'Gardening: its cosmic significance'
Sermon preached in St Salvator's Chapel, St Andrews on the 21st October, 2006 by Professor Simon Conway-Morris FRS
Readings: Daniel 6: 17 - 24 and Heliand Saxon Gospel: Songs 70 - 71
Sermon
"And at the first sign of dawn he got up and hurried to the lion pit"
I see, as is a good and ancient custom, that many of you have come equipped with not only prayer-books and hymnals but also well-thumbed copies of the McCrombies' I-spy churches. If you have not already done so, please turn to page 42; that's right, pulpits, lower left where most of you will I am sure have already marked the principal occupants - bishops, poets, the usual suspects - but just in case you missed it look right down to the bottom of the list of possible occupants: Good heavens! - "An evolutionary biologist". Well done, a firm tick, and yes you have earned 20 points. And with good reason, rare indeed; worth travelling miles out of one's way to see ' and perhaps to hear? But won't it all be just too predictable? Really, there isn't much choice. A fifteen - or more likely forty -minute-barrage: Eyes rolling, passionate disbelief delivered in a perfect North Oxford accent. Hold your breath. "How can you be so stupid to believe these fairy tales? Why just the other day Grayling and I '", and so it will go on and on and - Spleen, invective, diatribe and rant, and great dollops of ignorance. Well, the deluded can be pretty heavy going. But the alternative? Again hands flapping, eyes gleaming, hair like a druid, our speaker is equally passionate, but worthily anxious to re-unite science and religion, be it to explain the Bethlehem star, walking on water, or bless him even the Resurrection. Listen to our earnest friend, taking his cue from Bultmann, as he explains to us moderns how: "it is real in a very real sense, not that it actually happened, we must remember that the disciples were credulous peasants, but still, to repeat, this gospel story did occur in a very real sense", and so the apologist witters on. Today, perhaps, you will hear something a little different.
Consider the first reading from Daniel. To say it has curiosities is an understatement: although written a couple of hundred years earlier, to my ears it has strange echoes of the first Easter. As we heard: The king had had a very bad night on an uneasy conscience: not only insomnia but poor chap, he might be the lord of all, but tonight he couldn't even manage a concubine. Not good at all. Why he was so restless certainly had nothing to do with the security arrangements: a stone (we can safely presume of great size) closed the lion pit, and nobody would dare tamper with the seals of authority. But now note that echo of a future event: "and at the first sign of dawn [the King] got up and hurried to the " tomb, but why the hurry?; at best it could only yield some fat cats and a mangled corpse. It didn't and the rest, as they used to say in Babylon, is history.
Now as we all know after the first Easter the early Christians turned back to what now was a superseded Testament and found clues, parallels, whispers and rumours of what had actually manifested itself - well Himself - before their very eyes. Not surprisingly in our day and age we usually take a much more sceptical view: clues are misplaced, parallels imprecise, whispers are Chinese, and rumours vanish into thin air. But I want to suggest that truth has many dimensions and because something "didn't really happen", it is not automatically a falsehood, a fairy tale for the very dim.
Recall now our second reading. To some of you possibly it will have sounded unfamiliar, and if so then with good reason. Telling the New Testament in the guise of a heroic culture, a spear's throw from Beowulf and a few steps from Valhalla can be disorientating. This is the Heliand, the Gospel for the Saxons. Jesus is the Chieftan, the disciples are warrior companions, Simon Peter an earl, cities are hill-forts and elsewhere the miracle of Jesus walking on the water has the disciples in a long-ship quite capable of sailing to Iceland rather than pottering around the Sea of Galilee. I would argue, however, that the Saxon Gospel is as good a way for us to recapture the thrill of God's Spell. In this context consider J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings; how the chattering classes loath it, and from their strange perspective with good reason. Its gripping depiction of a heroic society plucks us from disenchantment and in Middle Earth we visit a world that is achingly beautiful: appallingly remote and tantalizingly immediate. My point, however, is not to dwell on what in some ways can be aptly called the Fifth Gospel - and I would argue Tolkien's masterwork weaves a far deeper spell that sometimes realized - but to insist that the heroic society in which the Heliand is cast resonates with us because not only has it a compelling immediacy but it is combined with psychological insights that re-ignite the Gospel story in our hearts.
As the editor of the Heliand, Ronald Murphy, points out in his commentary, the Saxon Gospel gives us a vivid insight into the mind of Miriam of Migdal, better known to us as Mary Magdalene, on the first Easter Sunday. Recall the words we have just heard: "she could not control her lamentation, she could not stop crying. She did not know where to turn, her thoughts and emotions were in a state of confusion". And this is followed, of course, by her apparently idiotic identification of the risen Christ as a gardener; idiotic until we realize that Mary was not "weeping"; she was beside herself with grief combined with the appalling fact that the tomb had been desecrated. She wasn't sobbing; she was howling. Or worse: as Naomi Mitchison reminds us, Mary had been dramatically cured by Jesus of what we choose to call insanity, and in the Garden if she wasn't mad she was probably tipped to the brink.
Now I want to suggest that just as Daniel has more than an echo of events in a Garden, so too there is a set of remarkable parallels between the resurrection narrative and the first chapters of Genesis. Do I hear a collective groan? If there was ever a stumbling block over which theologians, cosmologists, creationists and mocking atheists collectively trip it is the interpretation of these few chapters at the beginning of the Bible. There is no doubt, for example, that much of the disbelief by anti-Darwinians in organic evolution stems from what I would regard as not only a literal, but simply erroneous, reading of this creation story. Yet the fact remains that these chapters in Genesis are one of the greatest narratives ever written: not only in terms of the sheer sweep of events accompanied by a masterly economy, but also in the rhythm and balance of the story.
It is ever entertaining to see how the village atheists solemnly point out how similar Genesis is to the Babylonian creation myth, yet they entirely fail to twig that the Jewish writers have systematically disembowelled their rival's foundation story, and indeed by the time we get to the building of the Tower of Babel we are engaged in a superb satire of their neighbours' ludicrous pretensions. So too, as is well appreciated, to depict the creation of the great lights in the sky - "Let there be lights in the vault of heaven - the greater light to govern the day, the smaller light to govern the night and the stars" - without actually referring to them as the Sun and Moon was simply because everybody else naturally worshipped them, whereas the Jews had the genius to perceive their Maker. So too rather than being part of the cosmic battle between good and evil the monsters of chaos are created. God is in charge: it is His creation.
But as we all know things become very badly unstuck: stories of talking serpents, dodgy fruit, and fig-leaves coyly disposed offer a rich vein of merriment to the sceptic. But perhaps not rich enough. A very old legend identified Golgotha as the site of the Fall, and all of you familiar with medieval paintings of the Crucifixion will have noticed how frequent is a skull at the foot of the cross; the place of the skull, yes, but this is the skull of Adam. And with good scriptural warrant, as Paul writes in Romans 5: "Well then; it was through one man that sin came into the world, and through sin death '[But] he [Adam] prefigured the one [Jesus] who was to come '"
What Adam began Christ completes, and I would suggest that the Genesis and Resurrection stories show parallels and anti-parallels. Both take place in a garden, in the cool of the day; both involve a man and a woman; both involve angels and in both the crux of the narrative is a tree. But it is, of course, the opposites that are the more striking: in Eden it is a gardener, in the Resurrection the Gardener is a case of massive misidentification, in Eden it is the tree of life that causes death, in the other a tree of death against every expectation leads to the Resurrection; in one garden disobedience causes a catastrophe but in the other obedience results in what Tolkien called the eucatastrophe; in one garden there is expulsion and in the other a gathering in and reconciliation; in one place angels wave swords but in the tomb they are sitting in a very matter-of-fact manner.
To many of you I do not doubt this all sounds most fanciful: invoking the Genesis narrative is bad enough: we're modern, we stopped reading fairy stories years ago. As for the Gospels, well, we all know they were continuously rewritten, based on fast-fading memories, and comprehensively hi-jacked by crafty priests determined to bury finally the "real" Jesus, if of course he ever existed. Even if one takes a more generous view, that they are "ies told through silver", then however much "all men would wish that if any story was true then it was this one", the time has come to realize they are indeed a vast delusion.
Yet need I remind you it was C. S. Lewis who thought of the gospels as "lies told through silver", and he who tumbled to the fact that as a colleague of his, a philosopher no less, in his college in Oxford once remarked to him: "Rum thing; it looked as if it might have really happened". The philosopher apparently never took the last step, but Lewis of course did. As his poetic, literary, philosophical and critical instincts told him: this is no fairy-tale. Indeed, as Richard Baurkham of this university has argued, all the evidence points to the Gospels being an account by eye-witnesses, and so too there are simply too many consistencies and correspondences to think that if this story is not true then it is the strangest one anybody ever thought to invent. Most crucially, the Resurrection narratives are not only consistent, but what is described did happen. They are as much a part of our history as Davie Hume playing backgammon or Boswell in the company of Dr Johnson. And it is as much the indirect evidence that persuades me. Consider the family of Jesus, notably one of the brothers of Jesus, James. Pious, probably bit of a prig, but known throughout Jerusalem as James the Just; a man of transparent honesty, if possibly a little narrow-minded. He and the rest of his family all knew that his elder brother was at best deluded, more probably mad. Jesus came to a bad and very nasty end; so did many people under Pax Romana. End of story? No, the next thing we hear is that James has become a disciple within the new church, which is impossible unless something very odd indeed had happened to him. Paul tells us in First Corinthians that a man who had been crucified visited James (and note that in the list of witnesses given by Paul apart from James only Peter and Paul are actually named); pity poor old James, it was a pretty good illusion he suffered because if we are to believe Josephus, in due course James too ran foul of the Jewish hierarchy and so paid with his life for one simple, albeit massive delusion, that his brother was murdered and now was alive.
Except it was neither illusion nor delusion. The Resurrection was real; it really happened. Except we know it can't be true, in fact, more importantly we stamp our tiny post-modern feet like petulant children: it mustn't be true: we are, after all, the most fortunate of all generations to have lived because we now know almost everything. Or so the certainties are trumpeted. Yet even within that tiny area of human enquiry in which I spend most of my time and what we call science I suspect we understand almost nothing of this world, let alone others. My sense is we stand on a small hill surrounded by oceans of ignorance. And that is one reason why I am confident that the parallels between the Resurrection narrative and the Genesis story are far from accidental. Of course, Genesis is a myth but that doesn't stop it being true. The image of two gardens, one where death arrived, and one when it was overthrown resonates at the deepest imaginable level. But all we need to realize is that in the cool of the morning on 5 April, A. D. 33 the Gardener bestrode the cosmos and within the tomb, just behind him, the lion's jaw had been shut forever.
In the name of the Father, and the Son and the Holy Ghost. Amen.
© Simon Conway Morris
October 2007, St. Andrews, Scotland