Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7
Eating of the tree of knowledge
2:15 The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it.
2:16 And the LORD God commanded the man, "You may freely eat of every tree of the garden,
2:17 but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die."
3:1 Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, "Did God say, 'You shall not eat from any tree in the garden'?"
3:2 The woman said to the serpent, "We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden,
3:3 but God said, 'You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.'"
3:4 But the serpent said to the woman, "You will not die,
3:5f or God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil."
3:6 So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food and that it was a delight to the eyes and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate.
3:7 Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked, and they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves.
The famous filmmaker, Alfred Hitchcock, used what he called a “MacGuffin” in his films. A MacGuffin is a “device” or an element in the film used to move the plot along, was not really the story being told, nor even essential to it. Trouble is, often, viewers would miss the real message of the movie, getting caught up instead by the MacGuffin! Examples of MacGuffins in films include: the “spy” focus in “The 39 Steps”; the briefcase in “Pulp Fiction”; the ark in “Raiders of the Lost Ark”; and the $40,000 in “Psycho.” Another example I can think of is the falcon figurine in “The Maltese Falcon.” None of these items is really what the story is about. You could substitute almost anything for the MacGuffin in each of these films, and still have the central stories of adventure, mystery, intrigue, and most importantly, the relational interaction between the main characters. All good filmmakers understand the principle of the MacGuffin.
Too bad we religious people don’t get it, though, when it comes to the Bible and its wealth of stories! Ignore the plot device of the MacGuffin, and one misses the “why” of the story in the first place. Today’s passage is from Genesis, and what we have come to call the “Creation story.” Specifically, this part of that story has been labeled by theologians down through the century as “The Fall,” when Adam and Eve SINNED, thus introducing sin into the human equation, and cutting off humanity from deity. BOY, did we miss the boat here, and any decent filmmaker could tell us this! We went for the MacGuffin and missed the depth and meaning of the story.
Let me put on my best filmmaker “hat” and reapproach this passage: it’s not about SIN, at all. SIN is the MacGuffin that moves along the narrative. The actual story is about choice, trust, redemption, and love. I must confess that in my earliest days of preaching, I, too, got caught up in the MacGuffin. While I never taught this Adam/Eve/Serpent/God story as literally true, I was guilty of telling my first congregations that it was a metaphorical story designed to tell how “sin” first entered into the human experience, and that this “original sin” was what has plagued humanity, down through the ages. Thankfully, I at least told my folk that God loved them and provided a means of redemption in Jesus Christ, but that even this is too shallow for the powerful and inciteful message of Genesis 2.
Before we get beyond the MacGuffin of sin, let’s talk about “original sin” for a moment. Most of us grew up in some religious tradition that spoke of it, and even tried to teach the concept in Sunday School. The Roman Catholics really struggled with it, because they had two major streams of thinking about just what the “original sin” was. For the branch of the Catholic Church that flowed from Thomas Aquinas, the original sin of Adam and Eve was simply that they were “disobedient,” eating of the tree that God told them to leave alone. However, the branch of Catholic theology that stemmed from St. Augustus was much more specific: Adam and Eve had sexual relations before God had “prepared” them for it, and the Genesis 2 story is a metaphor for this version of “original sin.” Believe me, the whole thing is more complicated than that, but for now, my “Cliff Notes” version must suffice. My point, though, is that “sin” is not the real point of the story in Genesis. Some may believe my assertion here is heretical, but I don’t think so.
If we believe that God “hates sin,” then why would God creates humans with the ability to choose how to behave. What God “hates” about sin is how it seriously damages relationships and may harm human community. The commandments that God passed along to Moses are all about how God wants us to avoid sin because of this. As I mentioned in a recent sermon, all ten commandments are about the harm the listed infractions can do to relationships—with God, and with others. I would assert that the first commandments about how we should respect our Creator have less to do with how God “feels” about it than they do with how God desired to preserve Israel’s focus on their Lord (i.e. worship, service, and fellowship) that became their most common bond, helping them build and sustain a beloved community. The rest of the commandments “prohibit” behaviors that break relationships between neighbors, friends, and families, and by extension, harm the community at large. By believing the “offense” is against God, we are scapegoating not only where the real harm is occurring, but making God out to be the “mad dad” (as in the old threat, “Wait until your FATHER gets home!”).
We learn from the history of God and humanity in the Hebrew Bible that God loves humanity. In the New Testament, the Christ Event is front-and-center as the continued “working proof” that God loves us all. It’s also in the New Testament that we read that God IS love. What more do we need to “get it” that God’s “best life now” is that God’s people would truly find a path toward being a Beloved Community, would live in harmony with one another, would desist from hurting one another, and might also find a path back to their loving Creator. God loved us so much that God DID give us the freedom to choose how we will live, how we will behave, and what we will do to find the fulfilment and joy in life. Or not. Yes, we even have the freedom to make bad choices, to blame “life” for our dissatisfaction, and even to take it out on whatever we understand “God” to be.
By believing in “original sin” as some specific thing that our progenitors did, thus “introducing” sin into the human existential continuum, we fall for two “MacGuffins” that were really just there to move the true “plot” along: Adam and Eve “did it”; and “The devil made us do it.” Had “original sin” been the real issue bothering God, don’t you think Jesus would have made that the central point of his message? Instead, he loved the unlovable, taught us to love our neighbor, to love God with all our heart, strength, soul, and mind, demonstrated that men AND women are equal partners in life, and showed humanity that forgiveness and healing are the highest of virtues. He went to the cross, rather than pull some kind of divine power play to save himself, and offered that he was fulfilling Isaiah’s prophecy to “take away the sins of the world.” The church has focused SO MUCH on “the blood,” the cross as the “propitiation for our sins,” and on our redemption as being a “one and done” thing that I fear we’ve fallen for the “MacGuffin” again. The true plot of the Jesus story is that God came among us to again show us the height and breadth of Divine love, and to yet again PLEAD with us to “be our sibling’s keeper.”
Even as Jesus taught us, forgiveness is the easy part. Living into it is the challenge. We participate in our own redemption by LIVING the Gospel that Jesus taught. Not “earning” God’s favor, mind you, as this has been granted to us by Jesus, himself, but by BECOMING the people that WE want to be and that GOD wants us to me. By following through in making the Beloved Community a possibility, through mending our rifts with each other, and by looking out for “the least of these,” we bring joy to the halls of heaven, for this is what God was after, all along.
Make no mistake about it, sin was not “introduced” to the world by Adam and Eve. Their story was just the MacGuffin to move the plot along, getting us to focus on our OWN culpability in humanity’s inability to sustain God’s dream of a Beloved Community. The freedom that God gave us as humans can be used for “bad” (sin) or “good” (agape love). We are the ones who make the choice, in both the micro AND the Macro of this decision. Blaming it on Adam and Eve, or even “the serpent” sends us down the path of deception and blame, two things that will RUIN any attempt at building a sustainable human community, or what the Bible calls “The Kingdom of God.”
If it sounds like I’m suggesting that much of theology and church history has swallowed the MacGuffin whole and missed the REAL truth of the God-human struggle, I confess that I am. The longer I study the Bible, the more I see that God IS love, and WE are the offspring of that love. The true “melody” of human redemption, and that which will fully restore our relationship with our Father/Mother God, is best summed up in the fifth commandment: “Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land which the Lord your God has given you.” Amen.
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