000 Allen FMT (i-xxii) - The Presbyterian Leader

32 First Sunday in Lent/Year A
had legs when it was in the garden. The serpent’s craftiness is evident in
the fact that it does not directly tempt the woman but takes the indirect
approach of asking a question to which she knows the correct response
(Gen. 3:1–3).
The serpent then reveals how creatures sometimes become misguided.
It offers the woman as a good something that is actually bad by promising
that the couple will not die but that their eyes will be opened and they will
“be like God, knowing good and evil” (3:4–5). The woman wants things
that she believes are good: nourishing and good-tasting food, beauty, and
wisdom, but she thinks that to get them she must cross a boundary that
God has set (3:6a). Had the couple turned the snake away, they would have
had the very things with which the snake tempted them.
The woman is sometimes blamed for taking the forbidden fruit. However,
the man was present, did not resist, cooperated freely in the eating,
and is therefore equally responsible. To make humorous remarks about
the woman and the fruit only reinforces a negative caricature that damages
women.
When they ate, the serpent’s prophecy came partly true. Their eyes
were opened, but instead of seeing the serpent’s promises fully realized,
they immediately beheld their nakedness and became ashamed. Moreover
they received decision-making power that could now curse as well as bless.
They did not lose the capacity to participate with God in blessing, but
henceforth, individuals and communities have had to attempt to discern
the way of blessing from the way of curse, and suffer the consequences of
the latter.
The readings for today explain why the world is not the superabundant
realm of natural fertility, covenantal community, and justice pictured in
both Genesis 1:3–2:4a and the Edenic world of Genesis 2:18–24 (Proper
22/Year B): creatures presumed for themselves roles belonging to God.
The story of Genesis 2 is a paradigm of how temptation operates in the
world: by offering us as blessing (good) things that really lead to curse
(evil). The latter story presses a pastoral question. How do we creatures
today encounter the serpent’s lure to claim for ourselves things that rightly
belong to God?
These latter qualities make a thematic connection between this story
and that of the temptation in Matthew 4:1–11. For while the serpent of
Genesis is not the devil of Matthew, both are creatures who offer Jesus
(and us) penultimate possibilities in the guise of the ultimate.
Jewish reflection in the Hellenistic age sometimes identified the serpent
with Satan (e.g., Wis. 2:24; Rev. 12:9–15; 20:2; Lev. R. 26; Fathers