IF SIZE matters, the most important of the lections for this Sunday is Genesis 1. If ratios matter, it is four times as important as the other two. But there is no denying that it presents difficulties.
The belief that the world had a beginning sounds reasonable, even to modern science, but that it was created in six days does not; nor does the idea that God, who “ought” to be transcendent, rolls up his divine sleeves and brings the world into being through hard graft.
Most of us who work for a living are tired by the end of the day, even when work has been enjoyable. If it took God all day to fashion each part of his creation, then it must indeed have been hard work, not a mere wave of the hand or utterance of magic words.
Despite such complexities, finding nuggets of pure spiritual gold in Genesis 1 is not difficult. “God created humankind in his image”; “God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good.” What is difficult is making sense of these, in the context of the rest.
I think of Genesis 1-2 as a game of two halves. The first chapter is priestly: it finds beautiful order, satisfying pattern, in the act of creating, so providing a blueprint for the human future from the beginning.
The second chapter, best read together with the first, is mythological, by which I mean that it tells stories about people which are more than just stories. Adam and Eve, shorn of their supposed names (which mean “man” and “woman”), are not only human individuals in historical time, who exemplify that blueprint of striving and suffering. They are us. We hear their story and must apply it to ourselves.
This reminder that their story is our story is indispensable as we prepare for Lent. In the “fall”, Augustine detected a message that all are tainted by the sin of Adam with “original sin”. This is sometimes treated, by those hostile to any teacher who counts as an elderly male (albeit one who cannot have been pale, and who is never stale), as a disastrous wrong turn for theology.
I disagree. Original sin is exactly what it says it is: the situation we are born into, and in which our entire life is lived, which makes it impossible for us, by our own efforts, to reach God. It is by no means a wrong turn in the movement of Western theology, incompatible with the insight of Eastern Christianity that we are called to become “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1.4).
Knowing that, in mature faith, we take responsibility for how we live our lives, and for our mistakes and sins, but yet have limited control over what harms we do to ourselves, others, and the planet is not a burden. It is a liberation. There is deep consolation in knowing, as every child should, that our parent will love us whatever we do, because sometimes we cannot help making mistakes.
The Gospel shows how the Genesis take on the human condition should work out in our lives. Jesus frames his teaching as a form of reasoning, using rhetorical questions to encourage us towards finding a better way of understanding ourselves, and living for God. We applaud and quote his teachings on anxiety, but they do not magic away our anxieties. What they will do is to show us that anxiety is unavoidable because it is part of original sin. We must resist it constantly — and the answer is never more rigorism, tighter control.
Romans, on the other hand, takes a less down-to-earth approach, by personifying creation as an artefact with a purpose. It is subjected to futility; so are we. It is in bondage to decay; so are we. Most remarkably, it is a woman labouring to bring her child to birth. How Paul reached this exalted level of vision in his understanding of the Christ-event, I cannot imagine. But all of us must be glad that he did; for by his words he clothes our ineffable longings for God in garments of shining hope.
We can safely leave the last word on the theme of these lections to a Pope: “Good-Nature and Good-Sense must ever join; To Err is Human; to Forgive, Divine” (Alexander Pope, Essay on Criticism).
