Seven
days after starting this whole business of creating the universe and understandably
tired, God makes an amateur parenting error, which may be excused in part
because this is after all the first time God has been a parent. God tells Adam
and Eve that they are free to do anything and everything they want... with one
exception. As every parent—or in my case, ex-camp counselor—knows, the one way
to be absolutely certain of a given outcome is to tell your kids: You can do
anything you want except… one thing. God fell right into the trap.
In the
Garden of Eden the guidelines were pretty lax. Adam and Eve could do whatever
they pleased with the exception of one very big rule: Don’t eat the fruit of
that tree. It’s
a strange rule, really. I mean: why have a tree of the knowledge of good and
evil in the first place? Why allow for temptation? The simple solution would be
to set the tree outside of the garden, make it impossible to reach. The
possibility of eating the fruit seems a cruel oversight on God’s part.
But
this does tell us something about God. From the very beginning of the human
story we learn that God wants us to experience this life for ourselves. It’s
not that God wants us to know good and evil, but God is willing to allow us
that choice. He didn’t want us to take the fruit from that tree, but he did not
deny us the possibility of going for it. God didn’t stand in our way and stop
us from experiencing the thrills and spills of life out here in the “real
world.”
And
what’s more, from the very beginning of the human story we learn something
fundamental about us: we will reject God’s promises. Given the choice between
passivity in the garden and curiosity for the fruit we will take the fruit
every time. It is what makes us wonderful and horrible creatures. We are
explorers by our very nature; curious and infinitely inventive. There is
something profoundly fascinating in human beings. We are hopeful and courageous
even when faced with a world lacking hope. All of this is to be commended. It’s
not often enough that we take a good long look at the human condition and
remark on the miraculousness of it all. We are a piece of work.
Yet,
in talking up our good points a cloud hovers over us. There is
something not quite right. Our mortality outs us. God’s warning will become
true when Cain strikes down Abel. From the moment we take that fruit, death
creeps into the picture. It is a woeful problem with the human condition: it
does not last. Even our precious knowledge, our ability to learn, how we advance technologically and have become great by the standards of every temporal
creature in the history of the universe, every thing we learn and know is tamed
by our mortality and our inadequacy in managing the resources entrusted to us. For all the knowledge and wisdom we possess
we only prolong our physical existence by a meager few years, and we never save
ourselves in any meaningful sense. We’re magnificent creatures, knowledgeable enough
to come to the realization that we can’t fix everything. In fact, we tend to only
make it worse.
We
have only ourselves to blame. We take that fruit off of the tree at every
opportunity.
This message is a
far cry from your standard high school and college graduation speech fare, which
tries to tell you that that you are special and wonderful and you are going to
change the world. There is some truth in that, though it is a half-truth. You
are special and in many ways you will and do change the world, but ultimately
you deserve very little of the credit. I am reminded of Yoda in Star Wars: The
Empire Strikes Back when he explains the force to Luke by saying, “Luminous
beings are we, not this crude matter.”
That
is just the problem. We are more than this crude matter, but every time we take
the fruit—every time we use our knowledge to justify ourselves—we become
trapped in our humanity, because the fruit of knowledge leads us down an
infinite road whose only exit is the realization that knowledge alone cannot
save us. The only exit from the pursuit of knowledge is the one that leads to Christ. The reason Jesus
had to come was not only because some guy named Adam and some woman named Eve
ate a fruit off of a tree in the far distant past; the reason Jesus had to come
is because we eat the same stinking fruit every day. It is the fruit of
self-sufficiency; it is the ego that grows inside of us, and without Jesus it
will eat us alive.
The
Garden of Eden points out something that should be rather obvious about all of us
as human creatures: we are flawed. As far as I know, none of us are going out
and shooting 20-under par on the golf course, curing cancer on our lunch break
and then writing a symphony before bed. So none of us live up to the
expectations set for us when we grasp for that fruit. If the expectations
of the tree of knowledge sound patently unfair it is because they are. We were
never meant to eat from it; we bring this upon ourselves.
Thankfully,
as stories go this is not the end. We have more to the tale than the first four chapters of Genesis. It’s only the beginning. There’s a long road ahead, but the story
is worth the price of admission. It’s worth the ups and downs, the meandering
in the desert and all the various missteps along the way. The Biblical story is
our story, as much as it was ever the story of those who lived long ago. May you
begin to see this story as your own. May we remember that a good story requires
crisis in the beginning for catharsis in the end.
That’s
the biblical story and it's our story.
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