The Lenten collect urges us to reflect on our sinful nature. I find the thought of forty days thinking about sin and guilt daunting.
The best thing, among many good things, about Common Worship is its balanced attitude to sin and guilt. Cranmer and the compilers of the Book of Common Prayer employ magnificent language to express our individual guilt but the emphasis on sin and the need for penitence verges on an obsession. This only reflects how they saw the world, a different world, or rather a different perception of it, to ours.
It is not just our attitude to guilt that changed; we are rather more sceptical about sin itself; at least we are in general and in theory; whether we feel this as individuals is a different matter. The grand theories of human behaviour, Marxism, Darwinism, The Market etc all suggest an underlying determinism which tends to squeeze out sin along with choice. The absolute moralities which the Church has promoted leave equally little room for the human conscience to manoeuvre and yet without that ability sin becomes meaningless.
Working in an opposite direction, is a sense of control both of our selves and our environment. This may actually be illusory we think that we understand disease and disability and how to prevent and cure them. Most notable is the way that the control of our reproduction has transformed sexual ethics. Sin and sex were almost synonymous; now “living in sin” seems a rather quaint and irrelevant idea and not simply because so many people, young and old, are doing it.
It is not just our bodies that we can control; we have also, it sometime seems, gained the upper hand with nature; only seemed, as the Japanese and New Zealanders know. Some control of natural forces is a characteristic of our development and civilization, and I’ll shall return to that later, but as we have seen in the last thirty years, the desire for wealth and comfort has lead us to exploit the natural resources of the world with disastrous consequences, just as ruthless exploitation of the market has impoverished so many in the southern half of the globe which we be should sharing. The remorse and guilt that result can have a salutary effect as we have seen in small but important way in Fair Trade Fortnight.
This control of selves and our environment ought to lead to greater choice, and in some ways it does, but there has also been a reduction of individual responsibility; we are swept along by theories which tell us, often against our intuition, that we have no choice. It is hard to stand against the crowd that wants more, and judges success by possessions and the rapidity with which we can acquire them. But choice is an essential component of temptation and sin.
Can the stories of temptation in Genesis and Matthew help us to think constructively about sin and choice?
One of the features of Matthew’s account of Jesus’ temptation is the strange way in which it foreshadows his life and ministry. Jesus refuses to turn stones into bread because that will not feed the mind, but later on he will feed five thousand with just a few loaves and fishes and will liken the bread to the word which satisfies the soul. He will not jump off a pinnacle of the Temple, but later will be recognised as a prophet through the healing miracles and as divinely powerful in calming the wind and storm. Jesus does not bow down and worship Satan, but in the passion he allows himself to be subjected to the forces of evil, brutality, fear, prejudice and ignorance. The temptations are, it seems, a question of motivation and timing; Jesus will use divine powers but not as magic; they will be an expression of his loving nature and ultimately an expression of the deepest sympathy of the divine for the human, made possible by the incarnation. It is as if sinning- giving in to Satan’s suggestions- is a question of doing the right thing in the wrong context, for a perverse purpose. The sin would be to choose to do good in the wrong way, to pervert power. The choice is about how best to fulfil one’s potential.
Choice is also at the centre of the story of the Fall. We think of Satan as a deceiver, but as on the Mount of Temptation so in the Garden of Eden, what he says is substantially right; Adam and Eve do not die as result of eating the fruit, in fact they live. Life without death is really no life at all. By eating the fruit Adam and Eve do indeed become like Gods; they take control of themselves and their world. The underlying shift is from the gatherers of the Garden of Eden to pastoralists and cultivators who exploit and adapt the world around them. Adam and Eve are set off on the path of civilization; they will control the waters of the Indus, the Nile and Tigris and Euphrates; they will terrace the hills, mine the mountains and sail the sea in ships.
With control of the world around them Adam and Eve also realise the extent of their own human potential. Temptation is an empowering experience for them. Again, there is truth in what the serpent says; having broken the spell of obedience, Adam and Eve do indeed “know good and evil” and they share this power with God, in whose image they were made. It puts them in charge of their own destiny, and of course, makes them responsible for what they choose. That responsibility entails, eventually, death but it also means the possibility of full life before death. Eating the fruit makes them wise, and the first consequence is that they feel shame.
Why should their nakedness be the first state to embarrass them? God had made everything in the Garden good, so we assume that Adam and Eve were indeed as beautiful as artists have portrayed them. We don’t feel embarrassment looking at those pictures- or only a slight tingle of guilt remembered from the nursery that only adds spice to the pleasure- why should Adam and Eve have felt shame or guilt, unburdened as they were by 2000 years of the Church telling them bodies were bad?
I think the real reason for their shame is embarrassment at their lost state of innocence; they immediately see how inadequate it was, how unfulfilling of their potential. They were only creatures, totally reliant on their creator. It is like the embarrassment we feel in remembering some childhood naiveté, ignorance or misunderstanding. But Adam and Eve’s reaction is pragmatic; they take control of the situation by adapting and exploiting the world around them; they make themselves impromptu boxers out fig leaves.
Lent is time for reflection and growth; a time to look hard at our temptations and how properly controlled they may help us to be individuals capable of knowing Good and Evil, capable of living before we die. It is a time to assume control of underlying desires; to analyse and amplify our choices and so to come to better understanding of the nature of our humanity. It is a time to grow out of innocence and dependence. We need not, I believe, think that we are innately bad; there is “health in us” and we will realise the potential that health gives us by an appreciation of ourselves as morally responsible beings made in the image of God .