Magazine letter June 2023
As I write, parts of northern Italy have been struggling under almost unprecedented levels of floodwater. We can recall the appalling floods in Pakistan last year, and in other places across the world in recent years.
Rains that seem endless bring to mind that flood of myth and legend – the ancient Mesopotamian flood that inspired the story of Noah and the ark. They turned it into a thought experiment, a daring imagination of what if. It wasn’t global warming that the Hebrew scribes blamed for their flood, for them all things began and ended with God’s will. They used it to express God’s painful, gut-wrenching disappointment in the world of men and women, and perhaps to start again – to sweep it all away and begin afresh with one decent human being and his family.
At the end of the narrative the scribes state two things. The first is that mankind is a hopeless case, and even eliminating all but one family won’t change human inclination from being deeply set against God’s purposes. The propensity of people to go their own way hasn’t changed. For the scribes, hope for mankind will depend on the acceptance by God of mankind’s flawed nature. The acceptance declared by the rainbow, the surrendering of his power over the world, the acceptance that he must let it be.
The second conclusion is that God will nonetheless persist, and sustain his world. He will not let the rebellion of mankind sway him from his grand dream for creation. The flood didn’t changed mankind, but it meant an irreversible change in God, who will now approach his creation with unlimited patience and forbearance. To be sure, God has been committed to his creation from the beginning, but this narrative argues that the commitment is marked by grief, the hurt of betrayal, and that such a commitment on God’s part is costly. The God/world relationship is not simply that of a strong God and a needy world. Now it is a tortured relationship between a grieved God and a resistant world. This is a key insight of the writers of Genesis, that God does not stand outside the hurt like a judge in a courtroom, but that he is intimately connected to the world, but knowing that he must let it be what it will be.
The Hebrew scribes were, of course, commenting on the world of their day, and the nature of mankind to rush headlong to self-destruction, but nothing has changed. The world of men and women continues its resistance, we still ignore the Noahs of our time calling out to us to take another path, we continue our squabbles like children arguing on the deck of the Titanic. Oh how it must grieve the heart of God.
William