Origin of sin and the original sin
God created man in his own image and likeness; with sin we lost our likeness to God, while still maintaining his image. We are no longer as God created us; the sin of our parents spread through space and time, profoundly altering human nature. Man has built his own hell, typified by the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. The flood – destroying everything and starting over – with Noah's family, was the first plan to save the human species. But Noah’s descendants soon went back 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 inheritance, the Hebrews were already aware that certain evils are passed down from parents to offspring. In fact, the sin of Adam and Eve corrupted them, not only at an existential level as individuals, but also at a genetic level, so the consequences would be suffered by the entire human species.
Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man (Adam), and death came through sin, and so death spread to all because all have sinned… Romans 5:12
The original sin caused a genetic mutation in our genes and turned into a cancer, a dominant hereditary disease, that is, it is impossible that anyone born of a man and a woman not to have it. Evil has thus become a second nature that is already present from the moment of our conception.
Most parents do not teach children to lie or steal, and yet even with some years of good and superb education, both in example and in word, parents catch their dear children stealing a few coins from their wallets or lying blatantly. Evil does not need to be learned; we are naturally inclined towards it. Christ himself recognized this fallen nature of the human being when he said:
There is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile. (…) And he said, ‘It is what comes out of a person that defiles. For it is from within, from the human heart that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person. Mark 7:15, 20-23
Usurpation of the criterion of good and evil
The pseudo-emancipation of man, in wanting to be like God and having usurped from God the prerogative of good and evil, was the origin of sin or the original sin that has been passing down from generation to generation, because it had altered the DNA of the human species. Evil has established its roots within the human species 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 not, therefore, bad education that leads man to do evil; the evil is already inside of him.
While the criterion of good and evil remained at the center of the Garden of Eden, and belonged exclusively to God, the earth was the Kingdom of God; there was peace, unity, consensus, because everyone submitted to a single criterion. When man, in wanting to be like God, put himself at the center by stealing the prerogative of good and evil, then division, war, subjectivity, arbitrariness, relativism, discord came into the world. Every individual wants to be the center. Since there can't be two centers, so if I have the criteria of good and evil, you don't have it or I don't acknowledge that you have it.
No one does evil thinking they are doing evil; by killing 5 million Jews, Hitler thought he was doing humanity a favor; suicide bombers who carry out massive murder of innocent people say that they are sacrificing themselves for the greater good; Muslim extremists kill in the name of God....
We are apples with bugs
Parents who take great care in their children's education are caught off guard when they start lying, stealing, and doing other mischiefs they were never taught. Evil is within us and does not need to be learned. As the psychologist Jung would say, evil belongs to the collective unconscious of humanity. Every evil act that an individual carries out, settles in this collective coefficient in such a way that individuals born afterwards, are born with the ability to perform it again without needing any learning.
Many people seeing an apple with a small hole think that the hole was made by a bug that went into the apple, but what actually happens is the opposite: it was made by a bug coming out of the apple. The bug was born from an egg that an insect deposited inside the apple during flowering. We are all apples with bugs: evil is inside all of us and it only needs a certain circumstance to reveal itself.
It is not, therefore, as the proverb says "The situation makes the thief". Everyone, sooner or later, is faced with situations in which he or she can steal; from the outset, we are all capable of stealing. To steal or not to steal will depend on the degree of education, on human values, that we have at the moment of temptation. Only this degree of education on 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 how they should be like. Christ is in fact the measure of the human being, the benchmark of humanity, the one to whom all individuals must measure themselves, for He is the norm, He is the model, the paradigm. Christ is the man God created in Adam before the latter disobeyed. In fact, Jesus shows, by word and deed, that he remains, all his life, obedient to God.
As Christ is the second Adam, so Mary is the second Eve. Ave is, in fact, Eve in reverse. Christ, the son of the Most High God, could not have Eve after sin as his mother; therefore, at the moment of her conception, the moment when Joachim’s half-cell of united with Anne’s half-cell, God acted, preventing the genes that, from the sin of Adam and Eve had passed down from generation to generation, from also passing down to Mary. Mary was conceived without original sin because she was destined to be the mother of the Son of God. It makes no sense that God would incarnate with the human nature that Adam and Eve had stained with sin. Therefore, Mary who was going to be the mother of the Lord was preserved from this negative inherited trait, common to all mortals.
In Ethiopia, there is no negative connotation attached to the figure of stepmother. Often, one is the biological mother and the other is the mother who raises and educates the child. She is called the “Ingera enat", or the bread mother. When I was studying theology, I had a classmate who called his biological aunt mother and his biological mother aunt. My classmate had been rejected by his biological mother and was taken in by her sister who raised him. Their love for each other was so great that when she was already sick, 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 human beings; Mary is our bread mother, of this Eucharistic bread that is her son born in a town called Bethlehem, which literally means house of bread and whom she laid in a manger, a container where one eats, so that we could feed on him.
Eve is our progenitor, but she has abandoned us to our fate; Mary is the one who provides for our needs, just as in Cana when she said, "They have no wine" (John 2:2).
Eve is the one who taught us to do evil; Ave or Mary is the one who educates and teaches us to do good by pointing us to her son and saying, "Do whatever he tells you" (John 2:5).
Nativity of Mary
We cannot recognize the blessings that Jesus brought us, without recognizing at the same time how immensely God honored and enriched Mary by choosing her for the Mother of God. (John Calvin," Comm. Sur l'Harm. Evang.",20)
Nine months after the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary, the Church celebrates the nativity of Our Lady on 8 September. In a biblical context of so many births of same circumstances, from Isaac, Samuel, Samson, etc., according to tradition, Mary was born to elderly and barren parents, named Joachim and Anne. In response to their perseverance and constancy in prayer, these parents were blessed by God with the gift of a baby girl.
Some people place them as residents of Nazareth, but the most reliable tradition places them in Jerusalem, living next to the pool of Bethesda, where pilgrims purified themselves before entering the temple and where today stands the Basilica of St. Anne, very close to one of the main entrances to the Temple and the present-day Lions’ Gate in the walls of the Old City in Jerusalem, leading into the Muslim Quarter.
The girl was given the name Miriam which means seer, sovereign lady. It was most likely an Egyptian name because, as we know, Miriam was the name of Moses' sister. There are those who think that it derives from the Sanskrit name Maryá which literally means purity, virtue, virginity; the Latin translation is Mary. Like Samuel, she was also offered to the Temple of Jerusalem at the age of three, and remained there until she was twelve years old, when she was given in marriage to Joseph.
As we know, the canonical gospels tell us nothing about Mary's birth. The basis of tradition, however, is quite ancient, as it comes from an apocryphal writing of the second century, the Protoevangelium of James, written around the year 150.
Conclusion
Eve is our progenitor, because she is the one who gave birth to us; Mary is our mother, because she is the one who provides for our needs as at the wedding feast of Cana, and she educates us when at the same wedding she tells us, "Do whatever He tells you". Finally, it is she who prays for us at every moment of our life and at the hour of our death. Amen.
Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC
Thank you greatly for the very informative article 🙏😌
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