KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 8 October
In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground
Ah, the curses of work and labour! There is, it seems, no escaping the reality of the Fall. It means a different relation to the world and to one another and all because of a falling out, we might say, with God occasioned by our deceit and disobedience.
We return this week after the Thanksgiving Break to consider the further consequences of the Fall in the Third Chapter of Genesis. In a way, it connects with some of the themes of thanksgiving since bread is very much an aspect of our human engagement through work with the good order of creation. It means that nothing is simply ready at hand; labour is one of the consequences of the Fall, one of the curses. And yet, in and through our labours with the good order of God’s creation, blessings are found. We can learn about what we experience. The Fall means that good and evil, which are known to God through intellect, are known to us through experience. Yet through our experience of estrangement and separation, we may come to learn intellectually and ethically about good and evil.
The so-called curses that are the fall-out of the Fall are also about a kind of falling into reason. The awareness of ourselves as self-conscious beings means our awareness not only of the otherness of God and of one another but of the natural world itself. To live requires now our self-conscious effort at the same time as there is our self-conscious awareness of our connection to the world, to the ground itself: “for out of it you were taken; you are dust and to dust shall you return”. This is not really news. The two creation accounts have already and amply chronicled our connection to the ground, to the dust of creation and to every other created thing. What is new is the idea of labour and hard work. “In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread.”
