Thomas Kleinert
Groaning is one of those wonderful words humans have found and kept that sound just like what they mean. I watched a video of a two-year old girl bending over to pick up two small toys from the kitchen floor, groaning like she was lifting weights at the gym, and finally uttering a short series of garbled syllables that I swear sounded a lot like, “Ugh, I need coffee.”[1] Stefanie, her mom, had posted the clip, commenting, “Apparently I grunt too much.” Someone else left a comment, “My granddaughter walks down the road and says ‘oooh my poor back I need to sit down…’ She’s 2!” And Jancee Dunn tells her readers,
Like many other people, I have a playlist of activity-specific grunts and gasps: When I’m heaving myself out of a chair, I sound like Rafael Nadal returning a volley; when I’m reaching for something, I release a wheezy “ooof.”
She wraps up her reflections on “the middle-aged groan” with the assurance, “If you sound like a weight lifter when you bend down, you’re not alone.”[2]
I don’t know if I have any activity-specific grunts and gasps, but I am aware that when PBS makes me watch the same Viking River Cruise commercial for the twenty-thirteenth time, the groan I utter comes from a deep place, but that groan has additional features that would require it to be bleeped on public broadcasts.
In the book of Exodus, God declares, “I have heard the groaning of the Israelites whom the Egyptians have enslaved.”[3] We are to remember that God will not put up with oppression and exploitation. “When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice, but when the wicked rule, the people groan,” we read in Proverbs, like a wrap-up commentary on the daily news.[4] We are to remember that God will not put up with oppression, exploitation, and wickedness, nor with any other expression of sin’s rule in the world. God’s desire is for life on earth to flourish, and God acts to reclaim all that makes for life. “Because God is a God of life and blessing, God will do redemptive work, should those gifts be endangered,” writes Terence Fretheim.
The objective of God’s work in redemption is to free people to be what they were created to be. It is a deliverance, not from the world, but to true life in the world.[5]
And it’s not just people who long to be who we really are, who we are meant to be as creatures made in the image of God: the whole creation is waiting, according to Paul, because its own deliverance from futility, its own freedom from bondage is tied to ours. “The creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God,” Paul writes in Romans 8, just before the passage we heard this morning; “for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.”[6]
Human beings have a particular place and calling in creation. According to Genesis, we are created in the image of God to subdue the earth and have dominion over every living thing on the land, in the sea, and in the air.[7]And dominion in God’s creation is all about naming the wonders, and knowing them, and caring for them with the same attention, wisdom, and passion for life as God.
We are made in the image of God, but sin distorts our powers of naming, knowing, and caring into destructive modes of living; our dominion becomes oppressive, exploitative, abusive, wicked. We lose our place in the world, live like exiles far from home, and our homelessness impacts all. Listen to this lament by the prophet Hosea,
There is no faithfulness or loyalty, and no knowledge of God in the land. Swearing, lying, and murder, and stealing and adultery break out; bloodshed follows bloodshed. Therefore the land mourns, and all who live in it languish; together with the wild animals and the birds of the air, even the fish of the sea are perishing.[8]
Land and sea mourn, and all who live in it languish, because human beings don’t know our place as creatures made in the image of God. “How long will the land mourn, and the grass of every field wither?” wails Jeremiah.[9] And Isaiah cries, “The heavens languish together with the earth. The earth lies polluted under its inhabitants; for they have transgressed laws, violated the statutes, broken the everlasting covenant. Therefore a curse devours the earth.”[10]
“We know,” says Paul, “We know that the whole creation has been groaning until now.” But God is a God of life and blessing, and God will do redemptive work, should those gifts be endangered. God made a way for God’s people out of bondage in Egypt. God heard their groaning.[11] God remembered the covenant.
No cry or groan goes unheard. In the death and resurrection of Jesus, God made a way out of life’s bondage under sin and death, and opened the horizon of our hope to include the redemption of all that God has made.
Elsewhere Paul writes about our mortal bodies, “while we are in this tent, we groan under our burden because we wish not to be unclothed but to be further clothed, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life.”[12]Swallowed up by life… we know the opposite quite well. We know how what is true is swallowed up by lies, what is beautiful, swallowed up by ugliness, what is righteous, swallowed up by wickedness, what is alive, swallowed up by death. But now that Jesus Christ is risen from the dead, the power of sin and death has been broken. Now we are bold to hope that all that is mortal is to be swallowed up by life. Now the Holy Spirit is being poured out on all flesh, and now God not only hears the groaning of creation and our own groaning, but groans with us in “a mixture of lament and longing.”[13]
Paul calls the Spirit “the first fruits,” which alludes to the ancient practice of bringing a small portion of the harvest to the temple to consecrate the whole. It was an offering of gratitude for the gift of the land, the gifts of sun and rain and growth; it was an act of joyful recognition that all of life is altogether God’s gift. Dedicating a portion of the harvest was symbolic of receiving all of life as gift. Paul picks up the image and reverses the direction of the offering: with the gift of the Spirit, God has given human beings a taste of the fullness to come. The harvest has begun. On Pentecost, God has given us the first glance of the world to come, the first measures of the symphony that is the new creation. We hum along, sometimes we sing along, sometimes we whisper, and we groan, in a mixture of lament and longing, and it is the very Spirit of God who kindles in us the fire of holy restlessness that cannot put up with the world as it is. First fruits—we know there’s more where that came from, and we lean into the promise. “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom,”[14] Paul writes, and every taste of freedom from the power of sin is a taste of the freedom to come for the whole creation; every taste of freedom from fear, from oppression and exploitation and abuse is a taste of the world swallowed up by life.
Human beings have a particular place and calling in creation. We are created in the image of God to represent God’s dominion.[15] We are here to name the wonders, and to know them, and to care for them with the same attention, wisdom, and passion God has for life. And yes, sin distorts our considerable powers into destructive modes of living—but God does redemptive work wherever the gifts of life and blessing are in danger. In Christ, the image of God is revealed and restored, and because Christ has made us his own, we are free to live in him, and he in us. Led by his Spirit, we begin to reflect the image of God into the world—until the hills burst into song, the trees clap their hands, the land smiles,[16] the oceans dance and the rivers laugh.
Three times Paul uses the word “groaning” in this brief passage from Romans, and one of the three uses explicitly refers to the pains of woman in labor. It’s a fine metaphor, because creation is longing for new life; we are waiting for new life; and the Spirit is longing and laboring with us, with groanings too deep for words.
But the birth metaphor has also been terribly twisted by men, e.g. by the one who said, “The bomb was Robert Oppenheimer’s baby;” or by another who sounded like a dad on the phone, saying, “Doctor has just returned most enthusiastic and confident that the little boy is as husky as his big brother,” and what he meant was the plutonium bomb was as solid as the one made of uranium; and yet another man who observed the test from a distance and reported, “The big boom came about a hundred seconds after the great flash—the first cry of a new-born world.”[17] Even birth metaphors aren’t safe from being swallowed up by death. But we are bold to hope that all that is mortal is to be swallowed up by life. This is the promise of resurrection. This is the promise of the Spirit poured out on all flesh. Ours is a hope as a woman in labor hopes: panting and gasping, puffing, blowing, breathing through the pain, holding tight to a companion, fully present, and yet every fiber of her body fully extended to that moment of laughter and tears when this pain will be but a memory and everything will be made new.
[1] https://www.tiktok.com/@spritch29/video/7055839305301757230
[2] Jancee Dunn https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/24/well/middle-aged-groan.html
[3] Exodus 6:5
[4] Proverbs 29:2
[5] Terence Fretheim, “The Reclamation of Creation: Redemption and Law in Exodus,” Interpretation 45, p. 359; italics in the original.
[6] Romans 8:18-21
[7] Genesis 1:26-28
[8] Hosea 4:1-3
[9] Jeremiah 12:4
[10] Isaiah 24:4-6
[11] Exodus 2:23f.
[12] 2 Corinthians 5:4
[13] N.T. Wright, Romans (NIB), 599.
[14] 2 Corinthians 3:17
[15] Genesis 1:26-28
[16] See Isaiah 55:12
[17] Brian Easlea, Fathering the Unthinkable, quoted in Sallie McFague, Models of God: Theology for an Ecological, Nuclear Age (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987), 203n.5.