We have a tendency to think of fear and shame in the context of our relationship to God as pertaining to discrete offenses. We are supposed to fear the consequences of doing things that are wrong, and we are supposed to be ashamed of ourselves when we have done something wrong--at least, such is the commonplace application of the concepts of fear and shame. Fear and shame are understood in the context of discrete, identifiable acts of morality or immorality.
That this understanding is essentially problematic is revealed in the existence of the ever-encroaching consideration that no act of morality can ever be regarded as "good enough" for God. The moral-versus-immoral balancing is really inconceivable, and in any circumspect consideration is shown to be skewed perpetually in favor of immorality weighing down the status of any human being. It is no wonder that the theologians speak continually of "total depravity" and "miserable sinners."
What is incumbent upon the theologians, then, is the responsibility to consider fear and shame most crucially in terms of the non-discrete and the confusing. Genesis does not describe Eve as simply taking hold of the forbidden fruit and eating it. Eve is describe as joining in a scurrilous conversation with a creature that she knew--at the very least--was not God. Even the act of merely touching the fruit--which act is not prohibited specifically by God in the text, though we have Eve describing it so--is a questionable act, the more so as we might think of Eve (sinfully) concocting a prohibition and therefore (sinfully) violating it, this latter sin being what can come from the simmering irresolution that has characterized humanity from the start. Certainly such irresolution is evident in Eve entertaining in the slightest the snake's appeal to confusion, "Did God really say . . . ?"
Saint Paul or no Saint Paul, there is no warrant to understand the plight of humanity as springing from a simple, discrete sin (eating the fruit, though the theologians would be lying were they to contend that they knew with authority what would have happened had Adam refused to partake--such is the confusion of humanity's primordial sin-nature.) The plight of humanity is not understood in its rawest sense as innocence-versus-guilt or as right-versus-wrong, but as the perpetual not-even-as-simple-as-opposition relationship of fear and shame.
Eve did not know what to fear (which can be fearful in itself) and Adam did not know of what he was to be ashamed (which can be shameful in itself--consider Jesus' stark admonition, "Why cannot you judge yourselves what is right and wrong?") When we ourselves learn fear and shame, we learn them in the context of confusing, real-life scenarios--just like Adam and Eve (if we consider Adam and Eve as being "real" like "real people," not as the puppets cherished most ironically by those theologians most eager to argue for their historicity.) We not only fear things, we fear that we do not know what to fear. We not only feel shame, we feel shame as a generalization. This latter generalization is latent in the experienced mis-match (assignable both to our faulty conceits and to the imprecise description of our misdeeds by authority figures) that imposes itself upon us as we grow to understand that we can commit trespasses, and have committed trespasses.
Conceivably, perfect parents and other authority figures could relieve children of all fear and shame, by making it reassuringly unmistakable what are trespasses and what are not, and by levying perfect correctives such that all causes for shame were discharged perfectly. This is not going to happen, any more than succeeding generations of parents might practice eugenics or gene-alteration such that all proclivity for misdeeds might be extinguished.
Adam and Eve knew fear and shame, in the context of a story in which "knowledge of Good and Evil" was merely an element, rather than a presupposition. It is often said that God in the garden paradise was a perfect parent, but it is no more an impiety to contend that this simple platitude is swallowed up in the receding mysteries of Creation, as it is to contend that there is something amiss in a perfect Creator making a creation that is merely "very good."
Jesus knew the workings-out of all this. It is good to be kind to an animal, and it is bad to be neglectful to an animal, but that does not mean that it is "good" or "evil" to be seized by the urge to life a sheep from a pit on the Sabbath. It is good to provide for one's children, and it is bad to be neglectful to one's children, but that does not mean that it is "good" or "evil" to reach out on the Sabbath to collect a sheep that might be crucial to the family's welfare.
All real-life situations involve fear and shame. All real-life situations involve good and evil as well, but the very fact that they are "real-life" means that the good and evil elements in all situations are matters of discovery, not understood as merely "situational," but rather as developing--developing as each situation itself develops, a "situation" being a non-discrete and confusing happenstance that only with its unfolding crashes against the edifice of that which is abiding and irrefutable. This is nothing more or less than the giving (if we choose to regard it so) of the gift to Eve and Adam (and all imperfect of us) of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
It is irrefutable that the woman with the alabaster jar had cause (or what we might call "right," if in terms of our having anything to say about it) to approach Jesus in fear and shame. That Jesus deigned to extract from her actions that which must be seen as laudable is an expression of God's sovereignty. We are required still to decide in endless progression what to sacrifice, what to save, what to donate, what to labor for, and so on indefinitely. We are attended through all this by fear and shame, and we are guided through all this by fear and shame, and for us to try to subsume fear and shame to our conceits of Good and Evil is for us to cast back in our Creator's face gifts original to us in the very moment of Creation.
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