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The First Sunday of Lent

"Adams' (and Eve's) Decisions"

The Rev. Dr. Richard W. Pfaff

You may have noticed the recent trend, that when public figures, especially from the world of sports, do something egregiously wrong, such acknowledgment as they eventually offer comes out not in those terms – that they’ve done wrong – but that they’ve “made bad decisions.” If a star quarterback masterminds a dog-fighting ring, or a track superstar takes illegal drugs and for years lies about it, or a politician diverts large amounts of public money into his private pocket, the refrain is the same: “I made bad decisions.”

It is, apparently, rather like eating a bad oyster, something slightly outside oneself, but with undesirable consequences. When in the seventh grade I put a thumbtack point-up on Horsie Zweiback’s chair and then denied having done so, that was, I suppose, a bad decision – though Mrs. Dysart, the home-room teacher, didn’t quite see it that way.

In today’s Old Testament reading man and woman (Adam and Eve) are put by God “in the garden of Eden to till and keep it,” but make bad decisions. We learn that their bad decisions spring from a desire not to be in the relationship with God that their creator intends: that they should live in the Garden (“Paradise”) basking in his good pleasure and conforming to his rules – namely, his single rule, that they should abstain from the fruit of one tree.

This is intolerable to them; they want to know why, what’s the matter with that tree, what its fruit would taste like, what God may be hiding from them in prohibiting that tree, and so on, until—you know how the story turns out. And you know not only that, with the serpent presented as the agent of temptation, but also what follows: the long, tedious story of disobedience and disaffection and rebellion, of their mutual chagrin in regarding as shameful the nakedness that had previously been a natural part of life in the garden, of the subsequent drudgery of eking out subsistence living from the soil for Adam, of the pain of childbirth for Eve, and of the greater pain of watching their first-born, Cain, murder his brother Abel.

In short, their bad decision results in their being removed from the place of delight and finding themselves instead living in, as St Augustine put it, a land of want, of barrenness (regio egestatis). The place of Adam’s and Eve’s temptation, and subsequent bad decision, has been the garden, and as a consequence of that decision the garden becomes, for them anyhow, a wilderness.

That is the story of the Old Adam (and, of course, of Eve as well). The New Adam is tempted, too, and in a particular kind of place – the place that we’ve just seen came about as a result of the bad decisions of our first parents: the wilderness. This story, like that of the earlier temptation, is familiar enough, as in the account from Matthew that we just heard as the Gospel reading.

We hear it in the context of the Evangelist’s shaped unfolding of the life and ministry of Jesus: that is, passing from his baptism in the river Jordan to the beginning of his public career of teaching and performing miracles. But we must hear this story, the story of Jesus being tempted by Satan, also in the context of the Adam and Eve story – and, no less, in the contexts of our own stories. It is easy to get involved in the confrontation between the two figures, the tempter dangling in front of Jesus three temptations of increasing guilefulness. It’s much harder, but I think no less necessary, to see the connection between Jesus in this episode and those for whom he stands in the first instance as the one who recapitulates the whole of the human story: he whom St Paul calls, in our Epistle reading, one man, or, elsewhere, the Last Adam. “If, because of one man’s trespass, death reigned through that one man, much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man Jesus Christ… . For as by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so by one man’s obedience many will be made righteous” [Rom. 5:17-1].

What Paul means here is of urgent importance for us. Jesus, resisting the tempter’s offers, doesn’t only qualify himself for entrance into the great work of his public ministry; he stands for us, and in a sense with us, in using his free will to refuse to make bad decisions. The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews puts it more succinctly: “one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin” [Heb. 4:15]. Part, a substantial part, of what it must mean to have a savior, to be saved from our sins, is the capacity to be saved from making bad decisions – provided always that we co-operate with divine grace, co-operation which is possible despite our wills having been vitiated, as the episode of the fall of Adam and Eve reminds us.

We have that capacity, yet we continue to make bad decisions. Realizing, this, we’re supposed to repent, to receive God’s forgiveness, and to push on, making fewer bad, and more good, decisions. This is called progress in the life of grace, and we must fervently embrace it, hope for it. But there is a danger that we are likely to see this solely in individual terms: what decisions shall I make about my income tax returns, or about running that red light when no one is around, or about indulging in a twenty-minute shower? Those decisions are grave enough; but so are the decisions that cause executives of massive drug companies to push the marketing of products of which the efficacy, and even the safety, are in serious doubt. So are the decisions that cause political leaders to prevent our government from signing agreements to abide by international conventions on the treatment of prisoners. So are the decisions of financial managers who work out ways to entrap the unsavvy into agreeing to plans of mortgage payment that they can’t possibly repay, thus losing their houses. For all decisions are ultimately made by individuals. We cannot separate those that seeem to be made corporately from those each of us is responsible for personally.

Yes, we know that, even as we strive for good decisions, good outcomes, there will be backsliding, greed, and sin. In part our very lives are progresses through such cycles; but at the end of each cycle we are not back to where we were before. We are one stage closer to our deaths – and one stage closer to the final triumph of grace. After the worst has come to pass, when envy and hatred and the human propensity to dark violence climax in the death on Golgotha (its landscape summarized by its name, the place of the skull): then we may find ourselves once more, improbably – wildly improbably – in a garden. “Now in the place where he was crucified there was a garden, and in the garden a new tomb where no one had ever been laid” [John 19:41]. There, early on the Sunday morning, Mary Magdalen will encounter one she supposes to be the caretaker of the garden – very much like the man whom, in the words of Genesis, the Lord God took and put in the garden, to till and keep it. But this is the New Adam, of course. His is “that flesh and blood,/ which did in Adam fail,/ [and which] did strive afresh against the foe,/ did strive, and did prevail,” to paraphrase slightly Cardinal Newman’s great hymn which we just sang.

There was, in Shakespeare’s time four hundred years or so ago, a curious opinion (no one knows quite where it came from) that the Garden of Eden was not, as most think, meant to have been located in Mesopotamia, where the rivers flowed freely and life was relatively easy, but was in the same area as Jerusalem, with Calvary its bitter crowning glory. Thus the poet-priest John Donne, writing at the end of a time of grievous bodily sickness:

So we enter this season of Lent acknowledging the Adams and Eves that we all are; accepting responsibility for the bad decisions we’ve made and praying for grace to make the good decisions instead; rejoicing in our solidarity with the New Adam who, tempted as we are, made no bad decisions; and ascribing through him to his Father, in the unity of their Holy Spirit, all might, majesty, dominion, and glory, now and for ever.

© 2008: Chapel of the Cross