We just read the entire first chapter of Genesis, which, to some of you, may have seemed a little over the top, a little extravagant perhaps. Words poured out like precious perfume that could have been put to more careful, measured use, verse by verse, line by line, phrase by phrase. But the pouring out, far from being wasteful, may well be the only appropriate way to take in this grand liturgical poetry that opens our Bible. It’s the whole story of life, from first light to the seventh day when God contentedly rests amid the wondrous whirl of creation. A little extravagance of speech and attention is called for in trying to echo the lavish fullness and awesome orderliness of creation.
The biblical scholars remind us that the chapter, in its entirety, was composed as a “prequel” to Exodus 15, the story of Israel’s salvation at the sea, when God ordered the waters to part so the Hebrew slaves could escape the deadly threat of Pharao’s military and cross over on their journey to the promised land. The chapter was composed in exile, after the kingdom had fallen and the Temple had been destroyed and the ancestral land had been devastated by Babylon’s armies. With bold, assertive speech, the exiles claimed that the God who set them free and led them out of the brick yards of Egypt was the creator of heaven and earth. The orderliness of the composition reflects a deep orderliness of life with words that reassured a people far from home. The rhythms of evening and morning, of weekday and sabbath, pointed those who recited and heard them to cosmic orders that the chaos of foreign captivity could not erase or subdue. Creation had a beginning and a goal, and the story of life from empty nothingness to fulfillment in sabbath peace was spoken by the God of Israel, not the gods of Babylon.
God speaks with sovereign power, and the word accomplishes God’s purpose and succeeds in the thing for which God sent it.[1] God speaks. God makes. God names. God observes and delights. “And God saw that it was good,” is one of the refrains of this poem of life.
The first day. The second day. The third day. God doesn’t snap the divine fingers to bring forth light and land and life; God makes time and takes time. And at the end of each day, God, like an artist, steps back from the detail, to behold the whole as it is taking shape. Good. Good.
God pauses to observe closely how the earth brings forth plants yielding seed of every kind and fruit trees. The fourth day. God notices how the waters swarm. God sees how birds fly across the sky and where they build their nests. God lingers with delighted attention over every movement of every wing. The Carolina Wren, the eastern Goldfinch, the Belted Kingfisher, the Mourning Dove, the Great Blue Heron. The fifth day.
God speaks. God makes. God observes and delights. “Why so many forms?” asks Annie Dillard.
Why not just that one hydrogen atom? The creator goes off on one wild, specific tangent after another, or millions simultaneously, with an exuberance that would seem to be unwarranted, and with an abandoned energy sprung from an unfathomable font. What is going on here? The point of the dragonfly’s terrible lip, the giant water bug, birdsong, or the beautiful dazzle and flash of sunlighted minnows, is not that it all fits together like clockwork—for it doesn’t, particularly, not even inside the goldfish bowl—but that it all flows so freely and wild, like the creek, that it all surges in such a free, fringed tangle. Freedom is the world’s water and weather, the world’s nourishment freely given, its soil and sap: and the creator loves pizzazz.[2]
According to the opening chapter of Genesis, human beings are latecomers to creation. We are creatures of the sixth day.When Carl Sagan came up with his now famous model for the age of the cosmos, he didn’t count days, but he arrived at a similar conclusion regarding the late arrival of humankind. Sagan first popularized the idea of squeezing all the time of the universe not into seven days, but a single year, beginning with the Big Bang on January 1. On March 15, the Milky Way galaxy was formed. The sun and planets came into existence on August 31. The first multicellular life on earth appeared on December 5, fish on December 18 and birds on December 27. Human beings arrived on the scene about 8 minutes before midnight on December 31. And we started writing only about half a second ago in cosmic time.
“What are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?” we ask with the Psalmist. Humans have a special place in creation, but we’re not that special. We don’t even have our own separate day set aside. We are latecomers to the miracle of life, creatures of the sixth day who arrive in the afternoon, as it were, after cattle and creeping things and wild animals of every kind.
Let us make humankind, God said, in our image, according to our likeness, and let them have dominion over all this, as far as the eye can see. What kind of a mandate is that, dominion? We have a long history, particularly in the West, of confusing dominion with domination. And that history is not a long-gone past, but our present crisis and work.
We — and by “we” I mean first and foremost men of European descent — have been taught to view ourselves as “superior to nature, contemptuous of it, willing to use it for our slightest whim.”[3] In that profound misunderstanding of dominion as domination, the full humanity of women was questioned, and the question was answered in the negative; people of the first nations of the Americas were labeled innocent or savage, and when they resisted efforts to remake them in the image of their European “masters of civilization,” they were killed or marched off to shrinking reservations; the full humanity of people of African descent was brutally denied in order to keep labor costs down on plantations and the markets for cotton and sugar strong, and article 1, section 2, clause 3 of the Constitution defined a slave as 3/5 of a person. Women and all people of non-European descent were assigned their place “in nature” by European men who viewed themselves as superior to nature, contemptuous of it, and willing to use it for their slightest whim. This, we have been taught, is what dominion looks like — domination with a touch of contempt. The knee of a white man crushing a black man’s throat.
Sometime in 1938 or 1939, Bertolt Brecht, a German writer in exile in Denmark, wrote,
Truly I live in dark times!
A sincere word is folly. A smooth forehead
Indicates insensitivity. If you’re laughing,
You haven’t heard
The bad news yet.
What are these times, when
A conversation about trees is almost a crime
Because it implies silence about so many misdeeds.[4]
Truly I live in dark times, when my morning psalm of praise for the Osprey and the Belted Kingfisher and the Great Blue Heron, for the flowering Oak Hydrangea and sweet Magnolia blooms, when such a song is almost a crime, because it implies silence about so many horrors of domination.
Peniel Rajkumar writes about the life-giving word of Genesis 1 becoming flesh and assuming an identity as “Jesus, the incarnate word who chooses to pitch his tent among human beings in an act which can be described as radical solidarity,” and he asks, “Where do our words pitch their tent today? In the safety and security of power or in the vulnerability of and solidarity with those disadvantaged by power?”
In Genesis 1, God’s word creates life, God speaks the world into being, and “on the seventh day, when the text states that God chose to refrain from all of God’s work, what seems to be implied is that God was silent on the seventh day. But an important aspect of this ‘silence of God’ is that God could afford to be silent because God saw that ‘everything was very good’.”[5]
On that great sabbath, God will rest amid the wondrous whirl of creation, and we will all sing in the one great symphony of life. Until then, God will continue to speak, and we will choose where our words, inspired and formed in the company of Jesus, will pitch their tent.
Until then, we will sing whenever we catch a glimpse of life’s wholeness; and we will stand and speak in solidarity with those whose full humanity as creatures made in the image of God continues to be denied, and we will work with them in dismantling the structures of domination.
Dominion is not a license to define and oppress and exploit — it is a commission to see as God sees, and care as God cares, and delight as God delights.
We together, humankind in all its diversity, and each of us in our unique expression of our shared humanity, are made in the image of God: entrusted to represent God’s dominion among each other and in our relation to the non-human creation. We have been given the capacity to see in astonishing detail how God’s creatures are all fearfully and wonderfully made, and how each is connected with the others in a single fabric of mutuality.
May our eyes be clear and our speech truthful.
[1] See Isaiah 55:11-12
[2] Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, 1988, 137.
[3] Lynn White, “The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis,” Science vol. 155, no. 3767, 1967, 1203-1207.
[4] “An die Nachgeborenen,” translated by Peter Levine https://peterlevine.ws/?p=18077
[5] Peniel Jesudason Rufus Rajkumar https://politicaltheology.com/speech-and-silence-the-politics-of-genesis-1-24-peniel-jesudason-rufus-rajkumar/