Genesis 1:1-2:4 13:11 -13; Matthew 28:16-20
The Fullness of God unfolds as Creator,
exalted Humanity, and Spirit sanctifying space and time.
Christian tradition calls the first Sunday after
Pentecost Trinity Sunday. After the coming of the Spirit launched the
age of the church the revelation was complete:
the full being of God as creator Parent, servant but exalted Son, and
dynamic communing Spirit is now experienced as three aspects of a single
ultimate reality.
The readings from the Hebrew scriptures emphasize the
elevation of humankind to partnership –
image-sharing – with the creating God.
Genesis 1:1-2:4
The Torah reading
is the beginning of the Bible, Jewish and Christian.
Jewish tradition reads this story of creation at
Sabbath services beginning shortly after the High Holy Days in early
autumn. (Their annual reading of the whole Torah begins at that time.) The Christian Revised Common
Lectionary reads this story now because it is the beginning of the
Bible. The Lectionary now enters “common
time,” the time in the year not included in the long sacred seasons of
Advent-to-Epiphany and Lent-to-Pentecost.
During this “common” time, readings are selected in sequence through various Biblical books. (Year A will read from Genesis to Judges in this period; Year B will read the historical and wisdom books; and Year C will read the Prophets.) It is a time for Christian hearers to get general exposure to the Scriptures in their Sunday readings. For such Christians, this is the beginning of many weeks of hearing selections from the book of Genesis.
During this “common” time, readings are selected in sequence through various Biblical books. (Year A will read from Genesis to Judges in this period; Year B will read the historical and wisdom books; and Year C will read the Prophets.) It is a time for Christian hearers to get general exposure to the Scriptures in their Sunday readings. For such Christians, this is the beginning of many weeks of hearing selections from the book of Genesis.
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Genesis 1 presents the universe as a sacred
structure, created within sacred time.
The dominant mood is creation by deliberate act, and
the outcome is a rational, orderly edifice in which the human is central and
reflects the divine character in “image” and in the exercise of dominion. No conflict goes on in this
presentation. Creation is not the
outcome of a violent struggle between chaos and creator god. It is the outcome of calm pronouncements
which immediately become reality.
The overarching message is that the entire universe
was created in a way to sanction observance of the Sabbath rest. Those who are in harmony with the Creator
observe that rest. The commandment in
Exodus to observe the Sabbath will appeal to this creation story (Exodus
20:11), and the actions in Genesis 1
To show that the creation is complete in six days
the narrator has to double up some of the days’ actions. For there are eight actions of creation which have to be placed within six
days.
This is accomplished by putting two actions each into the third and the
sixth days. Also, there is a symmetry
between the actions of the first three days and the actions of the second three
days of creation. The whole arrangement,
then, is as follows.
First Day Fourth
Day
(1) Light
[heavenly action only] (5)
Lights (sun, moon, stars)
Second Day Fifth
Day
(2) Dome
[vertical separation] (6)
Creatures of water and air
Third Day Sixth
Day
(3) Dry
Land [horizontal separation] (7)
Creatures of the dry land
(4)
Vegetation (8)
Humans
Seventh
Day – the Divine Rest
In its treatment of the creation of humans, the
narrative makes clear that God the Creator has a special interest – even
intimacy (considering the possible implications of “image”) – in the human
being. Other than the emphasis on the
Sabbath, the pronouncement about the human is the climax of the eight acts of
creation.
So God created humankind in his image,
in the
image of God he created them;
male and
female he created them.
God blessed them, and God said to them,
“Be fruitful and multiply,
and fill
the earth and subdue it…” (Genesis 1:27-28, NRSV.)
In this sophisticated narrative (compared to the
earthier creation story in Genesis 2
The ideal Human exercising this role is anticipated
in the Psalm reading.
Psalm 8.
This psalm is framed, beginning and end, by an
exclamation that God’s “Name” is majestic throughout the earth.
The speaker then declares that God’s glory is set
“above the heavens” – beyond the visible dome of the sky, in the heights of
God’s own dwelling with the heavenly beings.
By contrast, at an opposite extreme in the vertical dimension, there is
a “bulwark [of praise]” that comes from the babbling mouths of nursing babies
and helpless infants – a bulwark that protects the innocent and defenseless
from the “enemy and the avenger” (verse 2, NRSV ). God is
praised within the mystery of the supreme height in heaven but also at the
mysterious depths of the helpless child who cannot yet utter human speech.
Between those extremes, other signs of God’s majesty
are provided by the visible heavenly bodies.
“When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers / the moon and
the stars that you have established…” (verse 3). These created wonders of the visible heavens
force mere humans to gaze upward in complete awe. And, having gazed up for some time, one then
looks down to the other extreme: “…what
are human beings that you are mindful of them, / mortals that you care for
them?” (verse 4. The NRSV uses plurals in place of the Hebrew enosh,
poetic humankind, and ben adam, son of human / son of Adam. The singular means the archetypal Human, the
original and ultimate Human, and this will be important in early Christian
citations of this verse.)
Within this extreme between great heavens and mere
mortals, a divine elevation is proclaimed.
Yet you have made him little less than a god,
you have crowned him with glory and beauty,
made him lord of the works of your hands,
put all things under his feet,…
(Verses
5-6, New Jerusalem Bible translation, avoiding the plurals.)
Within the glory of the visible world, the Human has
been exalted to near divine status, and that is the supreme expression of the
majesty of God’s Name throughout the earth.
In the rhetoric of the Israelite psalmist this is a
magnification of the generic human species on the earth, though expressed as
the elevation of a single ideal Human.
In the language of the early Jesus followers, this is God’s exaltation
of the suffering servant to his destined supreme place for all creation. (Psalm 8 is specifically quoted in this way
in I Corinthians 15:27; Ephesians 1:22 Hebrews 2:5-9
In that perspective, the Human is the Lord who came to save the lost and has been
elevated to rule over all powers and realms of heaven and earth. That elevation of the Christ as the
archetypal Human was anticipated in the praise of the psalmist.
The human, vulnerable and mortal creature, is also
included in God’s own being. Thus the
early believers learned to know the threeness of God, whose praise they
included in their doxologies.
II Corinthians 13:11-13.
The Epistle reading
contains such a doxology.
The last few words of the letter from the apostle
show how early Christians expressed their best wishes to each other. Here, these seem hurried, almost jumbled – a
few bullets in a memo.
Put things in order.
Listen to my appeal.
Agree with one another.
Live in peace – and the God of love and peace will
be with you.
Greet one another with a holy kiss.
All the saints greet you. (Verses 11-12, NRSV.)
And then the benediction, blessing with words that express the threeness of
God as these believers have come to experience it.
The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God,
and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.
Matthew 28:16-20
And in the Gospel reading – the closing words of the Gospel According to Matthew – we have one of
the greatest expressions of the threeness of God that comes from the early believers.
Matthew here presents an appearance of the risen
Jesus to the disciples in Galilee, rather than in Jerusalem Galilee , on “the mountain to which Jesus had directed them” that the final
commission to the disciples is given (Matthew 28:16, NRSV ). Besides
this passage in Matthew, Mark also shows that originally Jesus would appear only
in Galilee to the disciples (Mark 14:28 and 16:7).
For Mark and Matthew, Jerusalem Galilee is the place to go and live again.
In any case, in Matthew the Jesus story ends with Jesus
sending the disciples to “make disciples of all nations.” (“Nations,” ta ethne, we may recall, is mistakenly rendered in English as
“Gentiles,” its Latin translation.) “The
nations” certainly includes all the Judeans gathered from other countries at
Pentecost (Acts 2:9-11) as well as the non-Judean people among them! The apostles are to go, “baptizing them in
the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them
to obey every thing that I have commanded you” (verses 19-20).
This teaching
(the Gospel According to Matthew)
begins with John the Baptist, only now it is a baptism in the name of the
three-fold character of God. After this
baptism, the peoples of the nations will continue by learning the Sermon on the
Mount and then the other blocks of teaching material in Matthew’s Gospel.
This sequence of teachings, in the name of the
three-persona God, is what the Lectionary Gospel readings in Matthew will lead
us through in the next few months.
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