The Garden of Grace
By Rollin Grams, Bible and Mission.
[Foreword: This is a short, fictional story, written in response to a heretic in the Church of England who recently asserted that God’s grace is so radical that no repentance is required. Her implication is that the Church must not even bring up the subject of sin, no one has any need for repentance (though they may if they like!), and everyone should accept everyone else just as they are. Most heretics in the Church of England deny that homosexuality is a sin, but this heretic wants to go one step farther in dissolving the category of sin because, she falsely claims, grace simply accepts everyone as they are. Of course, this is an impossible reading of all the Bible, but it also rids the Church of the need for Jesus’ death on a cross for our sins. John ran into this heretic’s forebears when he wrote in response to them, ‘If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. 10 If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us’ (1 John 1.9-10, ESV).]
‘Oh, you startled me!’ said Eve.
‘Terribly sorry—I did not mean to.’ The creature had the tail fin of a small fish emerging from its mouth. With a quick slurp, the fin disappeared.
‘What are you, if I may ask? You look vaguely familiar, but I must say you are a different creature from those I’ve met so far.’
‘I am a salamander, dear soul. You might call me by that name. I do look rather like the Snake that you met in the Garden, don’t I?’
‘You know about that?’!
‘Eve, I am the Snake of the Garden.’
‘What? How?’
‘It does seem strange, doesn’t it? In there, I am the Snake. Out here, though, I am the Salamander. In there, I am cursed to slither on the ground. Out here, I have four legs to lift me above the dust of death.’
Behind her, across the water, the flaming swords of the angels that stood guard at the Garden’s entrance could still be seen in the distance—flashing lights in the grey of late evening. To look in that direction brought a stab of pain. She knew, of course, that ‘in there’ meant in that garden—the Garden from which she had been evicted with her husband, never again to enter. ‘In there’ was also where she held an enlightening conversation with the Snake, who taught her that to follow one’s own definitions of good and evil is to be god to oneself. The temptation was irresistible, and both Eve and Adam bit into the fruit offered by the Snake but forbidden by God. This resulted in their expulsion from the Garden of God, but not before God had graciously clothed them from the starkness of their naked disobedience that had opened their eyes to sin lest the shame overwhelm them.
Now, outside the Garden, Eve had been collecting firewood and looking for something in which she might carry water from the lake while Adam was building a bivouac just inside the forest. He could be heard breaking branches and releasing the occasional yelp as his tender hands took the piercing jab of some wood. The pain was a new sensation, unpleasant, yet curiously interesting—as was the sight of the blood from his hands on the tree. The shelter was coming along. He had positioned a sturdy branch as a main beam between two trees. As the trees were a little too far apart, he had cleverly tied a mid-pole vertical to the ground to give it support. The mid-pole rose above the beam, and where they crossed, he had tied them together. He had been testing the use of a sharp rock as an axe, and he used it to cut tree bark into long strips that he then used to tie his pole to the beam. Something about the smell of the forest, the urgency of his work in the waning hours of the day, the axe, and his bloodied hands energized him. He also instinctively felt a duty to protect and care for Eve, and the excitement of an adventure was restrained by this responsibility.
Eve, however, appeared to be getting along well enough without Adam’s efforts on her behalf. She was now laughing freely and heartily at the Salamander’s wit. He was every bit as charming as the Snake.
‘And what kind of a joke is that?’ she asked.
‘A pun,’ replied the Salamander. ‘It works by giving meaning a slight twist that surprises and then delights.’
‘And the other one—the one you told first?’
‘Oh, it doesn’t really have a name yet, but I was thinking of calling it a Boundary Crossing. The humour is in the shock the hearer has of crossing some boundary, some taboo, or some rule.’
‘Are there other types of jokes?’
‘Many. There are jokes that work off of false assumptions, jokes that exaggerate, jokes that poke fun at others, and others still.’
‘Oh, tell me another one,’ said Eve, tossing her lovely black hair behind her and widening her deep, brown eyes in an abandonment to the pleasant intercourse that kept her from her duties.
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