The Second Adam
10 February 2008
Lent takes us to the Cross, through death to life, and so to our participation in the resurrection of Christ, the Easter victory. It is this new life, the life of baptism, the life of the Spirit, for which Lent is to prepare us. Because Lent is, or should be, about a renewal of ourselves, mind, body and soul, it should not surprise us that the Church points us, on this first Sunday, to the place of our origins, to Eden, and to the creation of our first human parents. John Donne sees the symmetry between our beginning – in the Garden – and the place of our new beginning – on the Cross - in his Hymn to God my God, in my Sickness:
We think that Paradise and Calvary, Christ’s Cross, and Adam’s tree, stood in one place;
Look, Lord, and find both Adams met in me;
As the first Adam’s sweat surrounds my face,
May the last Adam’s blood my soul embrace.
The poet is writing out of that great insight of St Paul’s theological imagination which gives this sermon its title, and which understands Adam to be the representative of the old humanity, just as Christ is the representative of the new, a second Adam. The word representative, however, won’t quite do, because it might lead us to think that there is something merely exemplary about the way in which we relate to Adam, and to Christ; as if the former simply showed us the wrong way to go about things, and the latter a much better one. No, there is a solidarity between ourselves and Adam; we are one with him by nature, we stand where he stood. (Donne picks up the theme with that marvellous and uncompromising image of how his face is surrounded by Adam’s sweat.) Likewise, though this time not because of our nature, but by grace and the sacraments, we are one with Christ. We share the same humanity which God, in Christ, has now made his own, which he has received from Mary. We inhabit the flesh and blood once made in Adam and made anew in Christ. The second century bishop and teacher S Irenaeus famously speaks of Christ recapitulating the life of Adam, walking over the same ground a second time, but this time in loving obedience to the Father, as the temptation narratives in particular illustrate. That sense of Jesus occupying the same space in which Adam dwelt, is given fresh force in Donne’s appeal to the ancient tradition that the Tree of Calvary was ‘planted’ on the very spot where once the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil grew.
We have no choice about our solidarity with the old Adam: and that is, quite simply, what the church is trying to articulate when she teaches the doctrine of original sin. Let me teach you, brothers and sisters in the Lord, a little bit about sin. The doctrine of original sin – properly understood – is surely the most generous, humane and compassionate of theological anthropologies which ever might have been devised. As Chesterton wrote, it releases ‘a thunder of laughter and pity.’ Laughter, because only a fool could not laugh when confronted with the unerring capacity for all humanity – you, me, parents, tutors, learned doctors of divinity, medicine, the law, Ministers of the Crown, bishops.. – to make the wrong choice rather than the right, and to do so consistently and habitually; pity, because it means that when we come across the deadbeat, the dropped-out, the drunken failure, the has-been and the never-will-be (and we might not have very far to look), we must pause for a moment before condemning, before saying with a shrug, there we are, it’s all their own fault. The doctrine of original sin does not excuse us from the consequences of our actions, for the church teaches freedom and responsibility too; if I steal your glass of sherry from under your nose after this Mass, I cannot say, I am sorry, it was original sin that made me do it; you could still feel justified in punching me on the nose (though I wouldn’t recommend it.) But to believe in the reality of original sin is to put the whole of our capacity to choose, our ability to know right from wrong in every circumstance and to act accordingly, into a new context: that of accepting that our choices are inevitably compromised, always flawed. Mr Brown may have confidence in his ‘moral compass’: Christians have, or should have, rather more realism and humility than such a comment suggests. The doctrine of original sin pricks the bubble of pomposity and deflates the swollen ego. It points out how it is that our highest aspirations are somehow alloyed to baser instincts, such that the result is the extraordinary dilemma of humanity, capable of so much that is sublime and so much that is grotesque and depraved.
The writer of the book Genesis gives us, brilliantly, a cameo of how all we humans – represented in the story by Adam – came to be where we are, such that we can talk sensibly about the whole idea of original sin. Contrary to what many non-Christians (and perhaps not a few Christians as well) mistakenly believe, Genesis does not tell us – and the Church does not teach and never has taught – that sin came into the world through sexual appetite or sexual activity; although the disordering of the mutual harmony of the sexes, and the disordering of sexual desire such that it can become a means of sinning, is one of the consequences of the fall. No, the first sin – as Aquinas teaches – is superbia, the sin of pride. The serpent tempts Eve with the promise that, if she eats, she will be like God. The fault is essentially that of presumption, of mankind’s overreaching itself, taking to itself the gifts and prerogatives which are God’s alone. God provided for the first humans all things necessary for them to attain to the highest good which God willed for them, and to do so according to their own, human, nature: the fall is a consequence, we might say, paraphrasing Aquinas, of that wrongful desire on humanity’s part to seek to short-cut God’s purposes, of giving in to ambitions which formed no part of the providential vision: of seeking to be angels rather than men.
On Easter night, in a darkened church lit only by the light of the Paschal, or Easter Candle – the symbol of the risen Christ – the Deacon sings an ancient hymn of praise, beginning, Rejoice, in Latin, Exultet, from which the hymn takes its name. In the course of his chanting, the deacon will use one of the most significant little phrases in all the liturgy, when he sings of the felix culpa, the happy fault, of Adam’s sin. This phrase might justifiably prompt some questions. What can be happy about the entrance of sin into the world, and the consequent separation of man from God? Why should Adam’s fall form any part of an Easter hymn of thanksgiving and rejoicing? The fallen angels, God abandoned to their fallen state. But in order to restore mankind, God took upon himself human nature, in order that we might not simply be restored to where we were – put back in the Garden of Eden – but to be bring us into a new and deeper unity with himself. Theologians have differed over whether, had Adam not sinned, God would still have become incarnate. We do not need to have a definite answer to that question in order to be clear – as the Church confidently teaches – that the good wrought by the redemption of humanity in Christ is infinitely greater than the evil brought about by the fall.
But we must also be clear that mankind fallen and redeemed differs from mankind in its first innocence. As I said just now, it is not simply that we are put back in the Garden of Eden; we are brought to a new place, represented in the Scriptures not by a garden, but by a city – the New Jerusalem. As Fr Seville said so clearly last Sunday, the coming of Christ does not eliminate suffering – it allows suffering and holiness to touch. Neither, as a moment’s reflection on experience tells us, does it eliminate sin. Here, Lent can really help us. We have no choice, you might recall me saying a few moments ago, about our solidarity with the Adam. But we do have a choice about how we respond to the love of God and the possibility of salvation held out to us through the birth, death and resurrection of Jesus. We need to tread carefully here. Salvation is God’s work, God’s gift, and nothing we can do – no Lenten penances or deprivations, no additional devotions however fervent or frequent – can earn it. Catholics, particularly, can still be prone to treating the exercise of piety as if it were a way of winning God’s favour. Nevertheless, while the initiative is God’s, the freedom to respond, or not, is ours; indeed, God has freely chosen to associate us with his own work of his grace, with his purposes for our redemption. While we can do nothing unless we are led by the Spirit preventing – that is to say, going before – us, it is possible, by the exercise of our wills, not to capitulate to every temptation to sin which comes our way.
And come such temptations surely do, as we all know. The church has a word for this ‘weakness’ for sin to which we remain prone, and which Christ’s redeeming work has not caused to be abolished in us. The word is concupiscence, and, technical a term though it be, it is very useful. It explains why, even as followers of Christ, baptised, confirmed, communicant, (even ordained), we seem able – in Oscar Wilde’s phrase – to resist everything except temptation. Lent offers us a real chance to have a go at making that act of will – effortful, conscious – which is entailed in resisting our habitual sins.
If we go back to the story of Adam and Eve, we will find a very helpful guide to concupiscence from which we can learn. Do you recall the three things which motivate Eve to listen to the serpent and take the fruit? She sees that it is good for food; that it is a delight to the eyes; that it was to be desired to make one wise. Here, in ascending order of gravity, are three kinds of sin which we can ask for grace to overcome this Lent. The first kind is also the least serious: what we can call the sins which are more associated with our animal nature – gluttony and the like. To quote Chesterton again, the best way of giving thanks for Burgundy is not to drink too much of it; restraint is the proper manner of expressing gratitude. Lent offers us the opportunity to practise restraint, that we might learn thankfulness. The middle sort of sin – represented by Eve’s finding the fruit ‘a delight to the eyes’ – is more insidious: it is to do with covetousness of things and people, giving in to the thrill of acquisition and control. Drooling over the property pages of the Sunday Times, or the latest catalogue from Mr Luzar, as much as older kinds of pornography, is to be tempted, like Eve, by what is a delight to the eyes. Lent is a time for the exercise of chastity, of not indulging our appetites for goods and commodities, in whatever guise they come. Finally, there is the most dangerous kind of sin, characterised by the wrong exercise of the mind and spirit rather than the body or passions. Jealousy – why can’t I be like God? – and resentment – who is God to tell me what to do? – result in Eve’s disobedience. In Lent, we are called to school our pride and learn humility: and it hurts. (Though which of us does not begin by thinking, humility, oh yes that’s my strong suit…)
As we try to balance God’s initiative and our response, the call to holiness and the struggles and inevitable failures in answering that call which we shall experience, let us end with the Gospel. The mercy of God is greater by far than the sinfulness of men. When we fail we know that there is one who has been tested, and has resisted, and who has remained obedient, even unto death, that Second Adam, "who to the fight / and to the rescue came". Newman takes us back to John Donne: Look, Lord, and find both Adams met in me. Or, as one of the founders of this House put it in this hymn:
Look, Father, look on his anointed face,
And only look on us as found in him;
Look not on our misusings of thy grace,
Our prayer so languid and our faith so dim:
For lo! Between our sins and their reward
We set the Passion of thy Son our Lord.
Father Jonathan Baker Principal