Tasty

Dare I say this? Yes, I do dare.

Last Sunday, one of the liturgical readings was from Genesis, chapter 3. That's the Eve and the Serpent and the Forbidden Fruit from the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden section. Yes, that story. The one we women have been paying for for centuries--'the woman made me do it, Lord, really she did, she said it tasted good.' Well, I heard it in a new way. I heard this. I heard that when they ate of the forbidden fruit, they became able to discern the difference between good and evil. They became like God, in that regard. The serpent did not lie and Eve knew a good deal when she heard it. And lazy Adam, he should have thanked her for what she did. Because, given the choice between childlike innocence all my life, and the ability to look at the complexities of the world with discernment and judgment, with free will and the ability to respond to challenges as I see fit, I would eat the fruit too. I would prefer to be an actor, an enactor, than a passive child, waiting to be rescued, waiting for some one else to figure out what we do next. It's like all those TV shows with the male hero and the woman sidekick and whenever the shit hits the fan, the woman turns to him and screeches, What do we do now???

(Of course, I haven't had the luxury of a male hero to protect me and make all the hard decisions for me, especially when things got rough. Actually, more often than not, they got rough because of the male 'hero'. And so it is to God and to Jesus that I turn for help; I turn to that wisdom voice inside me, that which is commonly called 'the Holy Spirit', Jesus' last gift to us humans as we fretted and wrung our hands at the thought of him leaving us. He hasn't left us, for as he says at the end of Matthew's Gospel, "For I will be with you always, even to the end of the age.")

And sure, God was mad at Eve and Adam. God is mad a lot in the Old Testament. They broke his rule. He threw them out of the garden. Nothing new in that. I know what that feels like. I have been broken and banished and abandoned and humiliated myself. We humans, we all still break God's rules. Seems to be part of our human nature, and not just feminine human nature. Maybe that's why that's one of the very first stories, after the creation, in the whole Bible. Because it is basic and fundamental.

And so is this: God still loves us. God still gives us endless chances to get it right. Because it is up to us to get it right, actively. Not to sit there and wait for God to swoop in and fix it all. We have to make an effort to meet God at least half-way--and we do that by making an effort to do the right thing, to live mindfully and consciously, an ability given to us by Mother Eve who said, 'Hey, taste this fruit. It's good.'

Okay so now it's crazy time again, and I lose you here. Because after listening to all that about Eve and the Serpent, and then listening to the part in Matthew's Gospel about Jesus being tempted by the Evil One during his own 40 days in the desert--facing down Satan with Scripture, no less--, and then thinking about how it is now Lent, a season when people who participate in this part of the Christian walk face our own sources of temptation--be they an enticing food or a bad habit or a bad attitude or a negative way of thinking or whatever (pick your favorite!)--I thought I heard the sound of giant slithering snakes right there in our sanctuary. My eyes were closed as I listened to our Pastor pray prayers of thanksgiving and intercession, and I heard that slithery sound and not knowing what it was, I saw with my inner vision the sight of giant black snakes slithering up and down the pews: the visible symbols of all our temptations.

Because we are all tempted in how so ever many ways. Even more so during Lent, when we have turned our spiritual attentions that way. When we fast and pray and strive and walk that lonely walk with Jesus. It is not a bad thing, to struggle and to be tempted. It is a human thing. And we are the children of the great God who lets us struggle and fall and rise again and so learn from the falling, the great God who forgives us our fumbling attempts to be nearer to him. The great God who gave us Jesus, finest most divine teacher of them all to embody our human weakness and be at one with us, he who was wrongly arrested and tortured and humiliated and abandoned and finally hung up on a cross to die.

He did not run away. He stuck it out. He could have run away that night in Gethsemane Garden, he knew they were coming to get him, he had plenty of time to go. But no. He stayed, he stayed and he spent the time praying-- for us, for goodness sake.

And, he did not deny who he was. Pilate asked him if he was the King of the Jews, and Jesus replied, "So you say." Like, do your worst, Pilate, do your worst, let's get this over with. (Of course it was his own people who demanded such savage justice for one they considered a blasphemer extraordinaire, and it is NOT anti-Semitic to say that. Read it in all the Gospel versions: Pilate put the decision to the Jewish authorities. Politically expedient of him, really, being a Roman authority in an occupied land. He didn't want open rebellion.) And so, my sweet Jesus hung up there and he died and the sky was split asunder and the women wept. He was taken down and put away in a stone tomb. And a couple of days later, he rose again. He rose again. He showed us by facing his fear and his tormentors, he showed us by rising again, the magnificent power of our great God's blazingly glorious love, a love that defies the darkness of sin and death. A love that transcends temptation and all our puny human badness. And in our Protestant tradition, we are forgiven by God's grace through our faith in Jesus, in knowing that he was God's beloved son and he came to earth as a gift of love to us.

What they did to Jesus was so bad--and yet, he forgave them. He forgave them, and from the cross his asked God to forgive them, and he even forgave his own closest disciples who denied they knew him and ran away from him in his time of need. People still keep doing bad stuff like that to each other and to children and animals and to the planet every single day. Every single moment of every single day. And God still loves us, and gives us every single moment the chance to reverse our ways and begin to treat one another with love. To live the knowledge of the difference between good and evil acts. It is up to us. Truly. We simply have to get over ourselves, and do it.

Anyway. The snakes? Turns out the battery in the microphone needed changing. Nearly everyone I asked said, 'Oh yeah, I heard that, I thought it was a problem with the sound system.'

Until next time, I remain, your friend, Rozenkraai

(Image: painting by William Blake, 'Eve Tempted by the Serpent', Victoria and Albert Museum, London)