It’s often pointed out, with considerable solemnity
and an air of subtlety, that the Adam and Eve story has one character that’s a
male and one that’s a female. The clever interpreters who stumble onto this
fact will often go further and point out, with equal gravitas, which anatomical
features one should look for in identifying such a distinction. In this reading, the story’s sole purpose is
to prove the rather mundane fact that some people are boys and some are girls.
Its primary emphasis is that Adam and Eve were different from one another.
But examined a little more closely, a somewhat
obvious lesson on the different sexes really doesn’t seem to be where the story
wants to take us.
The story is set in motion by God’s statement (A):
“It’s not good that the human should be alone” and wraps up with the summary (B):
“And they were both naked and were not ashamed.” Point A sets up the problem,
loneliness; part B sets up the solution, naked togetherness. Everything else
must get us from point A to point B, and we’re going to need to follow whatever
trajectory the story has chosen to get us there.
Now, Adam’s name is a play on the Hebrew word adamah, meaning “earth” or “ground” or “land.”
God has brought Adam up from the adamah. But, at once, God recognizes
that something is missing, a partner. So God starts forming other creatures
from the adamah in an effort to find
a suitable partner or helper for Adam. Don’t
get caught up on implausibility of this exercise or God’s seeming incompetence,
thinking that these animals will fulfill Adam’s need for companionship (in
fairness, hindsight is 20/20). The point is that none of them are enough like
the man to make a suitable partner (v. 20).
Finally, and this is key, God gets the idea to take
a rib from the man’s side, a part of his own being, and forms the woman. Ironically,
given how this story has been appropriated in recent history, the man exclaims,
“This, at last, is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.” He’s not impressed
with how different the woman is from himself, there were plenty of creatures
that were different and none of them made for suitable partners. He’s impressed
with how she’s the same! Bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh. Only because she’s
enough like him to be a companion does she fulfill God’s initial concern, “it’s
not good that the man should be alone.”
This story is boring and adds nothing to simple
observation if all it’s about is the nuts and bolts of the different sexes. It
becomes very profound, though, if its point is that humans will now forever be
incomplete when they’re alone.
One continental philosopher called humanity a “being
toward death” and what he meant by this was that we’re creatures whose primary
occupation in life is death. We come preprogrammed with death on the horizon. That’s
not really the biblical view. In scripture death is an accidental result of
sin, not something fundamental to the creation. It would be more biblical to
call us a “being toward relationship.” We come preprogrammed for relationship
and we are incomplete, not whole persons, without it.
The level of intimacy
that exists between these two is shown in the last line that says, “They were
both naked and were not ashamed.”
If this is the ideal for human relationship, it seems
also to point to what God yearns for in God’s relationship with us. That we be
naked. That we be wholly vulnerable and intimate with nothing to hide.
Now, nudity is not the same thing as nakedness.
There is some crossover (thankfully), but you can be nude without being naked
(not sure if the reverse is true).
Nudity is fairly common in our society. The problem
with nudity, in my opinion, is not its lack of clothes. God didn’t make our
bodies so shamefully that they absolutely need to be covered up. The problem
with nudity is that it’s too simple a thing. At its most vulgar, it substitutes
voyeurism for intimacy. It reduces the
incalculable value of a person’s soul, the gestalt
of their mind, body, and spirit, to just their body. It reduces Adam to simple adamah. Voyeurism is the relational equivalent of philosophical
materialism. To the voyeur the human being is no more valuable than the dust
and earth from which it came.
Nakedness is very different than that. Nakedness
means more than just lacking any clothes (probably, not less). The ability to
be naked in the biblical sense is our ability to lay our souls bare before God
and before each other. Biblically, that’s all that God really wants from us. This is why repentance is so important. Repentance
is how we become transparent, we become open books so that true intimacy can
exist.
There is a clever play on words in the next part of
the Adam and Eve story. The Hebrew word for naked, arum in v. 25 is contrasted with the word arom, “shrewd” or “conniving,”
which describes the serpent in Gen. 3.1. I think we all know this from our
everyday interactions with other people, the opposite of being naked is being
guarded, wily, conniving, manipulative.
The serpent shows the humans how to be conniving,
how to hide secrets, how to have backdoor conversations, how to make
underhanded business dealings, how to present themselves publicly to make it
look as if they have nothing but benevolent motives, then manipulate the rest
of their community, exercising their own need to be in control. Worse, some of
them will get so good at guarding and hiding that they themselves won’t even
recognize that they’re doing it. They’ll “deceive [themselves] and the truth
won’t be in [them].”
Sure enough, on a casual stroll through the Garden
to check up on the humans, God is surprised and hurt to find out that the
humans have covered themselves up. They’re ashamed to be seen naked.
Our world is filled with people who are bent on
exposing someone else’s nudity but know next to nothing about nakedness. An all
too common example is the religious or political loud mouth, who, like so many
used cars, has traded in his or her spouse for a newer model, not once or twice
but multiple times, and then wants to pontificate to the rest of us about the
sanctity of marriage. But so few of us, in this world, have the courage to
really confess our own brokenness, the ways we’ve breached and abused and
neglected our own relationships. So few of us can really be naked to give
ourselves over and experience true unguarded intimacy with another human being.
I certainly struggle with nakedness. So for my part,
it would be nice if we could reduce Jesus’ demanding teaching on divorce (Mark
10.1-12) to a simplistic statement on pomp and ceremony or nuts and bolts. It
would be nice if the only relational issues that Jesus intended to comment on
here were those that didn’t apply to me (a once-married, heterosexual).
The problem is that Jesus doesn’t know when to stop.
He makes this broad sweeping statement about the brokenness of our human
relationships that hits close to home for pretty much all of us. It’s all fun
and games when Jesus comments on the relationships of people whose personal
lives I happen to disapprove of. But if he’s going to go and equate divorce
with adultery and adultery with simple lust, then, frankly, he’s starting to pry
a little bit too much for this privatistic, North American.
Jesus, you would have the nerve to comment on our
marriages of all things?
Jesus, you mean all the toxic words and the character
assassination that go along with a divorce…you don’t want God’s children to suffer
any of that?
Jesus, you mean you care about our relationships
sometimes even more than we do?
Jesus, you mean you equate lust with adultery so
that I can’t just point the finger at everyone else’s sexual immorality but
have to point first to my own lustful, adulterous eyes?
Jesus, you mean that in all our attempts to guard
and hide our flesh and our shame from one another, you would lay yourself bare
and exposed on the cross and give dignity to nakedness?
The Pharisees, both past and present, are absolutely
crazy if they really want to use this teaching, THIS TEACHING, on marriage and
divorce and adultery, to point their finger and cast a judgment on someone
else’s relationships. Really, this teaching? You want to hold to the
letter of the law on this teaching? I guess if you’ve never even lusted after
another human being, good job, you’re off the hook (though, I’d question how
much you’ve really lived). The rest of us are indicted here.
But remember that in Mark 10.1-12, Jesus isn’t
addressing a room full of public sinners, and lusters, and adulterers, and
divorcees. They already know how messy their lives are. At no point in any of
our Gospel’s, does Jesus ever take that group and rub their noses in their own
stuff like this.
Actually, Jesus is
talking to Pharisees, the hypocrites, the pious who made a big show of their
purity, claiming always to have looked to the side when a pretty girl walked by
on the sidewalk, implicitly casting the stone at everyone’s impurity but their
own.
At the root of it all, Pharisees are people who try
to solve the difficulties that come with human intimacy by cutting themselves
off from it entirely.
Kind of missing the forest for the trees then, aren’t
we? Intimacy isn’t the problem. Intimacy is the goal, God’s whole purpose in
creating us.
Still, the Pharisees would likely be thrilled if Jesus’
hard teaching on divorce and adultery were the end of the story. It’s not.
The larger story is about the God who yearned for love, for real, intimate relationship with the creatures…the creatures that became ashamed of their own
earthiness, the imperfections and eccentricities of their own flesh…the
creatures who then became wily and duplicitous trying to hide their true selves
from each other and from their God…the creatures that learned to point their
fingers and expose another’s nakedness to make themselves feel better about their
own…the one and only Son, who, instead of pointing his finger at another’s
nakedness, laid himself bare on a cross, and through the glory of humiliation
and the dignity of his own bareness, put an end to the shame and finger pointing…This
is the story of the one and only Son who made it okay to be human.
