Nick Cave once sang “I don’t believe in an interventionist God, but if I did…” We live in a culture that has dismissed God but has left a God-shaped hole behind. The triumphant claim of the so-called New Atheists of the first decade of this century that “religion ruins everything” has given way to something much more like’s Nietzsche’s cry that “God is dead, and we have killed him.” Not a cry of triumph at all, but something much more ambivalent. We have killed God - but what have we replaced God with?
A recent reputable poll in the UK found that the number of people aged 18-24 who regularly attended church had grown from 4% to 16%. Still a minority, but a sign of… something. Is something stirring?
My favourite Scriptural story for explaining our culture is found in Genesis, when there are actually two trees in the Garden of Eden. The Tree of Life, and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Famously, Eve and Adam, our ancestors, the archetypes of humanity, ate of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, rather than the Tree of Life, and were kicked out of the garden as a result.
The name of the tree is a bit deceptive to us, because it sounds like a sort of book of instructions about good and bad behaviour. As though it is just a bit of neutral information. We think we value the disinterested pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, and so eating the fruit seems reasonable – even laudable. What sort of religion wouldn’t want people to know good behaviour from evil behaviour?
I try my best not to bore people with textual level stuff, but the words the Hebrew uses for “good” and “evil” are broader than their English translations. They don’t restrictively mean good and evil in a moral sense, but something broader like “blessings and woe.”
Knowledge, too, is a broad word. It can be neutral information: what time is sunset in Arizona today? Or it could be a bit more pressing: where is the toilet please? It can also mean something a lot more visceral: you don’t know ice cream until you have tried our new flavour.
The Knowledge of Good and Evil is something much deeper than a bit of neutral information.
In Scripture, the knowledge of good and evil is a kingly quality. To know good and evil, to know blessing and woe, as a king is to be able to inflict it on people. The King, or Queen, in a pre-modern state rewards their friends and brings disaster on their enemies. They know good and evil, blessing and woe, in a visceral way.
In Scripture, you can see this when the young King Solomon asks God for the power to “distinguish between good and evil.”
So the serpent who tempts Eve does not completely lie when it says that Eve and Adam would become like God. They would have power, as well as knowledge.
However, having eaten of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and not from the Tree of Life, they cut themselves off from what really nourishes them. They – we - have the power to do good or evil, but we eat it without the fruit of the tree of life, the food which would really sustain us.
This is especially true of our culture, which has doubled down on Eve’s decision: we are obsessed with power and control – we are obsessed with having the “knowledge of good and evil”, but in our obsessive pursuit of it, we have left the tree of life far behind.
In our science, in our whole instrumental approach to nature and to one another, we gain knowledge of how things are. But science without the power to affect the world would seem pointless to us – who is going to pay for that? We tell ourselves we want knowledge for its own sake, and that isn’t completely untrue. But we also want to control the world for our own benefit. And if the price of this power is to lose a bit of our souls along the way – well, that seems like a reasonable price to pay.
We don’t just want to understand the world: we want to control it.
And, for a long time, this has worked out OK for us. We have become rich beyond the dreams of our ancestors. Can you imagine what my ancestors who came out here in chains on the Second Fleet would think of me jetting off to Europe for a funeral?
You can think of the ministry of Jesus as a direct rejection of these things – of power without relationship with God, of eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil without eating the fruit of the tree of life.
Jesus faced three temptations in the wilderness: to turn stones into bread, to be given all the power of the world, to dazzle the world by leaping off the great Temple in Jerusalem. All these things would have been shortcuts to outcomes which would have, on the surface, have seemed good. Who wouldn’t want a world of plenty, where stones become bread? A truly just international order, ruled over by Jesus? A world where it was completely and absolutely clear exactly who Jesus was, with no room for doubt?
God’s way, it turns out, is the way of love, of service, of relationship. Of the tree of life rather than just the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
And this is what got Jesus killed.
Because Jesus did not act out of domination or control, but out of the love of God and love for people. Because he relied on God in a truly radical way, he showed up the religious and state authorities and the mob of ordinary people who bayed for his blood for who they really were – who they really are.
Who we really are.
Jesus takes on all the resentment and envy and hatred of the world – all that fear and loathing of something greater and better than us which we all feel in our worst moments. The weight of sin and the shame of knowing that we are not who we pretend to be, not who we know we ought to be.
The result of a world which devours the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil and eats little of the tree of life.
All of it carried by Jesus into his death, which he willingly accepted, because to refuse to accept it would be to betray the whole point of his life - the whole point of all our lives - which is to live in love for one another and for God, not for our own benefit.
To eat the Fruit of the Tree of Life.
All creation groans, Scripture says, waiting for the unveiling of the children of God.
Our own culture, in which the rejection of Christian faith is such a strong element, in which the drive to control everything, to drive God out to the margins where God can be safely ignored, feels like it is running out of puff. While I’m a lot richer than my ancestors, I’m not sure I’m richer than my parents. The whole liberal way of operating in the world– the much ballyhooed “rules based international order” that stems from it - seems to be creaking at the seams, with environmental degradation, wars and rumours of wars, and the general civilisational malaise that I’m sure we all feel.
The system of demythologisation and systematization and operationalization of all the world seems to be hitting the buffers. Nietzsche proclaimed that God is dead. But it seems increasingly likely that the myth of inevitable Progress is dead, and the old strong gods of blood and soil are stirring.
It is not just some external thing which can be sorted out with slightly more rational taxation laws. It is something which cuts deep into our souls, because it isn’t just some external system. We are all products of our culture. We all eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and we all need to eat from the Tree of Life.
The thing about the first Holy Saturday, the day between Good Friday and Easter Day, is that no one knew it was Holy Saturday.
The very first time, the day after Jesus disciples had seen all the hope and love and effort and trust that they had shared with Jesus nailed to a scaffold and left to die, must have been a day of complete despair and bewilderment.
A time a bit like ours, where all our hopes for a just, prosperous, sane world seem to be receding. Where we know, deep in our gut, that things are not as they should be.
It is exactly into this sort of situation of despair that God comes.
The women who went to the tomb were expecting to say good-bye to Jesus. Instead they found an empty tomb, with the linen wrappings neatly folded up, and went running in amazement to tell everyone.
It is exactly into our corporate and personal grief and despair that God speaks. It is precisely when we are beyond our own resources that God acts. It is, in fact, only when we accept that we cannot control everything, that we cannot eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil without also eating of the tree of life.
Our whole way of controlling the universe relies on God staying in God’s place and not interfering with the world. Yet, in raising Jesus from the dead, God disrupts our comfortable, materialist, safety and control world.
The people who crucified Jesus thought that he was safely dead and buried and everyone could get back to business as usual. Our culture which thought it had safely buried God to make way for a freeway and new datacentre is, perhaps, beginning to wake up to the reality that Jesus is not dead. Instead, Jesus is risen.
The serpent’s temptation of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is that we could become God. But under our own power, through domination and control. But God raising Jesus from the dead on the third day, offers us the chance to join the dance of God’s three-personned life of endlessly giving and receiving love.
Through Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, the God who loves each of us personally and by name undoes the ancient mistake and gives us to eat of the fruit of the tree of life, for all who are willing to receive the gift.
Rev Alister Pate Easter 2025