Temptation & Authenticity
Genesis 2:4b-9, 15-17,25-3:7; Romans 5:12-21, Matthew 4:1-11
The story from the second chapter of Genesis today is not factual history, but it’s true. The story isn’t about the facts of human development. It’s the older of the two stories presented at the beginning of the Bible about the creation of human beings and their relationship with God. Another version, a more recently written version, found in chapter one is more cosmic in scale, and places human beings after light, and water, and earth, and other animals…the crown of all creation. But this story we have today, I think shows the complex character of the human spiritual condition more accurately…. more accurately, I think, than any other story I know. It’s at least 3000 years old (probably older in its oral tradition) and yet it’s completely modern, even post-modern in its insight.
It begins with a sense that we used to be more connected, that we were once more part of the whole of life, more a part of nature, and in real touch with God. That unity, it says, was a blissful state – like a garden. It was paradise.
There is, however, hidden within this bliss, hidden in the bushes of this paradise, also a sense of the duality of human nature, contentment and ambition, humility and pride, conflicting human nature.
We are, it says, made of the dust of the ground. Those of you who came to one of the Ash Wednesday services this past week were reminded of that -- “Dust thou art and to dust you will return”. Like all created things in the world, our existence is temporal and temporary. Life is bounded by death; existence is surrounded by non-existence. And yet there is more, it says, to being human than there is to being a tree or a rock or a lily of the field or a bird of the air. We have the breath of life in us – and not just any life, but the life of God. We are enlivened by the Spirit. That’s our difference – and the earlier/later creation story sees that difference as placing human beings on the highest rung of creation. “Let us make humankind in our image”, it says. “And so God created them, male and female he created them.” “And he breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.” We’re God-like, kind of. And we’re not God.
This story here is a little less anthropocentric, even as it’s more anthropomorphic than the story in chapter one. It only hints at being made in the image of God. And it points out that being inspired to life with the Spirit of god isn’t only our glory but the point of our vulnerability, as well. That’s the point at which the snake starts to probe. And notice it’s just a snake. It’s not Satan. It’s not the devil. It’s just your regular, run of the mill, garden of Eden variety, talking snake – who sounds a lot like that voice that comes into your head when you’ve got too much time of your hands, and you start to think about how things could be much better, even when they’re already really very good, even when they’re already really pretty blissful, even when you’re already really in paradise.
Eve starts to fantasize, to dream. The dream always judges the reality and finds it lacking. “Why are we bounded anyway?” “Maybe if I just knew more. Maybe then I could see. Maybe then we wouldn’t die. Maybe we would be like God really like God. Maybe be God”
This passage pinpoints the uniqueness of human life. We have an awareness that doesn’t seem to be shared by other creatures. We have a self awareness. We can make mental distinctions. We can make judgments, or right versus wrong, good versus evel. “I like this, I don’t like that.”
Consciousness is in a way like the being of God – but it’s still not God. We’re still dust. We do still die. But unlike trees and rocks and lilies and birds, we know it.
The birth of consciousness constitutes the birth of self-consciousness, as well as world-consciousness (which, as I think I said last week, may be the same thing.). It’s the birth of what psychologists call the “ego” – the sense of being an individual. So this story not only accurately depicts the spiritual and psychological evolution of the human race, but also the spiritual and psychological development of each individual as well. I learned in 8th grade biology that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” And that’s spiritually true as well.
We begin in the womb and in the first year of life in a sense of complete unity with the world that’s around us. Even for the first few years of life or maybe longer we’re in a half-conscious state – in and out of imaginary worlds – only occasionally laying down the permanent memory-tracks out of which our adult ego is built.
And this story is right about the pain of all that.
The development of our individuality involves a simultaneous loss of unity – a separation from everything. Our conscious awareness is the angel with the flaming sword, blocking our way back to unconscious unity with nature and with God. We become subjects in an alien objective world.
The primary task of spiritual development, of any religious practice in life, is to wrestle with this angel, to heal the break and move back into an awareness of the unity of our life with all creation and with God, without at the same time having our individuality overwhelmed by it.
But as a species, unfortunately, and as individuals we usually go off on the wrong foot.
One of the consequences of self-consciousness, as I said, is an awareness of vulnerability -- “Their eyes were opened and they knew that they were naked”. But instead of addressing the true cause of that vulnerability in the alienated illusion of the subject-object split, they just tried to cover it up, and we’ve been trying to cover it up ever since. Fig leaf aprons…CYA.
We lie , we spin, we craft the stories of our lives. We cover up insecurity, we cover up our fears about our own insignificance, our status, our goodness, our worth.
Whole industries, from advertising to defense contractors, have become super-skilled at playing on that vulnerability just enough to make us nervous, while offering this or that product, this or that idea, this or that war that will then fix everything. I remember the Alka Seltzer that showed this stomach-shaped character suffering from “the blahs”. They never told you exactly what the “blahs” were, but they said at the end of the commercial, “We wouldn’t have invented a disease if we didn’t have something to take for it.” (I don’t thin the ad ran very long. It was way too honest.)
We grow attached to our fig leaves in life. We can’t leave home without them… our jobs, our houses, our spouses, our children, our affiliations, our bank accounts. And we judge others by those things as well.
Temptation doesn’t consist so much in doing evil as it does in living a lie -- in trading a fig leaf for relationship with other people or with God so our ego can be king – We trade true life in the interdependent unity of paradise for a false, “independent” shadow of a life in a house with a sub-prime mortgage we can’t afford, so that we can be part of the “ownership” society.
That brings us to the Gospel. We have this story of the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness in one form or another every year on the first Sunday of Lent – (and usually it’s the main focus of the sermon when I don’t get to talk about Genesis.)
One of the points I always make is that just as the snake in Genesis isn’t Satan – so Satan in the wilderness here isn’t “evil”. He’s the tempter, which has always been his traditional role. He’s the voice inside – not really like the snake in the garden, he’s the voice inside that calls us to settle for easier, softer ways, rather than follow our true nature, and answer out true call.
Jesus is tempted to move away from the path he’s just entered with his baptism – the spiritual path that will lead to the cross and resurrection…tempted to walk, instead, a path that gratifies his ego in one way or another to satisfy his physical desires… which is what the stones into bread are all about….to exercise power in the world, over people, over kingdoms…to build his ego by proving his faith publicly, throwing himself off the pinnacle of the .
Jesus resists and moves on.
So neither of these stories, the garden of Eden or the temptation in the wilderness, centers on the issue of good versus evil, but on the need for integrity and authenticity in the deepening of spiritual life.
And both stories stress that temptation will inevitably be part of the journey.
It’s not really quite accurate when I say that our spiritual task is to “move back” into unity with God, to wrestle with the angel who holds the flaming sword, as if human self-consciousness, our awareness of death, the journey of development, and the struggles with temptation was all some mistake.
That would be the same as saying that it would be better not to be born because then we wouldn’t have to struggle with doubt or despair or fear or guilt. There are things we gain in this life than can be gained in no other way, than through the struggle and pain. I know that to be true.
See, God may be smarter than we usually give him credit for. He may have arranged this whole Genesis scenario , and sent human beings out of the garden not as a punishment, but on a kind of mission – to become what we’re becoming. To be who we can be…to be like God? To be God?
In any case….
Thanks be to God.
