A direction to follow
Commentary
Believers ordinarily have less difficulty thinking about the existence of God than they do accounting for evil in God's creation. When pressed, most of them would be inclined to back up into the first book of the Bible and look for answers there to the "why?" questions about evil.
Sooner or later, but probably sooner, their search for answers would lead them to the familiar story of the snake. "The serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that the Lord God had made." The problem with the idea of pinning it all on the serpent is this: it gets us nowhere. All we learn about this crafty being, which was not yet condemned to crawling, is that God made it and that it was crafty. Crafty, this time, means something bad. But did God make the snake crafty and bad? Or innocent and good? If the latter, how did it get to become crafty and bad?
Dead end. Maybe the other end of the Bible might be of help. There's some word tucked away toward its end, about "a war in heaven." But try making sense of that either to explain why innocents get bombed, parents abandon children, cancer cells multiply. Another dead end.
So we are left in the Garden, or outside of it, where the colloquy with the serpent went on. We bring to the scene or take from it our various theories of free will and choice. The element that stays most in the mind in the drama of Eden is this insight >or revelation about human nature: if there is an impulse to be tempted, to disobey, it should have the odds against. Eve and Adam could have eaten of all trees -- except one. So it acquired an allure, and temptation led them to follow the one forbidden choice in a garden of luscious permitted opportunities.
Romans 5:12-19
Stay away from theology! That might sound like the best advice in a week when a Sunday reading invites a preacher into a morass of meanings at the edge of meaninglessness. A riddle of existence, an enigma of history that the sages, philosophers, and theologians through 20 centuries have not solved is not likely to be clarified in a 20-minute treatment in one corner of the Christian world on one Sunday in 1996.
Stay away from theology! That does sound like strange advice coming from someone who teaches at a theological school and regularly calls for more theological depth in ministry. After offering such advice twice, I find it important to describe what is meant here by "theology" and "staying away," and then offering an alternative.
Theology here means theos+logos, a word about God designed to clarify the divine-human relationship. How to theologize without causing people to lay the blame for their shortcomings on someone else -- "Adam"! or see themselves destined to fall short, or even to blame God for the whole transaction is the problem. It cannot
neatly be done.
The alternatives are anthropology and Christology. A good rule in Christian thinking is this: since you cannot peer into the divine majesty, you can probe the human condition. In a 50,000-word footnote that theologian Karl Barth's American publishers turned into a book, Christ and Adam, we were taught to observe that we see other people too much, quite naturally, "in Adam." Instead we should also see each other "in Christ." That we are tied to the human condition, and carrying all its limits, is natural, easy to see. That we are tied to the divine condition, carrying the possibilities that come with the life in Christ -- and that we are to see them in others -- that's more than natural. And, hence, to be stressed.
Matthew 4:1-11
This story would be easy to take if it could be reduced, as artists or cartoonists might reduce it, to a desert dialogue between a stately but tortured man and a menacing, red union-suited, forked-tail underworld character. Naturally, since the man in the scenario is from God and the character is anti-God, we have to know who the winner in any encounter will be. We have heard the story before, so the outcome is utterly predictable. Send people home early; they know all that is likely to be said.
However, picture the temptation of Jesus as a highly condensed, thickly packed, tense version of what his divine purpose was about and how vulnerable it was to misinterpretation, how easy it would have been to deviate from its path, and one will come to a drama that could never be resolved in his life and that produces stirrings even today.
That the path ahead of Jesus, in the Gospels' telling of it, was one that demanded risk was obvious. Here he was offered a risk-free scenario. That he could be a cosmic show-off and entertain Jerusalem for a day and win a following must have crossed his mind often. Most of all, being promised the kingdoms of a world that was not obviously his -- his kind of power was no match for tall-tower imperial life -- should have been alluring.
What is refreshing about this dialogue is its abruptness. It is confined to three short responses, each of them a biblical question. The key words of the response are "not," "not," and "away." The longer one entertains the teasingly attractive alternative, the easier it gets to say "yes." The brisk and brusque put-downs served Jesus well as they do anyone who, following him, has a mission about which to be clear, a direction to follow, a calling. And a calling is a great gift and a great simplifier.
FIRST LESSON FOCUS
By James A. Nestingen
Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7
Pasting together selected verses as Christians have since the early days of the church, this text has obvious doctrinal significance. This and its other uses, including theodicy, often obscure what is plain when it stands alone: that the fall, as Lutheran theologian Gerhard Forde puts it, is really a rise, one that repeats itself again and again in a sinner's heart.
As Genesis describes it, both Adam and Eve were created with limits. One of them is in the earth itself. Their beginnings are in the dust; life enters them through the air that they breathe and they are made for the earth, depending on the green things for food as they look after the garden God has created.
Another limit built right into things for Adam and Eve is one another. The passage about Adam's rib, long used by men to subordinate women, has been left out of the pasteup. But there is enough remaining in Genesis' bare bones realism to show the actual situation: neither Adam nor Eve can survive without the other. Their lives are webbed together in a synchronicity of interdependence.
There is a third limit, the Creator. God planted the garden and gave the plants growth; God formed the creatures out of the creation, calling them into their vocations; God declared what could be eaten and what should be refused.
It was these limits, as real as life itself, that became the focus of Adam and Eve's rebellion. They were not junior gods, sparks of divinity, which somehow fell into mortality. They were gritty, substantial people who could see across the fence and
wanted what was on the other side. That's the temptation. It's not that Adam and Eve had a free will but that they wanted one, the freedom to take hold of their destinies, willing the sources of life into their own hands. As they sought to grasp it, the limits defied turned against them, life slipping away into death.
This rising tide of rebellion marks the sinner in each of us. It may take the form of an all-out quest to dominate, lunging at life in force. Or it may appear in withdrawal, self-concealment, the tricks and traps of the passive aggressive. Either way, any way, the old sinner is loose, looking over the top or underneath the nearest limit, seeking a way through.
And then, of course, we'll have to do just what we did: put the one divine lover to death. For even love, especially love, is a reminder that life is not our own. Looking for illustrations? Might as well start where it begins, in the mirror. That's Lent.
