Blame is a game firmly entrenched in our culture. It is most obvious in the profound story of the Garden of Eden. In the first reading, God is the owner of a beautiful garden, which were common in palaces and temples in the ancient Near East. Needing a gardener to look after the earthly garden, God creates a man. Observing closely to see what this new creature requires, God sees the man needs creatures to assist him and so makes animals out of the soil. But none proves to be a suitable helper. God then creates a creature from the man’s own body rather than from the soil, a suitable helper. Seeing the woman, the man declares, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.” Unfortunately, the woman displaced the snake, the cleverest of the animals God already made. The snake apparently considered himself to be “a suitable helper.” point that is missed by most readers is that the snake takes revenge on the woman by exposing her as an “un-suitable helper.” So, the snake tricks the woman into thinking that eating the fruit will give her and her husband super-knowledge, which only God’s heavenly servants are endowed with. The couple eat the forbidden fruit and gain only the knowledge that they are naked. Note that the woman is not a temptress as she has been often portrayed, because the text tells us that her husband was at her side when she spoke to the snake. (God had probably forbidden the fruit because he knew that eating it would harm the couple.) When God confronts the couple for their disobedience, they refuse to accept responsibility for what they did; the man blames the woman and the woman blames the snake. Despite their ingratitude and disobedience, God stays with them, enabling them later to have two sons, Cain and Abel.
The description of Jesus in the Gospel of Mark seems very different from the scene in Eden, but blame is still operative. We are surprised perhaps to learn that Jesus’s own family at least at this early stage in his ministry “stands outside” whereas Jesus addresses “insiders,” his disciples, his new family. His relatives’ willful distance from him provokes Jesus’s vigorous reaction; it holds lessons for us today. Jesus takes the opportunity to illustrate what the church is. Its relationships are not defined by biological family, but by openness to the word of God, to welcoming the preaching and presence of Jesus. He looks around at those inside the house and declares, “Here are my mother and my brothers. For whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.” Reassuring, but challenging.