O.K., I’m officially a dolt. I realized that as I began to study this coming Sunday’s sermon text, the end of Genesis 3, the expulsion from the garden in Genesis 3:20-24. While doing so I made a connection with Tolkien’s mythical history of Middle Earth which I had never seen before.
Though I am sure it was plain to many others, I never could quite figure out why in Tolkien’s universe west is good and east is bad. The elves and wizards come from the west. Orcs and evil come from the east. The Shire is in the west, Mordor is in the east. When the travelers sing an elegy to Boromir in a moving scene at the beginning of The Two Towers, they name the north, south and west winds in his praise, but Gimli refuses to sing of the east wind. And when we come to the Silmarillion we learn that the angels/gods dwell in the true west of the world.
Like an idiot I somehow imagined that Tolkien’s orientation to the west was some product of European prejudice. And I recalled that the Bible has a somewhat eastward orientation. The temple faces east. And there is a long-standing Christian tradition (evidently based somewhat on Matthew 24:27) that Christ will return from the east. Orthodox Christians bury their dead facing east so they will see Christ as He returns to raise them. So I simply chalked up Tolkien’s predilection for the west as an accident of his lineage as an Englishman.
But then yesterday I found the explanation of the westward orientation of Tolkien’s world staring me in the face. Of course, in Scripture human beings were cast out of paradise toward the east! The angel and flaming sword guard Eden on its eastward side so that we cannot return. Which is exactly the story Tolkien imitates and repeats in his mythology of the elves departing the paradise of Valinor eastward into Middle Earth.
So I’m a dolt for not seeing it for all these years, but Tolkien’s many tales of the struggles and woes of men and elves (and dwarves and hobbits) very much reflects the Bible’s picture of our current human situation. We live east of Eden. Paradise is no longer accessible to us and we live a hard existence, scraping for sustenance and in constant conflict with each other, as we heard last week in the punishments God dished out for sin in Genesis 3:14-19.
As John Steinbeck’s novel of that title, East of Eden, suggests, human life outside paradise is fraught with pain and sorrow. Yet it is into that location that God came in Jesus Christ to redeem us. He didn’t call us into some heroic quest to return west to paradise, but came to meet us where we are, east of the garden of His peace and joy.
And maybe that other biblical orientation toward the east, where the temple faces and Christ will return, is a sign that our salvation still lies east, not away from the pain of the world, but into it and through it. That is certainly how Jesus saved us. He went through the Cross and death and into new life. So our journey of faith is in the same direction. And as G. K. Chesterton pictured in his marvelous little book Man Alive, by traveling far enough in that one direction we will journey clear round the world and arrive at home. So God takes us eastward, away from Eden, but in the end brings us back to Paradise.