Genesis
3 - Now the drama begins. There is a serpent in the garden who approaches the woman and asks her if God
forbade them any of the fruits of the garden, and Eve tells him of the
prohibition on the tree of the knowledge of good and evil along with the
threatened penalty, which I must point out is a
prohibition given to Adam – before Eve was even part of the picture! She has
HEARD of the prohibition from Adam.
The serpent then tries to convince Eve that
God is bluffing them, that they won’t die if they eat from this tree. Furthermore, the serpent offers, God is
just trying to keep man from being “like a god,” for knowing good and evil is a
trait pertaining to divinity.
The language of the serpent is important: “’You will not die; for God knows that when
you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good
and evil’” (3:4-5).
Eve considers all the good things the fruit
seems to offer – its pleasing look (beauty), its good as a food (practical
usefulness), and she appreciates the desirability of the knowledge it promises
to give her (philosophical good).
So she disobeys God, trusts in the word of the serpent and eats. Her husband, who is with her
throughout, also eats. Then the
text tells us “the eyes of both of them
were opened” (3:7). They see that they are naked, but of course they always
saw that – it’s just that now they feel differently about it.
A lot of the meaning of this story
rests in understanding that it is all about “seeing” and less about really
eating and learning. And, I think
there is a good deal of irony in the
dialogue that is not commented upon.
First of all, when the serpent tells Eve that God doesn’t want them to
eat the fruit because it will make them “like god we mustn’t forget that God has specifically created them to be
“like us/God” (1:26). He wants them to be not only like gods but
“like” the one and only God.
Similarly when the text says, “the
eyes of both of them were opened”,
it is being completely sarcastic –
before they ate of the forbidden fruit, their eyes were opened – it is partly the beauty of the fruit that draws Eve
into disobedience. But after
disobeying God, they are now really
blinded to their true nature and to the nature of their relationships to
each other and to God.
Another interesting thing to point
out is that Eve is not drawn into
disobedience by desiring anything bad;
she convinces herself that what she really is seeking is “good.” The problem is that the first step she
must take is a failure of trust in God,
for he has already given her the good things she seeks here. And by failing to
trust in Him, she will lose the very things she is seeking through her own
independence from God.
Back
to the story - Later, when
God comes to talk to them, the shame they first experienced in relation to each
other now comes between God and them.
They are afraid, and God sees that things have changed between him and
them. They have separated themselves from him and from the divine nature He
planted in them.
When he confronts them they proceed to
obfuscate and deceive. The man
blames the woman; the woman blames the serpent. No one accepts responsibility for the act of disobedience
(1:9-13). The consequences of this disobedience are both explicit and implicit. The consequences already displayed in
the story are a dramatic alteration of the way reality is “seen” by man and
woman; the rising up of shame and defensiveness--which divides us from each
other and from God--and an inability or refusal to accept responsibility for
the acts we chose.
To these consequences God adds others: the
serpent is separated from the rest of the animal kingdom. There will be an on-going struggle
between the serpent (what it represents) and the offspring (seed) of the woman. The offspring of Eve will struggle with
the principle of evil as long as evil strikes at our heels or “dogs our steps”
if you will. “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” (NRSV 1:15).
Here it is important to comment briefly on the
promise Christians have always attached to these words, and here again the
salience of the words is directly related to the translation one works from.
Consider just the following:
·
“I will put enmity between you and the
woman, between your seed and her seed;
He shall crush your head, and you shall lie in wait for his heel”(Confraternity).
·
“And I will put enmity between thee and
the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and
thou shalt bruise his heel”(KJV).
·
“I will put enmity between you and the
woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will strike at your head, while
you strike at his heel”(NAB).
Christians saw in these words a kind of ur-promise to mankind, or more specifically to Eve and through her to all mankind, that
one of her line would eventually overcome the power of evil, and this seed of
Eve was seen as a prophesy of Jesus.
The word seed, therefore, took on significance – for many indeed the
significance of the two other great images for Christ – God’s Word and God’s
Light. All three of these images may take their origin from these stories of
the creation. I must say of all the changes the newer translations have
brought the worst change has been abandonment
of the word “seed,” for offspring.
So much biblical meaning is tied into the word seed that I just
think it should be kept.
Anyway, to return to the story,
woman will suffer in and through the having of offspring, yet she will be tied
in an unequal yoke with man. She
will yearn for that unity promised with man, but he will lord it over her
instead, frustrating both. Man is
burdened with the difficulty of eking out an existence from the soil, yet his
labors will be filled with hardship and with a sense of futility, for “you are
dirt, and to dirt you shall return” (1:19).
The
two of them are helped by God to some garments to cover their nakedness and
then banished from the garden. At
the entrance to the garden God posts sentries armed with a flaming, “revolving”
sword (1:24), so that they will not be able to come back in, eat the fruit of
the tree of life and live forever.
The further implicit consequences
of all this are the stuff of the later stories, but these are the main ones:
the peace of the garden is disrupted; the union and friendship with God is
shattered. This is the fallen
condition in which we live.
Now we must return to the problem alluded to before. What is the death Adam and Eve suffer
as a result of their disobedience? Have they already suffered it? Does it hang over their heads for the
future – when they return to the dirt or dust from which they came? Early in history, people who read this
story tended to believe that the death threatened by God was an eventual bodily
death, an allusion to their mortality which, readers believed, was never part
of the intention of God when He created them. Some more modern theorists, seeing the problem presented by
evolutionary theory in this kind of idea, posit that the mortality of man,
which is, they admit, part of the natural condition of man’s existence was
meant to be overcome supernaturally by God (by God giving us access to the tree
of life).
An insight I had some years ago into this promise of supernatural
intervention is that the cross of Christ might well be that supernatural tree
and the body and blood of Christ offered us in the Eucharist might well be seen
as the fruit of the Tree of Life. The irony of what “seems” to be death being
“life” is then applied to BOTH baptism and Eucharist.
Still, the story says that God said
that the death we were to suffer would come
upon them the very day they eat the fruit. And that death seems to me to be a spiritual death. This
is not a subtle, nuanced thing but a dramatic change in the way man sees,
feels, thinks and responds to his God and to other men and women as well. They are separated from the closeness
from God they were intended to enjoy and from the closeness promised between
them as man and woman. Later we will see that the death includes also the
turning of man to violence against his brother, and the deep ignorance we have in our “natural” fallen state of what our
true nature is and what we are in God’s creative scheme.
The question of what this story has to tell us or teach us about the state of relations
between men and women is one that has interested readers for centuries at
least. For many Christians, the
story has served to explain why women are to be subordinated to men, just as it
explains or pretends to explain why women have pain in childbirth while other
animals seem to deliver their young without undue pain. But the thing that interests me is that
both circumstances are not part of God’s intention with respect to our lives,
only the results of that deep sin which all mankind begins in “naturally”. As we enter into the redemption
offered by God, however, the consequences of the fall begin to weaken and the
lives we are called into begin to free us from the baneful effects of Adam’s
disobedience.
The two creation stories together also stimulate in my
mind another interesting idea. Could
it be that “man” – male and female together – is for God what Eve is for Adam? Did God perhaps create us to be his
companion, his other? Sometimes
when I look at people and see how amazing they are – how sensitive they are,
how profoundly they think and create, I feel in myself—sometimes only for a
fleeting moment, but intensely—how God must love us, how lonely it must be to
be God and how desirable man is.
God seeks humanity, I believe, because we are “bone of his bone, flesh
of his flesh.” He seeks to be wedded to
us as Adam seeks Eve. Complimentarity,
mutuality, love, admiration, dignity, and incredible goodness—all are at the
heart of this infinitely huge and unfathomable creation we are part of. The
miracle is that we can even sense it in part.
First Epistle of Clement of Rome to the Corinthians (96/97
AD) Sections 26-30
Section 26 – Still discussing the
importance of the Phoenix story, Clement says he finds the story meaningful
because it helps us to see resurrection as a reasonable hope for “those who
have served Him in holiness and in the confidence of a sound faith” (34). And
he quotes from the Book of Job: “You will
raise up this flesh of mine which has had all these trials to endure” (34).
Section 27 – “Seeing then that we have
this hope, let us knit fast our souls to Him who is ever true to His word and
righteous in His judgments. He who has forbidden us to use any deception can
much less be a deceiver Himself; untruth is the only thing that is impossible
to God” (34).
It is God’s Word that has
brought together all that exists, so he is able to end it if he chooses.
Section 28 – Let us approach our Lord with awe. There is “nothing He does not
see and hear” (34). He quotes psalm 139: “Whither
shall I go, and where shall I hide from your presence? If I climb up to heaven,
you are there; if I retire to the ends of the earth, your right hand is there;
if I make my bed in the pit, there is your Spirit” (34)
Section 29 – “It follows that we must
approach Him in holiness of spirit, lifting up pure and undefiled hands to Him
in love for the gracious and compassionate Father who has chosen us to be His
own” (34).
Section 30 – Since we are the “Holy
One’s own special portion, let us omit no possible means of sanctification” (35).
We must abandon slander, “lewd and unclean coupling”, drinking and rioting,
lust and pride. “Let us clothe ourselves in a mutual tolerance of one another’s
views, cultivating humility and self-restrain, avoiding all gossiping and
backbiting, and earning our justification by deeds and not by words” (35).
And the “testimony to our
good deeds is for others to give” (35), not for us to advertise.
