NOT TWICE OVER
1. The Tree of Knowledge was not the only great leafy treasure in the sanctuary of Eden. In the midst of the garden, stood a second and more magnificent tree, the Tree of Life. [cf. Gen 2:9] God told Adam and Eve their lives depended on not touching either tree. Listening to the devil, however, they feasted on the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. Satan's intent was manifest: To destroy their lives, he would persuade them to violate God’s truth.
2. Fearing that they would molest the Tree of Life, God promptly expelled them from the garden. Eating its fruit would make Eve and Adam the human equivalent of fallen angels. God had quite enough of the rebellious Lucifer and his demons. He did not want evil immortalized twice over. [cf. Gen 3:22]
GOD’S MASTERY OVER TRUTH AND LIFE
3. Though presented as a dialectic in the Genesis text, the Trees of Life and Knowledge do not imply dualities of God in whom being and knowing are one. They do however signify God’s mastery over all things. God is absolutely sovereign over life. He alone names what is true.
4. Unquestionably, God gifted man with stewardship over the created world. His dominion encompassed the land, sea and air of earth. However, God denied his human creation supremacy over everything. Man's suzerainty terminated where divine mystery started:
BUT OF the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die. [Gen 2:17]
HE DROVE out the man; and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to guard the way to the tree of life. [Gen 3:24]
PERPETUAL STRUGGLE
5. Adam and Eve paid a great price for hijacking the knowledge of good and evil. Their evil was responsible for the fall of God’s creation. This terrible comprehension entered society with Adam and Eve as its bewildered prophets.
6. They were responsible for every shadow, every heartache, every tear, every disappointment they suffered. They could not wish away the world’s vulnerability and risk. They could only cope with it. Further, the divine injunction regarding the Trees was inviolable. Human beings would struggle perpetually to interpret divine truth. For his part God would never grant them power to change it or make it up.
SCRUBBY PEOPLE
7. In the course of history, God inaugurated his plan to rescue human beings from their brutal folly. He approached a particularly pitiful clan despised by their Egyptian overlords for their flocks of sheep and goats and nomadic ways. God revealed himself to this scrubby and exhausted people "in a desert land, and in the howling waste of the wilderness; he encircled him, he cared for him, he kept him as the apple of his eye". [Deu 32:10]
8. They were Hebrews, Egyptian slaves. God commanded one of them, Moses, to work signs and wonders in pharaoh's court: “And there has not arisen a prophet since in Israel like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face.” [Deu 34:10]
9. Through Moses God asked this people to choose for or against him. If they chose for him, they had to ratify their choice by accepting the law written by God himself on stone tablets. [cf. Ex 31:18] Inscribed on these tablets, Moses informed the people, were ten commandments. They were stern and proscriptive, governing individual and corporate behavior alike.
10. The Mosaic law gave Israel its identity, their chart and compass. God placed his elect squarely in the midst of the garden of humanity to the west of the Jordan River in “a land flowing with milk and honey”. [Deu 27:3] Fidelity to God's law ensured life and good for God's people. [cf. Deu 30:15] As it turned out the commandments were hard to keep and easy to break.
NO LASTING CONVERSION
11. Throughout its history Israel experienced shocking episodes of intellectual and spiritual disintegration. The law painfully illuminated Israel’s shortcomings along the way even as it continued to reassure its people of God’s care in a hostile world. Though a perpetual good, the law failed to achieve Israel’s lasting conversion of heart.
12. God's law failed to animate the soul of Israelite society. Intended to preserve and defend life, it could not give or save life. Harsh and severe, the law relentlessly censured every individual and corporate violation against God's objective truth. Always close at hand was the fearful prospect of judgment and death.
VEIL OF THE LAW
13. The law veiled Israel’s eyes [cf. 2Cor 3:12-14] from discerning the Divine Order which it represented. While the law modeled God's fearful holiness, it had the effect of obscuring the personhood of God from his people. The law could not walk with man in the garden in the cool of the evening breeze. [cf. Gen 3:8]
14. Thus the breach between man and God widened. Israel was crushed by an intellectual and spiritual yoke beyond its capacity to bear. Sinful patriarchs and prophets were themselves powerless to husband the law to fruition. All too often the truth was distorted and corrupted or supplanted by the outright lies of the powerful elite.
LAW’S FULFILLMENT
15. Nonetheless Israel remained God’s favorite flower in the garden of humanity. In an acceptable time the Father sent his only begotten Son into their midst to be born of a virgin: “Behold, a young woman shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Imman'u-el.” [Isa 7:14]
16. Thus Christ stands at the center of Israel and the world: “Think not that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets; I have come not to abolish them but to fulfill them.” [Mt. 5:17] The Son of God fulfilled what the law of Moses could not.
ONLY A PERSON
17. Only a person can forgive sins, only a person by his passion and death could restore the broken relationship between God and humanity. Only a person can bestow his Spirit of grace upon a communion of men and women of goodwill, only a person can establish a new covenant in his name. Only a person could liberate the Mosaic Law from its joyless inventory of human offenses.
18. All human longing, wrote Pope John Paul II, is “a search for the truth and a search for a person to whom they might entrust themselves.” [John Paul II, Faith and Reason, no. 33 (1998)] That person is Jesus Christ, fully God and fully human. “Christian faith immerses human beings in the order of grace, which enables them to share in the mystery of Christ, which in turn offers them a true and coherent knowledge of the Triune God.” [no. 33]
MAN’S PARTICULAR NATIVITY
19. In his natural though fallen state, the human creature displays an obvious though imperfect beauty. God invites man to ennoble his existence, to acquire a privileged place in his Kingdom. By saying “yes” to God’s loving invitation he enters into the mystery of his own particular nativity: “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.” [Jn 3:5]
20. This higher level of human existence and dignity is nothing less than a sharing of the divine society of the Creator, most perfectly imaged in Jesus’ lovely and indefectible Bride, the Church! Jesus, anointed by God and sent “to proclaim liberty to the captives and the opening of the prison to those who are bound” [Isa 61:1] has wrecked the tyranny of evil and chastised human pride. He has shattered the iron collar enslaving man.
FREED FROM ANCIENT INFAMY
21. Christ is the truth and the life [cf. Jn 14:6], the high priest and the sacrifice. [cf. Heb 7:27] He is the revelation and the revealer [cf. Rev 1:1], the authority and the just judge. [cf. Acts 10:42] In Christ Jesus, our heavenly father is pleased to receive the human creation as a pure and fragrant offering to his glory. We are set free from the ancient infamy.
________________________________
