Lent 1, Year A | Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
February 26, 2023
the Rev. Jonathan Hanneman
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Original Sin!
The specter of human existence. That unavoidable stain. The tainting and corruption that infests us before we can choose right or wrong for ourselves. This Spiritual Death we inherit even before we’re born.
Original Sin has held a significant position within the history of the Church. Our Hebrew Bible reading recalls the story of its fateful beginnings while our Psalm sings about God mercifully overriding it. Paul waxed eloquent about it in our passage from Romans, and Matthew shows Jesus conquering it in the Temptation in the Wilderness. Original Sin has shaped human society from time immemorial, leading us to the confusion, violence, and discord that continues to plague the world today—and not just the world but the universe itself. “If only,” Creation continues to groan, “If only Eve hadn’t listened to the Serpent. If only she hadn’t tasted the fruit. If only she had never offered it to Adam!”
Foolish Adam and poor, deceived Eve—if they had only listened! Then none of us would be forced to deal with this mess!
Or would we?
While broadly accepted as a fundamental Christian teaching today, Original Sin is one of those may-or-may-not-be’s of the Bible. Judaism doesn’t generally recognize the concept, and it wasn’t a formalized Church doctrine until the 4th Century CE or so. We’re conditioned to read it onto the Bible—particularly these texts—but Original Sin is more of a theological construct than a definitive Biblical statement.
Unfortunately, the Church has used this teaching to support its more misogynistic tendencies since theologians began debating it. Various denominations point to it as they reject the ordination of women. People fond of “Christian headship” combine the idea with other writings appearing to support ancient Roman social practices to demand enforcement of what they consider to be “traditional” gender roles in their households. Oddly, despite our Romans passage clearly placing responsibility for sin on Adam, Eve is the one who continues to suffer most.
Theologians have also used Original Sin to establish a sort of spiritual pseudoscience, essentially turning sin—at least this one—into a genetic trait. The idea goes that Eve was the first to eat the fruit, but since she was tricked into it, sin itself entered the world through Adam, apparently because he made the active choice to disobey God. As such, whatever this corruption—this Original Sin—is, it must somehow pass through the father. Our amateur geneticists then use this thinking to explain the necessity for the Virgin Birth. Sin passes through the father, yet God’s Messiah needed to be free of this innate corruption. In order to have a truly pure Savior, God—and no human man—had to be the direct source of Jesus’ conception. Born without a father yet fully human because of his mother, Jesus was free from this hereditary Original Sin, which made it possible for him to be the spotless Lamb of God slain for all our sins, including that very first one.
Tracing that kind of logic can be a fun intellectual practice, but it has about as much value in the real life as trying to avoid whatever unnamed kind of fruit it was that Adam and Eve ate. The texts of the Bible weren’t written as scientific treatises or formal works of systematized theology. The stories were meant to help people retain important truths across changing generations while the Epistles show us early Christian leaders attempting to make sense of what happened through Jesus and what it might mean for people across different cultures in their own world.
Hereditary stain or not, if Genesis reveals the actuality of Original Sin, then I think our passage stopped short of what it really was. We talk about eating a piece of fruit as an act of disobedience resulting in the condemnation of exile and eternal death. But that punishment is absurdly disproportionate to the crime. Moses’ Law, a shadowy and imperfect reflection of God’s person and reality, restricts the severity of a punishment to causing no greater damage than the crime. And while God may be the Universal Sovereign who can mete out any sentence they desire, God is also the Ideal Parent and Perfection of Love. How many of your parents ever exiled you for sneaking a cookie before dinner? Have you chased your own children from your house with a flaming sword for something like that? What about pronouncing a generational curse on your grandchildren for what their mom or dad might have done as kids? If we recognize those responses as excessive, why do we think that God would respond to grabbing the wrong snack with such unyielding vengeance?
But if eating the fruit wasn’t the Original Sin, where does sin—disruption of and damage to relationship—actually appear in the story of Adam and Eve? It’s about five verses after the close of our Lectionary passage where we read:
God said, “‘Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?’
The man said, ‘The woman whom you gave to be with me,
she gave me fruit from the tree, and I ate.’”[1]
And there it is, the one action that truly brought division and animosity into the world, the trait that continues to pass unnoticed through every generation and has led to millennia of violence, pain, and death.
God asks Adam what happened, and his first reaction is to point the finger and accuse his closest friend, saying, “This is her fault! She made me do it!”[2] God turns to Eve and asks what happened, and her response mirrors Adam’s. “That snake tricked me! It’s their fault!”
And so began the cycle of blame, deflection, and accusation that still shatters our world. We fear to admit our own culpability, so whatever bad thing happens, it’s always someone else’s fault. I observe changes to the world that scare me or I don’t understand and instantly find someone else to blame. It’s China or Russia or Catholics or Evangelicals or Democrats or Republicans. It’s Muslims or the LGBTQ+ community or Hollywood actors or whatever. No matter what’s going on, accepting our role in the problem is too great a strain for our self-image. It can’t be my fault—I’m a good guy! I’m a Christian! I’m on God’s side! So no matter what I may have done in any particular situation, the problem can’t possibly be me. And if the problem isn’t me, it must be them.
We even do it with this passage!
“If only Eve hadn’t listened to the Serpent. If only she hadn’t tasted the fruit. If only she had never offered it to Adam!”[3] “If only…if only…if only…” is simply a roundabout way of saying, “Don’t look at me; it’s their fault!” In our attempts to locate the source and moment of the Original Sin, we fall into the same trap that perpetuates it.
This Lent, God is calling us to repent, to change. During this season we take time to look directly at our own lives and make every effort to observe reality with clear eyes. We can choose to stop looking across the ocean or across the street or down the pew beside us. We can stop casting blame on dusty figures of mythic prehistory, shades who can never truly bear our present shame. We can stop bewailing others’ mistakes, learning instead to identify and own our own. It might be impossible to undo what’s already happened, but we have an opportunity right now to change the future by following Christ on his path to death, by laying aside those extra weights that unnecessarily burden us so we can finally take responsibility for our own. Carrying our own failures and humbly presenting them at the foot of the cross, we too might just discover God’s power to take this death we continue to bear and transform it into hope and life.
[1] Genesis 3:11b-12 | All Bible quotations are from the NRSV unless otherwise noted.
[2] He also subtly blames God for creating Eve in the first place.
[3] Note how we still blame Eve!