Week 5 Saturday (Year 1)

Readings: Genesis 3.9-24; Psalm 90; Mark 8.1-10

Jesus's heart is moved with pity for the people who have been with him for some days. It is how the Lord, our God, is towards us always. God is good, and God is love, and can only be himself in his dealings with us. That means compassionate and merciful, anxious to come to our help. This is how God is revealed to us in how Jesus lived and acted, always seeking to attend to the needs of the people.

We see this compassion of God in a number of ways in the first reading also. What is recorded there is described as the punishment following on sin but really God is simply spelling out for Adam and Eve the consequences of their sin. Each of them tries to blame someone else for what has happened - the man blames the woman, the woman blames the snake, in effect they are blaming God for having made things the way He has. In speaking to them as he does, God is simply presenting them with the truth of their situation now that they have turned away from him.

But even in that moment his compassion and kindness win through. He makes clothes for them, for example. A tender moment, just a detail in the story. Are we to imagine God sitting at a sewing machine or taking out needle and thread to dress them?

Shutting off access to the tree of life may seem simply like punishment, even a kind of vindictiveness on God's part as if he is one of the Greek-style gods, just a human being writ large. But God is not like that. In fact preventing access to the tree of life is also a gesture of kindness on God's part. What if they were to become eternal now, in the condition of sin in which they stand? He acts to save them from confirming their sinful condition and perhaps being forever where they are now.

And a third act of kindness is hinted at in what God says to the serpent. There will be enmity between the woman and the serpent, between her seed and the serpent's seed. It is what has been called the 'proto-evangelium', the first hint of the good news that sometime in the future there will be a showdown between a descendant of the woman and a descendant of the serpent. It has become part of the iconography of Mary, how we represent her, crushing the head of the serpent. For it is her son, Jesus, who is the one who undoes the damage brought about by the serpent. He it is who opens again for us the gates of paradise and gives us access, following him, to the tree of life.

The tree of life is spoken about in two books of the Bible, the first one, Genesis, and the last one, Revelation. It is what the whole story is about. And it is the cross of the Lord which has become the tree of life for us because it is through the suffering, death and resurrection of Jesus that eternal life has been won back for us. Moved with pity at their hunger Jesus performed his miracles of feeding. Moved with pity at our spiritual condition and our profound need of grace and mercy he performed his greatest act of love, the sacrifice of the cross confirmed by the Father in the resurrection.

God is good and God is love. God is working his purpose out in our individual lives and in the history of humanity. And that purpose is our flourishing, our coming to share the eternal life that is promised. God always acts towards us from the basis of mercy and compassion. It is sometimes difficult to see how some of the things that happen in our lives can be squared with that but we believe that they can and that some day it will be clear to us.

In the meantime we have these small signs of God mercy to encourage us and we have the great sign of his compassion to transform us - the cross of the Lord become the tree of life - guiding and leading us home to the kingdom.