Michael Himes

“You recall that the temptation which the serpent presents to the first human beings is not disobedience, nor is it pride. The temptation is that if they eat the forbidden fruit they will become like God. That may be the most important line that evil is given in the Scriptures: Eat this and be like God. The temptation, you will observe, is to reject what we have learned. In the first chapter of Genesis we heard that we have been made in the image and likeness of God. In chapter three the serpent’s temptation is, in effect, “Don’t believe that you’re like God. How can you be like God? God is great and glorious and powerful and majestic and wise; you’re not like that. Being human is a messy business. You don’t want to be human. You have to abandon being human in order to be like God.” The origin of sin, according to the Hebrew tradition, is the rejection of the goodness of being human. It arises from the insistence that we human beings are not the image and likeness of God, that we must become something other than and more than human beings in order to truly be like God. In other words, according to the Hebrew Scriptures, the first sin—the entry of evil into creation—is the refusal to accept the goodness and rightness of being human. Evil is the refusal to accept the goodness of creation. To put it slightly differently, the sin which is the origin of all evil in the world is the rejection of God’s first judgment on us: “God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good” (Genesis 1:31). In contrast, the serpent insists that creation is not good at all; creation—including you and me—is trash. The acceptance of the serpent’s judgment rather than God’s is what leads to all the evil in history. The beginning of sin is despair of the goodness of creation.”
― Michael Himes, The Mystery of Faith: An Introduction to Catholicism: An Introduction to Catholicism