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Is Your Sin Original?

Lent 1 : 9 March 2014  : Genesis 2: 7-9. 3: 1-7 , Romans 5: 12-19

We enjoyed our visit by the Bishop last Sunday, and we got the impression that he enjoyed being here. Of all the Episcopal duties laid upon him there is one that is mercifully absent, that was a requirement of St Augustine of Hippo. In the Roman world getting access to cheap, fast justice was a major problem. Many people, including pagans, brought their cases to Christian Bishops, mutually agreeing to abide by their arbitrating decisions. There were many, many of these cases, and they took up most mornings of his working days. The repetitiveness, the triviality, and the mendacity of many of these cases would have revealed human nature at its most depressing, and would have led to a jaundiced view of the generality of humankind.

The other eroder of faith in human nature would have been the disappointments that inevitably come from a long Episcopal ministry, to do with church fights, clergy scandals and money worries.

Augustine was a passionate man with an acute insight into human behaviour. He could see that we seldom make clear, rational choices, because we are just not built that way. Desire is what drives our actions, and our hope for the delight that will follow from getting what we want. Feelings come first with us, but our choices and our desires and our feelings are clouded and confused. Usually we have mixed motives, and sometimes our choices are perverse and self-destructive. We are influenced by many lives that have gone before us, who have shaped our moral horizons and our behavioural expectations for good or ill in ways that we are often unaware of. Maybe we have chosen Christ, but there are vast areas of our psychic hinterland that remain unconverted, and pretty greedy, lustful, and vengeful to boot.

The two books of the Bible that Augustine loved the most were Genesis and the epistle to the Romans, so he laid this morning’s first two readings end on end to produce a doctrine called original sin. It contained a bleakly pessimistic assessment of human nature. He argued that the Fall had very serious consequences for us. Human knowledge of God has been clouded, and the will has been damaged to the point where we cannot make good choices on our own anymore. Human freedom is now extremely limited, in fact it may not exist in any real sense, because all human choices are deceptive. The division between feelings, will, and action cripples our decision-making capacities, and many complicated cross currents disrupt and confuse human choices. We cannot even choose God unless God’s grace powerfully gives us a shove in that direction in the first place. What is more this state of original sin is sexually transmitted, a curse laid on us at the moment of our conception.

Master psychologist that he was, Augustine had failed to read Romans 5:12 accurately. In coming to terms with the contrast between the first Adam and Christ as the last Adam it would have been more helpful to have lined this text up with what Paul had to say in 1 Corinthians 15 about the resurrection from the dead.

But to go one step back from that, the Rabbis in Paul’s time had divided into two camps in their opinion of what Genesis had to say about the connection between Adam and sin. One school idealised the first Adam, believing him to be one hundred feet tall, covered in natural body armour, an immortal creature. The Fall, and the introduction of sin, had brought death into the world, fatally limiting this wonderful creature to our limited life span, chopping him down to our size, and reducing his body armour just to the finger nails that we now have. The other rabbinic school of Scriptural opinion had not given sin that much weighting. Right from the start human beings were creatures of dust, destined to die. Paul saw things this way too, and argued in 1 Corinthians 15 that what Christ as the last Adam does is to resurrect us from the dust, to reassemble us in our spiritual bodies, free from the limitations of sin.

And that is where the temptations of Christ in the wilderness comes in. Here his obedience to the Father is clearly revealed, his firm no to sin opens up a way of hopefulness for us. As Brendan Byrne movingly puts it:

The obedience displayed in one human life gave expression to a divine love capable of overcoming and setting in reverse the whole destructive history of sin and selfishness from the beginning to the end of time–In Adam, as first ancestor, is told the "sin" story of the entire race – a story that leads to death. In Christ, as "Last Adam," is told the equally wide-ranging "grace" story, one that leads to the fullness of humanity intended by the Creator from the start. Both "stories" run in human lives and human society down to the end of time.

Here in the wilderness we see Christ wading into the strong, dark current of human sinfulness and reversing it. Now the current is flowing the other way because the model human life that represents God’s best hopes for us has said no to the seductive temptations that are put before supremely effective spiritual leaders.

In this season of Lenten hopefulness we are being invited to come to terms with the radical selfishness, otherwise known as sin, as it works itself out in the particularities of our personalities. For each one of us there will be an issue calling out for attention, and for action. In doing something about this we will need the acute insights of Augustine into what drives us to do the self defeating things that we do. We will also benefit from the way he confidently expected Divine grace to kick-start our apprentice ship in Christian living – as he pointed out it is comparatively rare for people to sort themselves out by pulling themselves up by their own boot straps.

But we could do without his radical pessimism about human nature. The trouble with the doctrine of total depravity is that it tends to leave people passive in the face of their own shortcomings – "I am so bad that only God’s grace can rescue the situation." There is in fact just enough freedom left in us to choose to go with God, and his life giving ways of restoration. We are frail creatures of dust, here only for a short time, but there is also something rather splendid about us. Even those who live without God often choose to live in impressively unselfish ways, a point I have always wanted to make to Augustine. And what Christ did in the wilderness was to get sin and evil on the run, to open up a contra direction in the flow of human experience and expectation. He had seen personified evil off, and would do so again, and he had done it by turning the bankrupt logic of temptation on its head. He has now opened up the way for us to take action, to get cracking, to have the resolved confidence to get our Lenten spring-cleaning under way.

To what extent will this be our grit and determination, or God’s powerful transforming grace? The disciples of St Augustine and his near contemporary John Cassian could argue about this until the cows come home. But John Cassian said something that I will be using to my benefit this Lent:

God is not only the suggester of what is good, but the maintainer and insister of it, so that sometimes he draws us towards salvation even against our will and without our knowing it.