Sunday School Lessons

Recently we decide to start attending church again, primarily to give the children some sort spiritual groundwork that they can choose to build on, or not, as they get older. While not a spectacular Christian, my own Christian upbringing ensured I would best be able to guide them from a Christian perspective. Finding a church in Texas to go to is not hard, there is one on every corner it seems, finding one that is open minded, liberal, if you will, and large enough to have a good pool of both adults and children with out being too big is problematic. None-the-less we eventually found one, and in the spirit of joining also took part in adult Sunday school. In one such class, we were discussing the devil, the snake in the garden and such topics when the assoc. pastor commented that Gen. 3.16 should be struck from the bible, and I have been mulling on the ever since.

Gen. 3:16 says “Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire [shall be] to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.” I find myself asking the question, what has happened here? What does it mean to say that Adam is condemned to toil and sweat in the fields of the earth and Eve is to suffer the pain of childbearing? Are these punishments for sin? In that case, then would the removal of sin (i.e. from baptism) remove their suffering?

Consider Adam and Eve's life in the Garden before they ate from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Adam's job was to work the garden (Gen. 2.15) and Eve's to Bear Children (Gen. 1.28), they are no strangers to these tasks. However the nature of these tasks is fundamentally altered once they eat of the forbidden fruit. God condemns them to pain and suffering specifically when performing these very tasks. But in what way? The earth still needs to be toiled, children to be reared, thus what seems to have changed is not the nature of our existence, but rather our perception of it. Existence has become painful. God's remarks might be understood as him saying, "you are going to have to do the job you did before, but now it is going to hurt." Instead of cultivating the Garden of Eden, Adam now has to toil and work in the field. He is still doing the same job but his perception of his existence has changed. It has become painful.

The idea that Adams perception of his existence has changed is evident in the previous passages. Certainly it is suggested that Adam's perception has changed by eating the forbidden fruit. Once the fruit has been eaten, Adam becomes ashamed; he detects God in the garden and hides. Why is he ashamed? He is naked, and he is aware that he has not followed the edict of God. Adam has eaten of the fruit and has failed to obey the Lord. Adam has failed God, and what is more, Adam had failed specifically to nurture his spiritual relationship with god. He has become spiritually bankrupt, and for this, he is ejected from the garden. Do we imagine weeds and thorns to have suddenly sprung up to torture Adam? More likely, Adam's sufferings tied to weeds and thorns reflects his subjective experience as a person who is suffering spiritually. Spiritually defunct, Adam experiences the world as one of frustrations and suffering, the wages of an unrealized spiritual life.

As Adams perception of the world has changed, his perception of the world reflects his inner, spiritual loss. Consider also his progeny. Both Cain and Able are farmers, and both have very different perceptions of their relationship with God, Cain looks for acceptance from God while Able seems to have already found his. Again their relationships with God seem to be reflected in their relationships with the earth. Abel praises the Lord and cultivates an abundant harvest while Cain has an adversarial relation and is cursed from the earth. (Gen. 4.11)

Finally, consider the words of the Lord. "From dust you came, and from dust you will return." This passage seems to make the connection that our relationship with God is mirrored in our relationship with the earth. We often think of death as a return to heaven, and substitute the word "dust" for "god" or "heaven" as in "from god you came, and from god you will return." But this is not what God says; rather our suffering and our death are uniquely tied to our existence on the earth. Another way of looking at it is, you will suffer, but you will not suffer forever, you will die, and your death will end your suffering. Our mortality and suffering, then, is not the result of sin, but of nature. And our death will relieve us of this suffering, just as our body will dissolve back into the earth, not from sin, but by our own mortal nature.

Then what of Eve’s plight? What I think is being described is nothing short of the ugly conflict between the male and female that has marked so much of human history. Previously I mentioned Cain and Able, look at the parallel between Gen. 3:16 and Gen. 4:7. This comparison is not new, people have noted the similarities between these passages for ages. In 3:16 God says to the woman, "Your desire is for your husband, and he shall rule over you." In 4:7 God says to Cain, "Sin's desire is for you, and you shall rule over it." The desire in 3:16 might be read as sin, especially when compared to 4:7. Desire in the Hebrew might be translated meaning, "to urge, drive on, or impel. 4:7 says that the sin in Cain's heart threatens to overpower him. Likewise in 3:16 we see something similar. "Your desire shall be for your husband," suggests that sexual union has been tainted by their sin of disobedience to God, sexual union will be both painful and oppressive, whether in the form of a woman's desire for her man or a man's desire to rule over her. Both Men and Women have become depraved and corrupted by sin, first in rebellion against God, and then in exploitation of each other.

I agree that this passage is troubling, and it continues to trouble me, even as the grief it has caused many has certainly taken its toll. Perhaps it is because this passage points out our vulnerability that we in turn should become so vulnerable to it.