Welcome to the new school year!

Today's Old Testament reading tells one of the two Genesis stories of the creation of human life.  You might remember that in the first version, God creates man and woman together at the same time:  “…male and female created he them…”  This is the second version, the one in which Eve is created from the rib of Adam.  By the way, the word “Adam” as the Bible uses it before Eve’s creation means “undifferentiated earth creature,” not “a man.”  It is only after Eve is created that a man named Adam—that is, what is left after Eve is taken out—comes into existence.  So we could, if we wanted to, make a compelling case that Eve was actually created before Adam.  But I digress.  Because the focus of our passage today is not so much on the creation of human beings, but on the big no-no that God sticks in the middle of their garden. 

"The tree of the knowledge of good and evil," God calls it.  How tantalizing!  Of course, God sternly warns his new creation not to eat the fruit of that one tree.  What is going to follow is immediately obvious.  It is what always follows in stories around the very common mythological theme of "the one forbidden thing."  Like Pandora’s box.  The story of the one forbidden thing has only one logical outcome, which you can guess.  If you have any doubts about the outcome of such a story, just fill a room with toys and put in a child and, say, a rock and tell the kid he can play with anything in the room except the rock.  “Don’t touch the rock!”  you say.  See what he goes for the minute your back is turned.

So stories about the one forbidden thing always come out pretty much the way you'd expect, and this one is no exception.  God doesn't have to be omnipotent to know that Adam is going to eat that fruit.  We all know, even the first time we hear the story, that Adam is going to eat that fruit.  So why does God put that tree there, knowing his humans will fail the test?  It seems like a dirty trick, a rigged contest; God comes across as either very evilly manipulative or confoundingly dumb.  You probably aren’t comfortable with either of those possibilities, so we have to assume that God had a reason for setting up this no-win situation.  God knew the humans would eat the darn fruit.  Maybe that’s what God had in mind.  Gee!  Maybe God wanted us to know the difference between good and evil!  Voila! 

But then why forbid it?  Why tack on a punishment, and a horrible one, at that? Why not just give them the apple, and tell them to eat it, and save the suspense?  After all, how are they supposed to know it’s wrong to disobey God if they don’t know the difference between good and evil, right and wrong, yet?  This is a set-up, pure and simple.  The humans creatures’ choice wasn’t really a choice at all.  Or, even if we use the broadest possible definition of “free will” and say they did, sort of, have a choice, it was not the choice to obey or disobey, to succeed or fail, to be saved or damned—it was the choice to be fully human, no longer obliviously content furry mammals, but conscious and conscientious beings of intellect and spirit.  Surely this is the “choice” God was hoping for, our option to be fit companions for God, to live in God’s image, to share in the divine spark of awareness, to be able to appreciate beauty and love and even mortality.  Surely, even knowing the pain the choice would bring, God smiled to see that the divine spark put into the creatures ultimately won out, that they opted for curiosity and imagination and knowledge, that they yearned to become co-creators through art and language and building. 

I can’t read this story as a disaster, the grimmest day in history, the genesis of evil.  I read it as a story of the day creation became truly alive, with all the slings and arrows that brings, with the prospect of suffering and death, but with the possibility of joy and hope to counteract despair and the sheer thrill of living to counteract the fear of dying.  I realize that they put this lesson here, at the beginning of Lent, because it is supposed to make us feel sinful, or at least remorseful, but while that is certainly the standard interpretation, I don’t think we have to buy into it.  Let’s say it’s here not because it is a tragic story, but because it is a cautionary one.   Even if we read the story of the first humans munching on forbidden fruit as one with a happy outcome, we must admit that having the knowledge of good and evil is a burden. 

Moreover, this gift of knowing does not always impart clarity.  All too often, we just think we know what's Good.  Loads of Christians today are convinced they know absolute Right from absolute Wrong.  And they are prepared to separate you from your children, your civil rights, and perhaps your life if you don't measure up.  Not recognizing the ambivalence of our knowing, not accepting that we only know obscurely and fuzzily, can be downright dangerous.  Over the generations, the world has been littered with the ruin left behind by Christians who were sure they knew Good from Evil. We must be very careful about judging everyone else's actions with this gift of knowledge.

In any case, there's no going back. We wanted the knowledge of good and evil, and we got it, and now God expects us to use it.  That knowledge comes in handy for Jesus in today's Gospel.  There the very human Jesus is, up on the mountain, and the devil comes to tempt him.  Now, it's helpful that Jesus knows right from wrong in this situation, for which I suppose he can thank Adam. 

Now, we may have the knowledge of good and evil, but we often don’t use that knowledge wisely, or act on what we know.   Jesus uses it wisely, and turns away his tempter.  We don’t always do so well.  Of course, our temptations aren't the same as Jesus'.  I am rarely tempted to climb to the top of a tall cliff and throw myself off, to see whether angels will catch me.

There are many other temptations we are faced with, however, and despite our hard-won consciences, we often make poor choices.  We are tempted by, and succumb to, the allure of too much good food, warm beds on Sunday mornings, computer solitaire, celebrity news flashes, and shop windows.  We also fall to more sinister temptations:  prejudice, self-centeredness, greed, thoughtlessness, arrogance.

The difficult question is why, if we have this terrific knowledge of good and evil, we have such a hard time resisting temptation.  Just knowing what’s right doesn’t seem to be enough to make us do it.  Maybe our ancestors didn't eat enough of the apple.  Maybe they should have eaten three or four. Or maybe over the centuries, we've begun to forget how to tell the difference, or why it is important. 

Nevertheless, we do seem to know, intuitively, when we have done wrong.  Unless we cover it up with biblical self-righteousness or modern psychobabble, we know when we've failed to resist

temptation.  Even if we've managed to overcome the burden of guilt laid on us by moralistic families, bad sermons in our childhood, overbearing nuns, crummy popular Christian literature, or theological oversimplifications, we can still sense, somehow, when we've blown it.

Ah!  Finally we get to that sin thing.  Now, I've often suspected our forebears were entirely too cozy with the idea of sin.  They enjoyed it entirely too much.  They made long, detailed lists of all the possible sins.  If your ancestors were Roman Catholic or perhaps a certain kind of Anglo-catholic, they would check off the lists, then rattle them off one by one to a priest sitting behind a screen in a wooden box.  If they were reformed protestants, they may have spent hours on their

knees, or been shunned by the community, or perhaps been dunked in a pond on the end of a pole.  If they were Episcopalians, their lawyers took care of it.

Nonetheless, the old prayer books were masterworks of penitence and self-rebuke.  The prayer

of humble access was my favorite thing to hate about having to go to church as a child (that, and the interminable Prayer for the Whole State of Christ's Church.)  Even then, I did not feel "unworthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under" God's table.  I did not feel like a miserable offender.  And I couldn't understand why, if Jesus died for our sins, and if we had just said the confession and were absolved for some other set of sins, we now had to grovel and generally humiliate ourselves just to finally get to communion.  I liked communion, even though we didn't have it very often.  I felt perfectly worthy to be up there with everybody else.

But that didn't mean I thought I was all that sinless.  I knew I was far from being a perfect kid.  I was mean to my sister.  I had this fresh mouth that continually got me in trouble.  I knew when I wasn't good.  And I was sorry.  It was only as time went on that I was taught in Sunday School--and later, in a Catholic parochial school--that I was born utterly sinful, that no matter how sorry I was or good I was, it didn't really matter because I was just going to keep on doing things that would send me straight to hell.

This was all pretty confusing, because it didn't match at all with the way I felt, then or now.  We turn to Jesus, not in desperation, but because in his long shadow we sense both our shortfalls and our ultimate justification.  Christianity, it seems to me, is nothing if we don't learn from Jesus that

to be human is something pretty special.  To be human is not to be born irretrievably evil, quivering and cowed before God's righteousness.  And if it ever was, Jesus slammed the door on that era and sealed it shut forever both by deed and example. 

But that does not take us off the hook for our own misdeeds.  We still have to account for those, and most especially to those we have wronged.  No God worth a darn is more interested in being personally appeased than in seeing reconciliation between the sinner and the sinned against. And a silent, muttered General Confession might not do the whole trick.  There is need for confession, there is need to distinguish good from evil, there is need for penitence and reconciliation before we celebrate.  There is need for Lent.

It may seem easier never to have known that there were such things as good and evil, never to have been thrown out of the garden, to have remained ignorant and happy.  I prefer to think that, rather than having been victimized by some primeval mistake, we are still evolving. The knowledge that Adam gained for us by eating the fruit of that tree is still in the process of refinement.  I prefer to think that our greater awareness of the sinfulness of interracial hatred, of the horror and futility of

war, of gender discrimination, of the status of children as persons, of corporate greed, of the evil of poverty, of the dangers of destroying the earth and its resources, are all signs that, very slowly, we are growing up.  Slowly but surely, I want to believe, we are learning, bit by bit, how to use that knowledge of good and evil.