Advent is a time of anticipation, in which we allow the Old Testament to point us to the coming of the Messiah. We allow the Prophets to orient us to holy waiting; yet where Israel could only guess how God was going to rescue the world from sin and death, as Christians we know what Emmanuel (“God With Us”) looks like, sounds like.
In this series of posts we will sit with some of the archetypes of the Old Testament in order to reveal what the arrival of King Jesus meant then, and what it means today. Our first meditation will be on the First Story, Adam and Eve.
You can listen to the sermon podcast by clicking here.
Through the Old Adam we fell subject to sin and death because we try to make ourselves into gods. We await the coming of the New Adam who brings new life. Whether the early stories in Genesis actually happened or not is an interesting conversation, but so often the question “did this really happen?” distracts us from the deeper meaning behind the stories. We have to read it as a theodrama - the story of Adam & Eve is the story of all of us today. The patterns laid out in this intricate passage contain profound understanding of humanity and our relationship to God as our Source.
Read Genesis 2:8-9, 15-17, 25
We have a choice to find life in intimacy with God, or to decide for ourselves what we think is good and evil. The creation narrative tells us that humanity is made of Spirit and Matter - Elohim gathers up the dust of the earth and breathes into it. We are the bridge between the spiritual and material worlds, the ambassadors from Creator to Creation and back again. Adam has unfettered access to God in Eden, but a living relationship must be cultivated just like the garden itself. Our faith is less a shelf upon which we arrange our doctrinal statements and appropriate practices like decorative kitsch, and more a garden that requires constant tending and sensitivity to the seaosns. This is the good work we were created for.
The two trees are a profound mystery that find their meaning when we realize that in order to love God we must be presented with a choice to not love, or else we are merely automatons without free will. The Tree of Life represents our central commitment to trusting God as the source of all life, in a way that good and evil, right and wrong, become byproducts of intimacy and accepting our created intentions as image-bearers. The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil represents our temptation to choose to look inward to our own desires as a way of creating meaning. We are tempted with self-reliance, taking upon ourselves the insurmountable burden of discerning right and wrong based on our limited understanding of the good life.
A still deeper ponderance - why fruit? The modern shelf-like orientation to our faith might suppose God would present the first humans with a contract to sign that merely states the transactional expectations of the relationship, much like a landlord and a renter or employer and employee. Yet the story does not contain cold legal imagery, it uses natural language. Fruit reminds us that we are created in such a way as we must take sustenance into ourselves and are thus transformed - we quite literally become what we eat. So to “choose fruit” is all about worship, trusting the source or highest ideal of the fruit as truly good so that we might grow. We see this encapsulated in the final line in the passage - because God was their source of Life, and they ate of the good fruit, Adam and Eve were un-self-conscious before God and one another. They were whole, complete, without shame or guilt. Tehy existed as their true selves.
Read Gen. 3:1-7
The Serpent’s lies tempt us to believe God is not for us, so we should take matters into our own hands. The lie that leads to the downfall of the human family is truly a deceptive one. On close reading we realize the serpent’s question to Eve begins with confusion - the premise has never been part of the agreement between God and the first people. The were not prohibited from eating any fruit, only the fruit that blessed their free-will choice to love. The confusion and deception implies an even deeper challenge to Eve’s heart that invites suspicion - “is God REALLY good? Just? Kind? Does this seem fair to you, knowing what you are created for? Maybe you’re better off without God…”
The lie also takes advantage of a truth about God’s relation to humanity. We are meant to “be like God”, for we are made in God’s image. It is not a temptation to godlikeness itself, but an invitation to reap the rewards of our destiny without the intimacy. Here we discover the provocation to make ourselves gods by our own means. We become the arbiters of good and evil based on our ego fixations, not on what the source of Life determines is best for us. This fruit is “pleasing to the eye” because we fall prey to the belief that we can take the self-definition of life into our own hands. Nietzsche called it “the will to power” while Freud name it “the pleasure principle”; regardless what our primary motivation in life is, we collapse under the weight of determining for ourselves what is good and what is evil. Because we were never meant to carry such a burden, our limited capacity to envision meaning for life leads us to wound ourselves and other people.
The consequence of choosing our own way of becoming godlike means we are robbed of our innocence. “Their eyes were opened” - their fleshly eyes - and they become self-conscious, feeling exposed and summarily inadequate as they are. If there is such a thing as Original Sin, it is our refusal to be content with our Original Goodness that is sustained only through intimate relationship with a Good God.
Read Gen. 3:8-13
It is easy to read this next passage and miss the emotional context of God’s line of questioning because we are so conditioned to see God through the lens of the Greek omnis (all-knowing, all-powerful, all-present) rather than a God of love who moves towards us in a bid for relationship. A God Who can and does experience profound heartbreak.
“Where are you?” The first question is one of relationship. Intimacy is about proximity to the Source of all Life. When we feel shame, which is to say we feel like we are not enough as we are, we hide from God and cover over what is precious to God. We hide from one another. We become so self-conscious we cannot see past our own shame and guilt to recognize we have pulled away from Goodness incarnate.
“Who told you that you were naked?” Here we can perceive the heartbreak of God Who delights in what God has created. At the beginning it was spoken over us that we are “very good”, yet the confusion and lies of the Serpent make us believe we are exposed and lacking, that we must cover over our nakedness with false selves to compensate. We hear in Adam’s reply the fear and finger-pointing that is a deflection from accepting his sin; not only does he blame the women, but also implies that it is God’s fault for giving him this gift of relationship. When we do not trust God is good, we look to escape our shame by any means possible.
“What is this you have done?” Eve’s actions result from the confusion and deception that made her second guess God’s order and intentions for God’s children. We often try to address the behaviors that result from our misaligned vision, rather than the root cause of our behaviors. Eating the fruit of either tree will bear out in how we act, how we treat ourselves and others. To choose our own determination of good and evil destroys our relationships to the world around us.
Read Genesis 3:14-19
The curses pronounced over humanity are a lament and not a gleeful punishment. John tells us in his Gospel that “God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God” (John 3:17,18). When we choose out of intimacy with God as our Source, we send ourselves into a spiral of sin and death; God enters into the spiral to bring us back to life in God.
To the Serpent, God prophecies the coming of the Messiah to undo the deception that leads to sin and death. “He will crush your head, and you will strike his heal” is a wonderful anticipation of the cross of Christ, that through suffering the Son of Man would overcome the Father of Lies and bring resurrection for all creation.
Eve’s curse is one that has been abused in many rooms in the Christian household. The misogynistic reading of this passage a) blames a woman’s cycle and childbearing on the first woman in a rather dismissive way, and b) reinforces woman’s unhealthy submission to her husband as the proper order of things and not the result of the curse. A deeper reading of this curse as the lamentation of a sad reality resulting from sin could instead name the pain of childbirth as the anxiety of bringing precious children into a violent world. Is this not what we see in the first generation born a chapter later? Cain is jealous of his brother Abel and murders him for it. The second portion of the curse predicts a tragic imbalance in marriage that runs contrary to the peaceable partnership of Genesis 2; scholars translate this line as either a desire or lust for her husband for something she can only receive from God, or a desire to control her husband even as he will control her. Either reading still suggests there is now enmity, suspicion, and a power struggle in what was a perfect intimate relationship.
Through Adam the ground itself is cursed. If one is to know whether or not we have deviated from God’s divine vocation, one need only to read a natural world in crisis as a result of our unwillingness to care for it and ensure its flourishing. In this tragic world, the good work in the garden now becomes toil in the world; Adam’s descendants will become bogged down in meaningless struggle that produces little fruit. Consider how often we put our hands to things that do not matter; or worse yet, we contribute to the decay of creation, eventually leading to death.
From this moment, everything spirals out of control. In another brilliant symbolic motif, each generation moves East until we find ourselves in Babel, which is Babylon. The place where one cannot wander any farther from the grace of God.
Like the ancient people first encountering these stories, we start to wonder, “what is God going to do to stop the spiral?”
Read 1 Corinthians 15:20-28
In the advent of the Messiah, the serpent’s head is crushed, sin and death are destroyed, and the children of Adam are gifted new life. God did not simply want to remake humanity in the image of Adam, but to create an even better humanity in Jesus. Death and life are not equal and opposite realities we keep in balance; rather, we yearn for the life we know we were created for. Christ answers the questions of God on our behalf, and through his sacrificial life we are welcomed back into the New Eden.
“Where are you?” the invitation to intimacy. Jesus says ““I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you had known me, you would have known my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him.”
“Who told me you were naked?” the question of identity. Jesus prays, “I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me.”
“What is this you have done?” the question of purpose. Jesus says, “Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will he do, because I am going to the Father.”
Grace Remington, of the Cistercian Sisters of the Mississippi Abbey in Iowa, painted this lovely representation of Mary consoling Eve, two mothers meeting at the central point of history. In it, we capture a glimpse at the shame Eve holds for her transgressions, and the invitation of Mary to receive the gift of her own child who will undo the curses of Eden and bring new life for all of us. This is what the Advent season is all about.