The Root of Sin

...but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.

 - Genesis 2

We enter Lent.

And the first reading of the season goes straight to the root of the origin of sin. Unfortunately I cannot adequately address this topic in one short reflection.

The concept of sin is deceptively simple, yet it has layers of complexity. God took thousands of years, and 66 books of The Bible, to demonstrate and define it; it's motivations, it's manifestations, it's consequences. It is still being tested, studied, and mocked even today.

I believe there is a sexual component to basic sin. The sex act is a decidedly selfish one. There likely has never been the person born, with any kind of interest in sex, that would be willing to give another person sexual pleasure indefinitely, without getting any mutual stimulation in return. People engage in it, not because they really, truly love the other person; but because they want what it can get for them. Sound ludicrous? Think about it. If there was nothing in it for us, we absolutely would not engage in it totally for the benefit of another person. Absent some climactic animal response, the whole thing comes across as quite silly.

As Jack Miles suggests in his superb work Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God, sex is integrally linked with death. We know the being is mortal, because the being is sexual. Interesting . . . 

And so we could go on now, with all of the symbolism in Genesis, linking sex and the Tree of Knowledge. But that would take too long. But let that presumption color how we look at the rest of Scripture. We shall see if God actually does treat sex and its misuse as a serious thing. And well might we wonder why God would establish such an expectation for his human children, and in what way the proper attention to sex actually ennobles and immortalizes us (for we all want to live forever).

And maybe that's it: You can have your sex, but you will die. If you want to live forever, the price is giving up sex. Perhaps one channel of discovery open to us . . .