As we have noted, today is the first Sunday in Lent, our annual 40-day season of preparation for Easter, which, in its earliest form, took inspiration from Jesus’ 40 days in the wilderness at the start of his ministry, which we heard read earlier. The main conflict in that story is, of course, the appearance of the Tempter, the Devil, that ancient biblical menace who the New Testament writers present as Jesus’s primary foil.
But that wilderness trial has echoes of previous encounters in scripture, beginning all the way back “in the beginning,” with the creation stories of Genesis—verses from which we heard earlier, of Adam and Eve there in the garden of delight when they are visited by the cunning serpent in a story Christians have come to know as “The Fall.” So the telling goes, this is the origin story of sin in the world: humanity was in paradise there in the garden until the serpent came and mucked it all up.
But the Bible, it’s worth pointing out, never calls this story “the Fall.” That develops much later, and mostly in Christian theology; our Jewish friends tend not to speak of this story in those terms. And there are many dangers in calling this story “the Fall,” most of which have to do with how doing so keeps it in the past.
I.
Now, that may sound strange to say about stories of creation, because of course these stories are set in the past—the very distant past, even. But this is not simply a story describing our beginnings; it’s a story meant to describe who we are right now, in the present, and who we have been all along.
And when we realize that this story is about the present, not the past, it frees us from all the mental gymnastics involved in trying to square it with what we know about natural history, and even before that, the plain old “birds and bees.” We don’t have to stumble over questions like who Cain married if he was one of three people on earth, and the other two were his parents? This alone should clue us in that this story isn’t meant to be read as history—at least not in the way we understand it. Ancient people knew this, probably better than we do. And the
more we can place it in the present, the more it has to say to us.
Simply put, this isn’t a story about the first humans as much as it’s a story about what it means to be human. And we pick the story up in the second chapter of Genesis, when the Lord God takes this new work of his hands, this adam, formed from the adamah, the Hebrew word for soil or dirt—a link preserved in English: we are humans formed from the humus. God places this new adam in the Garden of Eden to “till and to keep it.” And the Lord God commanded the adam, “You may eat freely of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for the day that you eat of it you shall die.”
II.
Walter Brueggemann points out that in these verses, the man—and the woman, who is created shortly after—are given three things that define their place in this new creation:
- First, they’re given a vocation: to till and to keep the garden—to take care of the earth. Not only are we a part of creation, made from the same stuff as creation, but we’re also told that God created us to cultivate creation, to work on it, to see that it’s able to reach its potential. We tend to act as if the reverse were true, that the world was created to serve us, so that we could reach our full potential, that we are meant to take or extract whatever we need or want from it at whatever cost. But this story describes a much different relationship. It’s a relationship where we’re meant to serve the world around us, not for it to serve us.
And more than simply serve it, we’re also meant to preserve it. To “keep,” something we’re told God does for us: “The Lord is your keeper,” the psalmist writes. Your protector, watching over you, committed to your care. This is who we are to be for the earth: its keeper. This is our vocation.
- With this vocation, they’re also given permission: almost unimaginable freedom to make what they will of the garden. Anything in this garden is open to them, all the possibilities they can imagine, except for one thing.
- Of course, they’re also given a prohibition. They cannot eat from this one tree.
Vocation, permission, and prohibition—these three are given. Brueggemann says our primary task as humans is to find a way to hold these three “facets of divine purpose together.” To have any two of them without the other is to have a diminished life.1 To have a vocation and a sense of freedom to enjoy the many gifts of God, but without a sense of right and wrong, is reckless. To have a sense of freedom to enjoy life and a sense of boundaries, but with no sense of purpose in life, is unfulfilling. And to have a sense of purpose and healthy boundaries of right and wrong, but not to enjoy the many blessings of life, is a waste.
And it’s as telling as it is true that in popular understandings of this story, our focus is always placed on the prohibition, what we cannot or should not do, with almost zero attention given to the other two. I remember reading this passage in a Bible study some time ago, and opening up the discussion, asking the crowd gathered what jumped out at them, and the first hand shot up—What about the tree at the center of the garden? Let’s hear more about that?
We’re drawn to it! “The beginning of desire,” the poet Wallace Stevens says, is “not to have.”2 This is something we all know and can see from an early age. The favorite toy of most any child is whichever toy his friend is playing with. And you and I are no different. The toys just get bigger and more expensive, maybe more abstract and harder to know if you have them: status, access, power. Unfortunately, this is part of what it means to be human; we have an insatiable desire for what we do not have.
III.
When the curtain drops at the end of chapter 2, the man and the woman are together in paradise, all the possibilities of heaven and of earth before them. But when the curtain is raised on chapter 3, we find a new character on the scene: the serpent.
He begins to speak, and not just speak, he begins to preach. He says to the woman, Did God say, ‘You shall not eat from any tree in the garden?’ Ladies and gentlemen, here we have the Bible’s first sermon: the first time in scripture that the words of God are interpreted and applied.3 The serpent is preaching here—just like, we should say, the devil does in Matthew: interpreting, or really, misinterpreting, scripture for Jesus in his time of trial.
Fortunately, the woman, like Jesus, knows her scripture and can correct him. She says, No, no, not every tree.
We may eat of any tree except the one in the middle of the garden, for if we do, we will die.
You won’t die, the serpent says. God knows that when you eat it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like him.
Suddenly, the approach has shifted. As Brueggemann puts it, “the prohibition that was a given is now scrutinized as if it were an option…The goal is not to serve or obey, but to avoid.”4
And we know what this looks like! Or what it sounds like. It’s the parsing of words to try and have them mean what you want them to say—or at least to find just enough wiggle-room to not be held accountable for what you plan to do, or more likely, what you’ve already done! This is a skill that most of us must learn as children and teenagers—it’s essential to pushing boundaries.
Now, when you said not to hit my brother, does that mean I can slap him?
What do you mean I wasn’t home by 11? We’ve been in his car in the driveway for the past hour!
And of course, the voice of the serpent isn’t something we ever grow out of, completely. It just gets more sophisticated. Children have child problems, and hear child serpents. Adults have adult problems, with full-grown serpents.
You won’t die, the serpent says. You’re in control. And then it all happens quickly: the woman sees that the tree is good for food, that it’s a delight to the eyes, that it’s desired, and so she takes its fruit, and eats it, and then she gives some to her husband—who was right there with her! He was standing there with her the whole time! Not speaking, just lurking in silence. And there’s no persuading that happens here—any notions of that come from somewhere outside the text we have in front of us. We’re simply told that she ate and then gave it to him, and he ate, and their eyes are then opened—just as the serpent said they would be—only when they do, what they see surprises them. They see themselves not as God’s equals, as they had hoped, but as that they are naked. We might say they no longer see themselves as God sees them, made with beauty and purpose; they now see themselves only for what they’ve done, which is never how God sees us. They’re exposed and ashamed.
As Brueggemann puts it: the prohibition has been violated, the permission has been perverted and the vocation has been neglected…”They had wanted knowledge rather than trust. And now they have it. They know more than they could have wanted to know. And there’s no place to run.”5
And we know how this feels, right here in our stomach. This isn’t a story about a distant past. It is a story that has been repeated, time and time again, surely in every human life. It is a part of our story: that we want what we cannot have, that we reach for control when we are given trust. Or as the Apostle Paul would put it generations later, I don’t understand my own actions, why I don’t do the thing I want to do, but do the very thing I hate.
This is a part of our story. But it is not the only part, and it is far from the end of the story. The serpent disappears, as serpents do. God finds them hiding and asks them what they’ve done. They each pass it off to the next, but of course God sees through it, and now the only question left is how God will respond. And given what we’ve already been told, this shouldn’t be much of a question—God has already made it clear that the consequence will be death. Surely here at the beginning, God will make an example. Surely God will stand by God’s word, only a few verses old!
But that’s not what happens. Just three chapters into this story, we learn something important about God. We learn that the only thing stronger than God’s word is God’s love. As Brueggemann puts it, “When the facts warrant death, God insists on life for his creatures.”6 God insists on life for the work of his hands.
And it may be that for all our talk about this story telling us something about what it means to be human, who we are, the even deeper point of it is to tell us something about who God is—something that will be expanded upon throughout the rest of the Bible. We learn that God’s mercy outlasts God’s judgment. That God’s grace extends past anything we could do to test it. We learn, as Paul would later put it, that nothing “in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God.” We learn that God loves us too much to let us go.
IV.
Depending on how you choose to read it, the Bible could appear to be one long retelling of all the ways we messed things up, how we’re still messing it up—and that’s certainly a part of it. But a better reading, one that’s more in line with where it all begins, reveals that the Bible is really one long retelling of how God keeps loving us anyway, generation after generation. In spite of all that comes with it, God keeps creating for us, with us, and through us. God keeps refusing to do it without us. God keeps loving us anyway. And that, more than anything else, is what it means to be human.
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1 Walter Brueggemann, Genesis, Interpretation Series, p. 46
2 Avivah Gottlieb Zoenberg’s wonderful commentary, The Beginning of Desire: Reflections on Genesis, takes this as its inspiration.
3 My friend and mentor, Matthew Myer Boulton, expands on this in his wonderful book, God Against Religion: Rethinking Christian Theology Through Worship.
4 Brueggemann, 47-48
5 Ibid., 48
6 Ibid., 50