We enter now the sentencing phase of the trial. The deed is done in the Garden of Eden—the forbidden fruit picked and eaten. The wide-eyed couple hiding in the trees has been found wearing nothing but fig leaves and guilty looks. An inquest was held, the accused called forth to answer. They incriminated themselves, spouses testifying against each other. The man blamed the woman, the woman the serpent; each hinted that God was behind the problem and that they shouldn’t be held responsible. You know, like, I failed the test because the teacher made it too hard. It’s always someone else’s fault. Well, it’s not. It’s our fault, and now we have to take our punishment. We know what’s coming. We were warned. Eat the fruit and die. Mandatory sentencing. Justice.

We’ve talked a lot about justice lately. How should America pursue justice against Osama bin Laden and his terrorist organization, al-Qaeda? The e-mail jokes have been cyber-circling the globe. Most popular? Find bin Laden and force him to undergo a sex change operation; then deliver him back to the Taliban and let him live as a woman. Taste of his own medicine. But that punishment doesn’t nearly fit the crime of cruelly orchestrating the murder of more than 6,000 innocents. We want a fuller justice, and death seems the most appropriate verdict.

Of course, maximum punishment usually seems most fitting when it’s someone else on the end of the sentence. Most of us want justice for others and mercy for ourselves. I know I do. I don’t want God to judge me fairly. And this is, let’s be candid, one of the differences between Islam and Christianity. One of the attractive things to Americans about Islam is its emphasis on responsibility. Do right and God will reward you. Do wrong and God will punish you. Strict but fair. You get what’s coming to you— nothing more, nothing less.

I was on a program a couple of weeks ago at Lake Highlands High School with a Muslim imam, who made it clear that if you take the life of another human being, the way the hijackers did, there is no mercy: you go straight to hell … forever. He repeated those words twice, and slowly. Now I understand the desire for justice, whether in Islam or Christianity. We need to be accountable. But if we all got only what we deserved, the Father, Son and the Holy Ghost would share a table for one in heaven … forever. Do I need to repeat that twice, and slowly?

Well, gratefully there is mercy mixed with justice in this story all the way back in Genesis. Sometimes people wrongly think the Old Testament is all about justice and the New Testament all about mercy. But the same God is God of both, and Jesus is the same yesterday, today, and forever. Whatever you see clearly in the New Testament is veiled but present already in the Old. So look behind the veil here, and catch the big surprise of this verdict.

Remember what God said? In the moment you eat of the tree, you shall die. Well, they ate of the tree and they didn’t die … right away. Death may be their ultimate end, but God is not giving up on life just yet. God finds another way to deal justice than in the one threatened.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I would like to have seen a little more contrition out of Adam and Eve before getting off so light. I mean, did you hear the lame excuses? Did you notice how they never came right out and repented? And yet God starts with the mercy right off.

If Rudolph Giuliani were God and not just the Mayor of New York City, that would have never happened. Did you hear his speech to the United Nations? He said we ought not try to understand why the terrorists did what they did. To understand is them is to excuse them. We just need to declare them evil. And then a Saudi Arabian prince showed up in New York this week with a relief check for $10 million. But when he started talking about how the U.S. needs to look at its foreign policies in Arab lands, Giuliani gave back the money and said, “No thanks.”

Now part of me likes that, the part that wants justice for others. I like Rudy, too, but I like him better as mayor than as God. I wonder if he would want to be judged the same way. He wants a political future beyond this term limit, but people will have to overlook or understand or forgive or be merciful for lots of things he has said and done, not the least of which is bringing his mistress into Gracie Mansion, flaunting his infidelities. But, hey, I can forgive that. I just wish he would be publicly as contrite as he wants others to be.

Why is it so hard for us to see how hard it is for us to repent? How many people do you know who have been fired for cause and then said the company was right, the judgment was just? The Dallas Cowboys are a bad football team. They have bad players that were drafted and traded for by bad management. Objectively, that’s obvious. Try to get Jerry Jones to admit that. He’s responsible, but he’s also too close to it. He acts subjectively, not objectively: he gets defensive and deflects the criticism. Who doesn’t? How many of us earn mercy when all we deserve is justice? Fortunately, God gives us what we need and not what we deserve.

So look at the sentence in the text. The serpent first, reverse order from the inquest. Notice the serpent was not addressed in the trial the way the man and the woman were. Humans alone are response-able creatures. We have a voice and can answer for ourselves. The serpent had a voice of sorts to begin with: it spoke to the woman in the temptation scene. Now it only gets spoken to and acted upon. Justice involves the serpent becoming voiceless and vulnerable, addressed but not answerable. It doesn’t get death, but it does get dust. Dust in the mouth all its days. It claimed to have a lofty perspective on things in the Garden; now it will be the lowest of creatures, never getting off its own belly. It wanted to collaborate with the woman, and instead it gets perpetual conflict. Fear, not friendship, will be its fate.

The woman next. She has a voice. She is the one screaming in the delivery room. Pain in childbirth. More pain in love, too. There will be no unmixed joy in life. Bring a child into the world, and you will know suffering in the process. Desire your husband and find yourself frustrated by the lack of mutuality. Whenever a woman feels the injustice of inequality in relationship to a man, it will be a reminder that things have fallen from God’s intended will. Push the pause button on that one; we’ll be back to it in a minute.

Now the man. The ground is cursed because of him. A gardener could not have heard a sentence more apt. Every time a farmer plows a field and confronts thorns and thistles, bugs and boll weevils, he will know something has gone very wrong. Every time he wipes his brow and his wife tells him he smells like a mule, he will know something has gone very wrong. God puts toil into our tilling, making us work for our food, labor for our livelihood. In the end it’s back to ground zero, back where we came from—earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

Why are things the way they are? Why is life so hard? Why do we worry about our children, our marriages, our work? Why are we afraid of nature? Genesis 3 answers those questions. God has let us off, but God has not let us off lightly. We don’t die; we live with the specter of death always. We get to love but not without suffering in it. This is our lot, and it’s a lot.

But it’s still a gift. The gift of pain, albeit, but a gift nonetheless. The judgment of God is not abusive pain. God doesn’t whip out the belt every time we spill our milk and spank us for the fun of it. Instead, God allows for distortions to exist in all of our relationships, so that we will have to work at them to feel the original intent of the creator, and thereby remember the One who made us.

Too often in churches you hear that husbands are supposed to rule over their wives, and men over women, because that is the decree of God due to sin. Women need to accept their fate and make the best of it. Be graciously submissive, don’t you know?! Men are supposed to step up and accept their rule over their wives —lovingly, of course. Not to do so is to disregard God’s judgment.

But is that so? Is this judgment a prescription of irreversible punishment or a description of distorted reality that is a consequence of our sin? If it’s prescription, then we have to take our medicine and choke it down with a little water perhaps. But are we really saying that the way God created us is not the way God wants us to relate anymore? If that is true, then why do we think it’s okay for a woman to get an epidural to ease the pain of childbirth? Shouldn’t she just bear it as punishment? Or why do we devise tools that save us from toil? If a man doesn’t sweat when he works, is he being as unfaithful as a woman who wants to be treated as a man’s equal?

Look, if you have a pain in your abdomen, do you wait for your appendix to burst, or do you go see a doctor and have it taken out? Pain is a signal that something is wrong that needs to be righted, not that you must bear it as punishment. Same with relations between men and women. Redemption is painful, but redemption, not pain, is the point.

Christ died for ours sins. Christ lives to give us the power to reorder our relationships in keeping with God’s created intentions. Every time husbands satisfy the desires of their wives and treat them with the equal dignity God intended, they are honoring God’s merciful judgment. Jesus said he came to give us life, and life more abundant than we can know it on our own. He came, in other words, to reverse the curse, to redeem suffering, to reorder our love.

Christians believe that Christ will judge the world at the last day. Which means, as Frederick Buechner has put it, that the one who judges us most finally will be the one who loves us most fully. … Christ’s love sees us with terrible clarity and sees us whole. Christ’s love so wishes our joy that it is ruthless against everything in us that diminishes our joy. The worst sentence Love can pass is that we behold the suffering which Love has endured for our sake, and that is also our acquittal. The justice and mercy of the judge are ultimately one [Wishful Thinking, Harper and Row, 1972, p. 48.]

If you are feeling pain in your relationships, pay attention to it—not just for the sign it is of what is wrong in you, but for the sign it is of where Christ is at work making things right in you.

By the first man came death; by the last man comes life. And Life has the last word!