Fruit of the Tree

According to the first narrative of the Book of Genesis, God took seven days to create the Universe, including a day of rest.  Why it should have been seven and not some other number is an interesting question, but in all events, it leaves us with a seven-day week as one of the basic elements of our calendar.  According to the second narrative, however, God took just one day.  There are several other interesting differences between the two narratives, but the most significant to my mind lies in the basic question being addressed: the first describes how the Universe is put together, the second how it works, works, that is, from the perspective of human involvement.

The second narrative, set in the mythical Garden of Eden, includes an extensive dialogue between God and the newly-created human persons, whom we know as Adam and Eve.  In the dialogue God forbids Adam to eat of “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil”.  Despite this command, in fact Adam, with Eve, does just that.  At the same time, they realise that they have acted contrary to God’s intention, for when they next encounter God “walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze”, they hide themselves.  

The story points to two significant conclusions: first, by disobeying God’s command they show that God had endowed humanity with the agency of choice, and secondly, by hiding from God, they show that God had given humanity the capacity to make moral judgements.  Human persons possess freewill and they know right from wrong, that knowledge being the fruit of the tree.  What the story does not tell us is what is right and what is wrong, for we do not finish with a list of moral precepts or a code of ethics.  That comes later.

Our best-known code of ethics was presented by Moses in his Ten Commandments.  In due course the code was extended to cover, it is said, six hundred and thirteen laws, all set out in the Book of Leviticus and elsewhere.  Some prophets thought that this extension overdid it.  Micah, for example, asked: “[W]hat does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”

The problem with legal codes is that they are inevitably connected to the circumstances in which they are formulated, making them irrelevant in other circumstances.  The commandment “You shall not muzzle an ox while it is treading out the grain” may have made considerable sense in the agrarian society where it was first formulated, but for us it is quaint and of little import.  Conversely, those ox-owning millers would have been puzzled by our prohibition of driving on the wrong side of the road.

These examples are relatively trivial: others are much more significant.  The ancient Hebrew culture found nothing immoral in polygamy and, as in many other cultures, women were oppressed.  More recently, changes which were once inconceivable have occurred in that area, and the oppression has lifted somewhat, a fact apparent to me every time I see a woman presiding at the Eucharist.  

But while a legal code can become inapplicable in new circumstances, actually amending it can be disturbing for many people, me among them.  After all, once a practice has been judged immoral how can it ever be otherwise?  How can it be right today and wrong tomorrow, or wrong yesterday and right today?

It is indeed, a challenging matter, and in the long run, our only choice is to return (metaphorically) to the Garden of Eden.  This, surely, is what our Lord did, when he was challenged by the lawyer to identify the neighbour whom he, the lawyer, had been commanded to love.  Our Lord did not define ‘neighbour’ but instead told of a man going down from Jerusalem to Jericho.  Having been told the circumstances, the lawyer used his God-given sense of right and wrong to answer his own question. 

In exercising our moral sense, we must take account of our contemporary circumstances with all of their intricacies and complexities, whether at a personal, communal or cultural level.  Our judgements will change as our circumstances change, as history continues to demonstrate.  We are to make moral judgements according to the teachings of Christ and by virtue of his grace.  As our knowledge and experience change, so too will our judgements, for we live by grace, not the law.  As St John put it: “The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ”.