Life-Giving Death
A pattern from the beginning
Let’s start with a familiar story.
In the beginning, God creates the heavens and the earth. After everything has been made, God sees it is very good. God makes humans and places them in a garden in Eden, a garden of abundance. They can eat from any tree in the whole garden save for one in the middle, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
It doesn’t take long (at least in the text) for them to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, thanks to a persuasive talking serpent. And “their eyes were opened, and they knew they were naked” (Genesis 3:7). They make leafy loincloths for themselves. When God shows up, they hide in the bushes—it doesn’t take long (at least in the text) for God to find them.
God asks them what happened. They play the blame game, and then God curses the serpent, lays out consequences for the woman and the man, and curses the soil. God makes leather clothes for them and kicks them out of the sacred garden.
This is one of the most familiar biblical stories, and for many Christians, there is one right interpretation of this text: through their disobedience to God’s command—their sin—Adam and Eve brought evil and death into the world, which is the root of all our problems today. This is the story of “The Fall” (i.e., a fall from grace, a fall from perfection, a fall from paradise).
There are a myriad of other ways this text has been interpreted, however. In one reading, for example, the first humans do not so much sin as come to maturity by eating the fruit (to grow up is to have one’s eyes opened, to know good and evil).
I am going to offer a different interpretation through the lens of a particular theological category: life-giving death. Christians believe that in Jesus, God did something new for us, for the world: through Jesus’s death and resurrection, we are given new life. It is a death that brings life, life-giving death.
But this pattern has been present since the beginning, and can be understood as a paradigm for theological reflection and practice.
After God creates everything, including humans, God tells humans and animals what to eat: “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food” (Genesis 1:29–30).
Plants are living creatures. For humans and animals to sustain their own lives, they must eat plants. Plants give their life so that we can live. Life-giving death. Adam and Eve did not bring death into the world by eating the forbidden fruit. Death was already present, already a part of the good earth God had created.
But this is a certain kind of death—a death that contributes to the life of others. This is the pattern that Jesus followed. His death brought life to us.
The Tree of What?
God places two trees in the middle of the Garden of Eden: The Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. What do these trees actually do? What do they impart to the eater of their fruit?
At the end of Genesis 3, as justification for exiling the humans, God says, “the man might reach out his hand and take also from the Tree of Life, and eat, and live forever” (3:22). This implies that humans would not have lived forever unless they had eaten from the Tree of Life. In God’s original creation, humans would have died eventually. So plants die and humans die (and presumably, animals die as well)—this is the order of things as God created them, not a consequence of eating the wrong fruit.
The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil gets a bad reputation. People often use misleading nicknames for it. The Tree of Knowledge. The Tree of Good and Evil. The Tree of Evil. Evil. But only its full, legal birth name helps us appreciate its particularity.
It’s name is a chain of prepositions: The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. And it’s not the tree that is forbidden—it is the fruit thereof. So the chain grows longer. “Do not eat of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.” There is something very specific this tree imparts to its eaters. It is not Pandora’s box, releasing all evils at one go. It is only an eye-opener.
Good and evil are present in the “good” world that God created in the beginning. The fruit which Adam and Eve eat “opens their eyes” to the good and evil around them. The eaten fruit does not change anything in the world; it changes the two humans, who now have a new relationship to the world.
“Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves” (3:7). Later, Adam tells God, “I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself” (3:10).
The first reaction Adam and Eve have to their new knowledge is fear. Why? They are naked. Before they ate from the fruit, they were blissfully naked “and not ashamed” (2:25). Now they are afraid. Perhaps they are ashamed of their nakedness in front of each other, and want clothes to cover up. Their new knowledge has granted them modesty.
However, I think there is a likelier reason. To be naked is to be vulnerable. It is to be unprotected from danger. The fruit opens their eyes to good and evil. What is good? That which enhances and brings forth life. What is evil? That which diminishes or destroys life, leading to death. When they can “see” danger, or evil, or things that could harm them, the two humans become fearful.
They try to protect themselves with clothing. They make loincloths from fig leaves. Why loincloths? To protect the part of their body which (re)produces life.
Notice how they use fig leaves to make their protective gear. They take from a nearby plant; they diminish its life in order to protect their own. This is death-giving life.
Is this not what we do, on personal, political, and international levels? In order to feel “safe” and “secure” we have to lock others in cages, send soldiers to kill enemies, bomb others from far away. In order to protect our ego, our self-image, we have to insult or oppress others, or at the very least think less of them. In order to live up to our ideal “standard of living,” we ignore those who toil in factories and in poverty for our benefit. We take from the earth, produce more than we need, and diminish the lives of all living creatures—including ourselves—with our waste and exhaust. This is not life-giving death. This is death-giving life. Life that brings death and diminishment to others. This is what sin is: giving life to evil, which brings death.
There are some evils which are not sinful. Natural disasters, disease, accidents, for example. We must endure them, we must suffer these diminishments of our life, but we cannot argue “who sinned” to cause this kind of misfortune (cf. John 9:2). Sometimes—not all the time, of course—but sometimes, what we experience as evil is indeed a diminishment of life, but it is also a suffering that is necessary to our growth. Not all suffering is evil. Not all pain is bad.
In our culture, we are told—through advertisements, political speeches, media, culture, etc.—that the goal in life is to avoid suffering. If we suffer, we have done something wrong. If we suffer, it is our own fault. If we suffer, it is because of our own sin. (By the way, this is also the argument Job’s friends make against him.) We are conditioned in our culture to avoid suffering, to build protective walls around ourselves: walls of wealth (cf. Proverbs 18:11), walls of military strength, walls of willful ignorance (cf. Proverbs 24:10–12), walls of preemptive strikes, walls of self-justifications.
The first couple had their eyes opened to evil, the potential for danger, in the world around them, and they damaged that world in order to protect themselves. Their loincloths were a wall of security—it was the best they could do. They wanted to save themselves from threat of death; they wanted to preserve their life. God’s warning was probably clanging through their heads, “On the day you eat from it, you will surely die” (Genesis 2:17). Perhaps they saw poky plants or sharp-clawed animals and believed those were the means by which their death would come.
But there is another model for the relationship between good and evil, between life and death. If evil is that which leads to death, then a death which brings forth life complicates matters. There is some evil, some diminishments, some suffering that actually enhances our life, makes it deeper, richer, wiser. But it depends on our perspective.
When the first couple ate from the fruit, their new awareness was attuned not only for evil, but also for good. It is the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, after all. So does this mean that before they ate from the fruit, they could not see the goodness in the world around them? God saw that creation was “good,” “good,” “very good” (Genesis 1). It’s possible the humans didn’t understand the idea of goodness until they ate from the fruit and “became like God” (3:5, 22).
We could say that when their eyes were first opened, their knowledge of “good and evil” was narrowed to focus only on evil, the threat to their life and safety. But we could also argue that Adam and Eve confused what was good and evil, so that they saw good things as evil, and did not consider the evil they did (taking from the fig tree’s leaves) as anything but good and necessary to their survival.
It’s the same predicament we find ourselves in: how to discern good from evil. How do we determine what is right, what is beneficial to the flourishing of ourselves, those around us, and the whole creation? How do we know whether a decision will be life-giving or death-dealing? Most decisions involve both—sometimes what seems right in the moment turns out to have grave consequences later (cf. Proverbs 14:12; 16:25). And sometimes what seems to fly in the face of all wisdom and self-preservation yields the fruit of goodness and justice for times to come.
Curse or Pattern?
After God gets the scoop from Adam, then Eve, about why the forbidden fruit was eaten, God launches into curses and instructions. Many interpreters classify this speech from God as all-inclusive curse. But read it carefully, and see what you notice (Genesis 3:14–19):
The Lord God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this, cursed are you among all animals and among all wild creatures; upon your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life. I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will strike your head, and you will strike his heel.”
To the woman God said, “I will greatly increase your toil in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children, yet your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.”
And to the man God said, “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten of the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it,’ cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
The serpent is cursed because it led the humans astray. The ground is cursed on account of Adam’s disobedience. But the man and the woman are not themselves cursed. Instead, they receive instructions from God about what life will be like for them.
Both are told they will toil (עצבון in Hebrew; ʿitzabon). The woman’s toil will be in childbearing. The man’s toil will be in working the land for food. For both, the toil is an evil, a diminishment of their life, an expenditure of their energies, a suffering in order to survive. Yet what is the fruit of their toil? Life. For the woman, it is the bringing forth of the next generation of life. For the man, it is food which nourishes and sustains life. They are united in their toil—together, their toils sustain and create life, continuing the human line on earth.
(Note that the Tree of Life also sustained human life so that Adam and Eve could have lived forever (3:22). But that would have prevented the couple from learning a different lesson about good and evil, life and death and toil.)
God does not curse the man and the woman. Far from it. God invites the humans to participate in life-giving death, in self-giving toil that supports life. God shares the blueprint of the world with Adam and Eve. The serpent tells them that if they eat the fruit, they will be like God, knowing good and evil. When they eat it, their eyes are opened and they fear the evil that threatens their lives. So God corrects their understanding of good and evil. There is evil that can lead to good. The evil we suffer, that we take unto ourselves, in order that others may live, produces good. The diminishment of our own lives that the lives of others may be enriched.
Adam and Eve step into this blueprint that is ultimately fulfilled in Jesus, who gave his life that we might truly live. Jesus does not “reverse” what God says to Adam and Eve; Jesus acts according to the same pattern. And we are called to do the same:
Then Jesus told his disciples, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. Those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 16:24–25)
“This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:12–13).
For God has granted you the privilege not only of believing in Christ, but of suffering for him as well … Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross (Philippians 1:29; 2:5–8).
For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you should follow in his steps (1 Peter 2:21).
Life-giving death. Sacrificing your own comfort, your own security for the sake of another’s dignity and well-being. Giving away your resources, to the point of foolishness, so that those in need may prosper. Toiling for the benefit of the next generation, and seven generations to come. Producing and consuming less so that we contribute to the life of plants, animals, and ecosystems, restoring balance to our world. Giving your life that another may live.
Yet there is also a kind of life that brings forth death. An aggrandizement that diminishes others. “Woe to you,” says the prophet Isaiah, “who join house to house, who add field to field, until there is room for no one but you, and you are left to live alone in the midst of the land!” (5:8). Later in that same chapter, Isaiah goes on to say, “Woe to you who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter! Woe to you who are wise in your own eyes, and shrewd in your own sight!” (5:20–21).
As our eyes are opened to the good and evil in the world, we must discern which is which. Or, more accurately, we must discern how good and evil—that which supports life and that which diminishes life—can both be in the service of God. We must discern how we might live: not according to the patterns of this world, in which we protect ourselves and our own interests at the expense of others; but according to the patterns God inscribed into the very creation, giving of ourselves for the flourishing of others.
Appendix of Related Quotes
All those who die like Jesus,
sacrificing their lives out of love
for the sake of a more dignified human life,
will inherit life in all its fullness.
They are like grains of wheat,
dying to produce life,
being buried in the ground
only to break through and grow.- Leonardo Boff, Way of the Cross, Way of Justice (quoted in Bread of Tomorrow: Prayers for the Church Year [edited by Janet Morley], 116)
“Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.
-Jesus (John 12:24)
We should really differentiate two sorts of death here: one that opens forward into a greater life and another—a dead-end death—that leaves a restless soul, unable to reach its home. This is the death we rightly fear. And just as gifts are linked to the death that moves toward new life, so, for those who believe in transformation (either in this life or in another), ideologies of market exchange have become associated with the death that goes nowhere.
- Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, 45