Friday of the Fifth Week in Ordinary Time

Lectionary: 333

The woman saw that the tree was good for food,
pleasing to the eyes, and desirable for gaining wisdom.
So she took some of its fruit and ate it; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.

“What was I thinking?” I often ask myself days, weeks, or years too late. Sometimes I have an answer but it’s never satisfactory.

We ask the same question of others, and sometimes aloud. “What were you thinking?”

The answer, too often: “I wasn’t thinking.”

We ask the question of the mythical Adam and Eve, “What were they thinking?” Genesis explains: The food was pleasing to the eye and desirable for gaining wisdom. That’s reason enough. We’re bound to learn something from everything we do, though we might not do it for that reason. Eve, it appears, was curious. And so was Adam. It looks good, let’s eat it.

Despite many treatises and much tradition, I see no reason to suppose Adam acted for a different reason. Many creative authors have given Adam a more noble reason; especially, “He chose to stand by his wife!” (What a guy!)

Were that the case he would not have blamed her for the sin in the next paragraph. A noble husband would have said, “I have done wrong; we have done wrong. Please forgive us.”

In today’s gospel we hear of Jesus’s healing a deaf man who could not speak clearly: “…his speech impediment was removed, and he spoke plainly.”

Adam, caught in sin, could not speak plainly. Certainly, like him we often have a hard time saying, “I am sorry. Please forgive me. How can I make it up to you?”

We might be spiritually incapable of such an expression. We have never heard such words and cannot speak them. Or, even if we know the words, the tongue is tied, and nothing comes out.

Adam is a man like any one of us, made of dirt. He has the breath of life but lacks the Holy Spirit which Jesus gave us from Calvary. The Lord gave us the power of such words to forgive and to apologize when he said, “Father, forgive them. They know not what they do.” We have only to speak.