Original Sin

Address given at Templederry, Nenagh & Killodiernan on Sunday 9th March 2014, the 1st Sunday of Lent, Year A

Temptation and sin are strong themes running through the readings set for today.

This is no accident, because today is the 1^st Sunday of Lent. Lent is traditionally a ‘penitential’ season, a time when we are invited to reflect on our sinful natures, and to seek God’s forgiveness for actual sin.

The 1st reading (Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7) is that old, familiar story of the Fall: how the serpent tempted Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, and how they disobeyed God and ate the forbidden fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The first sin – the original sin.

The 3^rd reading from Matthew’s Gospel (Matthew 4:1-11) tells us how Jesus resisted the temptation of the devil in the wilderness. He did not sin.

In the Epistle reading from his letter to the Romans (Romans 5:12-19), Paul contrasts the sin of Adam with the righteousness of Jesus. This passage is very important historically for the development of Christian theology, because it’s a scriptural foundation for the theological doctrine that it is by God’s grace through Jesus Christ that original sin is overcome.

It’s this uncomfortable idea of original sin that I want to explore today.

First let’s look at the story of the Fall.

Surely this is just an old myth, with no relevance to sophisticated people like us today? Well, yes it is a myth, and a very ancient one. But like many an old myth I think it captures an essential truth.

We don’t need to believe that Adam and Eve were literally the first man and the first woman, the ancestors of us all - but they are typical men and women, very like you and me. God forbade Adam and Eve to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, but they did so, and became like God, able to distinguish good from evil. We can all tell good from evil, can’t we? We call that capacity conscience: it is part of what makes us human - we are moral creatures.

Adam and Eve could distinguish good from evil, and like us no doubt in their best moments they would prefer good to evil. But that doesn’t mean to say that they would always choose good over evil, any more than we do. Like us, they had free will. They were tempted by the serpent, and they chose to eat the forbidden fruit, because they desired it - because it was good to eat, because it was beautiful, and because it would make them wise. So many rationalisations for their bad choice! We don’t need to believe in a literal talking serpent, but we’ve all heard that little nagging voice in the head, haven’t we? Prompting us to do something we know in our heart of hearts is wrong, for what we pretend are jolly good reasons.

This is original sin – Adam’s sin, Eve’s sin, and our sin too: to know what is right, but to be tempted by our desires to do what is wrong, and all too often to give in to our desires. We all suffer from it, without exception. It is not so much a mysterious, theological doctrine as a truth about our psychological natures, derived from observation.

Matthew tells us how Jesus was tempted by the devil in the wilderness, but resisted his blandishments.

But how did Matthew get the story? Since Jesus was alone in the desert, I think the source must be Jesus himself, who told it to his disciples. They in turn passed it on to Matthew, the Gospel writer, and so to us.

The devil tempted Jesus, we are told, just as the serpent tempted Adam and Eve. Jesus was human like us - he could hear that nagging little voice in his head too, but he had the strength to resist it. This should be no surprise, since we believe Jesus to be fully God as well as fully human.

Notice how the devil quotes scripture as he tempts Jesus: “He will command his angels concerning you … On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone” – it is a quotation from Psalm 91. We should be on our guard, I think, when we hear someone use scripture as a weapon against an opponent in argument – it just might be the voice of the devil tempting us.

Notice also how Jesus quotes scripture too to rebuke the devil and to resist temptation. Perhaps we might do the same when we are tempted. Scripture can also be a tool to help us resist temptation. Now that’s a thought that might help us keep our Lenten resolutions!

So we come to Paul, and his contrast between the sin of Adam and the righteousness of Christ.

I don’t know about you, but I find his argument convoluted and difficult to understand. But he ends up crystallizing matters in these words:

‘For just as by the one man’s disobedience - Adam’s -  the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience - Christ’s - the many will be made righteous’.

Paul seems to believe that Adam’s original sin causes our own, rather than being a consequence of our common humanity, as I do. But Paul sees the reality of original sin only too clearly: all human beings, like Adam, are inevitably sinners; like Eve too for that matter, though Paul leaves her out.

Later on in his Epistle to the Romans, Paul expresses the human dilemma perfectly:

‘I do not understand my own actions… I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.’

What a mess we are all in! Our sins convict us; they cut us off from God; and we inevitably suffer spiritual death. Or to put it another way, in the language of psychology:

I feel shame for the bad things I do; the shame destroys my self-esteem; and I plunge into deep depression.

But Paul also sees another reality: the reality that God offers us a way out of the mess. The way out is God’s free gift of grace in Jesus Christ. By following Jesus’s path of obedience to God, our sins will be forgiven and we will be made righteous. Again, to put it in the language of psychology:

When I am truly sorry for the bad things I’ve done, I will change for the better, seek to make amends and cease to feel corrosive guilt, coming to accept myself for who I  am whatever my flaws.

So to sum up

Every one of us, without exception, should feel uncomfortable about original sin, because it is a reality: we all share the innate tendency of human beings to sin, which leads every one of us to be a sinner.

But as St Paul saw so clearly, that is not the end of the matter. God offers us the free gift of grace in Jesus Christ. If we follow his way and repent, our sins will be forgiven.

And a final comforting thought for Lent: ‘Remember, I am with you always’, says Jesus. The essence of original sin is the nagging little voice of temptation, which we personify as the serpent or the devil. But if we trust in Jesus and listen for it, we can also hear his confident, comforting voice: he encourages us to resist temptation, and offers us forgiveness when we succumb to it, if we come to him in penitence.

Let’s try to listen for Jesus’s voice, really listen, as we travel with him on the way to Jerusalem this Lent, to Calvary and on to Resurrection!

God suffers with us in Jesus!

1. Sickness brings patience, patience brings perseverance, and perseverance brings hope.

If you’ve ever been to the Galway Clinic, you’ve most likely seen these words, written on the wall in the reception area close to the chapel, and attributed to St Paul. When I first saw them, I thought what a strange thing to write on the wall of a hospital. If I were sick - in pain, frightened, suffering – I think I would rather resent the suggestion that I should display the virtues of patience, perseverance and hope. I would much rather someone just made my suffering go away!

These words are of course a variant translation of Paul’s words in his Epistle to the Romans, which we have just heard. ‘But we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.’

Now we all know about suffering – to some degree or another it is a part of our common experience as human beings. And surely suffering is a bad thing, a manifestation of evil within the world. I don’t mean pain. Pain can be a good thing, when for instance it teaches us as children not to put our hands in the fire. And a little pain can even be pleasurable, like the slight ache I get when I’ve done a couple of hours hard digging in the garden. Suffering is more a psychological torment that comes from feeling bereft, out of control, in danger, unloved, hopeless, only sometimes from unremitting pain. Suffering drives us to forget everything and everybody else around us in our rage to be rid of it. Suffering is evil.

So how can Paul possibly ask us to ‘boast in our sufferings’? Doesn’t that sound a bit like glorying in something evil? Today I want to try and tease out some thoughts about suffering.

2. First let’s think about the causes of suffering.

Much of the suffering that we see about us and experience ourselves is caused directly or indirectly by you and by me, and by other human beings. The wholesale suffering caused by war, oppression and famine is driven by human greed and thoughtlessness. What you might call retail suffering, from hurtful words to a loved one up the scale to violence, rape and murder, are caused by individual people like us not living up to God’s loving message, expressed by Jesus when he summarised the Law - ‘You shall love the Lord your God, and you shall love your neighbour as yourself’. This suffering is the result of human sin. We are moral beings, souls, who know the difference between right and wrong. Yet we know too how we seem to be drawn to do what we know to be wrong or not to do what we know is right. We seem to be born that way - theologians call it original sin. We are all sinners, we all need forgiveness, and Jesus assures us that our loving-father God will forgive us if we truly repent.

But there’s an awful lot of suffering in this world which we really can’t trace back in this way to human sin. I’m thinking for instance of the suffering caused recently by the cyclone in Myanmar/Burma, and the earthquakes in Szechwan in China. I’m thinking of the suffering caused by illness and disease, for instance by viruses and cancers. And I’m thinking about the suffering caused by the fact of death – each one of us must face up to the fact that in the long run death will separate us from all that we know and love. All of this suffering seems to be due to the working out of the natural laws of physics, chemistry, biology, in the universe created by almighty God.

3. As Christians we believe our God is both almighty and loving.

But surely if God were really both, he would not allow such a burden of suffering to exist. He would not have made us humans subject to original sin, we would always be perfectly good, and we would never cause others to suffer. He would have created a universe in which natural disasters and disease were absent, and where we would be immortal. Therefore, some say, if God exists he can’t be both: if God is almighty he can’t always be loving, and if God is always loving he can’t be almighty.

This is known as the Problem of Suffering, or the Problem of Evil, and it has been debated by philosophers and theologians since time immemorial. I think the apparent paradox at the heart of it is something that prevents many thoughtful, caring people from accepting our Christian view of God. So how can we as Christians resolve it?

Many Christians, using an argument first made by St Irenaeus in the C2nd, suggest that God made us with free will, and therefore capable of sin which causes suffering, because only that way could we be souls, moral beings made in his image, capable of freely choosing good.

More recently others have extended the argument to suggest that it may be logically necessary for God to establish the universe with the natural laws it has, in order that beings like us can emerge who are free to choose to love. And surely a universe without freely given love but without suffering would be worse than one with both. One such is the eminent physicist John Polkinghorne, who is also an Anglican priest.

These are only speculations, and there are many others, which you can accept or not. But for myself, I think that I must accept as a Christian, with all humility, that I just do not know why God has made both human-kind and the universe such that suffering exists. I believe God is both almighty and loving, so I must also believe that he had sufficient reason to do so. But what that reason is is hidden from me. There is so much that is hidden from us, at least for now!

4. The Romans would have understood Paul’s reference to ‘our sufferings’ to mean their persecution.

Scholars say the letter was probably written by Paul around AD55. The Emperor Claudius had expelled Jews from Rome in AD49, ‘because the Jews constantly made disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus’, a likely misspelling of Christus, Christ. No doubt the authorities continued to make life difficult for the early Christians, and we know that in AD64 Nero was able to scapegoat them for starting the great fire during which he fiddled.

The way human psychology works, groups who are persecuted tend to be strengthened by it. No doubt these persecuted early Christians were proud of the endurance, character and hope they showed under persecution. I don’t think we should take the word ‘boast’ too seriously. No doubt Paul skilfully drew on their pride to get them to listen to his difficult theological message. But I don’t think in the context we can accuse Paul of glorying in something evil.

Rather I think what is important is to see what we can learn from Paul’s message.

5. What St Paul is teaching us, I think, is that God suffers with us in the person of Jesus.

As he puts it, ‘God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us’. Jesus, with perfect obedience to his loving father God, suffered a cruel death on the cross in order to show us all how to deal with the suffering and death which every one of us will know.

‘God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit’, Paul says, just as Jesus promised us. It is this love which gives us the character to endure suffering, and never lose hope.

Our Christian hope is that by God’s grace our faith will justify us – that is our faith will put us in the right relationship with God – and so bring us ‘peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ’.

God sent us his son, Jesus, to ‘proclaim() the good news of the kingdom’, as Matthew’s Gospel has it, and to show us his way of eternal life. He is always full of compassion for those who suffer.

How amazing it is that almighty God should make such a gesture of loving solidarity toward sinful people like you and me!

How comforting we find that solidarity when we ourselves suffer!

Let us thank God for expressing his solidarity with us in the life and mission, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ our Lord.