This week's Bible Study reflection comes from our Sunday morning study of Genesis. This week we covered Genesis, Chapter 3 wherein Adam and Eve bit the fruit and broke the world. Ooops! Not good.
One of the observations that came up was that this seemed like the birth of independent thought. For the first time humans did something against God. It's hard to argue that definition, but we also need to be careful about how we define, let alone value, such independence.
There's a strain of thought out there, often found among folks who deny and decry belief in God, but also in rebellion against other aspects of society, that says, "Yeah, I'm rebelling against this. I'm my own person. Right or wrong, nobody tells me what to do!" Bad becomes good in a sense. Even if the act is unethical or immoral, we kind of respect the stubborn, anti-authoritarian stance. This devil-may-care attitude makes a person look strong somehow.
Certainly this was the serpent's argument. Before they bit the fruit he told Adam and Eve it would make them wise like God. Even though that didn't exactly happen, his post-snack argument almost certainly would be, "Hey...you're stronger than God! You showed him what for when you ate that fruit. Nobody controls your destiny now! You proved it!"
Click through for a little chagrin about how well this trick works and how it still affects us today...
I wonder what good this proof of independence did. What did it earn us? If you read these chapters in Genesis you'll see several things coming in the wake of that biting incident: shame, blame, pain, toil, power inequalities between people, and ultimately death. Because God told Adam and Eve about these things (after all they had known none of them before this) many people paint him as the authority figure, punishing them for their infractions. This feeds right into this "rugged independence" model. "You showed him you would make your own decisions no matter what the cost!" Personally I don't believe God was punishing Adam and Eve as much as describing the reality of what they (not he) had brought into the world. This is what happens when you don't trust. This is what happens when you try to become your own God. This is what life looks like in the kind of world you just tried to create. The one thing that could be claimed to be legitimately God's doing was the pronouncement of death. But in this case death is a necessary response to the evil Adam and Eve had brought into creation. Blame and shame and toil and war and poverty and all those things can't last forever, lest the world be forever cruel. Death is God's limit on Adam and Eve's mistake...a kindness if anything.
The ironic part is, Adam and Eve didn't truly jump from dependence to independence when they bit the fruit. Where is the great freedom that was promised in this rebellious act? It doesn't exist. They weren't free. We aren't free. Instead all the rebellion earned us was getting locked into a trap that we couldn't get out of. We are still dependent on God to free us, except now instead of being a happy, joyous dependence it's filled with wailing and pleading for help.
Biting the fruit wasn't the birth of independent thought. It was the birth of slavery to sin and death. That act, and the thought that went into it, was the beginning of the biggest and worst dependence we'll ever know.
This has huge repercussions for our lives. Every teenager in the world has enacted this story. Adolescence means growing away from your roots, exploring the new person you're becoming. But how do you manage that? If you do what mom and dad want, what they've always told you is good and right, then it doesn't feel like you're asserting your independence. So most teenagers end up doing something they know is stupid and wrong just to prove that they're strong and "adult" enough to make that choice. In retrospect almost every one of them will say, "That didn't prove I was an adult. It just proved I was stupid." But doing the wrong always looks stronger from the front end.
People sometimes wonder if they're happy in their marriage or just trapped. Often they'll try to prove their independence in the same way. Working on the marriage, re-committing to it, wouldn't prove anything, right? They feel like they have to do something against the marriage in order to prove they're still a real person, not trapped by it. Of course this usually ends up ruining the marriage, much to everybody's sadness.
Of late there's been enormous pressure on girls and women to own their sexuality. In general this is a good thing. I believe that women have not been socialized to accept themselves as honest, loving, and yes sexual beings the same way men have. Things that guys get applauded for give girls a "reputation". That needs to change. The way we view, educate, and judge girls in this area needs to change. But look at how people are defining "owning your sexuality" for women now. If you're fairly close to societal norms, somewhat modest, maybe looking for long-term relationships or marriage you're not proving that you're comfortable with yourself. That's just following "The Man". Instead in order to prove you've broken free you have to get up on a stage (or in front of a webcam) somewhere wearing next to nothing, get involved in sex quickly in a relationship, or jump from relationship to relationship with wild abandon. If that's really, really who a person wants to do, OK. But isn't it a little suspicious that in the big picture a woman's comfort with sexuality is only proved when she's performing these acts, presumably most of the time for the benefit of men? Isn't that the exact bondage people were trying to get out of in the first place? Who got to define that as the only way to be free? And is it really freedom or just the same old song with a more modern beat?
"Independence" is equated far too often with things that are harmful and bad. Apparently the only way to prove that you are free is to do the very things that get you into more trouble and deeper slavery. Can anyone else hear the serpent's whisper in all of this?
It may be a radical argument, but I'm going to suggest that the only real freedom comes in following God. There's no such thing as dependence versus independence. There's only a choice over what you're going to be dependent on. And in those matters the choice is pretty simple: life or death. The former comes from God. The latter comes from putting anything else in his place...even our own sense of independence and control. How much different would life be, how much different would our choices look, if we understood this? By ignoring it and pretending there's another way we repeat the mistake of Adam and Eve.
Having our lunges at independence only turn us more dependent on the wrong thing is one of the nastier mazes in which we find ourselves entrapped. Thank God that God himself intercedes and chooses to lift us out of this mess. If he didn't, I'm not sure how we would manage. It's hard to find your way out when you don't even know which way is up anymore. In the end that's the lesson of Genesis 3.
--Pastor Dave (pastordave@geneseelutheranparish.org)
