This blog follows the daily bible readings of the Catholic Church

Genesis 3: 9

But God called to the man. ‘Where are you?’ he asked.

10 ‘I heard the sound of you in the garden,’ he replied. ‘I was afraid because I was naked, so I hid.’

11 ‘Who told you that you were naked?’ he asked. ‘Have you been eating from the tree I forbade you to eat?’

12 The man replied, ‘It was the woman you put with me; she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.’

13 Then God said to the woman, ‘Why did you do that?’ The woman replied, ‘The snake tempted me and I ate.’

14 Then  God said to the snake, ‘Because you have done this, Accursed be you of all animals wild and tame! On your belly you will go and on dust you will feed as long as you live. 15 I shall put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; it will bruise your head and you will strike its heel.’

20 The man named his wife ‘Eve’ because she was the mother of all those who live.

The sort of Mary I believe in

Gospel, Luke 1:26-38

26 In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, 27 to a virgin betrothed to a man named Joseph, of the House of David; and the virgin’s name was Mary. 28 He went in and said to her, ‘Rejoice, you who enjoy God’s favour! The Lord is with you.’

29 She was deeply disturbed by these words and asked herself what this greeting could mean, 30 but the angel said to her, ‘Mary, do not be afraid; you have won God’s favour. 31 Look! You are to conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you must name him Jesus. 32 He will be great and will be called Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his ancestor David; 33 he will rule over the House of Jacob for ever and his reign will have no end.’

34 Mary said to the angel, ‘But how can this come about, since I have no knowledge of man?’

35 The angel answered, ‘The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will cover you with its shadow. And so the child will be holy and will be called Son of God. 36 And I tell you this too: your cousin Elizabeth also, in her old age, has conceived a son, and she whom people called barren is now in her sixth month, 37 for nothing is impossible to God.’

38 Mary said, ‘You see before you the Lord’s servant, let it happen to me as you have said.’ And the angel left her.

Today’s Lectionary is the result of ancient parallel between Eve, the mother of humanity who disobeyed God and Mary the mother of God’s Son who obeyed God and ushered in our salvation. This motif is defective in its attribution of the original sin to Eve and in its unbiblical focus on the Virgin Mary. It has led to a cult not only of Mary but also of virginity that has done immeasurable harm to catholic teaching on sexuality.

Heavy- handed interpretation does no justice to either passage. There is a real humour in the Genesis story. “Who told you that you were naked?” – a fine piece of cross examination by God. “The woman you gave me” –a fine example of blaming the co-accused. And there’s the snake that loses its legs. The serious aspect of all this comedy is also comic: God has created creatures capable of disobedience. What did he in his divine wisdom expect to happen? There is no more radical depiction of God in the bible that this one which shows God stumbling along in the wake of his creatures with no plan B except immediate expulsion from the playground.

What is the purpose of this impious narrative? It is to show the magnitude of God’s folly in creating human beings. It takes many hundreds of years for Paul to say, “The folly of God is wiser than the wisdom of men.”

The narrative of the angel and Mary also has its moments. The practical Mary interrupts the high-sounding promises to remind him/her that conception requires carnal knowledge. Here is no “Mother of God” but rather a young woman of faith ready to commit herself as mother of her people’s Messiah but unsure if the angel knows the facts of life. Luke’s account, unlike Matthew’s, comes perilously close to imagining God taking the male part in conception, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you and the power of the Most High will overshadow you.” The Jerusalem translation is even more suggestive, “The Holy Spirit will cover you with its shadow.”

A theology which begins by emphasising God’s initiative in the person and ministry of Jesus –indicated in Mark and John with the phrase “beloved son of the Father”, gets close in Matthew and Luke to removing Jesus from sinful humanity altogether. Was Jesus conceived without male chromosomes? Would Joseph have failed a paternity test? I ask these questions out of concern to protect the true humanity of Christ which the Virgin Birth motif puts at risk. Of course it has a “poetic truth” but we should not confuse it with history.