Tenth Sunday of Ordinary Time (B)
Now that baseball season is well underway, I can mention a quote I recently came across. It was from Warren Spahn, the Hall of Fame pitcher who played for the Braves nearly all his career – beginning when the Braves were still in Boston. Here is the quote:
“Hitting is timing. Pitching is disrupting timing.”
Now, in the light of the readings for this Sunday, I thought of a way to rephrase that quote – with all due respect to Mr. Spahn! Here’s my rewritten quote:
“The Christian life is trust. Temptation is disrupting trust.”
If temptation is disrupting trust, then sin is when we buy into the disruption and then suffer the consequences. There may be no better example of this in the Scriptures than our first reading, which is taken from the third chapter of Genesis.
Let’s take a moment to review all that happened leading up to our first reading.
In the opening verses of Genesis, we are given a grand, sweeping view of creation which culminates in the creation of human beings – man and woman – who are made in the image and likeness of God. Then, beginning with Genesis 2:4, our camera zooms in to one particular spot. God creates a man from the dust of the earth, places him in a garden, creates animals, and intimately creates a woman to be the man’s true helpmate. The man pronounces the woman to be “bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh”. They are indeed one flesh, equal in each other’s eyes before God. God walks with them, we are told, in the cool of the afternoon. They are naked but feel no shame. Why? They do not feel anxious or defensive or threatened in any way. God is good, close to them, and worthy of trust. The man and the woman can trust one another. There is no need to hide.
The man and the woman are given a vocation. They are to tend this garden that God has given them in the manner that God would, so that God’s own joy in creating might be theirs as well. They are allowed free rein and free run of the garden, to eat what they like. Except for only one thing. There is only one prohibition. All the rest is theirs. They are given no reason for the prohibition. If they trust God, no reason is necessary.
Enter the serpent.
The serpent cleverly uses this sole prohibition as a means to disrupt trust – to try to drive a wedge between the man and woman on one part, and God on the other. The serpent speaks to the woman, but we find out later that the man was with her all along. Both hear the serpent’s words.
Using the prohibition as its starting point, the serpent tries to portray God as someone who can not be trusted, someone who does not have human flourishing in mind. No, the serpent claims, God has prohibited them from the fruit of this one tree because God does NOT want them to be like him and to know good and evil. God wants to keep them ignorant and keep all the cards for himself. Now, we have already been told that God, in fact, made the man and the woman in his image and likeness. But the serpent’s trap works. The woman and the man fall for it. They both eat the prohibited fruit, and immediately experience its results.
Let’s pause momentarily, simply to note that the serpent’s trap was not only something from the distant past. It is quite relevant. people fall for it even now. Look at how many people, in Europe and in North America, have turned away from trust in God and placed that trust in something else: progress or science or money or whatever. It’s the same dynamic. They were led to see God as an obstacle to their flourishing, someone who did not want them to know happiness or to ever really grow up and become adults. So, they chose to pull away from trust in God. As a result, do we not see that anxiety, fear, defensiveness, and divisions dominate our Western society? Can we not see how all of our personal temptations to sin – whatever the sin may be – are ways of disrupting our trust in God?
Now back to the Genesis story. What happens as a result of this breaking of trust? Not only is the couple’s trust in God broken; they lose trust in the goodness of creation and in one another. The couple realize that they are naked. They now feel exposed, vulnerable. The world is now a threatening place. They no longer feel safe before God or even before each other. They try to sew fig leaves together to cover themselves, but when God calls for them, they still hide and say that they are naked. Their own efforts, alone, cannot make them feel secure.
The oneness that the felt with each other and God is now broken. They blame someone else for their sin. The man blames the woman and God, who created the woman. The woman blames the serpent. They try to hide from God. Their relationship with one another is damaged. Later, after our reading, we will learn that the man will dominate the woman. But this is a result of sin, not a result of God’s original intention.
The oneness they felt with the garden and the world is broken. They will now have to struggle to grow food for themselves. Animals will fear and mistrust them. They will have to leave the garden eventually.
It’s interesting to note that, in all that happens, the man and the woman never apologize to God, nor do they ever ask for forgiveness. They admit the deed, but do not admit any responsibility for it. (That might sound too familiar to us!) Nevertheless, God shows them mercy. He promises that their offspring would one day overcome the serpent. And, in another act of mercy, God clothes the man and woman with animal skins. They feel naked and vulnerable, threatened by all that is around them. Their fig leaves do not make them feel any less exposed. God meets them where they are at, in spite of their sin, and offers them some protection and relief. God would punish, but not abandon, his people.
In the Gospel reading for this Sunday, we see the serpent’s trap again used, unwittingly perhaps, by Jesus’ relatives and by scribes from Jerusalem. Jesus has been teaching, healing, and forgiving many. More people are beginning to follow him. Jesus’ relatives claim that Jesus is “out of his mind”. The scribes say that Jesus “drives out demons by the prince of demons”. Both try to disrupt the trust that others are beginning to have in Jesus, each for their own reasons.
As I said before, the serpent’s trap has not become passé. We see its presence and its results among us still. And it’s not only people who have chosen a more “secular” way of life who are its victims. Whenever people of faith see God as primarily someone who needs to be appeased (or even outwitted) again and again, we are already sliding into the trap. How can we avoid being caught by this fiendish trap?
For this, let us turn to our second reading. Paul is writing his second letter to the church in Corinth. He is dealing with trials in his own efforts to preach the Gospel, and the Corinthians are also beginning to experience trials. These trials can lead to discouragement, which can make people more vulnerable to the serpent’s trap.
What does Paul say?
He immediately focuses his attention on trust:
“Since we have the same spirit of faith, according to what is written, I believed, therefore I spoke, we too believe and therefore we speak, knowing that the one who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus and place us with you in his presence.”
Paul goes on:
“Therefore, we are not discouraged; rather, although our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this momentary light affliction is producing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to what is seen but to what is unseen; for what is seen is transitory, but what is unseen is eternal. For we know that if our earthly dwelling, a tent, should be destroyed, we have a building from God, a dwelling not made with hands, eternal in heaven.”
It is ultimately a matter of trust or faith. We believe, like Paul, and therefore we speak and act. We know that the One who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us with him. We know that nothing can separate us from the love of Christ, as Paul told the Romans. So, even if we find ourselves afflicted in some way or tested, we know by our trust in the Lord that everything is already ours, in a sense. The Lord blesses us abundantly, and we respond with overflowing gratitude. This trust allows us to believe not only God, but to have trust in one another. We can re-form community once again, thanks to God’s presence among us. This trust also allows us to see – once again – that all of creation is God’s gift to us. The world is our “garden”, so to speak, and we are called to tend it as God would. By doing so, we experience a taste of God’s own joy in creation. Al these things make us far less vulnerable to the serpent’s trap.
Our life as Christians is ultimately an act of trust that God truly is for us. We do not live in a zero-sum world. God’s flourishing enables human flourishing. God is not competitive with us, nor does God oppress us. God is the one who frees us from slavery, as he freed the Israelites from Egypt.
God is trustworthy. On this one simple truth, all else depends.