KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 3 October
Where are you?
The story of the Fall in Genesis 3 confronts us with five compelling and intriguing questions which reverberate throughout the pageant of Scripture. They connect as well to the philosophical traditions about what it means to be human and about our relationship to the world. They especially concern what is, perhaps, the distinguishing feature of modernity, namely, the question and issue about self-consciousness. How do we come to know ourselves as selves?
The first question is the question of the serpent in the Garden. “Did God say?” it asks. The other four questions are the questions of God to our humanity, ‘Adamah, now distinguished as Adam and Eve. “Where are you?” God asks Adam. “Who told you that you were naked?” and “Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?” God asks him. To the woman, he then asks, “What is this that you have done?”
In the story of Cain and Abel that follows upon this chapter, the Lord asks Cain, “Where is Abel your brother?” and, to his evasive response, then asks, “What have you done?” All the questions of God to our humanity in this mythological and poetic form serve to call us to account, to truth, and as such belong to our awakening to self-consciousness. The questions seek to make us aware of ourselves and of the radical nature of ourselves as rational creatures who are ultimately responsible for our thoughts and actions. In a way, these questions reach a kind of crescendo of intensity in God’s great question to suffering Job: “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth … when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?” The question recalls us at once to creation and to our separation from the Creator and his creation and thus to the pageant of redemption. Job, too, is being called to account about the meaning of the Law in terms of the prior order of creation upon which the Law of Moses ultimately depends.
In Luke’s introduction to his famous parable of the Good Samaritan, Jesus asks a questioning and cynical lawyer, “What is written in the Law? How do you read?” and, then, in the conclusion of the parable that illustrates the love of neighbour, a further question, “Which of these three, do you think, was neighbour unto him that fell among the thieves?” In every case, the questions of God seek to convict our consciences and in so doing awaken us to the greater truth of his creation of which we are a part but from which we have departed. Such is the radical meaning of the Fall.
