· Genesis 9:8-17
· Psalm 25:1-10 (10)
· 1 Peter 3:18-22
· Mark 1:9-15
My first thought about this lectionary was to talk about the symbolism of water in Christianity. But really, there are volumes written about that, I haven't read them, and I'm sure I don't have anything to add to them. But then something else occurred to me.
In the epistle, Peter is drawing a parallel between The Flood and our baptism in Christ, but he is also pointing to the progression in our relationship with Jehovah. And that is very interesting.
When you read the entire Bible, from Genesis through Revelation, or in whatever order suits you, it is very striking that God is not static. Unlike what I was taught in Catholic school, God is not unchanging. And of course neither are we. So like any relationship between two people, our relationship with God evolves with time.
In the beginning, our relationship started when God created us. And in the early days in the Garden, the relationship between God and Adam and Eve is a lot like a parent to a newborn child. You are mine, I created you, I provide everything for you, I am everything to you, you have nothing apart from me. Though there is love in this relationship, there is great inequality. The infant is completely dependent and beholden to the parent. He cannot exercise free will.
Then the child is two years old. He can walk. He can express himself. He has volition. He can defy his parent and assert himself as a separate human being. We call this the "terrible twos" because of what we see as rebellion and tantrums, which is really the resistance of an independent personality to the enormous control the parent has exerted so far. Many parents get angry and stressed. And so with us and God in the Garden. For the first time ever, we did something independent of God's will.
God totally freaked out on us. Seriously, as I love the Lord, that was not one of his best moments. The Garden, when you think about it, had a rather Orwellian quality: everything that is not forbidden is mandatory, and/or vice-versa. When man exercises free will, he gets the boot. One might argue that following the snake was not free will either, but the fact that man chose between two options was the first exercise of will. And God totally freaked out.
Then, life goes on outside the Garden. Man tills the soil and eats by the sweat of his brow, woman bears children in pain, the snake crawls on his belly and eats dust. Yeah. But at least they all get to make choices. It reminds me of General Emiliano Zapata, who famously said, "prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado." (I would rather die on my feet than live forever on my knees.) And God adapts to this new state of things, as parents sooner or later have to adapt to the fact that their young child can walk, talk, and exercise volition.
One day, God figures he's had enough of all that volition and he's got a plan that's gonna teach us obedience once and for all. The Flood. The Flood is going to wipe out [SQG] "sin" once and for all. [SQG] "sin" is really just disobedience to the will of God. When you think about it, that doesn't reflect too well on him either. God picks eight people that he's gonna keep, and makes a horrible example out of everyone else. I think Maoist China was something like that. Now in this case, I don't have a parallel with parenting, because it would be like a parent saying "I'm gonna kill all my children but one, and the one I spare is never gonna disobey me again." That's beyond brutal, and it's not gonna work. You're gonna go to jail, and your surviving child is never going to talk to you again. So it's rather miraculous that The Flood didn't completely break off our relationship with God.
And after The Flood, Jehovah does realise that he screwed up. Not only he drowned all mankind but eight, but he also drowned all the animals that weren't in the Ark. Mostly out of pique. So God promises not to do that again. If you've ever been in an abusive relationship, that promise sounds a lot like one of those "I'm sorry baby, I'll never do it again" moments, doesn't it? And we know what that's worth. But God, after all, is God, and he can do better than that. He can actually get over that kind of behaviour. Even so, he has to give himself a reminder: the rainbow. He puts his rainbow in the clouds to remind himself not to get that pissed off ever again. The rainbow is a sign of God's Covenant with us, but it's also an anger-management trick God taught himself.
Now although there is no strict parallel to The Flood in parenting, there is a gradual realisation that it is pointless to try to impose one's will on a child through punishment. So, gradually, the child is given more and more permission to make his own choices. A five-year-old does not have the same freedom as a twelve-year-old. Then again, neither does he have the same responsibilities. And as we read through the "historical" books of the Bible, we see just such a thing happening. God, in effect, gives the people more and more responsibility, and less and less punishment. No more floods. No more sending destroying Angels. God speaks through the prophets and warns the people of dire consequences, but the consequences come at the hands of other human beings. In a sense, the child is no longer being punished, but simply not being bailed out when his choices have undesirable consequences.
And then one day, there comes Christ. And after Christ, God pretty much stayed out of our lives. We don't have signs, prophets, floods, plagues of Egypt anymore. The Bible ends shortly after the death of Christ. Why? What's the analogy to the parent-child relationship here?
As a parent, at least as a parent who has a good relationship with his or her children, there comes a day when you say to your child something like this: "I've raised you the best I knew how, and now you are an adult. You are leaving my house and I can't tell you how to live your life. I'll always love you and I'll be here to listen when you need me, but you're your own person now and you will make your own way in life. I hope it goes well for you."
I think that's pretty much what Christ is all about. And that's one of the ways we can understand that Christ "takes away the sin of the world." God is cutting us loose, in effect. He is not going to punish us for exercising free will anymore. And he's going to listen to our sorrows, but he won't bail us out anymore. God has raised us to be his people the best way he knew, and now with the death of Christ, we are released from our child-like obedience to God. God acknowledges to us that we will make our own choices and some of them will not be to his liking, but it's our life, we live it as we see fit, and he'll always love us.
Maybe, somewhere in the universe, there is an infant people who is now learning to be God's people, as we did. Or maybe God is out golfing. Does he still pay attention to us? Yes. But he's not our nanny anymore. There is no more punishment for our sins, but there is also no more spoon-feeding. We're adults. God does not run our lives anymore.
So that's one meaning of the death of Christ. God doesn't just [SQG] "love" us anymore: he respects us as free-willed beings separate from himself. And I think God actually likes us.
That is very good news indeed.
Praise be to God, the Giver of life, the Causer of death, the Ever-Living, the Self-Existing by Whom all subsist.
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