half-cell of his wife, Anne, God acted to prevent the ruined genes that had been passed down from generation to generation since the sin of Adam and Eve from also passing on to Mary.
Mary was conceived without original sin, because she was destined to be the mother of God’s son. It makes no sense to be incarnate in the human nature that Adam and Eve modified with sin. That is why Mary, who was to be the mother of the Lord, was preserved from this negative inheritance common to all mortals.
In Ethiopia, there is no negative association with the stepmother figure. Often one is the biological mother and the other is the mother who raises and educates. The latter is called "Ingera enat" or the bread mother. When I was studying theology, I had a colleague who called his biological aunt mother, and his biological mother aunt. My colleague had been rejected by his biological mother and taken in by her sister, who raised him. There was so much love between them that when she was terminally ill with cancer, she did not die until she saw her son (biologically her nephew) ordained a priest.
Eve is the biological mother of all the living beings, Mary is our bread mother, of that Eucharistic bread which is her son who was born in a town called Bethlehem, which literally means house of bread, and whom she laid him in a manger, a container where food is eaten, so that we could all be fed by him.
Eve is our progenitor, but she abandoned us to our fate, Mary is the one who provides for our needs when at Cana she says, "They have no wine" (John 2:3).
Eve is the one who taught us to do evil, Mary is the one who educates us and teaches us to do good by pointing to her son and saying, "Do whatever he tells you" (John 2:5).
Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC
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