The following is a column I wrote for our Parish newsletter in April 2014:
...and the earth was filled with violence. -- Genesis 6:11
"I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters
of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth." -- Genesis 9:11
Jesus said [on Easter Evening], "Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer
these things and then enter into his glory?" Then beginning with Moses and all the
prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures. -- Luke
24:26-27
I'd like to connect the dots on these Bible passages, drawing a line from the story of Noah
and the Flood to our Holy Week journey this month. (We will read the Flood story during our
Easter Vigil worship April 19.) The Bible's Flood story (Genesis 6-9) is getting significant
exposure in our culture right now because of the Hollywood version in the movie
Noah, starring
Russell Crowe. This exposure is an opportunity for today's outspoken atheists to make their
claim that humanity no longer needs gods who perform genocides that include drowning babies.
Have you ever tried responding to such challenges among your friends, or family? Perhaps
you've struggled with such questions yourself. How is it that the loving God we meet in Jesus
Christ drowns basically
everyone in trying to solve the problem of violence?
Let me be blunt: if we don't let Jesus himself teach us to read the Scriptures according to
himself, then our Christian faith will be lost. The story of the Flood is a prime example. Christ
came to show us who God truly is. So we should be able to understand that gods who command
genocidal floods are the gods of old -- the gods who in every culture command a good and
sacred violence to stop the flood of human violence. The God who places a rainbow covenant in
the sky -- precisely as a promise to never try to solve the problem of violence by
inflicting more
violence -- is the God we meet in Christ. God on the cross
suffers our violence.
So what do we say about all the parts of the Bible where "God" kills or commands killing?
This, to me, is the most important question to get right in learning to read Scriptures according to
Christ. During the Easter season, we will also read heavily from the Book of Acts, where the first
half features five sermons from the Apostle Peter. Despite the varying situations and overall
messages of these five sermons, each one of them contains the central point we need to see in
undergoing the story of Christ's death and resurrection. In all five, Peter says, 'we kill, God
raises.' It's human beings who have the problem with violence, not God.
And a huge part of our problem is that the only way we human beings have ever been able to
fully trust in solving
our problem with violence is to use a counter-violence -- just like God
supposedly did with the Flood. What I'm saying, then, is this: if we don't learn to see the God
who slaughters everyone in the Flood as the false gods of human cultures, then we are losing the
revelation of God in Christ -- the God who is revealed in the rainbow promise at the end of the
Flood story.
Which brings us again to the essential importance of anthropology to our faith. We must
understand what the Bible, coming to fulfillment in Christ, is trying to show us about ourselves.
The Flood story is an ideal example, because similar flood stories are present across the globe. It
gives us the opportunity to see how the Bible's Flood story is different. The Bible's story is the same in seeing a
god who uses violence to try to stop violence. But it's different in showing us a God who promises
never to do this. God on the cross in Jesus teaches us how to understand this difference.
And it's growing more urgent that we do so, because we now possess the technology to
destroy ourselves with our own violence. Actually, that's precisely why flood stories are so
universal in human culture. Since our beginnings as a species, we've feared wiping ourselves out
through our own contagious violence. A common image for this fear has been an all-engulfing
flood. The Genesis story names this flat-out: "The earth was filled with violence." Just like the
flood by which God supposedly uses in trying to stop it! But god using a flood belies that age-old
human
answer of trying to stop violence with violence.
Without going into all the details of the anthropology here, let's at least name God's startling
alternative to our human answer of stopping violence by
inflicting a counter-violence. God
suffers our violence on the cross, shows it to be impotent compared to God's life-giving power of
love on Easter, and enacts the healing power of forgiveness in the giving of the Spirit. The cross
and resurrection
is God saving us from the flood of our human violence that threatens to destroy
us.
Where is that salvation? Why is the world still so filled with violence? Remember, God's
way is not to use counter-force, so the transformation will not happen with the speed or methods
we typically choose. It might look more like the movement Gandhi began in having faith in Jesus' Sermon
on the Mount. That's why we emphasize faith in God's way, trying to understand the ways in
which it's different from our ways.
Let me finish, then, by suggesting that the cross and resurrection can turn the Flood story into
a different sort of parable. Learning to interpret the Scriptures according to Jesus might suggest
the following kind of twist that Jewish philosopher Günther Anders offered under the shadow of
nuclear proliferation. He pictures Noah as prophetically making a public show of mourning in
advance of the Flood, and writes,
Soon a small crowd of curious people had gathered around him. They asked him
questions. They asked if someone had died, and who the dead person was. Noah replied
to them that many had died, and then, to the great amusement of his listeners, said that
they themselves were the dead of whom he spoke. When he was asked when this
catastrophe had taken place, he replied to them: "Tomorrow." Profiting from their
attention and confusion, Noah drew himself up to his full height and said these words:
"The day after tomorrow, the flood will be something that will have been. And when the
flood will have been, everything that is will never have existed.
When the flood will have
carried off everything that is, everything that will have been, it will
be too late to remember, for there will no longer be anyone alive. And
so there will no longer be any
difference between the dead and those who mourn them. If I have come before you, it is in
order to reverse time, to mourn tomorrow's dead today. The day after tomorrow it will be
too late." With this he went back whence he had come, took off the sackcloth [that he
wore], cleaned his face of the ashes that covered it, and went to his workshop. That
evening a carpenter knocked on his door and said to him: "Let me help you build the ark,
so that it may become false." Later a roofer joined them, saying: "It is raining over the
mountains, let me help you, so that it may become false." (1)
Brothers and Sisters in Christ, may our journey through the grief of Good Friday and the
promise of Easter call us to work on the ark of God's salvation in Christ, the work of love and
forgiveness, so that our way of violence may become false.
Peace,
Paul
Nuechterlein
1. This version of Anders' parable is from Jean-Pierre Dupuy's
The Mark of the Sacred
(Stanford, 2013), p. 203, who makes the following citation (footnote 14): Quoted in Thierry
Simonelli,
Günther Anders: De la désuétude de l'homme (Paris:
Editions du Jasmin, 2004), 84-85. The emphasis is mine. Simonelli very
closely follows Anders's German text, found in the
first chapter of
Endzeit and Zeitenende (Munich: Beck, 1972), a
work that has not yet been translated into either French or English.
Anders told the story of the flood elsewhere and in other
forms, particularly in
Hiroshima ist überall (Munich: Beck, 1982).
