Sermon: Knowledge of Good and Evil

Text: Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7

Date: February 13, 2005

Rev. Dee Eisenhauer, Eagle Harbor Congregational Church

“I’m lonely,” Adam told God in the Garden of Eden. “I need to have someone around for company.”

“Okay,” replied God. “I’ll give you the perfect companion. She is beautiful, intelligent, and gracious—she’ll cook and clean for you and never say a cross word.”

“Sounds great,” Adam said. “But what’s she going to cost?”

“An arm and a leg,” answered God.

“That’s pretty steep,” replied Adam. “What can I get for a rib?”

Does that explain Eve’s sin? Maybe after all these years we can shift the blame for the fall of humanity from Eve’s uppity desire for wisdom to Adam’s tendency to be a tightwad. What do you think, ladies?

Well, that’s all in good fun, but the question of human sin is deadly serious. Where did sin come from? Are human beings naturally sinful? Is there one class of human being that is naturally more prone to sin than another? Does the temptation to commit sin come from inside a person or outside? Why can’t we just be God’s “perfect companions?” Can we avoid sin, or at least some of it? How are we to know what is good, and what is evil? If we think we know good from evil, how do we make choices that affirm our judgments? How many questions can one person ask about the nature and origin of sin?

I don’t take the Bible literally, reading the story of the first humans as if it were an evening news report. But I do try to take it seriously, and often think of the description of scripture from Hebrews 4:12: “The word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart.” Scripture can serve us like a surgeon’s scalpel, cutting into us with the intention of healing. An old story like this one, though more like an ancient myth told round a campfire than an NPR feature story, can still poke us where we need to be poked.

Let me tell you how the story prodded me reading it this time around. There is an interesting article at textweek.com comparing the story of Eve to the story of Pandora. The general point the author makes is that the Greek story of Pandora has been overlaid onto the Hebrew story of Eve in the thinking of western theologians and philosophers, so that the two figureheads of womanhood have been sort of melded in people’s minds. You know what Pandora is famous for, right? She’s the female that opened up the jar containing all the evil in the world, setting it free. The story is found in the works of the Greek poet Hesiod, who probably wrote it himself, and it’s dated about 100 years later than the story of Eve in terms of its first telling. It’s the Greek version of how woman was created. Here’s what the article says about Pandora:

Woman, according to Hesiod, was created under the direction of father Zeus as retaliation against Prometheus. That trickster demigod had stolen heavenly fire for earthlings. The outwitted Zeus commissioned members of his pantheon to make "an evil thing in which men will all delight while they embrace their own destruction." Like a potter, crafts-expert Hephaistos shaped a lump of clay into the shape of a luscious maiden; like a goldsmith, he made her a crown. Athena decked out this creation with clothes, jewelry, and flowers. Aphrodite bestowed charm and seductive powers, while Hermes implanted "a bitch's mind and a thief's temper." The "beautiful evil" (kalon kakon) was named Pandora because a variety of Olympian gods and goddesses had given her traits. This "booby trap" equipped with "lying and tricky talk" was delivered to Epimetheus ("afterthinker"), the uncautious brother of Prometheus ("forethinker"). Before Epimetheus accepted the gift, men lived like gods in a paradisiacal Golden Age "free from evils, harsh labor, and consuming diseases." But when Pandora maliciously opened the lid of a huge jar, all kinds of miseries flew out and infected mortals throughout the earth. Hesiod ends his story: "This was the origin of damnable womankind, a plague with which men must live." Further on in Works and Days, the poet warns of sweet-talking and hip-wiggling women who steal from those that find them fascinating. Hesiod's final judgment: "Any man who trusts a woman, trusts a deceiver" (373-375). He believed that the multitude of Pandora's daughters inherit their mother's loveliness and cunning. Their charm and breeding potentially compel men to associate with them, but their bad character makes domestic life miserable.[1]

The author of the article goes on to cite dozens of examples of later descriptions of Eve and her female descendants that sound a lot more appropriate for Pandora. One of the church fathers, Chrysostom, says, "What else is woman but a foe to friendship, an inescapable punishment, a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic danger, a delectable detriment, an evil of nature, painted with fair colors!" Tertullian, first teacher of Latin orthodoxy, says in no uncertain terms that woman opened the devil’s door.

If you scrape the Pandora paint off of Eve, she’s not so bad. Yes, she entered into conversation with the serpent, and yes, she took the forbidden fruit, desiring the wisdom she thought would come with it. But take a look at Adam. Pop quiz: was Adam there at the foot of the tree with Eve? If you’re not quite sure, there’s a good reason. Early translators of the Hebrew scriptures, notably Jerome who was a notorious misogynist, translated the Hebrew story in such a way that Adam was absent during Eve’s encounter with the serpent. Quite a few translations followed Jerome’s lead, including the RSV and Today’s English Version. Some newer translations, including the Jerusalem Bible and the NRSV, correctly note that Adam was with her. [Genesis 3:6] Several women writing about the scene have some words about Adam’s role:

A century ago, Lillie Blake observed: "Adam standing beside her [Eve] interposes no word of objection... Had he been the representative of the divinely appointed bead in married life, he assuredly would have taken upon himself the burden of the discussion with the serpent, but no, he is silent in this crisis of their fate. Having had the command from God himself, he interposes no word of warning or remonstrance, but takes the fruit from the hand of his wife without a protest."4 More recently, Jean Higgins has likewise been amused: "There is something comical in the image of the man standing there and never entering into the conversation at all, never intervening to stop the temptation, leaving the woman to do the talking, thinking, deciding, acting, and only at the end reaching out his hand to accept and eat what his wife put into his hands." 5 Phyllis Bird makes a more restrained comparison: "The woman in this portrait responds to the object of temptation intellectually and reflectively, employing both practical and esthetic judgment. The man, on the other hand, passively and unquestioningly accepts what the woman offers him."6 [2]

I’m not going into all this to try to give men some kind of payback for the centuries of slanderous talk about Eve and her daughters. I’m not trying to suggest that sin is all men’s fault, after all. I’m harvesting this article because what it did for me was remind me that there is more than one way to conceive of sin and more than one way to engage in sin. Look at Adam and Eve the way the Hebrew story does, as two human beings, barely differentiated between man and woman at this point in the story, without trying to infer anything about maleness or femaleness in human character. You can see that a human being might pursue temptation actively and reflectively, knowingly. Or a human being might sin rather passively and then blame somebody else when they get into trouble. Both are sinful. Both are options open to us as human beings. Right?

I don’t know which is worse—to weigh the options, knowing about good and evil, and then choose what you know in your heart to be wrong; or to let someone else lead you into temptation and then try to dodge responsibility for it. Actually, maybe the sin of scapegoating deserves a category all its own. Because we can look for someone else to blame for our troubles even without the step of responding actively or passively to temptation. Finding a scapegoat may be the most common sin of all.

I just finished reading Mel White’s Stranger at the Gate so an example from his story is fresh in my mind. Mel White is a gay pastor who didn’t come out of the closet until mid-life. He grew up in an evangelical Christian home and had a hand in ghost-writing the books of some very prominent fundamentalist leaders, including Jerry Falwell. Mel thinks that since the end of the cold war, television evangelists, who need to raise a spectacular amount of money every day to keep their ministries afloat, needed an interesting enemy to replace communists, whom they used to rail against. Gay and lesbian people make a colorful enemy. Among Jerry Falwell’s many mailings, he sent one letter with a red banner across its face: “Declaration of War…Official Notice.” Falwell was declaring war against gay and lesbian people because, according to Jerry, homosexuals “have a godless, humanistic scheme for our nation—a plan which will destroy America’s traditional moral values.” He went on to claim that the goal of gay and lesbian people was “the complete elimination of God and Christianity from American society.” Another letter talked about how America might be wiped off the face of the earth by God like Sodom and Gomorra unless God-fearing moral people stop homosexuality from becoming an accepted lifestyle. Now there’s a Pandora paint job! Those may be Rev. Falwell’s sincere beliefs. But he also said in an interview once, following a noisy confrontation with some gay activists, “They played right into my hands. Those poor, dumb fairy demonstrators gave me the best media coverage I’ve ever had. If they weren’t out there, I’d have to invent them.”[3]

I’m not here to pick on Jerry Falwell, though I think his interpretation of Christianity in this regard falls far short of being loving. I was just so struck by that last sentence about having this sinful enemy to rail against and blame America’s troubles on: “If they weren’t out there, I’d have to invent them.” One of the time-honored ways of avoiding confronting our own sin is to look around for someone who’s worse and focus attention on them. Jerry Falwell finds it convenient to pick on sexual minorities. I find it convenient to moan about Jerry Falwell and all the red-state Christians in what one political cartoonists has labeled “Jesusland.” What Rev. Falwell and I have in common is the identification of an enemy that provides a useful distraction from a searching self-inventory about how we personally might have sinned and fallen short of our true potential.

Kathleen Norris points out in her book Amazing Grace that “one of the strangest things that people say is, “I’m a good person.” Most of the time, people will not come out and say that they are good people in contrast to those who are not, but that is often what they mean. And that is a dangerous proposition, because that leads to the “bad” people being seen as less than human. “Genocide is justified in the eyes of those who perpetuate it on grounds that it is not real people who are being killed; rather, something evil is being eliminated from the world by people who are good.”[4] It’s so important that we not even start down that road that ends in the horror of genocide. The most any of us can say about ourselves is that we are “trying to be good.” Sometimes we succeed, sometimes we fail.

“Trying to be good” leaves the door open for repentance, forgiveness, and the healing that follows. Blaming, scapegoating, and declaring war on our perceived enemies do not leave that door for healing open. It’s such a spiritual dead end to try to identify the real Pandora in the world or in the household. No one person or group of people is responsible for taking the lid off the jar of evil in the world. In reality, we’ve all participated in allowing evil into the world, either actively or passively. The season of Lent is an opportune time to examine again our temptation to blame and scapegoat others for our troubles, as well as re-examining how we choose evil or allow it to be chosen for us.

The fruit of the tree Eve and Adam ate was for knowledge of good and evil. That fruit will nourish us, all these generations later, if we allow our eyes to be opened to the good and evil in each of us. May that knowledge be an invitation to God to lead us and shape us with redeeming grace.

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[1] Phipps, William E. “Eve and Pandora Contrasted” http://theologytoday.ptsem.edu/apr1988/v45-1-article3.htm

[2] Ibid.

[3] White, Mel Stranger at the Gate: To Be Gay and Christian in America New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994, p. 224, 249, 295

[4] Norris, Kathleen Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith New York: Riverhead, 1998, p. 175, 176