Genesis 2:15-17 ; 3:1-7 ; Psalm 32; Romans 5:12-19 ; Matthew
4:1-11 .
Humans disobey parents to
find a world of hardships and mortality, but the Servant shows a way beyond
temptation.
The season of Lent brings a focus on the brokenness and
failure of human efforts to attain righteousness and the good.
It is a season about our defeats, perhaps especially about
our own betrayals of the good we hoped for.
This is the condition of sin, as Christian language and experience has
traditionally defined it.
Lent is the 40 days in which recognition and confession of
sin, contrition and repentance, are called for.
It is, therefore, a season of reversing – practicing abstention
from – selfishness and worldly living.
It is a season when disciples imitate the suffering Jesus as he made the
trek toward Jerusalem and the Via Dolorosa.
The Torah reading is the story of Eve and Adam eating
the forbidden fruit. This was, in the
first instance, a folk story. It was
probably used in its present form as a didactic text for young men who have
just reached puberty and are now learning to read and write in wisdom
schools. The texts they have to learn, recite, and discuss with their teacher are about their new stage of life.
The whole story in Genesis 2:5-3:24 is a paradigm of the loss of the paradise and innocence of
childhood.
The story tells how two youngsters, who had all their
desires met in a perfect garden by a super-parent, gradually woke up to the
realities of the adult world – sexuality, childbirth, labor in the fields, and
the resistance of the earth to the desires of humans. And most of all, they woke up to the
reality of mortality. They came to know that they would die – “you are
dust, and to dust you shall return” (Genesis 3:19 , NRSV).
The critical transition from childhood innocence to adult
awareness comes about by eating the fruit of the tree of knowing good and
bad. (Hebrew ra‘ , “bad,” doesn’t
normally have the weighty overtones of Anglo-Saxon “evil.”) This is a fruit that gives a knowledge of
consequences, knowledge of what will happen if… This is the knowledge possessed
by the gods. It is the chief advantage
that gods have over humans. (“See, the
man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil [bad]…” Genesis 3:22 .) Therefore, this
is the fruit that the man and the woman must not eat. They must not become like the gods.
As it stands, this story is about disobeying the parental
authority and in the process becoming mature adults – with all the pains and
benefits appertaining thereto – in a real world instead of in the dream world
of children. This story is not
about sin; “sin” is not mentioned in Genesis until the story of Cain and Abel
(4:7).
The story of Adam and
Eve is never referred to in ancient Israelite times. No historical, prophetic, or poetic book in
the Judean scriptures mentions it, much less quotes it. The story simply sat in Genesis for many
centuries, enjoyed, no doubt, but making no big impression on Israelite
writers.
The earliest reasonably clear reference outside of Genesis
to Eve and the forbidden fruit is in the Wisdom of Jesus Ben Sira (died about
180 BCE ). One of his
sayings is, “From a woman sin had its beginning, / and because of her we all
die” (Ecclesiasticus [= Sirach] 25:24, NRSV). Ben Sira was a misogynist, but it is clear
that by his time the story of the forbidden fruit had become the story of
“original sin.” This notion of sin that
is inherited by all the human race may have first appeared in the Hellenistic
age (300 BCE and after), but it had a vast future, especially through
the writings of Paul of Tarsus (died about 64 CE) and, for all the
Latin-speaking West, through the influence of Augustine, bishop of Hippo (lived
354-430 CE).
As the story of the origin of sin, the Adam and Eve
story is about disobedience. A
command from God’s very own self was clear and explicit. Do not eat that fruit of knowledge. They ate it, and the consequence was the
corruption of existence as it had been in the days of innocence, including the inheritance of mortality. All humans thereafter were enslaved by this corruption.
The drama of human destiny then
became whether there was any way out – any way back to innocence and paradise
(that is, to “salvation”). That is the
point at which all later Jewish and Christian teachings pick up, insisting that
there is a way, a way through obedience now – of the Torah (two-fold torah in Rabbinic Judaism),
or of the Way offered by Jesus, the Anointed One of God.
Psalm 32.
The Psalm
for this Sunday’s reading has to do with the language and experience of sin
and forgiveness, and especially of the power and blessing released by
confession of sin directly to God.
What is
pretty much standard language for sin in the psalms is presented in the two
opening verses: “transgressions,” which
need to be forgiven; “sin,” which needs to be covered; “iniquity,” which needs
to be not imputed or “reckoned” to one; and “deceit,” which must be avoided in
one’s spirit (or one’s mouth, in the Greek translation). The first three terms are repeated in the
speaker’s report of confession to the Lord in verse 5.
The primary force of the psalm, however, has to be the
apparent personal experience reported. “While I kept silence, my body
wasted away through my groaning all day long” (verse 3, NRSV).
Transgression, sin, and iniquity (sometimes translated “guilt”) are destructive of vitality, spirit, and health. This speaker finally resolves to confess all to the Lord, acknowledging sin, not hiding iniquity, and confessing transgressions. The result: “you forgave the guilt of my sin” (verse 5, NRSV; New Jerusalem Bible, “took away my guilt, forgave my sin”).
Transgression, sin, and iniquity (sometimes translated “guilt”) are destructive of vitality, spirit, and health. This speaker finally resolves to confess all to the Lord, acknowledging sin, not hiding iniquity, and confessing transgressions. The result: “you forgave the guilt of my sin” (verse 5, NRSV; New Jerusalem Bible, “took away my guilt, forgave my sin”).
The rest of the psalm is lessons learned from this
experience, though perhaps in verses 8-9 it is God speaking rather than the
forgiven sinner, warning the unrepentant not to be stubborn as mules who have
to be bound and bridled to keep them where they belong.
The Epistle reading gives us one of the versions of original
sin that Paul developed from his Judean training and his own Christian
inspiration and scriptural study.
The passage maintains a polarity between Adam, the first
man, and Christ. Adam and Eve’s sin of
disobedience changed the human nature of all peoples. Everybody inherited the consequences of Adam
and Eve’s sin. Paul distinguishes
between the original sin of Eve and Adam, and all the rest of the sins
committed in later ages. Only Adam’s sin
changed human nature; everybody else only had ordinary everyday sins.
The same principle is applied to Christ. Christ’s obedience to God on the cross was an
ontologically potent act; it changed the being of humans who came to be
included in it – “so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made
righteous” (verse 19, NRSV). How one
gets included in that act of grace is spelled out more fully in the following
chapters of this epistle.
Important for Paul’s overall view is the distinction
between the sin everybody is involved in (from Eve and Adam) and the sin that
increases because of the Law.
When the Law came with Moses, the requirements of righteousness were
spelled out much more fully – a just world pleasing to God was projected, posed
as a goal, by the Law. But, alas,
failure to attain righteousness before God only became greater because it was
burdened with even more occasions to fail.
“But law came in, with the result that the trespass multiplied…” (verse 20,
just past our reading).
Whether only from Adam and Eve or also through Moses,
people right and left were caught in sin and its consequence (death). Until the dominion of grace came in -- and with
it “eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord” (verse 21, also just past our
reading).
The Gospel reading is the narrative of Jesus’ temptation
by the devil. Sin and temptation
have always been understood to go together – thus being tempted to do evil is
the way humans get caught in the bondage of sin.
In the framework shared by all the Gospels, Jesus’ coming
is a decisive event in the cosmic struggle between good and evil. The
temptation of Jesus is the immediate sequel to the coming of the Holy Spirit
upon him, and that coming sets in motion a conflict between the powers of the
Spirit and the powers of Satan. This
conflict is fought out in the human world – which has been pretty exclusively
in Satan’s power in recent times.
The temptation of Jesus is to exercise his divine powers
improperly, or in the service of the demonic lord instead of the
true Lord. The devil (he is called
“Satan” only at the end, verse 10) is trying to seduce Jesus over to his own
side.
The three temptations, like many in ordinary life, are a
mixture of good and evil. Increasing the
bread supply from stones is not in itself a bad thing; doing it for the devil
is. If we read the passage correctly,
the three temptations, in their positive potential, are in fact fulfilled in
the course of Jesus’ later work, as the Gospel According to Matthew presents
it.
The first temptation is to turn stones into bread,
because Jesus, who has fasted for forty days, is very hungry. Jesus refuses by quoting Moses – which Jesus
does in response to every temptation – that humans do not live by bread alone
but by all that God says (Deuteronomy 8:3). However, later
in the ministry on the Galilean hills, Jesus does multiply loaves of bread and
feeds the hungry who have been following him and waiting upon his words
(Matthew 14:13-21).
In the second temptation (in Matthew; Luke reverses the
order of the last two) the devil takes Jesus to “the holy city” and invites him
to throw himself down from a pinnacle to demonstrate to the world that he has
divine powers ready to protect him. This
time the devil also quotes scripture, citing a promise that God’s angels will
protect the Messiah from all harm (verse 6).
Quoting Moses again, Jesus replies that you should not put the Lord your
God to the test (Deuteronomy 6:16).
The devil begins this temptation, like the first, by
saying, “If you are the son of God, …”
At the crisis at the end of Jesus’ mission, others say to him, “If you
are the son of God, come down from the cross” (Matthew 27:40, NRSV). The temptation was to avoid the cross, to
make a great display but only one that would serve the fancies of the world and
not the will of God to redeem the peoples.
In his final act, Jesus did indeed cast himself down to death – in God’s
way rather than in Satan’s!
Finally, in the third temptation the devil takes
Jesus to a high mountain and shows him “all the kingdoms of the world and their
splendor” (verse 8). Now the full force
of the devil’s lure comes out. “All
these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.” There is a clear reply in Moses again;
“Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him” (verse 10, quoting Deuteronomy 6:13).
But here, too, Matthew’s Gospel finds a truer and more
righteous way of achieving the goal to which the temptation referred. In the final commission, after the
resurrection -- also on a mountain in Galilee -- Jesus says, “All authority in heaven and on earth has
been given to me. Go therefore and make
disciples of all nations.” (Matthew 28:19-20.)
The ambiguous good of this temptation too has been accomplished in God’s
own way.
Matthew has presented the temptations of Jesus as devious ways by which the devil would achieve his own purposes and defeat those of the Lord. In his faithfulness, Jesus will fulfill the whole will of God and show his followers the way to go beyond temptation (usually by quoting Deuteronomy).
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