Sunday, March 17, 2024

Skins and Sins and Sons; or, Restating the World

Over the course of Genesis 3, we've witnessed the slow-motion downfall of humankind from being God's image to God's exile. It's been a tragic and degrading path that the first sin put the man and the woman on. And now that the garden has vomited us forth, now that cherubim and burning blade firmly bar our way back in, we have little choice but to begin looking at the world from a new perspective – a perspective from outside the garden of God. With today's passage, we begin to consider, in Bede's words, “the deeds of this world and of mortal life.”1

First, though, “the LORD God made for the human and his wife garments” (Genesis 3:21). Earlier, the man and woman had sewn together fig leaves into skimpy girdles to conceal their nakedness, but in neither durability nor size were they up to the task. God generously provides replacement clothing, something larger, “something more durable, more suited to the hard lives they will face outside the garden.”2 The kind of garment pictured here is a long tunic that reaches down at least to the knees, maybe even the ankles.3 Unlike flimsy fig leaves, they're stiffer stuff, able to not only visually obstruct their bodies but also protect them from the elements, from “blazing sun, chilling wind, or pouring rain.”4 Now, God doesn't have to do this. He could just let them spend their whole lives doing little more than stitching leaf to leaf! But generously, before he sends them out to face the consequences of sin, he provides something to ease the harshness of the world. And to that end, having stopped his work of 'making' on the seventh day, God goes back to 'making,' all for the sake of mercy.5

Not only are they a protection, though, they're a privilege. The word for 'garments' here is used by Moses for the 'tunics' that Aaron and his sons will wear as their priestly vestments (Exodus 29:5-9; Leviticus 8:7).6 These vestments given to Adam and Eve are more than just the customary clothes of a caveman; they show that the man and woman go forth invested as priests who maintain a relationship with God. The LORD God stooped down and peeled the fig leaves away, destroying the covering they've tried to make for themselves; he exposed their shamefully bare nature. But then the hand of the LORD gently “clothed them” in what they had no way to get themselves (Genesis 3:21). By God's “caring authority,” he shows his commitment to not give up on us, to cover us when we confess we're naked and poor, to welcome us, to dignify us.7 We're rightly moved when the father runs to the prodigal son and throws a robe over him as he comes home; but this is the Father giving the fine robe as the prodigal son leaves in the first place! These vestments are astonishing symbols of the authority and dominion that the man and woman will still bear in the world beyond the garden as God's images and as God's beloved.8

But this intimacy and power of grace, while free to the man and woman, still has its cost. These are, we're told, “garments of skins” (Genesis 3:21). And to make body-length tunics for two, no animal has that much skin to spare and then just go about its day. God's provision comes at the cost of some animal's life.9 Something had to die in order for the man and woman's shame and vulnerability to be covered, in order for them to be reinvested with status and authority, in order for them to be equipped to still minister to God outside the garden.

Sin is a costly thing that can't merely be papered over or dismissed. To get by in the world will be painful and messy and at least a little bit brutal. For even here, in this dawning moment, some beast has died for our sake. And whatever it was, it won't be the last. The priest who slew a guilt-offering was entitled to its skin (Leviticus 7:8). And so, as they say goodbye to the garden of God, man and woman wear the skins of a dead beast over their own naked skin, a constant reminder of “the profound consequences of their choice for disobedience.”10

Now “the human called his wife's name 'Eve,' because she was the mother of all living” (Genesis 3:20). Adam and Eve – their names mean 'Human' and 'Make-Alive.'11 And to call her 'Mother of All Living' is a profound gesture Genesis makes; among Israel's pagan neighbors, that kind of title was reserved for mother goddesses.12 He calls her that in advance. But now, in the world outside God's garden, “Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived, and she bore” (Genesis 4:1). They were told to “be fruitful and multiply,” and the original blessing remains intact despite the curse (Genesis 1:28). In fact, this conception and labor are carried out “with the LORD (Genesis 4:1). Despite how challenging and uncomfortable Eve finds the process, “with God all things are possible” after all (Matthew 19:26).13 God “makes her the joyous mother of children” (Psalm 113:9).

And so “she bore Cain, and she said: 'I have gotten a man!'” (Genesis 4:1). It's a curious thing for her to say. The verb she uses, qānîtî, is used elsewhere for acquiring wisdom (Proverbs 1:5), owning livestock (Isaiah 1:3), buying a field (Jeremiah 32:44), buying a lamb (2 Samuel 12:3), buying clothing (Jeremiah 13:2), even buying a slave (Exodus 21:2). It's a commercial word, a property word, an ownership word. Eve's claiming what she's conceived and birthed as her purchase, her property, her possession. In more special circumstances, though, this is also the word used for God as the Producer of heaven and earth (Genesis 14:19), as the one who created Israel (Deuteronomy 32:6), as the one who forms our innermost parts before we're born (Psalm 139:13). Eve's laying credit to forming, fashioning, forging, manufacturing a man.14

In Genesis 2, the woman was depicted as derived from the man (Genesis 2:23); now she, as woman, asserts her womanly power as the source of man from henceforth.15 She concedes, at the end, a role for God – “I have gotten a man with the LORD (Genesis 4:1) – but casts herself as his colleague, as though Cain were the fruit of a group project they'd worked on.16 But it's almost like she's his competitor as well: “Now it's not just you who manufacture men, LORD; what you do, I do too!” She “puts herself on par with the Lord as creator,” and so Cain's very name is testimony to the same grasping after godhood that led her to snatch the forbidden fruit.17 It isn't a sign of a healthy attitude: in her son whom she manufactured and owns, she has a man, she thinks, like a new husband, who won't disappoint in the way Adam does; he'll be “the apple of his mother's eye.”18

“And she added to bear his brother Abel” (Genesis 4:2). He comes across as an afterthought. His name gets no comment, because its meaning is obvious to anybody who speaks Hebrew. It's a pretty common word in the Old Testament, often translated 'vanity,' but really meaning 'breath' or 'mist' or 'vapor.' It refers to something so fragile it can easily be blown away, something on the verge of dissipating the moment you see it,19 “something insubstantial and evanescent.”20 It's a pretty odd name for a baby boy; perhaps he was a small and weak child, not expected to last long, the kind for whom Adam might've stayed up late into the night praying for a miracle.21 And, of course, there's no doubt some foreshadowing here: Abel's really won't be a long life on earth.22 “Leave me alone,” Job tells his friends, “for my days are a vapor” (Job 7:16). Abel could've said that just as well.

The fact that Genesis only mentions once that Adam knew his wife or that she conceived, and then narrates two births, has led many to suggest that Cain and Abel might be implied to be twins.23 If so, they make quite the contrast: one born so robust he's portrayed as a full-grown man straight from the womb, and his brother born so frail he was practically named 'Temporary,' 'Don't-Count-on-It,' 'Here-Today-Gone-Tomorrow.' And together they paint a portrait of the world as we find it outside God's garden. Cain shows us the world through the lens of pride and possession. He tells us there's no limit to human potential, nothing to thwart our glory. In Cain's world, the way to get by is to get ahead, to work hard, to put yourself first and achieve all you can imagine. His whole life will be stamped by the dynamic of owning and being owned. His is the world viewed by economists, industrialists, technologists; he's the manufactured man, the quantifiable man. To live in Cain-world is to live for grabbing and getting, a world of invention and production, of seeking salvation on an assembly line. It's a world bought and sold a trillion times a minute, a world we demand to reshape and repair and remortgage, a factory model of markets and might, suffused with objects and efforts, a world we imagine we can master through ingenuity and elbow grease.

But then Abel is born: “Vapor of vapors! Everything is vapor! What profit does an adam have by all the toil which he toils under the sun?” (Ecclesiastes 1:2-3). So says Ecclesiastes, which might as well be called the Book of Abel. Everything Cain represents is unmasked therein as an “ultimate emptiness and fruitlessness.”24 “All toil and all skill in work,” everything Cain was all about, “come from a man's envy of his neighbor: this also is vapor and grasping after wind” (Ecclesiastes 4:4). “So I hated life, because what was done under the sun was grievous to me, for everything is vapor and grasping after wind” (Ecclesiastes 2:17). “Adam is like a vapor; his days are like a passing shadow” (Psalm 144:4). “Surely every adam stands as entirely vapor” (Psalm 39:5). Human life turns out to be 100% Abel. All we are is dust in the wind. And so are all these nice things that share this Abel-world with us. Things fall apart. If Cain shows us the world through a lens of pride and possession, Abel shows it through a lens of peril and pointlessness. Nothing in life is certain but death and taxes. “Time and chance happen to [us] all” (Ecclesiastes 9:11). Nothing we can do amounts to more than children building sandcastles on a beach holiday, or a fool trying to shoot down the moon with bow and arrow.25

As one author puts it, “where the name 'Cain' speaks of grasping after divinity, then, the name 'Abel' signifies the transient nature of human existence.”26 The hopes of Cain are thwarted by Abel every time, and Cain will make sure of it. Here we have the world outside the garden: pride raising its own peril, possessiveness proving pointlessness, and the vicious cycle locks us into a desperate combat to secure the impossible. The more we see that nothing lasts, the more anxiously we crave to cobble together something certain; and the more frantically we try, the more we damage the world and hasten its dissipation. Now that's a Cain-and-Abel world we're in.

It wasn't meant to be that way, of course. In the beginning, we were made originally righteous, innocent, by “a definite gift of grace divinely bestowed upon all human nature in the first parent.”27 If Adam and Eve hadn't sinned, then at the moment of our conception God would've given each of us that same added gift of a total rightness inside and out, key to operating human nature the right way.28 In Genesis 3, we watched Adam and Eve lose that innocence, but we might hope that when their children are born, they'll enter even the world outside the garden as innocents who have the same inner health Adam and Eve had.

But it turns out that the answer to that is no. As St. Augustine put it, “the transgression of those two,” of Adam and Eve, “ought to be understood as so great a sin that it could change for the worse the nature of all who are born of man and woman and could bind them with a common guilt.”29 Original righteousness was ripped off human nature violently, leaving human nature itself naked and wounded in all who are born to it, starting here in Genesis 4. In Cain and Abel alike, Adam and Eve “begat sons who still carry with them the original sin of their unfaithful progenitor.”30 Or, to use the Bible's own words, Cain and Abel could both look back and sing in unison the psalm: “I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me” (Psalm 51:5).

The Apostle Paul explains that “by the one man's disobedience, the many were made sinners” (Romans 5:19). Each one of us can say, “In Adam I fell, in Adam I was cast out of paradise..., in Adam I am guilty of sin.”31 It's right there in the Bible: “the trespass of one led to condemnation for all humans” (Romans 5:18). “As an inheritance, Adam left his children... not freedom but bondage..., not salvation but destruction.”32 Paul says it without mincing words: as Adam's descendants, we are all born “children, by nature, of wrath” (Ephesians 2:3).

So the early Christians recognized that “every soul... born in Adam... is unclean,” and “sinful, too, because it is unclean.”33 That includes Cain. It also includes Abel.34 And me, and you, and your great-grandkids. Not only after they grow up, but from the very beginning. “All the children of Adam were in him infected by the contagion of sin,”35 hence why the birth of every child in Israel called for a sin-offering (Leviticus 12:6).36 “No one is without sin, not even an infant one day old, although he never committed a sin” in his own person,37 they said, for a newborn baby “has not sinned at all, except that, born carnally according to Adam, he has contracted the contagion of the first death from the first nativity.”38 “All souls, even those of infants..., contract original sin.”39 That's because “the human nature in which each of us is born of Adam... is not in good health,” because it has a “defect which darkens and weakens” it.40 This “defect stemming from the origin remains in the offspring to make them guilty.”41 So “no one is born of Adam who is not bound by the chain of sin and condemnation;”42 “absolutely everyone who has been born is held guilty.”43

Those aren't my words; they're the words of Christians from the first four centuries of the faith, before Patrick began to evangelize Ireland. As sons of Adam, as daughters of Eve, “we are invariably fellow-travelers away from God” even as he forms us in our mother's womb.44 We have an obligation to be in a right relationship with God, to be at peace with God, but we are born outside that relationship, born inheriting a fallen state, born as heirs of a war declared on God.45 Even though we didn't choose it, we're born guilty of being on the wrong side of it. From our first infant cry, Adam's generating influence is reaching down through the ages, connecting us to his sinful will.46 Since Adam represented us all before God, human nature itself was declared guilty in him, and so what we inherit is guilty, even before we've had a chance to will anything sinful as newborn individuals.47

It's not just a silly outdated idea, either. John Wesley reminded us that “all men are conceived in sin and shapen in wickedness,”48 so that each person born in descent from Adam and Eve is “justly punishable for it.”49 Our own denomination's articles of faith confess this, too. Each one of us suffers from a “disordered disposition,” a “corrupt habit of sorts” through which “the various powers of the soul strain towards conflicting objectives.”50 That inner disorder we're born with and guilty of explains why “human nature is now defective so that we are all prone to [actual] sin.”51 Original sin doesn't coerce us into putting sin into practice – we have free will – but, living with the effects of original sin, universally we actually sin once we get the chance.52

That might sound like an incredibly gloomy, dreary, and offensive message – that we should look into an infant face and see not only the precious image of God but also the presence of disorder, guilt, sin, judgment. But the reason why the Church came to so strongly insist on this original sin idea is because, if original sin isn't true, then “not all would be in need of redemption through Christ.”53 The Church came to this deep understanding of original sin by reasoning backwards from the beautiful reality of our redemption in Jesus!

It all adds up from one practice and two convictions. First, the practice: the early church baptized babies. We can't find a time when we see Christians unwilling to baptize babies. Our earliest witnesses say the Church got it as “a tradition from the apostles to give baptism even to little children,”54 and the New Testament itself shows us cases of whole households being baptized together, babies and all (Acts 16:33). If “no one is prevented from baptism and grace,” one early bishop said, “how much more should an infant not be prohibited?”55 Second, the first conviction: there are not two different kinds of baptism. They got that straight from the Apostle Paul, who says outright in the Bible: “one Lord, one faith, one baptism” (Ephesians 4:5). Third, the other conviction: baptism is an answer to sin and guilt. They got that from the Apostle Peter, who “baptized... for the forgiveness of your sins” (Acts 2:38), and from Ananias who baptized Paul to “wash away [his] sins” (Acts 22:16).

So, they reasoned, babies are baptized, and baptism is to wash away the guilt of sin. Could they be baptized for some other reason? No, because then there'd be two different kinds of baptism, but we know there's only one. So if babies are baptized, then “the Church certainly baptizes” them “for a true forgiveness of sins.”56 For “if there were nothing in infants that ought to pertain to forgiveness..., then the grace of baptism would appear superfluous.”57 But what in infants could need forgiving, if they haven't committed any sins of their own? The early church answered: “In the case of little children, original sin is removed by baptism.”58

Whether we accept all their premises or not, that's how the early church reasoned their way there. “The first birth holds human beings under the condemnation from which only the second birth sets them free.”59 That's why Jesus says, “You must be born again!” (John 3:7). “Who will be so bold,” they ask, “to say that Christ is not the Savior and Redeemer of infants? But from what does he save them if they don't have the disease of original sin?”60 So, they concluded, on account of original sin, “it is necessary even for infants to be reborn in Christ,”61 to be “released from the bonds of sin through the grace of Christ the Mediator.”62

This dark doctrine of original sin is actually meant to cast into relief the bigger truth that “every human being, even the littlest, is called to the knowledge and love of Christ.”63 And if that's true of even a baby at her first breath, if it was true of infant Abel and child Cain, then how can any of us ever doubt that we're called to Christ, that salvation is meant for the likes of us? For the Lord's faithful grace “has the same fullness of power... in the action, confession, and forgiveness of sins in every sex, age, and condition of the human race.”64

Just as the sin of Adam and Eve was covered by garments God made, so Cain and Abel, though born naked and poor, need not stay that way. Even out of God's garden, Adam and Eve could knit and sew clothes of cotton and wool and animal skins for their children, and undoubtedly they did. But spiritually, Cain and Abel don't have to stay naked and poor either. They, like every child, like every adult, can be clothed by God. “For as many of you as were baptized into Christ” – even if in the very hour you opened your eyes outside the garden – “have put on Christ” as a vestment infinitely nobler than what Adam and Eve wore (Galatians 3:27). And so we can thank God that, though we're out in this world of pride and peril, of possessiveness and pointlessness, although we're born in sin and all we grasp at is only chasing the wind, Christ welcomes us one and all with this same promise, even in our Cain-and-Abel world: “Let the little children come unto me” (Matthew 19:14). Amen.

Sunday, March 3, 2024

The First Gospel

We've listened in as the serpent whispered his power of confusion into the woman's ear. We've gazed at the fruit in all its delectable allure. We've tasted with the woman, and the man, the sweetness of sin and its rot. We've endured the spiral of shame, the growth of guilt, the frantic force of fear. We've panicked and bellowed blame every which way. We've toiled under the catastrophic weight of the curse. We've said a tearful goodbye to our paradise lost, and ventured out to the land of thorns and thistles where our tombs will be. But in the course of wringing all these tragic meanings out of Genesis chapter 3, there's one little note we've passed by, one glimmer in the dark. For this all began with a serpent, and before our penalties are even mentioned, he's got to get his.

The LORD God said to the serpent, 'Because you have done this'” – because you deceived the woman who did you no wrong, because you twisted and mocked and spread doubt, because you cast the holy name of God into disrepute, “cursed are you above all livestock and above all beasts of the field; on your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life” (Genesis 3:14). Now, the surface meaning is that God has a problem with the animal we call a snake.1 Formerly, the snake was the most cunning of wild beasts; now, it's the most cursed of wild and domestic alike, an exile from the animals.2 The snake gets around not by flying, swimming, walking, but slithering, wriggling its body over the earth. Their tongues flicker in and out to augment smell; it looks like they lick up dust as food. As far as “enmity” goes, even infants instinctively are wary of snakes,3 and “many species of primates are deeply afraid of snakes.”4 By some estimates, over 150,000 people die each year from snakebites, making them the most deadly animal to us besides mosquitoes and each other.5

But if we're content to leave things at that level of understanding here, we're missing out. As we've mentioned, the serpent here isn't just an ordinary snake, as if snakes were cunning conversationalists. We're dealing with a spiritual power behind the surface of the snake. Many of Israel's neighbors told stories about cosmic serpents who set themselves up against the gods. In Egypt, the sun god was under threat each night from a giant serpent of chaos, and a great deal of Egyptian religion revolved around keeping this serpent at bay. Among the Hittites, the storm god had once been defeated by the serpent, and only with human help was he able to kill this serpent and its offspring.6 Among the Canaanites, their god Baal was said to have faced “Litan the Fleeing Serpent..., the Twisty Serpent, the Potentate with Seven Heads.”7 The Bible uses that same language: “Leviathan the fleeing serpent, Leviathan the twisting serpent..., the Dragon that is in the sea” (Isaiah 27:1), “king over all the sons of pride” (Job 41:34). “No one is so fierce that he dares to stir him up” (Job 41:10).

So this isn't simply a common, everyday snake in the first place. This is that serpent, a spiritual power opposed to divinity, just as the Egyptians and Hittites and Canaanites and others all could've recognized. Here, “the nature of the serpent was a symbol of the devil.”8 This is 'the Serpent' with a capital S. The snake seen on the surface is hiding a fallen angel, an adversarial Satan, a force of disorder and disruption and danger, the sinuous wellspring of pride, a Leviathan full of venom that corrodes the soul. And that's whom God is judging.

Cursed are you above all the livestock and all the beasts of the field!” (Genesis 3:14). More than any other creature, God curses the devil. The Serpent is tolerated only for a time. A cosmic war has begun: the Serpent picked a fight with God, dragging his name through the mud; in turn, God skewers the Serpent with the words of his curse (Isaiah 27:1).9 In the end, this Serpent will be destroyed, which will mean creation's salvation.10

In the meantime, “on your belly you shall go,” the LORD announces to the Serpent (Genesis 3:14). The devil – once a lofty light in heaven, momentarily absorbed in the contemplation of the perfect good which is God – is now condemned to earthly obsessions, the muck and the mud of baseness.11 For the devil to be cast onto his belly is to be a pathetic figure slithering through the world, since he “forfeited the dignity accorded him in the beginning and was cast down to earth.”12 The devil is here being restrained, bound from being the menace he'd otherwise be; cowardice strikes his heart, forced into submission by God before the war really begins.13

Dust you shall eat all the days of your life,” God announces (Genesis 3:14). Just like crawling on the ground, licking or eating dust was a posture of extreme humiliation in the ancient world.14 To 'eat dust' was a Near Eastern way of describing what it was like to be dead: people in the underworld were pictured as “those who long for light, who eat dust and live on clay.”15 No matter how much of our dust he eats, no matter how much destruction he causes, it doesn't nourish or satisfy the devil: he's starving on this dusty diet, frustrated, pained.16

God goes on: “I will put enmity between you and the woman” (Genesis 3:15), that is, the devil “with the power of death” (Hebrews 2:14) will be made an enemy to “the mother of all living” (Genesis 3:20). “I will make the woman your implacable enemy,” God's saying.17 For a moment in the story, it seemed like the Serpent had won the woman for his partner, his ally, virtually his vessel in leading humanity astray. But now that budding alliance is blessedly ripped asunder, divorced, turned into burning hatred, as the scales fall off her eyes and she at last can recognize all the Serpent's abuse for what it is – and she will be his furious foe.18 This is no merely mild mutual dislike; it's a state of war, a hatred on which life and death hang.19 And this hostile condition, this bold antipathy, this open enmity between the Serpent and the Woman, is enforced by the word of God.20

I will put enmity,” the LORD elaborates, “between your seed and her seed.” Not only are the Serpent and the Woman personally opposed, but from each will descend dueling lineages locked in a mortal combat throughout time: “He shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel” (Genesis 3:15). There is, there must be, an instinctive opposition between everything truly human in us, everything that comes from the mother of life, and the darkness that roams the world. There's common grace hereby placed in us that, despite our sinfulness, will burst through and resist the dark. “Reconciliation with the Evil One is harmful... Accordingly,” St. Basil said, “the devil has remained our opponent because of the fall that came upon us due to his abuse long ago. So the Lord has planned for us wrestling with him so that we would wrestle through obedience and triumph over the Adversary.”21 This long war is part of God's curse against the Serpent, who expected no resistance from us.

And that means, for one, a long spiritual warfare. One old commentator observes that “the seed of the devil are apostate angels, who were corrupted by the example of his pride and rebellion.”22 For all human history, we've been under siege by subtle powers of corruption, seed of the serpent which slither behind the scenes. These are spirits oppressive and possessive, unclean spirits that stink up all they waft through like a sewer breeze (Mark 1:23), harmful spirits that wear down our living (1 Samuel 16:14), lying spirits that aim to propagate that old mission of deception (1 Kings 22:22). And they were quite successful: through the ages, as the line of promise narrowed and narrowed, “demonic deceit was thus overshadowing every place and hiding the knowledge of the true God.”23 Yet we could always resist them through obedient openness to being taught by God's Spirit.

But it isn't only spirits who are the Serpent's seed. Down through the ages, the devil has been able to draw away many of those descended physically from the woman. The Serpent's seed includes all “those captured by him to do his will” (2 Timothy 2:26), into whom he implants his sly craft, onto whom he imprints his low-down ways, through whom he reproduces his faithlessness and wickedness.24 In the grand field of this world, humans can be either “sons of the kingdom” or “sons of the Evil One” (Matthew 13:38). Just as the woman's seed will live in the direction of humanity's mission to spread life and order and flourishing, so the Serpent's seed will go the other direction, to disrupt and disorganize and dismantle that which God wanted to see in the world.25 For “whoever makes a practice of sinning is of the devil” (1 John 3:8). But just as the Serpent can corrupt the seed of the woman into his own, anyone who's lived as the Serpent's seed can be renewed as the Woman's seed, can “turn... from the power of Satan to God, that they may receive the forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith” (Acts 26:18). The question is, whose side will you take? Whose seed will you prove to be?

Skipping past how this plays out in the rest of Genesis (we'll get there), at Sinai the LORD chooses to take Israel under his wing as a young bride (Ezekiel 16:8). She became “a Woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars” (Revelation 12:1). And so the Children of Israel are, from that perspective, the promised collective seed of this Woman, Mother Zion.

When they enter the promised land, the city of Gibeon decides to be “cunning” – now there's a serpent word (Joshua 9:3-4). They manufacture false evidence that they've traveled from a distant land that isn't in Canaan, and so when they speak flattering words and seem harmless, Joshua and the Israelites make a hasty covenant with these Gibeonites (Joshua 9:4-15). After realizing the truth, Joshua asks them why they “deceived” Israel (Joshua 9:22). He uses God's words to the serpent against them, announcing “Cursed are you” (Joshua 9:23), and he relegates them to servants under Israel's foot, debased like a serpent slithering in the dust (Joshua 9:24).26

In the days of the judges, when a Canaanite general named Sisera menaced Israel, a woman named Jael lured him into a false sense of security in her tent and, as he slept, hammered a tent peg through his skull (Judges 4:21). “Most blessed of women,” they sang of her who “crushed his head” like a serpent's head (Judges 5:24-26).27 Later, the Children of Israel demanded a king, so they got a promising young man named Saul (1 Samuel 10:17-27). His first real test of leadership came by a confrontation with the Ammonite king Nahash – 'Serpent' (1 Samuel 11:1-4). So Saul mustered an army, marched to the rescue, and struck at King Serpent's army until salvation was won (1 Samuel 11:8-11). Only once he'd shown himself a true seed of the woman (for now), able to lead Israel in crushing the serpent's head, did they accept him fully as king (1 Samuel 11:15).28

Eventually, as Saul began to take a more serpentine path in life, Samuel anointed a boy named David to one day take his place. And it's no coincidence that, when the Philistines sent their champion to intimidate the Israelites, Goliath was wearing a helmet made of bronze – (the Hebrew word for 'bronze' sounds a lot like 'serpent') – and, literally, a “coat of scales” (1 Samuel 17:5). Goliath was costumed as the seed of the Serpent, so what was David to do as the seed of the woman? Smash a stone square in the giant's head, that's what (1 Samuel 17:49)!29

The prophets promised his descendants that “the nations... shall lick the dust like a serpent, like the crawling things of the earth..., and they shall be in fear of you” (Micah 7:17). But even within Israel, “whoever does not practice righteousness” could find themselves numbered among “the children of the devil” (1 John 3:10). Be they Jew or be they Gentile, “the wicked... go astray from birth, speaking lies; they have venom like the venom of a serpent” (Psalm 58:3-4), “plan evil things in their heart and stir up wars continually; they make their tongue sharp as a serpent's, and under their lips is the venom of asps” (Psalm 140:2-3). No wonder, then, that as Israel grew more and more venomous to each other, more and more serpent-like, Jeremiah heard the verdict: “Behold, I am sending you among serpents..., and they shall bite you, declares the LORD (Jeremiah 8:17).

The rabbis looked back and said that whenever Israel forsook the commandments, the serpent “will aim and bite on his heel and make him ill. For [Israel's] sons, however, there will be a remedy; but for you, O Serpent, there will not be a remedy, since they are to make appeasement in the end, in the days of King Messiah.”30 To bring a climax to this conflict, a woman would bear the Messiah, the One destined for the promise. Until then, Israel – Mother Zion – endured the agony of her combat like labor pangs, “and the Dragon stood before the Woman who was about to give birth, so that, when she bore her child, he might devour it” (Revelation 12:4).

Eve, an undefiled virgin,” they used to say, “conceived the word of the serpent and brought forth disobedience and death.”31 But in answer to that, there's a New Eve in town, a Woman who hears an angelic voice announce to her good tidings that she's conceiving the hope of the world.32 And so “the knot of Eve's disobedience was untied by Mary's obedience.”33 We probably don't give Mary nearly enough credit or honor; the Bible she every generation must celebrate the matchless blessing God gave her (Luke 1:48). It was with unstained faith that she carried God in her womb, was tethered by an umbilical cord to the Infinite, the Immortal, the Consuming Fire. It was through her that Mother Zion's birth pangs came to their blessed fruition. If Eve the Disobedient was the “mother of all the living” in a natural sense (Genesis 3:20), Mary who gives birth to the Body of Christ is the new “Mother of All the Living” spiritually. As the New Woman carrying the Promised Seed, she's the woman whom the Serpent most completely hates, and who most abhors him as her enemy, wanting nothing to do with him but to see him destroyed by her Son (Genesis 3:15).34 Her childbearing is curse-breaking, world-saving, all because it brings our Savior to us. It's as the Seed of this woman that Jesus is here to save.

Legend had it that, from the moment the Virgin Mary gave birth, the darkness shuddered in terror and confusion – for, in a moment, “all magic was vanquished, all bondage of evil came to naught, ignorance was destroyed, and the ancient realm was brought to ruin.”35 Looking back on everything that came before, Christians could say that the Serpent had “bit and killed and hindered the steps of humanity until the Seed came who was Mary's Child, who was destined beforehand to trample on [the Serpent's] head.”36 This Child, this Jesus, was born with a mission: “to destroy the works of the devil” (1 John 3:8), whether demonic or human.

And so Jesus “commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him” (Mark 1:27). Famously “he cast out many demons” wherever he went (Mark 1:34). And he enlisted his apostles as officers in that same campaign: “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven! Behold, I have given you authority to tread on serpents and scorpions and over all the power of the enemy” (Luke 10:18-19). The demons, seed of the Serpent, were tread down by Jesus. But Jesus was also opposed by those to whom he thundered back: “You brood of vipers! How can you speak good when you are evil?” (Matthew 12:34). “You are of your father the devil” (John 8:44). “Serpents, brood of vipers, how shall you escape the sentence of hell?” (Matthew 23:33). The scribes, the Pharisees – they'd become seed of the Serpent, full of devilish venom against the Woman's Seed.37

Ultimately, though, the Seed of the Woman wasn't sent just to live out his enmity with the seed of the Serpent. His fight, in the end, was to be against the Ancient Serpent himself. And it all came down to the moment when he allowed the devil to bite his heel, to lash out with all his venom and fury, to hurl him down to the dust of death from the cross. Little did the Serpent realize that it was in biting Christ this way that his own head would be smashed. At the cross, Christ “disarmed the principalities and powers and put them to open shame by triumphing over them” (Colossians 2:15). It was a costly victory, since the Son of God, wearing the fragility of our flesh, had to be bitten by everything the devil could muster; but it was the only way for God to make this a truly human victory.38 “On Good Friday,” it's been said, “a holy heel took aim with all the power of heaven.”39 Now are fulfilled the words of Job: “His hand pierced the fleeing serpent” (Job 26:13)! Now are fulfilled the words of Asaph: “You crushed the heads of Leviathan” (Psalm 74:14)! Now is the Serpent trodden down!

But though the Promised Seed has triumphed decisively, the fight isn't over. The Woman has been reborn in him, and her name is Church. Meanwhile, the devil limps along, crippled and enraged: “The Dragon became furious with the Woman and went off to make war on the rest of her seed, on those who keep the commandments of God and hold to the testimony of Jesus” (Revelation 12:17). Someone being baptized into the Church would declare: “I renounce you, Satan, and all your works, and all your pomp, and all your worship!”40 In saying that, every person baptized into Christ, abandoning the Serpent to become the seed of the Church, pledged enmity against the Serpent and all his seed. One Christian said this about the Church as the Mother of Christians: “Do you not see these weapons, unconquerable and unbreakable, with which she shatters and removes the head of the serpent? I am speaking of the cross, the body, the blood of Jesus, and the vows, prayers, vigils, and other weapons that fight against the serpent.... Here is evidence of the God-given hatred this pious woman has gained against the serpent: she removes the idols..., she raises the churches, and the nations acknowledge God.”41

Still we have demons to resist by our resolute faithfulness to God; still we have demons to cast out in our Lord Jesus' name. Still we have false teachers to beware, for until the end, “some will depart from the faith by devoting themselves to deceitful spirits and doctrines of demons” (1 Timothy 4:1), “who do not serve our Lord Jesus Christ but their own belly, and by smooth talk and flattery they deceive the hearts of the naive” even now (Romans 16:18). “Satan, through his works of wickedness, has driven some from the Church and formed heresies and schisms.”42 “May a hatred of the serpent be granted you that, as they lie in wait for your heel, you may crush their head.”43

Still, too, we have persecutors and critics. Given that the seed of the Serpent on earth oppose the cause of Christ, we should expect to feel a sharp nipping at our heels if we're truly the brothers and sisters of our Master. Be sure you're not the one cozying up to the devil, of course! “Let none of you suffer as... an evildoer” (1 Peter 4:15). But “rejoice insofar as you share Christ's sufferings” (1 Peter 4:13). Rejoice when they hiss derogatory things, when they coil around and squeeze your life tight, when they spit venom, when they bite, “for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you” (Matthew 5:12). “Do not repay evil for evil..., but, on the contrary, bless” (1 Peter 3:9). Pray for those who imitate the Serpent, that “God may perhaps grant them repentance leading to a knowledge of the truth” (2 Timothy 2:25). It's through prayer and blessing and good news and the outpouring of love – only through these – that we can crush what the Serpent has done in them.

Ultimately, in having chosen to tempt us, chosen to pick a fight with God through us, the Serpent did so much more harm to himself than he's done to us. We have a promise: “The God of Peace will soon crush Satan under your feet” (Romans 16:20). Even now, “when you gather frequently as a congregation, the powers of Satan are destroyed, and his destructive force is vanquished by the harmony of your faith.”44 And so “if you turn to the Lord with your whole heart and do righteousness..., you will be empowered to rule over the works of the devil. Do not fear the devil's threat at all, for he is as weak as a tendon on a corpse.”45

Already we bear witness that “the Dragon, that Ancient Serpent who is Devil and the Satan,” is “thrown into the pit... so that he might not deceive the nations any longer” (Revelation 20:2). “Just as it was decreed against the serpent that he and all his seed were to be trod upon, so it was also decreed against him who was in the serpent that he go to the fire together with all his hosts,”46 into “the eternal fire which has been prepared for the devil and his angels” (Matthew 25:41). And so at last “the devil who had deceived them [will be] thrown into the lake of fire and sulfur,” to “be tormented day and night forever and ever” (Revelation 20:10).

And thus, by Jesus the Woman's Conquering Seed, “God destroys both the Serpent and those angels and humans who have come to resemble the Serpent; but frees from death those who repent of their sins and believe in Christ.”47 That's what God, in a veiled way, announces in advance here in the Bible's third chapter, amidst all these curses – indeed, before we hear a word of our punishment, we hear the protevangelium, the first gospel! The war may be long and hard and costly, but evil will run out! Evil will be beaten! Evil will get its head caved in and be done away with, and the death-blow to the Serpent's head has already been dealt by Christ crucified and risen! And because of him, humanity – all those who, in the end, prove to be the Woman's seed – will live to trample down the ruins of evil, thanks to Jesus Christ the Serpent-Smasher! Thanks be to God! Amen.

Sunday, February 25, 2024

The Burning Blade at Our Backs

What began as a fall is beginning to seem more like the triggering of an avalanche. In these past weeks, we've tread methodically through Genesis 3, watching in slow-motion as everything precious comes undone. Hearing the serpent engage the woman with his cunning, we observed a case study in how we could be deceived into doubting the goodness of God's will. Drooling with her over the forbidden fruit, we felt the pull of how desires can be preyed on to tempt us toward sin. And then, as she reached out, plucked, bit, we saw how intellect and will led to the action that constituted sin. But once both had sinned, immediately a whole host of psychological and social consequences began to crop up: guilt and shame, fear, blame, the fracturing of relationships. And so we learned that our decisive failure would frustrate the whole creation's aspirations of rushing into God. Up to these verses, though, we've still been safely sheltered in God's garden of delights. The time has come, though, for that to change. For by our sin, we've forfeited the bliss we once briefly knew as home.

I suppose our first question is, “Why? Why did we have to leave the garden? Why wasn't all this enough as it is?” And by my count, there are five reasons why we had to leave the garden. Reason #1 is punitive: as sinners, we just don't deserve to enjoy all the good things of God's garden any more. “Shall I not punish them for these things? declares the LORD (Jeremiah 5:9). God is Justice, and justice has a problem with sinners reaping a life of bliss. “Why does the way of the wicked prosper?” (Jeremiah 12:1). In the end, the solution God's wise justice provides has to be what's written: “The wicked will not dwell in the land” (Proverbs 10:30), “the wicked will be cut off from the land” (Proverbs 2:22). “There is no greater punishment than to be cast out of paradise.”1

If the first reason is punitive, Reason #2 is purgative: we are now unclean through sin, and for the good of the garden, we can't be allowed to stay in the holy place. Remember, Genesis pictures the first sin as involving an unclean beast getting humans to gulp down unkosher food, and so to take all that defilement within ourselves; and as a result, humans have become ritually dirty, potentially staining anything we touch.2 “Can mortal man be... pure before his Maker?” (Job 4:17). The image of God has been desecrated, his priests have been defiled.3 “We have all become like one who is unclean..., we all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away” (Isaiah 64:6). But “who shall stand in his holy place? He who has clean hands and a pure heart, who does not lift up his soul to what is false” (Psalm 24:3-4). Once that's not us, we cannot stay.

If the first two reasons are punitive and purgative, Reason #3 is restrictive: it would be bad for the world for us to have access to the Tree of Life. At this point, we've become, the LORD God says to his heavenly host, “like one of us, to know good and evil” (Genesis 3:22). That is, they've attained divine wisdom, divine power. Now, I'm inclined to think God's speaking a bit sarcastically: if there's anything the pitiful cowards having a meltdown in their fig leaves hardly look like, it's sages or mages.4 Still, divine knowledge and divine life – the things represented by the two trees – add up, in the eyes of Israel's neighbors, to what makes something a god.5 If we've stolen the first, can we take the other step? This isn't, as some think, as if God fears us. No matter what, it's nonsense to picture any threat to the Almighty. But this is heavenly horror at our hubris. We couldn't be trusted even with what we'd been given, let alone with godhood!6 Full of ourselves, we'd do limitless damage.7 So we can't be allowed to be like deranged gods roaming the world. We must be humbled by a limit.

On the other hand, it isn't just for the world's sake that we mustn't live forever. It's for ours, too. Reason #4 for us to leave the garden is medicinal: it's for our own good that we not live forever. Think about it. What would the world be like if we had a way to keep ourselves alive indefinitely? Picture Adolf Hitler's fifth millennium in power, with no prospect of an end.8 Or imagine if torturers could keep their victims alive for a thousand years of agony! The truth is, even shy of those dramatic cases, life is hard, and if we're honest, we struggle to tough it out for seventy, eighty, ninety years before we say we want off this crazy ride. If the man and woman “eat while they were clothed with a curse,” they would thereafter “remain in lives of eternal suffering,” as St. Ephrem put it; they'd “live as if buried alive..., tortured eternally by their pains.”9 Not just that, but the more we sin, the more attached we get to sin. If it's hard to break a bad habit now, imagine if you were set in your ways for four thousand years and then tried to quit? To live forever as sinners would literally be hell on earth.

And so the earliest Christians all saw that it was for our own good that humans were sent away from the Tree of Life, “that they might not continue forever as a transgressor, and that the sin that had them surrounded might not be immortal, nor their evil interminable and incurable; so he checked their transgression by interposing death, and he made sin cease by putting an end to it through the disintegration of the flesh.”10 Paul says that “one who has died has been justified from sin” (Romans 6:7) – that is, there's something about dying and suffering that lets us repair our sins. Without it, our sin could never let up or lessen. “God conferred a great benefit on man: he didn't let him remain forever in a state of sin but... cast him out of paradise, so that through his punishment he might expiate his sin in a fixed period of time.”11 Thus, “he who had been harmed in the leisure of the garden might be aided by the toil of the earth” as a penance,12 and at the end of it, “death is healing.”13

Our removal was a punitive, purgative, restrictive, and medicinal measure. But it was also missional. Back in the beginning, Genesis identifies a gap in the creation: “there was no human to work the ground,” as a result of which, the ground couldn't reach its fullest potential (Genesis 2:5). It was partly to solve that problem that God made us two verses later (Genesis 2:7). Now, the human leaves the garden “to work the ground from which he was taken” (Genesis 3:23). In chasing us back to the ground where we began, God is coupling our survival to his service. We won't eat unless we're working, but it's somehow the very work we were made for. We're being sent out, despite our fall, on mission. (The Latin Bible even uses emisit here, from the same root as missio.) As much in exile as at home, we have a purpose for our lives!14

So “the LORD God said, 'Behold, the human has become like one of us, to know good and evil. Now, lest he send out his hand and take also of the Tree of Life and live forever...,' therefore the LORD God sent him out from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was taken. He drove out the human” (Genesis 3:22-24). The remedy for us sending out a hand to take the fruit is for us to be sent out. But we aren't just sent out. We're driven out, pushed out, forcibly evicted from our special home. And that was God's own doing. It says so right there: the LORD God is the one who sent out, drove out, humanity from the garden, for the five good reasons we mentioned. One ancient reader pictured the scene: “The Immortal became angry with them and expelled them from the place of immortals..., and they immediately, going out..., wept with tears and groans.”15

And he placed, to the east of the Garden of Eden, the cherubim and a flame of the sword that whirled, to guard the way of the Tree of Life” (Genesis 3:24). Genesis is written as if we're already supposed to know what this is talking about. And maybe those old Hebrews did. The countries around Israel all had traditions about spirits with human heads, lion bodies, and eagle wings; we actually have pictures of them even from Israel.16 While the Greeks called them sphinxes, the Assyrians called some of them kurību. In inspiring Scripture, the Holy Spirit used this “poetic imagery,” as “a concession to the nature of our own mind,” to portray one of the sorts of spiritual creatures God made for his heaven.17 Generally, Christians have taken these cherubim, alongside the seraphim and thrones, as the tip-top, cream-of-the-crop angels, the ones who are “God's immediate neighbor..., receiving the primal theophanies” so that they “contemplate the divine splendor in primordial power.”18

But everybody in Israel's neighbor-world knew that kurību had a job to do, and it was to serve as guardians of holy spaces – basically, they were bodyguards for the gods and their temples.19 So they'd be portrayed at temple gateways and in front of holy trees, always in pairs, to mark a boundary between sacred and profane. Genesis up until here has made that our job, to “guard” the garden as its keepers (Genesis 2:15). But now we've lost the job, gotten canned, been replaced by these alien entities from a realm not our own.20 Now the cherubim are put at the eastern gates of the garden-sanctuary, defending it from our trespass.21

With them is an added protective measure – as if the cherubim weren't enough!22 It's probably best translated as “Flame of the Whirling/Thrashing Sword” (Genesis 3:24).23 Some of Israel's neighbors thought that their gods made supernatural weapons that had minds of their own, and they also worshipped a god they called 'Flame of the Arrow,' so Genesis might be borrowing that language to picture a fiery member of the LORD's heavenly army who is now stationed at the garden gate to fiercely intercept and destroy anything that intrudes.24 The point of all this is that the garden is locked down tight. There's no going back, not with the burning blade at our backs!

And so we, humankind, were “thrown out into this world, condemned as though to prison.”25 Made homeless, we confronted a darker and less pleasant world than we knew.26 The world outside is an as-yet-uncultivated land that's neither the haunted desert nor the vivacious garden, but a space in between that'll become what they – we – make of it. It's a wild world out there, no longer the comfortable refuge of the garden.27 It comes with “many dangers, toils, and snares,” as the hymn has it.28 But the good news is that we're sent out neither naked nor in our skimpy fig-leaf girdles. Instead, God himself manufactures a remedy for our intense vulnerability: “the LORD God made for Adam and his wife garments of skins, and clothed them” (Genesis 3:21).

Outside the garden, with access to the Tree of Life cut off, we come to a world where “our deaths are assured, though not immediate.”29 “Sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and death spread to all humans” (Romans 5:12). Sooner or later, everybody's battery runs out, and God took our charger away. So, “through fear of death,” we all become “subject to lifelong slavery” (Hebrews 2:15). But here's the good news: “the human called his wife's name 'Eve' because she was the mother of all the living” (Genesis 3:20). In faith, Adam announces God's promise that life will roll on in the face of death, generation after generation.30 It isn't eternal life, but the continued ebb and flow of natural life. Death is here, but death won't keep life down.

Sadder than death, though, this “curse is fundamentally excommunication,” distancing us from our former fellowship with God and his angels.31 The loss of the garden signifies “a motion away from fellowship with God” on our end,32 but also “a divine retreat from humanity” so that God and his angels are less visible now.33 In the garden, the realities we call spiritual would've been as matter-of-fact as fig leaves; to exchange quick pleasantries with Gabriel in the orchard might've been a perfectly typical occurrence. But now God honors the relational distance between us by allowing a perceptual distance – that is, he's increasingly hidden from our view, harder to see. He interacts with us through symbols and messengers to mediate his presence in ways we seldom recognize or understand. Although God is always close by, it's rarer to see his closeness in this darkness.

Between this distance we discern, the difficulties we endure, and the definite demise we face, deep inside we all feel a homesickness we struggle to put a finger on. Even when our thoughts aren't on the garden, our hearts are! And to that end, God doesn't let Adam and Eve get very far. They live their hard lives on the cursed ground in the garden's shadow, provoking them to lives of grief in this world. Why would God do that? Because “godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation without regret,” the Bible says (2 Corinthians 7:10). It may not restore them to paradise in this life, but it keeps God's friendship and gives them hope beyond life's exile.34

Fast-forward to Israel camped out in the desert. They built a tabernacle, positioning it with its entrance on the east side. Not only does it have a replica tree as a lampstand (Exodus 25:31-36), but its most sacred furnishing is a box whose lid is flanked by two gold cherubim (Exodus 25:17-22). The box is kept behind a veil decorated with images of the cherubim (Exodus 26:31), and in fact all ten wall curtains of the tabernacle are decorated with cherubim (Exodus 26:1). The whole camp faces in towards it as the heart of their life (Numbers 2:1-31). What they have here, out in the desert, is an artificial Eden. So, Moses says, the “camp must be holy” (Deuteronomy 23:14).

For that reason, anyone who became unclean – from leprosy, discharges, touching corpses, whatever – they were to “send... outside the camp, that they may not defile their camp in the midst of which I dwell,” God said (Numbers 5:2-3). Just as Adam and Eve were banished from the garden, unclean Israelites were banished from the camp which was one body, one land, with the Tabernacle of the LORD.35 The good news is, this expulsion wasn't permanent. Those excluded for uncleanness only dwelled “outside the camp” until they could be clean again (Leviticus 13:46). That called for bathing, rituals of restoration, and time (Leviticus 14:8; Numbers 19:12-19; Deuteronomy 23:11). The way they kept their exclusion so limited was that, once a year, they chased a scapegoat out of the camp, making it a substitute for their own exile from the garden (Leviticus 16:20-22).36

Unlike Adam, who failed to drive out the serpent, Israel is given divine help to – (mostly) – drive out the pagan nations squatting in the land God promised them (Exodus 23:30-31). And this land takes the place of the camp as their new Eden. They had been warned in advance, though, that if they defiled the promised land, they'd be sent away as surely as Adam and Eve were sent away. Sadly, Jeremiah then heard the bad news: “When you came in, you defiled my land. … I will hurl you out of this land … I will thrust you out, and you will perish” (Jeremiah 2:7; 16:13; 27:10). As a national community, they were exiled from the land of promise, from their new garden.37 It was punitive to respond to their sin, purgative to cleanse the land, medicinal to humble them, even missional insofar as they should've proclaimed the LORD among the nations to which they were scattered.

Even before it happened, though, King Solomon had prayed that, should they ever be sent out from their garden, “if they repent with all their heart and with all their soul in the land of their enemies,” God might have mercy (1 Kings 8:48-50), just as Moses had promised God would (Deuteronomy 30:1-5). So the LORD tells the exiles, “You will call upon me..., you will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart..., and I will restore your fortunes and gather you from... all the places where I have driven you..., and I will bring you back” (Jeremiah 29:12-14). But once back in the land, they now know it's no lasting garden yet (Ezra 9:13-15; Daniel 9:24). Still they're left hoping for a future Savior who “shall open the gates of paradise,” who “shall remove the sword that has threatened since Adam,” who “will grant to the saints to eat of the Tree of Life.”38

Fast-forward again, and there's a man dying on a cross. He turns to one of his neighbors and says words that should wake up the world: “I tell you today, you will be with me in Paradise” (Luke 23:43)! On the third day, that middle man has risen from the dead. And in the light of Jesus' resurrection, we get a fascinating scene. What happened in the beginning? Two humans in the garden listened to the serpent teach them false knowledge and open their eyes (Genesis 3:1-7), and therefore they were sent to walk the 'way' out of Paradise, away from the food that is life; the 'way' back in was blocked (Genesis 3:22-24). Now, we find two humans walking along a way, when the risen Jesus comes among them and teaches them true knowledge by opening the Scriptures to them (Luke 24:13-17). As they walk on the way of his teaching, their hearts burn within them, almost as if passing by the fiery sword (Luke 24:32), and at their destination, their eyes are suddenly opened when Jesus breaks the bread and gives them the food that is life: his body and his blood (Luke 24:30-31).39

The road to Emmaus became, to those two disciples, the way back into Paradise! And ever since, Christians have faithfully believed that God planted the Church itself as a new Garden of Eden on the earth.40 They saw that “the things of the garden refer to the Church of Christ,”41 where every week in their liturgy the Christians would eat knowledge from Scripture and then, in the second half, eat Life from the altar. And “the grace of the Holy Spirit does not ever cease from decorating and crowning with fresh flowers the Paradise of the Church.”42

But could the tragedy of Adam and Eve be repeated here, too? It's an uncomfortable question for us. Modern America tells us community is too vital, everyone should feel welcome, come as you are, love means radical inclusion. At a denominational level, let me tell you, I've heard boasting about how many decades it's been since anybody's been treated with any kind of disciplinary measures. Maybe the truth is that we've gotten so desperate to see butts in the pews that we've traded away holiness for consumer satisfaction – a devil's bargain.

Paul, though, tells the Thessalonians that if any Christian doesn't live by what he, as an apostle, teaches, “take note of that person and have nothing to do with him” (2 Thessalonians 3:14). And when he hears of a man in the Corinthian church whose very grave sin is tolerated by the rest, Paul thunders with the voice of God: “Let him who has done this be removed from among you! … When you are assembled in the name of the Lord Jesus, and my spirit is present, with the power of Jesus you are to deliver this man to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved in the Day of the Lord” (1 Corinthians 5:2-5). 

So “someone who has condemned himself to his own destructive fall... is cast out in exile from the fountains of Paradise.”43 Early Christians said that just as Adam “became an outcast of the garden,” so a Christian “who has believed but has not kept the commandments... has become an outcast of the Church,” and so “no longer receives.”44 As St. Augustine observed, Adam had been, “in a way, excommunicated” from Paradise, and in just the same way “nowadays, in this Paradise which is the Church, people are commonly barred from the visible sacraments of the altar by church discipline.”45 But the Church always emphasized that “the aim of excommunication is healing and not death, correction and not destruction.”46 “When we are judged,” St. Paul says, “we are being disciplined by the Lord so that we may not be condemned along with the world” (1 Corinthians 11:32). That implies that if the Church fails to judge, it risks condemning its members to hell. But those who are disciplined, excluded, can be so freely restored to the Paradise of the Church through repentance and reconciliation!47

But let me end by pointing ahead from here, to what the seer saw in a vision: “The angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city; also, on either side of the river, the Tree of Life, with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month … No longer will there be anything accursed, but the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him” (Revelation 22:1-3). In the end, in the very end, there is a Last Garden waiting. The cherubim finally step aside with joy. The burning blade backs down. The way is open, never to be shut again (Revelation 21:25). And on that open way, Adam and Eve will at last come home, for, as earlier Christians believed, after being driven out, “those first human beings afterward lived righteously, and for that reason we are right to believe that they were set free from final punishment by the blood of the Lord.”48

There may, horrifyingly, be other people who remain outsiders to this Last Garden: “Outside are the dogs and sorcerers and sexually immoral and murderers and idolaters and everyone who loves and practices falsehood” (Revelation 22:15). Tragically, that is a choice someone could make: to refuse to be set free, to deny themselves entry. For “nothing unclean will ever enter it, nor anyone who does what is detestable and false, but only those who are written in the Lamb's book of life” (Revelation 21:27). Those who prove to have chosen to return to the defilement of deadly sin, those who will to not repent and be cleansed of it in even their final hour, those who finally display no faith toward the Lamb who bade them follow... this Last Garden can never receive such.

Here, though, is the good news, the very, very, very good news: those who endure in faith, those who enter and remain in Paradise here in hopes of Paradise there, will on the last day be saved to the uttermost, confirmed in perfect righteousness: “I will deliver you from all your uncleannesses,” God promised (Ezekiel 36:29). The Last Garden looms ahead, and those who dwell in it have no need for any punishment, they are too pure to need purged, their humility transcends all restrictions, they need no further medicine, and their mission will at last be complete. “Blessed are those who wash their robes, so that they may have the right to the Tree of Life and that they may enter [the garden] by the gates” (Revelation 22:14)! With Adam and Eve and all the saints, they shall never, no, never, no, never be driven out from the Eternal Garden of the LORD our Light! Thanks be to God for an undying hope, that our homesickness now shall be answered by an immortal homecoming ahead! Amen.