Some biblical reflections on the Noah story, the creation, care for the Earth and social justice

SOME BIBLICAL REFLECTIONS

(These were offered at an Iona Cymru weekend with Members, Associates, and Friends of the Iona Community at the Centre for Alternative Technology near Machynlleth at the end of September 2007).

Content

Psalm 24. "The earth is the Lord's, and all that is in it; the world and its people belong to the Lord".
Genesis chapters 1 and 2. Two Creation-stories in Genesis.
Genesis chapter 6 verse 5 to chapter 9 verse 17. The Noah story.
Nehemiah chapter 5 (especially verses 1-13)
Deuteronomy chapter 26, verse 1-13.

Psalm 24. "The earth is the Lord's, and all that is in it; the world and its people belong to the Lord".

This is the masthead message of the Hebrew scriptures. Against all theologies which divide the divine from the material order, against all social systems which make the differences between humans more important than our common humanity, against all economic systems which tolerate and encourage the notion that the created order can be parcelled out into individual ownerships of persons in competition with each other, this song insists that there is one creator, one creation, one human family, one environment to be received as a gift and not grabbed for individual consumption or occupation.

But the song does recognise that there can be a process of recognition, in which some see the truth more quickly than others. This is not because of differences of cleverness or goodness; it all depends where you happen to start from.

See the way the voices relate to each other. There are two groups, the pilgrims who are on the move, outside the city, and the citizens who are content in their occupation of the city. Each group has a representative leader. Their words can be dramatised into a liturgy as follows:

Chorus (pilgrims): Let the Lord enter:
Chorus (citizens): He is the King of Glory.

Leader (citizens) The earth is the Lord's and its fullness,
The world and all its peoples.
It is he that set it on the seas;
On the waters he made it firm

Chorus (pilgrims) Let the Lord enter:
Chorus (citizens): He is the King of glory.

Leader (pilgrims): Who shall climb the mountain of the Lord?
Who shall stand in his holy place?
Leader (citizens): Those with clean hands and pure heart,
Who trust not in fraud and deception.

Chorus (pilgrims) Let the Lord enter:
Chorus (citizens): He is the King of Glory.

Leader (citizens) They shall receive blessings from the Lord,
And reward from the God who saves us.
Leader (pilgrims) Such are the folk who seek him,
Seek the face of the God of Jacob.

Chorus (pilgrims) Let the Lord enter:
Chorus (citizens) He is the King of Glory.

Leader (pilgrims): O Gates, lift high your heads;
Grow higher, ancient doors;
Let him enter, the King of Glory;
Let him enter, the King of Glory

Chorus (pilgrims) Let the Lord enter:
Chorus (citizens) He is the King of Glory.

Leader (citizens): Who is the King of Glory?
Leader (pilgrims) The Lord, the mighty, the valiant,
The Lord, the valiant in the struggle;
He is the King of Glory.

Chorus (pilgrims) Let the Lord enter
Chorus (citizens) He is the King of Glory.

Leader(citizens): Who is the King of Glory?
Who is the King of Glory?
Leader (pilgrims): He, the Lord of all powers;
He is the King of Glory.

Chorus (pilgrims) Let the Lord enter
Chorus (citizens) He is the King of Glory

Leaders together: Give glory to the Father Almighty,
To his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord,
To the Spirit who dwells in our hearts
Both now and for ever, Amen.
Chorus (pilgrims) Let the Lord enter
Chorus (citizens) He is the King of Glory

The Psalm starts with a fairly conventional description of the virtues which qualify a person for access to the place of holiness. But then there is a demand for this access to be made real: the pilgrims recognise that there are gates, obstructions to entry; these gates are ancient, old-established, part of a traditional set-up which may need to be challenged. Furthermore, the pilgrims claim that these gates obstruct the Lord himself - God is not secure in the safety of the place of holiness, he is with the pilgrims. The 'gates' may be racial, economic, moral. They must be lifted. Access must be made real. The citizens find this difficult. They have to ask twice who is the authority that the pilgrims claim. In the end, there is a common praise that unites the two groups.

This was acted out by Jesus. He did not start off from the place of holiness, but from the place of confusion, racial mixing, demonic disorder, Galilee, with its northern accents which were easily identified by the cosmopolitan southerners. He moved from Galilee, on the edge, to Jerusalem, the centre (this is the classic movement of the Gospel - it does not start from the centre and ripple out to the edge; true insights characteristically start from the edge and move towards the centre; otherwise the Gospel would be merely confirming existing patterns of dominance, not discovering new places and new people. This is the pattern, Galilee to Jerusalem, Judaea to Rome; see also Paul's experience in Galatians). Jesus came to the Holy City, and the citizens had to ask, Who is this? His companions were able to say, This is our man, our home-boy, from Nazareth.

He came accessible, riding on an animal which made his eyes no higher than the eyes of the pedestrians. He came into the place of holiness, cleared it to make space for the Gentile outsiders, accepted and served the people afflicted with disabilities which excluded them, and honoured the voices of children. Jesus, the true pilgrim. He is the Lord; he shows what lordship is about (At one stage, I made a version of the psalm which avoided the word 'Lord', which some people find offensively patriarchal and class-bound. But I think it is better to claim this word, and recognise how Jesus re-defines it, and gives it new character as the one who washes the feet of his friends and dies between convicted terrorists. He shows what holy lordship and true authority are like) .

Our task is to demand entry for this accessible king, on behalf of all who are excluded on account of race or poverty or sexual orientation or background or disability, and those who are disabled by systems of debt, environmental injustice, and educational rejection. That is his struggle, and he is indeed Lord of all powers, because goodness is stronger than evil (as Desmond Tutu affirms) love is stronger than hate, light than darkness. Life than death (and, I would add, truth than the lie). Victory is ours, through him who loved us.

Genesis chapters 1 and 2. Two Creation-stories in Genesis.

A/ runs from Chapter 2, verse 4 to end of chapter 3. This comes from a period after the Exodus, the deliverance of the people of Israel from slavery in Egypt and their possession of the Promised Land. Exodus comes first: because we know ourselves as a nation created by God out of slavery, so we know that this same God is responsible for the whole creation. According to A, creation begins with the formation of the man Adam; he is there as observer and sharer of a developing environment. Without the observer, there is nothing to be observed. He is put into an environment which he is to care for, to work in, and to understand by forming a map of language and symbols. The story is told, as it were horizontally, from his point of view, as observer, worker, discoverer, creator of language and relationships, and as a moral agent. He is an artist, interpreting creation according to his own insights. "An artist is not a special kind of person, but every person is a special kind of artist" (Eric Gill, slightly adapted)

B/ is from chapter 1 verse 1 to chapter 2 verse 3; this comes from several centuries later, after the second tragic period of Israelite history, the era of exile in Babylon. B/ starts with the beginning of a universe, with increasing complexity and diversification. Creation is seen, as it were, from vertically above, systematically.
The human couple are the last part of creation; but they are not separate from the rest - their creation comes as part of the same phase as the formation of animal life, sharing the same place in the order of things and in the carbon cycle. They are given responsibility for the well-being of the environment in which they are placed. This is expressed as 'dominion', a word which many good people believe has caused the Judaeo-Christian tradition to be reckless and destructive in its attitude to the environment - leading to the extermination of bison and the competitive claiming of mineral wealth. We need to treat this word with the same care that we give to a word such as 'Lord'. 'Dominion' means exercising lordship; Jesus re-defines 'Lord'; he shows his understanding of 'dominion' and 'lordship' when he washes the disciples' feet.
But the creation of human beings is not the final stage; the real climax is the seventh day, the Sabbath, which celebrates the goodness of creation and of the Creator. The weekly Sabbath is the joy and the restraint on human enterprise, and the story tells how this shapes even the divine creativity, identifying it in six 'days'. The Sabbath provides for a regular limitation on exploitation and domination, both of human upon human and of human upon the rest of creation; it provides for regular equalisation of the values placed on people and upon land; it provides for regular recognition of God as the Lord of creation, to whom humans are accountable. The Sabbath means regular recognition that creation and human life are gifts to be received from a Giver, not as possessions to be grasped, fought over, and used as tokens in rivalry and competition. The other elements in creation exist in their own right and are reckoned as good by the Creator, irrespective of their perceived value to humans. Ecology is not to be subservient to human ideas of economy.

There is one human couple, one humanity. The people who told and treasured the B/ story knew all about the cruelty, division, and tragedy of the world; they had experienced exile and racial humiliation. Their Babylonian oppressors told a creation-story of the formation of the universe in stages, as the by-product of hostilities between divine monsters; the Israelites borrowed this Babylonian cosmology as a frame; but at the centre they put a totally different theology of a single good Creator, with a single good purpose.

Like other empires, ancient and modern, their imperialist oppressors had overstretched their empire beyond its ability to sustain the life of its own people - it had become colonialist. Israel had been guilty of similar aspirations; the prophets, especially Jeremiah, condemned this as doomed and saw exile as the punitive consequence. The Sabbath-centred story of creation recalls God's people to a proper dependence and humility - a warning against the political and economic hubris which relies on constant transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich, involving ecological damage to the well-being of the poor.

Genesis chapter 6 verse 5 to chapter 9 verse 17. The Noah story.

Summary: - Humanity is doomed, because of its violence. Water is the original source of life; it will invade the land if humans go beyond the limit of what God will tolerate. Animals are doomed also, because they share the same environment. Humans defile creation with their violence; innocent animals are caught up in the punishment which is inflicted on guilty humans. But God is on the side of the animals; God provides a device to prevent the animals and humans being destroyed altogether. Human violence and stupidity do not have the last word. As in Genesis 1, humans are given responsibility for the rest of creation. There is a second chance, for the humans and for the animals. This second chance is reinforced by a covenant, a commitment. The humans are committed to new responsibility: God is committed to maintaining the reliability of the creation's processes of fertility.

The animals are saved for their own sake. They are God's creation, and exist in their own right. They are not preserved merely so that they can be exploited by humans. Noah, the representative human being, is mandated to ensure their survival. The salvation does not come by waiting around for divine intervention; Noah is given a job, depending on his skill and enterprise in design, quantity surveying, building, management, animal husbandry, etc. There is much expenditure of energy; but then, there is a time for inactivity, for mere waiting. God and the forces of nature take over. We float. We do not control. And we depend on animals to give us the signals for our freedom.

Just as the mandate in Genesis 1, which gives humankind 'dominion' over the rest of creation, can be misapplied, and interpreted as making 'man' the 'master and owner' of everything else, so it is possible to read the same sort of message into the Noah story - but only if we ignore the fact that the whole story arises from God's intolerance of human violence, and if we forget that our place on the earth depends on the covenant which God has made with us, requiring us to take responsibility for the well-being of the rest of creation. There is no room for the 'can-do therefore will-do' mentality, which can lead to unnecessary cruelty to foxes, to the wastefulness of Concorde, to Auschwitz, to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The rainbow links the ancient story to our continuing experience. It certifies the continuing covenant between God and all living things. It is God's signature on the covenant, renewed whenever it appears in the sky. It is the sign that God continues to be the God of the Second Chance. Evil is powerful, but it does not inevitably and permanently rule. There is a real alternative.

The sign of the reliability of God is the sign of the broken spectrum. The white light of God's purpose has many colours, fitting many different situations. The simple creature, the human race, consists of a huge variety of types and styles - the 'Rainbow People of God'. There are the opposites, or complementaries, the reds and greens. There are those at the edges - the dangerous reds and the passionate purples; and there are the mild and middling ones, the oranges and the blues. And there are those who are beyond our ability to see, the infra-reds and ultra-violets, which can represent those who have died and those who are yet unborn. The violence which stirred the wrath of God is very often a violence of refusing to accept the variety within the human rainbow.
Further, no two people see exactly the same rainbow; it depends on where you are. The angle of sun and raindrops for me will be slightly different from what they will be for you. And it can't be exactly predicted. God seems to have chosen a remarkably subtle symbol to represent the Creator's reliability.

Nehemiah chapter 5 (especially verses 1-13)

The story is of a community which has recently experienced exile and racial humiliation. This exile has been seen as divine punishment upon the people of Israel for their deviation from the Law of God, which (among other things) provides for equal sharing in land-rights for all families within the community.

A small number have returned to Jerusalem, and are re-establishing their occupation of the land and their religious identity. They know that, in their historic background, they are a people who are supposed to have been delivered from slavery; the law of Moses, which has been most precious to them, has been designed to avoid the sort of society where only a few possess the land, the political levers, and educational advantage. But, now, even as returned exiles, they are becoming a stratified society of haves and have-nots - a new slavery. This is a form of theft. Monopolisation happens when assets which are supposed to be available to all are grabbed for the few. The land (and its benefits such as its ability to absorb carbon, its fruitfulness in production of crops, its function as an economic stabiliser) ceases to be treated as a gift for all and becomes a commodity to be exploited by an oligarchy of controllers. They organise systems of taxation, usury and interest, whereby wealth derived from the labours of the poor is channelled into the pockets of the rich. The moral control of the land and its assets is replaced by 'the market'. So, the land is (as Isaiah and Jeremiah point out) polluted - i.e. distorted from its nature as God's good creation. Rich and poor alike have become vassals of an economic system - they have lost their freedom, their solidarity as neighbours.

Stages in reform:
1. The sufferers - including the women - find a voice. They insist on their rights and dignity.
2. Government pays attention, is stirred emotionally.
3. Government responds to the voice of the poor and amplifies it.
4. Government sets example of truthful analysis, takes personal responsibility and acknowledges complicity in systems and conditions which make the poor poor.
5. Government, in the personal response of the Chief Executive, repents, affirms the moral commitment of obedience to the law of God, and divests itself of its economic advantage.
6 Government re-instates the priority of what is right rather than what is profitable or advantageous.
7. Government invites the other beneficiaries of the present system to follow suit.
8. The risk pays off: those who have power recognise their human solidarity with those who have been excluded from the systems of advantage and disadvantage.
9. The process ends in joy and praise, with recognition of the rule and worship of God.

Government is not a charity. It is not primarily in business to give to the poor; rather, its duty is to restrain the rich from taking from the poor.
Outright possession is an illusion, and is theft; especially this is true of the possession of land, which humans cannot create and which is in limited supply. The land and the air are gifts of God's creation, not commodities to be exchanged in the non-moral and irresponsible vagaries of the market; in these days, the land of the poor is being stolen when rich countries export their industrial and toxic waste to poor developing countries, and when rich polluting countries use the atmosphere of poor countries to absorb their waste carbon. There is 'ecological debt' as well as economical debt. This is another form of slavery. Economy is a wholly-owned subsidiary of ecology - not vice versa.

But change is possible; moral conscience can regain control. But, as with the struggle against apartheid, don't assume that impersonal market forces can achieve what moral and political intervention should be doing.

Deuteronomy chapter 26, verse 1-13.

This is a ceremony, a ritual. Science and philosophy are both concerned for truth, but (on the whole) they do not provide rituals to affirm it. Religion engages us in corporate activities, which validate the truth in our will and commitment. They help to stimulate motivation, without which no action for truth will happen.

This ceremony requires participants to recognise God as the owner and ruler of the physical world, the world of work, power, wealth, economics. They are required to bring the first products of their working activity to God, to recognise God's authority over it all.
The ceremony involves each individual worshipper. It does not support the notion that the corporate organisation can look after issues of truth and justice while not making a claim upon the personal conscience, and without any need for people to try personally to be good.
The worshipper bringing the offering is to recite the community's story, the creation of our nation out of a population of slaves. Once we had no power, no voice, no rights over the produce of our labour. Now we do have something to offer; but it is not our possession, it is God's gift to us, and it is to be shared with those who do not have land and who therefore cannot be self-sufficient - the Levite (the tribe which had no land-rights), the widow, the stranger, etc. We celebrate not only because we are grateful for the land's fertility but because we are part of God's purpose of justice. In contrast to the gods of neighbouring nations, for whom might is right, we rejoice in the knowledge that the true God is a God of justice, that the power-motive in the universe is subsidiary to the love-motive. This is our story; this is our song.
What is offered is not the best or the prettiest of our work; it is simply the first harvest to ripen, the first product to be ready for use. It is not a display by the conspicuously successful, it is a first instalment of our duty to regard all the products of land and labour as God's. None of our wealth is strictly our own; it is on loan - God has first claim upon it.

In the first stage, there is no demand for a specific proportion to be paid. But every third year, there is a requirement for a more definite percentage, the tithe. This is not a tax for the payment of clergy; it is a Social Security provision, for the benefit of the most disadvantaged members of society, including immigrants and other outsiders. Nobody is to be left poor and unsupported. This principle is too important to be left to private generosity; it has to be reflected in public accountability and budgeting.
The ceremony affirms the links between each human being and the physical world of work. It is an offering of real wealth, not an illusory wealth that can be stored in money systems where it can be insulated against decay.

The ceremony affirms that food is a necessity for all, not an art-form for the entertainment of the privileged and the fastidious, and not a commodity to be exploited to the disadvantage of the poorest. It subverts the notion (reflected, for instance, by insurance companies, by legal compensation claims, and by calculations in monetary terms of the relative damage that will be done by climate change to people in different areas of the world ) that some human beings are worth more than others. It affirms the moral status of people who are, in one way or another, disabled.
This is all celebration; it is joy and delight. How can this be more fully expressed in our harvest festivals, particularly where the human work is concerned more with animals, or with other income-earning activities, rather than with arable crops? And how does this connect with