Second Adam as Hero in Eden Turned Wilderness

1 Lent C March 9, 2025
Deut.26:1-11    Ps.91
Rom.10:5-13     Luke 4:1-13

Lectionary Link

The Gospels might be said to include the sub-genre known as the heroic. They are literary products and they are written in the discourse of the fantastic. They are literary parables of Jesus as the hero for people who never lived during the actual time of Jesus. The stories are drastically time-lapsed presentations the deed of greatness by the heroic stands alone for the persuasion efforts about the worshipfulness of the Risen Christ. The Gospel give us a very limited selection of stories about a man's life, so they are crafted with teaching for the persuasive teaching purposes found in the form of the written records which we have come to have. The Gospels serve as narrative teaching parables for the mystagogy of Paul and those who first wrote and preached, not because they actually saw Jesus, but because they were members of communities of people who confessed experiences of the sublime which came with the specific interpretations of being interior encounters with the Risen Christ or with the Spirit of the Risen Christ. In trying to teach about their mystical experiences, the Gospels appeared in communities to connect the experience of the Risen Christ with the heroic person of Jesus.

To tell the story of this heroic Jesus, the writers did what all writers do; they knew their audience and they borrowed the vocabulary and the genres which are available to them to persuade about what for them was their highest insight of life, namely, their experience of the Risen Christ. Their goal was to persuade others about what they had already become persuaded about, namely, their experience of the Risen Christ. Ironically, the very word for faith or belief, is the Greek word pistos which in Aristotle's Rhetoric means persuasion. The Gospels are persuasive writings about what they were persuaded about. This is literally the dynamic of the New Testament Greek word for faith, pistos, which means persuasion in classical Greek.

The Gospel writers were using persuasive language appropriate to their era to be persuasive about that which they were persuaded about. The great heroes that were known from the Hebrew Scriptures had fantastic stories written about them. The Greco-Roman context from which the Gospels were written included the traditions deriving from Homer and Virgil who integrated heroic presentations of Roman Caesars with their interactions with the various deities including their deifications and their eventual designations as sons of gods. When contrasting heroes the hero sub-genre was a culturally received mode of presentation.

The Gospel writers made use of the existing models for the presentations of heroes while being inventively unique for their own persuasive and teaching purposes with their communities. They were practiced rhetoricians who studied the heuristics of their time for being able to persuade for their preaching and writing occasions.

How did Jesus become the Risen Christ known to Paul and to the Gospel writers communities? How was the mystical experience of the Risen Christ going to be connected with an understanding of the person of Jesus who was known in varying ways by Peter and James and others?

The Gospels are thus teaching parables about Jesus who achieved more fame and notoriety in his afterlife as the Risen Christ than he would have had in his actual life in his limited location in Palestine.

How does the story of the temptation of Jesus get told using the symbols within the existing cultural contexts? And how are those symbolic meanings found in the presentation of the temptation of Jesus by Satan which we read on this first Sunday in Lent? And what are the teaching insights that we might be able to translate from the ancient contexts into our postmodern lives because we believe that words have the ability to bear our projected interpretations upon them to inform how we choose to live our lives now?

Adam is the symbol of the first child or son of God. For St. Paul we are all like Adam the first son of God in that we fail in significant moral tests which come to us in life. And the accrued failures of being like Adam are so massive, it would seem like that we and our world is doomed to drastic failure. How can this great pattern of failure and the mis-timings of doing things at the wrong time in the wrong way ever be interdicted?

The story of the Garden of Eden includes the features about how a created being of God, and a permitted agent of God, the serpent was a superior trickster within a perfect environment but such perfect environment only included good people, who were not yet persons of mature completeness. Adam and Eve were naively innocent who could be tricked out of following the maturational path to mature completeness which God meant for them. This story itself should not be used as a literal cause and effect event; rather it is a parable by wisdom writers who was trying in story form to provide insights in how everyone fails in passing from child-like non-culpable innocence to be culpable guilty offending adults. The Garden of Eden story is in part a story about the mystery of human agency as moral beings.

In biblical cosmology, the assumption is that we're causally in this altogether in a kind of cosmic symbiosis. Because Adam and Eve fail in their efforts to be responsible moral beings as prescribed by their creator parent; the rest of creation responds by taking on the human failure and voila, we as imperfect adults live in an imperfect world. Imperfect people only spoil the perfect world of innocence.

Biblical writers often express the hope and longing for getting back to the Garden, even with fantastic utopian presentations of lion and lamb being playmates with the ending of preditor-prey relationships. The prophet aspire for a new age and this gave rise to what we call the apocalyptic intervention. John the Baptist, Jesus, and St. Paul all had the meaning of their mission formed within apocalyptic aspiration for a catastrophic intervention.

The Gospel writers knew that they didn't live in Eden anymore and hadn't ever done so; they lived under the oppressive conditions of the Roman Empire which had the collateral suppression effect of being the Pax Romana, the peace of a big bouncer Empire maintaining public order to allow the functions of life.

Knowing that they didn't live in the Garden of Eden, the Gospel writers told about a heroic revisit to the spoiled Garden of Eden, now a wilderness inhabited by the wild beasts who are not friendly to each other or to human beings. The wilderness might be a metaphor for the human condition of the wildness of probabilities. How do we live with the uncertainties of anything that could happen? We need a hero guide to carve a path for us to live in the wilderness to survive live with the results of the harsh collisions among probable occurrences which can harm us in various ways.

The temptation story about the hero Jesus is a story about Jesus as the second Adam returning to the metaphorical site of the original failure, and making the right choices, at the right time, in the right way, by resisting the trickster now known to be great Accuser, Satan. And this hero Jesus also gave the trickster an edge; he purposely weaken himself by fasting for forty days. Our hero made himself most vulnerable and which only enhances his victory in his heroic clash with Satan.

The temptation of the first Adam was not about whether fruit from a tree was bad or whether moral beings should know the difference between good and evil, or whether they could ultimately eat from the tree of life in the middle of the Garden; the issue was about obedience to God in the timing of moral education as to eating, knowing good and evil and being brought in good timing to partake of the tree of life. The insight from the story of the Garden of Eden is that humanity fails to find the best timing in our moral education and in our trial and errors, our errors end up accumulating to the point of overwhelming us so that we in fact need the enforcement of the law to teach us.

The Garden of Eden story indicates that the human condition of our errors is juxtaposed with our basic goodness because God does not make mistakes unless one would regard creating free agents to be a mistake. The dilemma is that freedom is so wonderfully good that it has resulted in the manifold range of probable outcomes, some of which are wonderful and some horrific, if not evil.

How do we live now with the wilderness, the wildness of our own interior lives as we try to articulate in word and deed the best way to live? I believe that the story of the temptation of Jesus is a hero story of Jesus, the second Adam, dealing with the interior life as the wilderness. Our interior lives can be a wilderness, a kind of devil's playground, as interior forces within us influence how we come to express agency in our lives as words and deeds.

The temptation themes provide insight for us on features of our own interior dynamics which influence us in how we come to express our agency in words and deeds.

Ideal human agency has to do with saying and doing the right things at the right time. We get in trouble when we have mistiming in our words and deeds of human agency.

Temptation is about getting us to mistime how we fulfill our bodily needs. Temptation is about how we choose to use and interpret language. Temptation can be about how and when we die. Temptation can be about choices we make to experience personal esteem. Satan, the trickster and interior accuser psychical feature within Jesus and us, tried to get Jesus to mistime these crucial facets of his life.

Everyone needs food, drink, clothing and the physical necessities of life. The timing of how we use the provision is a major issue of life. Mistiming can lead to gluttony, drunkedness, addiction, and greed. Satan wanted to get Jesus to depart from his fasting and self-control; Jesus affirmed that the self-control facet of his life was governed by God's word. We need higher insights to teach us good timing in organizing the things we need for life for our healthy benefit and for the ideal benefit of the common good. We need the organizing principle of God's word to inform our timing in the use of the wonderful provisions of life. Fasting is ability to have regulating self-control in how we use the materials of our lives. The church recommends fasting as a way to exercise our self-control muscles for the enlightened use of the good provision of life, particularly as we make sure that everyone has enough.

Another thing that we need good timing on is when to be literal and when to be metaphorical in our language. Satan tried to get Jesus to understand the poetry of the Psalms as being a literal invitation for Jesus to leap from a tall place to prove that God's angels would allow the laws of gravity to be violated. This could be understood as a tricking Jesus to die before his appointed time. You and I need to learn in our language use when to be literal and when to be poetic and metaphorical. And we need to have dying a good death, not a self chosen early death, as a goal in the good timing choices of our lives.

A basic issue of life is esteem. The biblical view of human esteem is that it comes from the realization of being made in the image of God as God's child. Adam as representing any human being experienced sin as a forgetting of his heritage as a son of God. Sin is living as though we don't belong to God. The temptation of Jesus is presented after his baptism when the heavenly voice declared him to be the beloved Son. A major temptation in life is to seek esteem wrongly. One of the great drugs of humanity is the false esteem which we call fame. People can excessively want fame as a barometer of their sense of esteem. Satan promised to give Jesus the fame of having everyone adore him but it would come at the price of worshipping the prince of lies and darkness. Jesus knew the foundational esteem of being God's beloved Son, and as he was true to his heritage he would receive recognition, not that would come for some narcissistic ego trip, but the recognition that comes from benefiting many, many, lives. Living in the esteem of being the children of God, we know that healthy recognition comes from being beneficial in helpful ways to other.

Let us on this first Sunday in Lent work on the good timing our lives following the insights of our hero Jesus in his temptation by Satan. Let us adopt the fasting lifestyle of self-control for the regulation of life provision for ourselves and for the common good. Let not be tricked into literalism when we need to appreciate poetry; let us not be poetic about food for souls, but be very literal about the people who actually need to be fed. Let us live so as to arrive at the good timing for good deaths and fulfill our callings. And let us anchor our egos not on the drug of popularity and social fame; but let the image of God upon our lives as God's child be a profound event of esteem because we know that God loves us, and Jesus as God's unique Son, show us how to live in good timing of our lives as God's children. Amen.