Power and shame

While I believe that God created the world, that’s not what I understand the ‘creation stories’ of Genesis 1-3 to be about. Instead, I see in these stories, a Jewish community in exile in Babylon, seeking to make sense of their experience, of disorientation and hope, by reinterpreting ancient stories passed down through the ages. In Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, rulers of the world, prohibited from consuming the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, I see the rulers of the greatest empire of the time, in their walled city of hanging gardens—one of the wonders of the ancient world—a city rich in resources, between the Tigris and the Euphrates…in whose very midst a wise people has been planted by God, his own exiled people. In the Bible, trees always represent people.

When the Mother and Father of All Peoples Everywhere, seeking to be even more like gods on earth, lay hands on the forbidden fruit, on the strange people found among them, their eyes are opened to their nakedness, to the conceit of the emperor’s new clothes as a modern writer put it. They experience shame; and this shame finds expression in three ways: they weave together a covering, a cover-story; they hide, in hope of not being found out; and, when exposed, they seek someone else to blame—not for what has gone wrong, but for the shame they feel.

God’s response is multi-layered. In grace, God covers their nakedness. In grace, too, God places constraints upon them, limits on their ambition, but also on their struggle: while life will be hard, it will be fruitful. And God sets in motion a story of redemption, through one man and one woman, sent out of Eden, of Babylon, exiled from exile. Here, Adam and Eve shift form—all good stories work at several levels; but this is crucial to the ‘salvation story’—morphing into Abraham and Sarah, called out of Ur of the Chaldeans to the Promised Land of Canaan. (This explains the strange gloss on why a man leaves his parents and cleaves to his wife, an observation that has nothing to do with marriage practice—the Patriarchs all did exactly the opposite, brides leaving their parents to join their husband's parental home—and everything to do with the origin of a family descending from Abraham.)

This same story of rulers responding to shame, we see in political rulers today. The President of the USA seeking to steal the election he lost resoundingly, by claiming that the victory he is due was stolen from him by his enemies, the enemies of the people. The British Prime Minister shamefully accusing the German Chancellor of initiating another Kristallnacht, this time against the maligned British people. Dissemble, deflect, decry.

And God? God is true to godself. Placing limits on political ambition; truth-telling in regard to the cost of productivity; and calling out from the nations a family who will make sense of the world we live in by locating our lives, our story, within God’s great story. A people of God’s own possession, planted in the very midst of the sometime dystopian utopias of the nations.

Some stories endure, stand the test of time, finding new meaning in contexts that are ever changing and simultaneously always the same. Some stories sustain us, orientate and reorientate us in the world. Some stories are worth a second look. Some stories are worth coming back to again and again.