Biblical reflections on the Noah story
12/31/1899
These Biblical reflections, offered at the Iona Cymru weekend, highlight six areas of the text and are considered in light of Creation, care for the Earth and social justice Psalm 24:
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: Leader (citizens) The earth is the Lord's and its fullness, Chorus (pilgrims) Let the Lord enter: Leader (pilgrims): Who shall climb the mountain of the Lord? Chorus (pilgrims) Let the Lord enter: Leader (citizens) They shall receive blessings from the Lord, Chorus (pilgrims) Let the Lord enter: Leader (pilgrims): O Gates, lift high your heads; Chorus (pilgrims) Let the Lord enter: Leader (citizens): Who is the King of Glory? Chorus (pilgrims) Let the Lord enter Leader(citizens): Who is the King of Glory? Chorus (pilgrims) Let the Lord enter Leaders together: Give glory to the Father Almighty,
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. 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. 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. 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 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. 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: 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. 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. 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. 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 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. |
