My wife and I are three weeks away from our first child. She is smaller than average and the child is bigger than average, so it’s not the most comfortable time for her. Naturally, as a loving husband, I’ve reminded her that it was the woman who first ate the “apple.” She, of course, retorted that my work was made more difficult because of Adam’s lack of leadership and his subsequent consumption of the forbidden fruit. Touché.
Jesting aside, in reflecting on the Genesis narrative of the fall, I was reminded of God’s tendency to use the physical to mediate a spiritual consequence. As Catholics, we should know this truth well. We encounter it every week in the Eucharist, through which the transubstantiated body and blood of Christ brings us grace and eternal life.
During my Protestant days, I found spiritual mediation through the Eucharist to be odd and objectionable. But to a Bible-believing Christian, it shouldn’t have been strange at all. The fall came about through eating real food—the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Death and knowledge were wrought not just from disobedience, but because they were the spiritual and physical consequences of consumption of the forbidden fruit itself. See Genesis 2:17; 3:7. Eating the fruit of the Tree of Life had real physical and spiritual consequences too: namely, eternal life. See Genesis 3:22.
If, from the beginning, God saw fit to mediate death and life through fruit, why object to the literality of Christ’s teaching that His body and blood in the Eucharist brings eternal life? Indeed, our Catholic theology on the Eucharist is a beautiful completion of that Genesis narrative. The Tree of Life that God ultimately removed from Adam and Eve’s grasp was returned to Earth through the Cross of Christ. And the body and blood of Christ is its undeniable fruit.
Adam and Eve should have trusted God’s warning that death would come if they ate the forbidden fruit. We should learn from their failure and trust Christ’s proclamation that eternal life comes to those who eat His flesh and drink His blood in the Eucharist—real food and drink, indeed. See John 6:53-56. To do otherwise—to discount the power of food and the physical—is to fall into the trap of the same doubt and disobedience that ensnared humanity in the Garden of Eden.
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I had never drawn this connection so explicitly. I’m grateful for the insight. During my conversion to the Catholic faith, I actually found the Real Presence one of the easiest doctrines to accept. Well, at least after I read John 6 and meditated on it, because it was then that I was confronted with being a proclaimed “Bible believing” Christian yet refusing to take Jesus’ words at face value.
This contradiction is ultimately what led me to ask the hard question: by what authority do I resolve these competing interpretations? You know what side I came down on.
Your insight about mediating the spiritual through the fruit will be a handy one in many conversations to come, I’m sure. Thanks.
Atticus,
Agreed on John 6. The Bread of Life Discourse played a tremendous role in my own conversion. It’s amazing how clear Christ was and how much of an effort He made to ensure that His listeners understood that He was being literal. And, yet, Christians still reject it. It’s sad that we still haven’t learned from the fall.
Thanks. Great post.
I hadnt thought about it that way. The wine of the Eucharist is the body, blood soul and divinity all by itself, just as the bread is. I think, since we normally consume the bread alone at mass, the fruit connection did not occur to me. Great post!