Sunday: 1st Sunday in Lent A
Reading: Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7; Matt 4:1-11
Preacher: S. James Steen

This past week I found myself wishing that I had all the time in the world to read. Every passage I came across, while delving into the myth about our first parents, made me want to read the entire book to gain a fuller understanding of its perspective. As one author writes, "The quantity, breadth, and diversity of interpretations of Genesis 3 testifies to the complexity of this seemingly simple tale. Each approach illuminates some aspect of its possible significance: historical context, literary parallels, wordplay and characterization, semantic structures, and the effect on the reader.... Yet the same questions that concerned early readers continue to shape interpretation today. What exactly happened in that garden? [Not what literally happened, but what was going on there?] What does it have to do with evil, sin, and death? Is it a story about a fall from paradise or about growing into new human potential? What is the knowledge of good and evil, and why is it prohibited? Does this all have something to do with sexuality? Who is the serpent and why does it entice the woman? Is it all the woman's fault?"¹

One thing everyone can probably agree on is that this is a story about desire. With a little help from the crafty serpent, the first couple desire to eat the forbidden fruit. "...the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise..." Just a few verses earlier, the same Hebrew word, nehmad, was used to describe all the trees in the garden as desirable.

It's intriguing that the last of the Ten Commandments, usually translated, "You shall not covet," also uses this Hebrew word for desire. René Girard, professor emeritus at Stanford, thinks that this translation misleads us into believing that what is prohibited is uncommon or extreme desire.² How often have you heard someone say - or said yourself - "I covet such and such," meaning, "What I wouldn't give or do to have the object of my desire."

The point is that both Eve's desire and the desire in the Tenth Commandment are not about extreme or unusual desire, but about human desire in general. "You shall not desire the house of your neighbor. You shall not desire the wife of your neighbor ...nor anything that belongs to him" (Exod. 20:17) is a good deal more radical than "You shall not covet" these things, which allows me to say, "Well, it's okay for me to desire my best friend's spouse as long as I don't commit violence in order to get her or him." Similarly, the point is not that the first couple craved or coveted the forbidden fruit. The message from the Garden is that all our desire for things we don't need alienates us.

As Girard points out, "The commandment that prohibits desiring the goods of one's neighbor attempts to resolve the number one problem of every human community: internal violence."³ It's not surprising that it was reserved for the place of honor as the last Commandment, and why it is more detailed and more complex that those which immediately precede it, like "You shall not steal" and "You shall not commit adultery." Desire is all pervasive, and even when it doesn't actually lead to violence, it contributes to keeping a few people rich and many poor, to depleting the world's natural resources, with resulting international tensions, and to global warming, to name only a few of its effects.

It's pretty obvious that desire is at the heart of the story of Original Sin. And almost as basic to the story as desire is blame. I think we could even call this the account of Original Blame.

You may remember that, after Adam and Eve put on the fig leaf, God and Adam play hide and seek. When God finds Adam, God asks him what's going on, and in his answer to God's query, Adam blames it all on Eve, and "he has been repeating this accusation ever since, in the [face] of a Biblical text that, far from condoning his cowardly avoidance of responsibility, obviously regards it as a continuation and aggravation of the original sin. There is no biblical reason for singling out Eve as the main culprit.... From the beginning, [Man] has tried to transform a minor point into the total message of the story. He does this in order to elude the truth of his desire. What we inherited from him is both [his] desire, and [his] appetite for scapegoating that goes with it."⁴

Now as a man, I'm going to say, let's be fair. It's true that men have been blaming women for everything possible for a very long time. However, I notice that when Adam says, "She made me do it," and then God questions Eve, she says (does anyone remember?) "The serpent made me do it." This blaming and avoidance of responsibility - by just about everyone - gets passed on down the line all the way to the present. Just think of all the people and groups - excepting ourselves, or course - who are responsible for whatever is wrong with the world and with our lives today. Is it the Iraqis, or the Iranians, or the Muslims, or the Republicans, or the Democrats, or our teachers, or our bosses, or our parents or our partners, or our spouses or our children?

Not only do we blame others for how things got to be the way they are. Because our desire to avoid responsibility is so strong - maybe we really do covet this - we also blame others in order to avoid taking responsibility for our lives in the here and now, in order that things might be better in the future. This may seem a little harsh. But after all, it's Lent. It isn't hard to figure out that early Hebrew people wondered how things got to be such a mess: Why do we die? Why are we so alienated, suffering such pain, always blaming one another, and filled with desire which gets us into all kinds of trouble? Why? And a very clever person must have said, "It all goes back to what happened to the first Man and the first Woman. It wasn't like this in the beginning. They lived in Paradise; but soon, goaded by a serpent..." And you, my friends, know the rest.

In the Temptations of Jesus, today the writer of the Gospel According to Matthew provides us with another story, a story about the possibility of life that is not a slave to desire or to blame, but is open to the possibility of deep community, community based on the desire and ability to serve God. According to the story in Matthew, because Jesus is able to become the new Adam, free from the bondage of the old, we can now become his descendants, heirs of his freedom, who are able to live with him in God's grace.

Whatever this new story claims, we know that it is only by fits and starts that we move from the old to the new. So we can be thankful that a greater gift than Jesus' example of perfection is his example of forgiveness. Even when desire and blame conspire to produce the very violence against Jesus that the Commandment had been written to prevent, he is able to say, Father, forgive them. It is in that forgiveness that our true hope lies. But that is another story, one for which we will have to wait a few weeks. Until then, I wish you all a blessed and fruitful Lent.
Amen.

¹Psychological Biblical Criticism by D. Andrew Kille, copyright © 2001 Fortress Press. Used (in the Bible Workbench) by permission of Augsburg Fortress Publishers.
²I See Satan Falling like Lightning by René Girard, Maryknoll, NY, Orbis Books, 2001, opening pages.
³Girard, pp. 7-9.
⁴A Theatre of Envy: William Shakespeare by René Girard, St. Augustine's Press, 2004, p. 324.