Sermons
September 15, 2024 (Proper 19)
The Buck Stops Here
Genesis 3:1-13
I was in college before anybody told me that there are actually two creation stories in the book of Genesis. Obviously I knew the stories, since I had been in church and Sunday school from the time my mom could carry me to church, but I hadn’t learned about where the two stories came from, or how they came to be where they are in the Bible.
The first story, in Genesis 1, is the account in which God speaks everything into existence over the course of seven days; the second is Genesis 2 and 3, which is presented sort of as a close-up look at the last day of creation and what happens next: the creation of the first humans and animals.
We’re skipping the actual creation part of the second story this morning. I think we’re all pretty familiar with the outline of the story, at least: God plants a garden, then makes a human being out of mud and puts that human being in the garden. But he’s lonely, so God sets about trying to create a partner for him. God creates all kinds of animals and brings them to the first human, to see what he might call them; but none turns out to be a suitable partner.
So God puts the human to sleep and takes a rib from his side and uses it to fashion a second human, who turns out to be the perfect fit. “This one shall be called Woman,” the first human says, “for out of Man this one was taken.”[1] They live together in the garden, working together and walking with God in the evening when the day’s work is finished. Until something goes wrong.
Traditional Christianity calls this part of the second creation story “The Fall.” It’s understood to be the account of how sin came to be in the world, and how, as a result, life is difficult and then we die.
We talk about “Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden,” but neither of these first two humans has a name until the very end of the story. The name Adam is seen throughout the story, but with a definite article: ha-’adam, the man. It’s not actually used as a name, at least in the English translations I work from, until the first verse of Genesis 4. The man names Eve after she, the man, and the snake all hear the consequences of what they had done: Eve, or in Hebrew Chava, because “she was the mother of all living.”[2]
So God put the first man and the first woman in the garden with a very specific job to do: they were to serve[3] the garden, take care of it, look after its well-being. It might have been relatively easy work; sweat and toil and the constant battle against weeds and pests are a consequence of what happens in today’s reading, presumably not a part of life in Eden for the first humans.
We sometimes think of Eden as an idyllic paradise, but that’s not what the text says. That notion comes from Greek thought, and Genesis 2 assumes something much cooler, I think: the human beings in the garden, through their tending of the ground, the plants, and the animals, are working with God in a continuing process of creation.
So we have the first humans in the garden, tasked with caring for the garden and all that lives in it, walking with God in the evenings like a friend. And then the devil comes along and tempts them. Right?
Well, no, not exactly: in this text the snake is not associated with the personification of all evil, the devil or Satan. It’s a snake. It’s a very crafty creature—the Hebrew word translated as crafty is used quite a bit in the wisdom literature, like Proverbs, but there it’s generally translated prudent or shrewd, and it tends to be seen as a good thing.
In Genesis 3 the snake acts as something like what internet users know as a “troll.” A troll, as you probably know, is a person who posts something incredibly provocative on social media or in a comment thread on someone else’s post, just to watch how others react. The snake is like that: you can sort of picture it sidling up to the woman and muttering out of the corner of its mouth, planting a seed of doubt and then sitting back to watch the show—and quite a show it turned out to be; although the snake doesn’t come out of it unscathed.
So the snake comes along and tempts the first humans with a delicious-looking piece of fruit. We often imagine that it’s an apple, but the text doesn’t say what kind of fruit it was. It could have been a peach, or a grapefruit,[4] or a pomegranate. And while the text does say the fruit, whatever it was, looked delicious, the temptation wasn’t so much to eat something yummy (as we might be so tempted when we’re grocery shopping on an empty stomach and find ourselves in the junk-food aisle), but to become wise, to become like God.
We’ve also picked up the misconception along the way, and Paul helped with this some,[5] that Eve was the one tempted because she was weaker, and thus more prone to be led astray. The text doesn’t say anything, though, about Adam being more likely to resist the temptation. It actually doesn’t say that Adam says or does anything. He just takes the fruit Eve offers him, and eats it.
There are some interpreters who suggest Eve was the one the snake talked to because she was the more curious of the two, the more hungry for knowledge and wisdom, the more likely to explore and try new things. She wasn’t chosen, according to this interpretation, because she was weak and stupid; she was chosen because she was bold and smart.
In any event, the temptation wasn’t to do something bad, as in Fred Craddock’s description of the snake saying, “I’ve got a bottle and a deck of cards behind that tree over yonder.” Who doesn’t want—even need—to become wise, to understand the difference between good and evil?
So the man and woman eat this forbidden fruit, and sin enters the world and ruins everything and this is why we can’t have nice things, like a garden that produces abundant food with minimal effort, without weeds or squash borers or tomato worms or whatever else might damage the plants in the garden.
Well, not exactly. The story actually never mentions sin—although one could make a case, as Terence Fretheim does in his commentary,[6] that if you have to spell out the meaning of a story, you might not have done a very good job telling it.
The first thing that happens is not, in spite of what God said, that the people dropped dead on the spot. And it doesn’t actually say anywhere in the story that the people would have lived forever if they hadn’t eaten the forbidden fruit. In reality it isn’t until after that happens, after God realizes what they’ve done and has to deal with the mess they’ve made, that God realizes they can’t be allowed to eat from the tree of life, which would cause them to live forever. And that is why they’re driven out of the garden, to keep them away from the tree of life.
What happens to the people after they eat from this tree is that they have knowledge they don’t know how to handle. They’re not ready for the knowledge of good and evil—we don’t know but that they might have one day been ready, and God might have at that point let them eat that fruit, except that they jumped the gun and grabbed for the knowledge before they were able to deal with it—something that is still part of human experience today.
We’ve been hearing for years about wooly mammoths that were trapped in ice and thus preserved well enough that scientists were able to recover and sequence their DNA. We’ve been hearing that some of these scientists want to clone the mammoths and reintroduce the species into the Arctic, as a way to help preserve that ecosystem.
Every time I hear about this business, a question leaps to my mind: “Because you can, does that mean you should?” I mean, haven’t they watched Jurassic Park?
Even a scientific breakthrough that has brought about what I consider miraculous outcomes, like the discovery of antibiotics, comes with unintended consequences, like the ominous superbugs that have adapted resistance to nearly all the antibiotics we have. So far science has managed to stay one step ahead of them, but for how long?
Knowledge we don’t know how to handle, like what Adam and Eve ended up with, tends to make us afraid—but sometimes afraid of the wrong things. Adam and Eve realized they were naked and became afraid of the very obvious differences between them, so they sewed fig leaves together to cover up those differences. And they became afraid of God, who, up till then, seems to have been a close companion, who came to the garden to walk and talk with them in the cool of the evening after the day’s work was done. They hid from God, and because of that God knew immediately what had happened.
Since they were now afraid of God, Adam and Eve got busy shifting the blame. Adam says, hey, Eve made me do it; Eve says the snake tricked her. The snake didn’t have anybody to shift the blame to, so the buck stopped there. But God told all three of them that things were going to change for them because of what had happened.
This part of Genesis 3 reads like a “just so story,” to use Kipling’s terminology, a little tale that purports to explain how something we see every day came to be. The “just so story” that leaps to my mind first is one from Joel Chandler Harris’ Uncle Remus, about how a pig got its curly tail: The pig saw an opossum hanging by its tail from a tree branch, and decided to try it. The pig couldn’t reach the tree branch, so he tried wrapping his tail around a fence rail; but a pig’s tail being much different from an opossum’s,[7] the thing went wrong and the pig ended up with a curly tail.
The curses we find in Genesis 3—after the passage Carol read for us this morning—explain some givens in the lives of the first people who told this story to one another:
- why snakes don’t have any legs and slither along the ground;
- why people hate and fear snakes;
- why it hurts to have a baby;
- why the relationship between spouses is often fraught with power struggles, yet we just keep on pairing off and getting married;
- why it’s such hard work to bring forth food from the earth, and why we have to fight weeds;
- and maybe even why our bodies turn back into dust when we die.
All of these things have happened, the story tells us, because two people listened to a troll and it caused them not to trust the God who created them and who walked with them in the garden as a friend.
Nowadays we sometimes hear—maybe less so these days than in the past, but you still hear it—someone say, well, all the bad things that happen in the world are consequences of the Fall. And sometimes we hear somebody say that God created men and women to be in an unequal—but, perhaps, complementary[8]—relationship in which the man rules and the woman submits.
In the past some people actually said that since God said women were supposed to bear children in pain, therefore doctors ought not to give them any medication to help ease that pain. You’ll notice, however, that nobody ever said anything about God prohibiting the use of fertilizers or herbicides on our crops.
We sometimes hear people say that natural disasters like hurricanes or earthquakes are part of life on earth because of the Fall, although frankly that seems to me to give way too much power to a human being, or even two human beings, to think one woman eating a piece of fruit and sharing it with her husband could have caused the earth to tremble and the sky to whirl. And, really, this text doesn’t say that.
The idea that this one incident brought sin and death into the world and it damaged all of creation came from Paul.[9] And Paul wasn’t as concerned about a dogmatic explanation of how sin came to be as he was about proclaiming the gospel, which he sees as a way out of sin and the mess it makes, for us and for all of creation.
The reality is that the consequences laid upon Adam, Eve, and the snake in Genesis 3 are not the last word for us. We won’t live in fear, distrust, endless toil, or relationships characterized by domination and oppression forever. And even though Adam and Eve were sent out of the garden so they didn’t eat from the tree of life and live forever, even death can’t finally destroy us, and one day that last enemy will be destroyed.[10]
The original plan for creation was to live in harmony, men and women in partnership caring for the earth and all its inhabitance, in a close relationship with God. That went wrong, but even now, as we speak, that wrong is being undone, so right now we can stop living in fear and distrust of one another, or in relationships characterized by domination and oppression; we can go about our daily work knowing that even the hard toil that is required to bring forth a living isn’t eternal;[11] and we don’t even have to fear that last enemy, death.
The curse is not the last word. Christ is the last Word, just as he was the first word, Alpha and Omega; and one day we will get back to the garden, and one day we will be able to eat from the tree of life.[12]
[1] Genesis 2:23
[2] Genesis 3:20
[3] The NRSV says the man is put in the garden “to till it and keep it.” The Common English Bible says he is there “to farm it and take care of it.” But the Hebrew word is ’abad, which means “serve,” often in the context of worship; the noun form is ’ebed, “servant,” which is part of the name of one of the Minor Prophets, Obadiah, whose name means servant of the Lord.
[4] Probably not a grapefruit, actually, since grapefruit is a hybrid, like broccoli is. Grapefruit appears to have originated in Barbados, an accidental cross between two fruit species introduced from Asia, the sweet orange (aka your basic orange) and the pomelo or Shaddock. But it was sometimes referred to as “forbidden fruit” in its early days.
[5] See 1 Timothy 2:13-15.
[6] The New Interpreter’s Bible, volume I, p. 359.
[7] Awhile back a baby opossum got in my house, and as I removed it I had the opportunity to touch its tail. It felt like the “hook” side of a Velcro closure.
[8] The notion of “complementarity,” which is popular in some Evangelical Christian circles, doesn’t really make the unequal relationship they urge on couples better or more attractive, in my opinion.
[9] Romans 5, to be specific; although there are hints of this understanding in 1 Corinthians 15 as well.
[10] 1 Corinthians 15:26
[11] This is part of what people who observe Sabbath are reminded of every week.
[12] See Revelation 21—22. In the midst of the redeemed and restored creation Revelation calls “the new Jerusalem,” we find a river flowing from the throne of God—as the river flowed out of the ground in Eden—and the tree of life grows beside that river, laden with fruit and with healing power in its leaves.