03/13/11
Genesis 3:1-24
Hudson UMC
The third chapter of the book of Genesis is well known as the story of the Fall of humanity. In some ways it is among the most fascinating chapters in the entire Bible. Some have used it to defend particular doctrines, some have used it to uphold their sexism, and some have used it for many other purposes. Just in case not everyone is aware of it, I want to run quickly through the standard interpretation of this chapter.
God created the heavens and the earth, along with everything in them. At every stage of the creation, God declared that it was good. When God finally created human beings, both male and female, he declared the whole creation to be very good. Because of that, we cannot imagine that God created evil. The question that we must ask, since the fact that evil exists is far too obvious to ignore, is “how did evil come to be?” The story of Genesis three is then put forward to explain that evil entered the world through sin, when human beings decided that God’s rules weren’t good enough anymore and that they wanted to be like God and call their own shots. This fundamental sin, this unbridled desire to be in charge, is seen as being the root of all others and the reason why our world is marked by evil and death.
Of course, this doesn’t wrap everything up nicely. After all, where does this evil idea come from? How could a human who was created totally good come up with such an evil idea? We read that the serpent put the idea into their heads, and did so in a way that made it not seem quite so evil to Adam and Eve. This preserves the initial goodness of humanity, but where did the serpent, who was part of the good creation, get such an evil idea? The text simply doesn’t tell us, and no amount of careful interpretation will take care of all the loose ends. However, even though some questions remain unanswered, the major thrust of the text is clear. Human beings are sinful, not because of any fault in God, but because of our own desire for power.
The text can be read almost as a transcript of a group therapy session for a dysfunctional family. Adam says, “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me the fruit from the tree, and I ate.” It isn’t my fault, God. Eve then says, “The serpent tricked me, and I ate.” It isn’t my fault, either. What is amazing is that God doesn’t, strictly speaking, take sides. The serpent tricked the humans, so he needs to be punished, so he loses the legs that he presumably had before all this, and becomes a slithery reptile that many people have hated over the years.
However, Adam and Eve are not simply let off the hook as if they had done nothing wrong. Though they were not the masterminds behind this sin, the fact remains that they did indeed eat the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Even if it wasn’t their idea, the deed was done and, because that deed had such profound implications, God couldn’t simply pretend like it hadn’t happened. The only other option I can even think of is that God would somehow remove the knowledge that humanity had gained, which doesn’t seem to me to be any better of a choice.
So, because God loved Adam and Eve, he allowed the consequences of their sin to come upon them rather than turning back time and preventing it from happening. God chose to deal with his people as adults, as people who answer for their actions and don’t rely on other people to make good choices for them. The brokenness that entered the world at that point is profound. We suffer from it to this day. Each of us has, to a greater or lesser degree, endured the difficult, sometimes arbitrary effects of the evil that still permeates our world. And if that were the end of the story, there wouldn’t be a whole lot of hope. Though we did not have an Ash Wednesday service here this week, the key words from such a service are in this chapter. “You are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
But that is not where the story ends. We have, even in this very passage, words that the church has, since the very beginning, taken as a prophecy for the coming of Christ. God spoke to the serpent, saying, “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will strike your head, and you will strike his heel,” words that have classically been interpreted as a foreshadowing the cross, where Jesus was crushed, but who, even in that very act of defeat, defeated Satan and paid for the redemption of the world with the very blood of God.
During this Lenten season, I want to spend some time thinking about the atonement that God has worked out for us, because it is something that we don’t often want to think about. Atonement literally means at-one-ment, where we human beings, who are in a state of separation from God, are reconciled to him and at-one-ment is attained. The problem is that atonement implies that, without it, we really are alienated from God, that we are not as we should be, that we need help because our difficulties are far greater than we can free ourselves from, and that can be a scary thought. We also don’t always like to think of atonement because, according to the Bible, atonement always involves blood. When someone sins, something has to die. We don’t often have that in the front of our minds because we don’t sacrifice animals in the church, we don’t connect our sin to the shedding of blood and we, in our enlightened and modern age, often think of sacrifice as barbaric, if not pagan.
And yet, when we look at the whole Bible, we find that this idea that human beings are not what they ought to be and that atonement must be made through the shedding of blood is everywhere. What might be surprising, though, is who takes the initiative to reconcile humanity to God. It isn’t humanity. What do we see here in our passage for today? When Adam and Eve ate the fruit, what do we read? “Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves. They heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden.” The first thing that humanity did when they realized they had done wrong was run and hide.
“But the Lord God called to man,” even though Adam and Eve have sinned, even though they have hidden themselves, God calls out to them, reaches out to them, “and said to him, ‘Where are you?’ He said, ‘I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.’” I wonder if the nakedness of humanity might mean something more than just that they were physically naked. Perhaps it means they had nothing to offer to God. It had always been the case, only now they realized it. Regardless of what it might mean, the man and woman whom God had loved when they were naked before, were terrified that he might not love them now, so they cover themselves with fig leaves, another way of hiding from God.
We are all aware of the fig leaves. When we imagine Adam and Eve, we often picture people who are wearing nothing but leaves, but why is that? According to our passage, they only wore fig leaves for a relatively short period of time. Way towards the end of the chapter, we read “And the Lord God made garments of skins for the man and for his wife, and clothed them.” This is absolutely fascinating. This sets up the pattern for what we see happening over and over again. God made human beings good, human beings sin against God, often quite seriously, human beings invent some way of hiding from God, God provides an actual means of reconciliation.
There is a certain foolishness to thinking that we human beings could think up a good way of being reconciled to God. After all, we are the source of the problem. That would be like someone who cheated at a game saying, “I know that I was the one who broke the rules, but I am going to call the shots and decide on the terms by which we can continue playing.” If we are the sinners, who, even when we are at our best fail to live up to the standards that God has given us, what makes us think that we can somehow figure out, by our own act of genius, how we can get back on God’s good side? The thing that we need to remember is that we do not have any examples in the Bible of human beings messing up and then doing something that they thought up to make God happy. We always see God taking the initiative, we always see God saying, “Though you have sinned, though you have wronged me, I will seek reconciliation with you and I will tell you what you can do so we can have fellowship again. It isn’t something that you think up, but what I tell you to do.”
Even when we think about this as God’s mighty grace taking the initiative and paving the way for atonement, it is still easy to hear it as harsh and authoritarian. If we choose to, we can hear God’s offer of mercy and compassion as if he were the insecure kid who says, “If we don’t play by my rules, I’m taking my ball and going home.” Yes, it is indeed true that God insists that we give up doing things our own way so we can do them his way, but why does he do that? For one thing, if it was doing things our own way and not his way that got us into trouble in the first place, it sure isn’t going to make things better after the fact. But there is something more important than that to consider.
When human beings tried to think up a way to make God happy, they covered themselves in fig leaves and, because they weren’t entirely sure that it would work, they hid from God. What does God do? He says that their fig leaves are no good. They do not help the situation. But God doesn’t leave them naked, does he? No, he clothes them in skins. He gives them clothing that is far better than the best they could come up with. He provides in ways that are far more extravagant than they would have dared to do. After all, they were sinners, what business did they have wearing fur? And yet, when God insists on his way, it is not because he wants to be on a power trip, but because his way is better for us to start with.
However, we cannot ignore the fact that skins don’t just come out of nowhere. Skins come from animals, which means that, in order for God to clothe the people who had sinned against him, animals needed to die. Sin is serious business, so serious that it never gets dealt with without the shedding of blood. This is a theme that we will explore throughout the season of Lent. Adam and Eve’s sin did not just make their lives harder, it meant that life had to be ended. Every time they thought about their clothing, they had to remember that they were not killed for their sin, for their spitting in the face of God. They were allowed to live, but something died, something had its blood shed and it was shed for them, on their behalf and in their place. When God forgives, it is never a pretending that sin never happened, but an acknowledging it in all its seriousness, even a seriousness that we would rather it didn’t have, and dealing with it in a way that has real consequences, consequences that are so severe that the sin of humanity resulted, not merely in the death of animals, but in the death of Christ himself, God with us.
There is one more aspect of this story that I think needs to be mentioned, and that is the very end. After God has clothed Adam and Eve, we read, “Then the Lord God said, ‘See, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, he might reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever’ – therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken. He drove out the man; and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim, and a sword flaming and turning to guard the way to the tree of life.”
This act of God has often been seen first and foremost as a continuation of the punishment. We want to cry out, “Adam and Eve have already been punished for their sin, do they need to suffer death, too? Why can’t they have the tree of life?” We only ever hear of the tree of life one other time, and that is in the book of Revelation, the last book of the Bible. When we see it there, it is basically the same as we see it in Genesis, it is in the very presence of God and it is, indeed, associated with immortality. The question we have to entertain is, “What if being in the unmediated presence of God while broken by sin isn’t a good thing? What if God sending Adam and Eve away was the most merciful thing he could do for them?” After all, if they don’t live forever, it means that their brokenness will not last forever, they will one day be free of it. I am certain that most people have known someone whose body was so broken with age and disease that they welcomed death. Though death is consistently portrayed in the Bible as the enemy of humanity, there are times when death seems a less harsh enemy, even if it seems more final.
We also get the impression that to really be in the presence of God while we are still broken by sin is not good at all. After all, what does God do? After humanity fell, God casts them out of the garden, but we see that he never gives up on them. He takes a particular man and his family and begins to reshape the way they live and think so they can understand him, so he can re-forge, as it were, the connection between him and us. Finally, it seems that the only way that God could really deal with the issue of sin is for God to actually become a human being, to take the brokenness of our world onto his shoulders, and to suffer unto death alongside of us. Only after God has radically shaped culture and life so that we can receive him, only after God has done the impossible and become a human being, only after God has done what is more impossible still and died for us, on our behalf and in our place, does he invite us in a deep and personal way to be in the unmediated presence of God. If that is so, as I believe it is, we are not dealing with a God who wants to keep us away, but with a God who loves us so much and wants us to be with him so much that he is willing to quite literally do anything for us. That is what we should always remember when we come face to face with the incredible cost of redemption and reconciliation, that God loves us so much that he is actually willing to do it. And if our God loves us that much, he is worth entrusting our lives to and living every day for. Let us pray.
AMEN
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