Gen 3, 11-13 "Why did you do such a thing?"

(Gen 3, 11-13) "Why did you do such a thing?"

[11] Then he asked, "Who told you that you were naked? You have eaten, then, from the tree of which I had forbidden you to eat!" [12] The man replied, "The woman whom you put here with me - she gave me fruit from the tree, so I ate it." [13] The LORD God then asked the woman, "Why did you do such a thing?" The woman answered, "The serpent tricked me into it, so I ate it."

(CCC 396) God created man in his image and established him in his friendship. A spiritual creature, man can live this friendship only in free submission to God. The prohibition against eating "of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil" spells this out: "for in the day that you eat of it, you shall die" (Gen 2:17). The "tree of the knowledge of good and evil" (Gen 2:17), symbolically evokes the insurmountable limits that man, being a creature, must freely recognize and respect with trust. Man is dependent on his Creator, and subject to the laws of creation and to the moral norms that govern the use of freedom. (CCC 1607) According to faith the disorder we notice so painfully does not stem from the nature of man and woman, nor from the nature of their relations, but from sin. As a break with God, the first sin had for its first consequence the rupture of the original communion between man and woman. Their relations were distorted by mutual recriminations (Cf. Gen 3:12); their mutual attraction, the Creator's own gift, changed into a relationship of domination and lust (Cf. Gen 2:22; 3:16b); and the beautiful vocation of man and woman to be fruitful, multiply, and subdue the earth was burdened by the pain of childbirth and the toil of work (Cf. Gen 1:28; 3:16-19). (CCC 394) Scripture witnesses to the disastrous influence of the one Jesus calls "a murderer from the beginning", who would even try to divert Jesus from the mission received from his Father (Jn 8:44; cf. Mt 4:1-11). "The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil” (I Jn 3:8). In its consequences the gravest of these works was the mendacious seduction that led man to disobey God.