Sermon: A Fall, or Failure to Mature?

Lectionary: Lent 1(A)

Texts: Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7; Matthew 4:1-11

From Paradise to Chaos
Herrel, Edie Mae; 1975

A mother bakes a cake for her child’s – let’s call him Greg – birthday party. She tells Greg to leave the cake alone, and not pinch pieces away and eat them. Why? Is it because she doesn’t want him to have the cake? No, it’s for him, after all. But the time is not right. When the party takes place, that is the right time. But Greg is still quite young – let’s say he is 3 years old – and the wait is too much. He doesn’t yet comprehend the value of delayed gratification. His immaturity gets better of him; he tears a piece off the cake and eats it.

The story of The Fall as it is commonly known, at least within Christianity, can be interpreted in many ways. The most common and I would argue, the least interesting goes like this:

Adam and Eve are fresh-off the assembly-line, shiny, new, perfect, first human beings—sort of super humans. God tested these flawless creatures with this command not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, just to see if they meant business and would obey God. But they failed the test, rebelled against God, and lost not only their own perfection but that of every other human being since.[1]

This is how most of Western Christianity has read and interpreted the text since at least Augustine (CE 354-430). If you’ve heard of the Doctrine of Original Sin, this is where it originates (pun sort of intended), even though the word sin never occurs in these texts.

Now recall that I said, “Western Christianity.” This is because the other large group of Christians, the Eastern Church, reads it differently.

Another angle, one often taken by Christians in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, is to read the Adam story as being not about a fall down from perfection, but a failure to grow up to godly wisdom and maturity.

Think of Adam and Eve not as perfect super humans but as young, naïve children, who were meant to grow into obedience, but were tricked into following a different path.[2]

Some of the earliest Christians read it quite differently from even these first two that I discussed. Just prior to Augustine, Ambrose taught that eating the “forbidden fruit” was “fortunate guilt.” It was because of this “blessed fault” that Christ was able to enter the world.[3] Now, when this interpretation is analyzed, it doesn’t take long to realize it is based on several pieces of faulty logic.

For the early Jews, the story is not about human disobedience.

The early Jewish focus is rather on the garden itself, the gaining of sexual knowledge (“and they knew they were naked”[4]) and the concurrent loss of immortality, and the regaining of the garden in the future.[5]

For the early Jews, the loss of immortality of a single individual was replaced by immortality of the community through reproduction and descendants.

For the later rabbis, contemporary with the early Christian period,

The idea of an edenic fall is a minority opinion. More popular are countervailing claims suggesting the everything, including death, was part of the divine plan.[6]

Why do I bring up these many interpretive variants? Some not Christian? Because interpretation and development of doctrine don’t happen in a vacuum. Development happens in conversation with the past and with contemporaries who hold divergent views. Sometimes it agrees and at other times it is a reaction against.  Understanding and knowing about them (hopefully) allows us to be better interpreters and more open to listening to other viewpoints, even when we ultimately disagree.

In addition to different theological interpretations, there are also different views about the historicity of these texts in Genesis. One view posits that the stories of the creation, fall, and exile are literal and historical facts. Another view is that while not everything should be viewed literally, it is still a factual accounting of history.

A third view sees these stories as myth. Now “myth” does not mean lies or falsehood. It does mean fiction. But as any good literature professor will tell you, oftentimes, good fiction can communicate truths better than bland facts.

I started in the “literally true” end of the spectrum. But now I read these early chapters of Genesis as mythology. These are texts that preserved early Hebrew traditions where they attempted to make sense out of their world. They were in conversation with other cultures and mythologies around them. They used familiar motifs and archetypes to create their own mythology of how the world began and how it ended up so fractured in so many ways.

The text of Genesis as we have them today wasn’t finalized until well after the return from Babylonian exile. This is important because Genesis 2 and 3, in addition to a mythological tale of Hebrew origins, it is also an allegory of the historical journey that Israel has taken. The creation of man from dust can be seen as paralleling the creation of Israel out of slavery. The first humans were placed into a paradise garden; the Israelites were led to a paradise-like land, “a land flowing with milk and honey.” The first humans were given a command to follow; the Israelites were given commandments to follow. Life and perpetual habitation of the land given to them would follow obedience. Conversely, disobedience led to death and exile for both parties of the allegory. God gives warnings to both the first humans and to Israel the consequences of disobedience.[7] The mythology of Genesis is written by returnees from the Babylonian exile, looking back at their history and diagnosing what went so wrong.

Lending more strength to the argument that Genesis 2 and 3 are stories about Israel is the different word for God used in chapter 1. In Genesis 1, the word for God is Elohim, a general, cosmic deity. But when we get to Genesis 2:8, the words used are Yahweh Elohim, naming a deity who is specific to the Israelites.[8]

This is where we revisit the theological interpretation of naïve children who are faced with a choice to obey God or do their own thing. Did God want them to remain naïve? I don’t think so. Proverbs chapter 1 begins with the following words on the purpose of this collection:

To know wisdom and reproof, to understand discerning maxims.

To accept the reproof of insight, righteousness, justice, and uprightness.

To give shrewdness to the simple, to a lad, knowledge and cunning.

Let the wise man hear and gain learning, and the discerning acquire designs.

To understand proverbs and adages, the words of the wise and their riddles.

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. Wisdom and reproof dolts despise.[9]

During the Babylonian exile, the prophet Ezekiel wrote about returning to obedience, not because of commands written in stone, but because they would be internalized. One such text reads:

²⁶ A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you, and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. ²⁷ I will put my spirit within you and make you follow my statutes and be careful to observe my ordinances. ²⁸ Then you shall live in the land that I gave to your ancestors, and you shall be my people, and I will be your God. [10]

The writer of Hebrews writes about maturing in faith:

You need milk, not solid food, ¹³ for everyone who lives on milk, being still an infant, is unskilled in the word of righteousness. ¹⁴ But solid food is for the mature, for those whose faculties have been trained by practice to distinguish good from evil.[11]

There is no shortcut to maturity. There is no shortcut to genuine knowledge and wisdom. The problem with Adam and Eve in the garden was not that they desired these things, but they took a supposed shortcut that was offered to them.

And here is where Jesus’ wilderness temptation (our gospel reading) becomes relevant. Jesus too, was offered shortcuts to achieve what he was destined to do. But to take the shortcut would have prevented him from reaching his goals. The journey itself – the learning that happens, the struggles that must be overcome – are just as important, and perhaps even more than the destination. The writer of Hebrews wrote, “Because he himself was tested by what he suffered, he is able to help those who are being tested,”[12] and “Although he was a Son, he learned obedience through what he suffered.”[13] The writer also (in chapter 4) describes how Israel failed to grow and mature because of their disobedience.

Shortcuts appeal to our own vanity, comfort, and power. These are the things to avoid and give up (in the spirit of Lent).

Rather, we should not shy away from the hard work necessary to gain Christ’s wisdom and knowledge. Paul writes in Philippians what this means:

³ Do nothing from selfish ambition or empty conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. ⁴ Let each of you look not to your own interests but to the interests of others. ⁵ Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,

⁶ who, though he existed in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be grasped,
⁷ but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
assuming human likeness.
And being found in appearance as a human,
⁸ he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death—
even death on a cross.
⁹ Therefore God exalted him even more highly
and gave him the name
that is above every other name,
¹⁰ so that at the name given to Jesus
every knee should bend,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
¹¹ and every tongue should confess
that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.[14]

Amen.

References

Alter, R. (2019). The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company.

Bartlett, D. L., & Brown Taylor, B. (2010). Feasting on the Word: Year A, Volume 2. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press.

Enns, P., & Byas, J. (2019). Genesis for Normal People: A Guide to the Most Controversial, Misunderstood, and Abused Book of the Bible. The Bible for Normal People.

Hamilton, V. P. (1990). New International Commentary on the Old Testament: Genesis 1-17. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.

Levine, A.-J., & Brettler, M. Z. (2020). The Bible With and Without Jesus: How Jews and Christians Read the Same Stories Differently. New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Van de Laar, J. (2026, February 12). Falling Down, or Growing Up? Retrieved from Sacredise Your LIfe!: https://sacredise.substack.com/p/revolutionary-blessedness

William B. Eerdmans. (2003). Eerdman's Commentary on the Bible. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans.

 

 

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[1] Around page 37, Kindle edition. (Enns & Byas, 2019)

[2] Ibid.

[3] Around page 128, Kindle edition. (Levine & Brettler, 2020)

[4] Around page 113. Ibid.

[5] Around page 123. Ibid.

[6] Around page 129, Ibid.

[7] Around page 36, Kindle edition. (Enns & Byas, 2019)

[8] Genesis 1:1-2:7 and Genesis 2:8ff are two separate creation accounts. The first one, the more cosmic one, and the later one, could be read as Jewish reaction to Babylonian creation mythology. The second is based on older Hebrew traditions, still probably influenced by surrounding societies, but more distinctly Israelite.

[9] Proverbs 1:2-7. (Alter, 2019)

[10] Ezekiel 36:26-28. (NRSVue)

[11] Hebrews 5:12b-14. (NRSVue)

[12] Hebrews 2:18. (NRSVue)

[13] Hebrews 5:8. (NRSVue)

[14] Philippians 2:3-11. (NRSVue)