Sermon transcript:1
Adam, Eve, the serpent and the apple—ask someone that’s never set foot in a church to name a story from scripture; it’s likely they’ll name this one. It’s central to the Christian tradition. It’s interesting, though, that to our Jewish siblings, this story isn’t that important. It certainly is not on par with the exodus from Egypt, the rise of David, or the Babylonian exile. In fact, this is only referred to a couple of times in the Hebrew scriptures.
So, why such importance in the Christian tradition? Well, it has to do with the Jesus lens. The writers of the New Testament are trying to answer the question, “how could this man of God, the supposed savior of the Jewish people, how is it that he is executed like a common criminal?” To answer this question, they turn to the tools at their disposal—their culture and their scriptures. In the scriptures they see the story of God saving the Jewish people from the final plague in Egypt (the death of first-born sons) by instructing them to sacrifice a lamb and smear the blood on their doors, to mark the homes as Jewish. The New Testament writers also live in a culture of religious sacrifice—animals are routinely slaughtered at the temple to mark important events, and to atone for sins. With this cultural and religious background people begin to identify Jesus as the “lamb of God”: the one who is sacrificed in the crucifixion to save Israel from sin. The original sin brought into the world through Adam and Eve’s disobedience in the Garden of Eden (Romans 5: 12-21). The story of Eve, Adam and the serpent becomes central to the Christian story because it helps to make sense of what happens to Jesus.
Because of the baggage this story carries, it can be difficult to see it any other way. Joseph Campbell, the late world-renowned expert on mythology, has studied our scripture with the rigour of an academic and the artistry of a storyteller. Campbell sees the Garden of Eden as a place of unity, where men and women do not know that they are different from each other, where God and humans are practically the same, God walks in the garden with them.
When Eve and Adam eat the apple, their sense of unity disappears, and they step into a world of opposites—light and dark, good and evil, human and divine. Campbell says this is the moment we begin to see everything in opposite categories instead of as one whole. From then on, the world is no longer seamless. We start to name, sort, and divide. What was once whole is broken open, and we find ourselves apart from it—aware, separate, and longing to belong again.
Campbell says that to live is to be in a world of opposites, a world of divisions. We cannot seem to help it; it’s how we make sense of life. We take this common life we have together and we fragment it—animals and humans, Canadians and Americans, Jews and Muslims, black and white, rich and poor. Doing this serves a purpose: dividing the world into categories helps us make sense of life. At a traffic stop, you want to be able to distinguish light according to colour. At dinner, you want to be able to distinguish the salt from the pepper. To communicate, we need to divide the world up so that there is common agreement that when we say a certain word we all mean the same thing.
This all makes sense, but the problem is that we’ve become so caught up in trying to master and control the world by separating it into categories that we’ve lost sight of the deep connection, the unity, that holds everything together. Examples abound everywhere. Just look at all the groups of people that refuse to acknowledge each other’s humanity because they resist or have forgotten the unity that underlies difference, whether that be because of categories of ethnicity, skin colour, gender, sexual orientation, and on and on. Consider the current environmental crisis: in large part, it is a spiritual problem, caused by our refusal to see ourselves as part of creation. We treat the planet as something apart from us; we act as if the health of the planet and all living things on it don’t affect us. This ancient, well-known story of faith has something to offer us beyond attempts to make sense of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. It is saying that behind and before all the divisions, all the opposites, there is a unity to life. Christians call that unity God, the name we have bestowed upon the Great Mystery, with our limited language.
The Lenten journey is about finding our way back to that unity, to the place beyond opposites, beyond division; to the oneness we call God. It’s the journey taken by Jesus. It costs him his life. Jesus is a threat to those who benefit from the carving up of the world into kingdoms, classes, and religions in his day and ours. The beauty and glory of Jesus is his seeing beyond the categories of sinner and righteous, rich and poor, man and woman, disabled and able-bodied, Jew and gentile, child and adult. Jesus sees beyond the human-imposed, fragmented categories of life to expose the glory of God that lives in the hearts of the people he encounters, seeing beyond the world of opposites to the unity of Eden. The former Moderator of the United Church of Canada, Peter Short, spoke at my graduation from seminary and he used a phrase that sticks with me still: he said, “we are haunted by our memory of Eden.” In other words, even though we live in a world of opposites, a world that is divided and fragmented, there is something inside of us, a distant primal memory perhaps that longs for the unity at the heart of all things and our place in it.
What if, instead of only seeing this story through the Jesus lens, we also see the Jesus story through the Eden lens? Through this lens, Jesus is more than a sacrifice who saves us from sin; Jesus, by his life of love, is the one who points and leads us back to Eden. “The kingdom of God is among you” (Luke 17: 21) Jesus said. Eden is in our midst when we see the world as it really is. May our Lenten journeys lead us there.
Rev. Joe Gaspar
1 This reflection relies heavily on the thoughts and analysis of Joseph Campbell in his interviews with Bill Moyers in the book The Power of Myth, Doubleday, 1988, pp. 5, 47-48 and 107.