Last Sunday, resuming our tour through the Book of Genesis, we found ourselves in a garden in which God had planted a large number of very pleasant trees, which offered all we could want out of created goods – they're useful, enjoyable, interesting, and varied. But among them, we met with two trees that stood out, two trees that are something more than the others. There's something sacramental about these trees. The one we focused on the most last Sunday was called the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. It represents the presence of divine wisdom in the garden, and its fruit offers the royal power to govern by handing our blessings and curses, just like the Law of God. But this was withheld from us, because we weren't capable of handling it – not, at least, without growing through discipline. And so to have it planted there, available but forbidden, presents us with the very first law, the original commandment: Enjoy everything else, but don't trespass in this one thing. In turn, that commandment created the possibility of obedience – or disobedience. Two very different options.
Today, we're not going to take long, because we don't have much time. But I want to turn our focus away from this tree that's forbidden, and over to another tree, a more central tree. And that was called the Tree of Life. Its fruit is a sacrament of divine life, God's own life-giving presence in his creation. It's symbolized, in the later tabernacle and temple, by the menorah that shines 24/7 to fill the holy sanctuary with light, including shedding it onto the golden table that always offers holy bread. These two things together – the lampstand and the table of bread – reveal the illumination and provision that the Tree of Life was there to give in the garden-sanctuary. The Tree of Life represents the opposite of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, insofar as the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, if approached disobediently, becomes a tree of death. Obedience to God's word, keeping his commandment by refusing the forbidden fruit and enjoying all the other fruit, is what's shown to us by this other tree, this first-mentioned tree. The pathway of obedience to God leads to sharing God's life.
Later, we hear that the wisdom that begins with obedience is “a tree of life to those who lay hold of her; those who hold her fast are called blessed” (Proverbs 3:18). God wants us to lay hold of life, God wants us to cling to this tree of life and be blessed. The problem, you might have noticed, is that we presently are not living in the Garden of Eden. We're going to find out how that happened over the course of the next month. But the fact remains that this isn't Eden. So it looks very much as if the Tree of Life has been taken away from us, left to us only in symbols like the lampstand in the temple and the ability to approach wisdom through God's law.
But when the early Christians read Genesis, they saw a prophecy. “Very sad was the Tree of Life when it saw Adam hidden from it!” they said. “Into the virgin earth it sank and was buried, but it arose and shone forth from Golgotha.”1 From these early days, Christians identified “the tree of life” with “the mystery of the cross.”2 In advance, Christ's “crucifixion was symbolized by the tree of life.”3 After all, what did the Apostle Peter say? “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree.” That's what Peter calls the cross: 'the tree.' Why did Jesus bear our sins in his body on the tree? Peter says: “That we might die to sin and live to righteousness.” That is, the fruit of Christ's cross is that we come alive – alive to righteousness, alive to the life God wants for us. And Peter goes on: “By his wounds you have been healed” (1 Peter 2:24). How does John depict the Tree of Life? “The tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month; the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations” (Revelation 22:2). And so “by the tree of life he restores us.”4
The Tree of Life is a sign, a prefigurement, of Christ crucified. His wounds are the medicinal leaves that bring healing to all the nations of the world. His fruit is the life he offers to us, the life he surrenders into God's hands as he dies. Although the cross was a Roman instrument of death, Christ brilliantly turned it into the Tree of Life – it's the wooden tree on which he sacrificed himself so that we could come alive to righteousness. And in this way, Christ crucified “became the Tree of Life that saved creation.”5
Last Sunday, we heard from Moses that, when confronted with this choice posed by the trees, this divergence of life and death, we ought to “choose life” (Deuteronomy 30:19). And now we know how to choose life: by choosing the cross of Christ. Now, to the world, and maybe to the worldliness in us, that's absurd! The cross is such an ugly, foolish, scandalous thing – pain and blood and tears and death. “Christ crucified” is, the Apostle Paul already told us, “a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles” (1 Corinthians 1:23). How could this tree of a curse, this tree that terrorizes and kills, be the Tree of Life? Only because Christ is on it to save. A bare cross, a cross that isn't Christ's throne, could do nothing. But Christ crucified is everything.
Paul tells the Corinthians, not long after mentioning the scandal and the foolishness of the cross, that he “decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Corinthians 2:2). The reason was, he said, so that their faith “might not rest in human wisdom” – in other words, in what the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil gave – “but in the power of God,” the power of the Tree of Life (1 Corinthians 2:5). Right now, we're in the middle of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, because – contrary to the express wish of Jesus – Christians have fractured from the unity he gave to his Church in the beginning. These different denominations, these self-governed 'non-denominational' churches – none of that was what Jesus gave his Church. He gave the Church a unity to gather around, be fed by, and abide in a single Tree of Life. That was what Paul proclaimed: that Jesus “might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross,” through the Tree of Life he became on Calvary. And our prayer and passion should be to resolve these divisions, to reconcile into the one unity of the Church, to really become a single kingdom of peace, for the sake of that life.
And I will tell you this: there is nothing more unifying, nothing more powerful, nothing more healing for all these sicknesses of life – including our disunity – than to gather around the Tree of Life, than to gaze at Christ crucified, than to cling to that old rugged cross, than to feast on the fruit of his love. So come. Come and stand at the foot of the cross, and know you tread ground holier than Adam and Eve trod. Come, stretch out your hand to him, and take what the cross is offering. Lay hold of life – at great cost does it grow for you to take!
I'll close with a quote from a medieval bishop, one of the great scientists of his day: “It is right for the blessed cross to be called the tree of life, because by the fruit of that tree of paradise, the human being, if he had not sinned, would have been able to make his life everlasting. So by the fruit of the tree of the cross, the life of grace is made everlasting. The fruit of the tree of the cross is Christ … Other trees, though they bear fruit from which one may live, do not bear the fruit which is life. The tree of the cross not only bore fruit one could live on, but the fruit which is Life. … And on this tree of life, he put death to death and gave life to the dead.”6 Thanks be to God, who makes us alive by Christ crucified, our Tree of Life which saves all creation! Amen.
1 Ephrem the Syrian, Hymns on Virginity 16.10, in Kathleen E. McVey, tr., Ephrem the Syrian: Hymns (Paulist Press, 1989), 332.
2 Origen of Alexandria, Homilies on Exodus 7.1, in Fathers of the Church: A New Translation 71:302.
3 Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho 86.1, in Fathers of the Church: A New Translation 6:285.
4 Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 29.20, in Popular Patristics Series 23:88.
5 Ephrem the Syrian, Hymns on Virginity 51.8, in Kathleen E. McVey, tr., Ephrem the Syrian: Hymns (Paulist Press, 1989), 463.
6 Robert Grosseteste, Hexaemeron 11.8.2, in C. F. J. Martin, tr., Robert Grosseteste: On the Six Days of Creation (Oxford University Press, 1996), 322.
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