Everyone Forgets The Part About Creation Being Cursed
On The Gap Between What We Want and What We Get
Continued notes on scarcity and how we forget about it.
The Mysterious Disappearing Genesis 3:17-19
Annie Dillard’s haunting meditation Pilgrim at Tinkers’ Creek is one which stays with me, even as I stand in front of my wonderful office window, which remains shrouded in trees both summer and winter. It stays with me as we paddle on kayaks along Texas waterways, and delve into the forests teeming with life.
The Scriptures present this puzzle to us repeatedly: famines, floods, plagues—all signs of something in nature proliferating without end, but doing so in a mismatch of human need.
Such themes are not popular to talk about. More frequently, we love stories in which creation provides what we desire, and then some. Robin Wall Kimmerer, in her new book The Serviceberry, builds her case for human reciprocity and generosity off of the example of a berry which performs multiple functions in the natural world. By contrast, the witness which Dillard brings up is a disquieting one, formed by simply asking why frogs lay piles of eggs which are destined to be pillaged by fish and other frogs.
Walter Brueggemann, of blessed memory, frequently treated manufactured scarcity as the villain of the spiritual life, scarcity as a problem of our own making and nothing natural. The prophets, he rightly point out, chastise the people for theft, greed, and overconsumption. These sins are made all the more poignant for him by the fact that the world is given to us in abundance. As Bruegemann puts it:
The Bible starts out with a liturgy of abundance. Genesis I is a song of praise for God's generosity. It tells how well the world is ordered. It keeps saying, "It is good, it is good, it is good, it is very good." It declares that God blesses -- that is, endows with vitality -- the plants and the animals and the fish and the birds and humankind. And it pictures the creator as saying, "Be fruitful and multiply." In an orgy of fruitfulness, everything in its kind is to multiply the overflowing goodness that pours from God's creator spirit. And as you know, the creation ends in Sabbath. God is so overrun with fruitfulness that God says, "I've got to take a break from all this. I've got to get out of the office."
The world is given, for Brueggemann, in overflowing goodness; building bigger barns makes no sense in such a world. Brueggemann is right as far as it goes, but there is an eclipse in his thinking, a papering over of a problem. In his commentary on Genesis, when treating the aftermath of Adam and Eve’s disobedience, Brueggemann describes the scene as follows:
The sentence (on the people) (3:8-19) and the final action (3:20-24) still hold surprise. Guilt is not in question. The situation is clear. Since chapter 2, everyone has known that death follows guilt that violates the boundary. Perhaps the sentence of 3:8-19 is heavy. But it is less than promised, less than legitimate. The miracle is not that they are punished, but that they live. Graciousness in this narrative is not just in verse 21, after the sentence. God’s grace is given in the very sentence itself1.
His note here is that, even in judgment, God is gracious to humans. This is true with Cain as well: the murderer is not killed, but sent away under God’s sign of protection.
This is pure Gospel, and not to be discounted. In the remainder of commentary on this passage, Brueggemann continues to emphasize the rupture between what is expected (death) and what God gives anyway (life). In his commentary, Bruegemann emphasizes the overflowing gifts of God. But, in his treatment of the passage, Genesis 3:17-19—what happens to creation after sin—is ommitted, papered over.
Two things can be true: that God’s grace abounds, and the world does not give as we wish. But in emphasizing the first, the second is left untreated by Brueggemann. Genesis 3:17-19 reads, in the NIV, as follows:
To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat from it,’
“Cursed is the ground because of you;
through painful toil you will eat food from it
all the days of your life.
18 It will produce thorns and thistles for you,
and you will eat the plants of the field.
19 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.”
Life persists, even abounds. It should not be, and yet is. All of this is true, as Bruegemann notes. And yet, it persists in a mismatch that Brueggemann underplays, and then obscures. And it is just this that will help us correct course, to see that God’s provision and the realities of frogs eaten by mosquitos, of Dillard’s fish eggs, are not opposites, but that they are companions.
Interrogating the Curse
On purely empirical grounds, Genesis 3:17-19—as well as the verses before it concerning men, women, childbirth, and longing—are less of a mechanical law than a natural one. For not every childbirth is filled with pain, and not every woman longs for a man who subjugates her. Likewise, not all toil is filled with pain, and not all work produces weeds.
But, as a rule of thumb, these things seem to hold. Romans 8 echoes the sentiment here, that creation groans for its redemption, a redemption characterized by one thing being desired and another thing happening. The Psalms speak of God’s abundance in nature; Jesus describes the rain coming on the just and unjust.
But Jesus, in speaking of that rain, notes with Genesis that the world opens up not only in grain stalks, but in thorns that choke out the wheat, in tares that grow up alongside the wheat. Nature gives, as Genesis says, in abundance, but not the kind that we want. For who desires an ocean of weeds and tares?
In his treatment of this passage, Brueggemann inaugurates a new trajectory that many others have followed. But it is not as if earlier generations did not see what Bruegemann names—that the punishments of God are not the ones promised or expected, accompanied by strange new abundant gifts.
Consider here Theodoret of Cyr, in commenting on this passage, who writes:
By punishing us with death, the lawgiver cut off the spread of sin. And yet through that very punishment also demonstrated his love for us. He bound sin and death together when he gave the law…And yet he ordered things in such a way that the punishment might in itself serve the goal of salvation2.
Or Ambrose of Milan (the teacher of Augustine), who ponders why God would remove the people from a land of abundance to a land of thorns:
The solution…lies in the fact that since disobedience was the cause of death, for that very reason not God but man himself was the agent of his own death. if for example a physician were to prescribe to a patient what he thought should be avoided, and if the pattient felt that these prohibitions were unnecessary, teh physician is not responsible for the patient’s death. Surely in that case, the patient is guilt of causing his own death. Hence God as a good physician forbade Adam to eat what would be injurious to him3.
Note that, in both of these cases, the scarcity of the world serves the aims of God’s mercy. It produces something which gives us opportunity to cultivate patience with the weeds, as in Matthew, or the secret key to salvation, as with Theodoret. We might take the approach of Tertullian, who writes that, in the figure of the thorns of the curse, we find the shadow of the cross, accompanying us all the way through the world4.
John Chrysostom, the greatest of the ancient preachers, proposes a similar solution in his reading of this passage, one which puts the moral meaning of this front and center. Chyrsostom riffs on the voice of God in these verses, paraphrasing God as saying:
I an ensuring that everything you do is achieved only by sweat so that under pressure from these you may have continual guidance in keeping to limits and recognizing your own makeup5.
Put differently, thorns and scarcity train us in the dust-to-dust limits of being a creature, and equip us to live well in that frame. What Bruegemann—and many intepreters after him—neglect is precisely what the ancient interpreters knew: that the mismatch between our desire for the world to give what we want, and the world’s intransigence to do so, is a pedagogical gift. God’s gift of abundance is this complex provision of a world which does not give as we want, that we might be saved from a matched desire that would kill us.
It is God providing for us amply and always, but not in a way which tracks with our desires. It is a way which provides daily bread, manna for the morning, but not larger barns. Consider that the early church also held that wealth was a greater threat to the soul than poverty6, that the wealthy would only find their way into the kingdom of heaven through the eye of a needle—and this view of scarcity and abundance clicks into place. We are given what we need to navigate to the Promised Land, where the milk and honey flows in modesty.
Notes on Tares, Weeds, and Other Strange Gifts
In Jesus’ parable on the weeds and the wheat (Mt. 12:24-43), the abundance of creation appears as a surd, an irresolvable question. For in that parable, the seeds grow in strange circumstances, and yet they grow. The point of that parable is not that the seeds do not grow, but that the mismatch of seed and context prevents the seed from coming into its own.
But if the commentaries on Genesis are right—that what appears in creation is fecundity, but not as we wish—then this gives us eyes to ask what this might mean for things beyond the fields and flowers.
The desire of the woman for the man (3:16) is not an irresolvable gap, but the very engine which pulls the man and the woman together. The pain in the childbirth becomes likewise a marker in the memory of a new person entering the world, a change in the body that is the price of a new love.
The emnity between the serpent and the woman (3:14-15) is not only eternal conflict, of the offspring of the devil and of Jesus, but a kind of mismatched desire as well. We see this over and over again in the Gospels: the crowds yearn for Jesus to be what they hope for, and Jesus is that but not quite that7. But it is that mismatch that keeps the crowd drawn to him, if only to try to put an end to him: our enemies, I think, are often those who we wish were more than they currently are.
At every juncture, the mercy of God for creation creates within it a kind of desire for that which is given, but not in the form we wish. And that desire pulls us forward, deeper in, asking what to do with all this gift that is not what we asked for.
Genesis. Walter Brueggemann. Interpretation Series of Commentaries. John Knox Press, 1982, p. 50-51.
On the Incarnation of the Lord 6.1
Paradise 7.35
On the Crown 14.3
Homilies on Genesis 17.40-41
And more.
Very thought provoking. Have you read Abundance by Ezra Klein? Did I miss a review? Is it worth the $$ and time? Just curious. Keep provoking!