Sermon for the Second Sunday before Lent Year C 2025

'Tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil', by Bill Bell

Sermon for the Second Sunday before Lent

Preached at St Mary the Virgin, Charminster and St Michael Stinsford.

Genesis 2:4b-9, 15-end. Luke 8: 22-25

They were afraid and amazed, and said to one another, ‘Who then is this, that he commands even the winds and the water, and they obey him?’

May I speak in the name of God; Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Given the choice, would you choose humanity – life, we might say - or would you choose power?

Water is a terrifying thing. At least it is for me. My mother was shipwrecked twice whilst pregnant with me, and I have terrifying memories of nearly drowning in the river Moskva, and in a boat ride between Bali and Lombok, where we encountered a sudden sea storm with 30ft waves. 

I’ve never had a particularly good relationship with any body of water where I can’t see the bottom. And yet, there’s also something quite relaxing about being carried on the sea, about being held by something much greater than ourselves. 

Water is a sometimes gentle, sometimes terrifying reminder, that none of us, not one, is really in control. And that is the perfect subject to ponder as we step towards Lent. 

Our reading from Genesis didn’t mention water, but that’s not the Bible’s fault, that’s the people who put the lectionary together and decided to cut out 5 verses from the middle. Verses 10 to 14 describe the rivers that flow from the Garden of Eden, one is the Euphrates, which of course, still flows through modern Iraq, Turkey and Syria, two others, Gihon and Pishon, which we can’t identify geographically, and then the river Tigris, which is an immense river that joins the Euphrates and flows out into the Persian gulf.

Water is the tool God uses as a source of life, not just in Eden, but flowing out into the rest of the world. In Genesis 1, we see the Holy Spirit trembling, or quivvering, over the dark formless deep before God speaks light into the world. In Genesis 2, we see water supporting an abundance of fruit trees and verdure, for Ha-Ish, the Man, to eat from, including the tree of life, and the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil, and then right at the end of the bible, in the Revelation of St John, we see streams of water flowing from the new Jerusalem, water which brings healing to bodies and nations. It’s interesting, perhaps, that in St John’s depiction of heaven, there’s still healing work to be done on earth.

Genesis describes the scene where, as God looks on this first paradise, Eden, God recognises that the human is alone and needs an equal to share the garden with, so God creates animals, living things of all shapes and sizes, but as the human names them, they become like pets, sort of subordinate creatures, they have been named, not by God, but by the human. And at last, God puts Adam into a deep sleep, and our English bibles get a bit lost here, so I’m going to revert to the Hebrew. God says:

לֹא־טֹ֛וב הֱיֹ֥ות הָֽאָדָ֖ם לְבַדֹּ֑ו|  אֶֽעֱשֶׂהּ־לֹּ֥ו עֵ֖זֶר כְּנֶגְדֹּֽו

"It is not good that the adam, the earthling, should be alone  | I will make him, an Ezer, a helper, to be his likeness"

... nowadays we might say reflection, or the person you see when you look in a mirror.

Of course we know that for millennia, ever since the Bible was translated from Hebrew and Greek into Latin, really, this verse has been misused: I’ve heard it used to promote so called complementarianism, which means male headship and female subjugation, and even twisted into some strange arguments to justify the horrors of homophobia. 

I’ve personally only ever misused it to prove that there are biblical origins to the phrase ‘if you don’t succeed the first time, try, try again.’ 

But this is really important. God sees that the adam, the earthling, is companionless, and God wants to create a counterpart, someone to stand alongside the adam. And so God puts the adam into a deep sleep, and here the Hebrew is more complicated again. God takes from ha-ish, which means the man, or the only one, one of his ‘sides or halves’ (also translated as ribs), and forms ha Ishah, the woman, from half of him. In other words, God splits humanity in half, and creates from the adam, the earthling, two beings that mirror one another, and then, unlike the animals, the man giver he his own name, and she becomes ishah. They are naked and unashamed, and free to roam that garden and eat from all the trees, excluding the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, because it will lead to death. 

True knowledge, after all, is not just about seeing and understanding, but about doing, about practicing, as we know from the modern euphamism "knowing someone in the biblical sense". 

As we know, the humans later choose to eat, not from the tree of life, but from the tree of death, the tree that the devil tells them will give them power, and so humanity falls away from that easy relationship they had with God.

Regardless of whether Sunday school taught you to take this story literally or allegorically, the need for an equal, or equals, is something that we carry with us through life. We are made for companionship, not necessarily specifically for the companionship of marriage, or romance, but for community. It is not good for us to be alone, we need someone to help us.

It’s also that need for a companion, and for a helper, which we can carry into Luke’s Gospel where we see Jesus, curl up and fall asleep in the boat. He’s with them because they’re his friends. He’s not sleeping to annoy the disciples, or to avoid helping out, or even to create a better story, he’s sleeping because he’s fully human, and he is tired. 

And Luke decides to give us a picture of a very human Jesus, living through all the weaknesses of his humanity, just before we see the storm brewing, but before we know it, the boat is starting to fill with water, and the disciples are starting to panic. They go and wake up Jesus, and he rebukes the wind and the raging waves, and all is still. Jesus, can control the wind and the waves, and the disciples marvel, who is this man?

Would you choose life, or power? 

If you were presented with the tree of life, or the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, would you choose life? 

I suppose we all like to think that we would, but what we see around us in the world, in those countries through which the river Euphrates and Tigris still flow, in our own country, in America, Russia, China, and many more areas around the world, is a constant choice of power, to the detriment of life. Choosing life when the world around us chooses power can mean we’re caught up in a storm of powerlessness. But when we are, we find ourselves with Jesus, curled up with us at the stern. God's power doesn't look the same as the power play we see around us. There is of course one eternal throne: God’s throne, and one eternal king, and next week we will hear the story of the transfiguration, and see Jesus’s brilliant, terrifying, God-self shine out. But for this week, we’re invited simple to curl up in the stern, and abandon control to God.

Lent, in about ten days time, is a period when we learn to give up control to God, and we deliberately give up those things that distract us from God, or give away those things that we hoard and put our sense of value in. It brings more freedom and life than we can imagine when we do so, but the micro-management of the world around us can make it difficult. 

I’m always reminded, at this time of year, of C.S. Lewis’ “the voyage of the Dawn Treader” (last book in the Narnia Chronicles), where poor Eustace gets so greedy for gold that he turns into a dragon, because he is more focused on self-gain than on the people who love him:

"Sleeping on a dragon’s hoard with greedy, dragonish thoughts in his heart, he had become a dragon himself." 

God calls woman in Genesis 2 the ‘ezer’, ‘helper’, which is a word that is otherwise only used to describe Godself, God also calls her Eve, or life-giver. Jesus came to us, like our Genesis woman, like Eve, as a mirror image, a helper, a co-worker and life-giver, not as a royal or political leader, not as a temple priest, but as a man curled up on a fishing boat with his friends.

And so we have chaos and order. Water, storms, creation, rivers, ribs, sides, man, woman, companionship, power, powerlessness, panic, and choices. But above all these things and no matter what season, or stormy weather we find ourselves in, we have a God who is in control, and who invites us to curl up, in the stern of the boat, with Christ as our companion, and rest. 

Amen.