A sermon on Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7 by Alison Sampson

We can all picture the story. Adam and Eve, naked as jaybirds, are wandering the garden. That devious, cunning, and above all evil snake points out the fruit to Eve and whispers suggestively, ‘Take, eat, for then will you be wise.’ Eve plucks the luscious fruit, and bites into it suggestively. Juice runs down her chin and between her naked breasts. Adam swoons. Eve flutters her eyelashes at him; ‘Take, eat, for then will you be wise,’ she murmurs. And Adam reaches out his hand to the ripe and fragrant fruit, raises it to his lips, and eats. And in this way does sin enter the world.

And all it’s the fault of this woman, Eve. The church fathers think so;(1) the Apostle Paul thinks so;(2) the author of 1 Timothy thinks so.(3) Hundreds of medieval and Renaissance artists think so; numerous paintings portray her as sensual, sexual, seductive. Some even show Adam gesturing towards Eve, his fingers held in the crude Italian symbol for vagina, a gesture used to this day. Across Europe and the United States, Eve was named the ancestor of all witches; her name was invoked time and again in the torture and slaughter of women during the great witch hunts. Eve was the one who was willingly deceived by the snake; Eve was the one who knowingly lured Adam into sin. And so, because of Eve, all humanity is cursed. And, on the assumption that all women are made in her image – and not God’s – women have been silenced in God’s name for millennia.

Despite the best historical evidence, which shows that women were named as early church leaders and patrons, women were silenced in the churches. Women were silenced as scolds, their tongues locked down by branks. Women were silenced for being witches.(4) These days, women are silenced through lower pay and discrimination in the workplace. Women are silenced through church-condoned domestic violence; women are silenced by the humiliation and shame of sexual violence and a culture which blames the victim. Women are silenced when they are prohibited from exercising their gifts in pastoral ministry; women are silenced when they are stripped of their ordination when political winds change. Even in our own circles, in which women are usually recognised as equals and granted the right to speak, women are being silenced.

Let me tell you a story about the time Paul and I became partners. For many reasons, we decided to leave the church where we had met. When this was made public, I was invited to meet with the pastoral team. I went, only to be told that I was a seductress and a Jezebel who was dragging Paul away from the church, to his destruction. Nobody met with Paul. Nobody asked him why he was leaving. Nobody accused him of anything. Apparently, I had such power over him that he was no longer able to think with any part of his body above the waist; he could not be reasoned with; and our leaving the church was all my fault. Needless to say, the accusations left me gobsmacked, humiliated – and very effectively silenced.

Even in our own congregation, we see it. In the last few months at this church, I have watched good men silence women; and good women accept this. I have heard husbands belittle and humiliate their wives in front of others. I’ve seen men interrupt other men, and no one bat an eyelid; and women told off for interrupting the same conversation, as if they were rude children rather than mature adults trying to get a word in edgewise.

And it all arises out of a particular picture of Eve as a devious, conniving woman who seduced Adam into sin, and who has been blamed for the presence of evil in the world ever since. The picture is insidious; the picture, and the woman-silencing it justifies, run right through our culture. But the picture is wrong. Worse, the later New Testament texts, which refer back to it, are also wrong.

We need to remember that the Bible isn’t consistent. It didn’t drop down out of the sky one day, fully formed. It was written over many centuries, and subject to many influences. And when we go back to tonight’s story, and read it carefully, we might find a few surprises.

First, we need to look at what is not in the story. If you read closely, you will see that there is no mention of sin. There is no mention of ‘the fall’. There is no hint that Eve is seductive. The word evil is never used. Neither Adam nor Eve are tricked into eating the fruit. The snake is not evil, merely crafty or devious.(5)

So instead of the temptress, we have a story in which Eve makes a choice based on what the snake tells her. She considers, eats, and offers the fruit to Adam. And despite being told by God not to eat the fruit, Adam eats it too. No deceit, and no sex, are implied.

So where does the idea of a seductive, deceitful Eve come from? It’s not part of the Hebrew Bible. Instead, it comes from other writings, the pseudepigrapha: early Jewish writings which were later rejected in the formation of the canon. They were rejected, because the councils which decided on the canon believed they did not faithfully describe humanity’s relationship with God.

In the Apocalypse of Moses, written in the first century AD, we find a story in which Eve is described as having an affair with the devil. At her lover’s command, she deliberately entices Adam to eat the fruit. Although the devil is not mentioned in the Hebrew Bible, in this apocryphal story the devil is a driving force. In The Life of Adam and Eve, a Latin text, all responsibility for sin is allotted to Eve; on Adam’s deathbed, Eve asks that he be absolved from sin, since absolutely everything is her fault. Other apocryphal texts blame women for sexual depravity and for triggering desire in men, and describe men as completely innocent of sexual wrongdoing – even in stories of incest and rape.

Unlike the stories which made it into the Hebrew Bible, these apocryphal stories maintained the status quo. They described exactly how life is in the patriarchy: men are in charge and have absolute power over women and women’s bodies. Women are subservient, and responsible for men’s sin. Worse, these stories claim that this is ordained by God.

This is why the apocryphal stories were rejected from the canon: they were false descriptions of God’s relationship with humanity. But they’d already done their destructive work. They informed both New Testament writers and early church fathers, leading them to read the stories of Creation through patriarchal cultural blinkers and to use them to uphold the status quo. And so, for example, even although women were already accepted leaders and sponsors of the earliest churches, the writer of 1 Timothy prohibited women from taking leadership roles and speaking in church, because of what he perceived as Eve’s absolute responsibility for the fall. This false reading of the Eve story is why, even now, women continue to be silenced and oppressed, and men continue to dominate.

It’s easy enough to settle for this picture of Eve; it’s been around for a long, long term. But if we want to hold on to this image of Eve as the temptress, an image which is not in the Hebrew Bible, and if we want to use this to justify male domination, we have a rarely admitted philosophical problem. For a seductive Eve implies a spineless Adam who only thinks below the waist. A seductive Eve implies Adam the victim, powerless, gullible, and not capable of being in charge of anything. A seductive Eve suggests that Adam can’t say no to anything or anyone; Adam is shown to be a weakling. Adam didn’t even participate in the conversation with the serpent; he just took the fruit, and et it. This is not the image of God which we might hope for in a man.

If we go back to the Hebrew Bible, and look at the stories which did make it into the canon, instead of Eve the seductress and Adam the chinless wonder, we find a different picture of humanity. In the first story of creation, ‘God created humanity in God’s image, in the image of God God created them; male and female God created them.’ There was no differentiation between male and female. They were both made in the image of God; they were both blessed; they were both told to be fruitful and multiply; they were both instructed to tend the earth; they were both granted everything. And God saw that this was good.(6) Even more, in the commandment to be fruitful and multiply, God blessed man and woman with sex. Desire was not something to be ashamed of. Desire was not something that was anybody’s fault. Instead, desire was a blessing from God.

In the second story of creation, of which we heard just a little tonight, we are hearing answers to the big questions: Where do we come from? Why are we here? Why do we work so hard for so little? Why is childbirth so painful? Why do men dominate women? Why do people do the wrong thing? And so on.

And the story provides some answers. For example, we are told that Eve is formed from Adam’s rib. To modern ears, this can sound condescending, but what it is telling us is that Adam and Eve are made of the same stuff. Unlike other ancient writings, which speculated that, since women were so inferior, they must be made of different or flawed materials, here we have a radical story which says that Eve is made of the same stuff as Adam; and so, women are made of the same stuff as men. Even more, the story goes on to tell us that this is why we have sex, and so we learn again that sex is not a problem but a part of the divine order.

What else might we learn? Well, if we can shelve the baggage which tells us that Eve is a conniving woman, we might notice she has some other qualities.

For it is Eve who first makes a choice. She shows us that humans are free to choose to do what God instructs; we are also free to do otherwise. Our choices have consequences, certainly; but what is instructive is the idea that we have been given the freedom to choose in the first place. So Eve shows us that humans have free will.

Eve shows us how hungry we are for wisdom and life. She took the fruit in order to experience fullness of life. It was not the right path to wisdom; there were other ways that weren’t so quick and easy. But she shows us that curiosity and a thirst for life are part of human nature; she also shows us that, from the beginning, we are rarely willing to take the hard road on our journey into wisdom and maturity. Like her, we want the quick fix.

Eve shows us how to live with hope. After leaving the garden, she gets on with life: desiring her husband, tending the earth, enduring childbirth, bearing sons, grieving the death and violence in her family. Even outside the garden, she engages in the creation. Her story shows us what happens when we make bad choices: life does not end. Instead, we experience the consequences; then, from the new place in which we find ourselves, we start again.

This fuller picture of Eve, made in the image of God, thirsty for knowledge and life, resilient in the face of difficult change, enriches us all. It challenges us to look for the image of God in every woman and girl we see. It challenges us to think about why we find it so easy to ignore, ridicule or silence women, even when we think of them as equals. It challenges us to reflect on how our churches are run, and our governments are formed; how conversations are conducted, and decisions are made. It challenges us to see how women, whether in our kitchens, our churches, our workplaces, or on the other side of the world, are oppressed through violence, humiliation, or ‘merely’ silencing, all because we still struggle to acknowledge that she, too, is made in God’s image.

But until women are equally part of the formation and running of our institutions and systems of power,
until women and men work together side-by-side and respect each other as equal participants and contributors,
until all women are safe from violence and humiliation by husbands, partners and fathers,
until female Baptist ordination candidates don’t have to be told that there are fewer opportunities and many closed doors for them,
until women in other denominations are eligible for ordination in the first place,
our families, our churches and our society will reflect far less than half the image of God; for God is found not in the male, alone; but in male and female, working together.

We are well on the way: I am standing here speaking with you tonight. But we have more work to do, in our church systems and in our relationships with one another. We are called to be witnesses to a way of love, healing, reconciliation and justice, and we will be when we let God’s vision of male and female working together in harmony be our model and our guide.

For us, it means small, important things: thinking before we speak, wondering whether we are allowing each other equal air time, noticing our deep-seated cultural prejudices and assumptions about women, paying attention to the ways we talk and the ways we make decisions, and gradually learning to make room for all voices and all styles of expression.

But on a wider stage, just think how this vision of equality might play out! Once we recognise that all women, like all men, are made in the image of God, the ramifications are enormous. For women in sweatshops, women in the sex trade, women in violent relationships, public women who are ripped to shreds by the media, women who are blamed for their own rape, and so many others: to these women, what could it mean for us to stand up and say, you too are equal? Equally formed, and equally capable, and equally responsible, and equally precious to God?

On the sixth day, women and men were made in the image of God, called to be partners in God’s ongoing creative work. We will never get back to the garden; the way is barred. And yet we yearn for God’s original vision for us. And so, for the day when all people experience God’s radical and abundant love, and the pouring out of justice demanded by that love, we are called to work, and hope, and pray.

Notes:

1. See, for example, ‘…it is the part of man, with diligent care, to repel the woman that gives him wicked counsel; and woman, which gave that pestilent counsel to man, ought at all times to have the punishment which was given to Eve sounding in her ears.’ and ‘For nature has in all beasts printed a certain mark of dominion in the male and a certain subjection in the female, which they keep inviolate’ (John Chrysostom, 347-407, approx.); ‘Woman compared to other creatures is the image of God, for she bears dominion over them, but compared to man, she may not be called the image of God, for she does not bear rule or lordship over man, but obeys him’ (St Augustine, 354-430).

2. 2 Cor 11:3: ‘Just as the serpent deceived Eve by its cunning…’

3. 1 Timothy : Because of women’s role in the fall, women must be silent in the church and submissive to men, ‘For Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor.’ (1 Timothy 2:14).

4. Every woman killed in the Salem witch trials in Massachusetts held property independently of men.

5. For example, Jacob the Trickster.

6. Genesis 1:27:30