The First Sunday of Lent

The Tree of Knowledge

By Emily Claire Schmitt

But the serpent said to the woman:

“You certainly will not die!
No, God knows well that the moment you eat of it
your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods
who know what is good and what is evil.”

I’ve always struggled with the story of Eve and the serpent. For one, I can’t help but bristle at the underlying assumptions about women the story contains. Ah, of course, they say the woman ate first. Of course, they equate her desire for knowledge with sin. And what’s so terrible about a woman wanting to know things? I ask. Isn’t the desire for knowledge holy? Aren’t we called to pursue Truth? Isn’t ignorance a form of evil, especially willful ignorance? Why would God want to withhold Truth from humanity?

The story (or stories) of Adam and Eve found in the book of Genesis are pre-historical. This means that, as Catholics, we take them as spiritually True, containing the fundamental spiritual knowledge we must have as Christians. We do not necessarily hold them as historically true. We don’t need to square Adam being formed from clay with the scientific reality of evolution, for example. That’s not the point of the story.

So it’s easy, a very strong temptation for me, to cast aside the bit about the Tree of Knowledge. I can tell myself that the point is that early mankind disobeyed a direct order from God at the behest of Satan. It doesn’t have to be about knowledge, I tell myself. It could have been about anything.

The devil is so tricky.

My rationalization is a huge mistake. No, let’s call it what it is: a sin. The Truth about the first sin is right there in the story. We as human beings, chose to know something we had no right to know. In our arrogance, we decided we knew better than God.

Isn’t that the core of all sin? It’s how Lucifer got himself thrown out of Heaven. All we have to do is tell ourselves the rules make no sense, that we know better. We intellectualize, rationalize, and justify until we can do just about anything… and receive Communion the next day.

This is how all my sins go down:

I ask myself, “Who died and made God God?”

As if I didn’t already know.

The sin of eating from the Tree of Knowledge isn't about pursuit of Truth. In the garden, Adam and Eve already had access to true knowledge. They had immediate access to God Himself, the font of all knowledge. The sin is that they wanted to be the font. They wanted to be the source, the ultimate arbiters of Good and Evil. In seeking that, they fell into ignorance.

This Lent, let us search not for intellectual knowledge, but for God. It is the only way to know anything worth knowing.

Called By Name