Tenth Sunday, 1997

God is on the side of the losers

This passage from Genesis which is so familiar is also one of the most grossly misunderstood passages in the Bible. This is really important because this passage is pivotal for understanding the whole career of Jesus. Let me back up a bit... The whole Creation Story was written long after the events of the Exodus and the Jews in that event came to believe that God, the God of the universe, was the God who heard the cry of the oppressed and was moved to do something about that. The absolutely central notion they had about God was that God is on the side of the losers..., and yet it doesn’t take much experience or insight to see that the world does not seem to work that way. So hundreds of years later they came up with this notion of the Fall Story, this business about the temptation to become like God, which we get right before today’s readings.

The Temptation itself refers to some kind of desire to simply step outside of the human condition, to achieve some kind of omnipotence, some kind of omniscience, some kind of control over the world and reality so that one doesn’t have to, as we human beings must, move blindly from moment to moment. The Temptation is the great temptation to short-cut the whole process and achieve a type of power and independence that really contradicts the human condition. Who has not been tempted by that? Who does not want to appear other than they are? That’s what the Jews said was the central problem for human beings. If in fact the world wags along as if God does not exist and if the oppressed continue to be oppressed, what can account for that? So they created story about the Temptation and the Fall. But what is crucial for our purposes is the consequence of sin, which is the continuation of the falsification of one’s self: "I didn’t do this, this lady that you, God, gave to me, she made me do this..." And the man of course does the same sort of thing: "I didn’t do this, the snake made me do it..." The Jews wanted to say that by some choices that we human beings make to flee from our own humanity, we, in that very gesture, end up fleeing from each other, from God, and from ourselves. In other words, to be human for the Jews was precisely to be connected to God and to the other and thereby to have a self that was genuinely one’s own. So this text is absolutely crucial for understanding the rest of the Bible and most certainly the New Testament.

We then go to this extraordinary passage from Mark, where people thought that Jesus was crazy. It is very interesting to see that in the parallel passages in Matthew and Luke, - both of which were probably written fifteen to twenty years after the Gospel of Mark, - when they come to the same scene, they wipe out this notion that Jesus was mad. And of course to be mad was in that world, to be diabolically possessed. So, why did they think Jesus was crazy? Because, and this is where the Genesis passage is so crucial, here was somebody who was naked and unashamed before everybody else... The Genesis passage is so astonishing because the author, uses the same words before the Temptation and after: they were "naked and unashamed" before each other in this passage. And now, after this massive lie that they told to themselves and each other, they were "naked and ashamed" and could not stand before God, or each other, or, ultimately, themselves. So here you have this character who walked around totally available, totally revealed, concealing nothing about himself in front of everybody else, and they thought he was mad.

I don’t know if they put these two readings together on purpose, but there is an extraordinary reflection of one on to the other. And this is of course what we’re here to celebrate. In the light of Jesus we are, first of all, to see ourselves as being naked and ashamed before each other, and God, and ourselves, and so disconnected in every way... But we are also here to celebrate this man who was naked and unashamed, and to celebrate his life and our possibilities, our destiny of being called to stand naked and unashamed before everybody... Good news... The best news... So Paul will say, finally, in Corinthians when talking about faith namely that we believe this is what we are called to. But to tey to live in this way is to suffer a fair amount of wear and tear, so he will talk about our outer nature wasting away, and who we really are, being renewed day by day to the extent that we operate out of that faith. Again, all this fits together in this wonderful, astonishing, and all but unbelievable coherence.

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RT 22/5/97