The Rev. Sara Warfield
Scriptures: Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7; Matthew 4:1-11
If we never experienced pain, would we be able to appreciate pleasure? If we never felt sadness, could we really know what happiness is? If we don’t get to choose our joy, if joy is our only option, our only experience, can we really know what joy is? I ask because it seems as if the garden of Eden was a place where God protected Adam and Eve and all of creation from suffering. It was a place of perpetual innocence, of knowing no sin.
I think this is the reason that God set the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the garden. God understood that without the freedom of choice, Eve and Adam would not be able to truly know and experience the blessing and peace that the garden offered.
Aside from the act of creating them, creating us, this choice was the most profound gift and burden God could give them, and us. And I think it’s worth noting that the scripture today says, “Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that the Lord God had made.” The serpent didn’t sneak into the garden when God wasn’t looking. God made the serpent, and presumably God made the serpent more crafty than any other wild animal.
In this way, God set all the ingredients for choice, for temptation, for freedom in the garden.
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Freedom is such an ambiguous concept. Some people take it to mean the ability to do whatever they want. Indeed, one formal definition of the word freedom is “the condition of being free of restraints, especially the ability to act without control or interference by another or by circumstance.” This meaning has largely defined our country’s identity: the founders unshackling themselves from the restraint of English rule. Of course, many of those same founders literally shackled other humans and forced them to work without pay. And later many Americans chose to try and create a new country by fighting a terrible war rather than give everyone the same freedom they experienced. Women were not free to vote in a national election in the United States until 1920. They weren’t free to open their own bank account without a man’s approval until 1974. Even now, the Epstein files show us how prominent leaders in politics, business, and academia valued their own freedom, their own pleasure or enrichment, at the expense of the innocence and freedom of actual children.
So again: the meaning of freedom is ambiguous at best. What happens when one person acting without restraint actually restrains another person? Or to put it another way, if one person’s freedom impedes another person’s freedom, is that freedom at all?
But freedom is defined in an entirely different way for those of us who claim to follow Jesus. In our faith, it is sin that is the restraining or controlling or coercive factor in our lives. Freedom for Christians means freedom from sin. Or put in a positive way, freedom to be in relationship with God. It’s the choice, the gift and the burden, that God gave Adam and Eve, gave us: either allow sin to guide your life or allow God.
Which is to say: Do we acknowledge the reality of God’s creation or do we deny it? Here’s what I mean: Earlier in this chapter of Genesis, it says, “And the LORD God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there God put the man whom God had formed. Out of the ground the LORD God made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food.” Adam could not survive without the trees, which were his food. The trees could not survive without the day and night, the sunshine and rain that God had created before then. By design, the world God created is intricately interdependent, biologically, yes, but also socially: “It is not good that this man should be alone: I will make him a helper as his partner.”
The reality of creation is: we cannot survive and thrive without all the living things God created. The apostle Paul describes this reality as the Body of Christ. To accept this reality is to be in relationship with God, our Creator. To deny this reality is to sin. And, again, we have the great gift and burden God gave us: the freedom to make that choice.
Adam and Eve use their freedom to break relationship with God. They don’t eat the fruit because they’re hungry, they eat it because “the tree was to be desired to make one wise,” so the serpent had implied. They put their own craving and desire ahead of God’s request. They defy God by eating the fruit, which brings them a feeling they could not have felt if they had maintained relationship with God: it brings them shame. And when we feel shame, we want to hide, which is exactly what they did.
But then in the gospel we have Jesus, who is actually famished in the wilderness, and the tempter he encounters challenges him to use his power to turn stones into bread to satisfy his hunger. But Jesus is in that barren wilderness, a place that is the opposite of the abundance of Eden, on purpose. He’s just been baptized into his mission, and he’s there to prepare for that mission, to learn and practice every day he’s there to trust God rather than his own power.
Jesus has the same freedom as Eve and Adam did, as we do. He could use his power and gifts to turn those stones into bread to eat, to throw himself off the temple to prove to the devil that he was who he said he was. He could decide that he wanted all earthly power and abundance for himself.
But Jesus didn’t come to this earth to lift himself up. After all, according to the gospel of John, Jesus himself was the Word that brought God’s creation into being. He was there! Jesus understood that, in this interdependent world God created, sin is choosing the enrichment and thriving of the self over and against the enrichment and thriving of the whole. And Jesus came to us in human form for all of us, for all of creation.
Now listen, I’m not saying that we shouldn’t take care of ourselves. As soon as the devil left, “angels came and waited on Jesus,” which I assume means that he broke his fast and was very well tended before he set off on his ministry. I imagine the angels had some decent provisions for him. God needed Jesus strong and nourished for the work he was called to do, just as the whole Body of Christ needs us strong and nourished for the work we’re called to do. Because if one part of the body is weak and wilting, the whole body is less healthy for it.
The only way to know and experience the depth of joy of the freedom that God has given us is to choose the whole over the self, to choose relationship with God over our individual cravings and desires. So I think the words of the Black civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer best describe the Christian concept of freedom, Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.
Amen.
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