Whenever I get anxious
or stressed, my instinctive reaction is to say to myself: “I need a
cigarette.” Now, I don’t. I quit smoking thirteen years ago. Any physical nicotine addiction left in my
body is long gone. But, there’s some
kind of memory lurking there that tempts me.
It tempts me to forget who I am, to forget my identity of ex-smoker. It remembers all those times when I felt
stressed and anxious because of nicotine withdrawal and whispers: “that’s all
this is! You can evade all your stress
just by lighting up.” Now, luckily, my
conscious mind has gotten pretty good at telling that instinct that it’s wrong,
that it’s confusing my identity, that a cigarette would not help me one
whit. But, it’s still there.
Eve and
Adam were not able to quiet that whispering voice of temptation. The voice that snared them and convinced
them: “you need this fruit; you need this fruit to become like God.” The serpent’s voice made them forget who they
were. It made them forget that they were
created in the image and likeness of God, that God’s own breath had been
breathed into their nostrils in a loving act of messy intimacy. They were like God! They were created as the glory of creation,
as the ones who were to tend the good garden God had made to nourish them, the
co-workers in God’s creative action, walking in unquestioned harmony with each
other and with God, always dependent, always delighting in their dependence (on
each other, on God), always trusting, never anxious.
The
serpent sows a seed of worry, the first such seed in this good garden. He makes them forget who they are: “you’re
not like God, not yet! You’re dependent,
go on, take your life into your own hands, take this fruit… that’s what you
need, that’s how to evade this stress.”
It’s a lying voice. The serpent
is the first figure in all of scripture to talk about God in the third person, rather than to God or with God. He’s the first person to do God-talk, to do
theology, absent a posture of prayer. He
creates this anxiety, this stress, causing the creatures to doubt their true
identity, their likeness to God, and then offers the fruit, that seeks to
overcome anxiety about self by undermining God, when only God can truly handle
our anxiety. That’s the true sin here:
to doubt our likeness to God, and to try to take our lives, our worries into
our hands and seek a way out of them through a quick fix, a cigarette or some forbidden
fruit.
And there
is an alternative, there is another way.
There’s the way of trust, of entrusting all our worry to God, of
clinging to Christ’s cross, which stabilizes us like an anchor, piercing
through the stormy water, not evading it.
But that’s hard. Because there
are so many other tempting options.
There’s the option to deny our likeness to God, to deny our loveliness
to God, to refuse to see ourselves as beloved daughters and sons of so great a
Father. This is the way of dejection, of
abandonment, of losing hope, when our souls magnify our worry instead of
magnifying, with Mary, the Lord, of refusing to really believe that God would
do anything in His power to reach out and save us and gather us into His arms. Just like for Eve and Adam, the punishment is
natural and self-imposed: we fear, we hide.
Another
temptation is to deny that there’s anything to worry about, to refuse to look
around and see that the good garden has been violated, that there is darkness
around us: in our world, in our neighborhood, in our hearts. It’s to confidently think that we can solve
our problems with a cigarette or an apple, to take our lives into our hands and
seek quick simple solutions, solutions that evade pain, evade suffering, evade
full obedience to what it means to be human.
It can work, for a while. But
when we take problems much too big for us into our hands, when we think our sin
is eliminable through grit and determination and pulling ourselves up by our
bootstraps, we’ll find we’ve turn in on ourselves, fixated on autonomy, starved
of covenant, blind to mercy, tone death to compassion.
There is
another way. To truly accept that we are
loved sinners. That we have strayed from being like God, from that simple
brilliant other-centered love. That He hasn’t. He hasn’t strayed from loving us. He longs to bring us home, to bring us back
to that garden, to walking in the intimacy for which and by which we were
created. And He will. St. Paul is clear: the legacy of Christ
outweighs that of Adam. Justification
and life triumph over sin and death.
In
Christ, God has shown us how to refuse to listen to that whispering voice of
temptation that tries to entice us into denying our identity. Christ declares with conviction: he is God’s
divine son, and he is close to us in our hunger, and he trusts in God to
feed. He’ll refuse to use miracles to
meet his own hunger, to summon angels for a showy stunt, to commit idolatry to
gain power. He’ll assert who he is, a
trusting Son of God. And then the angels
will come, and will feed him. He will
later face death, not for a dare with Satan, but in loving submission to humans
even as they deny their vocation to love and nourish, with nails and a
cross. He will rise, and all power will
be given Him. And in that power, he will
reach out his hand, his loving wounded hand, in welcome, in embrace, in
healing. And with him, trusting,
clinging, we’ll rise to be who we are.
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