KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 18 September
Where are you?
“Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” God asks Job out of the whirlwind. Where are we is equally an important question in the opening chapters of Genesis. Where do we fit in the order of things? In Genesis One we are there, I have suggested, first in our thinking after God in his creative acts and, then, explicitly in our being made in the image of God. Nothing speaks more completely to the truth of human dignity. The point is that we are connected to everything in the created order and have a special relation to God as made in the image of the one who calls everything into being. Made in the image of God means that we are emphatically not God. To be made in the image of God bestows a certain dignity that should shape our relationships with everything else in the created order, including one another.
Genesis Two provides another account. Rather than locating our humanity within the grand pageant of creation as an orderly affair, the focus turns, in a more intimate and unabashedly anthropomorphic way, to our humanity itself. But it must come as a bit of a surprise since it seems to offer a complete contrast. We go, it seems, from dignity to dust. “Remember, O man, that thou art dust.” It marks an important spiritual act of remembrance. But from dignity to dust!? How are we to think this?
These two chapters of Genesis have existed side by side for more than two millennia. Rather than seeing them in contrast or even in contradiction with one another, we can see them as complementary. To be reminded that man is formed from the dust of the ground – the word adam comes from adamah meaning the ground – not only humbles us but grounds us, connecting us with everything that belongs to the material and physical world. We are the dust into which God has breathed his spirit. Such is the dignified dust of our common humanity. This serves as a check perhaps upon our hubris and arrogance and the misuse of our God-given domination of the world which can really only properly mean our acting in the image of the Dominus, the Lord, who calls creation into being and sustains and cares for it. We are in his image as the dust into which God breathes his spirit.