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Baresheet bara elohim et hashimayim
vaet ha-aretz... thus begins the book of Genesis. In a beginning, God
created the heavens and the earth... and we know how it continues:
the earth was formless and void. The story of creation began with a
formless universe, one in which all the components of life swirled
and moved without discernable order; it was chaos. Then God spoke.
And the Word of God was unlike anything else that had ever
happened—it was a force which turned the proteins and carbons into
organized elements, which caused cells to come together and then
divide, which caused life to begin. The Word of God was action and it
made a world that existed in a state of shalom—not just peace, but
wholeness. Very briefly, we thrived in this world of wholeness; of
shalom.
And then came un-creation. Humans,
actively rebelling against God's beautiful, ordered universe peaked
outside of that order, opening the metaphorical door just a crack,
and chaos flooded back into the world. Suddenly things that were made
became unmade: order, relationships, lives. Since the moment of
uncreation, or what we call the fall, the violence of chaos entered
the world, and we became active participants. It wasn't long before
the first murder took place. Cain met his brother's giving heart and
generosity with violence, and soon the world degenerated into such
violence and brutality that God was sorry that humans had ever been
created, and he destroyed everyone except for one righteous family.
But even Noah fell into drunken disorder, and from there came Sarah's
violence toward her handmaiden Hagar, who she gave to her husband,
and Jacob's wrestling match with God and Joseph's brothers violently
throwing him into a pit and selling him into slavery. Where once
there was a harmonious picture of creation, only a jumble remained,
and it just got worse from there. Slavery, idols and human sacrifice,
war, captivity... What was God to do in the face of this ever
degenerating world?
God had tried to start clean by the
flood, but loved us too much to put an end to humankind. God wanted
instead to redeem us, so God gave us the law to try to guide us, but
we rebelled against that too. The law gave some kind of order, but it
wasn't the same kind of order as God had first made. It wasn't
shalom. So God spoke again. This time, the Word that God spoke became
embodied in human form and walked on earth. Jesus began to undo the
violence and uncreation that we enacted. Jesus preached, speaking a
Word like the Word that God had spoken, which rejected violence for
relationships. Jesus healed, taking the destruction of decay,
disease, congenital illness, psychological damage, and even death,
and restored things nobody thought could be fixed. Jesus even turned
the social order upside down by rejecting the type of rigid order
that the law enacted and replacing it with the kind of order that
promoted wellness and relationships. For a while it seemed like it
was making a difference and people were going to be swept up in this
radical movement.
But God knew that the human propensity
for uncreation would overwhelm, so Jesus had prepared to do something
even more radical than fight against uncreation one illness, one
person at a time. Jesus went to Jerusalem and was welcomed with
expectation and happiness, with the people waving palms and laying
down their coats. He entered into chaos and the pharisees tried to
quiet the chaos. They wanted order, a kind of worldly, shallow peace
that we laugh at when a Miss America contestant declares her desire
for “world peace”--what they wanted was an absence of conflict.
Jesus wasn't bringing the order that we wanted or expected, and so
again we acted violently. A crowd of welcome turned into a mob
shouting crucify him, crucify him! And so they led him to a brutal
death; the death of a prisoner, a death like a gay man attacked in
the South; a death like a family murdered in Sudan; a death like the
long, drawn out illness of a family member. The solution to violence
became violence, and so the cycle continued. And so the story ended.
But Jesus wasn't just a man. Remember
who we said he is? He is the embodiment of the divine Word that was
spoken in creation, where chaos and not-creation turned into life
flowing from the force of all order. Jesus was the one the prophets
spoke of, who was supposed to turn swords into plowshares and spears
into pruning hooks; implements of death into tools used to nurture
and sustain life. And so how could he be defeated by our human
brutality? For God the story can't end there. The story continues in
the transformation of human violence into something more than
peace—into a wholeness that calls us beyond our childish
understanding of peace into a new creation where all the things that
were once used to destroy become things which engender life. It is
only God, whose very words are a force of creation, that can
transmute even violence itself into peace. And so we walk with Christ
to the cross, understanding our brutal, broken nature which led him
there, waiting for Easter... Amen.
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