The lectionary readings for the First Sunday in Lent (Year A) pair two narratives of temptation: the familiar account from Genesis 2:15-17 and 3:1-7, where the first humans encounter the serpent in the garden of Eden, and Matthew 4:1-11, where Jesus faces Satan’s threefold testing in the wilderness. Both texts explore the nature of human desire and divine limit, but they do so by presenting us with starkly different responses to what is offered and what is forbidden.
Is the Creator allowed to have something within which He delights alone?
The question sounds almost impertinent, yet it strikes at the heart of the Genesis narrative. God places the human creatures in a garden of extravagant abundance. “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden,” God tells them (2:16). Every tree. The generosity is almost overwhelming. But there is one exception: “of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die” (2:17).
One tree. A single prohibition in the midst of such plenty. And it stands in the center of the garden, unavoidable, a visible marker of limit. The question is not whether God has the right to prohibit; the question is why we find even one limit intolerable.
The serpent approaches Eve with a question that seems designed to make the prohibition sound unreasonable: “Did God say, ‘You shall not eat from any tree in the garden?’” (3:1). Of course God said no such thing. God’s command was specific, limited to one tree. But the serpent’s distortion works because it taps into something already stirring in the human heart: the assumption that everything should be available to us, that any boundary is suspect, that withholding anything suggests divine stinginess rather than divine sovereignty.
Eve corrects the serpent’s misstatement, but she’s already engaged in the conversation, already contemplating what has been reserved. The serpent presses further: “You will not die; for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (3:4-5). Here is the real temptation—not not the fruit itself, but the erasure of distinction between Creator and creature. Why should there be anything God knows that we do not? Why should there be any realm reserved for divine delight alone?
They eat. And remarkably, the serpent’s prediction proves partially accurate. Their eyes are opened. They do come to know good and evil. God himself later confirms it: “the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil” (3:22). In grasping what was not given, they have indeed crossed a boundary, become something they were not. But the cost of erasing that boundary is exile from the very place where limit existed as gift rather than deprivation. They take what is not given, and in doing so, lose the garden itself. On that day, they become subject to death – mortality now marking their creaturehood in ways they could not have imagined.
The Gospel reading presents us with a second human in a second landscape. But here, everything is reversed. Where Adam and Eve stood in a garden of abundance with one prohibition, Jesus stands in a wilderness of scarcity facing three temptations. Where the first humans reached for what was forbidden, the Second Adam refuses what is offered.
After forty days and forty nights of fasting, Jesus is hungry – genuinely, physically hungry in a way that the well-fed residents of Eden never were. The tempter comes with an apparently reasonable suggestion: “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread” (4:3). The temptation is not simply about satisfying hunger. It is about exercising divine prerogative, about refusing the limits of incarnation. Jesus could turn the stones to bread. He has that power. But he will not. “One does not live by bread alone,” he answers, “but by every word that comes from the mouth of God” (4:4). The stones remain stones. Hunger remains hunger. The Son of God accepts the vulnerability of creaturehood.
The second temptation escalates: stand on the pinnacle of the temple, throw yourself down, let the angels bear you up. Here is an invitation to test God’s faithfulness, to demand proof of divine protection, to live outside the ordinary constraints of gravity and consequence that govern all other human bodies. Again, Jesus refuses: “Do not put the Lord your God to the test” (4:7). He will not claim exemption from the conditions under which all creatures live.
The third temptation offers everything the serpent promised Adam and Eve: sovereignty, glory, the kingdoms of the world spread out before him. “All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me” (4:9). But Jesus knows what the first humans learned too late—that grasping at divine prerogative comes at the cost of communion with God. “Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him” (4:10). Where Adam reached for equality with God, Christ—who was in the form of God—empties himself, accepts limit, remains faithful to his creatureliness even while being the Creator incarnate.
Two trees stand at the heart of these narratives. The first tree grows in the center of the garden, forbidden and yet grasped. Its fruit promises knowledge, autonomy, the dissolution of the boundary between Creator and creature. The cost of eating from that tree is exile—from the garden, from easy communion, from life unmarked by death.
The second tree stands on a hill outside Jerusalem. This tree offers no fruit, only suffering and death. Yet what the first Adam grasped at—equality with God—the Second Adam refuses to claim. Instead, he accepts the tree that is offered to him, embraces the ultimate limit of human existence, dies the death that all creatures die. On that tree, the boundary between Creator and creature is not erased but honored, even as it is also mysteriously bridged. The cross becomes the place where God’s sovereignty and human creaturehood meet, where limit is transformed from curse into gift.
Lent invites us into the wilderness with Jesus, into the practice of refusal and relinquishment. We fast, and in fasting we remember that we do not live by bread alone, that not everything exists for our consumption. We pray, and in prayer we acknowledge that we are not God, that we depend on One beyond ourselves. We give alms, and in giving we practice the truth that not everything is ours to keep.
The season asks us to accept our creaturehood, to stop grasping at what is not given, to trust that there might be something within which the Creator delights alone—and that this is not divine stinginess but the very structure of love. In the wilderness, we learn what we refused to learn in the garden: that limit is not the enemy of life but its condition, that mortality itself can become the place where we meet the God who, in Christ, chose to share our death so that we might share his life.
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