This week we enter Lent, a time of preparation in the early
church for those being baptized at Easter. On Easter those
being baptized learn that though caught in the death and sin of
the human condition, they will enter the waters of death symbolically
with Jesus and rise with him into a new creation. Sin
and death will no longer have a stranglehold on them.

Today’s passage tells part of the story about how our first
parents, Adam and Eve, and we as human beings got into the
broken world we live in now. In the beginning, nothing existed
on the earth—no plants or animals or human beings.

Then, one day, God decided to create our world and made
human beings from the dust and God’s breath. God places the
first two human beings in a wonderful garden filled with plants
and animals and trees bearing fruit to eat. God gives them oversight
of this lovely place. Then God issues a command: Do not
eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil because it will
bring death.

Of course, the first people are unable to resist. Why do
they disobey and eat? One ancient writer says they are greedy.
Others say they want to be like God or that they are curious. I
suspect that they wanted to have everything—just as we do in
our consumer culture. Though they don’t literally die when they
give in, this “consumerism” is surely one thing that ultimately
kills them. Thus, the first parents move from a life of goodness
intended by God into a life of choosing something “other.” Our
choices can likewise move us outside God’s well-ordered and
blessed intention for our well-being into a place just outside
God’s desiring.