Into each man's life shall trouble exist

Into each man’s life shall trouble exist

As we look at the stars or count the sand on the seashore we shall find that our problems number their many and no one can remove them.

The beginning of such effects had its entrance when Adam and Eve committed the sin of rejecting God’s generosity.  To the woman he said:  I will intensify the pangs of your childbearing. In pain shall you bring forth children.”  To the man he said: “Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree I had forbidden you to eat, Cursed be the ground because of you!  In toil shall you eat its yield all the days of your life.”  (Gn 3: 16 - 17).

We may think of the words that God spoke to our wayward parents and wonder if they just would’ve understood the simple requirements of obedience?  Yet, that is the thrust of man;s desire to have what isn’t his.  Enter the sins of lust and covetousness.  Man in his belief that everything he sees should be his he lusts for what he cannot have and finds himself sinning against his brothers and God.  

So the punishment human beings receive is not God’s way of opening the eyes of his children as much as seeking their forgetful minds and showing his love through total forgiveness.  He would bring himself to sacrificing his own divinity to shed mercy on this greatest creation, mankind.

If God was to send any man to explain this pattern of forgiveness, the man would laugh at God signifying this image was just like themselves.  He would sin just like me, they would boast,  and how can he be any better than me?  

But God, in his infinite wisdom,  went one step beyond the mind of man and decided to come himself to man’s world.  Since God is incapable of sin this Incarnation of the divine union would be the way to eternal salvation.  (Lk 2: 1 - 14).  

Man would continue to sin in his unique manner of avoiding God and finds his future is filled with regret, shameful feelings of failure, and no way to find forgiveness until the Man of God entered his world of evil inclinations and brought with himself God’s mercy through his own sacrifice on Calvary.  This scene would come at a price no man could ever emulate and the suffering he took upon himself was the one and perfect way to prove that God always desired to forgive Adam and consequently you and I.  (Jn 19: 1 0 30).

Suffer “O” man to expiate the evil that you allowed to control your own desires of lust and covetousness, to the expiration of the holiness that was implanted within your soul until your God, Jesus Christ, the Hypostasis of the two natures God and Man to become the Paschal Lamb that willingly became the answer to Eve’s weakness as she accepted the devil’s suggestion and fell as the first human to do so.  

Each time you or I sin rejoice because as the Exultet sings out at the Easter Vigil before the Light who is Christ, without your sin Christ would not have come and heaven would still remain closed.  It is an irony that this paradox for our acceptance into an eternal existence with God needed Eve to show her husband Adam a fruit of knowledge that had the beginning of the Incarnation which was the only manner that would save you and I.  “For I will forgive their evildoing and remember their sins no more.”  (Heb 8: 12).

Ralph B. Hathaway