When I was a little girl, my mother came home one day and noticed something very funny about one of our cats. He had large patches of fur missing from one side and when she looked at his face, all the whiskers on one side were gone. Calling my brother and me in to look at the cat, she asked us if we knew what had happened to him. We promised her that we had no idea how it happened! When the truth finally came out, my brother blamed me for holding the cat still and I blamed him for wielding the scissors.
We both got in trouble.
That's my first recollection of playing the blame game. I'm sure I've played it at least several times since then. It's so easy to point the finger at someone else to save our own skin, isn't it?
That's where we find Adam and Eve in today's reading. When God finds out they have eaten from the tree they were commanded not to eat from, they immediately started pointing fingers.
Adam blamed it on Eve, "The woman you put here with me - she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it." Actually, he kinda blames God at first...as if it was God's fault because He put the woman there with Adam.
The Eve followed up with, "The serpent deceived me, and I ate."
Nobody wanted to take responsibility for their own actions. It didn't take them half a second to blame the other person in an effort to save themselves.
But they both get in trouble.
I often wonder, what would have happened if they had just owned up to from the start? Oh, there still would have been consequences for breaking God's commands. But I wonder if the sting of the discipline was that much sharper because they turned on the one they were supposed to love and denied each other to the God who loved them both?
- Holly Barrett
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