The story of Eden

God's action in Christ to end - or at least to begin the journey back from - exile is part of a larger story of man's estrangement from his original relationship with God and God's creation. It draws on the imagery of Genesis, where our first king and representative, Adam, was exiled from God, for treacherously turning against God, betraying Him by siding with the serpent, and thus failing to rule the creation properly as God's representative.

Two crucial consequences fall out of this story.

The first is that Adam and his wife, Eve, realised that death had come upon them, just as God had warned it would.

Adam and Eve were orginally naked, but also unashamed, because God had declared all things good. Yet they'd nonetheless set themselves up as rivals to God, declaring their own version of what was good and what was evil. They did this by eating of the only tree that God had set aside from their use. So, they lost the glory of standing under God's declarations. And in shedding the covering of God's words, they found themselves truly naked in the sense known by the later re-tellers of the creation story: shamefully exposed.

Adam and Eve found themselves insufficient to the task of shaping creation and its responses - even their own bodies! - to the dictates of their words. God's had won; God was to be trusted after all. He was not a liar.

And God came to them and reinforced the lesson in terrible judgment: "Very well, Eve, since you despised life, your body will now give you pain and anguish in the bringing forth of life in childbirth. And Adam, since you listened to your wife, I tell you that even the ground from which you came in your birth will turn against you, producing thorns and difficulty, pain and hardship, whereas before it overflowed with sufficiency for you. And to that ground you will both return, for you have removed my sanctifying word - which is your glory - from yourselves and have thus nullified the life you had."

In the exile of Adam and Eve, pictured in their expulsion and barring from the place of God's dwelling - Eden - even the breath that God first gave Adam is eventually given up as their bodies go to the grave in dust. Exile and death is de-creation.

The second crucial consequence of the story is the opening of mercy to man. Amidst all this entry into death - the collapse of creation's blessings around his ears - Adam hears God tell his wife that she will bear a seed, one to crush the serpent's head, to do what Adam did not do. And if the head and cause of all the trouble be crushed, then surely there was hope for a restoration to life after all?

Adam clearly thought so. The first thing he did after God drove home the terrible consequences of his treachery was to call his wife Eve, the mother of the living. What great faith! Adam throws himself, and the future of a humanity he still leads (and has led into death) onto God's mercy.

Yet God does more than merely promise a new start. He shows that the damage of Adam's failure will be undone. Adam had shed the glory of God from his bare flesh by casting off the covering pronouncement about what was good. Thus, his bare flesh stood truly naked, becoming ia symbol of rebellion and shame. And Adam knows that this flesh is destined to return to the dust in exile. Yet God, in an amazing act of mercy, replaces this first covering with another - this time one that could be touched and smelt, one made of animal skins. Only then, having clothed Adam and Eve in mercy, does He banish them from the garden, into exile.

James Jordan has suggested that this covering is in fact a replacement flesh, a new way in which Adam and Eve could walk about the creation under God's glory. He suggests that it is actually a foretelling of the resurrection, of the spiritual body (meaning, 'of the breath') that will rise from the dust. I think this is a very compelling view, both exegetically and thematically. So here, God enters the fray, and with His own hands comforts Adam and Eve in their suffering.

And now we jump ahead, thousands of years. In the fullness of time, the man Jesus appeared in Israel, proclaiming the restoration of the rule of Israel's God for man, and therefore, inescapably, restoration and the end of exile. And we look back on that event and say with the testimony of the return from dust (the resurrection) and the apostolic proclamation, that yes, that man was the true seed of Eve, who crushed the serpent and broke out of Adam's failed headship. In him we therefore hope. And so we honour and trust God's word. We call God faithful, and not a liar.

And what a God we serve. In Christ He is revealed as a God who solves the problems of our exile by participating in it Himself, even as He first made new flesh for our parents to wear, by sending His own Son in our likeness to die in and for our situation. In that Son we find our new covering. So our God is neither remote nor uncaring, but incredibly involved in the pain and suffering - He is beside us all the way. He came into our exile and led us out 'from the inside'. Such condescension, such selfless compassion, should leave us staggered. Who has a god like ours? And if God participates in our suffering, who will dare to say that it will not be overcome?

So, we continue the story of the Garden as the new people of God, under a new king, Jesus of Nazereth. We have the renewed breath, the Holy Spirit, given in God's act of re-creation. So, in response we act to reverse the damage of Eden, to produce and nurture life, to be where the world is in pain in self-sacrificial healing, trusting that God will continue the process of recalling us from exile. It is this story that shapes us.