Advent 2019, day twenty

Various mythologies of Antiquity tell of an originating and distant father-of-the-gods who swallows his offspring; and of human beings as the slaves or playthings of the gods. The biblical storytellers imagined the human as a bringing-together of the heavens and the earth, formed from soil and animated by divine Life-Breath. On dying, the soil returns to the ground from which it was taken, becoming, in time, one with each other again. The life-breath returns to the Life-Breath: God swallowing his offspring, not into the stomach (from where to be passed out through the gut) but into the lungs (from where to travel to every cell of God’s being, to employ anthropomorphic imagery). Having no breath in its lungs, that which returns to the soil no longer praises God. But resurrection will be no reanimation of a corpse (even Ezekiel’s vivid imagery of bones regrouping into skeletons, clothed with organs and muscles and sinews and skin and given new breath is not an image of end-of-times resurrection but of a devastated community restored in time). When God makes new the heavens and the earth, it will be the treasure kept for now in heaven that is given new soil, new earth. For earth will not ascend to heaven, but heaven descend to earth. Christmas is the foretaste of this.