Snakes and Devils

February 13, 2005 (First Sunday in Lent)

By The Rev. Benjamin J. Newland

- Genesis 2:4b-9,15-17,25-3:7
- Psalm 51 or 51:1-13
- Romans 5:12-19(20-21)
- Matthew 4:1-11

So, in the beginning, God made a garden. It was, of course, the most beautiful, the most perfect, the most utopian garden ever created. God filled the garden with good things to eat, wonderful animals to live in it, and two people to enjoy it all. Then God said to the people, "OK, all of this paradise is yours. You can eat what you want, do what you want, go where you want, and just generally live it up on my nickel. But by the way, this one tree right here, don’t touch that one." Now seriously, given that set up, was it really the snake's fault that Adam and Eve went for the forbidden fruit?

I say no. I say quit blaming the snake. The story of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden is just that: a story. It is an important story. It is a story that is more true than many other stories. Yet it is still a story, and in any story where the main characters are forbidden to do something lest terrible things happen to them, they do that something anyways. It is just part of the rules of stories. If you tell the protagonist that he can't do a thing but don't give him a good reason why, the protagonist is obligated to do it anyways. The snake is not at fault. If anyone is to blame, God is, for setting Adam and Even up like that.

We hear this story today because today is the first Sunday of Lent, and the word of the day is temptation. The story of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden is about many things, and one of those things is temptation. The usual moral of the story is that Adam and Eve were tempted by the devil and if only they would have resisted that temptation everything would have been perfect. I have two problems with that. First, it was a talking snake, not the devil. Second, while the story may be trying to tell us something about temptation, I do not think it is trying to tell us how great it would have been if we were all still running around naked in the garden of Eden.

To my first point, ease up on the snake already! It's just a snake. Some translations say serpent, which sounds a little more ominous, but it's just a snake. There's no tempter, no devil, no Satan. The poor snake is given the quality of crafty, or wise, at various points in the scriptures. Sometimes this is a positive attribute, at other times a negative one. It makes as much sense as any other anthropomorphic statement we humans make, which is to say not much. The equating of the snake with the devil is medieval folklore, not biblical scholarship. None of this really has anything to do with the lessons for the day or Lent or anything else, I just feel bad for the snake. I don't want the S.P.C.A. coming in here and accusing us of speciesism.

To my second point (which is far more relevant I assure you), it is much to shallow to assume that the moral of the story of Adam and Eve is that if only they could have resisted temptation we could all still be living in paradise. First of all, that moral is simply never stated in the text. I think you have to stretch even to say that it is implied. From start to finish, God seems to have the whole thing worked out. God knows what will happen, and has planned for it to happen that way. God set Adam and Eve up with his rule about the one tree in the middle of the garden, because God knew that God had created a people who thought for themselves. A people with free will and choice. God also knew, that when God's people began to exercise that choice, they would become images of Godself, and no longer completely controlled by God; no longer just animatronic decorations in the perfect garden God was planting.

More on that later. Our next story of temptation comes from the Gospel of Matthew. A very similar story appears in Luke's Gospel. It is the story of Jesus tempted in the wilderness. Now you can make a good argument for the devil being a character in the story, though modern translators like "the tempter" better than the proper name of "Satan". At any rate, the devil takes Jesus on a whirlwind tour of temptation, offering him miraculous food from barrenness, a chance to demonstrate his power, and control over the nations of the world. For each of these temptations, the devil offers reasonable scriptural citation for why Jesus ought to do these things. It is this story that likely prompted William Shakespeare to so famously say that even the devil can quote scripture for his own ends. This is a good story to keep in mind the next time someone offers irrefutable scriptural evidence for a point they wanted to make anyways.

The thing I love best about the story of Jesus tempted in the wilderness is that it presents a fairly subtle look at temptation. All of the things Satan tries to get Jesus to do are things that Jesus is going to do later on in the Gospel story. Jesus refuses to produce bread on command for the devil, but later he would not scruple to make enough bread to feed five thousand of his closest friends. Jesus won't jump off the temple roof just to make God save him, but later at various times he'll slip away from a murderous crowd when he needs to. And Jesus refuses to be given the kingdoms of the world and their splendor, and yet in the end isn't that exactly what he had?

The subtlety of this story is that it shows us how resisting temptation is not just refusing to do the wrong thing. More often, resisting temptation involves refusing to do the right thing for the wrong reasons, or at the wrong time, or in the wrong way. This is, of course, a much more difficult temptation to resist; it is far more open to debate and disagreement, and much harder to see as temptation at all.

Perhaps the real moral of the story for Adam and Eve was not that they should have refused to eat the forbidden fruit. Perhaps the moral of the story was that they should have trusted God. When it occurred to them (whether of their own accord or through a talking snake) that maybe they should be allowed to eat the fruit of wisdom, perhaps they should have trusted God enough to have brought that question to God. Maybe their failure of temptation was a failure to trust God enough to wait, instead of eating as soon as they thought of it.

I for one am glad Adam and Eve took that bite. It was the right thing to do. Yet it may have been the wrong time to do it, or perhaps the wrong way to go about doing it. In Lent we are asked to identify our temptations and to resist them. It turns out that this is much more difficult that simply looking for snakes and devils. Snakes and devils are easy to spot. It's the temptation to do the right thing and damn the consequences that is harder to resist.