Article
- Date:
- Sunday 26th February 2023
Year A, The First Sunday of Lent - Place:
- Holy Trinity, Hurstpierpoint
- Service:
- Parish Eucharist
- Readings:
- Genesis 2.15-17; 3.1-7
Here we are in the garden of Eden in a state of perfection, supposedly similar to that of the angels except that even some angels rebelled against God. But, anyway, here we are, innocent of any concept of right and wrong. We are vegetarians and, from what one can tell from the text, we are celibate; unlike the Adam and Eve in Genesis 1 who were created and told to multiply, we, who were born in sequence in Genesis 2, Adam first and Eve second, have been told no such thing. All we seem to have for our occupation is a spot of garden maintenance and, for our leisure vegetables, fruit and nuts. But, as in all stories of innocence, there is a catch. Adam, before Eve was created, was told that if he ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil he would die.
Then this wise and, according to Jewish tradition, very beautiful, serpent turns up and tells Eve that God's threat is idle, that if she and Adam eat the fruit of the forbidden tree they will not die and will be wise. Well, like many worldly pronouncements, that of the serpent is partly right and partly wrong: they will not die immediately by any means but, as the result of their loss of innocence, they will die, as we all will. And, as to wisdom, eating of the fruit of the tree made us potentially wise, as opposed to naive, but we have more frequently been foolish.
And thus begins a sequence which constitutes the greatest mystery of human existence. Why did God create us in such a way that we could exercise our free will - our knowledge of good and evil - to love him and each other freely, knowing that we would fall short so that we would need to be saved from ourselves in order to be restored to fullness, to our original state, at that point where God's realm and our realm are united.
It is such a huge mystery that simply trying to describe it is bound to cause problems. For the Jews, this story had nothing to do with what we call salvation; it was an aetiology, a story written to explain how things were the way they were. And the one metaphor for this changed state, was the transformation from innocent to guilty nakedness; and for all the Jewish celebration of procreation and family life, this metaphor stuck.
When Christians came to consider this story they had the additional dimension to consider of how this original story related to the death and Resurrection of Jesus; and the great expositor, Saint Augustine, welded three elements together: first, in disobeying God we had 'fallen' and, therefore, secondly, we were each condemned to be born with original sin, exemplified, thirdly, - reflecting Augustine's own early life - by our sexual activity.
The last factor has resulted in a Western Christian obsession with sexual sin that involved rigid clerical control of private lives from Augustine's time to our own but has now resulted in a new, contemporary phase of self destruction. Our obsession with sex, in the face of war, climate disaster and economic injustice is reducing us to a bickering sect.
Having got the sexual element out of the way, let us look at Augustine's first two elements. We are so familiar with what he says because much of the theology of our prayer books describes us as having gone through a "fall" or being "fallen". As I said, as we are dealing with this massive mystery of why things are as they are, we have to accept that language will always be problematic and so we should not be surprised if this imagery of fallenness is questionable.
First, were we really meant to be naive, or were we created to exercise free will? And if the latter is true, in what way is this state "lower" than the naive state? In what way have we actually fallen?
Rather than thinking of the saving action of Jesus as raising us back up from our fall we might think of it as making perfect in us what God deliberately created imperfect; that is the essence of the mystery. Jesus under-wrote God's promise that our false exercise of free will would not result in our separation from him at the time of the reconciliation of the earthly and heavenly kingdoms.
But Saint Augustine's model had some serious consequences under which we still labour: first, it made the Church an indispensable transactional organisation for handling sin; secondly, we became obsessed with the mechanics of salvation from Indulgences before the Reformation to Justification by faith alone after it; thirdly, we needed to define sin and sinners in a way that put human judgment above God's mercy; and, finally, religious obsession with salvation meant that we put much less emphasis on loving God and our neighbour solely for God's sake, which is why we were created.
And, this being so, we must devote our lives, through every decision we take, to deepening our understanding of good and evil. If this is difficult when we consider global issues, it is even more difficult when we focus on the communal, the domestic and the individual. We all know the complexities of our moral lives and therefore the least we can do is to grant the same degree of complexity to the lives of others. But, even more important, we must think what love demands rather than what sin forbids. We were made, from the moment we bit the fruit of the tree, to risk everything for love; Jesus died and rose again so that we could take that risk.