June 9, 2024

Genesis 3:8-15

Then the LORD God said to the woman, “What is this that you have done?” The woman said, “The serpent tricked me, and I ate.”

If we look back over the exchange between the woman, also known as Eve, and the serpent, it seems more that she was convinced to eat the fruit rather than she was tricked into eating it. I suppose you can say you were tricked when you chose to do something wrong and got caught.

I named this woman as Eve. You might then ask why I did not also name the serpent by its more common name, Satan. It is a traditional interpretation of the story to make the serpent out as Satan. But that is a tradition, not something evident from the text of the Bible. And, even if that tradition makes the link correctly, the understanding of this character known as Satan is complicated, changing over time.

God had told the first man, known as Adam, not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Notice it is not the Tree of Knowledge, but of knowledge to make moral judgments. Prior to this moment, in their complete ignorance of morality, human beings were innocent. If human beings remained ignorant of this knowledge, we might imagine that they could not be held responsible for what they did not know. Does that mean it would have been impossible for them to commit evil? That is not clearly the case. Responsibility is not the same as capability.

In the Hebrew books of the Bible, the Adversary is a recurrent figure. The word for “adversary” in Hebrew is “satan” but the job description we might attribute to Satan seems to have evolved. The Adversary was a part of what we might consider the heavenly court of God, acting as a prosecutor. The Adversary appears in the Book of Job as the figure tasked with accusing and testing Job for his faithfulness. It is a troubling story, but there is nothing in it to suggest that the Adversary is fundamentally evil or is acting without the specific permission of God.

So, the serpent in Genesis is not necessarily the same as Satan and the figure known as “satan” in Hebrew texts also seems to be working directly for God. That is nothing like how Satan was described to me as an impressionable child. Satan was a pervasive source of evil who was working to subvert all the good things God was trying to achieve in the world.

Now, admittedly, this gives a lot of power to the character known as Satan, power that seems to rival God. My religious teachers were quick to point out that God was in fact all powerful and this was a part of God’s plan. Which honestly never made a lick of sense to me, although it did terrify me until I was an adult.

Satan is a more malicious figure in the New Testament. Satan tempts Jesus, though that goes nowhere as one might have expected. Satan then enters into Judas Iscariot, the betrayer of Jesus, subverting him toward his treachery. Satan changes over time from a being acting at the behest of God to someone seeking to thwart God or to lead people away from God.

Why did this happen? One explanation might be that there are terrible things that happen in the world all the time, bad things happening to good people and good things happening to bad people. That does not seem fair. And so, Satan became a necessary evil – I will explain.

There is a theological concept known as theodicy in which scholars criticize the idea that God can be all-powerful, all-knowing, and in all ways good – this is a problem with evil. Because if God is all-powerful, evil could be eliminated from the world. If God is all-knowing, God knows every evil thing that happens. And if God is in all ways good, God would seek to prevent these evil things. Put all three of those characteristics together, and it seems that there is a fundamental problem with the concept of evil existing in the world.

How might we fix that?

If we are struggling with the concept of God allowing evil, then might we instead move evil somewhere else. Make evil the responsibility of this character, Satan. Why would we do that? Because we have a few examples of Satan as the Adversary being a troublesome character. We have the Book of Job in which faithful Job is tortured by Satan. And if God is trying to test Job’s faith, why not test the faith of others?

This may also be why the serpent in the Garden of Eden is linked to Satan. Adam and Eve were being tested, a test that they failed. Adam blundered into it, while Eve was convinced by the serpent that knowledge was better than ignorance. But regardless of the reasons, human beings would suffer the consequences of knowing the difference between good and evil.

Why do people believe in evil? Evil as a force rather than evil as a way of interpreting events. Evil as a cosmic embodiment of terrible impulses or wickedness rather than focusing on those dark impulses and wicked actions. I do not think belief in evil is comforting, but the idea that God might be responsible for evil is outright distressing. And it is similarly uncomfortable to consider these impulses and behaviors coming from our fellow human beings, without there being some explanation for it. The devil made me do it or, more often, the devil made them do it.

I have spoken to people over the years who have said to me that they could just feel the evil emanating from a person they had met. And I do not in any way dispute those feelings or even the conclusion that the person might be in some sense evil. But that does not mean that I think the devil made them do anything. Nor do I think God made them do it.

I firmly believe that God is good. That is in fact my starting point for an understanding of God, goodness and all that might entail. Care and compassion, good will and loving kindness: these are the hallmarks of God. This sense of goodness, you might recall, is one of three qualities of God that get caught up in the problem of theodicy, the problem of evil in the world. Because if God is always good, why would God allow anything that was evil?

Next comes the concept of God being all-knowing. Does God know everything? It is said God knows the falling of every sparrow. That might be a little too conclusory for my purposes, so I will put it another way. A sparrow is hatched from an egg and then in time it falls, just as every person is born and then dies. The world turns and turns, day after day, with life coming and going in its myriad forms.

All the events of that sweep of existence happened. They happened in a real sense. They are not made-up stories. They are not even suppositions on our part, even if we cannot catalogue the death of every sparrow or person. We do not need to know each example to understand that there is a steadiness to these births and deaths in the world. They all happened and will happen.

All this information, to use a scientific term, exists. It is in the universe in some sense. I do not know it, but that does not mean it is unknowable. Human beings can look across the universe at distant stars and galaxies and assess events that happened billions of years ago. I can therefore imagine human beings getting better at doing so closer to home.

And if I can imagine us getting better at it, it is not an outlandish thought that some greater intelligence than ours might be even more capable of it. Do we call that omniscience or something like it? Perhaps. The idea of God knowing everything does not seem quite as remote if human beings can know as much as we do.

The next part is where I think we run into trouble, that God is all-powerful. I do not want to fight about this idea with anyone, or to try to count how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. And yet, the idea of God being all-powerful relies greatly upon an understanding of God as personally intervening in the events of our lives. All powerful for us when we need it.

When someone asks if God can make an object so heavy that God cannot lift it, they are trying to use logic to explain the unexplainable mysteries of the universe. You might just as easily say that God made an object that no one could lift and also knew in advance that even God would never have to lift it. That is being cute, but you can see how those though experiments might go.

Instead, I would like for us to turn back to a moment before Adam and Eve fell from grace. Before the serpent caused any trouble. Before even God had made heaven and earth. Back, back, back before anything at all.

In the beginning…there was nothing. Or at least no thing that anyone of us might recognize. Let’s consider this to be the moment of absolute possibility after which anything could happen. And from that nothingness, something pops into being. In the Bible, God says let there be light and there was light. We can work with that. Light came into existence. Light and things like light, things like photons, things like gravity and other physical forces.

Once those small things come into being, events start moving along. The pieces are all available from which everything can be made, which is often rounded off into the story of the Big Bang. But this is not simply a cosmic explosion. It is the moment when everything starts, when nothing turned into something which eventually becomes everything.

Last night while I was writing this sermon, I got up to stretch. I went into the kitchen to grab a drink. And I thought to myself, why on earth am I spending the last sermon of the regular church year going on and on about about the nature of good and evil? Why not give a lovely little sermon about gardening or going to the beach or some other worthy summer-related activity? Why try to explain a theologically troubling concept that has plagued human beings since the beginning of civilization?

Well, first of all, I find all of this to be interesting. And I hope some of you might share that sense of curiosity. Second of all, I have also been paying attention over the past weeks and months and I know that more than a few of you out there have been troubled by the state of world. That sense of anxiety is understandable because the news seems to be filled every day with terrible events. So, I thought it would be helpful to consider the idea of evil because it is often used as a way of explaining the events around us. Evil things are happening and evil things are, according to some folks, the purview of the devil, of Satan, of the wily serpent in the garden.

And, to put it bluntly, I do not think that is in any way true. Not that I think these events are good. Not that I see disasters and wars as positive in any way. But I do not attribute them to any supernatural source. Because I think the natural sources are more than sufficient to explain why these terrible events are unfolding.

That does not mean that I am placing these events at the feet of God, either. In particular, you do not need any supernatural explanation for why human beings treat one another terribly. It is human nature and I do not mean human nature because Adam and Eve ate something at the dawn of time.

Bad things happen and people suffer as a result. Some of those bad things are naturally occurring, like tornadoes and earthquakes. People take a strange form of comfort in attributing those events to some outside influence. And that is seemingly comforting because it is less worrisome than the alternative, that it is all beyond our control, that we are at the whim of nature.

And yet nature is not out to get us. Nature was not directed to hurl lightning bolts down upon the sinful and to send soft rains upon the lands of the righteous. Because, if you have been paying attention, bad things often happen to good people and good things happen to bad people.

And no, it is not further explained by thinking those good people somehow sinned or that those bad people are serving God’s plan in some manner. The world is orderly, just not in the way this logic suggests. Weather happens because of the physical nature of the world. Earthquakes happen because the earth itself is changing all the time in ways beyond our control.

It is an ancient religious impulse to explain these events within a supernatural system because that allows us to embrace an orderly outlook. Even if it is the devil who is causing everything bad to happen, at least we can wrap our minds around an admittedly bad reason. But what if it truly is beyond our control and not subject to the control of the devil or God?

Let me explain.

When the universe came into being, with everything arising from nothing, there were rules for how it would unfold. Rules about how forces interact, about how atoms work, about how stars and planets and galaxies come into being. Those are rules, like the weight God made so heavy that no one can lift it. But instead of it being an arbitrary rule in a thought experiment, these are the rules that explain existence itself. These are God’s rules, if that is how you choose to look at the universe, and those are not rules to be ignored or violated even by God.

Nature is not out to get us. Nature is simply following the rules of thermodynamics and conservation of energy. Put a bunch of energy into the ocean from the sun and it will pop up as storms somewhere along the way. The molten core of the planet shifts again and again because it has to, moving tectonic plates around and leading to earthquakes. Those are the rules. If you like the notion of the rules of thermodynamics and conservation of energy being a part of a divine plan, that is fine. But please do not be surprised if there are no exceptions made to that divine plan, even by God.

Which still leaves a whole lot of bad things happening in the world that are not the result of natural forces. Things like war, things like civil unrest, things like social discord. Those are in their way disasters on the order of tornadoes and earthquakes. But they are entirely the province of human beings. Human beings contending for control, manipulating society, and striving for dominance or destruction.

Those are evil in their way, but I think it is a mistake to attribute them to some supernatural force like the devil. Natural forces are also more than sufficient to explain the nature of human evil, the evil that we inflict upon one another. Honestly, it is a cop out to declare this to be the work of the devil because that means someone did not have a choice.

The Bible says that Satan made Judas betray Jesus, but it is equally accurate to say that temptation made Judas betray Jesus. And, theologically speaking, those are equivalent explanations, like the tempting of Jesus in the wilderness because he is hungry after weeks of fasting.

And even like the suffering of humanity because of its knowledge of good and evil. The story of Adam and Eve seeks to explain why human beings suffer. We understand what is good and evil and often choose the evil over the good. Because we are selfish, because we are spiteful, because we are wrathful. Those are more than sufficient reasons for explaining human evil in the world.

How should we deal with evil? The first step is to understand that we are the ones who need to fix this. God gave us this world and it would be more than ungracious to expect God repeatedly to clean up our messes. The second step is to consider the knowledge of good and evil that we have.

Often the greatest forms of evil are justified as a way of achieving something good. Fascism or nationalism or authoritarianism will make the nation and the people strong—we just need to break a few eggs to make that particular omelet. And of course, those eggs happen to be other people: the bad people, the evil people. The people who have made all the good people’s lives so difficult. This is where the idea of evil compounds the suffering of everyone. I now have someone else to blame and to whom I get to return all my suffering.

I have said this before and I will say it again now: every war could end this moment if everyone agreed to stop. Every person in the United States could be fed, housed, and clothed right now if we chose to do so. But we have these stories in our heads and these burdens upon our hearts that make that seem impossible.

The person who hurt me must suffer before it can ever be over. The person who needs food, shelter, and clothing needs to be more like how I want them to be—more noble, more deserving, more contrite—before I will consider doing anything about their suffering. Suffering must be balanced out with teaspoons on a scale. But even then, we often put down our thumb on one side of that scale when we have the power, when we are in control. We take outsized vengeance in what we pretend to be a balancing of wrongs.

None of this is consistent with the message of Jesus. My knowledge of good and evil begins and ends with the lessons of Jesus, who implored us to love one another. We might be tempted to take care of ourselves or those close to us. We might be tempted to blame others for the evil in the world and use that blame to keep us from fixing the problems around us.

There is a profound wisdom hidden in plain sight in our prayer book, within the Lord’s Prayer. Our father who art in heaven hallowed be thy name–God, you are pretty great. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven–if we follow your example, we will do just fine.

Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespassers as we forgive those who trespass against us – please help us to meet our needs rather than our wants and please forgive our mistakes to the same extent we forgive one another. Better get forgiving.

And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil–evil is temptation. Evil like the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness, like the temptation of knowledge in the garden of Eden. Not a serpent, not someone with a set of horns and a pitchfork.

We turn to God for our knowledge of the good because we know quite well the knowledge of evil, the knowledge of temptation. We do not need to worry about the personification of evil in the devil because the true personification of evil is within each of us when and if we allow evil to take hold, to gain control. We have seen the enemy and he is us, as the saying goes.

Having attained knowledge of good versus evil, we need to choose the good. We need to resist temptation. And we need to take responsibility for the evil in the world and any evil that each of us might do. Amen.