What stands in the middle of the garden of your life?

It was a difficult evening to be a St. Louisan on Thursday night/Friday morning.  As the story of the senseless killing in Kirkwood, MO was unfolding, I found myself just shaking my head and thinking: What next?  What has gone so horribly wrong in our world that someone felt their only recourse was to blow people away?  How did Charles Cookie Thornton, that man with that amazing smile, let the desire for revenge take over the center of his life in such a twisted, all consuming way? 

It is not an unfamiliar story. Or an unfamiliar result.  Providentially perhaps, there is a little detail in the Adam and Eve story that I have overlooked these past 50 years that may shed some light on Thursday night for all of us.  God planted a garden in Eden and placed the first humans there, we are told.  What God wanted was life and life to the full for us.  That is why the garden, an image of blessing, was created.  God wants LIFE for us.  Never stop telling yourself that.  God gives great permission within the garden.  The invitation was to enjoy everything in the garden – all the ways our powers are awake and engaged as humans.  The church fathers read that to mean science and math and politics and art – all the ways that we are able to be fully human and fully alive.  Once you understand that original blessing, comes an understanding of the prohibition.  There is only one thing human beings are not allowed to do:  They are not to eat from the fruit of the tree in the center of the garden. 

What does it mean?  If the Garden means the full flowering of our human traits, our ability to create, study, learn and grow, then what needs to stand in the middle to guide that all?  We need to have a keen sense of good and evil.  The condition for the possibility of human flourishing is a keen sense of the right/wrong, of good and evil.  And what this story from Genesis tells us is that deciding what is good and what is evil - that prerogative is God’s.  God determines what is good and evil – not us.  That is what is at the center of our human freedom, our human garden of Eden, - God’s law.

Don’t choose for yourself what is good, what is evil – let God choose that.  That was how you had life.  But when tempted by the cunning serpent, Adam and Eve grasp that power, seize that choice.  And if we are honest, we all have done the same.  WE, in our freedom, in our minds, in our wills - become the criterion of good and evil.  This is the heart of the disaster.  From this fundamental mistake – flow all our problems.

Though we’ll never know what was in the heart and mind of Cookie Thornton, don’t the behaviors say he chose just that – he was the one to decide who was good and evil on that city council.  And those are the people he targeted on that tragic Thursday night.  His is an extreme example of what happens when we usurp God’s role in deciding what is good and what is evil. 

The result of that choice is that Adam and Eve are driven from the garden.  It is easy to read that from a human standpoint as if God is MAD at them, or God is punishing them in a petty kind of way.  It is not about that.  When you seize the knowledge of good and evil, YOU leave the garden.  It becomes a place of lifelessness for you.  It becomes a desert for you.  This is the human story to the present day.  Ask any of the victim’s families – they’ll tell you about the desert they have been thrown into because a human usurped the judgment about good and evil. 

Fortunately, the story does not end there. Rather, it culminates in the story of the Son of Man – who begins his journey IN THE DESERT – in the place where humanity has wandered since being ejected from the garden.  Jesus stands in that place of our sin, our usurping of the right to decide what is good and evil, and reverses it.  Not by bread alone, but by every word that comes from God.  You shall not put God to the test.  The Lord your God you shall worship, him alone.  What Adam and Eve did wrong, Jesus did right, and taught us to do the same.  That’s what Paul is trying to tell us in that second reading.  What Adam and Eve rejected as the center of their lives, Jesus chose.

As lent begins, perhaps it is good to ask one simple question.  What are you making the center of your life?  Are you deciding for yourself what is good and what is evil?  Do you continue that rebellion of Adam and Eve by putting something else in the center of your garden?  For unless God is clearly there at the center, then you too, are being seduced by that most cunning of all the animals…