Fallen Creatures
13th February 2005, Parish Communion
Gen 2: 16-17, 3: 1-7 Fall
Rom 5: 12-19 Adam & Christ
Matt 4: 1-11 Temptation in the Wilderness
1. The Bible is the book which tells of the relationship between God and Creation, God and humanity, God and particular human beings in particular times.
2. The story is told in all sorts of different ways – in poems and hymns, in parables and stories, in histories and lists and accounts of battles.
3. Our Old Testament story today, the story of Adam and Eve and the Serpent, of God and the commandment and the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, is perhaps the story from the Hebrew Bible that has had the most impact of all.
4. This story, which is traditionally called the story of the Fall, is recognisably mythological. Snakes do not speak. Fruit cannot give knowledge of good and evil. I am not even sure that it is feasible to sew figleaves together to make clothing, although I would be happy to hear from anyone who has tried.
5. This story is at the beginning of what we call the Old Testament. Since the days, perhaps 1800 years ago, when Christians began to bind the scriptures together in books, rather than keep them long scrolls, it has stood there, right at the beginning of the whole book.
6. The point of a mythological story about beginnings is not that it tells us how things were, but that it tells us how things are. For thousands of years we have known and understood ourselves to be fallen creatures.
7. What does it mean to talk about being fallen creatures? It has something to do with being basically and fundamentally divided. Christians usually feel that human beings contain within themselves something that genuinely comes from God. We see in one another, and even in ourselves, a capacity and a yearning for love, peace, kindness, gentleness, for worship and prayer and commitment to God, for love of neighbour.
8. But we also know that this is not the whole of our human nature. There are things which surely cannot come from God – rage and jealousy, greed and backbiting, shame and persecution. The story of the fall begins to make sense to us if we have some sense of ourselves and divided, and of our lives being in many ways a struggle between our God-given nature, and our selfish destruction. We believe we see this in ourselves, our families, our churches, our societies, our nations and our global economy.
9. The powerful and dangerous thing about the discovery that we are fallen, is that it basically offers us a problem, but not a solution. In the epistle to the Romans, Chapter 7, Paul offers an eloquent psychological picture of what it is like to know that you are a divided person, or indeed a divided church or society. 15 I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. 16 Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. 17 But in fact it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me. 18 For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. 19 For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. 20 Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me.
10. Christians believe that we are not only fallen, but in our inmost selves we are healed, and we are healed by Jesus Christ. That healing began when Jesus accepted the baptism of John in the River Jordan. Its very first step was the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness. Jesus goes out into the wilderness as a human being who contains our fallen human nature, divided and uncertain about how to live. Before him lie fundamental alternatives. He can live and die for himself, dedicating himself to satisfying his own needs. He can live and die for ambition, dedicating himself to fame, and leaving his mark on the world. He can live and die for power, for the kingdoms of the world and their splendour.
11. Lent is a season of struggle for the divided self. Each one of us knows that the division is still real, and although we may be healed in our inmost selves, this still has to work itself out day by day, in the details of our lives. Our old and fallen selves is present always for us to wrestle with – and in each case it is a different struggle. I cannot know whether you are struggling with pride or dishonesty, with shame or timidity, with lust or avarice, with meanness or gluttony, with cruelty or gossip or self loathing.
12. This makes Lent sound grim, but it is not. It is, at root, a joyful and optimistic struggle. You and I, our Church and our Society do not have to put up with the old and fallen self. We know that we are creatures of God, and we use Lent to wrench the door to our heart a little further open, so that God can come in and remake us. We can and we will do better, because Christ over came temptation, and because the part of ourselves that seems to fight so hard is already fundamentally dead. You are free. Use Lent to claim that freedom.
13. It is not easy, and we are more likely to see signs of success in one another than ourselves. But there is guaranteed success, because Christ died for this, and rose again. There is a promise we live for, that helps us maintain the struggle – that we shall be made whole people, in peace and in love with one another, a whole society, and, in the fullness of time a whole heaven of God’s healed, whole and holy people.