We complex creatures, though created in God’s image, have sometimes indulged in the unfortunate habit of being wrong, of mistaking the purpose of our creation. The notion of dominion, in particular, has proven particularly irksome in our fallible hands.
We have interpreted the Genesis instruction that we “subdue” the earth to mean that we can bend it to our wills and whims (Genesis 1:29). We have not always paid homage to God’s creations; we have often humiliated them.
Environmentalists have long and loudly bemoaned the manipulation of that verse. We have exercised our dominion by mining our lands for resources, bleeding them until they collapse, exhausted and anemic. The notion of “dominion” has felled forests and hills. It has enabled us to taint and otherwise alter our oceans and fresh waters in the name of progress. The idea of dominion over animal life, similarly, has led to willfully taken liberties which are hard to excuse.
And yet our readings this week highlight a further area of abuse: they align creation to God’s goodness, align existing in the Divine image to the spreading of the gospel truth. To be an evangelist, in the Gospel sense, means to spread God’s good news; this extends to the gift of creation, to the beauty in all formed by heaven’s hands, and to awe over those gifts and blessings. In the 8th Psalm, the psalmist, with wonder, says “when I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?” (Psalm 8:4-5)
The offering of “dominion” to humankind was not the passing of a baton: God did not make us rulers over the earth, nor was true control over it relinquished. We were made, as many have suggested, its stewards. We are its tenants and the beneficiaries of its grandeur. We have the dominion, the power and the room to love it; we do not have the right to reduce it. The Psalm thus winds out of our consciousness this week not focusing on us, but on the whole of creation as a testament: “O LORD, our Sovereign, how majestic is your name in all the earth!” (Psalm 8:9)
To love God, we must honor what God made. The good news, and the challenge, is that this extends to ourselves. We were blessed with self-dominion: the grace of awareness, the ability to form a conscience guided by holiness, informed by wonder.
It extends, further, to one another. The gift of Christ was a reminder that we can live in radical community—that love can become a method by which we bind to one another, by which we strengthen and affirm our ties to the Holy. Paul enjoins “agree with one another, live in peace; and the God of love and peace will be with you” (2 Corinthians 13:11). Where we are conscientious, where we invite the Spirit and welcome grace, there is God. There our “dominion” comes to fullest fruition.
Alongside environmental injustices, therefore, we have to reckon the injustices which we visit upon one another. Environmentalists and animal activists have long denounced what we’ve done to the natural world in the name of dominion; our need to control and subdue one another has proven similarly disastrous. We raise ourselves unnaturally high and then forget to take care of our neighbors.
From Syria, we hear news of hundreds of innocents falling beneath a callous government which seeks to punish the population for breeding dissidents. Our president is pressed to declare war on Libya, where injustices against our neighbors are also rampant. The so-called “Arab Spring” is so colored by atrocities against mankind that the vibrant evocations of the name come to seem inappropriate. Life has become less, not more, verdant for so many who offended those in power simply by asking that their dignity be honored.
Here at home, we hurt each other, too. We restrict programs which aide those in need with arbitrary and humiliating new requirements, often in the name of respecting the limitations of our budget. We demonize our neighbors to the South, absurdly turning “immigrant” into a slanderous term, forgetting that we, ourselves, are a nation of immigrants. We allow fear to make us cruel.
Our women are subject to violence. There exist serious gaps in legal systems which could prevent it, but find themselves ill-equipped to actually do so. In all of this: we fail to respect the implications of the “dominion” which we were formed to exercise.
In our reading from Matthew, Jesus sends the disciples out to spread word of the Holy. He proclaims total authority in heaven and on Earth, and simultaneously enables them to proclaim this. As a grace. As a gift. As a continuation of creation.
“I am with you always, till the end of the age,” Jesus proclaims (Matthew 28:20). This serves as a clarification of the first chapter of Genesis: God, resting from the work of creating, gives human beings dominion not in God’s stead, but so they may understand, from a blessed perspective, the goodness of the gift. God stands them up before all created under heaven and declares, “this was for you.” God is with us always, until the end of the age.
To dishonor what God formed disgraces the gift of radical Divine love. When we are careless with the Earth, with its living creatures and with one another, we effectively forget these humbling and wonderful verses. We are careless with the Word when we are careless with creation.
We cannot claim, with integrity, to belong to God without also respecting the godly—a spectrum which encompasses all of creation. The gift begins and ends with us.
No comments:
Post a Comment