Lent 01, Year A: Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7
Episcopal Church of the Holy Cross
March 1, 2020
Jonathan Hanneman
Today marks our first Sunday in the season of Lent, and we open with the passage from the Hebrew Bible commonly referred to as “the Fall of Man.” Over the ages, people have speculated about what kind of fruit it was that Adam and Eve ate. Some say a banana, some a pomegranate. If you go by the art world, you’d be sure to think it was an apple. Shannon and I like to joke that it was a quince. For those of you unfamiliar with quince, it looks like a rough, yellow apple. The fruit smells floral and alluring, almost like honey. And it tastes great—provided you cook it. If you eat quince raw, it has an inedibly astringent flavor, and texturally, even a small bite feels like you just stuffed your mouth with sawdust.
My wife and I suspect that when Eve bit the quince, she had the all-too-human reaction of turning to Adam and saying, “You have got to taste this—it’s terrible!” As Adam spat out his mouthful, he said, “Ugh! I can’t believe God made something that awful! Clearly God doesn’t know what God’s doing.” Thus the first humans learned to distinguish the good from the bad, forever dooming humanity in the process.
But truth be told, it doesn’t really matter what the fruit was. It honestly doesn’t even matter if the story is factual history or not. Unlike our detailed information-driven society, ancient people preferred to share their knowledge and traditions more symbolically through story. And despite a long history of men using this passage to legitimize patriarchy and the poor treatment of women, the important thing wasn’t really who was at fault or what exactly happened. The important thing was that for longer than anybody could remember, the world had become dangerous—even broken—and, as creatures most closely linked to the image of the Creator God, it was largely humanity’s responsibility to make things better.
To be honest, even if the story were factual, I don’t think that disobeying God by eating the fruit was the real first sin. No parent exiles a child for stealing a cookie. I think the “original sin” itself occurs just after our reading, when Adam first blames Eve (as a roundabout way of blaming God) and Eve in turn blames the talking serpent. This aligns better with our Romans reading, where sin entered the world through one man, not one woman. It also matches up with one of the primary problems we see around the world today: it’s always someone else’s fault.
Across the planet, very few people—as groups or individually—want to take responsibility for their own actions. Whatever the problem is, someone else is always to blame. For an everyday example, have you noticed that, no matter how frequently one makes a mistake, it’s always someone else who’s the bad driver? I experience road rage not because of my own anger boiling over but because of what someone else did.
In a more global perspective, modern Israel blames Palestinian violence for needing to implement its abusive security measures, and the Palestinians in turn blame the Israelis for continuing to steal more and more of their land while imposing impossibly harsh restrictions on innocent people which tend to lead toward furthering radicalization and violence.
Or to listen to certain commentators, you might think that “an invasion” of largely non-white immigrants or poor people create all the problems with our economy and safety. Or maybe you think it’s Russia or China’s fault. Or the Democrats. Or the Republicans. Or Congress. Or maybe the President.
Whoever’s fault it is, it’s clearly not because of me or my group.
We even see this sin at work in the Church itself, despite Jesus and the Apostles’ instructions to proclaim the Good News though faithfulness, unity, and love. From almost the beginning, the Early Church broadbrushed the ethnically Jewish population for problems in their communities, so the Greek-speaking Christians rejected and disavowed them, leading to millennia of abuse and maltreatment. Later, the eastern, Greek-speaking Orthodox Christians were at fault, so the western, Latin-speaking Roman Christians excommunicated them. A few hundred years after that, the southern Romance language Roman Catholic Church was at fault, so the northern Germanic-speaking Christians split off, forming the greater Protestant tradition. Once the various Germanic tongues found they couldn’t agree, they divided into a bunch of different, smaller churches that, even today, keep spawning tinier and tinier new sects and traditions, each of which continues to think that everybody else is wrong, and only our group has the true interpretation of the Bible and Christian worship practices.
It just keeps happening, doesn’t it? No one wants to take responsibility for their own actions and errors. Little by little, the world continues to fall apart, working its way toward social, political, and environmental anarchy. And at the base of it all, we really want to find the right person to bear the blame.
And if you think about it, isn’t that why Jesus had to be killed?
We, as humanity, keep messing things up. The blame first spawned in the Garden of Eden keeps shifting and multiplying and spreading. We smear it on each other like kids playing in the mud, never once paying attention to how filthy we’ve become. Only once we’re home and tracking it through the kitchen, only once an authority figure demands to know who made this mess, do we start to become aware of the consequences of our earlier actions. And rather than face the facts, we almost always rush to find someone else to blame: my sister did it, or maybe the dog. Or—oh yeah—we’re pretty sure we saw a bad guy with dirty boots running through the house. That must have been it!
The blame keeps sliding from one innocent party to another until we eventually find the comfort of believing ourselves. Once we convince enough people to join our delusion, we discover we have the power to relieve our own guilt by inflicting that pain on someone else. So we look for the easiest target that we can: the outsider or the innocent. We use them as scapegoats to carry our shame and then either get someone else to run them off into the wilderness or go ahead and kill them ourselves.
Maybe that’s why Jesus, as our scapegoat, had to starve in the wilderness for forty days. Maybe that’s why he had to face so much scrutiny and testing from the religious authorities of his day. Maybe that’s why he had to bear the wrath of Empire. Someone was responsible for all our problems, and as a blank canvas, it was an easy job for us to project all our failures onto him.
So maybe that’s where we should start this Lent. What, exactly, is my responsibility in the situation facing me? How will I respond? How will my choices and actions in any particular moment affect others? How might they already have done so? What can I do to make amends?
It really boils down to what kind of standard we want to set for the future. What sort of legacy will we leave? Who do we really want to be like? Will we follow the ancient tradition of our ancestors and continue to spread death by ignoring our own faults and holding others responsible for our actions? Or will we follow our Savior, the one who not only shouldered the weight of his own responsibilities but also, for the good of others, accepted the blame rightly belonging to us, bearing the consequences of our wrongdoings and, in that way, restoring life, healing, and redemption to the world?
We each face tests. We each face trials. We each face temptations. No one can avoid them forever. Some are more severe than others, but all of them are difficult in the moment. The question isn’t whether or not those things will take place, whether or not we’ll someday sin or make a mistake. The question is, when we do, how will we respond?