Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne
Readings – Genesis 1.1 – 2.4; Genesis 3; Exodus 14.10-15.1; Ezekiel 37. 1-14; Romans 6. 3-11; Matthew 28. 1-10
Didn’t we have an awful lot of readings this evening? And weren’t a lot of them from odd bits of the Bible with unscientific stories like creation in six days, seas parting to open a walking path, and talking snakes? Wouldn’t we better just talking about God’s love and how God wants us to love others?
William Blake, Eve Tempted by the Serpent (1799-1800). Hangs in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
I don’t agree. These readings form the main arc of the Christian story – how we are related to God, and why Jesus had to come into the world: that’s why we have them tonight. They aren’t a science textbook and God never intended them to be when He inspired them to be written.
Science may explain our biological evolution but it does not explain our moral evolution. One of the great unanswered questions of human origins is how did we change from being creatures of instinct like other animals, to creatures of reason, and creatures with a moral sense, the ability to tell right from wrong? Where does the sense of right and wrong come from? That question provokes another, related, one – why do we human beings so often do things that we know to be wrong? For we seem to be doomed to constantly damage not only other human beings, but other life-forms, however well-meaning our intentions might be.
One of the saddest realities of human existence is that, as we spread across the world, mass extinctions of the native wildlife followed us in every place we expanded into, soon after we arrived. That is true on every continent and island; ever since we had the spear and the ability to create fire, we’ve been wiping other creatures out. We drove the mammoth to extinction before we even had rudimentary agriculture.
Many thousands of years before even the oldest parts of the Bible were composed, we were already out of balance with the rest of life. In our own time, we have unparalleled access to physical power through our technology, which we think makes us superior – yet it is we, and not our less advanced ancestors, who risk ruining our planet’s capacity to sustain life.
The Garden of Eden is a myth about what humans were before we seized the means to dominate the rest of God’s creation, before we had the capacity to exterminate other forms of life at our convenience. In the Garden, every part of creation, including humans, was in harmony with everything else and with God. God was so close that you could hear Him breathing when He walked through the garden in the cool of the evening.
Humans are identified right at the start of the Bible as being a very special part of creation – made in the image and likeness of God: created last, the summit of God’s creation. We were God’s apprentices, being trained to tend and keep the Earth, and made for eventual union with God, for theosis. There were no rules in the garden – except for one. The only thing we were forbidden do was to eat the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and we were told that if we did, we would die. We ate the fruit – of course we did.
The Fall is all about the gap between what we were created by God to be, and what we in fact are. Central to the Christian story is the idea that we were created to be something other than we’ve ended up being, that we became alienated from our true nature. Two things alienated us – the Devil and we ourselves.
The Devil tempted us to reach beyond the limits God set for us, saying that God was lying when he told us that we would die if we learned the difference between good and evil. The Devil sought to divide us not only from God, but from the rest of creation, and then ultimately from one another. But it’s too easy to blame the Devil – we humans were and still are more than willing to believe his lies. Through our own self-will, our apprenticeship as curators of God’s creation was broken, as was our harmony with it. We had to leave the garden to enter a world of pain and death – we left the world of myth and entered history.
Yet God didn’t abandon us. The Passover story showed God still in love with these rebellious creatures made in His image. He intervened here on the side of the oppressed against their persecutors. This was part of a longer story of the Jewish people and their relationship with God showing human beings remaining as rebellious and self-defeating as they were in the Garden of Eden; while God, although sometimes chastising them and sometimes angry with them, never abandoned them. Yet, the human race got stuck in a rut, full of good intentions, but never able to escape the disharmony that resulted from eating the fruit in the garden; never able to escape from the reign of selfishness and death.
A rescue plan was needed. This is where it gets strange, for Christianity is a very strange faith. God became a human being, one of us, in the mightiest Empire the world had seen to that point; but not as a child born to be king, but a carpenter’s son from a little town of no account in a remote part of a troubled province. Jesus of Nazareth didn’t lay down a new legal code, but taught in mysterious stories that different people understand in different ways, and He didn’t seek political power but a new kingdom of self-giving love.
People listened to Jesus and Palestine became a better place — only joking, of course they didn’t!
Although He sought no power, those in power saw Him as a threat and put Him to death. But this man was actually God, the source of life, and could not die. Somehow, mysteriously, in dying He destroyed our death.
His followers had no idea of that at first, though. When some of his most faithful supporters, distraught, came to His tomb at the crack of dawn two days later to tend to His body and mourn Him, they were confronted with some very weird experiences: an earthquake, and then an angel who rolled the stone away and told them to tell their friends that Jesus had been raised from the dead. These were among the few people to stay with Jesus right to the end on the Cross, but the fact that they were women made it less likely that their strange tale would be believed in their patriarchal society. Yet God gave them the task of conveying the most important news in history. That, strangely, seemed to be precisely the point, not as a test of faith from God, but to upend conventional standards of who is valuable and who is not. God, who is the source of all life and can make even dry bones live, treasures all human beings even when they themselves do not.
A big part of this story arc is that God is at often work unnoticed, in the margins, in ways people don’t expect. Like when some women visit the tomb of an executed friend at the break of dawn and find the world has changed forever, or when a small congregation gathers in a church in a village of no consequence thousands of years later to celebrate that Jesus Christ rose from the dead.
This is all terribly relevant to a world where it’s becoming ever clearer that we can’t save ourselves through cleverness or technology. We’re as prone as we were to dominating all around us to destruction point, and we now have enough knowledge and power to destroy ourselves too. Our problem in the garden wasn’t that we were stupid, but we were greedy. Our deep mess over climate should tell us that. We need to trust that only God can save us — and that’s alright, because God already has saved us, two millennia ago.
Now thanks be to God the Father, who has given us the victory through Our Lord Jesus Christ, in the power of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
