Genesis 3:1-24 Fall from Grace?

Some years ago, John Spong, the former bishop of Newark, sought to ignite a “New Reformation” by proposing 12 “theses.”  Spong is convinced that classic Christianity has been outpaced by modern thinking and the scientific revolution; in his view, the “pre-modern concepts in which Christianity has traditionally been carried will never again speak to the post-modern world we now inhabit.”  Spong rejects the idea of the Incarnation, the atoning value of Jesus’ death, bodily resurrection and ascension, miracles, and the moral authority of scripture.  In dismissing one after the next, he states each of these foundational convictions in as crude and unconvincing way as possible; each becomes a sort of straw man that no reflective Christian would recognize as their own understanding.  In the end, his “Christianity for a New Millennium” bears little resemblance to the faith that most Christian believe and practice.

The third of John Spong's “theses” dealt with the primeval event that Christians call “The Fall,” described in the third chapter of Genesis. He says, “The biblical story of the perfect and finished creation from which human beings fell into sin is pre-Darwinian mythology and post-Darwinian nonsense.”

There is nothing particularly original about John Spong's complaint about the Fall.  People have been trying to sort out the seeming disconnect between Genesis and scientific views of human origins for almost two centuries.  As a result, all too often, our attempt to hear and understand this crucial text has been sidetracked the question of whether “it really happened in this way.”  

The question of how precisely the events described in Genesis correlate with the growing findings of geneticists, paleontologists and anthropologists is unanswerable.  The Genesis account of the Creation and Fall is a story.  It is not, and was never intended be, a precise scientifically and historically verifiable description of an objective sequence of events.  It simply isn’t that sort of text.  It uses narrative to tell us that there is something deeply and tragically askew in human nature that cries out for redemption and atonement.

The Fall is tied to an act of disobedience.  The key to the story of Eve’s seduction is her motivation.  The serpent tells Eve that she will not die when she eats of the fruit, but “when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”  It is the prospect of “being like God,” that suddenly makes the fruit so attractive to Eve and “a delight to the eyes.”

What does it mean for the creation to claim the place the creator – to “be like God”?   It is the attempt to be autonomous rather than interdependant, and to place oneself at the center of one’s universe in which everything is at one’s beck and call.  Martin Luther spoke of sin as the moral condition of being “curved in on oneself” rather that oriented toward God and other people.

It has been said that “Original Sin” is the most verifiable of all Christian doctrines; one need only look at the New York Times, CNN, Fox News or whatever your favored source of information, to recognize the broken state of the world and the desperate need for a renovation of human nature.  A little education or social reform simply is not sufficiently strong medicine; what is needed is the gracious intervention of the Creator himself. 

1 Peter 2:4-10 The Temple of His Body

It does not make sense to talk about Jesus by himself — in isolation.  He is never apart from God the Father.  He is always, as John says, “in bosom of the Father” (the ESV says “at the Father’s side,”).  According to Colossians, he is “the image of the invisible God”; as Jesus tells Philip, "whoever has seen me has seen the Father"(John 14:9).

At the same time, Jesus is always inextricably connected to us.  For the Word to be “made flesh” means that he shares in our humanity, just as our baptism means our participation in his death and risen life.  Archbishop Thomas Cranmer’s matchless communion prayer, known as “the Prayer of Humble Access” captures this element of mutual participation in the petition that “we may evermore dwell in him, and he in us.”

Today’s passage from 1 Peter stresses not so much the Incarnation itself, as the “extension of the Incarnation” in the life of the Church — which is our common life in Christ.  When Peter speaks of our being “living stones built up as a spiritual house,” he is referring to the Temple – not the temple whose remains can be seen in today’s Jerusalem, but the temple that is Christ’s body. “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up,” says Jesus to the authorities in Jerusalem, and then John tells that “he was speaking about the temple of his body” (John 2:21).

When we participate by faith and baptism in Christ, we become part of that temple.  “Do you not know that you are God's temple and that God's Spirit dwells in you?  If anyone destroys God's temple, God will destroy him. For God's temple is holy, and you are that temple....do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God?”  (1 Corinthians 3:16-17, 6:19). 

In these two passages, Paul is not saying that my individual body is a temple of the Spirit. In each case, the word for “you” is plural.  Together, we are joined to Christ; together, we become part of the temple of his body, the Church – as 1st Peter says, ”living stones” of a “spiritual house.”

The event of the Incarnation — of the “Word made flesh” — does not come to end with Jesus’ ascension to the right hand of the Father.  Through his body, the Church, Christ is still Emmanuel, still “God with us.”  Just as God dwelt in the midst of his people in the Temple in Jerusalem, Christ remains among his people who are “living stones built up as a spiritual house.” 

Hebrews 1:1-4 Bridging the Gap

The God of the Bible is a God who speaks. He communicates.

God does not leave us in the dark.  He does not keep his distance – even if we have contributed to that distance by our own sin.

In the sphere of human relationships, our speech enables us to create and maintain ties with one another.  As the Apostle Paul observed, “who knows a person's thoughts except the spirit of that person which is in him? (1 Corinthians 2:11).  But speech bridges the gulf between us, and opens up our inner life to those around us.

In the same way, God speaks to human beings not just to communicate information, but to establish a trusting relationship (or "covenant") between us and Himself.  And according to the Epistle to the Hebrews, he has been at this for quite some time. “Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets.” (Hebrews 1:1)  Yes, God speaks to us in nature (“The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork," Psalm 19:1), but he has also spoken to us in our own idiom, in human words.

The basic point of the Book of Hebrews is that whatever God has done in the past, as wondrous as it may be, it pales in comparison to what God has done in Jesus Christ.  Hence, while he had formerly spoken to his people through the prophets, God has now done something new.  He has spoken to us in his Son, incarnate in our midst as one of us.  “In these last days he has spoken to us by his Son.”  He now makes himself known to us, and is present to us, with a new fullness and directness.

The Son is a fellow human being like the prophets before him.  As Hebrews 2 tells us, he was “made like his brothers in every respect.”  Yet he is also the eternal and pre-existent Son, “through whom God created the world,” the “radiance of the glory of God” and the “exact imprint of his nature,” who “upholds the universe by the word of his power.”

Again we are nose to nose with the miracle of the Incarnation, of Emmanuel, or “God with us.” Now that God has spoken to us “through a Son,” it is not just we have a clearer and more direct line of communication.  It is not so much that we have upgraded our connection from dial-up internet to fiber-optic cable.  Jesus is not just a better mouth piece than the prophets before him; he is the expression of an entirely different order of divine self-communication.  Jesus is himself the utterance of God.  Jesus is the one who bridges the gulf between us and God, and draws us into an intimate connection with God as His adopted children and fellow heirs with Christ.

Colossians 1:15-23 A Curriculum Vitae for the Pre-existent Son

“Until that moment in history [the Council of Nicaea in 325], Jesus was viewed by His followers as a mortal prophet…a great and powerful man, but a man nonetheless….Jesus’ establishment as ‘the Son of God’ was officially proposed and voted on by the Council of Nicaea....Constantine upgraded Jesus' status almost four centuries after Jesus' death.”

In these words, Sirs Leigh Teabing, a central character in Dan Brown’s novel, The Da Vinci Code, reveals all about the alleged deceptions and misconceptions of traditional Christianity.  The Da Vinci Code may be old news, but it cleverly played to a fascination with alternative spiritualities and a prevailing suspicion toward “institutional religion” that are both still very much with us.  It was also riddled with historical errors and distortions.

Dan Brown was correct that the Council of Nicaea addressed the question of the divinity of Christ.  The council’s great achievement was the Nicene Creed, and its assertion that the Son is “of one being with the Father.”  While the language of the Creed was new, it expressed a conviction that went back to apostolic times.  It is simply not true that until Nicaea, Christians viewed Jesus as merely a “mortal prophet.”  While never denying Jesus’ humanity, the New Testament makes very strong statements about the divinity of Christ, as we have seen in the preceding readings from John and Philippians.

Our reading for today from the Epistle to the Colossians offers another robust statement of Jesus' divinity.  Colossians reiterates some of the things we have already heard: it points to the pre-existence of Christ; it agrees with John 1:3 that “all things were created through him.”

While Philippians says that he was “in the form of God,” Colossians asserts that “in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.”

While John said that “no one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father's side, he has made him known,” Colossians says that, “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.” Both passages tell us that we meet the God whom we cannot see in the Son whom we can see.

Colossians tells us a few things that we haven’t heard before.  We learn that Jesus is “head of the Body, the church,” reminding us that we are never left to our own devices; he is always present to us and remains sovereign over the Christian community.

And Colossians stresses that in his divinity, joined to his humanity, Jesus has reconciled all things to himself by the blood of his cross.

This brief passage is a remarkable “Curriculum Vitae” of the Pre-existent Son who is made incarnate in the person of Jesus Christ.  Refer back to it often!

Philippians 2:1-11: Perfect Humility

“Jesus, Thou art all compassion,
Pure unbounded love Thou art;”

These words are from Charles Wesley’s memorable hymn, “Love Divine, all Loves excelling.”  They stress a key aspect of the Incarnation; in the absolutely unique event in which the “Word became a Flesh and dwelt among us,” God reveals the depth of his compassion for his creatures.

“Compassion” means “to suffer with” another.  But does it make sense to speak of God actually suffering?  God is perfect; God lacks nothing.  He is omnipotent and omniscient.  And God is holy, “set apart” from creation in all its finitude.  How could God suffer without being somehow less than God?  There have always been those who have insisted that God could not have truly become human, since that would have compromised His divine character.

In Philippians 2: 6-7, the apostle Paul tells us what it takes for an all powerful God to take on our humanity so completely that he can actually share in our sufferings.

The phrase, “Though he was in form of God…” refers to the “pre-existence of Christ outside of time and space.  To say he was in the “form” of God indicates that he shared perfectly in the exact nature of God, that he was, as Paul says, “equal to God” and fully divine. 

Yet he did not count equality with God “a thing to be grasped” but he “emptied himself.”  This phrase “emptied himself” has been the subject of debate over the years.  Some have thought it indicates that the divine Son divested himself of certain aspects of his divinity, that he shed certain attributes of God – ominiscience, perhaps, or omnipotence – in order to be human.

Instead of suggesting that the one who was “equal to God” became less than God for a time, this "emptying" is perhaps it is best to understood as an expression of his divine freedom.  God is not limited by some static, abstract definition of what God is supposed to be like,  In His freedom, God takes on “the form of servant” – he becomes human, fully equal to us.  Yet in sharing our humanity and “being born in the likeness of men,” he has not shed his “equality to God,” he has rather demonstrated a remarkable aspect of his sovereign freedom, the capacity for perfect humility. 

Karl Barth said,"If then, God is in Christ, if what the man Jesus does is God's own work, this aspect of the self-emptying and self-humbling of Jesus Christ as an act of obedience cannot be alien to God."

In his humility, God the Son is able to come alongside us and share fully in human suffering.  He is “all compassion” – suffering with us.  In his “pure unbounded love,” he is not limited by his majesty and omnipotence from meeting us face to face on our own ground as one of us.

John 1:1-18: The Eternal Word

            When I was sixteen, I was waiting at the bus stop when a man came along with a Johnny Appleseed bag across his shoulders and handed me a copy of the Gospel of John.  That evening I read John’s famous introduction for the first time, “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.”

            It sounded profound, but I was not sure how the term “word” was intended to be understood. It seemed to mean something more than just another entry in a dictionary. 

Years later when I was first ordained, a fourth grader read the same passage at a Christmas Lessons and Carols service.  Just before the service began he came to me and said, “This doesn’t make sense!  How can something be with God and be God at the same time?” 

Precisely. Normally identity and distinction are mutually exclusive.  If I am with you, we may share space, but I remain distinct from you. If I am you, there is no such distinction -- and there is no one else in the room. 

These opening words of John inscribe a unique and complex relationship between God and the Word, a relationship that is located within the being of God, but without compromising the oneness of the Biblical God. 

John clearly identifies this “Word” with the creative utterance of God.  The words, “in the beginning,” echo the opening passage of Genesis, “In the beginning, God…” God speaks a word, and the creation comes into being.  Similarly, John presents the Word as the means by which creation comes into being, “all things were made through him (the Word), and without him was nothing made that was made.”

John also echoes Proverbs 8:22-31, which speaks of the Wisdom of God in strikingly personal terms as the one who is present at the beginning, and who shares in the work of creation “like a master workman.”

            “The LORD possessed me at the beginning of his work,

                        the first of his acts of old….

            when he marked out the foundations of the earth,

                        then I was beside him, like a master workman,

            and I was daily his delight,

                        rejoicing before him always,

            rejoicing in his inhabited world

                        and delighting in the children of man.

(Proverbs 8:22, 29-31)

John appears to be thinking of Proverbs 8, but he does not use the term Sophia (or “wisdom’).  Instead, he speaks of the Logos, which is translated as “Word,” and which had a wide range of meaning in Jewish and pagan philosophical circles at the time. The Logos was a divine principle of coherence and rationality, a sort of template of order and meaning that lay behind the created universe, and was also the source of human reason. 

The opening words of John would have been thoroughly intelligible to John’s Jewish and Greco-Roman readers.  Yet there was a significant difference.  For Stoic philosophers, the Logos was impersonal and abstract, while for John, the Logos is the divine Son who “dwells in the bosom of the Father” (RSV).  But the truly novel and radical claim is in verse 14: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.” (John 1:14)

It is suddenly clear that John is not merely invoking abstract philosophical concepts; he is talking about a concrete person, located in time and space, Jesus, the rabbi from Nazareth.  And yet, in all his humanity, this Jesus has an eternal pre-existence.

In the readings that follow, other Biblical writers will also take this “long view” and speak of the pre-existent Christ, before we turn to the Old Testament expectation of the One who was to come.

In the beginning...

We meet Jesus in his Word.  He is, after all, the Word that was in the beginning with God, and was God, the Word that became Flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:1-2).  The Epistle to the Hebrews says, "Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son" (Hebrews 1:1-2). This tells us not only that God speaks supremely through Jesus, but even suggests that Jesus is himself the direct utterance of God. 

Scripture also tells us that the words of Jesus (who is the Word), and the words of those who first witnessed to Jesus, communicate the presence and power of Jesus to all who receive him in faith.  The Good News of Jesus is itself "the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes" (Romans 1:16). Reading the Bible can be a high stakes business indeed! 

Beginning on Monday, January 16, I will be reading five passages from the Bible about Jesus each week for twenty weeks.  Joining me will be members of the congregation of Trinity Church, Potsdam, and perhaps others as well (including readers of this blog).  Together we are taking the "Essential Jesus Challenge" proposed by an organization called Scripture Union, whose purpose is to get the People of God to the read the Bible.

What follows are my daily reflections on these 100 passages about Jesus, who is, as the Apostle Paul said, "the image of the invisible God....in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things" (Colossians 1:15,19-20).