March 1, 2020
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Lent 1 – Year A
Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7; Romans 5:12-19; Matthew 4:1-11
The Rev. Bradley Varnell
Today’s lesson from Genesis is the first story we have in Scripture of shattered trust. Adam and Eve are in the garden and the serpent appears, tempting them to do the one thing God said not to do: eat from the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil. And they do it! The result is a tragic, immediate awareness of their own nakedness. They see themselves as exposed, as vulnerable, as capable of being hurt. Before there was no knowledge of this, no thought in their mind that someone or something might mislead them. They were like children, who see only good. They were like children, who knew the word of God and knew, in their bones, that whatever God said was true and good and beautiful and right. God could be trusted, the God who created them, who brought then out of the dust of the ground, willed and desired only their best!
Adam and Eve lived in a state of absolute and total trust in God. But the serpent introduces a new thought: what if...what if God can’t really be trusted? God had given to Eve and Adam everything in the garden, except for this tree. What if there was more that wasn’t being given? What if…God was keeping something from them? What if God was keeping the very ability to be like God from Adam and Eve? The Serpent planted this seed in the mind of Adam and Eve and it took root.
The fall of Adam and Eve, the fall of humanity, is often taught or talked about as though it was the result of a violation of a rule. Adam and Eve broke the rule and so God dished out the punishment for breaking that rule, but I don’t think that’s quite right. I don’t think the fall is a result of a rule-break, I think the rule-breaking is a result of the fall. The fall happens when Eve and Adam choose to trust in the Serpent and not in God. The Serpent said, in so many words, that God couldn’t really be trusted and when you entertain that idea that God is fundamentally, untrustworthy, everything else goes haywire. Why follow the rule of this possibly capricious, possibly withholding deity?
What I find especially tragic in the story of the fall, is that the temptation made to Eve by the serpent is a twisting of the truth. The Serpent says that, in eating of the tree, Eve and Adam will be like God, they trust the serpent, and in trusting the serpent they forget the word of God, they forget the truth of God. Remember back in Genesis 1, God has just created the earth and stars, the creatures of the sea and the ground and the sky, and he says “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness…” From the very beginning, humanity was created to be like God. God created us to be as much like God as a creature can be.
Adam and Eve forgot. Adam and Eve forgot that they were already like God, that in their very bones they were like God, because God made them, and God gave them every possible good. Adam and Eve forgot, believing instead the Serpent. Eve and Adam are tempted by something they already had. To be like God, to desire to be like God isn’t a bad thing, it’s the greatest thing we could want to be. The first sin isn’t a desire to be like God, the first sin is forgetting what God has already given us and trusting in another instead of God. In trusting the serpent over God, humanity’s relationship with God and with everything else is broken. Doubt now exists – can we really trust God? Can we trust creation? Can we trust each other? The serpent sowed a seed of doubt that still exists in us.
It’s interesting to hear the story of Jesus’ own temptation in light of the temptation of Adam and Eve. Today Jesus finds himself away from the cities and towns of Galilee and Judaea, in the wilderness, led there by the Holy Spirit after his baptism, and here, in a setting not too different from the garden, he is tempted by Satan three times. I think it’s interesting how Satan introduces the first two temptations: “If you are the Son of God…” turn these stones to bread, throw yourself down. Christ is being tempted to prove that he is the Son of God. But he refuses. He won’t give in to temptation. We talk about Christ’s three temptations, and yes there were three specific ways in which he was tempted, but there was only one real temptation, the same temptation that got Adam and Eve: the temptation to doubt God and trust in another.
Keep in mind, the end of chapter 3 in Matthew’s Gospel is Jesus’ baptism. Do you remember what happens? Jesus goes to John, he is baptized, the skies open, the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove descends and God speaks. Do you remember what he says? God says “This. Is. My. Son.” At his baptism, God declares to everyone that Jesus is the Son of God, and now Satan comes on the scene wanting Jesus to prove it. Satan is tempting Jesus, just like he tempted Adam and Eve, tempting Jesus to doubt God. Tempting Jesus to imagine that God cannot be trusted.
But Jesus resists. Jesus’ will not stop trusting in God and in what God has said. Every temptation is met with a renewed statement of faith in God:
One does not live by bread alone…
Do not put the Lord your God to the test…
Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him…
Jesus is tempted, but Jesus at every turn trust in God. Do you see what’s happening? Paul helps us here, in the letter to the Romans which we heard from today, Paul sets up a contrast between Adam (and I would say Eve, as well) and Jesus. Through the one came death, through the other life. The temptation of Jesus in the wilderness is a kind of undoing of the fall from grace into sin. Jesus trusts God, where Adam and Eve couldn’t. Jesus becomes the new Adam, the new human. Jesus trusts in God fully, totally, completely. Jesus trusts God even to the point of death, and that trust proven on Easter morning.
Adam and Eve and Jesus. All of them were tempted to doubt God, to doubt what God had said about them: Adam and Eve were tempted to doubt that they were already like God, made in God’s likeness. Jesus was tempted to doubt that he was really God’s Son. Adam and Eve gave into temptation. They doubted that God was dependable. Jesus didn’t give into temptation. Jesus trusted.
There are plenty of serpents and devils around still. We are still tempted every day by voices that that invite us to trust what they say instead of God and what God says. The voices come from our jobs, our families, our friends, our churches(!), our politics. They’re all over. They tempt us to think, to believe that God can’t be trusted, that God’s word to us and about us can’t be trusted. Lent is a time to make space, to give up on a few of those voices that tempt us to doubt. Lent isn’t about thinking how terrible you are. It’s about taking stock of all the voices in our lives, it’s about answering the question of who we will trust. Will we trust serpents and devils that say we can’t really believe God, that we can’t really depend on God to tell us the truth about ourselves? Or will we trust God? AMEN