My theme in these Lenten reflections (of which there are four - there won’t be one for Mothering Sunday) is the Tree of Life. I invite you this Lent to consider trees, or perhaps a single tree; it may be a tree that is in your garden, or one that you can see from your window, or a tree that you walk past on your daily travels. I hope that particular tree will minister grace to you this Lent.
Sometimes, on solitary walks, I will stand beneath a great tree. I think of its roots beneath my feet; an intricate web anchored deep into the earth; a broad, expansive system, balancing the canopy above; its roots drawing water and nutrients, sustaining life, enabling growth and fruitfulness. I think of the trunk, strong, enduring; the hidden internal rings of the passing years; the life the trunk itself sustains, as insects feed in it and from it. And then the canopy; stark and mystical in winter; luxuriant in summer; glorious in autumn; full of promise in spring. A single tree to be with us during Lent.
I offer you the words of William Wordsworth from The Prelude.
But there's a Tree
A single tree
With sinuous trunk, boughs exquisitely wreathed,
Grew there; an ash which Winter for himself
Decked as in pride, and with outlandish grace:
Up from the ground, and almost to the top,
The trunk and every master branch were green
With clustering ivy, and the lightsome twigs
And outer spray profusely tipped with seeds
That hung in yellow tassels, while the air?
Stirred them, not voiceless. Often I have stood
Foot-bound up looking at this lovely tree
Beneath a frosty moon. The hemisphere
Of magic fiction, verse of mine perchance
May never tread; but scarcely Spenser's self
Could have more tranquil visions in his youth,
Or could more bright appearances create
Of human forms with superhuman powers,
Than I beheld loitering on calm clear nights
Alone, beneath this fairy work of earth.
William Wordsworth, The Prelude VI, 76-94
And here are the words of Psalm 1; the tree planted by the water; for Lent invites us to delight in the Law of the Lord; to meditate on that Law, day and night, to bring forth the fruits of righteousness, to be healthy and vigorous before God, rather than dry and withered. A tree by streams of water.
Psalm 1
Blessed are they who have not walked in the counsel of the wicked:
nor lingered in the way of sinners, nor sat in the seat of the scornful.
Their delight is in the law of the Lord:
and they meditate on his law, day and night.
Like a tree planted by streams of water,
bearing fruit in due season, with leaves that?do not wither:
whatever they shall do, it shall prosper.
(The Common Worship Psalter)
God our creator,
by your gift
the tree of life was set at the heart of the earthly paradise,
and the bread of life at the heart of your Church:
May we who have been nourished at your table on earth
be transformed by the glory of the Saviour's cross
and enjoy the delights of eternity;
through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.
Post Communion prayer for the Second Sunday before Lent
In his poem 'Ode on Intimations of Immortality', Wordsworth writes:
- But there’s a Tree, of many, one
A single field which I have looked upon,
Both of them speak of something that is gone:
The Pansy at my feet
Doth the same tale repeat:
Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?
William Wordsworth, Ode: Intimations of Immortality IV, 52-57
In the profound parable that is the narrative of the Fall in the book Genesis, we find that there are many trees in the Garden of Eden, but two are singled out. First, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, from which our primal parents ate the forbidden fruit and so lost the life of paradise; and second, there is the tree of life. The idea of a tree of life is common to many religious, philosophical and mythological traditions; it was by no means confined to Judaism; it is a kind of universal human symbol, representing our striving after immortality or fullness of life.
In the Genesis myth, at first Adam and Eve could eat freely of the tree of life, symbolising their bliss as those who walked in God’s Garden. But once they had eaten of the other tree, access to the tree of life is denied.
Genesis 3.22-24
Then the Lord God said, ‘See, the man has become like us, knowing good and evil; and now, he might reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever’ – therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken. He drove out the man, and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed a cherubim, and a sword flaming and turning to guard the way to the tree of life.
The tree is now a symbol, to quote Wordsworth, of ‘something that is gone’, of departed glory.
‘Where are you?’ is God’s great cry of dereliction in Genesis 3; God’s anguish at his lost children. The tree is, as it were, withdrawn from earth; it is now in the realm of the cherubim. No human being can have access.
When the Tabernacle (and later the Temple) was constructed to symbolise heavenly realities upon earth, God commanded Moses to fashion the Menorah, the seven branched candle-stand, to be placed in the holy of holies, the place of God’s Presence and glory, with the cherubim who over-shadowed the mercy seat, the place of atonement. The Menorah became understood as a depiction of the Tree of Life. Here is a little of Eden restored on earth, but still human access is denied.
He (Moses) also made the lampstand of gold…..There were branches going out on its sides, three branches of the lampstand out of the one side of it and three branches of the lampstand out of the other side of it; three cups shaped like almond blossoms each with calyx and petals, on one branch, and three…..on the other….He made its seven lamps and its snuffers and its trays of pure gold. (Exodus 37.17ff.)
In Lent, we recollect our human condition, our lost innocence, the ‘something that is gone’ that leads us away from God and his Tree. And yet, the Hebrew tradition does not leave us in utter despair. Look at these passages from the book of Proverbs.
She (wisdom) is a tree of life to those who lay hold of her; those who hold her fast are called happy (3.18).
The fruit of the righteous is a tree of life, but violence takes lives away (11.30).
Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a desire fulfilled is a tree of life (13.12).
A gentle tongue is a tree of life, but perverseness in it breaks the spirit (15.4)
Those passages encapsulate all that is good and positive and creative in our human living. Wisdom is a tree of life; we are not utterly banished from Eden.
Perhaps the message of the Hebrew Scriptures is that, like Adam and Eve, we have a choice – to eat or not to eat what is forbidden; to think that the Tree of Life is entirely beyond us, and so to wallow in our lost-ness, or to seek by wisdom to embrace it and find it? Wisdom teaches us to embrace it, to seek it. May Lent be for us a growth in holy wisdom.
God our creator,
by your gift
the tree of life was set at the heart of the earthly paradise,
and the bread of life at the heart of your Church:
May we who have been nourished at your table on earth
be transformed by the glory of the Saviour’s cross
and enjoy the delights of eternity;
through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.
Post Communion prayer for the Second Sunday before Lent
‘But there’s a Tree, of many, one’.
Here’s a catena of New Testament quotes that refer to one particular Tree:
The God of our ancestors raised up Jesus, whom you had killed by hanging him on a tree (Acts 5.30).
They put him to death by hanging him on a tree (Acts 10.39).
When they had carried out everything that was written about him, they took him down from the tree and laid him in a tomb (Acts 13.39).
Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us – for it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree’ (Galatians 3.13).
Christ himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, so that, free from sins, we might live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed (1 Peter 2.24)
Now none of these references refers explicitly to the Tree of Life. But notice, how in 1 Corinthians, St Paul links the Cross and wisdom:
For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling-block to Jews and foolishness to Greeks, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God (1 Corinthians 1. 21-24).
And so it is but a small leap in imagination that comes to see the Cross as the Tree of Life, for after all, the New Testament is clear that life, healing, forgiveness, the gift of immortality, spring from the Cross.
If you visit the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, directly under the site of Calvary there is the Chapel of Adam. This reflects a belief that the first Adam was buried on Golgotha, the place of a skull, the place of fallen-ness and death which Christ, the Second Adam, redeemed. Moreover, theologians and mystics also came to regard Mount Calvary as the place where the Tree of Life in Genesis once stood. Where paradise was lost, paradise has been restored. The Cross is the Tree of Life; it stands again on earth and it gives us access to the Father. In art and poetry, its wood bursts into life, just as in our Northern hemisphere, Easter is the great spring festival, when nature itself welcomes and illustrates the Lord’s resurrection.
Nowhere is this more beautifully expressed that in the 6th century hymn Crux Fidelis.
Faithful Cross! Above all other
One and only noble Tree!
None in foliage, none in blossom,
None in fruit thy peer may be;
Sweetest wood and sweetest iron!
Sweetest weight is hung on thee.
Bend thy boughs, O Tree of Glory,
Thy too rigid sinews bend,
For a while the ancient rigour
That thy birth bestowed, suspend,
And the King of heavenly beauty
On thy bosom gently tend.
Crux fidelis, Venantius Fortunatus (530-606), tr. Percy Dearmer
In Lent we seek to behold again the beauty of the Cross, the Tree of Life.
God our creator,
by your gift
the tree of life was set at the heart of the earthly paradise,
and the bread of life at the heart of your Church:
May we who have been nourished at your table on earth
be transformed by the glory of the Saviour’s cross
and enjoy the delights of eternity;
through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.
Post Communion prayer for the Second Sunday before Lent
Our Scriptures begin with paradise, and they end with paradise. Genesis tells of Eden lost and Revelation tells of Eden restored. It is as if Psalm 1 has become universalised; we have water and we have the tree.
Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and the Lamb, through the middle of the streets of the city. On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations (Revelation 22. 1, 2).
John’s imagery is complex; we have the singular Tree of Life, and yet we have the idea of the Tree of Life on both banks of the river, although it is possible to translate his Greek as meaning one tree in the middle of the river. It doesn’t really matter; indeed, there is something appealing about a brilliant river, bright as crystal, whose banks are lined with the Tree of Life, now multiplied to be all-embracing. This emphasises the fullness of salvation that the Cross achieved. For the tree is pictured as perpetually bearing twelve kinds of fruit every month; this is super-abundant fruitfulness; the garden restored, the figure twelve symbolising the in-gathering of all God’s people of every time and age. And the luxuriant canopy of leaves is for the healing of the nations. The dominant theme is life, the river and the tree, and creation and the human race – all the human race - at last find healing. The grasses of the wilderness are transformed by the Crown of Thorns, for Lent is about renewal, the lengthening of days, the coming of Spring, the promise of Easter. Our personal renewal is an anticipation of our ultimate renewal; in this season of sacramental signs, ash, bread, wine, water, oil, all of them made fruitful by the Cross, the Tree of Life. The sacraments celebrate salvation, a renewed humanity and a renewed creation.
So, in this holy season, I invite you to consider a tree. I finish again with Wordsworth:
A single tree
With sinuous trunk, boughs exquisitely wreathed,
Grew there; an ash which Winter for himself
Decked as in pride, and with outlandish grace:
Up from the ground, and almost to the top,
The trunk and every master branch were green
With clustering ivy, and the lightsome twigs
And outer spray profusely tipped with seeds
That hung in yellow tassels, while the air
Stirred them, not voiceless. Often I have stood
Foot-bound uplooking at this lovely tree
Beneath a frosty moon. The hemisphere
Of magic fiction, verse of mine perchance
May never tread; but scarcely Spenser’s self
Could have more tranquil visions in his youth,
Or could more bright appearances create
Of human forms with superhuman powers,
Than I beheld loitering on calm clear nights
Alone, beneath this fairy work of earth.
William Wordsworth, The Prelude VI, 76-94
God our creator,
by your gift
the tree of life was set at the heart of the earthly paradise,
and the bread of life at the heart of your Church:
May we who have been nourished at your table on earth
be transformed by the glory of the Saviour’s cross
and enjoy the delights of eternity;
through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.
Post Communion prayer for the Second Sunday before Lent
