Two Rivers Pastoral Charge
Sunday July 23, 2023
Scripture: Genesis 2:18-25
This week, in our exploration of the stories of women in the bible, we heard the story of the first woman in the bible who is named… only did you notice that we didn’t get to hear her name this morning? It turns out that we only heard half of her story this morning, and she doesn’t receive her name until the end of the next chapter – I just didn’t think that our reader would have been very happy about being asked to read a chapter and a half of the bible!
We also have part of the story happening before the part that we heard. In the first part of Chapter 2 of Genesis, we read about God shaping the first human out of the dust of the ground – an earthling created of the earth; a human created from the humus. This earthling was then brought to life by the breath of God and placed in a garden and given instructions to tend and care for the land. In the centre of this garden grew both the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil; and our earthling was told that they could eat freely of any tree in the garden except for the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, with the warning that if they eat of that tree, then they would die immediately.
That’s what came before today’s story – the story of the human, lonely without a companion, the story of God causing the human to fall into a deep sleep, and the story of God splitting the first human into two humans, a man and a woman.
And then the story continues from there in Chapter 3, and it’s a story that might be familiar to some of you. We have a crafty snake who approaches the two humans for a conversation. The snake asks: “Did God say, ‘You shall not eat from any tree in the garden?’” The woman replies: “We may eat of the fruit of the the trees in the garden, but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.’” The crafty snake answers back, “But you will not die, for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
And with that, the woman looked at the tree with fresh eyes – she saw that the tree of the knowledge of good and evil delighted her eyes. She saw that the fruit of this tree was good to eat. She saw that the wisdom that the fruit would bring to her was something to be desired. And she picked the fruit, shared it with the man, and the two of them ate.
Almost right away they were ashamed of what they had done. Together, they sewed fig leaves to cover themselves, and when they heard God approaching, they hid in the bushes.
This next part of the story reminds me of when my youngest cousin was little. The rest of us were still sitting at the dinner table, and she wanted to take a chocolate from the side table. We watched her come in to the room, one hand held up beside her face so that she couldn’t see us, grabbed a chocolate, and left the room the way she had entered… the rationale being that if she couldn’t see us, then we couldn’t see her.
So here we have the two humans hiding in the bushes, and in walks the all-knowing, all-seeing God. And God asks, “Where are you?” as if God doesn’t know where the humans are.
The humans are compelled to confess what they have done – the man blames the woman, the woman blames the snake, and nowhere do they say that they are sorry for what they have done – to say that they are sorry for disobeying God’s instructions and for damaging their relationship with God.
I have lots of questions for this story. The first one is: Were they sorry? I don’t know. I don’t know if the power, the lure, the appeal of the wisdom that they had gained was stronger than their desire to be in relationship with God.
And then what follows is expulsion from the garden. Rather than being able to freely pick from all of the trees that God had planted there, they would have to work for their food, work for their living.
It’s interesting to note that God doesn’t carry out the threat of immediate death for eating the fruit – they are about to lose access to the tree of life which means that they are going to die one day, but not today. This is where we hear the well-known words, “you will return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Which raises another question: Because the humans didn’t die as soon as they ate the fruit, does that make this a story about grace, about unearned forgiveness, rather than a story that is just about sin?
And only then is the woman named – Eve – her name meaning “Mother of All Living.” She isn’t named for the wrong that she has done, but rather for the life that she will bring as the mother of us all.
I have more questions for this story.
My next question is a foundational question. When Eve, the Mother of all Living, and Adam, named after the “Adam” or dust from which they were made – when they chose to listen to the snake and eat the fruit of the tree that God had forbidden to them, they hadn’t yet eaten the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Which sounds like a circular statement. Before they ate the fruit, they hadn’t eaten the fruit. But this means that they didn’t yet know good and evil. They didn’t yet know what was right and wrong. And so can they truly be blamed for eating the fruit? How could they have understood that it was wrong, until after they ate it?
And so I wonder if the expulsion from the garden was a consequence of their actions rather than a punishment. To have free access to both the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil would make humans like God – in the garden, we had access to the tree of life, outside of the garden we have access to the wisdom that comes from knowing good and evil.
Interestingly, access to the tree of life which humanity loses so early in the story of the bible returns at the very end of the bible, at the end of Revelation, with God’s re-creation of the earth, and there in the centre of the new creation stands the tree of life. But that’s a story for another day!
Instead, the story of Eve essentially ends as they leave the garden. She is mentioned again only in relation to her children, Cain and Abel. She goes on to live the rest of her life carrying the memory of the garden and the memory of what they had done, but the story of the rest of her life isn’t recorded.
I wonder if she regretted her choice? Did she regret choosing the path of wisdom and knowledge and insight, longing for the days when she was ignorant and unaware?
The expression, “ignorance is bliss” is popular for a reason! I don’t know about you, but I often think that life would be a lot easier if I wasn’t aware that there was a war going on in Ukraine; if I wasn’t aware of gender-based violence and child abuse; if I wasn’t aware of climate change; if I wasn’t aware of racism and homophobia and transphobia. Sometimes it feels like I are having so much doom and gloom thrown at us every day that I just want to curl up under a blanket with my cats and a novel and a cup of tea and pretend that none of that is happening in the world.
But I can’t. I can’t do that, because if I pretend that none of the bad stuff is happening, then I wouldn’t have the motivation to try and change the world a little bit for the better. Or, more accurately, I wouldn’t have to motivation to let the Holy Spirit work in me, empowering me to change the world a little bit for the better.
If all of us are ignorant, or feign ignorance, then the evil in the world will be allowed to flourish. We need to be aware of the evil in order to be able to stand up to it. We can’t just put our collective heads in the sand.
Even in the overall story of the bible, again and again, God pleads for us to seek wisdom rather than ignorance. We hear this most pointedly in Proverbs, where Woman Wisdom is running through the streets, shouting at people who seem to be choosing ignorance over wisdom.
Which brings us back to Eve. What if, instead of blaming her for the loss of the garden life, what if we could instead thank her for opening up the option of wisdom for us? What if the Mother of all the Living is also the Mother of all Wisdom (for I think that life and wisdom are very much connected), and we seek to follow in her ways of the fullness of all living, and the seeking of wisdom and knowledge?
And may this be so. Amen.
“The
Temptation and Fall of Eve”
(Illustration for Paradise Lost by John Milton)
William Blake
It is interesting, with this story and others, that so many of us
remember, not necessarily the story, but what we have
been told about the story. The words “temptation,”
“sin,” and “fall” do not appear in the story of Eve.
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