Friends
Peace be with you.
Our first reading for Mass today comes from the end of the first part of the Book of Genesis. This part is marked because of its mythic character. By calling it mythic, I’m not meaning to imply that it’s all a lie or definitely didn’t happen. I just mean that they describe events that don’t happen every day. Part of the reason for that is, undoubtedly, because they’re kinda weird, in particular surrounding the flood, it moves into the idea of fallen angels and such that we’d rather just relegate to a forgotten past. However, either directly in the second reading from First Peter and indirectly in the Gospel, the story of Noah is referenced. So, just to make sure we understand what really happens in the flood, in order to understand why it was Jesus was tempted by the devil in the desert among wild beasts for forty days for instance, let’s look briefly at Genesis chapters 6-9.
To recap what comes before this in the Book of Genesis, we have the two stories of creation, the story of the Fall, and the story of Adam and Eve’s children Cain and Abel. So, the point is that Adam and Eve were created in paradise without sin and, in two generations, they introduced original sin and fratricide, the muder of your brother. Chapter five is one of those lists of the names of ancestors connecting Adam and Noah with all the ancestors living eight hundred or nine hundred years long.
Chapter six begins with one of the strangest stories in the entire bible. It says that humanity was expanding and having beautiful daughters so the divine beings or sons of God, depending on how it is translated, come and have children with them. They are some kind of hybrid human and divine being, which really upsets the one true God. We’re not really told why it upsets God in Chapter six just that he decides it’s time to wipe out humanity and give it a fresh start. From a Christian perspective, we can see that the problem is that God already had a plan to save the world with Jesus, who was fully God and fully human. But, these beings, referred in chapter six by the term “Nephilim” and “the heroes of old”, weren’t a prefigurement of Jesus or an honor to God. They were a confusion, something that was not part of God’s plan. Jesus’ human and divine natures, though united in his person, are also separate in time. Jesus’ human nature was born in time but his divine nature existed through all eternity. The nephilim are a blending, a distortion, something not totally divine or totally human.
So, humanity is so polluted by this new creation, this Frankenstein’s monster if you will, that God decides it needs a restart. But, instead of wiping everyone out and breathing into dirt like he did with Adam, whose name means dirt, he’s going to instruct eight people, Noah, Noah’s wife, Noah’s three sons Shem, Ham, and Japheth, and Noah’s three daughter-in-laws, on how to survive. They build a large boat, or an ark, and watch as the entire earth floods and wipes out all life not on the ark. The flood is so complete that it covers mountains, leaving nowhere for anyone to survive. It rains for forty days and forty nights, the same number of days and nights Jesus spends in the wilderness, and then takes several hundred extra days to dry off so Noah and his family can exit the ark.
What I find interesting about the story is the part that is actually in our first reading today. You would think God would say that he’s going to form a covenant with Noah that they would never disobey him again and get as bad as they were before. However, it does get bad after this. In fact, it gets worse. Immediately after the story of the flood is the story of the Tower of Babylon. Then, we’re not all that far from the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. Human beings sin again and again and again. And, God doesn’t make that the point of this first covenant of the Old Testament.
Instead, God sets a bow in the clouds to indicate that he won’t try to wipe humanity off the planet again. It’s almost as though God feels bad about what happened right there, like wiping humanity off the face off the earth was a bad idea. Now, let me just say that I recognize what I just said in that last sentence is impossible and foolish. From a theological standpoint, God cannot make mistakes. God cannot do something that would cause sin because sin is disobeying God. God cannot disobey himself or he’d somehow be divided, which doesn’t make any sense.
But, human beings do this all the time. We are capable of regret. We do things all the time that we wish we wouldn’t have. And we associate ourselves with people who do things we wish they wouldn’t do as well. Have you ever thought to yourself that life would be easier if someone else moved away or wasn’t in your life or, and I know just how dark and evil this sounds, but have you ever wished someone would just die so that you wouldn’t have to deal with their bad actions anymore? Like I say, I know it sounds terrible. But have you?
We are still in the beginning of our Lenten journey and I think it’s fitting to reflect on what I think we are supposed to see when we see a rainbow in the clouds: God knows you and others make mistakes and he still loves you and loves them. He doesn’t love the mistakes. He wishes he could wash them away and he does wash them away in baptism and confession. But, there’s a pretty good chance, even after those sacraments, that people will sin. The first covenant that God makes with us is that he isn’t going to wipe us off the face of the earth because of our imperfections. Instead, he’s going to give us a second and third and fourth and fifth chance to face our demons and come out of the dry deserts of sin to the refreshing waters of his forgiveness. Which leaves us to ask: Can we accept that we and other human beings make mistakes and deserve a second, third, fourth, or hundredth chance?
