It is not unusual to wonder what the Bible means when it says that Adam and Eve were not to eat from the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. If you take it on the literal level, you are faced with the notion that all of God’s creation must never understand good and evil. That quickly devolves into just follow the rules and you will be safe and, if we are honest about how this story is interpreted, you will be loved by God.
This notion, based on following the rules and not on love, has led to a path that says sin came to the world because a woman could not resist temptation and a man couldn’t resist doing what his wife said. Really? So, as it happens often, we blame women and then we tell them that they will have “pain in birth” because of it. You see, this is exactly why God told them not to eat from that tree, because without maturity and love, it simply becomes a blaming process.
Is it possible that God didn’t want them to eat from that tree before they were mature enough to understand that God’s lover is the way to interpret good and evil? I believe that is exactly the point of the story, that before we begin to judge and develop the idea of “sin” we must be mature enough to trust God. If we learn of “good and evil” from the place of love, then we understand the life of Christ and the law of love.
How is it that church teaches us to obey and that because we don’t obey, we are sinful and must pay for those sins? And, then we are taught that because we are simply human, we cannot always obey so our humanity is what put Jesus on the Cross. Perhaps, with maturity, we are able to see that this is not the case. Jesus died to teach us that our lives matter but that even when they matter, it might go horribly wrong.
I am in agreement with Richard Rohr, Jesus was not plan B. Jesus was plan A always! He came to show us how to live, how it is possible to live life a different way, the way of Love. “I have come that you might have life and that life in abundance”. That life that he showed us, that is the “blueprint” for what we should do. We love, we accept, we forgive, and we go the extra mile. It is because he lived that we are saved, not because he died.
TMM