Who You Gonna Listen To?

Who You Gonna Listen To?

Wikipedia has introduced a great word: disambiguation, or to disambiguate. Which essentially means the fact of showing the differences between two or more meanings clearly. We shall attempt to disambiguate three Scenes in the Divine Narrative about which competing claims have been made throughout the ages. And how to sort out the voice of life from the counter-voices of death.

Act One – Trouble in the Garden. Genesis 2:15-17; Genesis 3:1-19

In creation God blesses the creatures of the sea and the air, and humans, male and female. Upon creation giving rise to humans, they are placed in a garden. It is a Garden called Earth. The creatures cares for the garden. The garden sustains the creatures. It’s pretty simple, with very few rules: Eat of all the trees but one. Seems simple enough. There is a man, a woman, and trees and other plants to sustain them. Only one tree is to be avoided which can bring death. What can go wrong?

There are two other characters in the story. One is God. God acts with strong and decisive verbs: God formed, God breathed, God planted, God put, God made, God took, God commanded. God is a self-starter, capable of transformative acts. The actions of God are what we know about God. Nothing else is said about God except how God acts. God says not to eat of the one tree for in the day you eat of it you will die. [Texts For Preaching, CD Rom version, p 184]

The Other is a snake. By contrast, the snake has no strong verbs, does nothing, has no power to act, is incapable of transformative intervention. The serpent can only talk. And although God is given no characteristics, the snake, we are told, is “crafty,” which it turns out is a play on words: crafty–arûm is a play on the word “naked”–arôm. It is easy to see where this is going. [Ibid]

The snake says to the woman it is OK to eat from the forbidden tree. She says, no, if we do eat it or touch it we will die. Note, she adds to what God has said. There was nothing said about touching. The snake says, no, you will become like God! The woman, we are told, “sees that the tree was good – as God had said about each stage of creation – and to be desired, or coveted – later, the only one of the ten commandments that is repeated twice, “you shall not covet.” Oops. She eats. The man eats. Oh no, they say, we are naked. Their innocence has died, and shame and blame are introduced. When God inquires, the man says it’s the woman’s fault, and your fault for giving me a woman; she says it’s the snakes fault. And I will submit the problem here is that they believed a lie – the snake said they would become like God, and just a short way back in Genesis chapter 1 we learned that they were already like God – created in God’s image, male and female were they created in the image of God. [Genesis 1:26]

Taken on its own terms, this narrative does not concern a “fall” or “original sin.” It is rather a narrative that invites awareness of the contradictions that resist God’s good intention and distort human innocence. The narrative sorts out the competing, conflicting voices that seek to define human destiny. Lent is a time to sort out the voice of life and the counter-voices of death. Who you gonna listen to? is the lesson here. Life is full of competing voices. Boy don’t we know that!

And we do well to note that God curses only the snake and the ground. Not the couple.

Act Two – Sin Abounds, but Grace Abounds More! Romans 5:12-19

Around the year 56 CE, the apostle Paul writes a letter to the church in Rome, some 20 or 25 years before the Gospel of Matthew. Paul speaks of the rupture that occurred in the garden as “Adam’s sin.” Note, the woman is not blamed here – that only occurs in later Christian art when Michelangelo paints her, not the snake, as a cunning and crafty seductress. Note Paul also suggests no notions of “the Fall,” or “original sin.” That comes much later with Augustine asserting that sin is transmitted generation to generation by birth, and that unbaptized infants go to hell, around the beginning of the fifth century CE. Paul asserts no such things here. For Paul, sin is whatever separates us from the love of God. That is, sin is not simply a bad action, but rather a “power under which humankind has lived since Adam and which causes separation from—even rejection of—God… the issues Paul raises in this text need always to be lifted up for believers, many of whom continue to understand sin as an individual act that is morally “bad” and grace as a reward for right belief or right action. Paul’s acknowledgment of the universality of sin and of what might be called the “superuniversality” of grace comes into such a context as a genuine word of good news.” [Ibid 188-189] Raising again the question of who are we going to listen to?

Act Three. Matthew 4:1-11

Most translations read that the Spirit-Breath of God leads Jesus to be tempted by the devil. Perhaps translators fail us here, as the word for tempted, peirazó, typically means to try, attempt or test, and the words used in this text, diabolos and satan, typically mean adversary, prosecutor, accuser or tester; not the medieval sorts of meanings they would later take on. Just declared at his baptism to be God’s Son, God’s own Spirit leads him off to be tested for forty days to be sure he is up to the task of Being God’s Son and God’s Beloved. What takes place is similar to cutting sessions between musicians like pianists or guitarists, challenging one another to up their game.

The Tester invites Jesus to perform three miracles. Jesus refuses. The careful reader will note that Jesus always responds with words from Deuteronomy, that book which relates a long speech or sermon by Moses to the people reminding them of the essentials of their covenant relationship  with God they have learned in their forty-year sojourn in the wilderness. Our question is: What do we learn about Jesus from this story?

In the language of Deuteronomy, we learn who he is and who he is not. That Jesus does not perform miracles on demand, or to show off. He lives out of Divine Grace. His trust in God does not depend on a show of power. He is obedient to the will of God over against “the kingdoms

of the world and their splendor.” He serves only one master. And readers are invited to find in his experience an image of what it means to be faithful in their own lives. [Ibid 190]

He finally orders Satan to depart. And he does. The Adversary/Tester has no power over Jesus, while Jesus issues commands and Satan obeys. Jesus wins the cutting session. “To be sure, Satan will return, but the secret in keeping the Adversary/Tester at bay is out: it is in being faithful to one’s vocation to be God’s child, clinging tenaciously to one’s divine calling.” [Ibid p191]

Throughout these three acts we learn to be more attentive to the actual details of the stories than what we have been told they mean. We learn to be attentive to the question: Who we gonna listen to? Because at the end of the day our answer to that question makes all the difference in and for the world. Lent is a time to sort out the voice of life from the counter-voices of death.