Genesis
3:8-15
Everything was perfect.
Everything was in its place. Everything was ready to go. So, how did it all
come crashing down? The stories of creation in the first two chapters of
Genesis are well known to most readers of the Bible. Whether you’re of the ilk
that reads these stories literally, meshing them together to suggest that God
created the entirety of the universe in six, literal, twenty-four-hour days, or
whether you read them as an Ancient Near Eastern attempt to make sense of the
world and its origins, these stories set the tone for what unfolds in the
biblical narrative. These stories tell of a God who creates an ideal
world—land, seas, sky, a garden, creatures that exist in harmony, a man and
woman who are stewards of it all. If there is one blemish on the whole thing
it’s that tree stuck in the middle of it all, a tree from which the man and
woman are forbidden to eat, a tree whose mere existence is puzzling and creates
within us all sorts of questions about God and why God would create such a
prohibition in the primordial paradise of Eden. While we could spend quite some
time pondering the nature of this tree’s existence, it is enough to know it’s
there and God has forbidden the man and the woman from eating its fruit.
What’s perhaps more
important is that this is the only prohibition
given to this couple by God; there aren’t ten commandments, no library whose
shelves are filled with leather-bound volumes of laws, restrictions, sanctions,
and proscriptions, just this one, tiny thing in chapter two, verses sixteen and seventeen: “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 in the day that you eat of it
you shall die.” That’s all; “don’t eat the fruit from that one tree.”
Now, we can tell this sinks in a bit farther in Eve’s conversation with this
snake in chapter three, verses two and
three, because she takes the prohibition a step farther, when she tells the
snake, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden; but God said, ‘You
shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor
shall you touch it, or you shall die.’” God said, “don’t eat it;”
God did not say, “don’t touch it.” Still, it’s just one rule, one restriction;
everything else is fair game. The woman (along with her husband “who
was with her”), however, breaks this single command when she takes the
fruit from the tree, and she and her husband eat.
Now, if I were to sit as
judge over all humankind, if I were the one who had to review all the great
atrocities of human history and hand down the sentence after each guilty
verdict, you know I just might let these two off the hook. After all, it’s not
like they committed murder; all they did was eat forbidden fruit. On the
surface, it’s no different than those times growing up when my grandma would
pull off the side of the road next to a peanut field and have us boys run out
and grab a few bushes to take home to boil (they weren’t going to miss them,
and no one got hurt). I mean, there are
far worse things to do than eat some prohibited produce, right? But you know,
if I really think about it—if I really think about their situation and their
infraction upon this solitary rule, I might not let them off so easily. In
fact, I might just want to throw the book at them! I mean, it was just one
rule—the only rule they had to
follow. How in the world could they break the one rule, the one law—how is it
possible that they would transgress the single prohibition given to them by God
when they were surrounded by paradise?! They’re the very first ones, after all;
the first ones off the assembly line, untainted by all those things that
pollute our own cultural surroundings and leach their way into our brains,
influencing our decisions. They have nothing, no one to blame for their
actions, no just cause that a skilled defense attorney could use to prove just
cause or reasonable doubt. They simply, blatantly did the wrong thing—and they
know it!
If they had had some
reason, some justification for their rule breaking, they wouldn’t have
high-tailed it out of sight at the sound of the leaves rustling in the evening
breeze, scared that every noise was God approaching. Of course, when God does
calls out looking for the man, the man answers God. God asks why the man is
hiding, “because I was naked,” he says. He was naked, and upon eating
the fruit he became aware of his nakedness. I suppose there may be something
there about being ashamed of our bodies, something about the ways we objectify
naked bodies, thus making them somehow shameful (of course, I’ve been sitting
on the couch when my three-year-old comes streaking through the house as happy
and unashamed as anything), but the reality is that the man’s nakedness is a
sign of his vulnerability, no longer able to hide from God what he’s done. He’s
exposed, and God sees him and knows exactly what he’s done: "Who
told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded
you not to eat?" The jig is up! God knows what has happened, so
the only thing left to do now is come clean, right?
Have you ever noticed
just what happens, though, when God confronts the man? God says, "Who
told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded
you not to eat?" and how does the man answer? “The woman whom you gave to be
with me…” At first, it’s sort of funny: Adam is questioned by God, so
he blames “the woman,” but then I think about all of those women and girls
who’ve been assaulted and how so many callous, ignorant people (mostly men)
respond by saying something like, “Well, if she hadn’t been wearing those
clothes…she was probably asking for it the way she was acting…” Even now, in
the wake of revelations about Paige Patterson (former president of Southwestern
Baptist Theological Seminary in Ft. Worth) and the way he ignored reports of
rape and his misogynistic beliefs and attitudes, there are some who are rushing
to his defense, pointing fingers at the women who are raising these
allegations. It seems as if it’s been in place since the beginning of time:
when a man fails, blame a woman. That’s how Adam responds: “The woman…it was
her fault, she gave me fruit from the tree, and I ate.”
He passes the buck—the
easy buck—to the woman, his wife. He
puts the blame on her, because he thinks it’s easier to shift blame than admit
fault, to push the accusation on down the line, because that’s what we do,
isn’t it? Whenever we’re caught, whenever the whole thing starts to come
unglued, we look for someone—anyone else—to pin it on. We’re like two kids
playing in the living room when the lamp from the end table crashes to the
floor; it’s anybody’s fault but ours! I suppose we pass the blame hoping we’ll
pass the punishment on with it. Maybe that’s what Adam thought, but did you
notice what else he says? “The woman whom you gave to be with me…”
Maybe it’s not the woman’s fault after all. Maybe it’s God’s fault! Yeah! It’s God’s fault! After all, if God hadn’t given
the man the woman in the first place, she would have never been tempted to take
the fruit and he would have never been an accomplice in her iniquity. Yeah,
it’s God’s fault. It’s God’s fault for putting the fruit there in the first
place. It’s God’s fault for giving us the freedom of will to choose. It’s God’s
fault for sticking us with inadequate help, for giving us a desire to please
people, for creating a nearly perfect world and lacing it with just a touch of
chaos. It’s God’s fault!
Of course, we don’t blame
God when things go wrong, do we? When we don’t get the job—again, when the
stove quits right after the car blows a head gasket, when the principal calls
(again) after our son has been in another fight, when we fall off the wagon and
find ourselves waiting outside the package store before the manager opens the
door…it’s not our fault. It’s got nothing to do with me. If God would stop
picking on me, if God would just help me, if God would just send someone to
give me a hand up…It’s not my fault. I mean, really, it’s sort of on God,
right?
“The woman whom you
gave to be with me,” that’s what the man says when God confronts him. I suppose God could
have just called the man out on the carpet, revealed to him that God knows
what’s really going on, but as the story goes, “Then the Lord God said to the
woman, ‘What is this that you have done?’" I’ve got to be honest
with you: I’m not wild about God’s tone to the woman—at least not how I read it
at first. "What is this that you have done?" almost sounds like
God is taking the man’s side (and maybe to the Ancient Near Eastern tellers of
this story, God was). I like to think, however, that God’s tone is a bit more
inquiring than accusative. "What is this that you have done?"
God asks, as if to hear her side of the story, not take the man’s blame
as gospel.
Now, here’s the woman’s
turn to come clean, to outshine the man in her honesty, to stop the flow of
finger-pointing and just lay it all out there for God (as if God doesn’t
know!). But what does the woman do? What does she say? "The serpent tricked me, and
I ate." “It was the snake’s fault! He tricked me!” She has the
opportunity to own up to her failure, but instead, she passes the buck on down
the line to the snake. Now, the ancient Hebrews had no intention of this snake
being what we know of as the devil, but it’s a commonplace phrase in our
culture, that whenever we do something we know to be wrong, whenever we give in
to temptation, whenever we cross that line, what do we say? “The devil made me
do it!” It’s not my fault; it’s this old world and all that’s wring with it.
It’s not my fault; I’ve been too deeply corrupted by advertising, video games,
violent movies, a bad childhood…it’s not my fault.
Now, don’t misunderstand
what I’m saying here: social, biological, and familial influences are most
definitely at work in and around us, and there are many times when we may too
easily dismiss their effects on the thoughts and actions of those who create
chaos in our world. But when we use such things as a crutch, when we avoid the
real cause of our hurt, our pain, our addictions, when we point fingers at our
parents or our culture, we are seeking to shift the blame away from ourselves
and onto that for which we feel no responsibility. We say to ourselves, “It’s
not my fault they don’t have anything to eat…it’s not my fault they’re sleeping
on the street…it’s not my fault that the jail’s overflowing, the school’s
crumbling, and the stores are closing. That’s got nothing to do with me.”
"The woman whom
you gave to be with me…The serpent tricked me..." “It’s not my fault,” they said when
God asked what was going on in the garden. They pass the blame all the way down
to the snake, and the snake is the first one to catch the curse from God: “Because
you have done this, cursed are you among all animals and among all wild creatures…”
Of course, the curses don’t end with the snake and our text this morning. God
goes on in verses sixteen through
nineteen: “To the woman he said, ‘I will
greatly increase your pangs in childbearing…yet your desire shall be for your
husband, and he shall rule over you.’ And to the man he said…’cursed is the
ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life…By
the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for
out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return.’"
They broke the only rule God gave them, so the punishment, the curses come
next. These first people, created directly by God, messed up. These first
people, created by God, surrounded by paradise, failed. These first people,
created by God, surrounded by paradise, free from all that pulls at us, all
that weighs us down, free from all the baggage each and every one of us lugs
around on our shoulders each and every day, there first people with only one
prohibition from God, miss the mark; they sin.
You and I, we actually
have a cause and a right to some of the excuses, the reasons at the heart of
Adam and Eve’s responses to God; we have all sorts of snakes hissing in our
ears, all sorts of confusing voices speaking into our hearts, distracting us;
you and I, we have way more than just one prohibition, one rule set before us
(even if we made such rules ourselves), but these two—these two should be the
last ones to ever be guilty, yet here we are, in Genesis, with these two, naked
and ashamed, guilty of sin. If I had been God, if it had been me finding them
cowering in the trees, trying to hide from me, that would have been the end of
it: “You had one rule! ONE! And you broke it!” I’m not sure I would have
bothered with curses; I may have just boxed the whole thing up and set it on
the curb for the trash truck to pick up…
But God doesn’t do that.
Sure, there are curses.
There are always consequences to our actions. Whether they are just, right, or
even from God, there are always actions. Sure, there are feelings of shame,
especially when it’s not the first time, especially when we have to make that
phone call, when we have to say it out loud, when we have to confess what we’ve
done, that we need help, that we’ve fractured some relationship. Sure, we’ll
not want to own up to it; we’ll look everywhere for someone else to blame, for
someone else to curse, for some set of circumstances on which to pin our
problems. But no matter what it is we’ve done, no matter if it really is the
fault of our parents, the culture, medication, or just some malicious
acquaintances, no matter how severe we find the consequences to be, God doesn’t
leave us.
I suppose that’s the hope
I find in a story that can otherwise be too easily read and dismissed as a
story about how sin entered the world. Maybe that’s fair; after all, it does
tell about the first time humankind broke God’s commandment. But maybe—just
maybe—this is a story about the first time God showed grace. After all, God
could have just ground them back into the dust from which they came and started
over. I suppose God could have banished them to some unseen, dark corner of
creation, away from God, forever. Perhaps God could have simply flicked them
off the face of the earth, wiping the slate clean to try a new set of humans,
an Adam and Eve 2.0, but God doesn’t do that. God’s more than a bit stubborn
when it comes to grace. God stays with the man and the woman—and God never leaves them!
Maybe you’re here today
thinking God has already left you, that you’ve messed up one too many times to
really still be one of God’s children. I’m here to tell you, God isn’t like
that. God doesn’t leave you; God’s grace is stubborn that way. Or maybe you’re
here and you think that there are those people who are surely outside of God’s
grace, too sinful to truly be cared for by God. I’m here to tell you, God isn’t
like that. If God stuck it out with two humans who literally had the world
handed to them, if God stuck it out with two humans who sought to blame
everyone but themselves for their failures, if God stuck it out with people who
time after time blatantly broke the covenant God had with them, if God could
look down from the cross as those who drove the nails and say, “forgive them,”
then God can stick it out with you and whatever junk you’ve got with you! Amen.
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