The Creation
story that starts in Genesis chapter 2 is the Yahwist version, which
means it is folk literature, aimed at explaining why things are they
way they are.  Folk literature and shared communal myths are pretty
deeply related.  While the entire rest of the Hebrew Bible never
comes back to mention the Garden, or Adam, or Eve again, the
Christian tradition has been quite obsessed with this story.  That’s
likely due to the work of Paul in Romans, and the way that Paul’s
understanding became a normal way of understanding the point of
Jesus!

However, the
story itself makes the most sense when we look at it in context, and
the context for the story is the Ancient Near East, and the creation
stories of the Ancient Near East.  For transparency’s sake, my
understanding about this text comes from the brilliant Roman Catholic
priest and scholar Addison Wright, who shared with “Ecumenical
Scripture Institute” in 2011.

The Canaanites,
neighbors and frenemies of the Ancient Israelites, have a creation
story centered around their tribal god, Baal.  Baal
was for them the storm god and fertility god. He fought Leviathan in
order to bring order out of chaos.  He dispensed well-being on the
earth.  He is called rider of the clouds, and much of this is
appropriated for YHWH.  Baal has a holy encampment on his holy
mountain after the intentional flood at the sea  – like YHWH with
Sinai and Noah.  Some text fragments of Baal’s creation story have
incantations against snake bites, with a story about a man in the
east near the Tigress called Adam who touched a tree he shouldn’t
have touched, and got bit by the snake, and by calling on the gods he
got the incantations to avoid death, and the enmity between humans
and snakes.  That tree was the tree of death.

OK,
so hopefully I’ve done my job in convincing you that the early
Genesis stories that the Yahwist tells fit into the Ancient Near
East.  Now, in the Ancient Near Eastern people believed that
you could EITHER be immortal OR reproductive.  You probably can see
the problem – if you let immortals reproduce, you get to infinite
people very quickly.  You can probably also see then, that for the
people who believed this, sexuality was inherently related to death
and mortality.  The capacity to procreate came WITH the reality of
dying.  And, lest we forget the rather long era of human history
before effective birth control, sexuality and children were tied
closely together.  So again, parenthood and death was one option and
immortal life without sexuality was the other.  One could not have
both, as they saw it.

Furthermore, in
Ancient Near East stories, paradise gardens are places that IMMORTALS
live.  Thus, children do not live there.  Given this assumption,
eating from “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil”
transformed Adam and Eve from being immortal, asexual beings into
mortal, sexual beings.  That knowledge seems like it may have had a
lot to do with sexual maturity.

Now, when I
first heard this, I liked it a lot.  Mostly I liked it because it
pulled us out of blaming women for everything, and out of a hyper
focus on sin.  I wasn’t really convinced by it though.

Then, Father
Wright pointed out that the punishments given in the story fit this
understanding.    After they eat, they see that they are naked, which
fits a burgeoning sexual awakening.  We stopped reading before the
rest of the punishments, but they are:  the couple is thrown out of
the Garden, the woman will have pain in childbirth, sexual desire
will complicate life, you will have to work to stay alive, and you
will now die.  Which it turns out, all fits.  Leaving the Garden is
what happens when you aren’t immortal.  Pain in childbirth is only
relevant when childbirth is going to happen.  Sexual desire IS
complicated, and wasn’t when they didn’t have any.  Having to work to
stay alive isn’t necessary when you can’t die.  Finally, being mortal
means death will come.   Perhaps most interestingly, at the end of
the list of punishments, the woman is named for the first time.  Adam
(whose own name means mud-creature) calls her “Eve, because she was
the mother of all who live.”  Eve means to breath, to live, or to
give life.

At that point,
I was convinced that Father Wright was not only onto a cool
interpretation, his interpretation was superior to any others I’ve
ever heard.  The only problem is that it doesn’t work with Paul’s
take in Romans, at least as it has been used through the millenia.
Paul argues that as death came into humanity through Adam, the sting
of death is removed from humanity by Jesus.  In fact, Paul is sort of
taking on the whole Ancient Near East, because he is claiming that
with God’s work in Jesus, one can have children AND be immortal, just
not an immortality on earth.  Paul is trying to make sense of Jesus,
and of the impact of his life, and this is how he does it.  I don’t
think Paul meant to create quite the firestorm of misogyny and
sin-guilt that he accidentally did.  

Which then
leaves us free to be rather grateful to Adam and Eve, since if they
hadn’t eaten of that tree, none of us would exist 😉  Moreso, it
gives us freedom to reconsider our understandings of both gender and
sin.  It feels like a good reminder that by “sin” the Bible means
“missing the mark” which always feels a lot lighter than what I
would otherwise assume.

One of my
curiosities is about why we’ve held onto this story so tightly.
Again, the ancient Jews did not, and while Paul makes this argument,
we could have rather ignored it as well.  Yet this story is still one
of the living folk narratives in our culture, for Christians and
non-Christians alike.

I’ve wondered
if it relates to a yearning for “paradise.”  It is all sort of
interesting, right?  Because once we bring Paul into it, paradise
comes back in the form of afterlife.  And I think people yearn for
paradise, quite possibly because the world we live in is so full of
suffering and we’d like to consider other options.  The Garden of
Eden itself though, according to the story, was quite small!  It was
small enough for one person to tend to it, and it contained only two
people.  That would be REALLY boring for ETERNITY.  Exiting
definitely seems like the right option.

And yet, the
world is not as it should be.  We know this in our bones.  And we
YEARN for it to be better.  Sometimes our yearning takes the form of
remembering the past in a way that cleans it up and makes it seem
closer to perfect than it was.  Sometimes our yearning encourages us
to close our eyes to the pain and suffering around us.  Sometimes our
yearning for better closes our eyes to the harm we are doing, and the
shame we live with.  Sometimes our yearning for better erupts in
anger for how things are.  Sometimes our yearning for better makes us
afraid of what is and what might come.

AND, sometimes
our yearning for better is how God works with us to make the world…
better.  Isn’t it complicated that the same yearning can do harm and
do good?  Oh, human life.  I think there are two best ways to respond
to our shared yearning for a better world.  One, as you might guess,
is to work with God and each other to make the world better.  The
other is to put our energy on noticing the things that are already
good.  There may be a natural desire for paradise, and we don’t live
in one, but we do live in a world filled with wonders, and when we
forget to attend to them, we can miss out on all the goodness that is
already with us.  The kindom, they say, is already here in part and
is coming in completion.  Let us pay attention to both parts – as
they are the work of co-creating that paradise with God.  Amen

Rev. Sara E. Baron
First United Methodist Church of Schenectady
603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305
Pronouns: she/her/hers
http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

March 1, 2020