I
wonder whether you have ever been to the Poison Garden at Alnwick Gardens? It
is billed as the most poisonous garden in the world. So long as you do exactly
as you are told by the tour guide, you will be perfectly safe; but decide that
the rules don’t apply to you, and you might make yourself violently sick, or
even die.
The
Lord God, we are told, planted a garden and took on the human as apprentice, to
learn the care and use and misuse of plants. One of the trees in the garden,
the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, had fruit that was poisonous to us.
Of course, humans are not the only creatures the Lord God created and provides
for, and there are plants whose fruit is poisonous to us but good for some
other animal or bird. There are also plants whose flowers, or berries, or
leaves, or bark are highly toxic, and yet whose bark, or leaves, or berries, or
flowers, rightly prepared, have medicinal properties. It is almost impossible
for us, who do not have to discover these things for ourselves, to imagine how
frightening the world might be for our ancestors, were it not for divine
protection and tutoring.
Note
that evil is already present in the world, the result of some element of
creation, here represented by the serpent, being in rebellion against the Lord
God. The human gardeners will need knowledge of good and evil, will need to
learn how to do good and avoid evil. And there is provision for this: but God
would avoid them learning it by a Russian roulette trial-and-fatal-error. (Not
that either Russia or roulette had yet been invented, you understand.) Note
also that death is already a reality in the world. The humans would have
experienced it. There is no “all animals were plant-eaters before the Fall of Man”
nonsense here. But again, God would have the humans avoid a sudden and
premature death, with all the fear that brings.
So,
the Lord God provides a tree, among the trees, with purpose and parameters. But
the parameters are broken, and the purpose remains at least partially
unfulfilled—although the consequences are ameliorated.
This
tree of the knowledge of good and evil comes up, albeit unnamed, in our Gospel
reading. Jesus declares, “I am casting out demons and performing cures.” In
other words, he has knowledge of evil, and how to cast it out; and knowledge of
good, explicitly how to cure the sick. Jesus has mastered what the first
apprentice failed to do. Even so, it is a risky business: and he too will die,
even if not today or tomorrow or the next day.
We
are called to join him, in growing in our knowledge of good and evil under the
direction of God’s instruction. To get our hands dirty, with Jesus—and at times
under his protection. But are we willing?
This
week, yet again, we have heard news of children who went to school and grew in
their knowledge of good and evil, as classmates were gunned down and a football
coach laid down his own life to protect the children in his care. Yet again, we
see sly political leaders offer empty ‘thoughts and prayers’ while refusing to
address the cause of death. From where we stand, the American obsessive
love-affair with that tool of violence, the gun, is beyond understanding. The
danger is that such reports obscure to us our own context, to the evil we are
called to cast out and the cures we are called to perform. Jesus gave his
followers power and authority to do the things that he had been doing. May God
open our eyes to see, and our ears to listen.
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