True Myth

Propers: The First Sunday in Lent, A.D. 2020 A

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Christ is the new Adam. That’s the clear theme in our readings this morning. So in order to appreciate what all this implies, we’d better talk a bit about who Adam is.

In the Scriptures, Adam is the first human being. He is formed from earth in order to tend and steward the earth, but his breath—which is to say, his spirit—comes directly from God. He is not like the other animals, nor even the heavenly powers. He is an amphibian, as it were, with one foot in the material and one in the ethereal: higher than beasts, yet lower than angels. Thus he serves as a bridge or a lynchpin between two halves of Creation: that which we can see, and that which we cannot.

Adam literally means “earth critter.” And at first there is no explicit reference to his gender. How can we say that he is male, after all, if there is as yet no female? Legends tell of a sort of fairy-wife named Lilith, but that didn’t work out so well. No, Adam is alone, the only one of his kind, until God places him under a deep sleep and removes from him a rib, which is then fashioned into Eve, the first woman. And I must emphasize that she is his equal.

“This at last,” he says, “is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.” In fact, the word we translate as rib can actually mean side—as though Adam, the earth-critter, were split in two, with one half now male and the other female. And this unity in diversity allows for wondrous new life. The name Eve means “giver of life,” “mother of the living.”

The story of Adam and Eve is found in the book of Genesis, starting in Chapter 2. It doesn’t quite mesh up with the story of Creation found in Chapter 1, but that’s never much seemed to bother anyone. For indeed the early chapters of Genesis are, literarily speaking, myths—and I use that term very deliberately. When I say that something is a myth, I don’t mean that it’s a lie or that it didn’t happen. I’m using the word myth in a technical sense.

A myth is a story that makes sense out of life. It lays the foundations of a worldview, imparting to us our deepest truths about God, reality, and humanity. For most of the ancient world, certainly the Fertile Crescent, myths taught that the gods arose from nature; that the world is a hostile place, at best indifferent; and that human beings are inconsequential. Genesis flips that paradigm on its head.

In Genesis, there is one eternal, all-powerful, all-good God; this God creates the world freely, out of generosity and love, proclaiming it good at every stage; and finally this God places human beings in the world to rule it, to care for it, and to enjoy it.

The problem then presents itself: if God is all-good, and the world was made good, why then do we find so much evil in it? Who broke the world? Not God, clearly. Good Himself cannot do evil. So it must have been us: fallen angels, fallen people. We broke the world. And we did it by trying to be good, trying to be gods, apart from the one true God who creates, sustains, and loves us all.

Now, the story of Adam and Eve has been interpreted in many, many ways. Some have said that Adam was the progenitor of the Semitic peoples. Some have proposed that he was the first animal, the first ape, to gain reason and a rational soul. I think it particularly interesting that the Bible’s names for the first human beings—Adam, Seth, etc—are the names that the Egyptians gave to their gods. And some, of course, especially in more recent centuries, have read Genesis in a fundamentalist way, claiming that the world is 6000 years old and that Adam was sculpted literally out of clay. This, however, has not been the Christian norm.

But in many ways, I don’t quite think it matters. Neither did Martin Luther. In his Small Catechism—basic instruction for the Christian household—he never speaks of Adam and Eve. You may have noticed that our Creeds do not either. For Christians, God’s act of Creation has always been about now rather than then. It isn’t just that God snapped His fingers Once Upon a Time and produced the Big Bang. It’s that God creates and sustains everyone and everything at every moment of our being. Every heartbeat, every breath, we exist in the ocean of God’s creative love.

Adam, then, whoever he was, however we understand him, represents all of us, mythic humanity as a whole. His failings, his sins, represent all of our sins. The weakness that existed in our first parents, the seeds of pride planted by the serpent, have taken root in us as well. We are, each of us, tempted to stray from God, to taste forbidden fruit, to proclaim ourselves to be our own gods, our own lords, apart from God Himself. One great Fall destroyed us all, yes—but not just Once Upon a Time. We fall every day, don’t we?

So then along comes Jesus, who is the New Adam, the New Creation, the new kind of man. And Jesus is like us in every respect save this: He cannot sin. And I don’t just mean that He’s a really good guy who makes better choices than we do. I mean here is a Man who is so perfectly transparent to the presence of God, so completely saturated by the Goodness and Beauty and Truth which is the Creator, that we cannot tell where His humanity ends and His divinity begins.

He is both God and Man—which does not make Him less human, but more human than you or I have ever been. He is the one perfect Man, the Man who lives in perfect union with God. He is what we were meant to be, and what we shall become. If sin is separation from God, then it is impossible that Jesus sin, for He is Immanuel, God-With-Us, God in the flesh. You cannot separate Christ from God.

Now in our Gospel reading this morning, Christ is tempted by Satan, just as Adam was tempted, just as we are tempted. But where you and I and everyone else since the loss of the Garden of Eden have failed and fallen flat on our faces, Jesus triumphs.  He has no pride to tempt, for pride means nothing to a Man who is already infinite. Power means nothing to a Man who fully is the Almighty. And food means nothing to a Man who is Himself the Bread of Life.

Yet that Christ should defeat the devil is neither surprise nor scandal. Of course God puts Satan to flight. But what should surprise us, what should scandalize us, is what Paul writes in his letter to the Romans this morning. For with regard to Christ as the New Adam, Paul proclaims:

Just as one man’s trespass led to condemnation for all, so one man’s act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all. For just as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous.

Do you realize what this means?

We are all one in Adam, all one in sin. His story, the story of Adam and Eve, is universal, archetypal. His myth is our myth, the story of every day of our lives. All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. We all know this in ourselves. But Paul says that if we are one in Adam, how much more are we one in the New Adam, in Jesus. Sin is universal in Adam; now righteousness is universal in Christ! Death is the fate of all under Adam; now life is the destiny of all under Christ!

You could not have a more shocking, more sweeping, more utterly, recklessly superabundant promise of Good News than this: Jesus is humanity now. His righteousness is imputed to us, infects us, like a healthful, healing virus. His life is life for the world—for all of humanity, all of Creation—the Resurrection unleashed upon worthy and unworthy, saint and sinner, believer and unbeliever. Just as we could not escape the condemnation we all share in Adam, so now we cannot escape the indiscriminate forgiveness that we all share in Christ.

The fruit of the Tree of Life, which Adam and Eve in their sin were denied, has now been offered up for the world—for the Tree of Life is the Cross, and its wondrous fruit is Christ Crucified and Risen. One again the side of the New Adam is opened. Once again, a Man’s rib becomes the womb from which all of the living are reborn. He is both Adam and Eve, the First and the Last, and the blood and water poured forth from His side have filled up hell to bursting and brought new life to all the world.

The Resurrection is a fire that is utterly inescapable. Just as life spread from Adam to every corner of the earth, so now new life, eternal life, is spreading from the New Adam throughout the cosmos, from the depths hell to the heights of heaven. And it cannot be stopped. And it cannot be staunched. And it will save us all in the end. For as in Adam all men fall, so in Christ shall all arise.

This is the new myth, God’s Word made flesh. And it is truer than any tale ever told.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.