The Bow Points Up
Lent 1B (Genesis 9:8-17; Psalm 25:1-10; 1 Peter 3:18-22; Mark 1:9-15)
God said: This is the sign of the covenant that I make between you and me and every living creature, for all future generations. I have set my bow in the clouds, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth.
Many ancient cultures told stories and myths about a great and sudden flood. Catastrophes occur on a semiregular basis in all human societies. Floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, wars. Even in our own day, a sudden cold snap takes down much of the infrastructure in Texas. A new virus suddenly emerges and spreads quickly around the world. When these catastrophes happen, there is loss of life, but even for those who survive, life is affected, changed, sometimes permanently. These events that affect communities and whole societies raise deep and troubling questions like How? and Why? And so these stories and myths appear in cultures all throughout the world.
Maybe you’ve heard of the Epic of Gilgamesh. It’s probably one of the oldest human stories that we have, it’s more than 4000 years old, older than even the Bible. It’s a typical ancient story about the adventures of a king named Gilgamesh, of a people called the Akkadians, who lived in what is now Iraq.
In one of these adventures, King Gilgamesh meets a king called Utnapishtim, who tells him the story about how, once, the Akkadian gods tries to kill all human beings in a great flood. That he, Utnapishtim, had survived the flood by building a giant boat, on which he took his family and many animals. He even sent out birds to see when it was safe to come out. And he said when it was over, the gods promised never to do anything like this again. In other words, even in some of the smaller details, it’s a story that sounds a whole lot like the Biblical story of Noah.
And yet, in the most important, the Akkadian story of Utnapishtim and the Biblical story of Noah could not be more different. For one thing, according to the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Akkadian gods decided to wipe out humanity because people were too noisy. The gods just couldn’t sleep at night, because human beings were too loud. And finally one of the gods had enough and sent the flood to quiet things down. Turns out that King Utnapishtim had friends in high places, he got tipped off about what was coming. His first thought was not how to save the people but how he and his family could escape what was befalling everybody else. Like many powerful people, both then and now, if you know what I mean. And that’s why he came up with the idea of the boat.
The Biblical story, however, is quite different. The reason for the flood, we are told in the Scriptures, is not that God is annoyed or bothered by human beings, but that is God is profoundly saddened by human violence. God had created a good world, created human beings in the divine image and likeness, created human beings for a life of communion and joy and love, and somehow it had all gone horribly wrong. First Adam and Eve and the apple, then among the children of Adam and Eve, Cain Abel, murder. And it all went downhill from there.
The Bible says that God was sad, and frustrated. And it got to the point that God regretted every having made human beings at all. If human beings are going to use the gifts of life and of God’s good creation to fight over them, and to kill one another, God said, I’m sorry I did it.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer once said that God’s judgment is really just God consenting to being rejected. And I think that’s what’s happening in the story of Noah. God looks at a world that’s consumed by greed and hatred and revenge and death and says, You obviously don’t want me. You obviously have rejected me. You don’t want my goodness holding all of creation in being. So OK then, have what you want. The song goes, He’s got the whole world in his hands. What happens when God says, OK, you don’t want me anymore, fine, I’ll let go. What happens? Well, in the Bible God created by harnessing and taming the chaos of the waters, confining them to above the sky and in the sea, and so when God lets go of creation, the waters come rushing back.
In the Biblical story, God does not send the food because God is angry with human beings and doesn’t like them any more. That’s the Epic of Gilgamesh version of the story. The biblical story is that the flood is simply the natural result of human beings rejecting God’s desire for human flourishing, and God’s reluctant acquiescence to being rejected. It’s an enormous difference.
Because if you believe that the gods are really out to get us, as the Akkadians did, if you believe that the gods would really kill all humanity because they’re too loud at night – well, then you probably also believe that it would be OK for you to kill your neighbors if they are preventing you from falling asleep. And certainly it would be OK for you to be indifferent to your neighbor’s suffering, if the gods are really that indifferent to our suffering. The Bible says those kinds of stories are exactly the problem. When we believe that’s the way God is, when we stop believing that God really is good and wants what is right for us, that’s when it all goes wrong.
But even in the Biblical story, if God is willing to go along with being rejected by creation, and repents from having created in the first place, the truth is that God must recognize that not everyone has rejected God. Noah has not rejected God. Noah, it is said, is a righteous person. And the animals have not rejected God. And even if God is willing to go along with being rejected by everybody else and letting human violence run its course, God cannot do that to Noah, or to the animals. And so God comes up with a plan for them.
And when the flood was over, God promises to Noah, and to the animals, and to every living thing on the earth, that never again would God use violence in order to restrain human beings. And even when the descendents of Noah descended into violence once again, God remains faithful to that promise. God has promised that, whatever may have happened in the past, God no longer regrets creating us.
And God has promised never again to meet human violence with divine violence. God hangs up God’s bow in the sky; God has gone out of the business of shooting bows and arrows at us forever. In fact, the bow is not pointed down at us. The bow in sky is pointed up at heaven, as if to say that from now on, God will absorb violence rather than inflict it. From now on, God will never use mass violence to coerce human beings into better behavior. From now on, God will try to change our minds.
And so, in today’s gospel passage about the ministry of Jesus, we read that in Jesus, God passes through the waters of baptism. And then, Jesus goes to the wilderness, and in Jesus God spends 40 days, just as Noah spent 40 days listening to the rain. Like Adam in the garden, and like Noah on the ark, Jesus is with the animals. Like Eve in the garden, Jesus battles wits with the devil. The other gospel writers tell us about that battle, but Mark gives us no details. Mark only tells us the outcome.
When Jesus comes out of the wilderness, (1) he announces that the kingdom of God is near, and (2) he tells people: Change your hearts, change your minds and believe this good news. Believe that the kingdom of God is near, trust this good news, change your minds.
The Akkadian gods who unleashed a flood in a fit of rage – they’re not trustworthy. If their kingdom had come near it would not be good news. But the Kingdom of God, the realm where God’s will is done, where justice and mercy prevail, where there is no coercion but only freedom, where communion and love have left no room for violence or indifference to suffering – this Kingdom, Jesus assures us, is and always has been close and hand. If we would only change our way of thinking and trust that this is good news.
The problem is, in this world, following the path, trusting this good news, looks more like hanging up a bow than it does unleashing wrath. It’s less about taking revenge and more about carrying a cross. And so it is scary. In the ministry of Jesus God does what God always does – God points the bow upward, carries the cross, and then invites us to see the empty tomb, that tells us: See, it’s actually all good. You just have to change your mind, change your heart, trust the good news.
As we walk through these forty days of Lent together, no matter what happens in our world, or in our lives, the Kingdom of God is actually very close. It’s in our midst. All we have to do is change our minds, change our hearts, and trust this good news.