Sarv-e Abarqu, a cypress tree in Iran, over 4,000 years old
When
the blind man healed by Jesus first began to see, he said, ‘I see men, as trees
walking.’ This Entish moment appeals to us. I’m sure it’s a true report by the
Evangelist, because of its unexpectedness. And it reminds me how important
trees and forests are as images in and of our lives.
T.S.
Eliot, following Dante, saw life as a journey through a vast forest: in middle
age we are in its centre. The path through the trees is not always clear.
J.R.R. Tolkien made great use of forests, beginning with Mirkwood in The Hobbit. But it happens that,
reversing a common saying, we can’t see the trees for the wood: that the forest
we travel in prevents us from paying attention to a particular tree.
So
it is with the Biblical Tree of Life (the Etz haChaim). All of us are familiar
with its neighbour, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, often abusively
lopped to ‘the Tree of knowledge’. But the Tree of Life gets little attention.
In
the Old Testament, after Genesis, it appears in Proverbs and in Esdras, always
with an indefinite article, ‘a tree
of life’. As an image, it seems to represent an abundance of spiritual life
that grows out of some spiritual goodness in a person or a nation, as a tree
grows from a seed. And that growth is given:
it is a gift of God.
In
that sense, the Tree of Life in the
Garden of Eden is perhaps also the principle of life itself, especially of
human life both individual and collective, that stands in the centre of the
Garden as a (perhaps the) gift of
God. But not of life simply physical: of life spiritual, of life as children of
God, of life as it was intended to be, created human life in complete harmony
with its Giver.
If
we do not, as some theologians have done, conflate the two Trees – and I find
it much more convincing not to -- , it is significant that the serpent does not
appear in the Tree of Life. Nor should he; nor could he.
The
Tree of Life stands in the Centre of
the Garden: it is central, spiritually it is the very core of what God created:
the incarnate image of life in harmony with God.
And
now, nearly at the beginning of Lent, we need to turn to a thought about that
Tree that first surfaced in the Eastern Church and came from it to us in the
West. Not surprisingly it was Pope Benedict XVI, that tireless seeker after
reunification with the Eastern Church, who expressed that thought in many of
his homilies. It is that since the Incarnation, the Crucifixion and the
Resurrection, the Tree of Life has a new form: the Cross. Or as we might say to
bring home the full weight of that thought: the gallows.
Ouch. The cross, the gallows, is the
tree of death. It is properly shunned, it horrifies us. Or it should, if we
could still see it as Jesus’ contemporaries saw it. Remember the Spartacus
Revolt, the rebellion of the gladiators and slaves, when the crosses of the
defeated rebels lined the Appian Way from Capua to Rome. Can one wonder that St
Paul was consciousness of his preaching’s monstrosity to both Jews and Greeks?
In his letter to the community at Corinth he wrote, ‘The preaching of the cross
is, I know, nonsense to those who are involved in this dying world…..the Jews
ask for a sign, the Greeks seek wisdom; but all we preach is Christ crucified—a
stumbling block to the Jews and sheer nonsense to the Gentiles.’
However, his point is that, in
contrast to those very natural reactions, natural in view of the cultures that
give rise to them, for ‘us’ who have been saved, made safe, rescued, that
stumbling-block, that idiocy is ‘the power of God and the wisdom of God’. For
God’s foolishness is wiser than man’s wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger
than man’s power.
And
so, the gallows-tree, the ignominious tree of death, becomes in this vast,
cosmic, terrifying, glorious paradox, the Tree of Life itself.
And the Tree of Life in the full,
original, Edenic sense of the word: it is now the incarnate image of the life
lived in harmony with life’s Giver. It is central. As the Carthusians’ motto
puts it: stat crux dum volvitur orbis:
the Cross stands while the world turns. Only now the Centre incoporates a
paradox: because that has not gone away. It cannot and must not be ignored. The
Tree of Life, the life of the tree, cannot be as if the Son of God, the
Moshiach Himself, had not been nailed to it, had not expired upon it. Which
means that we cannot meditate upon it without acknowledging that
stumbling-block – because stumbling-block it is, make no mistake. To adapt a
bumper-sticker: Sin Happened. Sin Happens. Sin gets, chronically, in the way of
Love. So that ubiquitous nasty has to be gone through. It can only be gone
through by going through it. Mercifully, we are not alone. He went through it;
and if He did, so can we. Because on the other side of Lent, there is Easter;
on the other side of the Cross, there is the Resurrection; on the other side of
death, there is life. A whole Tree of it.
