Fall
Lord, What are Human Beings? - Fall
Swanbourne 28.2.21 Lent 2
A young couple fall in love and get married. They willingly take their marriage vows to each other, promising mutual faithfulness and the cherishing of each other. For a while that is indeed what happens as they develop their lives together in caring partnership. But gradually a new dimension begins. The husband starts to put his career before everything else, even his wife. They have children and again, for a while, he is like his old self - caring and helpful. But then his priorities return along with another, darker, strand. Away from home a lot with late hours and business trips he begins to become suspicious of what his wife is up to when he is away. He begins to insist in exercising greater control of their marriage, but he cannot allay his burgeoning suspicions. He insists on her leaving her job and staying home - ‘for the good of the children’. She agrees because in his long absences she has found the children fill a hole in her life and she re-orients herself to them as a means of giving her happiness. But her husband’s need for control only grows. The children are to come home directly from school, and she has to give up seeing most of her friends and even family. Then one day, her husband comes home early from work and finds her absent. She has been having coffee with a neighbour but he finds her disobedience intolerable and for the first time he strikes her. Then the next time she displeases him he does it again; it is easier this time and he hits her a number of times. Two years later the police are called to the home and we see an item on the news about another murder suicide in which, after murdering his wife and children, the husband turned the gun on himself.
That is obviously an imagined scenario but we do indeed see and read of real tragic versions of this fiction virtually every week. If it is not the husband inflicting self-centred harm on others, it is the wife, or even one of the children, or a family member. Even in the most valued social institution of our entire culture, the family, we cause harm and destruction to ourselves and to those we love, driven by our own desires, needs, and urges.
What is being played out here, and in a thousand variations of human evil each and every day somewhere, anywhere, in this earth is a re-enactment of the story of Adam and Eve. The Genesis story is fundamentally about how we turn away from God, replacing God’s authority as Creator with that of our own. The disowning and taking over the place of God and making ourselves as gods in our life gradually results in the disowning of other relationships also. Previous to the disobeying of God and eating the forbidden fruit the first humans enjoyed the mutual acknowledgement of relationships. They welcomed the intimacy they shared with God, and Adam and Eve spoke of each other as ‘husband’ and ‘wife’. But after their disobedience all that breaks down. They hide from God. Adam cannot say to God ‘it is my wife’s fault’, but tries to undo the relationship, referring to Eve as ‘the woman whom you have to be with me’. Eve can think of nothing better as an outcome of her disobedience than to have her husband do the same. Having set themselves up as knowing better than God, and feeling justified in overriding the one and only command they were given from God, the result is the disintegration of love and relationship. Created to be open to God and to one another and to the rest of creation, the disobedient pair, fallen from their created purpose, become closed to God and to each other. Seeking to overthrow God in their lives they have merely ended up turning on one another.
Now we can no longer think of this story as history and the fall as a previous event in our human past. It is not that. It is a present reality, played out again and again in each human life as each of us chooses self over God and brings evil and destruction into our world. The choice to give priority to our own satisfactions, needs, and desires before all else simply results in the groundhog day of the Genesis playbook becoming a reality in every human life. Adam and Eve and their fall from their divine created purpose is the story of our own lives as human beings and our perennial disposition to serve ourselves at the cost of others.
In this making gods of ourselves evil enters the world through humans. Not all evil that happens to humans and other life is of course our responsibility. Often we are not responsible for floods, earthquakes, bushfires and other natural disasters that obliterate lives, though sometimes we are. However, much evil is human caused. No other lifeform inflicts as much misery and spoiling of the world as we do, Marriages end in control, violence, and even murder. Nurture of children is perverted to sexual pleasure. The intimacy and union of sexuality meant for marriage ends in adultery, prostitution, and degradation and ownership of another human person. Even when we are trying to do good because of our own need for control, or power, or some driver to be satisfied our best intentions too often end in perversion and evil.
After the horrors of World War One and the industrialised killing of millions on a global scale the citizens and nations of the world were determined that this would be ‘the war to end all wars’. To prevent such ghastliness happening again they set up an organisation, the League of Nations, in which, they hoped, potential conflicts between nations would be avoided by diplomacy and negotiation rather than by killing each other. However, not only did the League proved to be a paper tiger, but it did nothing when Japan invaded Manchuria or when Italy invaded Abyssinia. Japan’s invasion led to approximately six million deaths, including the deliberate slaughter of tens of thousands of civilians in the city of Nanjing. Italy’s invasion destroyed both warriors and civilians, all swept aside in a hail of machine gun bullets and high explosive, and hundreds of thousands of largely Christian Ethiopians died for the glory of a fascist state. In similar ways today, causes devoted to justice and human rights all too often end in intolerance, harm, greed, and perversion.
So why would God, our Creator who is good, and created us and all the universe as also good, have allowed such a fallenness, a falling short, of his own purposes for the good of his creatures?
The only way God’s purpose of creating a creature, us to be capable of being open to other beings and to God, an openness we rightly call love, was to allow the creature freedom. Love can only be a free gift, it cannot be compelled or coerced. So as God is love God gives himself to us in ways that do not compel our belief by exhibitionist displays of divine power. This was the sort of temptation our Lord himself repudiated when the devil told him to throw himself off the temple in order for angels to bear him up. Rather, God asks for our trust in him through faith, faith that the signs of his presence given us in the history of Israel and in our Lord Jesus Christ and his Church will be sufficient to allow us to come to belief and trust in him as a free choice. Creating the universe and us in love means that God cannot contradict himself and must allow that love to operate as the guiding principle of his creation and his creatures.
The principle of freedom at the heart of love necessarily means God must allow his creatures choice, for otherwise it cannot be the upholding of love in creation. But choice has to thereby allow for evil choices, choices contrary the love of God the Creator. And this is exactly what the story of the Fall of Adam and Eve points to. Adam and Eve are created by God good, like all the rest of creation, and in their goodness they live a life of majestic and wondrous grandeur in the garden of Eden, in harmony with all life and with God. They are given just one command, not to eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Not eating of the fruit does not keep them ignorant because the story says they share in the work of creation with God, naming all the other creatures. The prohibition is only important because it symbolises their willingness to accept the reality of their existence, that they are God’s creatures and that their fulfilment and happiness depends on their obedience to God, on their serving God’s good purposes of loving openness to him. However, when push comes to shove the two humans choose not God but themselves. They eat the fruit, they disobey the only command of their Creator, simply because it seemed good to them to do so. As a consequence of their self-centred, God-rejecting, choice they lose the harmony with all life and with God that God intended for them. Life becomes grim and hard and dangerous. Almost immediately, the evil of their choice to make themselves gods in place of the true God becomes apparent when one of their children, Cain, murders his brother Abel.
The Fall of Adam and Eve is the story of all of us. Created with free will by God as the only possibility that love will allow if it is to exist and flourish, we follow the path of Adam and Eve. We choose to make gods of ourselves rather than accept the one the only God, our Creator. Again and again, both as individuals and as collectives we repeat the refrain of Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost who, as one of God’s holy angels preferred his rule in Hell to the blessed service in heaven. Satan, created by God to be one of the brightest of beings, enunciates the principle by which he will live.
To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven.
The whole idea of serving God’s goodness is repugnant to the self-centred, self-worshipping Satan and his followers. As one of the fallen angels, Mammon, puts it: ‘How wearisome Eternity so spent in worship paid, to whom we hate.’ It is the same choice for self, to making little gods of ourselves, that lies at the heart of the story of the fall of Adam and Eve, and lies at the heart of the story of each one of us humans. It is a choice that God could not prevent, save by denying us the free will to choose and thereby denying his creation the possibility of love as its operative principle. As we evolved we had to be evolved into a free creature who could choose to do evil because only a creature who is truly free can genuine love, and love is not only God’s purpose in creating but also his own very nature. To do anything else would for God to contradict himself and that is the one thing God cannot do.
Consequently, we humans are fallen creatures. Fallen that is, not through some choice of our supposed first parents, but fallen through the invariable disposition in our species to repudiate our Creator in favour of making idols and gods of ourselves. A choice that has foisted that human selfishness on our planet and other species who live or die at our decree, and where even the previously exempt human-free zone of space is becoming littered with our junk. Refusing the true God and making gods of ourselves, believing in in the illusion of an impossible human perfection that tears down statues of past heroes who prove to have feet of clay, or worse, has left us unmindful or unconscious of the evil within us all. So the Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn realised when he lay in the rotting straw of his cell in the Soviet prison system. He awoke, he later wrote, to the realisation of the superiority of religion - all religions - to human ideology because religions ‘struggle with the evil inside man (all men [people]). Solzhensitsyn came to a realisation about human beings that could be a summary of our fallen nature:
the line separating good from evil runs not between states, not between classes, and not between parties - it runs through the heart of each and every one of us, and through all human hearts. This line is not stationary. It shifts and moves with the passing of years. Even in hearts enveloped in evil, it maintains a small bridgehead of good. And even the most virtuous heart harbours an un-uprooted corner of evil.’ (Michael Scammel, Solzhensitsyn: A Biography (1984), p. 304).
Topics for Discussion.
1. What issues has the sermon highlighted for you?
2. Does the concept of love requiring free choice make sense to you? How?
3. Is the presentation of the story of Adam and Eve as the story of each one of us
helpful to you, rather than the story of our original parents?
4 What illustrations of human evil as a result of striving for perfection do you know of?
5. Does evil enter the world through humans?
6. Could God have created us without free will?