Genesis 3: 1-24
by Rev. Dr. Fritz Ritsch
January 28, 2018
Many of us have been deeply disturbed by the crimes of Dr. Larry Nassar, the USA Gymnastics doctor who used his unique position to sexually abuse girls as young as six, many of whom went on to be world gymnastic champions. Over the past week, after Nassar had been found guilty and the trial entered its sentencing phase, 160 of these girls, now grown women, confronted Nassar about his crimes before a packed courtroom. Nassar stood and emotionally apologized for his behavior. Judge Rosemarie Aquilina looked at him and said, “I’m not buying it.” She pointed to a letter that Nassar had sent to the court in which he expressed his feelings of victimization. He said that the women had trumped up charges in pursuit of personal gain and then said, “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.”
When I heard that he’d said that, I felt a chill. That a man guilty of such behavior could use that phrase in that context clearly shows he is deeply self-involved and has no remorse whatsoever. But it also puts in plain view the larger issues that the #metoo movement is addressing: the ways that men have too often victimized women and then gotten away with it by putting the blame on them. Historically, Christianity has reinforced that attitude by maligning women as temptresses who seductively and often maliciously lead weak, vulnerable men down the path of sin. To see a man like Nassar attempt to attach such a charge to young girls whom he mistreated while in a position of power and authority over their lives disturbingly illustrates just how crazy this male- dominant, misogynistic way of thinking actually is.
A lot of people, though, believe this very attitude is enshrined in the Bible. Some people use the Bible as a way to justify misogyny. Others increasingly think that if the Bible says such things, then the Bible can’t be believed. Both sides will point to this very passage to justify their view. After all, isn’t Eve created from the rib of Adam, clearly implying that woman is inferior to man? And isn’t it the woman who is misled by the serpent and then seduces the poor helpless man to eat of the forbidden fruit?
But really, the only way you can read the story that way is to be already starting from the assumption that that’s what the Bible says. And it’s also to read the Bible in a way that the Bible itself indicates is not correct. It is vitally important to notice that in our passage for today, the domination of woman by man comes as a result of human sin. It is one of the curses that comes from the fact that Adam and Eve ate the fruit in the first place. That’s not the way God made things, and it’s not what God intends for male-female relations. And most of all, it is not the way we’re supposed to act.
This story tells us why it is that so many things are wrong with the world, and one of them is the whole idea of domination, of one person being superior to another.
Because of the sin of Adam and Eve, together, God says, “Your urge shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you” (Genesis 3:16b).
We can always get thrown off if we get literal when we read a story like this, a story that is clearly not meant to be taken literally. The first chapters of Genesis are theology that is presented as a story. So don’t get caught up in, “Why’d God do it this way?” questions. God didn’t do it this way. This is a story. And the point is, God didn’t intend for women to be inferior to men. This is a human-caused problem, and it’s a problem caused by the very human desire to dominate, to be in charge of our own destiny.
By disobeying God in the Garden, we started that ball rolling, by thinking we could control our destinies without God; but once we thought we’d severed that tie, we then turned inward on ourselves, and so now we practice this need to be in control, this need to dominate, on one another. One of the ways we do that is by imagining that one sex is dominant over the other.
Now, many Christian and Jewish fundamentalists will point to the fact that woman was created from the rib of man to say that woman is inferior to man. But that’s actually a misinterpretation of the story. When the first Human is created, it is called Adam–the human. It is in fact a genderless creature, neither male nor female, or maybe both male and female. But God, sensing the human’s loneliness, causes a deep sleep to fall on the human; and while the human is asleep, God splits the human in half, creating in
Hebrew ish and ishah—husband and wife, male and female, man and woman. Theologian Phyllis Trible says this is a second creation story. She writes:
[The Human] has no part in making the woman. He exercises no control over her existence. He is neither participant nor spectator nor consultant at her birth. Like [the Human], woman owes her life solely to God. To claim that the rib means inferiority or subordination is to assign the man qualities over the woman that are not in the narrative itself. Superiority, strength, aggressiveness, dominance and power (me: all the so-called “manly” traits!) do not characterize man in Genesis 2. By contrast, he is formed from dirt; his life hangs by a breath which he does not control; and he himself remains silent and passive while the Deity plans and interprets his existence.1
In fact, there are many different ways to interpret this story. French theologian Mircea Eliade maintained that woman was the pinnacle of creation because she was the last thing that was created.2 Distinguished theologian and preacher the Rev. Dr. Warner Bailey points out that the term used at her creation, which means “helper,” is only used in the rest of the Bible in reference to God. Warner points out that woman is made right after God warns the human not to eat of the Tree of Knowledge. To him, this suggests that God knew Adam couldn’t resist the temptation by himself. He needed a
backup, perhaps even someone stronger than himself, so woman was invented.3 Notice that the woman at least tries to resist the Serpent’s temptation. Also notice that the man is actually standing right there next to Eve while the Serpent and she and are speaking, but he never says a word; and when she gives him the fruit, the man just caves. He gives in. Poet John Milton shows us Adam pouring out a love song to Eve:
…Some cursed fraud
of Enemie hath beguil’d thee, yet unknown
And mee with thee hath ruind, for with thee
Certain my resolution is to Die;
How can I live without thee, how forgoe
Thy sweet Converse and Love so dearly joyn’d
To live again in these wilde Woods forlorn?
(PL IX: 904-910)
Adam, the fool for love according to Milton, eats the fruit, but will soon change his tune when Yahweh God confronts him in the Garden. “The woman you gave me,” he says, “she gave me of the tree and I ate!” Cherchez la femme: and the first domino falls that leads ultimately to Larry Nassar blaming little girls for his horrendous abuses. How pathetic. So much for male superiority.
But the real, larger issue in the story of the Fall is not just male superiority but the human presumption of superiority, what theologian Gerhard von Rad calls Titanism4, after the mythical race of people who sought to overcome the Greek gods and claim their power for themselves. Our author in this story is the Yahwist, who I told you about last week, an author who wrote during the 10th century BC, the period of the first kings in Israel, Saul and David and Solomon; and many scholars believe that the Yahwist has a bone to pick with the kings.
We often forget, or do not know, that God very specifically warned the people through the prophet Samuel that having a king was a very bad idea; that kings would arrogate power to themselves at the expense of the people—essentially that kings would play God. “You shall be his slaves,” Samuel warns the people (I Sam. 8: 17). But the people are fine with that. Both Saul and Solomon turn out to be disasters, and even David, the greatest of the kings, is proven to have feet of clay. It’s quite likely that Genesis 3 is written specifically to address what Walter Breuggemann calls “the new emergence in Israel of a royal consciousness of human destiny.”5
When the prophet Samuel raises the red flag about kings, he is upset because the people are choosing not to have God as their king, but rather to allow a fallible human being to control their destiny. This is exactly the issue in the story of Adam and Eve. While they live in the Garden, they are blissfully unaware of how absolutely dependent they are on God. They don’t need to be aware of it; their lives are so integrated into God’s that they no more need to think how much they need God than they need to think about breathing. But the temptation that comes is really about humans claiming that they can control their own destiny apart from the God who made them, the God who surrounds them and embraces them as atmosphere embraces the earth, the God whose spirit is our very breath, the God in whom we live and move and have their being.
Through the Fall, Genesis tells us, domination itself–the drive to control, the drive for power– enters human history. And so by eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, another set of dominos begins to fall that leads ultimately to Franco in Spain, Hitler in Germany, Stalin in the USSR, Duterte in the Philippines, and Bashar al Assad in Syria.
And the United States is hardly immune. From the earliest point in our history, even though our Constitution was specifically written to restrain the power of demagogues, presidents have tested those limits. It started way back with the second president, John Adams, and it has happened quite probably with most, if not all, presidents. For us, from a political perspective, protecting our own freedoms from the powerful has been an ongoing battle; but from a spiritual perspective, we do well to look to our own lives–because the story of Adam and Eve is our story, as well. We need to see the ways that the human desire to dominate, to be superior to others, to build ourselves up at the expense of others, is not only detrimental to others, it is also a usurpation of God’s ultimate authority over us. We aren’t just being arrogant to others, we are being arrogant toward God. Any racism, any sexism, any jingoism, any presumption of religious or ethnic or national or personal superiority, any desire to have gain at cost to others, puts us at odds with God’s rightful dominion over our lives. To use the Bible to justify it–to say God ordains it–as has so often been said about the lie of male superiority–is to insult God and to actually be claiming to have God’s authority vested in our own persons. It is the sin of Adam and Eve.
On the other hand, we can also live into the possibilities of the Original Blessing in which we were created. You may recall this incident from the 2016 Olympics. During the Women’s 5000-meter event, US runner Abbey D’Agostino
… was involved in a chain-reaction tumble… with New Zealand’s Nikki Hamblin.
Instead of scrambling up to keep running, D’Agostino went to Hamblin, helped her up
and urged the New Zealander to keep running. Later, Hamblin did the same
for D’Agostino as she, also injured, struggled to finish the race.6
You probably remember the photos of the two runners hobbling across the finish line as best they could, supporting one another. All the time, D’Agostino said, she wondered how they would make it; her own knee was like jelly. “It was a miracle we made it across the finish line,” she said. It turned out that D’Agostino herself was actually the worse injured of the two, and could not run for the rest of the events. But she said she had no regrets. She’d done the right thing.
Now at one level it’s a great example of what we like to call the Olympic spirit. But at another, D’Agostino’s reaction shows how deeply ingrained in her nature the state of Original Blessing is for her. Original Blessing is the way God originally made us, how we live into the image of God in which we are made. And think about this: God’s last act of creation in the Genesis story was to create a Helper. God made the one being Adam into two beings specifically to create the role of Helper. That means that being helpers, as Eve was created to be, is the highest calling of God’s creatures, the way in which we are most like God, who is our ultimate helper, upon whom we are absolutely dependent.
In the story of D’Agostino and Hamblin we see a brilliant example of people who toss aside the spirit of domination— the spirit of winning the Olympics—in order to live into their true created purpose—to help one another, and to submit themselves to the help we all most certainly need, from others and from God. For German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, this is the truest lesson of the Creation and the Fall. He writes:
Freedom is not a quality which can be uncovered–
it is not a possession, something to hand, an object,
nor is it a form of something to hand–instead it is
a relationship and nothing else.… Being free means
‘being free for the other,’ because I am bound to the
other. Only by being in relationship with the other
am I free.7
When we live bound to one another, we are truly free. When we live for the sake of the other, when we live to be helpers, we’re living most truly into the image of God in which we are created.
1 Trible, Phyllis. “Depatriarchalizing in Biblical Interpretation,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, XLI March 1973), pp. 30-48.
2 Unfortunately, I cannot source this.
3 Conversation with Warner Bailey, January 22, 2018.
4 Von Rad, Gerhard. Genesis, The Old Testament Library, Wright, Bright, et al., eds. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1961, SCM 1972 edition. p. 90ff.
5 Brueggemann, Walter, Genesis, Interpretation: A Biblical Commentary for Teaching and Preaching, Mays and Achtemeier et al., eds. Atlanta: John Knox, 1982. P. 40.
6 https://www.cbsnews.com/news/runners-who-helped-each-other-after-dramatic-fall-hailed-as-symbols-of- olympic-spirit/
7 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Creation and Fall: A Theological Exposition of Genesis 1-3. Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Vol. 3, Floyd et al, eds. Augsburg Fortress, 1997, p. 63.