Forgiveness Sunday and Great Lent
And Eve replies, truthfully enough, that God had said that they could freely eat of any of the trees of the garden, but had said that they should not eat the fruit of one tree. But the temptation to represent God as an ogre is hard to resist completely, so she exaggerates by saying that God had not only prohibited eating the fruit of the tree, but had even prohibited touching it.
And as the discussion proceeds, the God who made the prohibition seems more and more unreasonable, and so Eve eats and then persuades Adam to eat. The story is well known, but even in the telling of it, it is easy to misunderstand, and to exaggerate as Eve did, and to make God seem like an ogre.
To hear the way some people tell the story, one might think that God did not say "in the day that you eat of it you shall die", but rather "in the day that you eat of it I will kill you."
If we begin Great Lent with such a picture of an ogre God, we can very easily miss what it is all about.
It can therefore help if we consider two examples.
Say you have a guest who comes to stay, and you have to go out for a while. You say to the guest, "Please make yourself at home. You are welcome to eat any food you find in the fridge or in the kitchen, but please don't eat the bananas in the bowl on the dining room table."
When you return, you can't find the guest anywhere, but eventually, after a search, you find him hiding behind the door in a bedroom, and discover that he has hidden because he had eaten the bananas.
Would you be angry with the guest because of his disobedience? Or would you have been sad because of the abuse of hospitality, which had broken trust, and so broken the relationship?
The second example is even simpler: if you tell your child not to eat the rat poison in the kitchen, because if he eats it he will die, what do you have in mind? Is it your intention to kill the child for his disobedience if he eats the poison, or rather to warn against the consequences of eating?
In telling of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from paradise, too often the emphasis is on the ogre God who
Latest Articles