The creation story is just that: a story. It is a wonderful parable about creation and the place of us human beings in it. The central part of that story is that of the Garden of Eden, paradise on earth, inhabited by two so-far-sinless human beings. And then everything went to hell in the proverbial handcart. My guess is that the initial concepts of an eternal hell stemmed from a seemingly human need to punish those who knowingly and willingly eat those tempting apples, whatever those apples tend to be.
The truth is that there was no way for that biblical Eden to last. Given human nature and free will everyone one of us would and will decide to do something we know is selfish and wrong. Even if an original Eden existed, it was no going to last. But that was not the point of the parable. The point, or at least one of them, is that everything and everyone is good because God, who created and continues to create, is good and it is up to us to do all we can to keep us and all of creation good.
But we fail to do so and fail daily. That is why the world is in the shape it is in. To be sure, we know that. We all want a better world, a world where there is no hunger, no disease, no covid: an Eden-like world. That world will never be, at least not in our lifetime. Yet, that does not give us a pass so that we need not do all we can to do the best we can at every moment of every day.
The problem is that when we look at this world of ours and all the problems we personally observe, we can be and are overwhelmed by what it would take to resolve them. The temptation, then, is to not even try, knowing that what little we can do will be a drop in the bucket. Moreover, the truth is is that is all it will be: a drop, maybe two or three of them, but no more. But one drop is better than none at all.
All our failures, big and small, and we all have them, do not erase our successes. The good done cannot be undone even if it sometimes seems as if it had been. In the biblical story Adam and Eve did not pack it in. They had long lives to live doing the best they could to make their lives and the lives of their children as good as they could. They surely failed as did their children, as the stories of Cain and Abel, Noah and the Ark make perfectly and abundantly clear.
The story of creation is held out to us as a constant reminder of creation’s goodness, of everything and everyone in it: cows and chickens, snakes and gnats, you and me. We are all good and we all have a purpose even if we sometimes wonder just exactly what that purpose truly is. Perhaps it will only be in death when we will be able to look back and see how well and, at times, how poorly we did. It won’t matter then. But in the meantime, in the here-and-now, when it is within our ability to enjoy, care for and use God’s creation as best we can, we must do so. It won’t be Eden, heaven on earth, but it will be what we make it.
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