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PERICOPE STUDY
CENTER FOR THEOLOGY, LRC
THE FIRST SUNDAY IN LENT
FEBRUARY 13, 2005
1.
The
serpent does not invoke the name of God. At
no point in the conversation with the woman does the crafty one dare to name the
name of God. Always he references
God in the elohim impersonal generic, never in the Tetragrammaton.
The story of the origin of evil among and within humanity is cast in
terms of a Tempter who does not deign or dare to name the name of God,
referencing Him in semitic generics even in an account that scholars have
labeled as the “most ancient” – the J account.
[Interesting also that the woman does not reference the “LORD
God” in her conversation with the serpent (3:2-5), but uses the elohim.]
2.
The
phenomenon is underscored in both verse 1 and verse 8.
In the former, the serpent is described as “more subtle than any other
wild creature that the LORD
God had made.” In the latter,
immediately following the pericope section, the narrative focuses upon the man
and woman absent the serpent … and turns to the YHWH language:
“they heard the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze, and the
man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD
God among the trees of the garden. But
the LORD
God called to the man, and said to him, ‘Where are you?’” and so on.
In all the remainder of the chapter of the Fall, there is no
reference to God (qua Elohim); every reference is to the LORD
God.
3.
The LORD
God is the Name that the Hebrews were forbidden to utter in vain.
Why would the Tempter not show his scorn by deliberately misusing the
Name of God over and over, invoking the Name in vain, even and especially in the
evil of temptation. It would appear
that the Tempter does not dare utter the Name of God, fear and loathing
of the Name overriding his desire to diminish It. Or, just as likely, he reveals that he despises God by not
using the Name of respect, referencing apart God from the Adonai and the
Tetragrammaton in a subtle attempt to lure the woman away from the respect she
is to show to the LORD
God. The implicit message:
“This ain’t the ‘LORD
God,’ honey. This is just god. You won’t die … but your eyes will be open and you will
be like God, knowing Good and Evil.”
4.
The
Hebrew understanding of both metaphysics and the human condition acknowledged no
God but YHWH, and, further, knew that God authored the universe by
speaking it into creation, massaging and tinkering a little along the way, but
without conflict (as in other creation accounts both contemporary and later …
e.g., Babylonian and Gnostic) and without assistance. They also knew that, in such a world in which everything that
God made He saw as “very good,” one had to account for evil in a fashion
other than from God or some other deity equal and opposite to God.
The evil in human history comes from rebellion against God, from the
angelic revolt (“I saw Satan fall like lightening from heaven.” – Jesus of
Nazareth) to the move of the first parents to taste of fruit forbidden to eat.
They knew the tree, saw that the fruit was good to eat, were able to gaze
upon it, but were not to presume to ingest it.
5.
St.
Augustine argues in The City of God that already before they ate
of the fruit, their will was inclined to sin and therefore to evil:
“…in
that spot (Eden) of singular felicity, God could not have created and planted
any evil thing. But by the precept
He gave, God commended obedience, which is, in a sort, the mother and guardian
of all the virtues in the reasonable creature, which was so created that
submission is advantageous to it, while the fulfillment of its own will in
preference to the Creator’s is destruction.
And as this commandment enjoining abstinence from one kind of food in the
midst of great abundance of other kinds was so easy to keep—so light a burden
to the memory—and, above all, found no resistance to its observance in lust,
which only afterwards sprung as the penal consequence of sin, the iniquity of
violating it was all the greater in proportion to the ease with which it might
have been kept.
“Our
first parents fell into open disobedience because already they were secretly
corrupted; for the evil act had never been done had not an evil will preceded
it. And what is the origin of our
evil will but pride. For ‘pride
is the beginning of sin.’ And
what is pride but the craving for undue exaltation?
And this is undue exaltation, when the soul abandons Him to whom it ought
to cleave as its end, and becomes a kind of end in itself.
This happens when it becomes its own satisfaction.
And it does so when it falls away from that unchangeable good which ought
to satisfy it more than itself. This
falling away is spontaneous, for if the will had remained steadfast in the love
of that higher and changeless good by which it was illumined to intelligence and
kindled into love, it would not have turned away to find satisfaction in itself,
and so become frigid and benighted; the woman would not have believed the
serpent spoke the truth, nor would the man have preferred the request of his
wife to the command of God, nor have supposed that it was a venial transgression
to cleave to the partner of his life even in a partnership of sin.
The wicked deed, then—that is to say, the transgression of eating the
forbidden fruit—was committed by persons who were already wicked.
That ‘evil fruit’ could be brought forth only by a ‘corrupt
tree.’ But that the tree was evil
was not the result of nature; for certainly it could become so only by the vice
of the will, and vice is contrary to nature.”
(187-188, Great Books edition)
6.
The sin
preceded the deed. In the moment of
hearing and being tempted, the will was in jeopardy. They were not content to be human. They understood, even in their innocence, what it meant to be
“like God.”
7.
If the
nature of the sin was to be “like God” … what was it?
Augustine calls it pride. Was it only in the knowledge of the fact
and content of good and evil. Or
was it to presume the capacity to define the content of good an evil.
The secular-humanist take on the passage has been to disparage homo
religiosus and religion itself as pre-eminently disposed thus to oppose
knowledge and learning, a position not altogether without evidence in the
disposition of some sectarians. But
on the record that charge is patently absurd.
From the onset of the Hebrew faith there have been the interpreters, the
prophets, the scholars. From the
nascence of Christianity there have been, as for instance Justin Martyr, those
whose efforts at apologetics took into account the legitimacy, as well as the
epistemologies and categories, of philosophy and learning.
8.
One
suspects that, coming from the secularist critics, the charge of
anti-intellectualism leveled at the intent
and yield of the Edenic move is less quarrel with a Judeo-Christian
tradition that allegedly despises knowledge and learning and more a discomfort
with its claim of a mankind essentially
flawed. Knowledge and learning
aside for the moment, the central question as to mankind is twofold: whether or
not we are creatio imago dei and
whether or not we are essentially in
curvatus in se. Are we
creatures created in the image of God, or, as Desmond Morris wrote a few years
ago, only a naked ape with higher brain capacity … and thus a different
psychology. And are we, in essence,
beings who are free to grow and “become,” subject only to the limitations of
genetic favor as to person and the luck of birth as to social setting?
The claim of Christians and Jews is both to the imago
dei and to the relational, historic, and thus for all practical purposes now ontological
nature of human rebellion against God. We
are not born with a tabula rasa soul;
we are born into, and part and parcel of, a sinful humanity.
9.
There are
dimensions of sin that are irreducibly social … and certainly social setting
accounts for the incidence and much of the content of temptation.
But we are not simply residents of a flawed culture,
from which we may be rescued by better policies, better social programs, more
enlightened education … and the like. No
one on that account should oppose the more benign and enlightened social
setting. That is not the point.
Of course education is better than ignorance, adequate food and housing
are better than the grind of poverty, and on and on. The
point is that the Christian claim is that we are by
nature sinful and unclean, and that we have sinned against God and our
fellow man in thought, word, and deed. Does
this mean that we are incapable of good? Inevitably
nothing but immoral monsters in search of victims and opportunity?
Of course not. But it means
that the consequences of universal human participation in the rebellion against
God, told in the Genesis story as to its pointed rebellion and its incipient
desire, result in a flawed will. Not an erasure of imago
dei, but a flawed humanity. Which
from Eden on stands in opposition to the lordship of God. And constitutes the condition which God addressed in the
Incarnation … to which Jesus addressed Himself in His life, death, and
resurrection. And first of all in
the wilderness temptation.
JLY
– 02.07.05
… revised and augmented from 02.14.99
Comments on Matthew 4:1-11
1.
The Synoptics all connect the wilderness temptation of Jesus directly to
his baptism, with St. Luke intruding the genealogy in the narrative between the
events. St. Mark has it that, immediately
on being baptized, to use one of the Second Evangelist’s favorite words, Jesus
was driven into the wilderness by the spirit—to be tempted by Satan.
(St. Mark does not record the content of the temptation as to its
culminating conversation in St. Matthew and St. Luke, who both perhaps got it
from the famous Q source.) St.
Matthew puts it a bit more gently: Then Jesus was led into the desert to
be tempted by the devil.
2. We are not privy to the thoughts of the Savior at this point. The Evangelists do not reveal what went through his mind on the occasion of his baptism and temptation, either before or during or after. The clear implication is that the Spirit who spoke to him had brought him there, to cousin John, and then led him into the wilderness to contemplate the mission. If not the mission as to its culmination, at least the message as to its center: the time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe the gospel.
3.
In the Lent of our repentance we need to remember that our Lord was
tempted as we are. Forty days
in the wilderness to ponder the message and the mission.
Forty days of intermittent encounter with the Tempter.
If we are to believe Matthew and Luke—and I do—the temptations were
in the direction of what kind of messiah to be, popular or spectacular or
powerful. Surely those images
didn't reside only in the wiles of Satan or in the imaginations of the
Evangelists. Jesus the Galilean had
to ponder them. The content of the
Suffering Servant motif was being assaulted by various species of first-century theologia
gloria, avenues of fame instead of via
doloroso. Gratification
of the flesh, even in its more benign and everyday needs.
Spectacular feats as evidence of God’s power and blessing.
Power as defined by “the kingdoms of the world.”
The announcement of the kingdom carried a considered subtext: the way of
the cross.
4. In
the Lent of our identification with the suffering and death of Christ we need to
remember that he came as one of us, subject unto death, even death on the cross.
We need to remember that, however much we are in bondage to sin and
cannot free ourselves, we can resist temptation.
However much we are simul justus et peccator, semper penitens, we can just say no.
In our Wittenberg quarrel with both legalism and law-oriented salvation,
we do well to remember that God's grace is no warrant for laxity, much less
antinomianism. Legalism has several
ancestors, among them small-mindedness. But
another progenitor of legalism is laxity. The
Hegelian pendulum swings to its opposite pole; the mother of legalism is laxity. The father of reactionary heteronomy is unbridled autonomy.
The progenitors of totalitarianism are anarchy and license—witness
Weimar Germany.
As in ethics and politics so also in personality: in the moral geography
of our own lives, in our own wilderness episodes with temptation, we need to
remember that our Savior was also tempted, on a grander scale yet than we.
And he resisted. Part and parcel of repentance is amendment of life.
God grant us strength. And
discipline. And time for amendment of life.
JLY
- 02.12.02.
… revised 02.08.05
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