The Rev’d Armando Ghinaglia
Christ Church, New Haven, Conn.
The First Sunday in Lent
March 1, 2020
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Before God made woman as his partner, “the Lord God commanded the man, ‘You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.’”
Here’s Paradise—just don’t eat from that one tree!
But “the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that the Lord God had made.” And notice what the serpent does when he comes to the woman: he lies. Or at least he misleads the woman. “Did God say, ‘You shall not eat from any tree in the garden’?” Of course, if you have the text in front of you, you know very well that isn’t what God told the man. God told the man, “you may freely eat of every tree in the garden,” but “you shall not eat” “of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.”
Note that the woman wasn’t around when God told the man what he could and couldn’t eat, but somehow, between then and now, she learned the command, whether from God or from the man himself. “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden; but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.’”
Again—not what God actually says. Nowhere does God say, “don’t touch it.” But where Satan’s craftiness puts words in God’s mouth that God never said or intended, it’s the woman’s innocence—and her wisdom—that adds those words. Touching the fruit might as well be on par with trying to eat it.
But the serpent parries her wisdom with his craftiness: “You will not die; for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
What follows is, in my mind, one of the most eloquent verses in all of Scripture: “So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate.” The serpent tricks her and the man in two ways: first, he offers them half-truths, and second, he presents them with evil under the aspect of a good.
The half-truth is this: When you eat of the fruit of the tree, “you will not die.” Remember, God had said, “in the day that you eat of it you shall die.” In a sense, they don’t. They live for hundreds of years afterward. But in a truer sense, they die that very die: first, they lose their innocence; second, they lose Paradise; and third, they lose eternal life.
The serpent’s half-truth clarifies, for the first time in Scripture, the distinction between physical and spiritual death. To the woman—and so often to us—it’s hard to imagine or care about the difference. One seems far more visceral to us. Just look around at our reaction to the new coronavirus epidemic to see that. We take care and stock up on water and hand sanitizer and masks. And I don’t mean to criticize that; do listen to the public health authorities and what they tell us. But what I mean to point out is how much more real that danger feels—even to most of us—than the just-as-real danger that we live in bondage to sin and that we face spiritual death.
And a big part of the reason for that is the second way that the serpent tricks our first parents: he presents them with evil—that is, with spiritual death—under the aspect of what is good—here, food, life, and wisdom. Look back at the woman eating the fruit. She doesn’t do it because she hates God or be-cause she’s just curious. She did it because she “saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise.”
Eating of the fruit of that tree seemed good for their physical health; it even seemed good for their spiritual health—but for one thing: the man and the woman in the garden trusted more in their own judgment of what was good for them than in God’s. And when they eat of the fruit of the tree and their eyes are opened, as indeed they are, they learn in their newfound wisdom—before they learn anything else—that they are naked. They learn shame, and they attempt the first cover-up in history by sowing together fig leaves and making themselves loincloths.
Whether we realize it or not, we do the exact same thing when we sin. Some-thing presents itself to our sight or senses. We consider the thing and delight in it as a good. And we choose to pursue it—even though God and others have warned us that it will be bad for us. The early church referred to this cycle as suggestion, delight, and consent. The tempter suggests it; we delight in it in our minds; and we consent to doing it, whether in our minds or in our bodies. The suggestion itself isn’t sinful; what’s sinful is delighting in the bad thing that suggests itself to us and, even worse, consenting to it.
If you want to see where that leads, look at our gospel reading for today. The devil tries the same two tricks on Jesus that he used successfully in the garden: he tries to mislead him, and he tries to present him with evil under the aspect of good.
First, the devil presents Jesus with evil under the aspect of good in three ways. He tries to convince Jesus to turn stones into loaves of bread; he tries to convince Jesus to throw himself off the temple to fulfill the Scriptures and show his power over the angels; and he tries to convince Jesus to rule over the kingdoms of the earth.
This is where delight came in as sin for the man and woman in the garden, who failed to see how each of these might be evils masquerading as goods. And it’s not hard to see why this would be so. After all, Jesus has just spent forty days and forty nights in the wilderness; he’s famished. Why not make himself some bread? Plus, Jesus has a chance to show the devil who’s really in charge here by having angels attend him. And finally Jesus could figure that it’d be worth switching allegiances if he were to receive all the world’s glory in return.
But Jesus shuts each of these down quickly. He does not delight in them, much less consent to them, because he sees them for what they are: temptations to put our trust in something other than God’s word. And notice just how often those temptations can arise in our own lives and in others’: food, and health, and glory.
As to food, Jesus is hungry, and while eating is no evil, the tempter wants him to believe that physical nourishment is what is essential to a good life. Not so, says Jesus. “One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” In Scripture, it is not the rich man with a full granary who is said to have life, but it is Lazarus, once poor, who was fed the scraps from the rich man’s table, who is led into the heavenly city and enters eternal rest.
As to health, the devil presents Jesus with the ability to show him and others that God will save him from physical death if he wills it—and by extension, that our physical health is what is also essential to a good life. Again, not so, says Jesus, not because God couldn’t, but because God does not will it: “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.” In Scripture, the best life we find isn’t a man who lives an incredibly long life devoid of suffering or pain; what we find instead is Christ Jesus, who “suffered under Pontius Pilate; was crucified, died, and was buried.”
As to glory, the devil makes clear the whole aim of all these tricks, and utters, in desperation it seems, the greatest lie he can muster: “Fall down and worship me” and “I will give you” “all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor.” And here is the ultimate deception. This is the lie that sin seems to promise us if we are willing to delight in it and consent to it: that we can have everything we want or need apart from God.
But the ancient gloss on Scripture reads that “Christ saw [these kingdoms], not as we see, with the eye of lust, but as a doctor looks on a disease without receiving any hurt.” He sees the world’s peoples for what they are: not as things to be exploited for his own gain, but as sick people in need of a physician, whose hearts are inclined to evil, often under the aspect of the good. Jesus recognizes that we fail, time and again, to remember what we find set forth in the Wisdom of Solomon: “God created us for incorruption, and made us in the image of his own eternity, but through the devil’s envy death entered the world, and those who belong to his company experience it.”
The death we ought to be most concerned with isn’t what will happen to our bodies, which is the death that most often motivates our sin; it’s what happens, and will happen, to our souls, because only in doing God’s will shall we find freedom. And as Saint Paul writes elsewhere, “For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.”
“Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.”
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.