The Tree Less Cherished

Here is a little story that I heard about for the first time in third grade Sunday School. It pretty much spoiled my whole day. Once upon a time, there was a garden planted by the Creator of the universe. There, human beings and every other creature of the fields and the air were meant to live happily, forever. Right in the middle of the garden were two glorious trees. One, called the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, was immediately declared off limits. But a very deliberate Eve and a very distracted Adam ate from it anyway, and the world has been paying the price ever since.

I still think about this story a lot, especially during the Epiphany season, which celebrates among other things the manifestation of God’s light, life, and truth to all peoples.With respect to the latter in particular, I like to think of the coming of Jesus as bringing with it a new planting of the tree of knowledge, this time in the human heart. But the problem still remains of making credible the reasons the Old Testament story gave for God’s prohibiting access to a tree like this in the first place.

According to the first creation story in The Book of Genesis, what God had in mind for human beings was that they/we would tend the earth with him caringly and knowledgeably. But Eden's god --- the god of a second creation story --- is a very different kind of god, who had a very different kind of plan for a not nearly so admired human race. This god is a jealous, vindictive, self-serving, tribal kind of deity who hands out prohibitions and then tempts people into ignoring them. He seems constitutionally incapable of embracing the only creatures on earth capable of comprehending the wonders of creation, and seems not to care a whole lot for their habitat either, if the big flood later on was any indication.

What the story of the Garden of Eden finally comes down to is God’s expectation of unremitting obedience, and about the troubled life that befalls people who disobey him, in specific: having to work harder outside the garden than they would have had to work in it, having to bear children in pain, and having to die. (Genesis 3:16-19) My Sunday School teacher had an impressive way of boiling this down to third grade essentials. When you truly obey God, she told us, you trust that God knows best and you do what he tells you to do with no questions and no grumbles.

Sitting in church the hour after she laid this on us, I came to the conclusion that my own relationship with the god of the Garden was no better than Adam’s and Eve’s, and for much the same reason. I could not bring myself to believe that the supposedly perfect God we pray to is a God unwilling to give reasons for what he asks of us. Even my own very imperfect parents worked hard to be reasonable about what they asked of me, because they believed that it was the right thing for any parent to do. "Don't touch that tree," God said. Well, okay, but for whom, then, was it planted in the first place, and why?

The right attitude, this story encourages us to believe, is one of trusting and obeying: our parents, our teachers, our leaders, our church. It is one of bending to their will, conforming to their beliefs, and becoming as much like them as our immaturity and inferior wisdom will permit. The one question not to be asked about any of these conditions for living long and prospering is: why? Why should anyone be better off for doing so? Why should we trust these parents, these teachers, these leaders, this church?

What truly makes for the kind of partnership with God that human beings were created to enjoy in the first place --- at least as the Priestly writer of Genesis 1 envisioned it --- is not merely obedience, but also knowledge: knowing for oneself what is good and evil, knowing why each is what it is, and knowing that God is just as bound by the good and is just as obligated to resist evil as we are. Obedience to shared norms, based upon shared understanding, is what makes for co-creatorship, not a do-what-I-tell-you-or-else approach that prepares people neither to become mature on earth nor joyful in heaven.

There is a lot to be learned from the second creation story in Genesis. But not how to love God with all our minds. Or how to share in all of God’s truth, rather than in just the truth Who is Christ, without feeling fearful or guilty about it.