Be careful what you wish for, people say, because you might
get it.
In today’s Old Testament story that seems to be exactly what
has happened to Eve.
When the serpent sidles up to her in the Garden of Eden what
he offers her seems to be exactly what she wants. She wants to have her eyes
opened, and to know good and evil, just like God. And why not? Surely it is a
good thing to have your eyes open and to know good and evil. So she and Adam eat
the fruit, and what the serpent has said turns out to be absolutely true. Their
eyes are opened, and they do know good and evil. Unfortunately
what they see with those open eyes is that they are naked, and what they
discover about good and evil is that you can know as much as you like about it,
but that won’t stop you doing the wrong thing.
This is a story that has captured people’s imagination for
millennia. The snake, the fruit, the couple who are seduced into taking just
one bite. Even if people know little of the Bible, they recognise these images.
The latest Smirnoff advert, (http://youtu.be/t93jvMH6F50) for a vodka drink called Apple Bite, features
a couple walking into a sophisticated night club where they are served by a
bartender wreathed in snakes… It’s not explained, but it doesn’t need to be. We
all get the reference. They are being presented with what seems like an
irresistible temptation, and the implication is that life will be much more fun
if they give in.
The story of Adam and Eve has been used in many different
ways over the centuries, but often its original message has been twisted by the
meanings we’ve thrust on it. That Smirnoff ad, for example, manages both to
distort our understanding of sin, making it seem glamorous, and also to distort
our understanding of pleasure, by making it seem intrinsically sinful, which isn’t
the Bible’s view at all.
But if secular interpretations of the story have been
misleading, Christian interpretations have often been just as bad. Christians
have used the story to back up restrictive views of gender, sexuality, and the
value of learning too; it has often been used as a tool to keep people in their
place – especially women. It has been
distorted, as well, though, by being turned into the starting point for what I
think is a rather contrived theological grand story, an explanation of life,
the universe and everything which I don’t think it was ever intended to be. I’ll
say a bit more about that in a minute.
This story almost certainly grew out of an early Middle
Eastern folk tale. There are similar stories of the loss of innocence in many
cultures, and there’s no evidence to suggest that those who first wrote this
story down ever meant it to be read as history. There’s no evidence either that
they thought it was going to become as significant as it later did. It’s not
mentioned in the Old Testament after these early chapters of Genesis at all.
And Jesus never mentions it in any of the Gospels either. Adam gets just one
name-check in one Gospel - Luke Chapter
3 - but only as part of the family tree of Jesus. Luke traces Jesus right back
to Adam, who he describes as the son of God. There’s nothing about forbidden
fruit at all, or any fall from grace.
The only Biblical writer who really makes anything of this
tale is St Paul, as we heard in our second reading today. That‘s probably
because he’d grown up in a particular type of Jewish background, in one of the
many Jewish communities around the Mediterranean. These ex-pat Jews –
Hellenistic Jews, as they were known - were far more influenced by Greek
philosophical ideas and methods than those who lived in the heartlands of
Judea. They wanted to try to make their Jewish beliefs sound more like the
sophisticated Greek philosophy of those around them. So they tried to find
patterns in what had been the disconnected books of their scriptures to create
a unified whole from them.
Paul grew up in that milieu, so it is natural for him to try
to find links between Jewish stories and the story of Jesus, to see echoes of
one in the other, to want to make it all fit together somehow. So he talks
about Jesus as a second Adam, whose obedience cancels out Adam and Eve’s
disobedience. “As in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive” as he
says elsewhere.
Through historical accident as much as anything else, Paul’s
views came to dominate Christian theology, and soon this story came to be seen
as a crucial part of the Christian message. It was cast as the problem to which
Jesus was the solution, the question to which he was the answer. Humanity had
become separated from God by Adam and Eve’s sin, said this view, and the only
thing that could bridge the gap was the cross. The story acquired a name - The
Fall, with a capital F - something it isn’t ever called in Scripture.
Legends grew up connecting the two events. When Adam lay
dying, said one, an angel gave his son, Seth, seeds from the tree of the
knowledge of good and evil, the tree that had caused all the trouble. Seth
placed them in Adam’s mouth as they buried him. From them sprung a tree whose
wood was eventually used to make the cross on which Jesus died.
It has a satisfying neatness to it, but there are a number
of problems with this grand story of Fall and Redemption.
Firstly, to make it work, the story of Adam and Eve really
has to be a historical event, located in some actual place and time rather than
a myth or a metaphor. But few Christians now would take that view, and that
means that the internal logic falls apart somewhat.
Secondly, it treats both the story of Adam and Eve and the
death and resurrection of Christ primarily as a sort of metaphysical mystery,
something that happened up there, out there, back there, in the distant past,
in the heavenly realms. It becomes a sort of divine balancing of the books,
utterly remote from us, nothing to do with the reality of our lives and our
world, right here and right now.
Thirdly, and perhaps most important for today, it distorts
the story of Adam and Eve itself. To make that Fall and Redemption story work,
you have to believe that when Adam and Eve were driven out of the Garden of
Eden, a great gulf opened up, separating us from God, and that’s not what the
story says at all. Adam and Eve have to leave the Garden, they lose that primal
state of innocence and security, but the Old Testament is quite clear that God
goes with them, out into the wilderness. They meet God again and again out
there beyond the borders of Eden, in the shape of burning bushes, angelic visitations,
prophetic visions and the still small voice that speaks from deep within their
hearts. They might not always notice God or pay attention to what he says, but
he is right there all the time, as they
wrestle with the temptations and the burdens of life. Old Testament
writers sometimes say they feel as if God is absent or distant, but they just
as often talk about his closeness and they delight his presence and blessing in
the midst of their troubles.
And that brings us to the Gospel reading. The story of Adam
and Eve begins in a garden and ends in a wilderness, where they discover that
God is just as much at home as he was amongst the fruit trees and the pastures
of Eden. And here is Jesus out in that wilderness too, making the same
discovery. At the end of his struggle with Satan we are told that “angels came
and waited on him”
In the ancient world the wilderness was seen as a place of
great danger, filled with demons, rather than a place of peace. It’s the
front-line of the struggle, not a place of retreat. Jesus doesn’t go there to
find space or rest, but to do battle with the fears and temptations that would
inevitably be in his mind as he started his ministry. Should he choose the easy
route of power and popularity, or stick to the road God has called him to, a
road of service and sacrifice, confronting oppressive powers and suffering the
consequences? His struggles in the
desert prepare him for the life that lies ahead, and his death too. As he hangs
on the cross, in a wilderness of pain and fear, the fact that he has discovered
that his Father is present with him in this first wilderness – that there is no
wilderness where God is not - will really matter. It will matter, too, for
those he ministers to - the poor, the sick and the outcast . Their society
might have told them that they were out in the wilderness, beyond the pale, but
Jesus will proclaim that it isn’t so. In fact, God’s kingdom is growing first
and fastest in them. They are the people in whom God is most clearly at work.
The story of Adam and Eve has often had such a weight of
interpretation thrust on it, that its truest and most powerful messages have
been crushed out of it, but they are still there if we care to look.
On the one hand it tells us something quite obvious. This
world is not as it should be. Life is not as it should be. It’s natural for us
to look around at the world and wonder how it came to this, what went wrong,
why people aren’t kinder to each other, why bad things happen. We look at
Ukraine or Syria, and think, “why can’t people just get along?” We look at
ourselves and think “Why is it that I really mean to make the right choices and
yet so often fall for the same old temptations?” The story of Adam and Eve
reflects our awareness of the reality, and wrongness, of sin and suffering.
But the story also tells us something that isn’t at all
obvious. That God is with us in these times of struggle and failure and
confusion. He keeps pace with us as we wander about in circles. He hallows the
stony, thorny ground of our lives with his presence as he comes among us in
Christ, and he sows the seeds of his love in us, so that his kingdom can grow
there, where it is most needed.
Amen
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