From a CRC-Voices Discussion

The forced exile from the garden into the field is a consequence of the decisions of the man and the woman.

I think we too often flatten the action. It is amazingly nuanced in that brief but deep story.

1. Exile was foreshadowed in the hiding.

Adam and Eve implicitly self-exile in the hiding.
In that sense the forced and enforced exile can be seen both as punishment and mercy, giving them what they have themselves embraced but were perhaps too weak, unclear, confused, conflicted to pursue themselves. We don’t know that they could really leave the garden on their own.

2. The curses were also part of the exile.

The man and the woman’s avenues for power are both encumbered by difficulty. Power will not longer be as free and easy before the rebellion.

3. Their relationship with God goes from one of family intimacy to that of an estranged family.

There are visits, but they no longer live together.

4. God creates relational distance which is communicated in overt and subtle ways.

We have a myriad of subtle ways we communicate the strength and status of a relationship. When that relationship is injured by almost anything the cues that we have to communicate acceptance or rejection are myriad and measured. We long for approval of not only our self but also for the things we desire and appropriate as part of our identity.

The subtle cues create a relational economy by which we influence each other.

Watch parents struggle with a child with an addiction. It is a tortured journey of subtle relational adjustments all along the way with all parties in pain, seeking shalom and using good, indifferent and destructive ways of coping with that pain. Eye contact. expectations. money, access. indifference. tears. imagined communication. …

5. I don’t know that the “no judgment” path really works. Our judgments possess us as much as we do them. I think the “owned judgment” is probably more honest and true.

6. It is in a context of judgment that grace is illuminated.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/jessicamisener/why-i-miss-being-a-born-again-christian.

Bravado, which I think you need if you really want to embracing being a meat robot I think is a defense against fear. “I was made for the brutal field of weeds and dangerous birth, the garden is a fiction!”

Many others ponder the God who judges not. I think Miroslav Volf nicely puts a nail in that coffin. https://paulvanderklay.wordpress.com/2009/08/12/miroslav-volf-on-gods-violence-or-ours/

The power of the embrace of the father (Lk 15) is fueled by the devastation caused by the younger brother. The foil is the natural and not unjustified position of the older brother. Can you really have reconciliation if there hasn’t been rupture? Isn’t reconciliation made profound by rupture? We live this narrative.

7. In the church we are invited to “play God” in a way. What irony. This was the demand we cowardly embraced with the fruit of the tree, and now in the church we are invited into it, and to those with soft hearts we begin to see its terror. We have wanted to define good and evil and now in the church we try to do so with God’s signature.

Maybe in this we begin to glimpse some of what God wished to spare us. Why he invites us to leave vengeance to him. Why he invites us to allow him to finally judge and to fear the seat of power. Maybe we now look at those keys of the kingdom handed down and wish they would pass to another. Those who grasp them too quickly and eagerly know not what they do.

8. Perhaps in the end we make confession that this is all beyond us. We must make confession with fear why we exercise what we think needs doing. We long to abdicate, to hide once more in the garden but that day has passed. We are older and wiser and not a bit sadder.

9. Perhaps it invites is to the day when we will see it done right. Maybe it prepares us for the day when we realize God’s pain that hell is finally not fully avoidable. His pain that there will always be some who prefer to be gods unto themselves, their great despair in the pettiness of the god they choose, the self shallow enough to finally only want its own self, unable to find another.