“Knowing Good from Bad”
9 March 2014
Homily Delivered the First Sunday in Lent Year A
8 a.m. Said, 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass
Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland (Oregon)
Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7; Romans 5:12-19; Matthew 4:1-11;
Psalm 32
God, give us hearts to feel and love; take away our hearts
of stone, and give us hearts of flesh. Amen
Three years ago this week, a
powerful earthquake hit the Northeastern area of Japan, setting off a powerful
tsunami that killed thousands of people and caused the greatest nuclear power
plant disaster since Chernobyl, a critical environmental problem that is with
us to this day. Earlier that week, an
earthquake devastated Christchurch New Zealand.
In our congregation in Beijing at the time were Japanese and New
Zealanders from the affected regions, and as a group we were feeling a lot of
faith challenging questions.
Such horror is enough to make you
wonder if faith or even optimism is justified. It was after an earthquake in Lisbon in 1755 killed
thousands of worshippers crammed into the Cathedral for All Saints’ Day
services that the Enlightenment, and with it the modern world, lost confidence
in a world guided by any kind of friendly providence. Voltaire and
Rousseau both argued if God were good, he could not be almighty, and if he were
almighty, he could not be good. This is the classic problem of theodicy:
how can God exist with such irrational and random horror. In the words of the infamously funny
Australian subway public service video a few years ago, there are just “so many
dumb ways to die.”
At the Ash Wednesday Service earlier
this week, we began Lent with the words, “remember you are dust and unto dust
you shall return.” Today, we began our Lenten Sunday worship with the Book
of Common Prayer’s Great Litany.
“From lightning and tempest; from earthquake, fire, and flood;
from plague, pestilence, and famine, Good Lord, deliver us.” (TEC BCP,
p. 149) “…from dying suddenly and
unprepared, Good Lord, deliver us.”
Today’s story from Genesis seeks to answer the question “Why do we have to die? Why is the world so screwed up?” Does the bad we see in the world mean that God made it bad, or that God is part bad?” We often misread the story. It is about ha’adam, Hebrew for “the Human Being,” or Every Man and Every Woman. It is about each and every one of us. Evil here comes into the world through a talking snake, the cleverest of all animals. That detail alone should tell us that we are dealing with a folk story here. The snake convinces Every Man and Woman to eat the one fruit—of all the wonderful fruit available—forbidden them, the fruit of knowing good from bad. As a result, they are changed, become aware they are without clothes, and become ashamed. There is a link between the snake’s cleverness, ‘arum, and the couple’s nakedness, ‘arummim.
The story tells the
answer to these hard questions about evil and death: “We don’t know why,
and perhaps cannot know why, there is evil and death in the world. It’s
a mystery! But one thing is sure—the evil we do and the evil we see
do not come from God.”
The Book of Job makes the same point,
as do many stories about Jesus in the Gospels.
Jesus’ healing the sick tells us that the ultimate purpose of God does
not include disease, suffering, and death. God doesn’t intend horror and disappointment
for his creatures. One of the key difficulties in theodicy is
finding the appropriate connection between God’s ultimate good purposes and
intention and what we experience in our actual lives.
Elsewhere, Jesus was asked about
people who suffer horrible things. Once, a man born blind was pointed out
to him: “Was it his parents sin or his that caused this?”
“Neither,” he said. Another time people came to him and said,
“Did you hear that the Romans massacred those countrymen of yours who were
worshipping in the Temple? Their own blood was mixed with that of the
animals they were sacrificing! What did they do that was so bad that God
punished them this way?” “They did nothing any worse than anyone else,”
he replies, and continues, “What about those people who died in the Tower
of Siloam when it collapsed? They were no worse than anyone else.”
“The lesson we should take here,” says Jesus, “is not that they were
particularly bad, but that we all need to be better” (Luke 13:1-5).
Jesus knew well that sometimes bad things happen to good people and that in this world the evil often prosper. His death of the cross is the ultimate example of the righteous suffering unjustly. But he trusted in God and the goodness of God nonetheless. That’s why in Gethsemane, he asks if it is possible to have the cup pass from him. But immediately he adds, “Your will, not mine, be done.” It is this very openness to God that gets us out of the way, and helps bring the kingdom closer.
Jesus knew well that sometimes bad things happen to good people and that in this world the evil often prosper. His death of the cross is the ultimate example of the righteous suffering unjustly. But he trusted in God and the goodness of God nonetheless. That’s why in Gethsemane, he asks if it is possible to have the cup pass from him. But immediately he adds, “Your will, not mine, be done.” It is this very openness to God that gets us out of the way, and helps bring the kingdom closer.
The interesting point in the Genesis
story is that knowing good from bad is seen as part of the package—recognizing
nakedness only comes from already having partaken of the snake’s
craftiness. It is only when you can
distinguish between the two that bad really begins to bother you. For me this is one of the greatest evidence
of the existence of God: if this horror-ridden world were all there were, why should
we find that objectionable or wrong? A
fish in a bowl isn’t aware of the water.
It is only when deprived of water that it knows that something is
seriously not as it should be. We’re
that fish out of water, gasping for God and good.
That is the point of today’s Gospel
reading. Where we, Every Man and Every Woman, defect from God's purpose for
us and sin, Jesus Christ in the desert, though completely one of us, overthrows
the tempter’s power. And this through complete openness to his
Father.
We often lose sight of
this basic point in the story of the Fall of Humankind because of the
historicized way many of us have come to read these stories, a process helped
along by the rhetorical flourishes you can see in today’s reading in
Paul. But even there, note that Paul in today’s epistle says Adam passed
sin to his descendants “because all have sinned” not “so that they all
sin.” In his classic phrasing of the doctrine of original sin, St.
Augustine pushed it further by suggesting that this sin in our origins was a
moral contamination transmitted through the very act that generates children,
sex, which he associated with the symbol of eating the forbidden fruit in the
Genesis story.
In the Book of Genesis,
however, there is no hint of such a demonization of human sexuality.
Genesis sees sexuality as part of God’s good creation, and seeks to counter its
divinization in the fertility cults so abundant in the ancient near East.
This story in Genesis
does not teach that sexual sin corrupted our first parents and
transmitted this to us all. Instead, it tells a story where figures
representing each one of us go astray. And go astray we do.
Elsewhere Genesis teaches that the human heart, for whatever reasons, has a
mysterious tendency to go astray and desire evil. In the story of the
Flood, we hear, “Yahweh saw that the wickedness of humankind was great upon the
earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil
continually” (Gen 6:5) Later Judaism develops the idea in this
verse into the doctrine of the Yetser hara‘ “the inclination to evil,”
the rabbis’ doctrine similar to Augustine’s Original Sin, but without blaming
some human ancestor for one’s failings or disparaging sex and the body.
The greatest proof of the
truth of the teaching of a “Fall of Humankind,” therefore, is not to be found
in the archaeological or fossil record. It is to be found by looking in
the mirror.
So much for how Genesis
explains moral evil that comes from human choice. What about natural
horror, “nature red in tooth and claw,” or the great economies of waste and
suffering seen in natural selection in the evolution of species?
Genesis hints that there
is a lack of perfect conformity to God’s intention even in the natural world as
God created it (without benefit, as it were, of a historical “Fall of Man”). In
the Priestly account of creation in Genesis 1, for instance, not all the
commands of God in creation are perfectly reflected in what immediately happens
as a result, especially if you read this in the original Hebrew. Charles Foster
writes:
“‘Let light be,’
commands God; ‘Light be,” comes back the report. This is not ham-fisted
editing: whoever put this story together knew exactly what they were
doing. ‘Grass grass,’ God tells the earth. But the earth does
not. It ‘puts forth’ grass. The created order is slightly
disobedient from the start.” Of the eight “let there be” orders in creation,
only “Let there be light” is implemented exactly (The Selfless Gene:
Living with God and Darwin [Hodder & Stoughton, 2009] pp.
132-33).
The Priestly author only hints at
this lack of conformity of the created world with God’s intentions. He
knows that God’s declaration that creation is good, when in the face of
recalcitrant nature, presents us with mystery. But the idea ties in with
Augustine’s doctrine of what evil is. For Augustine, evil is not a
positive thing, but rather the absence of good. And if God is all good,
then the very act of creating something that is not-God implies that there will
be gaps in the goodness of the created world. That is how he accounts for
the natural evil in the world.
But again, the very reason we feel
that the world should be without natural evil, is that in fact we were created
with an imprint in us of a God of love and beauty in which there is no harm,
and no horror.
William Pike, writing on the Haiti
earthquake eight years ago, said that he had been reminded of the story of
Elijah’s flight to Mount Horeb in 1 Kings 19, where God spoke to Elijah not out
of an earthquake, whirlwind, or fire, but out of the whispering of the still
breeze. Pike remembers the words used in the passage—“The Lord was not in
the earthquake.”
God indeed is not in the earthquake, is not in the horror, not in the fire, nor the flood. God is not in our misdoings and our failure to do the right thing. All these show us how far the world is from God's ultimate intention, not God in action. Rather, God is in the efforts of people trying to do the right thing. God is in those who help the victims of such things, who reach out to others and show the grace and love of God written in their hearts. “Why was that man born blind?” ask Jesus’ opponents. “So I have the chance to help him and heal him,” is his reply.
God indeed is not in the earthquake, is not in the horror, not in the fire, nor the flood. God is not in our misdoings and our failure to do the right thing. All these show us how far the world is from God's ultimate intention, not God in action. Rather, God is in the efforts of people trying to do the right thing. God is in those who help the victims of such things, who reach out to others and show the grace and love of God written in their hearts. “Why was that man born blind?” ask Jesus’ opponents. “So I have the chance to help him and heal him,” is his reply.
May we all this week
continue in our prayers and searching to find such loving and repentant
hearts.
In the name of Christ,
Amen.
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