The Tree of Life… Eve could have eaten from this tree but she chose to pursue the fruit of tree of objective & distant knowledge instead.
For me, Genesis 3 is the story of a woman talking herself into rebelling against the one & only condition that God has set for living in the garden. God’s first words to Adam were expressed as freedom with minimal rules, “You may freely eat of every tree in the garden, but of the tree of good and evil, you must not eat…” Instead of being the story of the woman who enjoys the same intimacy with God in the garden as Adam, this is the story of a woman who remains where she is. Eve allows herself to be overwhelmed by the tyranny of her own ego.
Here we arrive at the heart of the matter. When we open ourselves up to the stranger and the alien, when we allow ourselves to be penetrated to the heart by another – we are shaped and formed by those experiences. We have movement and life and meaning and purpose in the world.
However, when we confine other people and different places to the edges of our self-same world, when we close the circle, and build a structure of meaning with ourselves at the center – well that’s the pathway that we traditionally call sin. The snake speaks truly, ‘If you eat the fruit… you will be like gods’. Sin is the sum of all those selfish and manipulative actions that gather momentum when the self is elevated to the position of a god.
