The Chosen People’s Experience of God
I recall a simple gesture in one my classes some time ago. A husband arrived late and gave a short, affectionate kiss to his wife of many years as he sat down next to her. That kiss was quite modest yet expressive of a deep reality. It was not just a display of affection. It carried the weight of their mutual journey for better or worse, in sickness and in health over the decades.The Bible is like that kiss. It is a story of love between God and his people. It is simple but also extravagant. It mirrors a story of human allegiance, ambivalence and rejection covering centuries.
The creation accounts in Genesis have their own style. They convey a deeply symbolic message. They contain profound insights about the human experience and our historical reality. Their description of the human venture is rooted in three fundamental and deeply connected relationships: with God, with neighbor and with creation. The Genesis account relates a basic brokenness in these three vital interactions. This is the reality of sin. Our parents set the pattern. We follow it.
Sin leads us to take the place of God at the center of all reality. We refuse to acknowledge the limits of being creatures. While the Bible is the story of salvation, the need for salvation flows from the stories of human rebellion revealed in the first eleven chapters of Genesis.
Pope Francis has a name for this sin that locates ourselves at the center in today’s historical experience. He labels it a “practical relativism” ourselves at the center, giving absolute priority to our immediate convenience and comfort so that all else becomes relative. This relativism, a powerful and pervasive expression of sin in our day, leads to the exploitation and neglect of others in all manner of ways. People are reduced to objects. Abuse of others, especially economically, racially and sexually, is a natural consequence of this way of thinking. This approach features the invisible forces of the market, human trafficking, organized crime, drug trade, and rampant misuse of the land, air and sea, along with forests and all animal life. All these destructive forces flow from this false vision and denial of human dignity. Another expression of this sin is the “use and throw away” routine of a malignant consumerism. This daily corruption of our environment generates a vast waste that is destroying our ecosystem.
The story of salvation, the deliverance from sin and its consequences, both yesterday and today, begins in chapter twelve of Genesis with the call and promise made to Abraham. The story covers almost two thousand years of the evolution of that promise leading to Jesus whose life concludes this epoch struggle of sin and grace.
In its broadest sweep, the story of salvation flows in a time-frame of two thousand years from Abraham to Moses to David. It then moves to the prophets climaxing in Jesus. It is a continual expression of God’s faithfulness and human ambivalence. The story moves from the promise of Abraham becoming the father of a great nation. Moses comes as liberator the people on the way to the Promised Land. The era of David and the kings initiates the idea of hope for God’s final intervention in the person of the Messiah. The enlightenment of the prophets’ message develops and deepens this hope. Along the way, we are gifted with the collective wisdom of the people in many of the other biblical books and stories, especially in the psalms. It also draws us deeper into the mystery of this ever-active, always loving and saving God.
During this entire journey of Abraham’s family who evolve from the twelve tribes into the Chosen People, the hope of the promise advances in spite of the consistent and profound infidelities. Likewise, there is a slow but steady growth in the communal understanding of who God is and what God wants. Many centuries after Abraham, the people came to the deepest truth of all: there is only one God, the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob.
The entire thrust of the movement of this salvation history leads to Jesus, the Word of God. In Jesus, we have the fullness of God’s revelation. We have the invitation into the Mystery of Love.
