On the Sunday of Cheesefare, immediately before Lent begins, the theme is the expulsion of Adam from paradise, and mourning for our separation from God. For this is what sin is -- it is missing the mark, failing to reach the goal and destination, failing to be what God intended us to be.
Adam and Eve fell through food, through seeing food as more desirable than loving God. And so Lent begins with fasting. We abstain from food -- not because food is evil, for it is part of God's good creation, given to us by God himself -- but because it is all to easy to seek the gift rather than the giver, to fall into the idolatry of desiring the creature rather than the creator.
Food gives life, and without food our bodies cannot live. Yet by taking food not given, not blessed by God for their use, Adam and Eve experienced a spiritual death. This is something that is easy to misunderstand. People sometimes ask: why did God punish Adam and Eve for eating the fruit of this tree? What was so terrible about it?
That is not unrelated to the question asked by the snake: did God say you were not to eat of the fruit of any of the trees of the garden? It is a seemingly simple question; it is simply trying to establish what God has said. But it is also a lawyer's question. And perhaps that is one reason why the Church has said that the snake was being used by the devil, by the Satan, for both the Greek diavolos and the Hebrew Satan mean the prosecutor in a law court. The prosecutor asks such questions not merely to establish what has been said, but to accuse the speaker of wrongdoing, to get the witness to give evidence to convict the accused. The answer, of course, is that God did not say that. But the question is phrased in such a way as to implant the suggestion that God is an ogre God, a God who makes unreasonable prohibitions, a God who wants his children to starve in the midst of plenty.
