I Lent – March 13, 2011 – Year A
Thanks to an organization called “The Center for Inquiry” billboards have begun appearing in Indianapolis and other places proclaiming that we “don’t need God—to hope, to care, to love, to live”.
Some of you may have seen them already.
I haven’t, but I’ve seen pictures of them.
Now, of course, a case can be made for such a claim.
As Lutheran Bishop William Gafkjen, writing in yesterday’s Indianapolis Star, readily admits: “Hope, care and love are deeply human characteristics, shared by all of us regardless of creed or other commitments.”
But, Bishop Gafkjen hastens to add, “…Lent is a time to remember that we don’t always do these things well; that we sometimes warp them to our own purposes to the harm of others; and that we can find new and abiding hope, love beyond our frail and failing versions, and life beyond imagining in the forgiveness and companionship of Jesus, crucified and risen for the life of the world.”
In other words, you may not need God to hope, care, and love, when you happen to feel like it.
But what if you don’t happen to feel like it?
Then you just might need God after all!
One of the important things about the season of Lent is that the Church has a chance to get back to basics.
In Lent we get to follow Jesus into the wilderness and wrestle with some of the hard questions: Who am I? How did I get here? Is anyone else around? Where do I go from here?
So it’s not all that surprising that on the First Sunday in Lent the lectionary should also present us with one of the creation stories for us to chew on.
The story is the older of the two stories we have in the Book of Genesis, and it’s also the longer story—which is probably one of the reasons some parts are left out in the lesson from the Hebrew scriptures appointed for today.
The most obvious omission is, of course, the description of God’s forming woman from the rib of the man after no fit partner can be found for him from among the other animals—at first the writer refers to “the man”, then with no explanation we’re hearing about “the woman and her husband”, but there are two other significant omissions: a detailed description of the garden, which locates it more or less geographically, and, extremely important for an understanding of what the story is about, the last part of the story.
Now, wait a minute!
Isn’t this story about how sin came into the world?
Isn’t this story about how we human beings arrived at what some like to call “our fallen state”?
Well, yes, at least to a degree.
This interpretation is after all central to the thesis that the apostle Paul proclaims in his letter to the Romans: “Just as sin came into the world through one [man’s disobedience], and death came through sin, …so one man’s obedience, …one man’s act of righteousness…leads to justification and life for all.”
In Paul’s eyes, Jesus, the Christ, undoes what was done in the garden—when humanity rebelled against God—and frees us from the powerful hold of sin and death, lifting us up from our fallen state and restoring us to harmony with God.
This is one interpretation, and a very useful one.
But it is only one of many interpretations, fastening, as it does, on one or two aspects of the story and leaving un-mined, as it is bound to, many other riches embedded in it.
The riches to be found in stories like the story of the garden are inexhaustible, with more and more of those riches coming to light each time we read them.
A student of the Bible need only cast an eye on the many volumes of commentary available on the Book of Genesis alone to realize that for a story like this one there may well be as many possible interpretations as there are interpreters.
It’s would seem to be beneficial, then, to take another look at this story, especially since, in this instance, we are being asked to relate it to the encounter in the wilderness between Jesus and the devil, as described in today’s Gospel lesson from Matthew.
I will likely end up running with one or two aspects of the story to the exclusion of some others that are at least equally important, but there is just no alternative.
What intrigues me most about the story, as we consider its possible meanings, is—what shall we call it?—the conversation between the woman and the serpent and what the outcome of that conversation may have to say about God’s love for us.
“Crafty” is the word used to describe the serpent, and “crafty” is indeed a good description of the side-winding approach that the serpent takes with the woman, as it asks: “Did God say, ‘You shall not eat from any tree in the garden’?”
The woman answers that on the contrary God has said that they may eat the fruit of the trees in the garden, but that if they eat of the tree in the middle of the garden they shall die.
“You will not die,” the serpent retorts, “for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.
Then, of course, the woman goes ahead and eats of the forbidden tree, and so does the man, and it’s the end of their child-like innocence: They become painfully aware that they are naked, so they make loincloths for themselves out of fig leaves, God surprises them in the cool of the evening, and the rest, as they say, is history.
But let’s look just a little closer at what happens next and why.
To do that we have to read a little further on in the story, to the point toward the end where God falls to ruminating aloud about what the man and the woman have done: “Then the LORD God said, ‘See, the man [and woman have] become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, [they] might reach out [their] hand and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever’…”
There was a time when I tended to think that the decision to drive the man and the woman out of the garden simply came at the end of a long list of vindictive punishments meted out by an angry God: greatly increasing the woman’s pain in childbearing, condemning the man to arduous toil in the fields with little hope of an adequate return for his labor, decreeing that having been taken from the dust it is to dust they shall return (“After all I’ve done for them! I’ll fix those ungrateful so-and-so’s!”)—but now I am not quite so sure.
God’s ruminations reveal that what the serpent told the woman was at least partially true: By eating of the tree they would indeed become like God, knowing good and evil, and, in fact, they would not die immediately from eating of it (though they would, of course, die eventually).
Is it a list of punishments that God rattles off or is it a vivid description of what knowing good and evil in the world involves—namely, coming face to face with the reality of suffering?
Could what at first sounds like divine vindictiveness be in fact one more proof of God’s self-sacrificing love?
And is it possible that by driving the man and woman out of the garden before they eat of the tree of life God saves them from being forced to share the entire burden of being like God: endlessly, eternally having to reckon with the reality of suffering in the world with no hope of relief?
The story of the man and the woman in the garden is only a story, of course, from which many meanings can be drawn, but the possibility that this story depicts a God who will go to any lengths to save us from our worst selves points in turn to a loving God whose nature it is to share our suffering and then some.
What astounds us is that the God who expels the man and the woman from the garden for their own safety will meet them outside in the wilderness again and again because it is truly there in the wilderness that God is pleased to dwell.
It is the same wilderness of questioning, uncertainty, and self-doubt—in short, a wilderness well acquainted with suffering—in which Jesus, the Christ of God, takes his stand against the devil and refuses to settle for anything less than what God has called him to be, refusing to imagine even for a moment that the carefree pleasures of the garden are not forever closed to the human spirit, refusing to imagine even for a moment that the wilderness could be other than the spirit’s proper abode.
Everything had come together at his baptism, when the Spirit had descended upon him like a dove and the voice from heaven had proclaimed him to be the Son of God; everything had held together during those forty days in the wilderness, when he had primed himself with prayer and fasting for the perilous journey that lay ahead; now all of a sudden everything that had held together was threatening to unravel, to fly apart, causing him to question his own identity: “So, if I really am the Son of God, I ought to be able to turn these stones into bread, I ought to be able to leap off the roof of some high building and not get hurt, and I ought not to have to wait any longer to claim my rightful inheritance!”
It’s at times like these that a good knowledge of scripture can really come in handy!
Thanks be to God, Jesus was able to stave off the doubts and uncertainties about where he had been and where he was headed, as well as the temptation to settle for less or even to attempt to be more than what God had called him to be.
For Jesus, the Christ of God, to have given in to the blandishments of the devil would have been to betray the trust of all who would come to believe in him, love him, and follow him.
For Jesus, the Christ of God, to have given in to the blandishments of the devil would have been to deny the very nature of God, whose all-suffering love still hastens to enfold us and keep us safe, especially in the trying wildernesses that each of us is likely to encounter more often than we’d like.
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