Lent I
Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7 and Matthew 4:1-11
March 5, 2017
Rev. Amy P. McCullough
Years ago I was working late at night, trying to finish a report in order to get home for the evening. My computer was an old one, with a fickle keyboard. The space key persistently refused to work. I’d be typing along furiously, hitting a space between words, only to look up and see one long stream of letters. All my work would need to be erased and re-written. After what seemed like the hundredth incident, I lost my temper, picked up the keyboard, and slammed it hard on the desk. The tiny letter “T” key flew off of the keyboard, onto the carpet somewhere beneath my desk. I scrambled beneath it, searched awhile and found it, gingerly putting it back on the keyboard. Miraculously the key continued to work, but now both the space key and “T” key were hard to push down. Everyday from then onward, each time I sat down at that computer, I had to confront the pesky consequences of my outburst; these sticky keys, this typing that reminded me of my impatience, rage, and sin.
When have you encountered your own failings, your mistakes and your sin? When have you been confronted with the consequences of your bad choices?
Toward the end of God’s creation of the world, God fashions Adam and Eve from the dusty clay of the earth. God breathes into them life, blessing them as companions to one another and calling them good. God then places them in the garden, giving them a life’s purpose to serve the land and its living creatures. Conjure into your mind your own image of the Garden of Eden. Can you see its lush variety of trees with fruit and vegetables available for the pickings, animals dwelling in harmony and rivers winding through the green fields? The only instruction beyond the job of being caretakers for the land is a command to eat from all the trees save one. Paradise is given, along with a limitation: Do not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
Have you ever noticed how tempting something becomes once it is no longer available? How mind engrossing, heart-yearning the distraction is for the forbidden item? What makes us want for that we cannot have? It is simply the fact that we cannot have it?
And what was God thinking to put that particular tree right in the middle of the garden? Here is a lush tree with fruit ripe on its low branches, standing in the heart of the garden. You can’t visit the bluebirds on the north river without walking past it. You can’t go for an evening swim without ducking beneath its branches. You can’t miss the tree. It is like a parent who makes a luscious, 14 layer Smith Island cake, oozing with chocolate frosting, places it on the kitchen table, and says to the children: Don’t touch. Don’t take a lick. What reasonable parent doesn’t realize the child is going to make the quickest dash to the table once she leaves the room?
It seems, for a while, Eve and Adam do listen to God’s instruction. At least until the snake slivers into view, subtly questioning the given limits. Did God say you aren’t to eat from any tree? One forbidden tree is a very different garden than an entirety of forbidden trees, but the question is asked to stroke Eve’s indignation. Really, you can’t eat from them all? Eve adds her sense of injury. We can’t even touch the tree, turning God’s modest limitation into a life-hindering barrier. Can’t you hear the advertiser’s appeal? Shouldn’t you have it all? Don’t you deserve everything you have ever wanted?
The serpent provides a quick education about this one tree in the garden. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil will not kill you. Its fruit will open our eyes, granting you more knowledge, making you more like God. In two sentences, just four quick phrases, the snake sows suspicion, casts doubt about God’s motives, encourages her to break the limit and minimizes the consequences of such a choice. Eve, along with Adam beside her, is more than willing to listen.
So what is this tree whose fruit imparts knowledge of good and evil? What does God know that humankind should not or cannot know, without suffering some sort of mortal blow? In this scripture, the phrase “good and evil” functions not to cast a moral spectrum – a yardstick between good and bad – but as a turn of phrase representing a totality of knowing. What did you learn? Everything from A to Z. Here is a tree that represents the fullness of knowledge – intellectual, experiential, relational. It signals maturity, we might say, or wisdom. This knowledge, in its completeness, God holds and we do not.
Think about the ways we confess this gap in knowledge. “What happened?” we might ask in the face of tragedy. “I don’t know, but God knows.” We are expressing a trust that God sees, feels, perceives, and understands far beyond us. God holds all the complexity of our universe: chaos theory, black holes, 7 million year old fossils, as well as urban blight, educational crisis and thousands of years of ethnic feuds. And somehow in the Garden of Eden lives a tree –standing right in its middle – that signals God knows. Your ways, O God, are not our ways. This tree signals for us our place in garden as creatures under the care of God our creator. This is God’s tree. Everything else is available to you. Eat, grow, tend, play, and rest. Acknowledge I am God.
Of course they did eat. The forbidden fruit looked so alluring. With the barrier of death cast in doubt, the temptation to gain something became their choice. The wisdom they acquire is only of their own nakedness. They learn to be ashamed. The death that happens in the moment is a death of their freedom, a freedom to live without need for cover or fear. In the aftermath it is painfully clear that while the serpent made have spoken facts, the snake also lied. They are not more like God. They are ill equipped to deal with their newfound insights. They are farther from one another others. Soon they will be hiding from God, who had their wellbeing in mind.
Although the limitation to not eat of the tree was given as a command, the dilemma of this story concerns trust. Do we believe in God’s good intentions toward us? Can we trust a situation – a garden – we do not fully understand? Jesus, alone, in the desert, famished and facing his adversary, faces the same dilemma. ”Central to each of the challenges Jesus faces,” says one scholar, ”is the single question: Will he trust God to be God?”[1] Jesus reaches back into scripture to remember who God is and to store up his trust. Tempted to seek food, deliverance from danger and power he chooses to stay within his limitations even as God is not immediately revealed.
Lent is a time of intentionally placing limitations upon ourselves, limits that evoke our creatureliness before God. Lent is the season to stand in front of that tree where God is God and we are not. We limit our appetites. We restrain our desires. We push against our self-absorption. The paradox of faith is that these intentional limitations expand our trust. These limitations enable the freeing grace of knowing ourselves God’s beloved creatures, at home in God’s care.
[1] Robert Bryant, “Exegetical Perspective on Matthew 4:1-11” in Feasting on the Word, Year A Vol. 2, David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor, eds. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2010), 45.