To Adam he said, "Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, 'You must not eat of it,' "Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return." (Gen 3:17-19 NIV)
This text is usually interpreted to mean that men should not listen to women, for look what happened to the first man when he listened to a woman! But the interpretation misses the point. The point is that Adam had earlier blamed God for giving the woman to be with him - had the woman never existed, he wouldn’t have taken the fruit and everything would have been just fine! To this God responds, “Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree, the ground will be cursed because of you.” There would be no passing of blame; everyone, including the first man, would have to accept and live with the consequences of the entrance of sin in to the world. And so we have.
The entrance of sin has complicated more than one thing in the world. Because what we see is a distortion of the world as God created it, a lot of things that are evil are called good. Rob Bell writes in Love Wins, A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate or Every Person Who Ever Lived:
Do you know any individuals who grew up in a Christian church and then walked away when they got older? Often pastors and parents and brothers and sisters are concerned about them and their spirituality – and often they should be. But sometimes those individuals’ rejection of church and the Christian faith they were presented with as the only possible interpretation of what it means to follow Jesus may in fact be a sign of spiritual health. They may be resisting behaviors, interpretations, and attitudes that should be rejected. Perhaps they simply came to a point where they refused to accept the very sorts of things that Jesus would refuse to accept. [i]
Could it be that the church has mingled truth with error to such a degree that people must leave to find the truth? Consider for example one of the many interpretations of the effects of the first disobedience: Should women confine themselves to their homes while the men go out to the world as breadwinners in order to re-create the blissful garden? First of all, there was no bread to be won in the garden; there were a lot of trees – the first man and woman had to only reach out and take the first fruit they saw. Secondly, there was no home to be made. The woman roamed the garden as freely as the man for there was no housework. What we today call “God’s design” appeared with sin as the eviction of our first parents from the garden made us responsible for the things once given to us freely by God.
... which brings us to the thorns and thistles. The once fertile soil began to produce weeds; wheat would appear only if the soil was cultivated carefully. The garden that had been a place of leisure and pleasure, not work, was lost and exchanged with a world filled with hard labor and grief. Ever since, humankind, that once enjoyed the blissful existence of plenty, has had to daily walk the tightrope between enough and not-enough. Starvation, disease, death; we know them all too well. And if we happen to belong to the Bottom Billion, they are our constant companions. But what has the church to say about all of this? Do we hear the ceaseless call to feed the poor and the hungry? Not really. Instead we are like the old Romans – we outdo each other building larger, ever grander mansions in which God does not dwell. And out the backdoor leaves yet another faithful who couldn’t find in her Bible the call to build yet another house for God, but who heard the gentle whisper of finding God in the least - impacting instead of impressing.
Now, that’s a thing Jesus would accept, just as he has always accepted all women and men who have challenged the dogmas of their times in order to remain faithful to God - not the church.
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