In honor of Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent, I think it’s fitting to start today’s post with a perennial memento mori.
Then to Adam He said, “Because you have heeded the voice of your wife, and have eaten from the tree of which I commanded you, saying, ‘You shall not eat of it’:
“Cursed is the ground for your sake;
In toil you shall eat of it
All the days of your life.
Both thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you,
And you shall eat the herb of the field.
19In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread
Till you return to the ground,
For out of it you were taken;
For dust you are,
And to dust you shall return.”And Adam called his wife’s name Eve, because she was the mother of all living.
Genesis 3: 17-20
A close look at that passage will show that it has rather satisfying bookends. It starts with the first man bringing death into the world because of his wife. But it ends with a subtle grace note of hope that names Eve the mother of all the living.
And it’s vital to remember that this statement comes right after the protoevangelium of Genesis 3:14. A Living Son descended from Eve will crush the serpent.
The term “living” carries deep biblical significance. It’s a title for God Himself. And in Mark 12:27, Jesus identifies God as the God of the living in reference to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. It’s clear He means that those three ancient patriarchs are still alive.
It seems like we’ve run into something of a contradiction here. Genesis 3:19 pronounces a curse of death on all children of Adam and Eve. Yet Jesus asserts that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob – three of their descendants – still live. Then we have Genesis 3:20 calling Eve mother of all the living.
The answer is right there in the proto-Gospel verse about Eve’s seed crushing the serpent’s head.
She can be called the mother of the living, and her descendants the three patriarchs can be said to live, because a Son from her line was prophesied to defeat the one who orchestrated the Fall and lift the curse of death.
But now we seem to have a second contradiction. How can a seed of Eve break a curse that binds Eve’s descendants? You can’t give what you don’t have, so it would seem absurd to claim of anyone who’s mortal that he can grant immortality to others.
And the answer to that riddle is in God’s title the Living.
Not only is God alive, He is Life (John 14:6).
In fact, God is infinite life.
And trying to affect Infinite Life with a finite death curse would not only fail, it would cancel out the whole curse in superabundant fashion.
So the cure for man’s mortal condition is for God Himself to become a Son of Eve.
That’s what Genesis 3:14 is getting at.
St. Paul affirms this interpretation in Galatians 4:4. “God sent His Son, born of a woman.”
And he lays it all out in Romans 1:3-4. “[H]is Son, born of David’s seed according to the flesh, constituted Son of God in power, according to the Spirit of holiness that raised him from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord.”
Nor is Paul just grasping at straws. He’s drawing from the proto-Gospel and the actual Gospel.
For instance, Luke 3:23-38 tracing Christ’s genealogy back to Adam.
It’s why Paul calls Jesus “the firstborn of the dead” who is supreme over creation (Col 1:18). He asserts Jesus’ supremacy over Adam, the old head of mankind, whose disobedience with Eve caused death to enter the world.
So Jesus Christ is the new and greater Adam whose obedience undid the effects of the Fall. But we still have to solve for the other half of the equation. Because Genesis 3 states that Jesus will be the woman’s seed and that Eve will be the mother of all the living. Yet how could those prophesies be said of her since she sinned and was under the death curse?
Just as humanity needed a new and greater Adam in the Person of Jesus, we needed a new and greater Eve to undo our first mother’s disobedience with an infinitely greater act of obedience.
And the great father of the Church, St. Irenaeus of Lyons, fills in the blanks.
By disobeying, Eve became the cause of death for herself and for the whole human race. In the same way Mary, though she also had a husband, was still a virgin, and by obeying, she became the cause of salvation for herself and for the whole human race.
-Irenaeus of Lyons, Adversus haereses, AD 189
Just as Jesus is the new and greater Adam whose obedience even to death won us eternal life, His mother Mary is the new and greater Eve whose “fiat” in response to God’s plan of salvation allowed God the Son to take on a human nature and redeem the world.
It is Mary whose “yes” to God enabled her Son to crush the serpent. And it is she who is the mother of all who live in Christ, the Church.
Have a holy and salutary Lent, knowing that Easter must follow.
As a slightly confused Evangelical, I’m trying to make an attempt to know and understand Mary more. This helps.
Good to know. Glory to God!
I cannot recommend the book “Jesus and the Jewish Roots of Mary” by Brant Pitre highly enough.
It essentially roots Catholic Mariology in three things:
1) Mary as the New Ark of the Covenant
2) Mary as the Davidic Queen-Mother
3) Mary as the new Eve
Pitre gives abundant scriptural evidence to support all three. If you want to know the “Why” behind Catholic Mariology, no book is better.
Sounds intriguing
Pitre is quite good. They use his and Bergsma’s Old Testament book as the OT textbook at Christendom College, I believe.
As a Methodist evangelical, I suggest thinking about this in Christological terms. To say that Jesus is very man and very God, as the Nicene creed does, we must admit – as much as it bewilders me and breaks my cradle Baptist brain, – that Mary is God’s mother by being the mother of Jesus. Not the Father’s mother, of course, but most assuredly the Son’s mother. We celebrate that fact every Christmas, but perhaps we don’t follow the ideas to their logical conclusion. We’re not adding anything to the Holy and Blessed Trinity by confessing the full humanity of God the Son. At the end of the day, what we understand about the Theotokos shapes what we understand about the Logos.
Great point. Yeah, it’s basic biology and math.