I remember a dinner party many years ago at a colleague’s home. Along one wall of the dining room stood a large terrarium containing several very large snakes. For someone who grew up in a country without snakes, being surrounded by them while trying to enjoy dinner provoked a certain… primal discomfort.
Conversation continued. Glasses clinked. Dinner was served. But I confess—I never quite relaxed. Somewhere deep in the human nervous system lives an ancient instinct: snakes are not to be trusted.
All fairy stories need a villain, and for most of us the snake fills the role perfectly well. Perhaps that explains why the serpent has occupied such a powerful place in human imagination for thousands of years—most famously in the Genesis story of the garden.
Just as Adam and Eve settle into carefree existence, something unexpected happens. A conversation begins. A question is asked. A boundary is crossed. Innocence is lost. To paraphrase Rabbie Burns—with some theological license—the best-laid plans of God and humanity often go astray. Who says God is never surprised?
The story that unfolds in Genesis has always challenged the religious imagination. Adam and Eve eat from the only tree forbidden to them, and immediately the blame game begins:
“Not me, Lord—it was her.”
“Not me, Lord—it was the serpent.”
Human history begins exactly where ours so often continues—with deflection, fear, and fractured responsibility.
But the deeper theological question remains: was this moment a disastrous fall from grace, or paradoxically a necessary step toward something greater?
Christian thought has never answered this question with a single voice.
In much of the Latin West, the story became known primarily as the Fall—a catastrophe with devastating consequences for humanity. In the Greek Christian East, however, another phrase emerged: felix culpa, the “happy fault.” Not because sin itself is good, but because redemption becomes possible through it.
The Apostle Paul traces this paradox when he draws a line from Adam to Christ: through human failure, God opens a path toward deeper grace.
Augustine of Hippo leaned decisively toward the tragic interpretation. His theology shaped what became the Western doctrine of original sin—the belief that humanity inherited a profound moral wound passed from generation to generation, healed through baptism.
For Augustine, human desire itself became suspect after Eden. It is striking that Adam and Eve’s first awareness after eating the fruit is shame about their bodies. They hide their nakedness. Sexual shame, something Augustine knew personally, profoundly shaped his theological imagination.
His interpretation took root so deeply that Catholic and Protestant traditions—otherwise divided on many matters—found rare agreement here.
Anglican theology, true to its vocation as a via media, or middle way, adopted a different emphasis.
We do not deny sin. But neither do we define humanity by it.
We hold together two truths simultaneously: human beings are broken, and human beings are dignified. Sin influences us, but it does not erase the image of God within us. Grace is therefore not merely corrective; it is restorative.
Like Paul, Anglican spirituality leans more heavily toward grace than condemnation. Human beings are vulnerable to self-centeredness not because we are irredeemably corrupt, but because our freedom is shaped by fear, culture, trauma, desire, and illusion. Our will is real—but never entirely free without grace.
Matthew’s Gospel revisits the Genesis story in a new setting—not a garden, but a wilderness.
Eden’s gates have long been closed. Humanity now lives east of Eden, in uncertainty and struggle. After his baptism, Jesus is led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted.
There the ancient serpent appears again, this time as Satan, offering metaphorical apples: power, control, certainty, invulnerability.
The ancient whisper returns: You can have it all. You can decide good and evil for yourself.
Unlike Adam and Eve—spiritually young and suddenly awakened—Jesus sees through the illusion. He knows who he is. More importantly, he knows whose he is.
Why prohibit the tree in the first place? Was God trying to keep humanity naïve or dependent?
Perhaps the prohibition was less restriction than parental guidance—loving protection until maturity could catch up with freedom.
Suddenly the garden story feels startlingly contemporary.
We are now handing powerful technologies—social media, algorithmic influence, endless comparison—to young people long before emotional maturity has formed. Children encounter limitless judgments and limitless choices without the wisdom needed to interpret them.
We are only beginning to see the consequences: anxiety, isolation, depression, despair.
Freedom without maturity is not liberation. It is danger.
The serpent’s whisper has gone digital
In the wilderness, Jesus confronts the illusion of unlimited choice and reveals something essential: freedom is not having every option available; freedom is knowing which options lead to life.
The wilderness is not merely geographical. It is spiritual and psychological—a landscape where our struggle to exercise wise freedom becomes visible.
This is where Lent begins.
After the clarity of the Transfiguration comes descent into the inner terrain we usually avoid. Here we discover something uncomfortable: sin is rarely dramatic rebellion. More often it is subtle confusion—a slow venom that dulls moral clarity.
The serpent becomes a powerful metaphor. Sin works like a toxin, numbing compassion and distorting perception.
If sin is the toxin, repentance is the antidote.
The Prayer Book invites us to keep a holy Lent through practices meant not to punish but to heal.
Self-examination reconnects us with emotions we prefer to avoid—anger, envy, resentment, fear, bitterness. Properly understood, self-examination is not self-criticism; it replaces the harsh inner voice of judgment with the gentler voice of grace.
Fasting introduces small discomforts that awaken awareness. We notice habits of consumption—food, screens, shopping, distraction, even the careless spending of time. Abundance easily breeds entitlement, yet awareness can transform abundance into gratitude, and gratitude into generosity.
Prayer, worship, and study retrain attention. They cultivate what the seventeenth-century Anglican divines called habitual recollection—an awareness of God’s presence permeating ordinary life.
Lenten disciplines are not punishments. They are detoxifications.
In the wilderness, Jesus shows us what humanity looks like when rooted in God: clear-sighted, grounded, and free—not because every choice is available, but because wisdom learns which choices lead toward life.
Lent gives us practice in noticing the difference.
The serpent, then, is not merely the villain of an ancient story. It is the voice of self-delusion—the temptation to remain in willful innocence, to avoid truth, to mistake unlimited choice for genuine freedom.
Lent does not invite us back to Eden’s innocence.
It invites us forward into mature freedom: a freedom shaped by grace, grounded in belonging, and healed by God’s patient, loving invitation.
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