Eve as an image of God (part 1)

Tomorrow I have to preach a homily to one of the most consrvative Catholic women’s organisation in our country. I want to shake them up a bit (aren’t I a devil!), so I’m preaching on Eve (of Adam and Eve fame) and what we can leanr about God and ourselves by taking a fresh look at her. Here’s the homily – if I don’t leave any more entries after thes you’ll know I’ve hung, drawn and quatered:

Something a visiting bishop said here in this very church just two nights ago sparked this morning’s homily. The good bishop mentioned that the image of Eve as presented in the scriptures has coloured the way church and society has thought of women for many centuries. So, today I want to reflect on Eve and what she tells us today.

It’s hard to imagine anyone who has been more scorned more often or rejected more universally than Eve. Men have heaped disdain on her as an enemy of the human race, and women have despised her for the weakness they see in her as having been bred in them as well. And judging from the basic shame that surrounds Eve throughout history, in the art of every culture, in the theology of every Christian church, in the hearts of every new and more distant generation, the campaign of derision and contempt has been universally successful. The cause of human suffering is the woman Eve, the fundamentalist theology of sin insists, and therefore women in general are to be punished, avoided, controlled, pitied, mocked, and feared. It is a rationale that has kept women out of public arenas, out of intellectual centres, out of ecclesiastical holy places, and out of touch with themselves for eons. That theological thinking has kept them down and kept them quiet. Eve was not to be trusted and neither were they. Eve was a danger to society and so were they.

But the picture of Eve the temptress that has served sexism so well for so long is an unkind one to men as well. If woman is by nature a calculating temptress who requires control, then man, who fell to her simpering wiles without a whimper, is, by nature an unsubstantial, unthinking, snivelling weakling who doesn’t qualify to be in charge of anything. If Eve is the enemy who took him down with a simple, empty-headed, inviting smile, then a man by nature is far too easily duped to be in charge of important things. He is far too gullible and a weakling.

The problem is clear: either Adam was rebellious and so was Eve, or Eve was weak and so was Adam. That fact is that Eve, no less than Adam, is the glory of God; and Adam, no less than Eve, is the sign of humanity becoming human.

The 21st century sorely needs a fuller picture of Eve in a world where the loss of respect for the feminine dimension of life has brought us to the brink of human extermination, the most organised brutality in the history of humankind, a control of the goods of the earth that leaves two-thirds of the children of the earth deprived, underdeveloped, and dispossessed, and a control over women that brings with it bride burnings in India, clitoridectomies in Africa, exploitative labour practices in our own and other so-called “civilised” countries, rape hostels in Bosnia, and ecclesiastical invisibility everywhere in the world. Clearly the human race cannot survive without a commitment to the feminine, and it’s not just those of extremist Muslim backgrounds who need to learn it.

Eve must be reclaimed if humanity is ever to be completely whole, if anything is ever really to change for women, if women in general, not privileged tokens, are to take their rightful places in the shaping of out world.

We must, therefore, begin to see Eve for who she is. We must begin to understand that Eve is the graphic memory of the unaccomplished in the human race. More than that, Eve is the other image of God, is the clear picture of what God has not been allowed to be for any and all of us.

Eve is a sign of possibility. If women are made of the same fabric as men, then women, too are unlimited in human potential. Eve is full of proof that women have both right and reason to expect that humanity with all its blessings as well as its burdens is for them as well as for men.

Eve is a sign of life in abundance. To both women and men Eve is the proof that life can go on, whatever its struggle, whatever its fragility. Eve failed, but she did not give up. Eve faced life and kept going.