The Failure of the Fall

He didn’t mean to fall. No one ever really does. Think about it: who would ever knowingly leave behind the One who calls creation forth from the deep, who imagines leviathan and fruit and vegetable and insect and bug and human, bringing them into being by a word? It wasn’t really a ploy for power or a hopeful usurpation of one who fancied himself equal to the Maker. He didn’t think it would happen that way, not exactly.

But what was he to do, when God worked differently than what he imagined God should work? What was he to do when God took too long to answer, too long to make things right, too long to respond to his questions?

The punishment fell and he with it, like a flash of lightning. You won’t die, God said, but you are banished. You will wander, homeless, aimless, always searching for meaning yet never finding it because the easy half-truth was easier than the whole truth. You will tell this as your truth. Constrained to tell the half-truth, half-lie of a world once created good in full disclosure of God’s glory gone wrong. His truth became life without God, life without creation, life only as the avoidance of death.

You won’t die, the serpent said, but you will know. The fallen angel teaches all that he knows, the half-truth masquerading as the full-truth. The problem of the knowledge of good and evil is that neither one betrays the Maker behind creation. The knowledge of good and evil is only the knowledge of the self, not the knowledge of the Creator. But we reach out for this knowledge of self, striving after good, shunning evil, trying to do better until the next time, until the next time the voice whispers, “You are here all alone,” because the knowledge of good and evil places us at the center, at the center of the garden, at the center of all that we do and fail to do, at the center of reality.

The problem with the half-truth is that it is easier to believe than the whole truth. The Accuser places us at the center of the garden, at the center of all that we do and all that we fail to do, and at the center of reality. Pointing his finger at us, he tells us the only truth he knows how to tell, of a world without God, of a world of human depravity and need, of poverty and of hunger and of sickness and of death.

He tells us that when we die, it is the end. Knowing the difference between good and evil, we believe him. We begin to believe that we are all there is. We begin to believe that the story the Accuser tells about us, about creation, about what happens when one falls so far from the truth it seems only a distant memory of long ago and far away, shut up in the picture Storybible that we left behind with all our childhood fantasies of being wanted, being loved, and knowledge wasn’t of good and bad, of right and wrong, but of the God behind each one of the stories. He was going to fall from heaven like a flash of lightning, yes; and he determined to bring us with him.

The problem with the half-truth is it doesn’t account for the whole story. It tells us about good and bad, right and wrong, but it doesn’t read between the lines on which this indelible love has been inscribed. When you only read the part about humanity turning away, you miss all the other parts of the story. Like children not content when a story does not end the way they know it ought, we demand a different story be told. The thing is, though, children almost never demand a new story be told.  “I want this one.” “We’ve already read it a million times; you have it memorized and you can’t even read.” “I want this one.” Toddlers at bedtime request the same story over and over again, memorizing it, believing it, absorbing it, of magical and distant worlds where good triumphs over evil and it all ends up happily ever after.

Happily ever after is long ago and far away, back before anything fell to pieces, back before life became real and bills needed to be paid. Happily ever after is for children and fools. Five minutes with the nightly news of shootings, of melting ice caps, of cruelty, of war illustrates humanity’s capacity for its own destruction. Happily ever does not exist in our world. True.

Happily ever after doesn’t tell the story of our world. Granted. But neither does the half-truths that the self is the center of the universe and death is the end. When God sets out to tell a story, it’s not just a story of happily ever after, where we receive a kiss on the scraped knee and a cosmic band-aid so that we can look past the reality of our world. This is a story that goes to the core of the matter, that neither glosses nor turns away from the truth of what it is to be human. On the contrary, this story pierces the core of what it is to be human, drawing more deeply into the reality that exists.

It de-centers us from our little universes and places us under the stars: count them, if you can. It brings us to the edge of the ocean and says: count the grains of sand, if you are able. It doesn’t make the reality of what it is to be human any less real, but it refuses to allow you to believe this part of the story as though it’s the only part there is.

The Accuser’s half-truths were not accepted as the story humanity would tell because God determined it was not the story God was going to tell:

And war broke out in heaven; Michael and his angels fought against the dragon. The dragon and his angels fought back, but they were defeated, and there was no longer any place for them in heaven. The great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world—he was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him. Then I heard a loud voice in heaven, proclaiming,
‘Now have come the salvation and the power
   and the kingdom of our God
and the authority of his Messiah,^*
for the accuser of our comrades^* has been thrown down,
who accuses them day and night before our God.

The Accuser has been accused, having been found guilty of telling half-truths, of placing humans at the center of the universe, of telling them all they see is all there is. This is not a story that proclaims “they all lived happily ever after” and closes the book. This is the story that flips back to the beginning, to be told over and over again, to be learned and absorbed, read until the pages hold not just a story of long ago and far away but here and now. This is the story that reveals the Deceiver for who he is and his story as only half-true. Where he tells a story about a fall, God tells a story of redemption; where he tells a story of death, God tells a story of resurrection. This is the story of the One who calls creation forth from the deep, who imagines leviathan and fruit and vegetable and insect and beast and human, bringing them into being by a word. By that same word, he claims us as his own, refusing to allow us to live in the world as though we are all that is and as though death is the end.