Guest Preacher: Max Del Bosque

Based on Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7 | First Sunday of Lent
Guest Preacher Max Del Bosque visiting University Lutheran Palo Alto this weekend.




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"The heart of the discerning acquires knowledge, and the ear of the wise seeks knowledge."
Proverbs 18:15
 
We are going to mark the first Sunday of Lent with essentially chopping down the tree of understanding we think we have about this passage from Genesis. If you're particularly attached to what you think you know, or what you've been told to believe this story is about, I'm sorry to say that I'm here to make you uncomfortable.                                                                               
 
What do we understand about the story of Eve and the tree of knowledge in the garden?  What do we think we know about this story?
 
Maybe you grew up hearing this story was about men being tempted into sin by women, that Eve was a temptress, and that the "punishment" for women was the pain of childbirth ever after-
or
 
that our fall from grace in God's eyes was because we, mediated through a sinful woman, defied God's rules to not eat from or touch the tree.
 
Now I've poured over the text and the scholarly contributions about this passage from Genesis and
 
I'm sorry to say, but there was no apple.
 
Apples originated from a wild variety, malus sieversii, that came from a region in what is now present day Kazakstan. Apples simply didn't exist during the time of the ancient Israelites. And if we're to believe that Adam and Eve preceded the Israelites, then apples were definitely not around yet.
 
The first thing we have to confront is that what we think we know, we must question that knowing.
 
There are some scholars who believe that early church fathers (emphasis on the fathers part) assumed connection with the latin word for evil—malum and the name of the wild variety malus, and ta-da! We have an apple. Even this is brought into question because the genus name malus sieversii came about in the 1830s by a German botanist who had named the apple after another German botanist, Sievers, who is the first known European to have discovered and documented the original Kazakstan wild variety in 1793. This was long after those early Christian theologians.
 
Again, I'm here to shake this apple and Genesis assumption free from each other,
because do you know anything about early varieties of apples that originated in Central Asia? Sweet they were not. We did not have red sweet apples until the late 1800s. So again, I poke at what we think we know about this passage from Genesis.
 
Jewish Hebrew scholars believe that the fruit now in question, was most likely, a grape. And grapes do not grow on trees. I'm sorry, my friends, but this makes it very clear, there was no apple.
 
And possibly, no tree.
 
Where does that leave us?
 
We can look to early theologians like Tertullian and Augustine who wrote about this passage to align it with the idea that the serpent, was not a symbol of knowledge and immortality, but was Satan.
 
Yet, in Hebrew, the descriptor for the serpent is arum, or clever. We see this in Proverbs. And Not clever as in trickery. To be clever was highly valued, as it afforded resilience and flexibility of mind.
 
And what about Eve? Eve's actions in our reading from today, have been used to promote virginity, purity, and suffering for this sin of being female. Suffering through labor and endless births. This idea of the apple as red, juicy, luscious, even—played well into these earlier church men's ideas. This sets up patriarchy and men's power over women and women's bodies well.
 
We have been led to believe this is a story about sex and desire, yet, that is not present in the original Hebrew text. In Genesis 2 we learn that humans were created in God's likeness. How we humans were made and why, was already established earlier. The issue in our reading today is about how and what happens when humans acquire wisdom.
If the original covenant between God and humans was for us to live in a forever child-like relationship with God and each other in the garden, what we know about our human experience is that we begin in that developmental state of innocence, and become adults, And this transition happens by experiencing the complexities and sorrows that are life itself.
 
This reminds me of a time when my oldest son was quite small. As a busy parent and grad student, I was always coming up with ways to occupy him, to work a bit more on my thesis, to get a meal on the table. I introduced him to crayons when he was quite young, giving him a lot of latitude to create, while teaching him to draw on paper. not on the table, not on the walls. to my dismay, I found him drawing on the front of his dresser one afternoon! It was the first time I had to tell him no, and gave him the consequence of helping to clean off the marks he'd made. My son was not pleased. And I in the adjoining room, overheard him grubbling, and mutter angrily, "fucking baba!" as he scrubbed. I was simultaneously horrified—when and how did my sweet child pick up the f word? Also wanted to laugh out loud, because the fact of his expressing his frustration via cussing me out for his consequence was also amusing. But, it was a significant moment for each of us. I had to hold that my child was no longer a baby and going to test me and need consequences, as well as hold that he could have all sorts of feelings about how I parent him. He, in turn, learned that sometimes his parent held boundaries he didn't like.
We each grew up some that day.
 
The Genesis story is similar--
God wanted us to remain forever connected to him and each other through love. Wanted to shield us from the complexities of life—pain, fear, grief, betrayal. These are all human experiences that God knows of, and wanted us to be spared from.
 
Instead, we became fully human. And in this, we lost some of that original connectedness through which we first began. Just like my son had to accept that I was going to set boundaries when needed, and with that, I did not remain the parent who only and always delights--we as humans are in a complicated and very real relationship with God and each other. Considering this passage from Genesis in this way, we can examine the aftermath of Eve and Adam gaining knowledge—the eyes of both were opened it says in verse six--this, is about education—and education as our first human act of disobedience.
 
This text indicates how wisdom, not women, is the cause of suffering in ancient Israel.  Forcing us to consider the changing landscape of knowledge, the sense of belonging and power that goes along with knowledge was shifting among ancient Israelites. Remember that later in Genesis we learn what life will be like for humans—that we will work hard, have offspring to work the land as well, and ultimately die after all this hard work. This isn't far off from what the Israelites knew life to be. What's surprising is the knowledge that what God had in store for humans was to not live this way, but instead, live a long life in mutual relationship to one another in creation.
So are we to believe that acquisition of knowledge is not part of God's plan for us? Are we to be doubtful of education and the power of the mind?  Is education, in and of itself, bad?
 
The story invites us to question what knowledge and its acquisition is seated in, where it comes from. It invites us to consider the importance of discernment, and how power determines who gets to steer the course of knowledge, as well as qualify what knowledge is. This Genesis passage reflects shifts in understanding about wisdom in monarchal Israel. If collective memory was sustained via oral tradition, we start to see a shift in story not centered in mutual experience, but coming increasingly from elites who'd left the villages, those who were learning new literary traditions coming from non-biblical sources. Ancient Israel's leaders were starting to rely on the telling of story that came from written texts—royal stories about kings and men in charge. The stories that were unique to each village, with their village storyteller who knew the nuances and intimate experiences of their people, were slowly being replaced. The story of Adam and Eve here in Genesis is about gaining knowledge, but its also a warning—about where knowledge comes from. We only have to look to our apple and our serpent—to see what happens when knowledge concentrated in the hands of a powerful few, a few who do not have collective interrelationship as their guiding force, to see what happens next.
 
Here's where our Genesis passage meets our readings from Romans and Matthew. We see sin now playing out as a divide between us and our relationship with God as well as our interdependent relationship with each other, through God.
 
If Genesis laid the groundwork of what was to become of us humans when we acquire knowledge, then our readings from Romans and Matthew, reinforce this.
 
In the Romans passage from today, we'll note that Eve has been disappeared entirely—an example of the way patriarchy has played out. Eve and Adam have been portrayed as a binary—male and female, husband and wife, sinner and temptress. In Romans that binary is continued Adam as sinful, and Christ, not. Yet, we're also reminded that our salvation is interconnected—our individual grace is bound up in our collective connection to and with each other through Christ.
 
In Matthew we are presented with Jesus meeting the adversary—what are we pulled toward in the world, we can have so many things, so many material wants can be met, but
Jesus quotes Deuteronomy, remiding us our relationships to God and each other are not all or nothing ones. Bringing us back to our covenantal relationship with God. This relationship that Jesus speaks of in Matthew is not an individual one, but a communal one—linking us to that tree of knowledge again, how do we learn to be in community through God as the very human people that we are? How do we use our wisdom, our access to all that the world offers us, to choose over and over, to deepen into interdependent relationship with each other?
 
We "die to sin" when we separate knowledge, from how to live interdependently with each other through God. Our readings today remind us that our Lenten journey begins with examining what we think we know. And to do so with the intention of considering wisdom as that which brings us into community with each other. Eve has been understood as a transgressor, breaking divine law. Let us consider what it means to transgress today—when our world makes it easy to turn away from each other, there are so many things we can numb and distract and entertain ourselves with—instead let us transgress from these isolating norms. In our current times, let us transgress, and lean into the knowing that we are all God's beloved.

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