Trees have always held my fascination. As a young child, I can remember not only wanting to climb them, but also wanting to know them. They draw me in in their grandeur and mysterious and enduring life-ness. Being the oldest creatures on the earth, they also contribute to the lifehood of our planet through the air they recycle and who knows all the wonders that they communicate deeply through the vibrations in their root networks. Such life and such breath, they touch us in enduring ways that no other lifeforms can…
The creation story of Adam and Eve being tempted by the serpent to take and eat from the fruit of the Tree of Good and Evil, despite God’s command to not do so, is one with which we are all probably at least somewhat familiar (Gn 2:7-9; 3:1-7), The elements of the story have been preached on and written about for centuries. I personally am struck by the Tree of Life which was right in the middle of the garden, next to the Tree of Good and Evil. I wonder how it must have looked. What a great symbol it seems to be, in a way, pointing back to that first beautiful line of today’s scripture selection in the oldest creation account in the Hebrew Testament:
The LORD God formed man out of the clay of the ground
and blew into his nostrils the breath of life,
and so man became a living being.
Perhaps this line does not give us an obvious reason to pause, but let’s look at it a bit more. In a sense, this one line tells us about our deepest origins. It is telling us that we not only were brought to life because of the breath that God breathed into us, but we indeed live by that same breath. It is our intimate origin and our continuing sustenance. More than that, though, this is telling us something quite remarkable and even paradoxical. In that it is God’s breath Itself that is in us as our own lives, we can say that God lives in us and through us. This is stunningly mysterious but nonetheless real! God’s breath, the Divine Spirit is the origin of our life and because that Holy Breath is in us, moving us, God lives in us! Put another way, we are God’s life! This is not coincidental and it is not a choice on our part. This sets a stage for life and living that we may often overlook and disregard.
What it means to have God’s very life within oneself, breathing, moving, acting, and abiding comes to life vividly in the story we know commonly as the Temptation in the Wilderness. This time it is Jesus himself that is being tempted. And it is within the context of the intimate indwelling God within that Jesus responds to each temptation (Mt 4:1-11) he is presented with in the wilderness.
We all have that divine capacity within each moment that we breathe in this life. It is our center which sustains and drives us. It seems the real temptation is not so much the choices to do something or not do something, which would fall either on the side of good or evil, but more a temptation to attempt to deny God’s life itself. That may sound strong. However, isn’t this one way of seeing what was going on with Jesus in that desert with the devil? How different is it really for us? How deep are we willing to go?
What if we looked at our ‘sins’ as the attempt to deny our Divine origin, what we have called the ‘image of God’ for centuries? Moreso, it’s an attack on our very lives, in that we are only supported by that Holy Breath inasmuch as it is housed within us. How crazy is it that we attack our very source, who LIVES within us, in everyone?
As we look at those things in our lives that we call temptations, can we begin to go beyond simply ‘good and evil’ to the core of our communion with the Divine, which is shared by all? This may be a more difficult route, and not necessarily a comfortable one. However, at this time it may be exactly what we are being called toward. This would take a kind of fasting that goes beyond simply our desire for comfort, power and self-importance. It would mean that we hang onto the Tree of Life, whose very roots we are, and even branches.
Like Jesus, it appears that our best bet in the face of temptation is to keep breathing in that Divine Breath and letting it support us and spread outward into our environment. Life in its Divine Goodness affords us no REAL options other than this. To stay with the source of our life in everything we encounter – in our hungers, in our confusions, in our disappointments, in our joys, in our unmet expectations, in our silly agendas. Jesus knew from his heart that he was safe in all that he would experience, as long as he remained in the branches of the Tree of Life rooted in Divine abiding.
The serpent told Eve that if she ate from the Tree of the Knoeledge of Good and Evil, she would become as a god. Jesus confronted the devil in his temptations as a true child of God by trusting in the deepest part of his life source rather than objectifying his human longings, and making an idol out of confusion and fear.
Then the devil took him up to a very high mountain,
and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in their magnificence,
and he said to him, “All these I shall give to you,
if you will prostrate yourself and worship me.”
At this, Jesus said to him,
“Get away, Satan!
It is written:
The Lord, your God, shall you worship
and him alone shall you serve.”
Where is this God who blew into our nostrils at life’s origin? We look for One who is looking through us! He’s in the garden, in the trees, in the desert, the stones, the mountains. She is in the very heart of Who we are! Without her Holy breath we are vanquished and where is she without our breathing? Shall we act as gods or become more the children of God that we already are?