Sermon, Lent 1, 22 February 2026
Readings: Genesis 2.15-17; 3.1-7; Romans 5.12-19; Matthew 4. 1-11
Theme: The Tree of Knowledge
The story of creation in the Book of Genesis is one of the best-known in the Bible. The separation of light from darkness, of land from water, the creation of animals and plants and finally the creation of humans, all furnish our imaginations with how things were in the beginning.
Countless films and paintings have used the setting of the garden of Eden for these primal events and to depict an original paradise and our expulsion from it. Central to this notion of expulsion is the presence of the two trees in the middle of the garden. Yet there is something puzzling about these two trees that we read about in Genesis 2.9: the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. It is not clear whether they are two trees or one. And what does it mean that one tree gives the power of life and the other the power of the knowledge of good and evil?
Once Adam and Eve have eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, God expels them from the garden. And we can understand this expulsion as less of a punishment from God but as God´s way of preventing them from also eating of the tree of life. In the light of the message of the New Testament, as for example in that of Revelation 22, we see that God does this to prevent them from living in this sinful state forever, which would have resulted from them also eating of that tree: A foreshadowing of what we have later come to understand as Hell.
This mortality and corrupted state, which comes from eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, will be redeemed in the new tree of life that will be planted in the garden of the kingdom of God: the cross of Christ upon which our salvation hung becoming the first fruit of the tree of eternal life. Eucharistic eating of this fruit restores us to life and wholeness. From this tree in the middle of the new city of the kingdom of God, other trees of life will sprout and cure all the nations (Revelation 22.1-2).
The image of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil has been variously portrayed in literature. In the 1911 novel by the Spanish writer, Pío Caro Baroja, El árbol de la Ciencia, Baroja uses this image to tell a story of a dark tale of a loss of faith and bitter disillusionment. The novel recounts the life of a young medical student, Andrés Hurtado, and his journey to maturity which ends tragically in his suicide following the death of his wife and child. Baroja was part of the so-called generation of ´98 who reflected on the demise of Spain and the rise of the opposing political solutions to this crisis developed in monarchism and republicanism, following Spain´s humiliating defeat in the 1898 Spanish American War. Inspired by the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, it is a pessimistic portrayal of a life disillusioned by the empty Enlightenment promises of the ‘liberating’ knowledge of science that cannot save us from despair at the fate of all life. The character of Andrés represents a Spain that has lost its way, and which no longer knows what it believes in and where it is heading: Wonderfully tragic!
The readings for this first Sunday of Lent inspired the title of Baroja´s novel, ‘the tree of knowledge’. Baroja uses the biblical story of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden to reflect on the meaning of life. He grapples in the novel with fundamental existential questions such as, what is it that makes life worthwhile? How are we to understand morality? What is death? Is love futile?
The point of the Genesis story, of course, is that disobedience to God is turning away from life, love, and God-given morality. Accepting who we are, who God is, and what follows from knowing these things turns us towards life and away from death. We are not God, but creatures created by God. A failure to realize this is the start of things going horribly wrong in the first garden. A loss of an original innocence results, portrayed in the narrative by the depiction of shame that they experience in God´s presence. The result is that they hide from God because they are embarrassed by their nakedness. Just like Adam and Eve, moral disorientation arrives for Andrés in Baroja’s novel, when he loses sight of God and stops listening to God´s voice amidst the trials and tribulation of his life. He raises questions that he has no answers for, and he finds no way back from his loss of original innocence.
However, for us, the good news is that Christ has given us a route back to innocence. Through Christ, God has remixed the primal story of disobedience that Genesis recounts and Baroja picks up in his dark modernist novel. As Paul says in the Letter to the Romans 5. 18, ‘Therefore, just as one man´s sin led to condemnation for all, so the act of righteousness of one leads to justification and life for all’. The restoration of eternal life in Christ and the overcoming of sin and death is a story that recounts the existence of a new garden of Eden: the kingdom of God. It is in dwelling in this restored garden that we come to learn that good and evil, life and death, have been transformed by the resurrection of Christ.
Christ has restored our likeness with God and liberated us from the disobedience of original sin. This obedience of Christ makes us righteous. It reconciles us to God and returns us to living in his image in the innocence of the garden of paradise. If only Andrés Hurtado had known that entrance to this garden of life comes as a gift from the Lord and not from his own deeds, or indeed, from the fortunes of his country; what ended in tragedy in the novel could have been a hopeful story of life-giving redemption.