Ethics - From Eden to the Cross

The concept of sin has taken a prominent place in every version of western religion: it has become fundamental to the western image of God. We need to determine what role this concept might have when the wrathful, autocratic, vengeful and demanding God is rejected in favour of a ground of all being and sum of all divinity whose nature is infinite compassion. At its worst, the western understanding of sin has been about arbitrary law, the demand for obedience, and the infliction of punishment. At its best, it has been about understanding, then reducing, and finally healing, the harm that we inflict on ourselves and one another.

The punitive model retains its power amongst so many of the faithful by bringing together two powerful biblical images: Eden and the cross. Every Sunday School child knows the Eden story – God tells the first human couple not to eat from one particular tree, they eat from it anyway, and God evicts them from the garden as punishment for their wilful disobedience – but Genesis was not written as a story book for children, and if we return to the text, we find a far more complex account. There are two trees involved. The only tree from which Adam and Eve are not to eat is called the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Eating that fruit, and acquiring that knowledge, they find themselves overwhelmed by shame. To protect them from further foolishness God removes them from the garden lest they eat also from the tree of life, which would condemn them to live for ever in their fallen state. There is neither arbitrary law nor punishment here, but a complex myth shedding far more light on our imperfect and mortal state than the usual superficial reading allows.⁴⁶

The punitive interpretation of the Eden episode is extended to the cross. This central icon of the Christian faith is presented as the final punishment for sin: Jesus voluntarily takes upon himself the punishment that we deserve, winning forgiveness for the faithful. This model presents a God who appears to have no choice but to exact punishment for all wrongdoing, who bizarrely accepts third-party payment, and who finally has his wrath assuaged by the death of his own son. As an image of God it could hardly be further removed from the images presented by Jesus himself. It was an image popular with medieval kings and emperors, allowing them to claim divine mandate for their own arbitrary systems of law, wrath and condemnation. It remains popular amongst religious leaders today for many of the same reasons – but the faithful know intuitively that it must be wrong. They experience a God of grace, not a God of wrath and law.

With Saint Paul, the faithful understand that sin is not primarily an argument with God, but a battle within ourselves, and a concept and experience far more complex than any list of prohibited actions. They see Jesus delighting in ordinary human virtues, not counting and condemning every human weakness. They hear him denouncing the self-righteousness and hypocrisy of those who boast of their religious purity. They see him undermining the legalistic model by declaring forgiveness recklessly, without first discussing conditions like repentance or recompense. They hear Saint Paul railing against the curse of legalism, and struggling to describe the higher virtue of the life of faith lived in the grace of God.

The faithful tend to resolve that God is not only forgiving, but generously so; and yet the idea that God has to choose to forgive at all suggests lingering traces of wrath and condemnation. We learn by our own experience that anger and unforgiveness can destroy the soul: that they are human failings, not attributes of the divine. It would be more accurate to say not that God is generously forgiving, but that in God there can be no trace of unforgiveness. God longs only to restore us from the damage we inflict on ourselves and one another.

Part of the attraction of the punitive model is that it gives the crucifixion a great cosmic purpose, but the true horror of the cross is that it has no purpose. It is a pointless slaughter, humankind murdering another of its own. The religious and political leaders conspired to bring it about – as is so often the case throughout history – but there is a part of every one of us that was there in spirit: denying him, betraying him, holding the nails, hammering them in. It did not require some great cosmic deal to put Jesus on the cross: just ordinary human beings doing what we ordinarily do. Far from magically solving the complex problem of sin, it merely kills another innocent human being, and proves once again that there is no justice in the world. It rightly becomes the iconic moment representing all the sin of humankind.

The episode only makes sense when considered as a whole, from the nativity to the ascension.⁴⁷ It is sometimes implied that the only purpose of the life was the death. On the contrary, the only purpose of the death was the living of a fully human life. God lived that fully human life in Christ because it is in the very nature of God to do so. Suffering at our hands was the inevitable consequence, and was not counted sufficient reason to stay away. The cross rightly becomes the iconic moment representing all the grace of God. That grace alone is the solution to the problem of sin.

Meditations and metaphors around the events of Good Friday validly draw in many themes as we try to comprehend the horror of what we did and why God allowed it to happen, but metaphors pushed too far can obscure a much simpler truth. The suffering of the incarnate life was the price God paid to be the forgiving and generous God that we know – to be true to the nature of God – but nobody received the payment. It was a ransom in the sense that our rescue was costly, but no captor received the fee. It was a sacrifice in the sense that those with high ideals make sacrifices for the sake of a higher goal, but not in the sense that there was a vengeful deity’s wrath to be appeased by receiving the sacrifice. The blood of Jesus wins our salvation in the sense of life-blood: in our culture, blood has become a symbol of death instead of life; life-blood is the one English usage that accurately captures the biblical sense. All these images go wrong when the metaphor takes over or becomes corrupted in translation: when the ransom demands a captor, or the sacrifice demands a wrathful and unforgiving God, or blood begins to symbolise death instead of life. But meditations and metaphors can still be helpful, so here is one more: there is nothing worse the human race can do than crucify the son of God; as we commit this worst of all possible offences, he says, ‘Father forgive’; our salvation is won on the cross, as in those words the compassion of God overcomes all evil.

46 The full story of Eden and the expulsion from Eden runs from Genesis 2:8 to Genesis 3:24. The section 3:14-19 has a different literary form from the rest (in traditional translations it is set out as poetry, unlike the rest, which is prose), and can therefore be identified as a later addition. This is the only section announcing punishments for the transgression, on (in turn) the serpent (which shall henceforth go upon its belly in the dust), the woman (who shall suffer pain in childbirth), and the man (who will have to labour to till the earth in order to eat). None of the punishments is expulsion from the garden, so the story not only works, but makes more sense, with this incongruous later addition removed. The addition might be regarded as one individual’s commentary or meditation on, or interpretation of, the original story, also introducing additional material. The verse 3:20 (‘The man called his wife Eve, because she was the mother of all the living’) is also out of place, a bizarre interjection at this point. The original response to verse 13 (‘What is this that you have done’ / ‘The serpent beguiled me and I ate’) is not any part of the section 3:14-20, but the gentle and gracious verse 21: ‘And the Lord God made for Adam and his wife garments of skins, and clothed them’, followed by removal from the garden.

47 The scriptures record the ascension of Jesus into heaven forty days after the resurrection – Acts 1:3&9.