The first Sunday in Lent

Asking a person to preach on that Genesis passage is the equivalent of asking them to nail their theological colours to the mast. The temptation is to skip it altogether and preach on the Gospel. However, while I do appreciate the Anglican reluctance to define, perhaps we do have to be clear on what we do, and do not, believe. In his first letter St Peter says “Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have”. I think that means that we should be clear about our beliefs and the foundation of them, not just in our minds but in what we say too. Theology isn’t just for the clergy. We, the lay-people, are if you like the “default” Christians. The clergy have a particular role, but they are Christians first and foremost just as we are. St Peter is not talking to the clergy, or to members of the ministry team, or even to the unusually devout. He is talking to you and to me – ordinary piskies in the pew.

It should be said, of course, that anything we state about God, whether it is about God’s nature or about salvation history, can never be more than provisional. In Thomas Aquinas’ words, we cannot understand “what” God is, only “that” God is. Which didn’t stop Thomas from writing dozens of books about “what” God is and “how” God works, but as he said after the great vision or dream that he had the year before his death, “All that I have written appears to be as so much straw after the things that have been revealed to me”. That’s the problem with any definition – if you have a living faith, nourished by prayer and chewing over the scriptures, it will not be long before you realise that “that’s not it…” It has been said many times that the only way to define God is to say what God is not. And some early Fathers of the Church used to say that it was better to say that God is not good than to say God is good and then sit back and think you had defined God.

But we do need to be able to say “This, so far as I understand it, and with the proviso that better understanding may come and lead me to change the way I express it, is what I believe.”

So here goes. This, so far as I understand it, and with the proviso that better understanding may come and lead me to change the way I express it, is what I believe about why the Son of God died on the cross for us and rose again.

The Genesis passage we have just heard is key, and that is why we have it at the beginning of Lent, the time set apart to meditate on precisely that.

God created human beings with free will. He did this, I believe, because he was more interested in being loved than in being obeyed. Paul says the demons believe and tremble; equally one could obey and tremble; obey and hate. That was not the sort of obedience God wanted, the sort of obedience it was his to command. Love cannot be commanded; love must be free. When Jesus says that the first commandment is to love God and the second is to love your neighbour he is not saying (how could he?) that he commands us to love. What he is actually saying is that that is the one thing necessary – if you do that there is no need for you to be commanded to do anything else. It is almost saying “There is no commandment: love, and do what you will”.
Now human beings, having free will, disobeyed God. There are people who believe the Adam and Eve story is literally true, and you may believe this if you wish. I don’t really mind whether it is or not; on balance, I doubt it.

Are you a bit shocked that I say that the Genesis story may not be true, that it may be just a myth? But I’m not saying that. A myth is something profoundly true, and it is never “just” a myth. It is a way of expressing a truth which both tells that truth and is within the grasp of the person you are telling. For example, when you tell a child that if he sticks a wire into the socket the Electricity Monster will get him. It’s not true, but it IS true that something very bad, that you can’t explain because he can’t yet understand it, will happen. That’s the sort of myth that Genesis is.
What Genesis is telling us is that human beings, created by God with free will, lost sight of love, and started being bothered about obedience (and it is only one step from valuing obedience above love to wondering just how obedient the letter of the law requires us to be, and thence to disobedience). That’s what it is, you know; and if you will forgive me for speaking so irreverently about God the Son, you can tell it because that, following the letter and not the spirit, is one of Jesus’ “hot buttons”. He can’t stand it. It is the one thing that makes him really, really angry.

People often have difficulty about the question of why the Son was crucified. Is it a sacrifice, is it a sort of restorative justice, what is it? I think the answer is that it can be understood differently by different people, different societies, and different times. We do not now naturally understand the concept of sacrifice in atonement for sin. We don’t do it. The original sense of the word is repugnant to us. To describe Christ’s death on the cross as an atoning sacrifice does not make sense to the modern mind.

Similarly the concept of “making satisfaction”, of appeasing an angry god, or the idea that someone had to die for the sin of the first human being. As if our God demanded suffering and death in strict justice and somehow was pleased by the suffering and death of his Son. These explanations fitted with particular societies, particular belief systems, particular ways of life. They do not seem to fit now.

But “Christ yesterday and today, and the same for ever”. Christ did die on the cross for our salvation, and that does not change. And we need to understand this during Lent and at Easter, because we need to understand what God has done for us and to us. May I suggest one possible way of understanding it, a way that fits – for me – with the idea that our first parents replaced divine love with human obedience, fits with Isaiah’s statement that “He was offered up because he wished it so”, and fits with that beautiful phrase “the restoration of all things in Christ”. In some way the death of Christ restores us to our original state of blessedness by restoring us, from the realm of law and obedience, to the realm of love and grace. What did he say? “Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends”. Love is his meaning, and love is the meaning of his death. To me it is not a question of justice, of a necessary death following a sin, but of such a weight of love thrown into the balance that it outweighs centuries – millennia – of law, obedience, and disobedience. Augustine said Amor meus pondus meum: My love is my weight: my love for God is what moves me, as surely as gravity. And Christ’s love is his weight, the weight that outweighs all our sins. Love is stronger than death, so how could he not rise again? It’s not a final answer – no answer will ever be final until, in God’s nearer presence, we know as we are known. But just now it’s my answer, and the answer I will try to take with me through Lent. I think…one could do worse.