The depiction in this chapter of God just cruisin' on up to Abraham's tent with a couple of his "entourage", his "posse" of angels, strikes me as so personal, such a testament to how Abraham lived his life. Through the entire Bible before this, there have been people who "walked with God", like Adam and Noah, and many who called on His name but there have been none whose personal experience with God showing up at their door was described in such intimate detail. There is a question posed to each other all the time by Christians: What would you do if Jesus came here right now? As a Catholic Christian I understand the amazing reality of Jesus indeed being here right now, body, blood, soul, and divinity, in the Eucharist. This chapter with Abraham's response to God walking up to his tent illustrates how all of us think we would act in such a situation, because we know we should, and how we ought to approach the Blessed Sacrament in reality.
First, Abraham greets God and the Posse properly, with reverence and respect, bowing low, because he recognizes them. Abraham didn't have to be told, didn't have to have some kind of sign before his eyes were opened that God was there. We don't need miracles or change in accidents/appearance to know that God is in the consecrated bread and wine. So often we fail to acknowledge Him properly when we realize the tabernacle is around. I too am guilty of dipping a little genuflection on the way in to choir rehearsal before Mass in my haste to be about my business. Abraham demands that they not go anywhere until he has had a chance to treat them properly, as though God and his Angels were the busy ones with many important matters to deal with and no time to sit and be cared for, which only makes sense. I should be overjoyed that the God of the Heavens and the Earth, the Sustainer and Creator of all things, takes not just a moment to stop and grace me with His presence in the Eucharist, but stays with me eternally. He who has so little time (if He were subject to time) or attention (if he could be said to have limited attention) to spare for me, spends it all on me. He will never "go on about his business," but stays in every cell, in every particle of me.
Abraham hastens to make God and the Posse comfortable, offering food in almost every major variety (dairy, bread, meat), and in amazing abundance. My sources (in this case Agape Bible Study) indicate that a seah of flour was a good couple of gallons of flour. Six gallons of flour made into pita-ish bread would be an insane amount of bread for three normal human visitors. Abraham's desire to give and give to the Lord whatever He might want and whatever might serve Him just floors me. I'm so often lacking in generosity with God, giving him my extra, my odds and ends. I give of my time, but not necessarily my attention, and I give of my money if I have any on me. I give of my material goods, but only what I don't care about. Approaching him even with these lowliest of gifts makes me feel better, but His Word totally challenges me to rise above that. What more can I give the God of the Blessed Sacrament? I was more generous with my time for prayer during Lent, but now I've got new responsibilities. I was generous with my material goods during Lent, but now I need to actually mail those mittens I knitted for Afghans for Afghans. I'm nominated for parish council, but now if elected I need to see it through and really give of my opinions, talents, and attention.
Abraham laughing at God's plan had such a different flavor than Sarah's laughter. As I mentioned before, Abraham laughing had an overtone of joy at the absurdly wonderful plans of God. Sarah, on the other hand, laughs in disbelief, so convinced is she that it is not her who will bear Abraham the promised son. The Almighty points out to Abraham what is in Sarah's heart of hearts, that she believes Abraham to be the source of her problem bearing a child. "My husband is so old, am I still to have sexual pleasure?" I might be able to bear a child, says she, if that old man could get it up once in a while! *giggle giggle snort*. This covering up of her own failings is compounded by her attempt, like a six year old, to hide her snide, under-her-breath comment and lie to the Lord's face. Like an exasperated parent, God corrects her. "I didn't laugh!" "Yes, you did." Don't you realize who I AM by now? The promised child, like the later Promised One, is heralded by the phrase "For nothing is impossible for God."
It surprises me that God seemingly reflects here on how He plans to involve Abraham in His great work of saving mankind. The Bible often shows God asking rhetorical questions, perhaps seeming as if He has not yet made His mind up about something, yet also explaining in a more elegant fashion God's plans. He reiterates the covenant He made with Abraham and considers that this covenant places man in a unique position of involvement with the work of God. He does not wish to hide his plans from Abraham, but instead wants to involve him intimately in them. Despite Sarah's occasional imperfection in righteousness, she will still be the mother of a great nation. She and nobody else, and no earthly circumstance will stand in the way of that. The same is true of Abraham.
In His discussion with Abraham about the fate of Sodom, God seems to be purposely involving Abraham in the plan. He wants Abraham to know who He is and what His nature is, and sometimes for human beings that involves questioning Him. He had planned earlier to never again destroy the innocent for the guilty after the Flood, and God's interactions with Abraham about Sodom make this ever clearer to him. He wants Abraham to understand what it really means when He says that he will never again destroy the innocent for the guilt of the wicked. Fifty out of thousands? Ten out of thousands? Yes, says God, even that little drop of righteousness in a bucket of evil is enough to stay My hand. Abraham walks away from this lesson with a real glimpse of what God would do through His Son Jesus.
Friday, April 29, 2011
Thursday, April 28, 2011
Genesis 16-17: More Covenants Divine
I'm struck very much so far in my reading of the Bible by how often people totally misunderstand what God's plan for them is, how often they reason that "God helps those that help themselves" and see to putting into motion God's promises in their own way. Abram has done this at least twice so far, and both scenes involve the matriarch Sarai. Despite how she can be depicted in these scenes, I actually really like Sarai/Sarah. She laughs in disbelief often when I might have but she submits and believes anyway. She is sometimes so sure of God's promises that she imagines she must take action to help them come to pass. God promised that you would be a great nation? Well then, he'll have to begin with a baby right? And since I clearly can't have any, I bet He means for this to happen via someone else, but no matter what, we'll get it done!
Sarai's maid Hagar seems to have stuck around from their previous foray into Egypt, a kind of reminder almost of the last time Abram and Sarai tried to keep their little tribe going and Sarai ended up in Pharaoh's harem. That time, God's promise that he would make Abram's name great seemed to be in danger, but their attempts to do this their own way ended in tragedy for everyone. Now, they have their own plans on how to make of Abram "a great nation", sadly involving bigamy with a foreign, pagan woman, and we all know how well that went. Egypt in Genesis seems to symbolize a land that tempts the faithful with a way to "do it their own way", to become self-made men, only to end up enslaving them to sin. Sounds a little like the "land of promise" I live in. I wonder how Joseph's story of elevation to prominence in Egypt will fit into this? I feel like that story redeems the reputation of the country while at the same time condemning the Hebrews to the fulfillment of the prophecy of physical slavery. Eventually, after the Exodus, Jesus will go there with the Holy Family as a place of refuge.
I cannot imagine what it must have felt like to be in Sarai's position. Hagar knows that in the world's eyes she has gained status purely by being pregnant with that precious, precious child. Sarai knows God and knows the kind of extravagant promises he has made to Abram and herself due to their faith, and this gives her an assurance of her status that the world doesn't know. Could Hagar's child really be the one to fulfill those promises for them? God couldn't possibly do it any other way, right? Finally she begins to get angry, thinking that all this pain and suffering came from Abram's need to have children to "father a great nation". He gets the rewards, and she gets all the backtalk and disrespect. She knew enough and had enough faith to expect justice from God, but wasn't sure about getting it from Abram, so she appealed to both. Like previous men and women in the Bible who have tried to achieve God's ends by their own means, Sarai took what she wanted and then blamed others when the plan backfires.
When sins are committed, even against unbelievers or evildoers, God's justice includes them. Hagar received justice for Sarai's lashing out in the form of a promise of greatness for her son's descendents, even though she was also commanded in justice to return to her rightful place as Sarai's slave. The fair and just thing was done on both sides, a win-win, but justice may not always look good to either party. Ishmael (God hears) was born after a vision of El-Roi (The God who Sees), seeming to indicate that Hagar understands the watchfulness and vigilance of God for people, the God who swoops down to bring justice. Her son's legacy would not be that of the faithful follower of God, but instead was predicted to be changeable, rebellious, and tough. The angel makes it clear that God has other plans for this child who was conceived to bring his promise to bear. It is important that his mother recognize her subordinate status to the matriarch Sarai, the one whose child would become the head of the line leading to Jesus and the salvation of the world, but when she does, it brings blessings to her. I wonder how Arab Muslims look at this passage, given their claimed lineage from Ishmael? I can see how this would prove to be an inspiring tale for them and could be seen in a good light, but it seems so clear that Ishmael is the offspring of an attempt to force God's promises to come true in a certain way.
Once again, a promise misunderstood is a covenant made. Abram's misunderstanding of the promise that he will father a great nation seems to lead directly to God's upgrading this to a covenant, a giving of Himself and a taking of Abram and his tribe to Himself in return. His timing is perfect...an already old man at Ishmael's birth, Abram is made to wait another thirteen years until he is ninety nine for God to do this. Now there is no chance of him expecting a child's arrival to make sense. This time, the covenant won't be written in creation, in a day or in the sky...but it will be written onto man, marking him out by a change in the flesh as belonging to the Lord's tribe. As Christians, we do not circumcise and name, as a sign of this old covenant and membership in the tribe of Abraham, but we do baptize and name, a sign of a new covenant that marks us out bodily for membership in the global family, tribe, kingdom of Jesus Christ. Eight days...the seven (perfect number) and one more beyond it...the number of redemption. As a sign of giving Himself to us, God gives himself a title, El-Shaddai (God, the almighty). Not quite a name, but close enough. He also gives titles/new names to Abram(great father) and Sarai (my princess)... makes them Abraham (father of a multitude) and Sarah (the princess).
Abraham clearly misunderstands some of God's intentions, and He is thus painfully clear at this point. If Sarah is going to have the honor of bearing a son that will carry this covenant forward, then Abraham and Sarah's former reasoning that Ishmael's drama-inducing birth was the fulfillment of the promise is laughably wrong. Abraham laughs to think he got it so very very wrong. Sarah's title as mother of the tribe has been usurped...and yet at the same time thinking of her as being able to take on that role via true, physical pregnancy and birth at her age seems absurd to him. Genius, Lord...says he...pure genius. Who'da thunk it. I've done that before. I've shaken my head and laughed in joy when God's plan for me, absurd as it so recently seemed to think it, becomes clear. The son that will bear their legacy is to be named Isaac, "laughing" in honor of the wonderful, joyous absurdity that is God's plan for us.
Abraham's fear that God's plan will not include Ishmael, given that Ishmael exists because of this attempt to take matters into human hands, is speedily dealt with as well. Ishmael exists, says God, because I wanted him to be and I care for him...but he isn't who I mean when I say you will have a great nation to descend from you.
Abraham's fear for Ishmael echoes in many human hearts. Women who are pregnant but abused (or men who are abused along with their children), women who become pregnant from rape, women pregnant out of wedlock. All of them wonder if God wants their children to be. All of them fear that, because of the way they were conceived or the situation they are born into, God is going to ignore these children or mark them out as lesser. There is a fear that, if blessings are due to the child born into "normal, godly" circumstances, then those blessings must come from depriving the children not born that way somehow. God has abundant blessings and mercy for every child, and He wants them to exist. They aren't an affront to Him. Ishmael is circumcised into the tribe along with everyone else.
God does have a problem with primogeniture, it seems, when the oldest son is unworthy, turns away from righteousness. Humans see status markers like "being born first", God looks on the heart. Shem, being righteous, is allowed to defend his leadership position as the first born, but Cain, Reuben, and Ishmael are displaced from God's favor by younger brothers because those younger brothers do what is right. They call on God's name in humility and defend his justice.
Sarai's maid Hagar seems to have stuck around from their previous foray into Egypt, a kind of reminder almost of the last time Abram and Sarai tried to keep their little tribe going and Sarai ended up in Pharaoh's harem. That time, God's promise that he would make Abram's name great seemed to be in danger, but their attempts to do this their own way ended in tragedy for everyone. Now, they have their own plans on how to make of Abram "a great nation", sadly involving bigamy with a foreign, pagan woman, and we all know how well that went. Egypt in Genesis seems to symbolize a land that tempts the faithful with a way to "do it their own way", to become self-made men, only to end up enslaving them to sin. Sounds a little like the "land of promise" I live in. I wonder how Joseph's story of elevation to prominence in Egypt will fit into this? I feel like that story redeems the reputation of the country while at the same time condemning the Hebrews to the fulfillment of the prophecy of physical slavery. Eventually, after the Exodus, Jesus will go there with the Holy Family as a place of refuge.
I cannot imagine what it must have felt like to be in Sarai's position. Hagar knows that in the world's eyes she has gained status purely by being pregnant with that precious, precious child. Sarai knows God and knows the kind of extravagant promises he has made to Abram and herself due to their faith, and this gives her an assurance of her status that the world doesn't know. Could Hagar's child really be the one to fulfill those promises for them? God couldn't possibly do it any other way, right? Finally she begins to get angry, thinking that all this pain and suffering came from Abram's need to have children to "father a great nation". He gets the rewards, and she gets all the backtalk and disrespect. She knew enough and had enough faith to expect justice from God, but wasn't sure about getting it from Abram, so she appealed to both. Like previous men and women in the Bible who have tried to achieve God's ends by their own means, Sarai took what she wanted and then blamed others when the plan backfires.
When sins are committed, even against unbelievers or evildoers, God's justice includes them. Hagar received justice for Sarai's lashing out in the form of a promise of greatness for her son's descendents, even though she was also commanded in justice to return to her rightful place as Sarai's slave. The fair and just thing was done on both sides, a win-win, but justice may not always look good to either party. Ishmael (God hears) was born after a vision of El-Roi (The God who Sees), seeming to indicate that Hagar understands the watchfulness and vigilance of God for people, the God who swoops down to bring justice. Her son's legacy would not be that of the faithful follower of God, but instead was predicted to be changeable, rebellious, and tough. The angel makes it clear that God has other plans for this child who was conceived to bring his promise to bear. It is important that his mother recognize her subordinate status to the matriarch Sarai, the one whose child would become the head of the line leading to Jesus and the salvation of the world, but when she does, it brings blessings to her. I wonder how Arab Muslims look at this passage, given their claimed lineage from Ishmael? I can see how this would prove to be an inspiring tale for them and could be seen in a good light, but it seems so clear that Ishmael is the offspring of an attempt to force God's promises to come true in a certain way.
Once again, a promise misunderstood is a covenant made. Abram's misunderstanding of the promise that he will father a great nation seems to lead directly to God's upgrading this to a covenant, a giving of Himself and a taking of Abram and his tribe to Himself in return. His timing is perfect...an already old man at Ishmael's birth, Abram is made to wait another thirteen years until he is ninety nine for God to do this. Now there is no chance of him expecting a child's arrival to make sense. This time, the covenant won't be written in creation, in a day or in the sky...but it will be written onto man, marking him out by a change in the flesh as belonging to the Lord's tribe. As Christians, we do not circumcise and name, as a sign of this old covenant and membership in the tribe of Abraham, but we do baptize and name, a sign of a new covenant that marks us out bodily for membership in the global family, tribe, kingdom of Jesus Christ. Eight days...the seven (perfect number) and one more beyond it...the number of redemption. As a sign of giving Himself to us, God gives himself a title, El-Shaddai (God, the almighty). Not quite a name, but close enough. He also gives titles/new names to Abram(great father) and Sarai (my princess)... makes them Abraham (father of a multitude) and Sarah (the princess).
Abraham clearly misunderstands some of God's intentions, and He is thus painfully clear at this point. If Sarah is going to have the honor of bearing a son that will carry this covenant forward, then Abraham and Sarah's former reasoning that Ishmael's drama-inducing birth was the fulfillment of the promise is laughably wrong. Abraham laughs to think he got it so very very wrong. Sarah's title as mother of the tribe has been usurped...and yet at the same time thinking of her as being able to take on that role via true, physical pregnancy and birth at her age seems absurd to him. Genius, Lord...says he...pure genius. Who'da thunk it. I've done that before. I've shaken my head and laughed in joy when God's plan for me, absurd as it so recently seemed to think it, becomes clear. The son that will bear their legacy is to be named Isaac, "laughing" in honor of the wonderful, joyous absurdity that is God's plan for us.
Abraham's fear that God's plan will not include Ishmael, given that Ishmael exists because of this attempt to take matters into human hands, is speedily dealt with as well. Ishmael exists, says God, because I wanted him to be and I care for him...but he isn't who I mean when I say you will have a great nation to descend from you.
Abraham's fear for Ishmael echoes in many human hearts. Women who are pregnant but abused (or men who are abused along with their children), women who become pregnant from rape, women pregnant out of wedlock. All of them wonder if God wants their children to be. All of them fear that, because of the way they were conceived or the situation they are born into, God is going to ignore these children or mark them out as lesser. There is a fear that, if blessings are due to the child born into "normal, godly" circumstances, then those blessings must come from depriving the children not born that way somehow. God has abundant blessings and mercy for every child, and He wants them to exist. They aren't an affront to Him. Ishmael is circumcised into the tribe along with everyone else.
God does have a problem with primogeniture, it seems, when the oldest son is unworthy, turns away from righteousness. Humans see status markers like "being born first", God looks on the heart. Shem, being righteous, is allowed to defend his leadership position as the first born, but Cain, Reuben, and Ishmael are displaced from God's favor by younger brothers because those younger brothers do what is right. They call on God's name in humility and defend his justice.
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
Genesis 14-15: Melchizedek, The King of Righteousness
Wow, just...wow. My mind is a little bit of a blur with all the place names, nation names, victories and defeats here in Chapter 14, but I think I've got it all sorted. I needed, I admit, a lot of help on this one from Agape Bible Study, from Scott Hahn in his "Genesis to Jesus: A Journey Through The Bible" online study, and from Haydock's commentary, but now it overall makes sense. And God is following the action the whole time.
The scene of the rebellion and war, coming shortly on the heels of Lot's defection and attempts to mingle with the Canaanites, really gives the sense that the family, tribe, or nation one comes from is no longer a perfect indication of one's stance toward God. Also, a lot of prophecies made about Noah's sons are beginning to come to pass already. The various city-states of the land of Canaan rebel against their presumed overlords, the kings of the Great Civilization of the day, Sumeria, Elam (in Iran), both children of Ham, and the other Goyim, children of Japheth. This Evil Empire swoops down and conquers them in a battle in a valley now filled with salt water, the Dead Sea. We know the names and places of everything mostly as an effort to say "This is about real people in real places!" Suddenly, God's prophecy from Noah regarding Canaan being a slave to his brothers, the other descendents of Ham, starts to make perfect sense. Controlling the area makes perfect worldly sense as a way for these kings of Mesopotamia to enlarge their territory and the route from Egypt.
Lot's punishment for leaving God's providence behind and trusting himself to make his own success is swift. The conquering army takes him and all the worldly success and material possessions he's ever had, sweeping over him unexpectedly. That's happened to me too, as I'm sure it has happened to others. Trusting in the Lord can seem so difficult sometimes, but it reaps such rewards. What happens here reminds me of why I must be "storing up treasures in heaven" because who knows what might take away what I think I built for myself. Luckily for Lot, Abram defends his Promised Land and gets Lot back by sweeping away the Mesopotamian overlords with the help of Canaanites, branches of a wicked tree who somehow individually were far far more faithful than Lot, from a righteous tree.
The next part is one of the most Catholic parts of Genesis. Melchizedek, the King of Righteousness, king of Salem (Peace) ,who is also the priest of God, brings out bread and wine and blesses it, and accepts a tithe in return. He is traditionally believed to actually be Shem, Noah's son. Yes, he lived that long. Do the math. Anyway, in addition, he prefigures a whole lot of people in the covenants to come. First, King David, in that David was a priest-king "in the order of Melchizedek" (Ps. 110). Of course, King David himself was a type of, a prefigurement of his descendent Jesus Christ, who took bread and wine and blessed it, making it contain his body, blood, soul, and divinity. Shem being still alive to personally hand this on to Abram like a baton in a relay is just amazing. The generations of people and the stretch of time between these two men melts away as the flame of God's worship and sacrifice to him gets handed on one good man to the next. God will keep it alive, no matter how long He waits or no matter what miracles he must perform. Abram received priesthood and the baton of God's service directly from Shem, just like Fr. Mike at my parish received his priesthood from a bishop who received his bishopric from another bishop before him back to the Apostles, who got it from Jesus.
As a result of this new mission and blessing he gets from Melchizedek, Abram is empowered to be generous to those he fought with. His Canaanite friends are blessed through him, receiving booty, all kinds of riches. He himself recognizes now that these things are meaningless next to God's blessings. He was patient in waiting for God to make his name great.
Next thing you know, however, God's promise to make his name great begins to seem like it will never come true. Fine, says Abram, I can be generous with money and things, even turn down worldly titles and fame. But how great can a name be that ends with me? At this point, God does a rare and wonderful thing. He takes the sum of Abram's life so far and looks on his loyalty, his repentance when he does wrong, and his willingness to do anything for God. On doing so, he "credits this to him as righteousness" and makes a brand new covenant with Abram. God agrees to make out of a childless old man, who figured he'd have to leave his stuff to a servant, a huge, expansive tribe. No longer is God merely wedded to His Bride, his Church, no longer is He merely the head of his Household the Church, he is now the chief of his Chosen Tribe. God promised to make of him a great nation, and with the sacrifice of the animals here, this promise becomes a covenant, a sacred oath. God will do it. He will take the Chosen Tribe out of the slavery they will get themselves into, even after four hundred years. It won't go smoothly, but Abram's descendents will be a great nation. And we are. We Christians, our older brothers and sisters in faith the Rabbinic Jews...even our Muslim brothers and sisters in faith.
The scene of the rebellion and war, coming shortly on the heels of Lot's defection and attempts to mingle with the Canaanites, really gives the sense that the family, tribe, or nation one comes from is no longer a perfect indication of one's stance toward God. Also, a lot of prophecies made about Noah's sons are beginning to come to pass already. The various city-states of the land of Canaan rebel against their presumed overlords, the kings of the Great Civilization of the day, Sumeria, Elam (in Iran), both children of Ham, and the other Goyim, children of Japheth. This Evil Empire swoops down and conquers them in a battle in a valley now filled with salt water, the Dead Sea. We know the names and places of everything mostly as an effort to say "This is about real people in real places!" Suddenly, God's prophecy from Noah regarding Canaan being a slave to his brothers, the other descendents of Ham, starts to make perfect sense. Controlling the area makes perfect worldly sense as a way for these kings of Mesopotamia to enlarge their territory and the route from Egypt.
Lot's punishment for leaving God's providence behind and trusting himself to make his own success is swift. The conquering army takes him and all the worldly success and material possessions he's ever had, sweeping over him unexpectedly. That's happened to me too, as I'm sure it has happened to others. Trusting in the Lord can seem so difficult sometimes, but it reaps such rewards. What happens here reminds me of why I must be "storing up treasures in heaven" because who knows what might take away what I think I built for myself. Luckily for Lot, Abram defends his Promised Land and gets Lot back by sweeping away the Mesopotamian overlords with the help of Canaanites, branches of a wicked tree who somehow individually were far far more faithful than Lot, from a righteous tree.
The next part is one of the most Catholic parts of Genesis. Melchizedek, the King of Righteousness, king of Salem (Peace) ,who is also the priest of God, brings out bread and wine and blesses it, and accepts a tithe in return. He is traditionally believed to actually be Shem, Noah's son. Yes, he lived that long. Do the math. Anyway, in addition, he prefigures a whole lot of people in the covenants to come. First, King David, in that David was a priest-king "in the order of Melchizedek" (Ps. 110). Of course, King David himself was a type of, a prefigurement of his descendent Jesus Christ, who took bread and wine and blessed it, making it contain his body, blood, soul, and divinity. Shem being still alive to personally hand this on to Abram like a baton in a relay is just amazing. The generations of people and the stretch of time between these two men melts away as the flame of God's worship and sacrifice to him gets handed on one good man to the next. God will keep it alive, no matter how long He waits or no matter what miracles he must perform. Abram received priesthood and the baton of God's service directly from Shem, just like Fr. Mike at my parish received his priesthood from a bishop who received his bishopric from another bishop before him back to the Apostles, who got it from Jesus.
As a result of this new mission and blessing he gets from Melchizedek, Abram is empowered to be generous to those he fought with. His Canaanite friends are blessed through him, receiving booty, all kinds of riches. He himself recognizes now that these things are meaningless next to God's blessings. He was patient in waiting for God to make his name great.
Next thing you know, however, God's promise to make his name great begins to seem like it will never come true. Fine, says Abram, I can be generous with money and things, even turn down worldly titles and fame. But how great can a name be that ends with me? At this point, God does a rare and wonderful thing. He takes the sum of Abram's life so far and looks on his loyalty, his repentance when he does wrong, and his willingness to do anything for God. On doing so, he "credits this to him as righteousness" and makes a brand new covenant with Abram. God agrees to make out of a childless old man, who figured he'd have to leave his stuff to a servant, a huge, expansive tribe. No longer is God merely wedded to His Bride, his Church, no longer is He merely the head of his Household the Church, he is now the chief of his Chosen Tribe. God promised to make of him a great nation, and with the sacrifice of the animals here, this promise becomes a covenant, a sacred oath. God will do it. He will take the Chosen Tribe out of the slavery they will get themselves into, even after four hundred years. It won't go smoothly, but Abram's descendents will be a great nation. And we are. We Christians, our older brothers and sisters in faith the Rabbinic Jews...even our Muslim brothers and sisters in faith.
Monday, April 25, 2011
Genesis 12-13: And He Built an Altar to the Lord
It pretty much was a given that at some point I would get behind on my strict "daily reading and posting" policy. Just Easter...just the resurrection of my Lord and Savior from the grave. No big deal. This past week was full of beauty and grace, but was also full of two, two and a half hour long services for the Triduum, and then this whole thing had to be celebrated. You know, with family and all that :). Well, back to business.
Abram. Now the Bible scales down from a focus on all humankind and our covenants with God, down to the scale of a single human family, a single human tribe. After the Tower of Babel, our human unity was destroyed (later to be brought back together), and not all of us wanted to be "God's chosen." We were a single family under Adam and Eve, then split into a "good branch" and an "evil branch". After Noah and the Re-Creation, we did the very same thing. This time, however, God's new covenant with us affected His response...He foiled the plans of the wicked without destroying the innocent. After that, we were suddenly broken up into tribes, nations that speak various languages and have differing cultures. One of them would come to shine out as a beacon of hope for us, one tribe among many as Noah's family was one family unit among many.
Abram's family had left Sin City (Ur) and had settled down to live somewhere else, but God had even bigger plans in mind. The men of the Tower of Babel tried to build cities, ziggurats, civilization on their own terms, in their own name (shem). But God made promises to Abram indicating that He is the source of greatness, of Name, of blessing. If Abram will follow Him into uncertain territory, that obedience will make blessings follow. Abram can do nothing alone that will make him great, but God will do that for him if he steps out of his comfort zone in faith and obedience. God hasn't covenanted with Abram yet, seems to be waiting for Abram's faithfulness, but the hint of that is there in these promises.
God seems to lead Abram, Sarai, Lot, their stuff, and their various hangers-on quite a long way, and Abram is faithful to him the whole time. Every time they stop, it seems, Abram is building another "altar to the Lord" and calling His Name. Abram's willingness to built altars to God and not monuments to himself, call on the Lord's name and not exalt his own is what makes him special and worthy of monuments and exaltation. The last shall be first. He who humbles himself will be exalted.
Of course, Abram's not totally a stand-up guy, it seems. He does tell at the very least a "half-truth", a "white lie" in order to protect his wife. Sarai was at the very least related to Abram, and given that you could call just about any relative "brother" or "sister" in that language and culture, it might not have been a lie at all. No matter what, doing this was not his finest moment. He wasn't quite at the point of full trust in God to keep His promises and preserve his life and his stuff.
There was a famine and Abram did what he needed to do, leaving the Promised Land of Canaan for Egypt (sounds like a theme that will be repeated...) in order to do the responsible thing and keep his little tribe going. Their little fib appears to work...Abram gets rich off of Sarai's place in the Pharaoh's harem, and Abram's name really does become "great" in the way the world thinks about it. Then God begins to set things straight with a some unnamed plagues (second verse will be the same as the first, a little bit louder and a little bit worse...), and suddenly the ephemeral nature of worldly glory and riches becomes all too clear to everyone. Got it, people? God hands out the real gifts, the real glory that lasts. Anything can destroy what you think you've built, but if God says He will make your name great, He will do so in a way that is impossible for us to imagine.
Thus, Abram makes an Exodus from Egypt, retraces his steps back to where he praised God before in Bethel and picks himself up after his mistake. The saints, according to the song, are just the sinners that fall down and get up. As he is doing so, Lot who has been with him the whole way so far refuses to "get back up" after their fall. He doesn't really learn anything from the episode in Egypt and doesn't recognize the hand of God in making people and places great or low. His hangers-on start having arguments with Abram's hangers-on and Abram realizes he needs to cut this guy loose. He responds in generosity, telling Lot he can have the land he wants. Lot chooses what sounds like paradise (actually described as being like the Garden, or Egypt which was really a very sweet place to live then) but it isn't Canaan. It isn't the Promised Land. He chooses what glitters, not the gold. He chooses to associate himself with Sodom, another Sin City, and gets right back into the thick of it, rejoining the everlasting climb up the ladder of worldly success.
For his generosity and faithfulness, God promises that the true treasure will be Abram's. He may think he just gave up his best hope, but the land and reward that God offers is a diamond in the rough. God rewards us with what truly matters. The "prosperity gospel" isn't truth...God rewards those faithful to Him, but not always with material riches or success, or even health. We aren't supposed to take the lack of these things as an indication of God's disfavor. He gives us what He knows to be the right thing for us. And Abram does what he knows how to do to claim the promise for himself - he builds yet another altar. The overall lesson for the day seems to be "when in doubt, build an altar." Worshipping God is always a good idea.
Abram. Now the Bible scales down from a focus on all humankind and our covenants with God, down to the scale of a single human family, a single human tribe. After the Tower of Babel, our human unity was destroyed (later to be brought back together), and not all of us wanted to be "God's chosen." We were a single family under Adam and Eve, then split into a "good branch" and an "evil branch". After Noah and the Re-Creation, we did the very same thing. This time, however, God's new covenant with us affected His response...He foiled the plans of the wicked without destroying the innocent. After that, we were suddenly broken up into tribes, nations that speak various languages and have differing cultures. One of them would come to shine out as a beacon of hope for us, one tribe among many as Noah's family was one family unit among many.
Abram's family had left Sin City (Ur) and had settled down to live somewhere else, but God had even bigger plans in mind. The men of the Tower of Babel tried to build cities, ziggurats, civilization on their own terms, in their own name (shem). But God made promises to Abram indicating that He is the source of greatness, of Name, of blessing. If Abram will follow Him into uncertain territory, that obedience will make blessings follow. Abram can do nothing alone that will make him great, but God will do that for him if he steps out of his comfort zone in faith and obedience. God hasn't covenanted with Abram yet, seems to be waiting for Abram's faithfulness, but the hint of that is there in these promises.
God seems to lead Abram, Sarai, Lot, their stuff, and their various hangers-on quite a long way, and Abram is faithful to him the whole time. Every time they stop, it seems, Abram is building another "altar to the Lord" and calling His Name. Abram's willingness to built altars to God and not monuments to himself, call on the Lord's name and not exalt his own is what makes him special and worthy of monuments and exaltation. The last shall be first. He who humbles himself will be exalted.
Of course, Abram's not totally a stand-up guy, it seems. He does tell at the very least a "half-truth", a "white lie" in order to protect his wife. Sarai was at the very least related to Abram, and given that you could call just about any relative "brother" or "sister" in that language and culture, it might not have been a lie at all. No matter what, doing this was not his finest moment. He wasn't quite at the point of full trust in God to keep His promises and preserve his life and his stuff.
There was a famine and Abram did what he needed to do, leaving the Promised Land of Canaan for Egypt (sounds like a theme that will be repeated...) in order to do the responsible thing and keep his little tribe going. Their little fib appears to work...Abram gets rich off of Sarai's place in the Pharaoh's harem, and Abram's name really does become "great" in the way the world thinks about it. Then God begins to set things straight with a some unnamed plagues (second verse will be the same as the first, a little bit louder and a little bit worse...), and suddenly the ephemeral nature of worldly glory and riches becomes all too clear to everyone. Got it, people? God hands out the real gifts, the real glory that lasts. Anything can destroy what you think you've built, but if God says He will make your name great, He will do so in a way that is impossible for us to imagine.
Thus, Abram makes an Exodus from Egypt, retraces his steps back to where he praised God before in Bethel and picks himself up after his mistake. The saints, according to the song, are just the sinners that fall down and get up. As he is doing so, Lot who has been with him the whole way so far refuses to "get back up" after their fall. He doesn't really learn anything from the episode in Egypt and doesn't recognize the hand of God in making people and places great or low. His hangers-on start having arguments with Abram's hangers-on and Abram realizes he needs to cut this guy loose. He responds in generosity, telling Lot he can have the land he wants. Lot chooses what sounds like paradise (actually described as being like the Garden, or Egypt which was really a very sweet place to live then) but it isn't Canaan. It isn't the Promised Land. He chooses what glitters, not the gold. He chooses to associate himself with Sodom, another Sin City, and gets right back into the thick of it, rejoining the everlasting climb up the ladder of worldly success.
For his generosity and faithfulness, God promises that the true treasure will be Abram's. He may think he just gave up his best hope, but the land and reward that God offers is a diamond in the rough. God rewards us with what truly matters. The "prosperity gospel" isn't truth...God rewards those faithful to Him, but not always with material riches or success, or even health. We aren't supposed to take the lack of these things as an indication of God's disfavor. He gives us what He knows to be the right thing for us. And Abram does what he knows how to do to claim the promise for himself - he builds yet another altar. The overall lesson for the day seems to be "when in doubt, build an altar." Worshipping God is always a good idea.
Friday, April 22, 2011
Genesis 10 and 11 - Brave New World
Genesis 10 is a pretty expansive, world encompassing chapter, and Genesis 11 will bring it back down into focus - on one man, Abram. After the Re-Creation post-Flood, and the sorting of the world into descendents of evil (Ham) and descendents of good (Shem, and in a more minor way Japheth) once again, we see how from these people the ancient Hebrews organized their world and the peoples they knew. Some were at least potentially good, some were known to be evils and enemies of the people of good, but all came from the same source...Noah.
The list starts with the people "way out there" on the fringes of the world. They had some hope of being converted to calling on God's name, but they were all far away. The descendents of Japheth represent, according to notes in my Bible (the NAB), peoples that were on the fringes of the known world to the ancient Hebrews. Madai represents the Medes, predecessors of the Persians from Iran, and Javan represents the Greeks. His children include the Rhodanim, the people of the island of Rhodes (probably essentially all the Greek islanders), Elishah and the Kittim, representing the people of Cyprus, and Tarshish, a city of ancient Turkey and the home city of Paul, representing the Ionian Turkish Greek people. Gomer and Magog represent people way up north around the Black Sea, including the Scythians. Tubal, Meshech, and Tiras represent areas of northern and northeastern Turkey, Armenia, and the Caucasus. These were all people way out there, people who were generally Gentiles. The interesting thing is, these very people, like Paul, the son of Tarshish in Cilicia, were later to hear Jesus' message and be some of the most fervent converts. These people were why Japheth is considered to be eventually on Shem's side, "mixed among his tents".
Ham's descendents were more southwest, and represented many of the enemies and "outsiders" for the ancient Hebrews. Cush was in Nubia, in the Sudan type area along the southern Red Sea. Mizraim represents the Egyptians, and may be another name for Menes, the legendary first king of Egypt. And we all know where Canaan is...but his nation doesn't settle where the others do, in northern Africa and Arabia. They steal Palestine from Shem's people. Put is farther out in Africa, where Libya is today. Sheba, the ancestor of the nation that sent her Queen to see Solomon, is somewhere near Yemen in Arabia, and most of the other peoples listed as children of Cush live in Arabia, along the Red Sea. This family also creates the Philistines, another great enemy of the Israelites. So far, this family, rooted in evil, sends out a lot of very evil and oppressive branches, but they are also very impressive when looked at as part of world history.
I love the Bible's many layers...you can understand it in so many ways. In terms of actual literal world history, it does a great job of showing the scope of how people went from hunting and gathering to farmers and milk-and-wool animal tenders, then began animal husbandry in earnest. It indicates how a small band of humans spread out and formed tribes all over the known world. Above all this, we get to read all this in terms of how God saw it and the covenants he made with humanity. As He watches the descendents of Noah spread out in the world, He watches their hearts.
When Nimrod, the "mighty hunter", comes to be, God watches his power grow with building arrogance and self-reliance until he establishes the oldest actual empires/civilizations that we in modern days have come to know. We know it because the people of his empire invented writing. His empire starts in Shinar (Sumeria), then comes to include Accad (Akkadians) , Babylon, and then Assyria, with its great capital of Nineveh. This empire, no matter what it is called, is always both the cradle of Abram and the major threatening shadow over his people. Nimrod builds up his own glory and the cities of his people will represent for the rest of time man's desire to make himself awesome and glorious and thumb his nose at God.
People again wandered east, farther away from the entrance to Eden and God's presence and favor. They picked a place in Shinar, in the very earliest place of empire and civilization and decide to build a tower, a ziggurat probably with a temple to a deity on top, tall so everyone could see how incredibly great the people were who built it. Instead of seeking Him out on "the holy mountain" where he is, they wanted to create an artificial "holy mountain" to find a God they themselves made. They did so to make a name, a "Shem" for themselves. They wanted to make their culture and empire a direct rival to the one God wanted, with Him at it's head. God wanted all the world to be a family with him at the head, but instead of calling His name, they began to praise each other by name.
I think the Tower of Babel story is a really good explanation for why humanity has so many languages, but I still don't quite fully understand God's wisdom in foiling the plan this way. He wants us to be a family, but our single language, our unity of purpose, was being turned to bad use. We figured that, in our united strength, we could equal God. Of course this isn't true, and our gift of being a global family was going to destroy us. Thus, like when other good gifts go bad (sex and relationships of intimacy, authority of all kinds), they are turned into a shadow of what once was. God didn't "destroy" a good gift he had given us with one language, global unity...he watched as it fell apart in our hands.
Symbolically enough, Shem's family too is divided between good and bad, and the Tower of Babel story stands between the sons of Joktan and Peleg (division). Like the previous list of the people from Adam to Noah, the line of goodness from Noah to Abraham is detailed. We see their ages get less and less, though Shem himself is still presumably around to see the day his family left civilization and pagan idolatry, and their names become more Sumerian. Then, one day, this one family, this one blessed family "wakes up" and plucks itself out of Ur, a Chaldean city where their artificial gods and goddesses were worshipped on ziggurats like Babel. They leave it behind, leave behind all the "comforts" and "excitement" of the city, all dreams of worldly success, to follow God and remain faithful to the covenant He made.
The list starts with the people "way out there" on the fringes of the world. They had some hope of being converted to calling on God's name, but they were all far away. The descendents of Japheth represent, according to notes in my Bible (the NAB), peoples that were on the fringes of the known world to the ancient Hebrews. Madai represents the Medes, predecessors of the Persians from Iran, and Javan represents the Greeks. His children include the Rhodanim, the people of the island of Rhodes (probably essentially all the Greek islanders), Elishah and the Kittim, representing the people of Cyprus, and Tarshish, a city of ancient Turkey and the home city of Paul, representing the Ionian Turkish Greek people. Gomer and Magog represent people way up north around the Black Sea, including the Scythians. Tubal, Meshech, and Tiras represent areas of northern and northeastern Turkey, Armenia, and the Caucasus. These were all people way out there, people who were generally Gentiles. The interesting thing is, these very people, like Paul, the son of Tarshish in Cilicia, were later to hear Jesus' message and be some of the most fervent converts. These people were why Japheth is considered to be eventually on Shem's side, "mixed among his tents".
Ham's descendents were more southwest, and represented many of the enemies and "outsiders" for the ancient Hebrews. Cush was in Nubia, in the Sudan type area along the southern Red Sea. Mizraim represents the Egyptians, and may be another name for Menes, the legendary first king of Egypt. And we all know where Canaan is...but his nation doesn't settle where the others do, in northern Africa and Arabia. They steal Palestine from Shem's people. Put is farther out in Africa, where Libya is today. Sheba, the ancestor of the nation that sent her Queen to see Solomon, is somewhere near Yemen in Arabia, and most of the other peoples listed as children of Cush live in Arabia, along the Red Sea. This family also creates the Philistines, another great enemy of the Israelites. So far, this family, rooted in evil, sends out a lot of very evil and oppressive branches, but they are also very impressive when looked at as part of world history.
I love the Bible's many layers...you can understand it in so many ways. In terms of actual literal world history, it does a great job of showing the scope of how people went from hunting and gathering to farmers and milk-and-wool animal tenders, then began animal husbandry in earnest. It indicates how a small band of humans spread out and formed tribes all over the known world. Above all this, we get to read all this in terms of how God saw it and the covenants he made with humanity. As He watches the descendents of Noah spread out in the world, He watches their hearts.
When Nimrod, the "mighty hunter", comes to be, God watches his power grow with building arrogance and self-reliance until he establishes the oldest actual empires/civilizations that we in modern days have come to know. We know it because the people of his empire invented writing. His empire starts in Shinar (Sumeria), then comes to include Accad (Akkadians) , Babylon, and then Assyria, with its great capital of Nineveh. This empire, no matter what it is called, is always both the cradle of Abram and the major threatening shadow over his people. Nimrod builds up his own glory and the cities of his people will represent for the rest of time man's desire to make himself awesome and glorious and thumb his nose at God.
People again wandered east, farther away from the entrance to Eden and God's presence and favor. They picked a place in Shinar, in the very earliest place of empire and civilization and decide to build a tower, a ziggurat probably with a temple to a deity on top, tall so everyone could see how incredibly great the people were who built it. Instead of seeking Him out on "the holy mountain" where he is, they wanted to create an artificial "holy mountain" to find a God they themselves made. They did so to make a name, a "Shem" for themselves. They wanted to make their culture and empire a direct rival to the one God wanted, with Him at it's head. God wanted all the world to be a family with him at the head, but instead of calling His name, they began to praise each other by name.
I think the Tower of Babel story is a really good explanation for why humanity has so many languages, but I still don't quite fully understand God's wisdom in foiling the plan this way. He wants us to be a family, but our single language, our unity of purpose, was being turned to bad use. We figured that, in our united strength, we could equal God. Of course this isn't true, and our gift of being a global family was going to destroy us. Thus, like when other good gifts go bad (sex and relationships of intimacy, authority of all kinds), they are turned into a shadow of what once was. God didn't "destroy" a good gift he had given us with one language, global unity...he watched as it fell apart in our hands.
Symbolically enough, Shem's family too is divided between good and bad, and the Tower of Babel story stands between the sons of Joktan and Peleg (division). Like the previous list of the people from Adam to Noah, the line of goodness from Noah to Abraham is detailed. We see their ages get less and less, though Shem himself is still presumably around to see the day his family left civilization and pagan idolatry, and their names become more Sumerian. Then, one day, this one family, this one blessed family "wakes up" and plucks itself out of Ur, a Chaldean city where their artificial gods and goddesses were worshipped on ziggurats like Babel. They leave it behind, leave behind all the "comforts" and "excitement" of the city, all dreams of worldly success, to follow God and remain faithful to the covenant He made.
Thursday, April 21, 2011
Genesis 8 and 9: A New Fall
The story of Noah's life after the flood is just jam-packed with words and phrases that are eerily reminiscent of the creation story. A wind (of the Spirit) blows over the waters from the abyss and calls forth land. We "rewind" the flood with a backward sequence of days (150 -> 40 ->7 ->7) as things return to normal. Noah's choice of a raven is rather weird as a bird to send first, as it is a bird that eats meat, specifically carrion, and wouldn't give him any information, just wanders the earth looking for meat. Ravens have always struck me as kind of devilish birds, with their scavenger ways and creepy caws. I wonder if the writers of the Bible felt the same. But the dove, the symbol of the Holy Spirit, was a good sounding tool for him to understand God's timing and will as the waters receded.
Noah sacrifices some of his hard work in the form of animals he maintained, and the goodness of this act is described as smelling wonderful to God. The simple goodness of this act is met by promises to never punish the innocent world, animals and plants that do nothing but reflect God's glory, for the sins of mankind who is dominant over them. I'm not sure why seasons are seemingly brought about here, but it seems like God is offering a physical, natural reminder that no human being is totally without darkness or totally without light, completely hot or completely cold. The cycle of years and months will include all of these. God will send rain as a more obvious sign of His caring for and tending to nature, where previously He just did so. It seems to imply that before this, plants and animals were cared for without visible signs of their maintenance, like rain and such.
Nature is here given into man's dominion in a more obvious way than in the previous covenant. We're allowed to eat animals now, and they know now that we are dominant over them and may eat them, so they will acknowledge our authority and be afraid. But now we are called to be even more respectful and just in our authority. We're called to respect the blood, the essential life-force, the "divine spark" in every animate creature, especially ourselves. Even our unborn!!!! How clear does the handwriting on the wall need to be? This respect and justice in our dominion again comes from the fact that we are made in the image of God. We need to treat all creation the way He does.
Like the other covenants, there is a sign to remind us of this one. The "bow in the clouds" - the rainbow. The rainbow often comes at the end of the rain, when the sun shines again. Hope and promise are obvious here - the rain when it comes will end. Innocent creatures will not be destroyed on account of guilty ones ever again. Amazing, isn't it. When we hear of some natural disaster as being "God's retribution" on people, it makes you stop and consider...God promised never to destroy the innocent with the guilty. His world sometimes works that way, that natural disasters take lives of humans and animals, but it is never in retribution for the works of the guilty. God promised that, and He always keeps His end of the bargain.
Here too, the good man falls and has a son that lets him down, renewing in humanity that spark of sin. Noah brings a very good thing to earth, wine, but lets it destroy him. He gets drunk and something sexual happens to him as a result that keeps sin alive and well in the world via his son Ham. What exactly happened? It could be just what is described...that he, in a drunken state, is naked in his tent and his son Ham goes in for a quick peek at Dad's junk, to compare sizes or something, to obtain some kind of hold over Noah. I've also heard that "to uncover your father's nakedness" in other places in the Bible means "to steal Dad's wife " - to commit incest with Mom. It almost makes sense to me... perhaps an alcoholic Noah allowed Ham to control more and more of the family's power and authority until one day he made the ultimate power play to take control of the family, sleeping with his mother. Thus, his more dutiful and righteous oldest son Shem (the Name) and his relatively moral baby son Japheth were squeezed out of the importance Noah meant them to have.
When Noah gets sober (either from alcoholism or from one single episode of drunkenness), he realizes that what he did left the door wide open for his incestuous or otherwise power-grabbing son to do what he did. And thus he sets the descendents of this foul branch, Canaan, in direct opposition to the Shemites, the Israelites, and their relatively supportive brethren the Japhethites. The people who actually wrote this were in the midst of taking back the land of Canaan on God's command and believed that the descendents of Canaan were squatters on their land and usurpers of their rights. Like Shem taking his birthright back from Ham, who stopped at no disgusting act to usurp the power, his descendents had a moral obligation to put authority in good hands. What does this say to me as a 21st century Catholic? I too must vote to put in power those who will do what is right with it and fight to keep out of power those who will do what is evil. We have to cover our father's nakedness, while keeping our eyes covered. We have to ensure that those in power don't have to get in bed with evil to get there, while at the same time ensuring that we avoid doing the very same thing in our efforts.
Well, once again, we stand with the world divided. There are Shemites and Hamites, the good branch and the bad. Ha-Shem, "the name" is what Jewish people who want to avoid naming God call him. It is the line of "The Name" and the line of those outside of it. How long will it be until the darkness and light mix again? The first Fall was an act of breaking down marriage and as a result all inter-personal relationships suffered. The second fall broke down the family and thereby all methods of passing down knowledge and authority from one generation to the next were done for.
Noah sacrifices some of his hard work in the form of animals he maintained, and the goodness of this act is described as smelling wonderful to God. The simple goodness of this act is met by promises to never punish the innocent world, animals and plants that do nothing but reflect God's glory, for the sins of mankind who is dominant over them. I'm not sure why seasons are seemingly brought about here, but it seems like God is offering a physical, natural reminder that no human being is totally without darkness or totally without light, completely hot or completely cold. The cycle of years and months will include all of these. God will send rain as a more obvious sign of His caring for and tending to nature, where previously He just did so. It seems to imply that before this, plants and animals were cared for without visible signs of their maintenance, like rain and such.
Nature is here given into man's dominion in a more obvious way than in the previous covenant. We're allowed to eat animals now, and they know now that we are dominant over them and may eat them, so they will acknowledge our authority and be afraid. But now we are called to be even more respectful and just in our authority. We're called to respect the blood, the essential life-force, the "divine spark" in every animate creature, especially ourselves. Even our unborn!!!! How clear does the handwriting on the wall need to be? This respect and justice in our dominion again comes from the fact that we are made in the image of God. We need to treat all creation the way He does.
Like the other covenants, there is a sign to remind us of this one. The "bow in the clouds" - the rainbow. The rainbow often comes at the end of the rain, when the sun shines again. Hope and promise are obvious here - the rain when it comes will end. Innocent creatures will not be destroyed on account of guilty ones ever again. Amazing, isn't it. When we hear of some natural disaster as being "God's retribution" on people, it makes you stop and consider...God promised never to destroy the innocent with the guilty. His world sometimes works that way, that natural disasters take lives of humans and animals, but it is never in retribution for the works of the guilty. God promised that, and He always keeps His end of the bargain.
Here too, the good man falls and has a son that lets him down, renewing in humanity that spark of sin. Noah brings a very good thing to earth, wine, but lets it destroy him. He gets drunk and something sexual happens to him as a result that keeps sin alive and well in the world via his son Ham. What exactly happened? It could be just what is described...that he, in a drunken state, is naked in his tent and his son Ham goes in for a quick peek at Dad's junk, to compare sizes or something, to obtain some kind of hold over Noah. I've also heard that "to uncover your father's nakedness" in other places in the Bible means "to steal Dad's wife " - to commit incest with Mom. It almost makes sense to me... perhaps an alcoholic Noah allowed Ham to control more and more of the family's power and authority until one day he made the ultimate power play to take control of the family, sleeping with his mother. Thus, his more dutiful and righteous oldest son Shem (the Name) and his relatively moral baby son Japheth were squeezed out of the importance Noah meant them to have.
When Noah gets sober (either from alcoholism or from one single episode of drunkenness), he realizes that what he did left the door wide open for his incestuous or otherwise power-grabbing son to do what he did. And thus he sets the descendents of this foul branch, Canaan, in direct opposition to the Shemites, the Israelites, and their relatively supportive brethren the Japhethites. The people who actually wrote this were in the midst of taking back the land of Canaan on God's command and believed that the descendents of Canaan were squatters on their land and usurpers of their rights. Like Shem taking his birthright back from Ham, who stopped at no disgusting act to usurp the power, his descendents had a moral obligation to put authority in good hands. What does this say to me as a 21st century Catholic? I too must vote to put in power those who will do what is right with it and fight to keep out of power those who will do what is evil. We have to cover our father's nakedness, while keeping our eyes covered. We have to ensure that those in power don't have to get in bed with evil to get there, while at the same time ensuring that we avoid doing the very same thing in our efforts.
Well, once again, we stand with the world divided. There are Shemites and Hamites, the good branch and the bad. Ha-Shem, "the name" is what Jewish people who want to avoid naming God call him. It is the line of "The Name" and the line of those outside of it. How long will it be until the darkness and light mix again? The first Fall was an act of breaking down marriage and as a result all inter-personal relationships suffered. The second fall broke down the family and thereby all methods of passing down knowledge and authority from one generation to the next were done for.
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
Genesis 6 and 7: Re-Creation
The single most "child-friendly" story in the Bible, there is so much more for adults to understand about Noah than the mere "boat full of cute animals", and new layers keep popping to mind every time I read this. A wonderful story, it really is. It speaks of baptism, of extending the covenant to make of God's people a family, not just a marriage, of hope during disaster.
The way Noah is described makes him a beacon of singular hope. He is a good man, which coming from the inspired writer of this text means quite a lot. He is "blameless in this age", even stronger language to convey his utter morality among the immoral hordes. He, furthermore, "walked with God," now the third party in the Bible to do so. He is faithful to the previous covenant, which is kind of a flickering candle at this point. Noah is a rock star of faith, an island of pure awesome in a sea of greyish purple blended evil-and-good. He is an indication that, despite how things seem, all it takes is one truly on-fire person in a bunch of lukewarm and ice-cold people, that God will never leave us forsaken, without a single shred of hope. God's anger at our unfaithfulness is exaggeratedly described, making it seem like He wants to write off, not just humanity but all of creation...a way to indicate just how ugly and awful every sin is to Him. It was time for judgement to be unleashed.
I notice that the places and buildings where God and man come together in these covenant meetings are all described in painful detail. It seems that pointing out every dimension, every aspect of how a place or thing is built (or in the case of Eden, what He built there) is a way of poking us in the chest and saying "Slow down! This place matters! You need to know what it looked and felt like because I met you here!" I'm beaten over the head by a 2x4 with comparisons to the regulations the Catholic Church has for church architecture and the liturgy that goes on there. "Say the Black and do the Red!" is the rallying cry of liturgical traditionalists, and there is often vocal disappointment expressed when churches are "built wrong", with altar, ambo, and tabernacle in the wrong places. Why? Because it matters! God cares deeply about the spaces and ways in which we meet Him. There is great symbolism and power in them, as well as practicality. Thus, I, as a reader in the 21st century who will never build the Ark myself, still need to know how big it was and where the windows were.
Calling it the Ark totally makes sense to me too. An ark in the Bible always bears humanity's salvation, always bears the sign we have of our covenant with God. In the first covenant, the ark was a day...the Sabbath...and a place, the Garden. The second Ark was a boat carrying the seeds of a new creation. Later, there will be the Ark of the Covenant itself, a box. I'm not sure what the "ark" will become when David covenants with God, but I know in the end...the last and most amazing covenant of all will be borne by an Ark of flesh...my Blessed Mother.
These covenants are always hinged, too, on exceptionally obedient people. People who agree to what plans God has in mind. Adam, at least to start, said "sure, I'll stay away from that tree". Now Noah "does what God commands him". There's a lot of sevens in it, the covenant number, the perfect number. There are eight people in the ark, the "next step after covenant", the renewal of covenant after the judgement and breakdown of the old. And these eight people are a family, sons, daughters, parents. God covenants here with an entire family, making humanity His family, not just His spouse.
I also think of what hardship it must have been for them all while in the process of making this covenant happen. The first covenant was born with very little suffering on the part of humanity. It just kind of happened. Suffering and hardship only entered the picture after the first Fall. But this new covenant came about through sitting around on a smelly, noisy boat full of animals for weeks, losing everyone and everything they ever knew or cared about. The sons' wives lost their families, for example. But they gladly went through it because they were obedient. The third covenant, with Abraham, is sure to involve suffering and pain as well. I know enough to believe I know how that is going to happen, but I'll wait to see if I'm right.
The Flood is often considered sort of a baptism for the earth, all creation dying in water and rising out of it again to a new era, a new life. The death of the old and the recreation in a newer, more beautiful way. But where my reading ends today, that process is still happening.
The way Noah is described makes him a beacon of singular hope. He is a good man, which coming from the inspired writer of this text means quite a lot. He is "blameless in this age", even stronger language to convey his utter morality among the immoral hordes. He, furthermore, "walked with God," now the third party in the Bible to do so. He is faithful to the previous covenant, which is kind of a flickering candle at this point. Noah is a rock star of faith, an island of pure awesome in a sea of greyish purple blended evil-and-good. He is an indication that, despite how things seem, all it takes is one truly on-fire person in a bunch of lukewarm and ice-cold people, that God will never leave us forsaken, without a single shred of hope. God's anger at our unfaithfulness is exaggeratedly described, making it seem like He wants to write off, not just humanity but all of creation...a way to indicate just how ugly and awful every sin is to Him. It was time for judgement to be unleashed.
I notice that the places and buildings where God and man come together in these covenant meetings are all described in painful detail. It seems that pointing out every dimension, every aspect of how a place or thing is built (or in the case of Eden, what He built there) is a way of poking us in the chest and saying "Slow down! This place matters! You need to know what it looked and felt like because I met you here!" I'm beaten over the head by a 2x4 with comparisons to the regulations the Catholic Church has for church architecture and the liturgy that goes on there. "Say the Black and do the Red!" is the rallying cry of liturgical traditionalists, and there is often vocal disappointment expressed when churches are "built wrong", with altar, ambo, and tabernacle in the wrong places. Why? Because it matters! God cares deeply about the spaces and ways in which we meet Him. There is great symbolism and power in them, as well as practicality. Thus, I, as a reader in the 21st century who will never build the Ark myself, still need to know how big it was and where the windows were.
Calling it the Ark totally makes sense to me too. An ark in the Bible always bears humanity's salvation, always bears the sign we have of our covenant with God. In the first covenant, the ark was a day...the Sabbath...and a place, the Garden. The second Ark was a boat carrying the seeds of a new creation. Later, there will be the Ark of the Covenant itself, a box. I'm not sure what the "ark" will become when David covenants with God, but I know in the end...the last and most amazing covenant of all will be borne by an Ark of flesh...my Blessed Mother.
These covenants are always hinged, too, on exceptionally obedient people. People who agree to what plans God has in mind. Adam, at least to start, said "sure, I'll stay away from that tree". Now Noah "does what God commands him". There's a lot of sevens in it, the covenant number, the perfect number. There are eight people in the ark, the "next step after covenant", the renewal of covenant after the judgement and breakdown of the old. And these eight people are a family, sons, daughters, parents. God covenants here with an entire family, making humanity His family, not just His spouse.
I also think of what hardship it must have been for them all while in the process of making this covenant happen. The first covenant was born with very little suffering on the part of humanity. It just kind of happened. Suffering and hardship only entered the picture after the first Fall. But this new covenant came about through sitting around on a smelly, noisy boat full of animals for weeks, losing everyone and everything they ever knew or cared about. The sons' wives lost their families, for example. But they gladly went through it because they were obedient. The third covenant, with Abraham, is sure to involve suffering and pain as well. I know enough to believe I know how that is going to happen, but I'll wait to see if I'm right.
The Flood is often considered sort of a baptism for the earth, all creation dying in water and rising out of it again to a new era, a new life. The death of the old and the recreation in a newer, more beautiful way. But where my reading ends today, that process is still happening.
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
Genesis 5-6:8: Cruisin' for a Bruisin'
OK, so I've apparently started traveling into the back roads of Genesis, the parts that start wearying the more faint-of-heart of those who determine to read this thing straight through. Near the beginning of Chapter 6, I'm starting to feel as though I'm reading the Epic of Gilgamesh or some other ancient Near Eastern text. Heck, Gilgamesh even has a flood :). But there is a point there...it seems to indicate that perhaps something really did happen, along the lines of poor suffering Japan or Indonesia five years ago. And perhaps there was a trend in their literature as there is everywhere else of describing the people of the past in hyperbolic terms. There isn't a neat and tidy, fully literal way to consider this part of the text, but what we do know is that it can still teach us something.
Today's reading traces the line of Seth, the "good son", to Noah in a very formal, repetitive format beloved of certain of the writers of the ancient Hebrews, the "begats". The funny thing is, the writers know just how to break out of the mantra-like repetitive listing to give a sense of who was important and why. Already just from reading this list, I can see the point that humanity was never broken up into "good people" and "bad people", Cain and Seth. There was always a mixture of sin and goodness in both. Cain's descendents, as I read in the last chapter, bear names and descriptions that give us a sense of how the world was developing. Cities were born, music and musical instruments were born (Jubal), metallurgy was born (Tubal-cain). A few of Seth's descendents (Enoch, Lamech, Methuselah/Methushael) bear names that are very similar to the descendents of Cain, giving the idea that "trendy" names have always existed and that you cannot judge a person's character or lineage from their name only.
People in this list were described as living an absurdly long time. I'm not sure if this was to make sure everybody had lots and lots of children so they could populate the earth, as I heard once, or if it was to give a sense of heroic, Titan-esque almost demi-god status. The local pagan types are said to have described some of their historic kings that way. No matter what one believes about this, symbolic, literal, it still brings a point that God wants to make, which is that He sustains His creation and everyone's birth and death are in His hands. People are born and they die, and the cycle of time keeps going. Adam does not die until after his perfectly righteous son Abel does...the first death on earth is not a punishment for anything, even the very Fall of Mankind. It's a martyrdom. And Seth is described as being in Adam's image, as Adam was made in God's. Being someone's "image and likeness" is to be their child.
I wonder why I've never heard of the character of Enoch much before. He's described, in a very mysterious but telling way, almost as a Christ/Elijah/Mary prefigurement. He is said to have lived 365 years,"walking with God" the whole time. The Holy Spirit and the human authors seem to indicate that he symbolically "walked with God" one year of life for every day of a year...his life was completely filled with God. And then "God took him". Simple as that. No dying, just "God took him." Not to heaven itself, necessarily, but someplace good. Adam and Eve "walked with God" in the garden before the Fall...they were so close to Him. The writers did not know much else about the man Enoch, but they had come to know him as a man very, very close to God. The other people who God assumed or who Ascended under their own power, were singularly close in relationship to God, and I'd love to know more about this man. There have been saints, people for whom God is an intimate friend, since the earliest times.
Then again, humanity here is also driving relentlessly downward in terms of our fidelity to Covenant #1, the covenant that bonded us to God like a wife to a husband. At the beginning of chapter six, it emphasizes that "daughters" were born to men. One ancient commentator I read once said that perhaps this could mean that even the sons were so effeminate that they were referred to as "daughters", which would give a sense I think, but I think it's simple enough that the daughters (the real female ones) existed as a temptation for the "sons of God/gods/heaven". Here we start sounding really Gilgamesh-y. The local pagan-y types believed their gods could assume human form and/or angelic-like humanoid form and referred to them as "sons of gods". Angels might be what the text is talking about coming and taking human women wives, but this doesn't seem to fit at all, as Jesus said that angels don't marry. It could be and probably is a lot simpler...the "sons of God" being the descendents of Seth, the good guys, and the "daughters of men" being from Cain's lineage, the rebellious ones. Either way, it is a reminder that even the good men were starting to get mixed and blended in with the badness around them.
Children produced by the mixture of darkness and light, black and white, are, in this case, a very very dark shade of grey, very very deep in shadows. I'd never heard the term "Nephilim" before, but this is about as Gilgamesh-y as the Bible gets. The men of the past were so awesome they lived hundreds of years, and when they turned bad, they were heroic and renowned in their viciousness and brutishness. Some have described them as giants, and said that Goliath was the last one, but I don't know what to think. It is not impossible. But it is also very very possible that these were very violent (Nephilim could mean "the violent ones" apparently) and selfish people who focused on making sure they were men of renown, that they would be praised for their strength and ruthlessness. Some people talk about this as giving credence to the idea that marrying outside of the faith is a sin, but I'm not sure that the marrying is the issue. What the children of Seth found when they married the daughters of Cain was a distraction and lure away from the godly life. They stopped living righteous lives, partly out of being tempted by living with unbelievers. If one is distracted away from godly life for any reason, that is sinful.
The results of this shocking level of "watering down" the goodness and righteousness in humanity are immediate - God prepares to bring about the justice in deserved smackdown form. The amazing mercy of God is evident in the face of what must be far, far more repugnant to him than it is to me ("no desire [mankind's] heart conceived was anything but evil" - hyperbole but reminds me that sin, no matter how small, stains us and prevents the good from shining through). God didn't regret us, not really...but what we did certainly grieved His heart to an unbearable degree. His justice needs serving and it needs serving now. But his amazing mercy gave them one hundred and twenty years to get back right. Not forever, not as long as the people before, but much more than justice would demand. It is this very mercy that creates the difference between Judas in today's gospel, who ran out the door into the darkness after having his sin recognized, steeled in his resolve to do Evil, and Peter, who was recognized in the very same sin, repented, and stuck around long enough for Jesus to forgive him and make a new covenant with us all.
Once again, the ray of hope shines out of the shadows with Noah. In the litany of "begats" in chapter five, Noah is born like all the others, but his father names him Noah (relief) in a specifically mentioned way. Naming a person in the Bible gives them a mission, and Noah's was to bring relief and consolation to those who were struggling to maintain a relationship with God in this culture by making a brand new covenant. His father lived a symbolic 777 years, a symbolically perfect long time. Righteousness has continued to exist through the generations, even when the darkness seemed overwhelming. Enoch and Noah were two of the first candles in a string of them through the centuries.
Today's reading traces the line of Seth, the "good son", to Noah in a very formal, repetitive format beloved of certain of the writers of the ancient Hebrews, the "begats". The funny thing is, the writers know just how to break out of the mantra-like repetitive listing to give a sense of who was important and why. Already just from reading this list, I can see the point that humanity was never broken up into "good people" and "bad people", Cain and Seth. There was always a mixture of sin and goodness in both. Cain's descendents, as I read in the last chapter, bear names and descriptions that give us a sense of how the world was developing. Cities were born, music and musical instruments were born (Jubal), metallurgy was born (Tubal-cain). A few of Seth's descendents (Enoch, Lamech, Methuselah/Methushael) bear names that are very similar to the descendents of Cain, giving the idea that "trendy" names have always existed and that you cannot judge a person's character or lineage from their name only.
People in this list were described as living an absurdly long time. I'm not sure if this was to make sure everybody had lots and lots of children so they could populate the earth, as I heard once, or if it was to give a sense of heroic, Titan-esque almost demi-god status. The local pagan types are said to have described some of their historic kings that way. No matter what one believes about this, symbolic, literal, it still brings a point that God wants to make, which is that He sustains His creation and everyone's birth and death are in His hands. People are born and they die, and the cycle of time keeps going. Adam does not die until after his perfectly righteous son Abel does...the first death on earth is not a punishment for anything, even the very Fall of Mankind. It's a martyrdom. And Seth is described as being in Adam's image, as Adam was made in God's. Being someone's "image and likeness" is to be their child.
I wonder why I've never heard of the character of Enoch much before. He's described, in a very mysterious but telling way, almost as a Christ/Elijah/Mary prefigurement. He is said to have lived 365 years,"walking with God" the whole time. The Holy Spirit and the human authors seem to indicate that he symbolically "walked with God" one year of life for every day of a year...his life was completely filled with God. And then "God took him". Simple as that. No dying, just "God took him." Not to heaven itself, necessarily, but someplace good. Adam and Eve "walked with God" in the garden before the Fall...they were so close to Him. The writers did not know much else about the man Enoch, but they had come to know him as a man very, very close to God. The other people who God assumed or who Ascended under their own power, were singularly close in relationship to God, and I'd love to know more about this man. There have been saints, people for whom God is an intimate friend, since the earliest times.
Then again, humanity here is also driving relentlessly downward in terms of our fidelity to Covenant #1, the covenant that bonded us to God like a wife to a husband. At the beginning of chapter six, it emphasizes that "daughters" were born to men. One ancient commentator I read once said that perhaps this could mean that even the sons were so effeminate that they were referred to as "daughters", which would give a sense I think, but I think it's simple enough that the daughters (the real female ones) existed as a temptation for the "sons of God/gods/heaven". Here we start sounding really Gilgamesh-y. The local pagan-y types believed their gods could assume human form and/or angelic-like humanoid form and referred to them as "sons of gods". Angels might be what the text is talking about coming and taking human women wives, but this doesn't seem to fit at all, as Jesus said that angels don't marry. It could be and probably is a lot simpler...the "sons of God" being the descendents of Seth, the good guys, and the "daughters of men" being from Cain's lineage, the rebellious ones. Either way, it is a reminder that even the good men were starting to get mixed and blended in with the badness around them.
Children produced by the mixture of darkness and light, black and white, are, in this case, a very very dark shade of grey, very very deep in shadows. I'd never heard the term "Nephilim" before, but this is about as Gilgamesh-y as the Bible gets. The men of the past were so awesome they lived hundreds of years, and when they turned bad, they were heroic and renowned in their viciousness and brutishness. Some have described them as giants, and said that Goliath was the last one, but I don't know what to think. It is not impossible. But it is also very very possible that these were very violent (Nephilim could mean "the violent ones" apparently) and selfish people who focused on making sure they were men of renown, that they would be praised for their strength and ruthlessness. Some people talk about this as giving credence to the idea that marrying outside of the faith is a sin, but I'm not sure that the marrying is the issue. What the children of Seth found when they married the daughters of Cain was a distraction and lure away from the godly life. They stopped living righteous lives, partly out of being tempted by living with unbelievers. If one is distracted away from godly life for any reason, that is sinful.
The results of this shocking level of "watering down" the goodness and righteousness in humanity are immediate - God prepares to bring about the justice in deserved smackdown form. The amazing mercy of God is evident in the face of what must be far, far more repugnant to him than it is to me ("no desire [mankind's] heart conceived was anything but evil" - hyperbole but reminds me that sin, no matter how small, stains us and prevents the good from shining through). God didn't regret us, not really...but what we did certainly grieved His heart to an unbearable degree. His justice needs serving and it needs serving now. But his amazing mercy gave them one hundred and twenty years to get back right. Not forever, not as long as the people before, but much more than justice would demand. It is this very mercy that creates the difference between Judas in today's gospel, who ran out the door into the darkness after having his sin recognized, steeled in his resolve to do Evil, and Peter, who was recognized in the very same sin, repented, and stuck around long enough for Jesus to forgive him and make a new covenant with us all.
Once again, the ray of hope shines out of the shadows with Noah. In the litany of "begats" in chapter five, Noah is born like all the others, but his father names him Noah (relief) in a specifically mentioned way. Naming a person in the Bible gives them a mission, and Noah's was to bring relief and consolation to those who were struggling to maintain a relationship with God in this culture by making a brand new covenant. His father lived a symbolic 777 years, a symbolically perfect long time. Righteousness has continued to exist through the generations, even when the darkness seemed overwhelming. Enoch and Noah were two of the first candles in a string of them through the centuries.
Monday, April 18, 2011
Genesis 4: The Roots of Evil
The second half of this chapter is foreign to me, but strikes me as interesting. The first half is yet another familiar tale of how far men have fallen in such a short time. As soon as mankind leaves Paradise, the lies we believe get more and more glaring and the results of believing them become ever more vicious.
I've never fully understood exactly what it is about what Abel presents to God that makes Him so happy and what it is about Cain's offering that is less pleasing. The text does say that Abel's offering was one of his best, brand-new lambs, but says nothing about Cain's veggies other than he just brought "some"of the fruit of the soil. It says to me that what we give to God needs to be the best of us...the very first and best of what we produce. When Jesus died on the cross for us, He became the Perfect Sacrifice. He is the best we've got. In order to be God's friend and family member, we needed to give him something in return for the amazing generosity he shows us, and when Jesus died, he was our Lamb, our firstling, and because he was God himself, without blemish. The people who once got upset about the costliness and showiness of Catholic churches and the items we use during Mass need to understand that it is here, in this chapter, that we find out why. God's house and the items we dedicate to his purpose are to be the best we can get. Like Mary of Bethany in the Gospel reading for today, we're called to pour out our alabaster jar of perfume that costs tens of thousands of dollars, the most precious thing we have, at God's feet and weep because it isn't anything like what He is worth.
Next, despite God's warning that Cain can still rise above the urge to sin, Cain ignores Him and out of spite murders his brother. He refuses to see even his natural brother as anything other than a show-off and a goody-two-shoes, rejecting his relationship with other people as well as his relationship with God. He makes this crystal clear by asking God in a huff "Am I my brother's keeper?" Is he my problem? You figure out where he is...I don't know and don't care. I'm not even going to try to hide what I did with a lie about where he went, because I don't owe You an explanation. God then gives him exactly what he claims to want, disconnection from both God and the rest of the human family.
I have a couple ideas on what happens then. First, it seems that Cain really looks into the face of what he just asked for, suddenly understands what disconnection from humanity means. It means that he can be treated with utmost contempt and with selfishness the same way he wants to treat others. Anyone who wants to can kill him out of spite or other selfish motives the way he just did. Then the Lord responds in words of powerful mercy and justice, that no matter what Cain has done, his life and his blood matter to God as much as anyone else's. It is impossible to do what Cain wanted to just before, to back out of God's justice and the human family, and so those around him who sin by mistreating him because of what he did will earn their own just wrath from God. Yet, because Cain did what he did, he has harmed his relationship with God, and has consigned himself to "wandering" status, trying to live life outside of this relationship and having a hard time in life as a result.
Thus, it seems that we as human beings are in a relationship with God and other human beings simply by nature of who we are, the covenant God made with us by creating us in His image and likeness. The murder of Abel and God's response to it indicate that we are not just responsible for our relationship with Him only, that our sin affects the human family too. We can scoff and rage at God for making us this way, responsible for others and in constant connection to them, but it cannot change. God won't let us out of this "natural law", the very basics of what is good and bad in relating to other human beings, just because we ask for it. Given the chance, we wouldn't like it. Instead, God marks us out for Himself to judge with justice and mercy.
Within a few generations, Cain's descendents only continue to sin in worse and worse ways, pointedly choosing to believe the lie that they are in charge of their own behavior and that their family history will never affect them. They don't have to be in a good relationship with God just because they are forced to be under his dominion and judgement, no matter how much He desires them to be. The world's first murderer leads to the world's first polygamist and the world's first serial killer/honor killer/rage-a-holic Lamech (poor, made low). Even the brutish man himself admits freely just how far his family has fallen by the time it gets to him, saying he has been so bad (or excusing himself for his deeds with a "but he started it" argument) that God will have to avenge his killing not seven times (a perfect number, indicating every time) but seventy seven times (a perfect number made even bigger, an infinite number of times...same concept as how often we're supposed to forgive things according to Jesus). A whole lot of people are going to be wanting his blood.
The chapter ends with some hope in the form of Seth, Adam and Eve's "third try's the charm". He is not like his brother, in that he raises his son Enosh to relate to God in a close, friendly way, calling Him by name. Haydock's commentary says that this is a more solemn , liturgy-type thing. It's kind of saying that religious rites that bring us close to God in a planned, ritual way started here. Haydock also notes something quite interesting that I thought of when I read this verse. It didn't just say that good men began calling God by name...bad men did too. The first swears and blasphemies against God's name began here, very very very early. Even from the earliest days, there were people inclined to righteousness and people not so inclined, and everywhere in between. Life under the very first Covenant with God has degenerated as humanity consistently becomes more and more contemptuous of it, and yet, the line of Seth still exists. Goodness and righteousness is still a stream present in the flow of human history.
I've never fully understood exactly what it is about what Abel presents to God that makes Him so happy and what it is about Cain's offering that is less pleasing. The text does say that Abel's offering was one of his best, brand-new lambs, but says nothing about Cain's veggies other than he just brought "some"of the fruit of the soil. It says to me that what we give to God needs to be the best of us...the very first and best of what we produce. When Jesus died on the cross for us, He became the Perfect Sacrifice. He is the best we've got. In order to be God's friend and family member, we needed to give him something in return for the amazing generosity he shows us, and when Jesus died, he was our Lamb, our firstling, and because he was God himself, without blemish. The people who once got upset about the costliness and showiness of Catholic churches and the items we use during Mass need to understand that it is here, in this chapter, that we find out why. God's house and the items we dedicate to his purpose are to be the best we can get. Like Mary of Bethany in the Gospel reading for today, we're called to pour out our alabaster jar of perfume that costs tens of thousands of dollars, the most precious thing we have, at God's feet and weep because it isn't anything like what He is worth.
Next, despite God's warning that Cain can still rise above the urge to sin, Cain ignores Him and out of spite murders his brother. He refuses to see even his natural brother as anything other than a show-off and a goody-two-shoes, rejecting his relationship with other people as well as his relationship with God. He makes this crystal clear by asking God in a huff "Am I my brother's keeper?" Is he my problem? You figure out where he is...I don't know and don't care. I'm not even going to try to hide what I did with a lie about where he went, because I don't owe You an explanation. God then gives him exactly what he claims to want, disconnection from both God and the rest of the human family.
I have a couple ideas on what happens then. First, it seems that Cain really looks into the face of what he just asked for, suddenly understands what disconnection from humanity means. It means that he can be treated with utmost contempt and with selfishness the same way he wants to treat others. Anyone who wants to can kill him out of spite or other selfish motives the way he just did. Then the Lord responds in words of powerful mercy and justice, that no matter what Cain has done, his life and his blood matter to God as much as anyone else's. It is impossible to do what Cain wanted to just before, to back out of God's justice and the human family, and so those around him who sin by mistreating him because of what he did will earn their own just wrath from God. Yet, because Cain did what he did, he has harmed his relationship with God, and has consigned himself to "wandering" status, trying to live life outside of this relationship and having a hard time in life as a result.
Thus, it seems that we as human beings are in a relationship with God and other human beings simply by nature of who we are, the covenant God made with us by creating us in His image and likeness. The murder of Abel and God's response to it indicate that we are not just responsible for our relationship with Him only, that our sin affects the human family too. We can scoff and rage at God for making us this way, responsible for others and in constant connection to them, but it cannot change. God won't let us out of this "natural law", the very basics of what is good and bad in relating to other human beings, just because we ask for it. Given the chance, we wouldn't like it. Instead, God marks us out for Himself to judge with justice and mercy.
Within a few generations, Cain's descendents only continue to sin in worse and worse ways, pointedly choosing to believe the lie that they are in charge of their own behavior and that their family history will never affect them. They don't have to be in a good relationship with God just because they are forced to be under his dominion and judgement, no matter how much He desires them to be. The world's first murderer leads to the world's first polygamist and the world's first serial killer/honor killer/rage-a-holic Lamech (poor, made low). Even the brutish man himself admits freely just how far his family has fallen by the time it gets to him, saying he has been so bad (or excusing himself for his deeds with a "but he started it" argument) that God will have to avenge his killing not seven times (a perfect number, indicating every time) but seventy seven times (a perfect number made even bigger, an infinite number of times...same concept as how often we're supposed to forgive things according to Jesus). A whole lot of people are going to be wanting his blood.
The chapter ends with some hope in the form of Seth, Adam and Eve's "third try's the charm". He is not like his brother, in that he raises his son Enosh to relate to God in a close, friendly way, calling Him by name. Haydock's commentary says that this is a more solemn , liturgy-type thing. It's kind of saying that religious rites that bring us close to God in a planned, ritual way started here. Haydock also notes something quite interesting that I thought of when I read this verse. It didn't just say that good men began calling God by name...bad men did too. The first swears and blasphemies against God's name began here, very very very early. Even from the earliest days, there were people inclined to righteousness and people not so inclined, and everywhere in between. Life under the very first Covenant with God has degenerated as humanity consistently becomes more and more contemptuous of it, and yet, the line of Seth still exists. Goodness and righteousness is still a stream present in the flow of human history.
Sunday, April 17, 2011
Genesis 3: The Fall and The Promise of Redemption
Today's chapter finds me again on familiar ground. The Good Lord has a real sense of humor and timing, definitely...to have me reading this on Palm Sunday, only hours after hearing the Passion read out to me. What wondrous love is this!
This story is, just like the Creation, a part of the underpinning of our culture. Just about everyone, Christian, Jewish, agnostic, Buddhist alike, have heard at least in summary the story the Abrahamic religions tell of how the world fell from grace. Paradise was lost and the world became the frustrating, disappointing place it is. I cannot speak for my older brothers and sisters in faith in the Jewish tradition, but in our belief, the sin of the Fall didn't just have ripples down the centuries, doesn't just affect "the world" in a general sense...it applies to us. We have the sin on our shoulders as though we had bitten the fruit ourselves.
The serpent, the monster of deception, calls us the way he called Adam and Eve, to question "Did he really say that? Could that really be a sin? What's wrong with that?" Human reason said there was nothing wrong with eating the fruit of That Tree...I mean, come on. What difference could it possibly make? Would God be such a mean, petty guy that he'd see us perish for something so little, so stupid? No sins look as terrible and damning to us as they do to the Perfect One. Eve, Catholic that she was :), even avoided the "near occasion of sin", interpreting God's command not to eat the fruit of the tree as a command not to even touch it, until the Father of Lies convinced her that this was stupid and was holding her back. He convinced her that God was the way many unbelievers and questioners say He is, concerned with details and ready to punish in grandiose, unjustly cruel fashion for any misstep. "Come on, He can forgive you a little thing like that. He just wants you to stay lowly and groveling before Him, when if you just used your head, you could be as awesome as He." Those old men in the Vatican just want to keep all the power for themselves, when if you just saw the truth and used your head, you'd see that there's nothing different between men and women, and women should be able to be priests if they "feel called" to it. Who cares if the priest only says half the words of the Eucharistic prayer and lets a random lay woman give a homily on "saving Mother Earth"? That sin I committed last week had to be venial, right, so I'm still totally fine to approach Our Lord in the Eucharist? Lies...the earliest lies. These are lies I tell myself all the time.
The glory of this chapter lies in what we commemorate today...the New Eve, the Woman Crushing the Serpent, watches her son die in agony, the New Adam, the one who would not pass off responsibility for his actions but took on those of others. Our Blessed Lady cooperated with God where Eve refused and Jesus cooperated with his accusers and executioners where Adam went his own way and wouldn't admit it. Therefore, when I listen to the lies, I have the chance to return to the truth when I really come to see it.
This story is, just like the Creation, a part of the underpinning of our culture. Just about everyone, Christian, Jewish, agnostic, Buddhist alike, have heard at least in summary the story the Abrahamic religions tell of how the world fell from grace. Paradise was lost and the world became the frustrating, disappointing place it is. I cannot speak for my older brothers and sisters in faith in the Jewish tradition, but in our belief, the sin of the Fall didn't just have ripples down the centuries, doesn't just affect "the world" in a general sense...it applies to us. We have the sin on our shoulders as though we had bitten the fruit ourselves.
The serpent, the monster of deception, calls us the way he called Adam and Eve, to question "Did he really say that? Could that really be a sin? What's wrong with that?" Human reason said there was nothing wrong with eating the fruit of That Tree...I mean, come on. What difference could it possibly make? Would God be such a mean, petty guy that he'd see us perish for something so little, so stupid? No sins look as terrible and damning to us as they do to the Perfect One. Eve, Catholic that she was :), even avoided the "near occasion of sin", interpreting God's command not to eat the fruit of the tree as a command not to even touch it, until the Father of Lies convinced her that this was stupid and was holding her back. He convinced her that God was the way many unbelievers and questioners say He is, concerned with details and ready to punish in grandiose, unjustly cruel fashion for any misstep. "Come on, He can forgive you a little thing like that. He just wants you to stay lowly and groveling before Him, when if you just used your head, you could be as awesome as He." Those old men in the Vatican just want to keep all the power for themselves, when if you just saw the truth and used your head, you'd see that there's nothing different between men and women, and women should be able to be priests if they "feel called" to it. Who cares if the priest only says half the words of the Eucharistic prayer and lets a random lay woman give a homily on "saving Mother Earth"? That sin I committed last week had to be venial, right, so I'm still totally fine to approach Our Lord in the Eucharist? Lies...the earliest lies. These are lies I tell myself all the time.
The glory of this chapter lies in what we commemorate today...the New Eve, the Woman Crushing the Serpent, watches her son die in agony, the New Adam, the one who would not pass off responsibility for his actions but took on those of others. Our Blessed Lady cooperated with God where Eve refused and Jesus cooperated with his accusers and executioners where Adam went his own way and wouldn't admit it. Therefore, when I listen to the lies, I have the chance to return to the truth when I really come to see it.
Saturday, April 16, 2011
Genesis 2: Eden and God's First Sabbath
The chapter division is a little awkward here, cutting off the first Sabbath from the rest of creation, yet at the same time ending the chapter just before it highlights that the "active phase" of the work of creation is done. I remember a recent Gospel reading in which Jesus says that God works all the time and so does He, to explain why He healed someone on the Sabbath. He also said that "the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath." God didn't need to rest, wasn't tired or hungry. So why did He? He wanted us to have a chance, I think, to sit back on occasion and just maintain. He doesn't ask so much of us that we must always be pushing ourselves, but can sit and seek Him out in a calmer, more still way.
I must admit that I am a tad confused here, or perhaps I would be more confused if I took this text a bit more literally. The creation of Adam and Eve seems to have taken place, according to this chapter, before, not after, the creation of plants and animals and the Garden. Thinking about it, it seems to make sense that God wants us to realize that we were intended to get joy out of interacting with the rest of his Creation, and that we are the ones made with an immortal soul that is His image and likeness. The Garden is there for us to enjoy and care for.
The four rivers give me a sense of where this really is, and yet give me an indication of the springs of abundant life God sent to maintain the world. Water in my mind always means baptism, new life, cleanliness, and wiping away the past, and here, four rivers extend from the heart of Paradise to the rest of the world.
Adam and Eve always reminds me of the purpose for which I was created woman and the "ideal" state of relationships and marriage. Man and Woman are meant to bind together into one glorious, complementary whole. This entire chapter is a beautiful picture of what life was like in Paradise, and what it could have been like forever without sin. It's amazing to think of seeing that again in the New Heavens and the New Earth.
I must admit that I am a tad confused here, or perhaps I would be more confused if I took this text a bit more literally. The creation of Adam and Eve seems to have taken place, according to this chapter, before, not after, the creation of plants and animals and the Garden. Thinking about it, it seems to make sense that God wants us to realize that we were intended to get joy out of interacting with the rest of his Creation, and that we are the ones made with an immortal soul that is His image and likeness. The Garden is there for us to enjoy and care for.
The four rivers give me a sense of where this really is, and yet give me an indication of the springs of abundant life God sent to maintain the world. Water in my mind always means baptism, new life, cleanliness, and wiping away the past, and here, four rivers extend from the heart of Paradise to the rest of the world.
Adam and Eve always reminds me of the purpose for which I was created woman and the "ideal" state of relationships and marriage. Man and Woman are meant to bind together into one glorious, complementary whole. This entire chapter is a beautiful picture of what life was like in Paradise, and what it could have been like forever without sin. It's amazing to think of seeing that again in the New Heavens and the New Earth.
Friday, April 15, 2011
Genesis 1: Order from Chaos
It's nice to begin on familiar ground. This text is familiar to me for a number of reasons and on a number of levels. Speaking of the Lectionary in the opening post, the Catholic Church has us proclaiming this text just over a week from now in the service of Easter Vigil, the "Salvation History for Dummies" service with readings that stack, one upon the other, to tell the story of how God began things, got into covenant with us, and eventually sent Christ to be the perfect Sacrifice to once-and-for-all reconcile us with God. He had to start somewhere, and so do I.
As small children we hear this story because it is so fundamental to how we see the world. As Catholics we believe that the point being driven home here is that God made everything you see and everything you don't. It doesn't matter how, really...He chose to leave the manner of how Creation happened out of it perhaps to keep us focused on His Creator role and because the ancient person He inspired to write this didn't understand the manner. And He was there in all his Three Persons. "Before Abraham was, I AM."
When I read this, I am reminded to thank Him for calling his creation good, many many times. Light is good...and darkness is good, the formed elements of the universe (matter) and the unformed (vacuum of space, "dark matter", anti-matter, whatever amazing and beautiful things physicists are finding that might be out there). Whatever is, is fundamentally good...despite the fact that this is not the world as it was meant to be.
Another interesting point is that, while there is quibbling about the order and the fact that there are two creation stories back-to-back, the fact remains that the creation the Bible describes is progressive, pushing forward from one step to the next, (gasp) evolving. How long did this process take? Who cares. God is outside of time and seemingly created the cycle of time with the moon and sun three "days" in. Asking Him how long it took or how He did it is missing the truth He wants us to see, which is that He pushed it forward. His is the drive that pushed creation forward step by step, and He is the artist that painted the sky and taught the birds to sing. In reading this, and stating that I believe it, I'm taking a step out of the worship of creation that comes so natural to humans, both the very ancient and the modern, and fixing my eyes on the Creator.
I am told at the end of the chapter that I am made in God's image...a common enough phrase in Christian life. My soul, my little human soul, bears similarities to God. It is immortal. It can be taken out of time. And it, when all the sin is washed away, is perfect and holy. No matter what else I can say about myself, my soul is meant to be that way. When God created me female, it was to express a part of Himself. A part that doesn't change because I said "Himself", or because women aren't called to be priests and men aren't called to bear children inside them. My femininity is a reflection of the female roles God plays, and my husband's masculinity is a reflection of the male roles God plays. He wants us to be different and complementary.
I have dominion over the rest of creation in almost the same way God has dominion...I'm called to exercise it with both justice and mercy. The ten shrimp on my plate for lunch are not going to ask me for an apology for eating them, because I have to eat something, and God provided that for me in the form of the various plants and animals around me. My dog, when my husband and I get one soon, is going to have to listen to my commands and is going to get scolded when he does wrong. On the other hand, when my dominion doesn't follow God's pattern, when I poison the water the shrimp live in or harshly punish my dog without mercy or even justice, that is Wrong. And Sinful. It makes me less holy than He is and unworthy of being with Him.
It strikes me as very cool that the first thing God commands me to do is to "be fruitful and multiply", to participate with Him in continuing to create. He isn't done yet, and as soon as humanity existed he commanded us to be part of the process, his image and likeness even in this.
Reading Haydock, I find that my earlier point about God being there in three Persons is actually cleverly hidden in the text. "Elohim" is plural (gods) but the verb for "made" isn't...These three acted as one. Elohim was a Hebrew way to refer to God...which suggests to me that they "got" the Trinity, the fact that God is more than one Person, in an incredible Unity. We also use this passage during Easter Vigil, when folks are baptized, which gives even more weight and meaning to the idea of the Wind on the Water...the Spirit making the water holy and special.
As small children we hear this story because it is so fundamental to how we see the world. As Catholics we believe that the point being driven home here is that God made everything you see and everything you don't. It doesn't matter how, really...He chose to leave the manner of how Creation happened out of it perhaps to keep us focused on His Creator role and because the ancient person He inspired to write this didn't understand the manner. And He was there in all his Three Persons. "Before Abraham was, I AM."
When I read this, I am reminded to thank Him for calling his creation good, many many times. Light is good...and darkness is good, the formed elements of the universe (matter) and the unformed (vacuum of space, "dark matter", anti-matter, whatever amazing and beautiful things physicists are finding that might be out there). Whatever is, is fundamentally good...despite the fact that this is not the world as it was meant to be.
Another interesting point is that, while there is quibbling about the order and the fact that there are two creation stories back-to-back, the fact remains that the creation the Bible describes is progressive, pushing forward from one step to the next, (gasp) evolving. How long did this process take? Who cares. God is outside of time and seemingly created the cycle of time with the moon and sun three "days" in. Asking Him how long it took or how He did it is missing the truth He wants us to see, which is that He pushed it forward. His is the drive that pushed creation forward step by step, and He is the artist that painted the sky and taught the birds to sing. In reading this, and stating that I believe it, I'm taking a step out of the worship of creation that comes so natural to humans, both the very ancient and the modern, and fixing my eyes on the Creator.
I am told at the end of the chapter that I am made in God's image...a common enough phrase in Christian life. My soul, my little human soul, bears similarities to God. It is immortal. It can be taken out of time. And it, when all the sin is washed away, is perfect and holy. No matter what else I can say about myself, my soul is meant to be that way. When God created me female, it was to express a part of Himself. A part that doesn't change because I said "Himself", or because women aren't called to be priests and men aren't called to bear children inside them. My femininity is a reflection of the female roles God plays, and my husband's masculinity is a reflection of the male roles God plays. He wants us to be different and complementary.
I have dominion over the rest of creation in almost the same way God has dominion...I'm called to exercise it with both justice and mercy. The ten shrimp on my plate for lunch are not going to ask me for an apology for eating them, because I have to eat something, and God provided that for me in the form of the various plants and animals around me. My dog, when my husband and I get one soon, is going to have to listen to my commands and is going to get scolded when he does wrong. On the other hand, when my dominion doesn't follow God's pattern, when I poison the water the shrimp live in or harshly punish my dog without mercy or even justice, that is Wrong. And Sinful. It makes me less holy than He is and unworthy of being with Him.
It strikes me as very cool that the first thing God commands me to do is to "be fruitful and multiply", to participate with Him in continuing to create. He isn't done yet, and as soon as humanity existed he commanded us to be part of the process, his image and likeness even in this.
Reading Haydock, I find that my earlier point about God being there in three Persons is actually cleverly hidden in the text. "Elohim" is plural (gods) but the verb for "made" isn't...These three acted as one. Elohim was a Hebrew way to refer to God...which suggests to me that they "got" the Trinity, the fact that God is more than one Person, in an incredible Unity. We also use this passage during Easter Vigil, when folks are baptized, which gives even more weight and meaning to the idea of the Wind on the Water...the Spirit making the water holy and special.
Catholics actually read the Bible?
So, what I'm doing here is not new, not innovative, and not, quite frankly, special. It is, however, an act of faith and an act of intellectual curiosity at the same time. For my Lent devotion this year, I have been doing Lectio Divina on the readings for Mass that the Church presents to us on a daily basis. I recently stumbled on a couple of resources that pushed me in this regard:
First, I was directed to a listing of Lectionary statistics - how much of each book of the Bible we actually read when we read the Mass readings for the day. Some books, particularly the minor prophets (Habakkuk? Nahum? Who were they???), receive very little of our liturgical attention, and some receive much, much more. The statistics for Sunday and holy-day-of-obligation Masses indicate that Catholics who are faithful to their Sunday Obligation hear a fraction of the complete Word of God. This makes sense, of course, in that Holy Mother Church uses Scripture as part of liturgy to serve the liturgy, not to ensure that we hear the whole thing like Ezra's crowd. The Lectionary readings have a special place in my heart because they always seem to suit the moment, and their cycling with the seasons seem to encompass all of the various moods and emotions and problems that come with the Christian life.
Secondly, I read the book Good Book by David Plotz of Slate.com...a book about reading the entire (Hebrew) Bible and commenting upon the experience as a person with a cultural, but not always spiritual, connection to it. I was expecting, I think, to read a scathing indictment of "fantastic" and "unbelievable" stories, particularly in the early books. What I found was commentary that, while not often relatable to my own experience of Scripture, had a very human element, a willingness to lay out there what the text makes him think and feel. He doesn't believe what I do or get what I get out of the Bible but it is clear that he is willing to be changed and challenged by it.
And so we have it: A Catholic girl is going to read the Bible...our Bible ( the NAB with all the Deuterocanonicals/so called "Apocrypha" etc.) and point out what I see, know, and believe about the Word. Approaching some of the Bible for the first time, some of it for the thousandth. Writing from the heart and off the cuff, and then consulting Catholic resources (Haydock's commentary, etc.) to let the Magisterium inform me. This is likely to be a four-year plan, using Marcus Grodi's "Read the Bible and Catechism in one year" and splitting it up by columns so reading only one passage, not four, per time.
Come Holy Spirit!
First, I was directed to a listing of Lectionary statistics - how much of each book of the Bible we actually read when we read the Mass readings for the day. Some books, particularly the minor prophets (Habakkuk? Nahum? Who were they???), receive very little of our liturgical attention, and some receive much, much more. The statistics for Sunday and holy-day-of-obligation Masses indicate that Catholics who are faithful to their Sunday Obligation hear a fraction of the complete Word of God. This makes sense, of course, in that Holy Mother Church uses Scripture as part of liturgy to serve the liturgy, not to ensure that we hear the whole thing like Ezra's crowd. The Lectionary readings have a special place in my heart because they always seem to suit the moment, and their cycling with the seasons seem to encompass all of the various moods and emotions and problems that come with the Christian life.
Secondly, I read the book Good Book by David Plotz of Slate.com...a book about reading the entire (Hebrew) Bible and commenting upon the experience as a person with a cultural, but not always spiritual, connection to it. I was expecting, I think, to read a scathing indictment of "fantastic" and "unbelievable" stories, particularly in the early books. What I found was commentary that, while not often relatable to my own experience of Scripture, had a very human element, a willingness to lay out there what the text makes him think and feel. He doesn't believe what I do or get what I get out of the Bible but it is clear that he is willing to be changed and challenged by it.
And so we have it: A Catholic girl is going to read the Bible...our Bible ( the NAB with all the Deuterocanonicals/so called "Apocrypha" etc.) and point out what I see, know, and believe about the Word. Approaching some of the Bible for the first time, some of it for the thousandth. Writing from the heart and off the cuff, and then consulting Catholic resources (Haydock's commentary, etc.) to let the Magisterium inform me. This is likely to be a four-year plan, using Marcus Grodi's "Read the Bible and Catechism in one year" and splitting it up by columns so reading only one passage, not four, per time.
Come Holy Spirit!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)