Breaking and Entering. Liz R. Goodman
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Being Suggestive
The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.” . . .
Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God say, ‘You shall not eat from any tree in the garden’?” The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden”; but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die. ’” But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not die; for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves. (Genesis 2:15–17, 3:1–7)
Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. He fasted for forty days and forty nights, and afterwards he was famished. The tempter came and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.” But he answered, “It is written, ‘One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’”
Then the devil took him to the holy city and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, saying to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down; for it is written, ‘He will command his angels concerning you,’ and ‘On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.’” Jesus said to him, “Again it is written, ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’”
Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor; and he said to him, “All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.” Jesus said to him, “Away with you, Satan! for it is written, ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.’”
Then the devil left him, and suddenly angels came and waited on him. (Matthew 4:1–11)
Scripture’s earliest preacher is the serpent. If preaching is interpreting the word of God, then the first one to do this according to the Bible is the serpent.
Just saying.
But that actually gets me thinking. The serpent in the garden and the devil in the wilderness don’t share a name, and they don’t share a form; many a scholar would caution us against making too direct an equivalence here. But, look, they do share a same technique—suggestion—and that counts for something.
The serpent asks the woman, “Did God say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?” It’s an ambiguous question; I imagine it’s so by design. Consider, does the serpent mean to ask, “Did God say that, of all the trees here in this garden, there are any from which you may not eat?” If so, then this would allow for God to be felt as gracious, having offered the man and woman a great abundance—everything here but one. Or does the serpent mean to ask, “Did God say don’t eat from any tree in this garden?” in which case God would be felt as withholding, even cruel, a tempter himself—laying out an abundance before the man and the woman, and then saying, “Don’t touch.”
We should recognize, of course, that what God actually says according to the story is neither of these. We should recognize that the serpent frames in negative terms what God just prior framed positively: “You may eat freely of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.” Really, we should recognize that the question as asked cannot be answered. But I imagine that’s also by design. As any student of politics knows, the one who frames the debate wins the debate—and the serpent means to win this debate, so indeed to frame the woman and the man.
These two naïfs are no match for the serpent, but their innocence serves them well for a moment. The woman doesn’t answer the question as asked; instead, she repeats what God did say. “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but not of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden.” And in so saying, she seems to hold on to the hope that God is not withholding, that God is gracious.
But the suggestion otherwise is a potent one, isn’t it?
Here’s another potent suggestion: “If you are the Son of God . . .” The devil is said to have said it to Jesus twice in the wilderness, the whole temptation essentially energized by this word: if. It’s a brilliant approach because, though Jesus never claimed such status for himself, it’s a pretty powerful one to be pinned with, one that he might want now to prove true.
Ironically, he would prove it by steadfastly resisting the proving of it.
If you feel you’ve heard this story before, then rest assured you have. This scene appears in all three synoptic Gospels, and so we hear it every year and always on the first Sunday of Lent. It sets up so well the forty days of Lent that are before us, forty days until Easter not counting Sundays. These are to echo the forty days that Jesus is remembered to have spent in the wilderness, away from all the comforts of his culture, away even from the law and ritual that safeguard living and give shape to time. To be in the wilderness is to be on your own, really on your own.
Mark, the earliest written gospel, doesn’t recount any details of Jesus’ time on his own, really on his own. According to that rendering, Jesus’ experience in the wilderness really was empty—a formless void, even, as before when God began to create. Pre-created: we might call it postapocalyptic these days—this entering into chaos, this giving over to nihilism. It all makes Mark’s version, to my mind, the most terrifying version, a temptation not about anything but about nothing, about annihilation, about non-being. The driving question to this understanding of the temptation, then, was whether Jesus could withstand self-giving, self-emptying. Could Jesus withstand kenosis, which as the Christ he would have to suffer on the cross?
But none of this is to make light of Matthew’s understanding of what Jesus withstood, which was also Luke’s understanding—for here, though Jesus didn’t face the threat of annihilation, he did face the threat of conscription to serving some master other than God. That he doesn’t succumb is perhaps the obvious point.
“[T]he essence of Jesus’ sinlessness,” writer Gil Bailie claims, “was his immunity to the contagion of desire.”3 This is typical of Mr. Bailie, he for whom a central question in the life of faith is this: Whom are you going to imitate? Who is your model for living? And so, to his mind, and to mine, Jesus’ success in the wilderness is about desiring the right thing, desiring to be like the right one. “His triumph over the demonic snares in the wilderness was a triumph over the glamour of mimetic suggestion; but it was an achievement made possible, not by Jesus’ strength of will, but by the superior strength of another mimetic desire: Jesus’ desire ‘to do the Father’s will,’”4 that is, Jesus’ desire instead to imitate the Father.
So, to sum up, Jesus’ triumph in the wilderness was in resisting the suggestions of the devil, which would have made him like the devil; and in continuing to model himself after the One in whose image and likeness he knew himself to have been made. Jesus might have become like the devil, following the devil; but instead he became evermore like the Father, following the Father.
Got it.
But wait. Wasn’t it this that God didn’t want in the beginning? Wasn’t it this that God meant to avoid—that any should be like God? Didn’t God mean to be inimitable? Or was that just in reference to regular old people?