I’ve seen any number of commentaries on Genesis from really childish and stupid youtube animations to Bill Maher’s “Religulous” to Richard Dawkins’ fiery rants to online memes, and they all seem to seethe over one particular thing… the tree of the forbidden fruit.
Now, keep in mind, Genesis is a theological explanation of the world’s beginnings, not a scientific one, which means it is just as true as evolution, but pertaining to a deeper truth than the purely physical matter of the world. It uses allegory, poetry, symbolism, and rich language that cannot be unpacked using a literalist/scientific approach.
Now, keep in mind, Genesis is a theological explanation of the world’s beginnings, not a scientific one, which means it is just as true as evolution, but pertaining to a deeper truth than the purely physical matter of the world. It uses allegory, poetry, symbolism, and rich language that cannot be unpacked using a literalist/scientific approach.
Back to the topic. Usually the commentary goes something like, “God is such a petty, egotistical, dictatorial, masochistic jerk who doesn’t want humans to have knowledge because he forbids them to eat from the Tree of Knowledge.” I’d agree wholeheartedly with all of them, except that they’re leaving out an important part of it; it’s the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Huh, does that maybe change something here? Indeed it does.
We moderns tend to think in the abstract. We think that everything can be measured and empirically tested and neatly put into a box that we can wrap our minds around and say, “Oh I get it, next topic.” We want to be totally objective, looking at it from afar where it doesn’t bear much meaning to us. For us, knowledge of good and evil fits that same kind of knowing, but unfortunately that’s just not the case for us humans, and Genesis reminds us of that truth, we are subjective beings, too.
See, there’s a reason that Adam and Eve eat something that represents knowledge of good and evil. By eating it, they take it into their bodies. Its essence becomes part of them (ergo us too). Not abstractly either, like we want it to be, but instead we know good and evil concretely, with our entire being, body and soul, heart and mind. Good and evil are not just something that we look at from afar and understand. Our knowledge of it is a lived knowledge, and that includes death, which is not what the living God desires for us.
We moderns tend to think in the abstract. We think that everything can be measured and empirically tested and neatly put into a box that we can wrap our minds around and say, “Oh I get it, next topic.” We want to be totally objective, looking at it from afar where it doesn’t bear much meaning to us. For us, knowledge of good and evil fits that same kind of knowing, but unfortunately that’s just not the case for us humans, and Genesis reminds us of that truth, we are subjective beings, too.
See, there’s a reason that Adam and Eve eat something that represents knowledge of good and evil. By eating it, they take it into their bodies. Its essence becomes part of them (ergo us too). Not abstractly either, like we want it to be, but instead we know good and evil concretely, with our entire being, body and soul, heart and mind. Good and evil are not just something that we look at from afar and understand. Our knowledge of it is a lived knowledge, and that includes death, which is not what the living God desires for us.
For us mere mortals, we don’t have the power within ourselves to break out of the hold that eating the fruit from the tree has over us. In eating the fruit we grasped at that divinity, but it does not belong to us. God does, however, and he designed from the beginning for us to share in his eternal life. Just like we cannot know good and evil from afar abstractly, God would not save us from afar abstractly, decreeing from Heaven that our sins are forgiven and that we can enter eternal life. That means nothing to us whose essence has been tainted by the fruit of the tree.
God became man. Jesus Christ, the Son of the living God, took on our human nature, being born of the Virgin Mary, sharing in our humanity in every way except for sin. He became part of our lived knowledge of good and evil, and in his passion and death allowed the full horrible violence of Evil to destroy his body on the cross, but that was not the end. Death has no power over the living God. Jesus rose again on the third day in the fullness of life, the resurrection from the dead. We are restored in our dignity and now have the way to redemption, we are able to break out of our fallen nature and share in eternal life with God, because God himself has set us free concretely. It is in our union with Christ, the resurrection from the dead, that we are able to participate in his salvation and eternal life.
God became man. Jesus Christ, the Son of the living God, took on our human nature, being born of the Virgin Mary, sharing in our humanity in every way except for sin. He became part of our lived knowledge of good and evil, and in his passion and death allowed the full horrible violence of Evil to destroy his body on the cross, but that was not the end. Death has no power over the living God. Jesus rose again on the third day in the fullness of life, the resurrection from the dead. We are restored in our dignity and now have the way to redemption, we are able to break out of our fallen nature and share in eternal life with God, because God himself has set us free concretely. It is in our union with Christ, the resurrection from the dead, that we are able to participate in his salvation and eternal life.
But God knows a little something about us humans, and that’s that we can’t know things abstractly. We can’t just look back at ancient history and fully grasp what happened in the death and resurrection of Jesus and participate in the fullness of it. He knows that we have to know it concretely, here and now, so Jesus gave us something to eat, his very body and blood.
We take him into our bodies, and his essence becomes our own. His death becomes our own, and his resurrection becomes our own. We know the fullness of life with our entirebeing when we celebrate the Eucharist, body and soul, mind and heart. It unites us perfectly with him, and yet it still points us forward into deeper communion because we humans are still on the journey, we’re not yet there. It remains a mystery to us, one that we constantly enter into, or rather, allow it to enter into us, so that we can fall ever more greatly in love with He Who Is Love, and one day eat at God’s heavenly banquet. It started with eating wrongly and it will end with eating rightly.
Written by: Marty Arlinghaus
Written by: Marty Arlinghaus
