Ps. 38 (the weight of sin)

I want to pause over the claim yesterday we made regarding the ‘weight of sin’ and how it is easily courted (performed) but impossible to remove. I believe there is something in the Genesis story of Adam and Eve that can help flesh out this idea further. Some preliminaries: a fundamental concern of the creation account is ‘separation’ (light/darkness, earth/water, waters above/waters below, etc…). Separation is, in fact, itself creation such that to be ‘created’ is to ‘be separated’ and to occupy a certain space and order. To be ‘uncreated’ then is to cross this boundary as the ‘sons of god’ cross their boundary and mate with the daughters of man, from whence come the ‘heroes of old’. The effect of this ‘crossing’ is the destruction of all separation in the flood as creation itself moves back into its uncreated state (being ‘covered by water’). If we take this fundamental insight and then move back into the story of Adam and Eve, something profound emerges in their first ‘crossing’ of the boundary. We must remember: creation and separation mutually inhere in one another. It is no surprise then that Yhwh, just as he separated ‘water from water’ separates two trees (that of life and that of the ‘knowledge of good and evil’). What we find is that man is man, just as the ‘sons of god’ are ‘the sons of god’, in so far as they occupy their designated places. For Adam and Eve, once that boundary is crossed (eating of the tree they were commanded not to) everything that constituted them in their created order begins to disintegrate in quick order: man accuses the woman of his sin (dissolving their mutually respective boundary), man’s first ‘image(s)’ (Can and Abel) destroy each other, and vengeance (Lamech) is lifted up to the primacy of power. Clearly, something much more than their humanity was unleashed in and through their disobedience; the ‘lion that prowls’ was born. But this describes the effect. What was it about that original grasping? If man became, in a sense, ‘more than man’ in his ability to disrupt the created order, what would he have become otherwise? What all of this leads to is this: that man was given his freedom in the garden, and it was one that placed before him two ends: whether he would come to see his freedom as one sourced in obedience to Yhwh or one that he could take to himself (and ‘become like god’) such that he would, himself, become the source of his freedom. It is at this point that he can come to understand how and why sin becomes a weight impossible for man to remove. Man’s freedom is not merely an ‘ability to choose’. It is potent; it effects and brings forth either the good or the wicked. In other words, man’s freedom is an act of generation, an ‘invitation’ if you will. When man takes to himself his own freedom, in utter disobedience to the created separation, he ‘gives birth’ to himself as a creature set over-against Yhwh and the created order. Crucially: he no longer is what he is (meaning, he becomes an agent of chaos). In this way we can say he is ‘more than what he is’ in so far as he is bringing about in and through him a power greater than himself (which is what man’s freedom is always doing—ushering into the world something more than itself); this is always the premise of freedom—that it is there to be generative of another. Man’s freedom was/is such that man will always become ‘more than himself’, either into to grace or sin. Because freedom is never static, man is never so either. However, we must say that when man is obedient to Yhwh, as Genesis makes clear, he is more than himself but that that ‘more’ is what he was created to be; in this regard, we can say simultaneously that man becomes man in obedience to Yhwh. As to sin, though, both of these cannot be said (and this is precisely the point): man may become ‘more than man’, but he never becomes man because he is acting against his created order. It is, to reiterate, precisely because both aspects of man when he acts in accord with Yhwh’s grace cannot be said of man when he acts apart from Yhwh that sin becomes ‘too weighty’ for him and results in the necessity of sacrifice and Yhwh’s removal of the sin through grace. Man alone cannot unmake the monster he has made himself.