What a beautiful creation; what a marvelous Creator! Last year, we took our time, as Genesis takes its sweet time, luxuriating in the time and attention and care God lavishes on building up each of the realms and features of his creation: the light, the sky, the sea, the earth, the plants, the creatures of the sea, the creatures of the land and the air. All of these things, as he summons them forth, he pronounces 'good,' calls them suitable for his holy purposes. But that doesn't mean he sees them as perfected. No, for that, he introduces one final kind of creature – his own image, stamped into creation on these dusty primates called human beings. This human creature is made so much like the rest of the creatures, called forth from the same stuff, but also made so much unlike the others, with a spiritual soul and mighty mind and heart able to respond knowingly, willingly, to a God of Love.
And to this human creature, the LORD God entrusts a daring mission. Transplanted into God's garden, they're there to reflect him as the priests and rulers of the earthly creation around them. All these creatures – humans are to gather up their implicit praise and give it voice. All these creatures – humans are to subdue their territory, have dominion over them, keep the peace among them and lead them onward. Humans are to cultivate the garden, keep it flourishing and sacred; and as the humans are fruitful and multiply, they're to make the garden itself fruitful and multiply it, stretching its holy goodness across the land and sea and somehow even to the skies. This is what human life is here for: to make a very good creation perfect, leading the whole creation – the earth, maybe the universe – on a voyage into God, until every created thing fully achieves its destiny in him.
But then we turn the page. And we don't at all do what it is we're here for. In this scene of a serpent whispering doubt and defiance, in this glimpse of human eyes lawlessly enraptured by the forbidden, in this final united act of detaching the created good from the love of its Creator-Goodness, sin has come on the scene – sin, the missing of the mark, the voiding of the purpose, the betrayal of the mission. And in its tow, sin leads a parade of creation's cheapening. Shame is born in us, and guilt, and fear, and defensiveness (Genesis 3:1-10). In our turning away from the God of Love, we humans willingly gave up many of the added gifts God had given us as a garment, gifts like our original righteousness with which we'd walked before our Maker. We stripped off our graciously given glory, heedless what we ripped and tore in this frantic process of denuding ourselves.
And without these, we find our inner and outer self disrupted, tainted, taken over by sin.1 Jesus tells us that “everyone who practices sin is a slave of sin” (John 8:34), because, as his apostle Peter adds, “whatever someone has been subdued by, to that he is also enslaved” (2 Peter 2:19). And man and woman prove it by how they react to the presence of the God whose images they are, as we heard last Sunday: rather than repent and expose their shame and guilt and fear and defensiveness to the healing storm of God's love, they justify themselves at the expense of each other, of creation, even blaming God for their own wrongs (Genesis 3:11-13).
In response, the LORD God – a God of justice as well as of mercy – is obviously going to respond. The chain of blame, as Genesis tells it, went like this: God spoke to the man (Genesis 3:9-11), who blamed the woman (Genesis 3:12); then he spoke to the woman, and she blamed the snake (Genesis 3:13); and the snake had zero right to speak and nothing to say before the awesome face of the LORD God. So God gives his responses, his judgments, working his way back out from there: first a word of judgment addressed to the snake (Genesis 3:14-15), then a brief word of judgment addressed to the woman (Genesis 3:16), and finally a longer word of judgment addressed to the man, both as a man and as 'the human being' (Genesis 3:17-19).
In these responses God gives, for the very first time in the Bible, a new word appears which is going to haunt us from here on out: 'curse.' In the world Genesis was written in, curses were a familiar part of life, “petitions to the divine world to render judgment and execute harm.”2 And people knew there were no curses more powerful or fast-acting than those uttered by a god; nothing was more distorting, disfiguring, dissolving, destroying.3 Up until now, God has only ever blessed: good, upbuilding, life-giving words. But now Love himself curses.
The Apostle Paul, looking back on what he reads here, has some big observations that take us deeper and higher than the surface, than the letter. Obviously, if human beings, as bearers of God's image, had a responsibility – a sacred calling – to lead creation into a glorious future, then those same human beings becoming 'slaves of sin' would have radical repercussions for that mission.4 Creation's destiny could only come through us, and if we're missing the mark, then the entire creation – the universe, one and all – is missing the mark. Therefore, St. Paul writes, “creation was subjected to futility” (Romans 8:20). With us losing the grace to exercise dominion God's way, creation is handed over to a new master: Futility – pointlessness, emptiness, an inability to reach the goal.5 The creation train that had been hurtling toward its heavenly goal has lost steam. Now it's coasting, aimlessly adrift, spinning around in circles.6 Meandering, the creation has fallen back on its merely natural condition, on things that were meant to be only a temporary stage. The entire creation is developmentally delayed.
St. Paul describes it another way, too: “bondage to corruption” (Romans 8:21). That is, since creation's human caretakers and cultivators are now 'slaves to sin' – or, in St. Peter's words, “slaves of corruption” (2 Peter 2:19) – now creation itself is enslaved to that same power of sin and corruption. Every creature that exists in this natural world is a slave now to corruption, to decay, to decomposition, to falling apart. Now, obviously, the fact of created things being broken down didn't begin at the curse. When the man or woman plucked a fruit off one of the lawful trees in the garden, and they took a bite, the living cells in that fruit would be broken down by their digestive processes – that was the whole point.7 So that's not what's new. What's happened here is that now creation is in slavery to this disorder, decomposition, and dispersal – a march toward corruption and chaos.
And St. Paul's third assessment is that “the whole creation has been groaning” (Romans 8:22). The creation all around us does not feel comfortable and at peace with its situation! It implicitly knows that this isn't all it was made for. Just as there's a God-shaped hole in our hearts, so there's a God-shaped hole in creation's heart. And it protests against the chains that bind it to aimlessness. Creation groans under the burden it carries. Creation is pained by being stuck at a rough-and-raw stage it should have moved past. Creation is frustrated by the curse.
Back in Genesis, the first word of that curse is the curse spoken to the snake. Earlier, we'd read that the snake was “cunning above every beast of the field which the LORD God had made” (Genesis 3:1). Now, using a word that sounds almost the same, God punningly pronounces the snake “cursed above all the livestock and above every beast of the field” (Genesis 3:14). The snake, which once excelled its animal peers in sly cleverness, now excels those same peers in bitter cursedness. And so the curse “implicitly affects all animals.”8 We'll find later that the ground, too, is cursed (Genesis 3:17). Animate and inanimate creation is impacted by the curse; and as a result, there's an estrangement there – human and animal and vegetable and mineral all implicitly resentful and alienated from each other, all hurting and confused by the judgment occasioned by human sin (Isaiah 24:5-6; Hosea 4:3). There's a new animosity, an uncooperativeness. As St. John of Damascus put it, “the creation that had been subject to the ruler appointed by the Creator” – that's us – “rose up in rebellion.”9
Then there are the words God speaks to the woman and to the man, both of which revolve around the same odd Hebrew word, 'itssabon. It's the physical and emotional toll of what's difficult, exhausting, unpleasant.10 It's a sorrow that combines agony and anguish. God gives us something to cry about. And this curse attaches to exactly those functions most essential for human life to go on, in one life or generation to generation.11
What does God say, after all, to the man? That this toll, this agony and anguish, will now attach to what Israel saw as the traditional male role: providing for himself and his family. “Cursed is the ground because of you! In toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life” (Genesis 3:17). Earlier, Genesis told us there was a need for humans “to work the ground” (Genesis 2:5). But now what once was just work – a good and joyful thing – has become “weariness,”12 “difficulty,”13 “grinding labor,”14 “toils and sorrows.”15 Work was meant to be enjoyable, rejuvenating, fun; but now the ground resists us with its firmness, demanding large investments of difficult effort – “the sweat of your nose” – to cultivate the creation (Genesis 3:19). This doesn't just apply to manual labor, either. St. Augustine pointed out that this 'sweat' “signified labor in general, from which no human being is exempt, though some work at hard tasks while others work with worrisome cares; to the same labor, there belong also the studies of any who learn.” Some people, he thought, “work harder with their minds than the poor with their bodies.”16 Physical or mental, work is often drudgery, a slog, a daily grind.
And what are we working for? Earlier, in the garden, we're imagined as nourished by fruits, nuts, vegetables, and herbs that grow wild (Genesis 1:29; 2:16) – a lifestyle sustained by foraging and gathering the abundance of a world bursting with bounty, allowing us to devote most of our strength to mission. But now, without toil, no food: “You shall eat the plants of the field; by the sweat of your nose you shall eat bread” (Genesis 3:18-19). For some early Christians, this transition into agriculture symbolized our guilt: from standing upright plucking fruit, now we're bowed low to the earth, so “the position of man's body confirmed the guilt of his conscience.”17
Yet “thorns and thistles shall it bring forth for you” (Genesis 3:18). That last word, 'for you,' is the emphasis here: painful plants and proliferating weeds cropping up where we're working. These are the kinds of plants that tend to take over in soil that's been depleted and degraded by human mismanagement.18 And sometimes, that's all we get: “Not only will work be painful and difficult, it sometimes also will come up empty and end in futility.”19 Or, as a prophet put it: “They have sown wheat but reaped thorns; they have tired themselves out but profited nothing” (Jeremiah 12:13). Fear, failure, futility stalk our labors. This is not what we were made for.
If this sort of agony and anguish attaches to what Israel saw as typical man activities, no less did it apply to the unique work of women. Just as humans were to “work and keep the garden” (Genesis 2:15), we were to “be fruitful and multiply” (Genesis 1:28). That's pretty important – an incredible blessing, to gestate and nurture new human life made in the image of God! But now, says God, he's going to multiply the woman's “toil and conception; in pain you shall beget children” (Genesis 3:16). The very start of pregnancy – and its uncertainty – will be overshadowed by sorrows. Pregnancy will be an uncomfortable time, one stalked by anxieties. Childbirth itself will be painful, difficult, risky. Ape babies may be easy, but human babies have such massive brains to squeeze out through an unaccommodating pelvis designed for walking upright that our childbirths are incredibly complicated and challenging.20 And then come further hurts and heartbreaks: “the birth of children and their upbringing and sickness and health and good fortune and misfortune.”21
What's more, God points out to the man in the garden that he'd preferred to live out 'one flesh' with his wife over being 'one spirit' with his God (Genesis 3:17); therefore, this one flesh, already divided against itself in their blame game, is going to be further poisoned; instead of willingly following each other's voices, now they'll treat each other like ventriloquist dummies, projecting their own voices onto the other, or as mute audiences to be lectured.22 A “battle of the sexes” begins, as man and woman will “no longer face the world as 'one flesh,'” but instead will present a divided front, busying themselves in misunderstanding and contradicting each other.23
“Your desire shall be toward your man,” God tells the woman, “and he shall rule over you” (Genesis 3:16). In this, we find the woman not only desiring the man with a positive longing, driven to him for survival and satisfaction, but also craving to domesticate and dominate him; and he, in turn, aims to subjugate her, to exploit her, to put her in her place.24 Each in their own way, they're locked into a competition for control.25 This brings a “dynamic of domination” into what was meant to be equal.26 Now, just as the man taken from the ground is being drawn back to and subjected to the ground, the tendency will be for the woman, pictured as taken from the man, to be drawn back to and subjected to the man.27 And through history, that's exactly what we've seen: the frequent sidelining of women, who have often been ignored, condescended to, horribly mistreated, abused.
The world described in the curses is a world where snakes slither underfoot, where getting pregnancy can be hard and giving birth hurts, where food comes from farming through men's hard work, where men put women down, where things fall apart – in short, the world of ancient Israel.28 Israel may have heard the curse explained in terms they could understand from their own experience, but we can still understand a world of sorrow, of anxiety and heartbreak, of mistakes and misunderstanding, confusion and conflict, power plays and resentments, sweat and fear and overwork, a world where things still fall apart. Work, home, family, society – the lesson is that what we call 'normal life' now is not what God originally wanted for us. It's the curse.
And that curse culminates in dissolution, decomposition – death. Humans will work and sweat and eat “until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken: for you are dust, and to dust you shall return” (Genesis 3:19). If you attended an Ash Wednesday service – oh, I hope you did – you probably heard those fateful words with which these curses conclude. Dissolving something back into its source ingredients was one of the most powerful effects a divine curse could have.29 And so it is with us: dust, loosely held together; our feeble soul can't hold on forever. God's intention was, by his grace, to make us imperishable, because God's image ought not break down, “God did not make death.”30 Yet we ourselves “invited death, considered it a friend, pined for it, and made a covenant with it.”31 And so “you decompose into the material you were formed from.”32 That's natural for us, but that doesn't make it right, that doesn't make it God's plan.33
As the bishop St. Cyprian reminds us, “we are all bound and confined by the bond of this sentence until, having paid the debt of death, we leave this world. We must be in sorrow and lamentation all the days of our life, and we must eat our bread with sweat and labor.”34 Isn't that what Lent tells us, too? Lent calls us, jolts us, back to that sorrow and lamentation which comes so unnaturally to a culture obsessed with happiness above all else. In Lent, we're urged to look at the thorns and thistles, at our agony and our anguish; to admit our curse with pained hearts; to humble ourselves before our Maker; to repent in dust and ashes; to toil vigorously against our sins.
In the context of all this, St. Paul offers us hope. He makes clear that when God issued these curses, his words acknowledged creation was on the wrong track and judged it, but he did so with every plan to work with sinful humanity to ultimately usher everything back on the right track through us.35 God “subjected it in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God” (Romans 8:21). For into this cursed creation, God sent his perfect Son to be the Human whom Adam and Eve failed to be. This Last Adam, by sharing in a cursed creation's sufferings, is steering it to the heavenly goal it was meant for. The Last Adam adopted the appearance of a slave, serving humanity to remake us in a less dusty image (Philippians 2:7; 1 Corinthians 15:49). He at last accepted the curse onto himself, for our sake and for all creation, to redeem all things from their curse (Galatians 3:13). He became “obedient unto death, even death on the cross” (Philippians 2:8), but “it was not possible for him to be held by it” (Acts 2:24). God did not, would not, could not allow his Son to become a slave of decay (Acts 2:31). Instead, God gave the Last Adam resurrection and exaltation, “having untied the birth-pangs of death” (Acts 2:24).
And God has promised that the Last Adam will, in the end, demolish Death itself (1 Corinthians 15:26). For “he who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus” (2 Corinthians 4:14). We who know the final force of the curse, that from dust we came and so to dust we all return, have a promise that dust and ashes are not our final fate. Even the rabbis added a promise: “You are dust, and to dust you are to return, but from the dust you are to arise again to give an account and a reckoning of all that you have done.”36 And so we are “dissolved only for the time which God has set for each. … As seeds sown in the ground, we do not perish when we are dissolved, but as sown we shall rise again, death having been destroyed by the grace of the Savior.”37 God does not send us a Lent without an Easter in store at the end of it!
And so these very bodies that dissolve to dust will serve as the seeds from which God will grow what we were meant to become; we'll be raised in “incorruption,” in bold defiance of corruption's present subjection of the cursed creation (1 Corinthians 15:42). Creation itself, St. Paul says, shares our wait for “the redemption of our bodies, for in this hope we were saved” (Romans 8:23-24). And when we are revealed in resurrection glory, restored as the priests and rulers of creation we were meant to be, then the whole creation will be set free, liberated in the fullest sense of the word, to become everything creation was meant to be. So yes, “the creation waits with eager longing for the sons of God to be revealed” (Romans 8:19), “for we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pangs of childbirth until now” (Romans 8:22). Only then will the birth come, the new heavens, the new earth, where all toil and pain, all agony and anguish, all death and decay will have “passed away” (Revelation 21:4). And we will for all eternity lead every creature in one exuberant shout of triumph: “Our God turned the curse into a blessing!” (Nehemiah 13:2). “To Him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb be blessing and honor and glory and might forever and ever!” (Revelation 5:13).
1 Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae I-II, q.85, a.5, in Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologiae 26:97.
2 Anne Marie Kitz, Cursed Are You! The Phenomenology of Cursing in Cuneiform and Hebrew Texts (Eisenbrauns, 2014), 3.
3 Anne Marie Kitz, Cursed Are You! The Phenomenology of Cursing in Cuneiform and Hebrew Texts (Eisenbrauns, 2014), 134-138.
4 N. T. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God (Fortress Press, 2013), 485, 493.
5Ben Witherington III, Paul's Letter to the Romans: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary (Eerdmans, 2004), 223; Frank J. Matera, Romans, Paideia Commentaries on the New Testament (Baker Academic, 2020), 200.
6 Loren D. Haarsma, When Did Sin Begin? Human Evolution and the Doctrine of Original Sin (Baker Academic, 2021), 74.
7 Loren D. Haarsma, When Did Sin Begin? Human Evolution and the Doctrine of Original Sin (Baker Academic, 2021), 66-67.
8 Adam E. Miglio, The Gilgamesh Epic in Genesis 1-11: Peering into the Deep (Routledge, 2023), 82.
9 John of Damascus, On the Orthodox Faith 24, in Popular Patristics Series 62:122.
10 Jacques van Ruiten, “Eve's Pain in Childbearing? Interpretations of Genesis 3:16a in Biblical and Early Jewish Texts,” in Gerard P. Luttikhuisen, ed., Eve's Children: The Biblical Stories Retold and Interpreted in Jewish and Christian Traditions (Brill, 2003), 4-5; Joseph E. Coleson, Genesis 1-11: A Commentary in the Wesleyan Tradition (Beacon Hill Press, 2012), 137.
11 R. R. Reno, Genesis, Brazos Theological Commentary (Brazos Press, 2010), 93.
12 Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies 3.23.3, in Ancient Christian Writers 64:106.
13 John Chrysostom, Homilies on Genesis 17.41, in Fathers of the Church: A New Translation 74:244.
14 Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews 1.49, in Loeb Classical Library 242:23.
15 Paulus Orosius, Defense Against the Pelagians 26, in Fathers of the Church: A New Translation 99:153.
16 Augustine of Hippo, Unfinished Work in Answer to Julian 6.29.A4, in Works of Saint Augustine I/25:688.
17 Novatian of Rome, On Jewish Foods 2.6, in Corpus Christianorum in Translation 22:197. See also Natan Levy, The Dawn of Agriculture and the Earliest States in Genesis 1-11 (Routledge, 2023), 65, on early Neolithic agriculture's many drawbacks.
18 Ellen F. Davis, “Propriety and Trespass: The Drama of Eating,” in Stephen C. Barton and David Wilkinson, eds., Reading Genesis After Darwin (Oxford University Press, 2009), 213; Joseph E. Coleson, Genesis 1-11: A Commentary in the Wesleyan Tradition (Beacon Hill Press, 2012), 140; Iain W. Provan, Seriously Dangerous Religion: What the Old Testament Really Says and Why It Matters (Baylor University Press, 2014), 121.
19 Douglas J. Moo and Jonathan A. Moo, Creation Care: A Biblical Theology of the Natural World (Zondervan Academic, 2018), 101
20 Lesley Newson and Peter J. Richerson, A Story of Us: A New Look at Human Evolution (Oxford University Press, 2021), 20-22; John H. Langdon, Human Evolution: Bones, Cultures, and Genes (Springer, 2022), 671-673; Rene J. Herrera and Ralph Garcia-Bertrand, Sex and Cohabitation Among Early Humans: Anthropological and Genetic Evidence for Interbreeding Among Early Humans (Academic Press, 2023), 190.
21 Philo of Alexandria, On the Creation of the Cosmos According to Moses 24 §167, in Philo of Alexandria Commentary Series 1:91.
22 Ingrid Faro, Evil in Genesis: A Contextual Analysis of Hebrew Lexemes for Evil in the Book of Genesis (Lexham Press, 2021), 154.
23 Iain W. Provan, Seriously Dangerous Religion: What the Old Testament Really Says and Why It Matters (Baylor University Press, 2014), 117-118; Paul C. Vitz, “Men and Women: Their Differences and Their Complementarity: Evidence from Psychology and Neuroscience,” in Paul C. Vitz, ed., The Complementarity of Women and Men: Philosophy, Theology, Psychology, and Art (Catholic University of America Press, 2021), 184.
24 Donald E. Gowan, Genesis 1-11: From Eden to Babel (Eerdmans, 1988), 58; Nahum M. Sarna, Genesis, JPS Torah Commentary (Jewish Publication Society, 1989), 28; Bruce K. Waltke, Genesis: A Commentary (Zondervan Academic, 2001), 94; Joseph E. Coleson, Genesis 1-11: A Commentary in the Wesleyan Tradition (Beacon Hill Press, 2012), 138-139.
25 Leon R. Kass, The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis (Free Press, 2003), 114-115; C. John Collins, Genesis 1-4: A Linguistic, Literary, and Theological Commentary (P&R Publishing, 2005), 160; Anne Campbell, A Mind of Her Own: The Evolutionary Psychology of Women (Oxford University Press, 2013), 257.
26 Abigail Favale, The Genesis of Gender: A Christian Theory (Ignatius Press, 2022), 49. See also John Chrysostom, Homilies on Genesis 17.36, in Fathers of the Church: A New Translation 74:241 (“I created you equal in esteem to your husband”).
27 Zvi Grumet, Genesis: From Creation to Covenant (Maggid Books, 2017), 52.
28 Leon R. Kass, The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis (Free Press, 2003), 94.
29 Anne Marie Kitz, Cursed Are You! The Phenomenology of Cursing in Cuneiform and Hebrew Texts (Eisenbrauns, 2014), 150-151.
30 Wisdom of Solomon 1:13.
31 Wisdom of Solomon 1:16.
32 John Chrysostom, Homilies on Genesis 17.41, in Fathers of the Church: A New Translation 74:244.
33 Athanasius of Alexandria, On the Incarnation 4, in Popular Patristics Series 44A:59.
34 Cyprian of Carthage, On the Good of Patience 11, in Fathers of the Church: A New Translation 36:274.
35 N. T. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God (Fortress Press, 2013), 1091-1092.
36 Targum Neofiti Genesis 3:19, in Aramaic Bible 1A:62.
37 Athanasius of Alexandria, On the Incarnation 21, in Popular Patristics Series 44A:95.
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