Adam's Curse? - Androcentrism and Ecology
Reflection at Choral Evensong, Jesus College Chapel, Cambridge
This is a reflection I gave in the beautiful candlelit chapel of Jesus College, Cambridge during Choral Evensong on Sunday, 5th November, 2023.
Scripture readings: Genesis 3: 1-20; John 20: 11-18
For the order of service, please go to this link.
If you prefer to listen to this as a podcast, you can find an audio recording here:
The Book of Genesis attributes human suffering and alienation to a change in the order of knowledge, which suggests that being redeemed is a transformation in our ways of knowing. This means asking what afflicts us and prevents us from attaining the reconciling peace we yearn for. This is not escapism that masquerades as peace by refusing to confront the reality of violence. It’s not a cheap romanticism nor a new age fantasy, but a quest to inhabit our darkening world with a spirit of hope embodied in the risen Christ.
So I turn to Genesis to consider that mythical account of the loss of paradise and the ushering in of a history of gendered suffering and alienation. I then follow some patristic theologians in reading the account of Christ’s encounter with Mary of Magdala in John’s Gospel, as a recapitulation of the Genesis story of creation and the fall.
The Hebrew creation story is a poetic myth of origins which is repeated several times in different forms. This is too complex to unpack here, but it’s worth pointing out that the first human creature is not a man called Adam but a species of earthling whose generic name,’ādām, evokes associations with blood (dām) and soil (’ādāmāh). Sexual difference becomes significant when the woman (’iššâ) is created out of the man (’îš). In her influential reading of Genesis, biblical scholar Phyllis Trible points to the significance of naming in the relationship between the man and the woman. When she is first created, he recognizes her as woman – issa. Only after the fruit has been eaten does he name her. The Hebrew Bible uses a naming formula that implies ownership and domination. According to Trible’s interpretation, “Now, in effect, the man reduces the woman to the status of an animal by calling her a name. … Ironically, he names her Eve, a Hebrew word that resembles in sound the word life, even as he robs her of life in its created fullness.”[1] The Hebrew word translated as Eve is ḥawwāh.
The original harmony and interdependence of creation, when man and woman were in communion with one another, with nature, and with God, is shattered when a new form of knowledge enters human consciousness: the knowledge of good and evil, which brings with it the knowledge of certain death. This is the beginning of dualism, a world of antagonistic opposites setting humankind against God, man against woman, and the human against nature. The finite and fragile freedom accorded to the human in God’s very good creation is destroyed by a hubristic desire to breach all boundaries, to violate all prohibitions, to be as gods. We have been granted godlike power, but we are not gods, and this is a power too dark and dangerous for mortal beings. Now we find ourselves adrift and ashamed in a fractured and disorientating world. Each sex must struggle for survival against its own disordered desires and blighted consciousness. The woman’s relationship with her male companion becomes a masochistic craving for the man who rules over her, and the natural function of childbearing becomes a deadly affliction. For the man, earth is no longer a source of abundant nourishment and beauty but an accursed enemy that must be forced to yield up its meagre offerings by the sweat of his brow, and his endeavours are rendered futile by knowing that he will die.
Like a virus that multiplies at every level of existence, the knowledge of good and evil corrupts our innocence and gives us the capacity to blame and to shame, to judge and condemn, to conquer and dominate, to threaten and to kill. Every time a fist is raised, a threat is uttered, a gun is fired, a bomb is dropped, the consequences of original sin manifest themselves. Every time men glorify war and violence in the name of God, justify the domination of others in the name of a divinely mandated authority, violate the earth’s intrinsic dignity and sanctity in the name of their God-given mastery, the consequences of fallen knowledge parade themselves in the garments of imperial and blasphemous power. All this has been perpetuated by corrupted readings of Genesis.
Already in the Letter to Timothy we see the stern injunction from the Pauline author: “Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence. For Adam was first formed, then Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression.” (1 Tim. 2:11-14) There are glimmers of an entirely different order, for example in the baptismal formula in Galatians in which “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Gal. 3: 27-28). Here, in this non-hierarchical community of equals, we see what it means to be redeemed. But dualism and its attendant oppositions and hierarchies are deeply rooted in the order of knowledge. These powers have carved a highway through history, often masquerading in the name of Christ. Onward Christian soldiers.
Through all this there has also been the road less travelled, a rocky footpath trodden by those saints who walk with the victims in compassion, solidarity, and hope. These saints dwell quietly in our midst, and they are to be found in every parish and community. Like the description of Dorothea at the end of George Eliot’s Middlemarch, we might say of such people, “that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.” We must seek the meaning of redemption in lives such as these.
So how might we read John’s account of the resurrection as a reversal of Genesis 3, transforming dualistic violence into a reconciled relationship with one another, with nature, and with God? In the typological readings of the early Church, the texts of the Old Testament formed an interpretative framework for understanding the life of Christ. Here is St Peter Chrysologus writing in the fifth century about that text we heard in our second reading:
Mary came. This is the name of Christ’s Mother. Thus, in the name there came a Mother; there came a woman, to be the Mother of the living, who had become Mother of the dying, that it might be fulfilled what is written, This is the Mother of the living.[2]
The author of John’s Gospel tells us that the tomb had not been used before. It was customary in Jewish burials to reuse tombs for laying out the dead. (Jn 19:41) Nicodemus who brought herbs for embalming the body of Jesus was the same one who visited Jesus at night and was told that, in order to see the Kingdom of God, one has to be born again. (Jn 3; 19:39) In telling us all this, the Gospel author is inviting us to join the dots. The risen Christ, the new ’ādām, was rebirthed from the virgin earth – the new tomb – just as he had been birthed from the virgin’s womb, and just as the first ’ādām was created from the virgin earth. Virginity here doesn’t refer to sex but to the state of nature when it is free from all human interference, domination and corruption. We still speak of virgin forests and virgin soil. Creation is renewed from within when the earth gives birth to Christ.
Here, as in Genesis, both sexes are involved. There is a prohibition against touching, though this would be better translated as “do not cling to me”. There is also an act of naming. The woman is freed from the masochistic desire to cling to the man who lords it over her. Her name signifies recognition and restores to her the dignity that was taken from her when the man claimed the right to name as a right to own. And the one who has been silenced throughout history on account of Eve’s sin is given a voice of authority by God. Christ’s earthly life is book-ended by women’s preaching – by Mary’s Magnificat, and by Mary of Magdala’s commission to go and tell the good news. Mary of Magdala becomes the symbolic mother who gives birth to the new community of the redeemed when she announces news of the resurrection.
But the language of good and evil is still used to deadly effect by Christians to exclude, to condemn, and to punish. Anyone who follows social media will know that the evil other is everywhere, and every evil can be done to that other by those who claim to be on the side of good.
I read an article by Jonathan Freedland in last week’s Guardian, on reactions to the horrors unfolding in Israel and Gaza. He writes of the “binary thinking” that fuels the need “to see one side as all good and the other as all evil”. He writes,
the late Israeli novelist and peace activist Amos Oz was never wiser than when he described the Israel/Palestine conflict as something infinitely more tragic: a clash of right v right. Two people with deep wounds, howling with grief, fated to share the same small piece of land.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was martyred because of his opposition to Hitler. He reflected at length on the meaning of good and evil in the context of Genesis. The knowledge of good and evil gives rise to an idolatrous religion that substitutes conventional morality for the all-encompassing goodness and justice of God. That is why Bonhoeffer said that the first task of Christian ethics is to supersede that knowledge. The refusal to confuse faith with morals, the recognition that morally sanctioned respectability is no substitute for the radical faith of Christian discipleship, is a call to go beyond good and evil, to hear the howls of grief and see the deep wounds that turn septic with violence when they are left unattended.
Today, in this dark time, perhaps we are being called to sit with Mary of Magdala, weeping outside the tomb of the crucified God in the desolation and ruination of our world. Our tears are not in vain. Even now, he is seeding himself within this winter barrenness, and our tears of sorrow and repentance water the earth where green shoots of hope unfurl, like poppies flowering in the broken and war-torn soil.


[1] Phyllis Trible, ‘A Love Story Gone Awry’ in God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality (Philadelphia PA: Fortress Press, 1978): 72-143, p. 133.
[2] Peter Chrysologus, Serm. 64, quoted in T. Livius, The Blessed Virgin in the Fathers of the First Six Centuries, London, Burns and Oates Ltd.; New York, NY – Cincinnati, Chicago, IL, Benziger Brothers, 1893, p. 191.
A welcome reflection, Professor and timely invitation to peer into the chasm between Good and Evil; and worth every nano-moment we can snatch to engage with this thread. 👀🍁