The story of Eve
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
Welcome to the commons cast. We're glad to have you here. We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Head to commons.church for more information. Let's take a look back at where we have been this summer.
Speaker 1:Bobby walked us through the story of Bathsheba. Elena led us alongside Hagar. And last week, Larissa helped us to understand Tamar a bit more. And by the way, just so you know, that was Larissa's first sermon in front of a live audience here at Commons. And it's the one where she got, wait for it, a story about a woman who tricks her father-in-law into sleeping with her by pretending to be a prostitute because her dead husband's brother wouldn't properly impregnate her.
Speaker 1:So have fun with that one, Larissa. Thing is, she did. She nailed it. She deserves all of that. But, there were a few things that Larissa brought out of the text that were really profound as I listened to her.
Speaker 1:Particularly, I think the way she brought the story all the way around at the end. That way Tamar reveals her deception and the way that she has taken agency over her own story again. And Judah is about to pronounce judgment on her, but sees the truth clearly for once. He responds, she is more righteous than I. And as Larissa said last week, that is the mic drop moment in the story.
Speaker 1:But here, for all of his faults, Judah realizes the moment for what it is. He doesn't try to weasel his way out. He doesn't try to make excuses. He doesn't even say, okay, you got me. He says what is true in that moment, that Tamar is righteous for the way that she has cared for her self.
Speaker 1:And to think that that moment frees Judah and us as much as it does Tamar is remarkable. Because remember, Judah is the one who sold his own brother, Joseph into slavery, and yet here something in him is woken up. Some sense of what is right that transcends the rules. And maybe that change is part of what sets him on a path that will lead to the eventual reunion with his brother. We may never know that.
Speaker 1:But as a white guy who has lived a lot of my life with the same kind of freedom and privilege that someone like Judah would have had in his world, I think it's meaningful for me to understand that that Judah is no more abandoned by God than Tamar is. And that sometimes, the leveling of the playing field that can feel like being brought down a peg can also be the blessing of the God that repairs and reconciles and puts right everything that has been out of balance for far too long. So Tamar has something to teach all of us, regardless of where we come to our story from, and I really love that about it. Today, however, we have one final story of shadow. And today, we are going to make our way all the way back to Eve.
Speaker 1:First though, let's pray. To the God who meets us in every story, whether shadow or light, whether ingenuity or humility, whether mistake or sin or victory or blessing, God, we welcome your presence in our stories today because we trust that you are working for our good right now. Healing and repairing, caring and comforting, slowly moving the pieces and the understanding, the wisdom and the awareness that we need to see the places where your hand is present with us. And when we do, God of peace, might we recognize and be grateful for it. Might we give ourselves to the movement you imagine for us, to the story that you are working to tell in the kingdom you intend to build.
Speaker 1:And if we find ourselves today unsure of that story, unable to see the bigger picture from where we sit, we ask that your spirit be close, and your peace confirm that your wisdom is available to us to open our eyes and see the love that surrounds us always. In the strong name of the risen Christ, we pray. Amen. Okay. Today, it's all about Eve And we're gonna talk about being created together, making of a helper, snakes and fruits and imitation versus creation.
Speaker 1:But first, let's acknowledge that Eve has been stuck between a rock and a hard place for most of the last few 1000 years. Cliff Notes version of her story is that she is the one who was tricked by the snake into eating the forbidden fruit, sharing it with her husband, and then getting them, and all of us ever since, kicked out of the Garden of Eden, forced to toil endlessly, when we could have all just been sitting around stark naked, eating fruit all day. Now, that may or may not sound appealing to you. You can tell me after. But that's the gist of the story, at least, it's how we often tell it.
Speaker 1:The unfortunate part for Eve is that she has been cast vicariously, and sometimes even at the same time as the seducer who tempts her husband into disobeying God, yet while also being the naively seduced who is easily tricked by the crafty serpent. And just in terms of good storytelling, one character should not be the scheming villain and the trusting victim at the same time, and yet Christian history is littered with unfortunate attempts to defend patriarchy and to justify misogyny by appealing to bad readings of Eve's tale. So, let's make our way back to the start today to read Eve's story in 3 parts, Because this is a complicated story. Woman that is steeped in ancient mythology and millennia of interpretation. And that means there is a lot to cover today.
Speaker 1:So strap in. It's a wild ride. But let's start in Genesis 1. This is verse 27. God created humanity in God's image.
Speaker 1:In the image of God, they were created male and female. This is the first Croatian story. We talked about this a few weeks ago. But so far, we don't really have any characters yet. There is no Adam and Eve here.
Speaker 1:In fact, in verse 27, they are both referred to together as adam, or the Adam, or better, the humanity. At this point in the story at least, Adam is not a person or a character. Adam is a generic word for all of us from male to female. And yet, the humanity in this story, all of us we are told, carries the divine image in the world. And that in itself is a remarkably progressive idea in a world in which it was kings and priests that imaged God for the masses.
Speaker 1:In our story, all of us, male and female, but also rich and poor, powerful and subject, all bear divine witness, and that's incredibly important for the stage that Genesis 1 is setting for what comes next. Because in Genesis 2, we read the story again, this time a slightly different version of the story. And this time, in verse 7, we read that the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being. Now, a couple notes here for when we're reading this in English. When we read, the Lord God formed a man, That's actually that same term adam that we just read in Genesis 1.
Speaker 1:Now we know that Adam is made from adamah or the dirt, and that dirt becomes a living nafesh when God breathes into it. Now nefesh is a Hebrew word. At its most literal, it means throat. That's what it means. But here, it's probably pointing to the act of breathing or in the abstract, being alive.
Speaker 1:So, to translate this as literally as possible, we're probably reading something more like this. Then the Lord God formed a clump of dirt from the ground and breathed into it, and it began to breathe on its own. Now, when we looked at creation in our origins series, we talked about how this is a counterpoint to other, more ancient creation myths. Creation myths that posited humanity was born of the mixing of dirt with the blood of a defeated, murdered, tyrannical, chaos god. And the writers of Genesis want to push back against that to say, no.
Speaker 1:Our identity is rooted in generous gift, not violent conquest. We are breath, not blood. Still, so far, the story is pretty similar to what we saw in Genesis 1. Remember, adam at this point is an encompassing word that means all of humanity. Adam, as a character, has not yet appeared in the story.
Speaker 1:But then, in verse 18 we read, and Lord God said, it is not good for this dirt to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him. And here is where we get the story of how that living dirt becomes the them, that male and female that we saw back in Genesis 1. And the designation helper here, that translation choice is interesting because the Hebrew word that we're reading is ezer. And ezer absolutely does mean helper.
Speaker 1:That's the appropriate word. That's what it means. Except that in English, our semantic range tends to lean in the opposite direction of the Hebrew word. Here's what I mean by that. Both the word helper and ezer have at their core this idea of assistance and support.
Speaker 1:Help, that that's why it's a good translation. It's just that helper in English tends to automatically, for us, carry the connotation of assistance from below. Right? A helper is someone who comes and supports and pushes you up. Think of how we use the term assistant.
Speaker 1:That's automatically the subordinate position in any relationship. Idea. Ezra, on the other hand, in Hebrew, has exactly the opposite connotation for a Hebrew reader. In fact, in all of Torah, apart from this passage, the term is only ever applied to God and the help that comes from God. So, Exodus 18, he took the name Eleazar, for he said, my God's my father's God was my helper, Ezra.
Speaker 1:Deuteronomy 33, hear Lord, the cry of Judah, be his helper against his foes. And then a little later in the same chapter, verse 29 this time, blessed are you Israel, for who is like you? A people saved by the Lord, God is your helper, Ezra. And that thought extends throughout all of scripture. For example, there's a very famous line in Psalm 121 that reads, I lift my eyes up to the mountains.
Speaker 1:Where does my help come from? The answer, of course, is God. So, in Hebrew, ezer means helper, that's the word, but the assumption is that help comes not from below, but from above. And Ezer is the one who reaches down and lifts you up into your potential. Look, even before we go back to Adam and Eve and our story here in a moment, just think about the difference in worldview that makes.
Speaker 1:One that believes help is embodied in those beneath us, who lift us up and platform us. And another that believes help is embodied in those who reach reach down and elevate others. I mean, what if we learn to think and talk about our bosses as assistants? And what if we learn to think of ourselves as helpers that elevate others? Maybe mister Rogers was on to something when he said, look for the helpers.
Speaker 1:There's something in that. Look for those who use their platform to elevate you, rather than expecting you and others to elevate them. That is a helper. But, here's our story so far. God has fashioned a living clump of dirt, Adam, who's not yet Adam, but that dirt needs a hand up to become what it could be so God makes a helper.
Speaker 1:And in verse 21, we read that the Lord God caused the dirt to fall asleep, and while he was sleeping, he took one of his ribs and then closed up the place with flesh. For the record here, the word is not rib. In fact, that is the only time this word is ever translated rib in all of scripture, this passage right here. The word is side. God took one side of the dirt and made a woman.
Speaker 1:Here, we get for the first time, the word for woman, Isha, which is the proper noun. And when Isha was brought to the dirt, he said, now this is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh. She will be called Isha for she was taken from Ish. This is the first time we get the word for man anywhere in the story. Technically, woman appears before man in the text before Adam becomes Adam out of adam.
Speaker 1:So there is no Ish without Isha in this story. Now, there's a fact that woman was taken from man implies some kind of inferiority in this story. Well, I would say not any more than the fact that man was taken from the dirt implies that men are less than dirt. And we're not, so let's keep going here. But that reading is just not coherent with what we have in front of us in the text.
Speaker 1:The dirt becomes a clump of dirt, a breathing dirt, it becomes a man and woman. So Genesis 1 presents a story where God creates in a pattern, moving from the plants to the birds to the animals to humans as the pinnacle of creation. The creative representation of God on the earth, the divine image we all bear. Genesis 2 now presents a story where God creates a living dirt that becomes a man only once woman is created, perhaps because she can help elevate him into new possibilities, the ability to create life together in the world the way that God already has. An image of God in the world.
Speaker 1:Now, please hear me. This is not a gender studies class. That's not what we're doing. That's not what's going on in the text here either. In fact, my point is that when we bring our assumptions about gender into the text, we misread what's happening here.
Speaker 1:Genesis 2 is not commenting on gender hierarchy one way or the other. It's saying that the divine image we see in Genesis 1 is realized in human partnership. And yes, that is procreation. It's certainly part of it, but it's in all the ways that we structure ourselves together, the way we build families and communities and cities and social contracts that either inhibit or properly provide the context for human flourishing. In fact, it's only in our third story, Genesis 3, where adam becomes Adam, the one from dirt, and the woman becomes hava or Eve, the one that lives.
Speaker 1:Our identities, our names as human beings are born out of our coming together. Not just sexually, but creatively and administratively and in leadership and in partnership, this is where we are fully alive, the them that was together in Genesis 1. Okay. Now, we come to what we've all been waiting for. Right?
Speaker 1:Eve and the apple and the tree and the snake and the OG mistake and who we really get to blame for everything that's gone wrong ever since. But with all the background we've built up now and maybe some of our assumptions about gender in this story peeled back a little bit, let's look at story number 3, The Fall. This is Genesis 3 verse 1. Now, the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. And he said to the woman, did God really say you must not eat from any tree in the garden?
Speaker 1:Now, first of all, snakes don't talk. You know that, and I know that, and ancient people knew that as well. This should be a very big, red, neon flashing sign that lets you know you're reading a story here, an incredible story, and an incredibly important story with something to teach us. Now, understand, ancient people were not less sophisticated or aware of storytelling techniques than we are. But I would argue that because story was so important in ancient cultures, they would have been far more adept at spotting the clues that invited them into the meaning of this story.
Speaker 1:Because here, the talking snake is not Satan, not yet anyway, And the forbidden fruit is not sex. Those are but both much later ideas that were imposed back onto the text. Ironically, both of those are far less literal interpretations than the text actually wants you to start with. Because in the world of Genesis 3, the snake is a snake, one of God's creatures, and the fruit is a fruit, one of God's gifts. This story is not an allegory where everything represents something else.
Speaker 1:This story is what we call an etiology. And what that means is just a fancy word to say it's a story designed to explain how things are the way they are. At the end of this story, the woman is going to be cursed with painful childbirth, and the man with hard work to carve a life out of the earth. And just understanding human physiology, there has never been a time in the human experience when those things were not true for homo sapiens. We are large brained mammals, which means birth is painful, and it means we have resources here that could have gone here, my impressive biceps notwithstanding in this story.
Speaker 1:This story explains something about our world to us. And the question then is, what should we make of that story? What is it telling us about human nature? And what did these ancient communities perceive about themselves and about us that would be so resonant that it would be preserved and passed on for millennia, that it would form the basis for stories that would lead us all the way to the Christ, and the fullness of God present in the person of Jesus with us. Did God say you must not eat from any tree in the garden?
Speaker 1:Said the serpent. Verse 2. The woman replied, we may eat from the fruit of the trees in the garden. But God did say, you must not eat from the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden and you must not touch it or you will die. So already, you can kind of see here, the serpent is twisting things just a bit to see what's gonna happen.
Speaker 1:And by the way, all the pronouns in this section are plural. The snake is talking to them, the woman and the man here. It's just that the woman is the one who's speaking on behalf of humanity in the story. The text will actually make that very clear a little while later when the woman takes the fruit and shares it with the man who has been quote, with her. But the serpent said to the woman, you will not certainly die.
Speaker 1:Quick note here. There's a lot of debate in Genesis scholarship right now about whether this should better be translated as a question, something more like, is it certain you will die? That actually seems to fit better with the strategy the serpent is taking, like asking questions and sowing doubt and seeing what will happen. We're not going to settle that today, but regardless, the serpent continues here. For God knows that when you eat from the tree, your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.
Speaker 1:So, 2 big questions. 1st, why is the woman speaking for humanity? And does that mean that she and therefore all women ever since share some unique culpability in the consequence of this story? And second, what is this tree about? This knowledge of good and evil, what are we being tempted with here in the story?
Speaker 1:The answer for the first question from the text is decidedly no. The man and the woman are both present for the serpent's deception, They share the fruit together, and they both share in the consequences of that decision, both of them. In fact, everything that happens here in chapter 3 is entirely consistent with what we saw in chapter 1, when both were made in the image of God, and consistent with chapter 2 where Eve is named as the helper or the one who is made to offer a hand up to Adam. In fact, by the time you get to Paul in the New Testament, who is very firmly embedded in a patriarchal worldview, he actually pins all of the blame on Adam saying that through Adam, sin has entered the world with disastrous consequences for everyone ever since. The irony, however, is that to shift all of the blame to Eve, as some do, or to ignore her culpability and say, well, she's not really smart enough to know what's going on.
Speaker 1:That's to miss the point of the Genesis narrative. Eve is neither vile, seductress, nor a naive victim in this story. She is a fully realized human character equal to Adam, and that's the point of this. The humans, all of us, are interconnected by our nature. In fact, we are only fully human together.
Speaker 1:And it does still leave us with one question though about this tree. How to make sense of this temptation? There are, of course, lots of ways to conceptualize this image, different interpretations of exactly what God intended here. We are not gonna settle this one today. It's been 1000 of years.
Speaker 1:But for me, there are 2 things in the text that are important. First, the knowledge of good and evil. That's a phrase that doesn't necessarily point to awareness. As in, the humans didn't know the difference between right and wrong until they ate. Otherwise, how could they know it was wrong to disobey God and told them not to eat?
Speaker 1:The phrase here can actually point to the authority to decide what is right and wrong. And, you can see this in 1st Kings 3. There's a prayer there asking for wisdom to know right and wrong, but the same phrasing is used, tov and raw, good and evil. And if that is the intent here, I think it opens up some insight into what's going on. The humans want to be like God.
Speaker 1:That that's the phrase that the serpent uses. And that desire to be like someone else is the source of so much pain and suffering in our world. What is greed if not the desire to copy what we see someone else holding? What is jealousy if not the desire to be who someone else is? What is most of our conflicts centered on is not the desire to possess the place, or the authority, or the possessions, or the relationships that someone else already has.
Speaker 1:I mean, we would often rather imitate each other than explore all of the unique possibilities we've been gifted with and who we could become. And we do this in all kinds of ways. Right? We conform to each other. We struggle to fit in with each other at all costs, we copy what we see others doing, and then we ostracize anyone who doesn't do that well.
Speaker 1:It's the root of so much of our sin and our suffering are wishing to be someone else. Imagine being given an entire world in which to create, only 2 humans in existence, an entire planet as your canvas to paint on, and already being consumed with the desire to take someone else's place in that story. See, this is the start of that shadow that we have carried with us from the very beginning. God has given us a world of endless possibility, and we have responded with the least creative option possible. The path of imitation and conflict and competition with each other, rather than the creative flourishing in partnership the way that God imagined we could take.
Speaker 1:See, we tend to read this story through the lens of gender, man versus woman versus snake versus God, but that in itself is actually part of the problem. Because our expectation of each other is to conform, to look around and imitate, to be what others define us as, ironically including fairly tightly prescribed gender roles, rather than reaching into the unique and special reflection of divine creativity that each of us represent here on the earth. To Eve and her partner, they are archetypes of the human experience. They are not stereotypes that we are bound to imitate for the rest of our lives. They are starting points that invite us to see our world with new and fresh eyes, a world unmarred by sin and violence and imitation and competition, to peer back through history into that primordial but beautiful canvas on which God invited us to write the best version of the divine image that resides uniquely within each of us.
Speaker 1:And we took it, and we copied each other. So may you know yourself as love today for who you are, and may you see yourself with the freedom to truly live into who you have been created to be, unique and special in the world. May you recognize in Eve the full reflection of the human heights and depths that exist within you and everyone around you. And may these expansive archetypes be ones that free you rather than confine you. Ones that invite you to welcome the spirit of Jesus, that invites you to become the unique expression of divine creativity you were always created to be.
Speaker 1:Let's pray. God who meets us even within the shadow stories that we occupy, the spaces where we trade the freedom to be creative in the world, the courageous spirit that entails for the easier path of imitation and conformity, boxing ourselves into prescribed roles in the world. God, for those moments when we are too scared to be ourselves, And so instead, we imitate, we see ourselves in competition, we define ourselves by conflict, May your spirit be present in those moments to remind us that that is not who we are. That we are a unique spark of your creativity born into the world to become everything you imagine us to be. And that that spark, when expressed in partnership, and relationship, and creativity with those who surround us can free us from the desire to fight, and imitate, and be in conflict, and instead, to express all of the grace and peace that has been extended to us.
Speaker 1:May we free ourselves by your spirit and invitation. And in that, might you help us do the same for each other. In the strong name of the risen Christ, we pray. Amen.