Making Things Good [Proper 22B - Genesis 2:18-24]

 The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson

Genesis 2:18-24

 

Making Things Good

 

In the beginning, God was pleased – at least that is the impression one gets when reading the creation story that opens our Bible.  God made and God liked what God made.  Everything is evaluated and called good.  Water = good.  Dry land = good.  Plants yielding seed = good.  Lights in the dome of the sky = good.  Winged birds, great sea monsters, even creeping things = good.  God makes things and those things are good.  But it gets better; God decides that the whole is actually greater than the sum of the parts.  After stepping back and evaluating all of those good things together, God decides that the whole of creation is, in fact, very good.  God is pleased.

 

But in all of that goodness, there is still something amiss; something is not quite right.  God continues to look around at this very good creation until God finds something that is not good.  Which I guess is the text’s way of telling us that God is pretty obviously a perfectionist - because that definitely seems like something a perfectionist would do.

 

After all of the good, God says, “It is not good that the man should be alone.”  Except that is not exactly what God says.  That is what our translation this morning says; the Hebrew is a little different.  The Hebrew text, the original text, does not say man.  It says human.  You might not think that matters, but actually it does.

 

There is a lot of word play in the Hebrew Scriptures.  We miss some of that because we read the Bible, at least most of us do, in English.  And there is nothing wrong with that; we read in the language we know.  That is why folks keep translating our ancient texts: so we can read them.  Historically we have learned that when the text is inaccessible people do not read it; and it is difficult to know the Bible, the stories of salvation history, if we cannot access them.  And so one might say it is good that we have Bibles in our language.  Probably God would even say it is good.  Because we can read the Bible, we know that is something God likes to say.

 

What we miss in today’s story from the book of Genesis, is that God does not say, “It is not good that the man should be alone.”  God actually says, “It is not good for the human to be alone.”  Perhaps you think I am splitting hairs here, but I assure you that I am not.  There is a Hebrew word for man; it is even used in today’s passage.  Just not at the beginning of the passage.  Here the author uses a non-gendered term that simply means human.  All of us, regardless of our gender identity, are adam.

 

That is the Hebrew word for human: adam.  That is very intentional because God creates the human from the ground, the soil, the humus.  The Hebrew word for soil is adamah.  So, Hebrew word play, the adam is created from the adamah, the human from the humus.  Clever stuff.

 

And that matters in this passage.  God sees that this human, this one human from whom the entire human race descends, is alone.  And God thinks that is not good.  And so God goes back to the soil, to the adamah, to make things right, to make things good.

 

Like a magician, pulling an assortment of props from a black top hat, God starts pulling things up from the dirt.  God is getting those creative hands dirty once again.  God pulls these creatures out and parades them in front of the human.  The human gives them names, but not one of the many options seems a suitable partner.  Not the cattle; not the birds of the air; not the animals of the field.  Not one of the animals God pulled from the earth appears to the human to be a good partner; not a conversation partner, business partner, sexual partner, life partner, or even partner in crime among them.  Things are then still not good.

 

God refuses to give up.  The dirt does not seem to be producing the right stuff, and so God considers another building material.  If a suitable partner is not in the adamah, perhaps there is one in the adam – similar but different stuff.    

 

God knows this going to hurt, and so God puts the human to sleep; God puts the human under, if you will.  And once the human is asleep, God begins what we would think of as a very intense surgical procedure.  Now, there is a long history of translating what God took from the human as rib.  Having a rib removed probably would be a painful surgery; you would want to be asleep for that.  But the word often translated as rib is found elsewhere in the Bible.  And in the other places it is not translated as rib but as side.  And I think that gives us a better idea of what is happening here.  The human is being cut in two.  You definitely want to be put under for that kind of surgery. 

 

The human wakes up and now there are two humans: a couple of partners, similar but different.  Both the similarities and differences are quite obvious because at this point they are both naked. 

 

Once there are two pieces, once the human had been divided by God, the author, for the first time in this story, uses the words for man and woman.  Out of the one human came the possibility of humanity. 

 

The moment the two meet is the first time in the Bible someone other than God speaks.  The man speaks of the woman.  There is conversation because there is now, finally, a partner.

 

The two are from one.  And though half, they are whole.  And though they were separated, they are made to be together.  They are blood.  They are family.  The text begins with loneliness; it ends with companionship.  And it tells us that this is the work of God.  God created us to be in relationship.  It is one of the things that makes the world good.

 

And that could be marriage; this text certainly speaks to that specific type of relationship – although in a way that would have subverted ancient expectations and norms.  In the ancient world, typically the woman left her family to join the man’s household; that is exactly the opposite of what this ornery writer of Genesis suggests.  Scandalous.

 

But this text also speaks more generally.  Not everyone is called to marriage; we know that.  But everyone is called to relationship, more specially to live in reconciled relationship with others.  We are meant to see in the other humans, with whom we share this vast creation, an ancient connection, to remember that the God who fashioned me also created you.  To remember that long, long ago, God made good the one thing that was not good by creating human relationship. 

 

We are connected, made for and from, each other.  Bone of bone and flesh of flesh.  The very first human was hand-made by God.  God covered the person in dirty fingerprints.  And those fingerprints remain; they are a birthright; they can never be washed off.  We all wear them – to remind us that we, each one of us, were created of the same stuff – created to be a human family – God’s final good creation – so that no one ever has to be alone.