Year B: February 21, 2021 | Lent 1
Lent 1, Year B: Genesis 9:8-17 | Mark 1:9-15
Episcopal Church of the Holy Cross
February 21, 2021
the Rev. Jonathan Hanneman
To watch a video of the sermon, please visit this page (about 24:05 in).
Noah and the Ark is one of the Bible’s most popular stories. Even in our post-Christendom society, go into a baby store, and you’re almost certain to find it referenced somewhere around the shop. We start telling it to the youngest of children, singing about a boat and lions and elephants and giraffes marching two-by-two. But have you ever thought about how weird that is? Does the presence of a rainbow or “every wild animal of every kind, and all domestic animals of every kind, and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth, and every bird of every kind”[1] really justify turning a tale about cosmic genocide into a bedtime story? Does a (somewhat) happy ending do anything to make this global tragedy anything less than a horror story?
We do this a lot, gliding past the hard parts of life and overemphasizing peripheral distractions, even with our modern myths. «-Spoiler alert for the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies: if you haven’t yet seen all the Avengers movies but still plan to, you might want to plug your ears for the next minute or so.-» At the end of Infinity War, the third movie in the Avengers series, the bad guy, Thanos, succeeds in wiping out half of all life not just on earth but throughout the universe in order to restore what he calls “balance.”[2] Endgame, set five years later, then begins with an exploration of how “the snap” affected those who survived. At the end of the movie, the good guys finally overcome the villain, reverse the snap, and restore the entirety of the population that had been wiped out. We cut to people celebrating the return of loved ones, happy teenagers reuniting at school, and other scenes of joy. Not until the new Wandavision series do we begin to glimpse the chaos and challenges a sudden redoubling of earth’s population brings—especially when half of them, on top of not aging, have no idea that they’ve been dead for five years.
Happy ending? Yyyeeeesss—more or less. Does it really clean up the traumatization for the characters or audience? No, not at all.
Today marks our return to the season of Lent. As such, I think it’s important that we slow down to consider the Bible’s stories as they come to us. As Jesus begins his 40 days of temptation in the wilderness this week, I want us to fight the temptation to skip over our own 40 day journey. With the holidays long gone and still no certain end to the pandemic in sight, this Lent isn’t a bad time to regather ourselves, stopping to pause and reflect, an opportunity to recognize our own very real mortality and to prepare ourselves to follow Jesus into suffering and death. And yes, we know the end of his story, but that doesn’t mean he did.[3] Jesus and his early followers had no spoiler alerts! Just like with our own life stories, a happy ending wasn’t guaranteed—and Jesus endured a tremendous amount of struggle and tragedy to get to one.
Going back to our Hebrew Bible passage, I want to take some time to look at this story in its broader context, to focus on the “why” of the telling before the “what” that we read today.
So, Noah.
Basic summary: Humanity has flourished since the days of Creation. However, society has become such that everybody on earth is always and only planning evil and violence toward their neighbor. God looks down, sorry about ever making people in the first place, and decides to wipe us all out, fully recognizing that the animals and birds will be collateral damage. But then God’s like, “Eh—I guess Noah’s okay,” and warns Noah and his family to rescue the animals from the impending global flood by building a giant boat. Noah obeys, saving his wife and three sons and their wives along with at least one male and female of every type of animal or bird. Everybody else—everybody—then dies in a flood that keeps rising for 40 days (hence our reading’s connection with the 40 days of Lent), until even the top of the highest mountain is more than 20 feet underwater. A little over a year later, the waters have subsided. The plants have grown enough to provide some food, and the ground is dry enough to walk on. So the animals and Noah’s crew all disembark. Noah offers a sacrifice of each of the appropriate[4] animals and birds. God says the seasons will be stable from now on, establishes the beginning of Kosher dietary laws, and reiterates that humanity is made in God’s image. That’s where we finally hit today’s reading, where a rainbow becomes the promise that God won’t ever flood the earth like that again. A couple chapters—and at least a thousand years after all that—Abraham’s story begins.
But did you know that the story of Noah and the Ark isn’t unique? It turns out global flood stories were fairly common in cultures across the Ancient Near East, as were variations of many of Israel’s formative stories and songs of worship. But while the similarities are striking, the differences—primarily the reasons for and consequences after the flood[5]—are where my interest lies.
In the Bible, God decides to wipe out humanity because of our constant inclination to evil and violence. In the region’s other variants—and in an interesting nod to Thanos in Infinity War—the gods are generally annoyed with human overpopulation. Where God warns Noah to build the ark and save the animals, in the other stories, one of the gods feels bad about the impending doom and secretly warns someone about it. With Noah, God accomplishes all God’s plans and then promises to preserve life for the rest of time. With the others, the gods, upset that their plans have been thwarted, decide to manage the human population through infertility, infant mortality, and other common yet inexplicable blights on human life.
While it most certainly doesn’t explain away the planned destruction of all human and animal life, it does make for an interesting contrast. It’s almost like Israel, though embedded in their region’s broader cultural traditions, was hoping to reform its neighbors’ views of the divine.
But there’s something else here that interests me, too.
A few weeks ago we talked about the ancient understanding of water as the physical embodiment of primordial chaos. While preparing that sermon, I read ahead in the Lectionary and discovered that Noah was coming up. Then it hit me: what if this story isn’t necessarily about divine judgment? What if God didn’t send the flood? What if we read this as God simply giving humanity the very thing it proved itself to have most desired?
Remember that in the ancient cosmos, the gods were the ones who kept the sea—and therefore chaos—at bay, constantly working to provide order and protect humanity. But if humanity then began to seek out chaos—to plan evil and work harm to all of their neighbors—then chaos and disorder had already spread across the land, simply in a different form. If primordial chaos had already enveloped humanity from the inside out, what was the point in wasting energy holding back the ocean? The people had embodied the spirit of chaos, so God simply unleashed the waters, allowing their physical and spiritual essences to reunite. While it was certainly still an act of judgment, it sounds more like the kind of sad judgment that comes by finally removing barriers to the full consequences of exactly what people have been clamoring for.
It isn’t hard to draw connections from that to our recent climate, medical, and political upheavals. We’ve had plenty of warning, but most of us didn’t care enough to take it seriously. So now all of us pay the price.
And yet, in spite of my desire and earlier urging to stay in the present, to experience the reality of our stories as they occur, I can’t help but peek ahead at the hope the end of this story offers. The rainbow isn’t the sort of lazy, cosmetic promise we might take it to be. It isn’t just about no more mythical-level floods or God apologizing for giving us exactly what we asked for. We have to remember that, in that era, the bow is primarily a military weapon. Capable of killing an enemy from a distance, the bow, along with its arrows, was an important and fearful weapon in the ancient world, probably ideologically akin to our idea of snipers or stealth drone attacks. The bow embodied death at a distance. An archer didn’t necessarily see the effects of their work. They didn’t have to watch at close hand the horror of blood splattering to the ground or hear their dying enemies cries or watch their eyes fading as they fell. The bow was powerful and impersonal, a weapon of fear and surprise. Its user had the physical and emotional space not just to be inhumane to the enemy but to become completely inhuman in themself. Their personal actions had no immediate consequences.
So if the bow momentarily transformed an archer from an ordinary human into one of the gods, what might it do in the hands of a genuine god?
Suddenly “the snap” doesn’t sound so unreal.
But here in our story, we don’t find an angry God or one bent on vengeance against human enemies. From the earliest chapters of its first book, the Bible offers us a God who not only denounces the heavens’ historical war against humanity by hanging up the cosmic bow but turns that weapon against God’s own self. This is more than a cease-fire agreement or an armistice. It’s even more than a full-fledged peace treaty. The hanging of the cosmic bow with its arch upward is God’s promise to destroy the heavenly realms before ever again surprising the earth with complete destruction. God will no longer sit at a distance, impersonally judging humanity. Instead, God chooses to come close, to enter into relationship with Creation. God will no longer act dispassionately from afar but will know the experience and consequences of any actions firsthand. Humanity no longer needs to blindly grope for some hint or hope of God’s presence. God has come—in peace and reconciliation—to us.
And so we arrive at today’s Gospel, back to the opening chapter of Mark. Jesus has fled humanity for forty days, accompanied only by wild animals and the adversarial temptations facing him. Yet even in this self-imposed isolation, God sends messengers to care for him.[6] When Jesus returns to his people, his confidence in God’s love and presence is assured. And throughout these forty days of Lent, he offers us the same message of peace and empowerment he spread 2,000 years ago: “Now’s our chance: God’s Reign is in our hands—think it over, and be faithful to this good news!”[7]
[1] Genesis 7:14 (NRSV)
[2] And—according to the original comics—as a sacrifice of dedication to Lady Death, but that isn’t mentioned in the movie.
[3] Depending on how you understand the divine-human mystery.
[4] Noah’s story is the first reference in the Bible to “clean” animals and birds.
[5] https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/first-sunday-in-lent-2/commentary-on-genesis-98-17-5
[6] Actually “to deacon” to him
[7] Mark 1:14 (my [admittedly loose] translation)