Saturday of Week 5 of Ordinary Time – Gospel
Commentary on Mark 8:1-10
Today we have the second of two multiplication stories found in Mark. The first, with 5,000 people, was in a predominantly Jewish area while this one, with 4,000 people, is in mainly gentile territory. Jesus is reaching out to both groups. The people have nothing to eat and are hungry. The meaning is both physical and spiritual.
Once again we see Mark indicating the emotional response of Jesus. He is filled with compassion for the people in their need.
I have compassion for the crowd…If I send them away hungry to their homes, they will faint on the way—and some of them have come from a great distance.
They will collapse “on the way”, i.e. on the road. Jesus is the Way, the ‘Road’. To walk the road of Jesus, we need a certain kind of nourishment. This is what Jesus came to give.
The disciples, interpreting Jesus literally, as they usually do, ask:
How can one feed these people with bread here in the desert?
In the presence of Jesus, the question answers itself, but the disciples have not yet clicked. In Mark’s Gospel, they are often shown to be without an understanding of just who their Master is—that is because they represent us.
The disciples are asked what they can supply. Seven loaves and a few fish is all they have. There is a strong Eucharistic element in this, as in the former story (with the 5,000). The people are told to sit down, and:
…he took the seven loaves, and after giving thanks [Greek, eucharistesas] he broke them and gave them to his disciples to distribute, and they distributed them to the crowd.
Again, we note that Jesus himself does not give out the food the people need. It comes from him, but is distributed by his disciples. The same is true today. It is our task to feed the hungry—both physically and spiritually. All were filled—4,000 people altogether—and even so, there were seven (a perfect number) baskets left over. This was another sign of God’s abundance shared with his people.
As before:
…he sent them away. And immediately he got into the boat with his disciples and went to the district of Dalmanutha. [i.e. back to Jewish territory]
Jesus was leaving no room for any misinterpretations of what he had done. The disciples, too, are quickly removed from the scene. There was to be no self-congratulation or glorying in their connections with Jesus, the wonder worker. Through the miracle, the teaching had been given and that was it.
And so, we pray:
Lord, teach me to serve you as you deserve;
to give and not to count the cost;
to fight and not to heed the wounds;
to labour and seek no reward,
save that of knowing that I do your holy will.
(Prayer of St Ignatius Loyola)
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Friday of Week 5 of Ordinary Time – Gospel
Commentary on Mark 7:31-37
Jesus is still in gentile territory. He has now moved east from the Mediterranean coast to the interior, on the east side of the Sea of Galilee, in the area of the Decapolis (Greek for “Ten Towns”).
A deaf and mute man is brought to Jesus for healing. He takes the man aside, puts his fingers in the man’s ears, touches his tongue with spittle, looks up to heaven and prays, “Be opened”. Immediately the man’s ears are opened, his tongue loosed and he is able to speak plainly. As often happens in this Gospel, the people who witnessed the miracle are told not to say anything about it to anyone:
…but the more he ordered them, the more zealously they proclaimed it.
The people “were astounded beyond measure” and they said:
He has done everything well; he even makes the deaf to hear and the mute to speak.
As often happens in the Gospels, and especially in Mark, what we have here is much more than a miracle story, i.e. the healing of a physical ailment. We are approaching a climactic part of this Gospel, and this passage leads into it. What Jesus does to this man is something that is meant to happen to every one of his followers, including his immediate disciples.
We all need to have our ears opened so that we can hear and understand in its fullness the message of Jesus. In addition to that, once we have heard and understood, the natural consequence is that we go out and speak openly to the world about what we have heard and understood. Both hearing and speaking are inseparable for the Christian disciple.
And so, in the older form of the baptismal rite, the celebrant touched the ears of the one being baptised and put saliva on the lips (saliva was then still believed to have healing powers). This rite symbolises the grace of the sacrament by which the newly baptised (in speaking about an adult) hears and accepts the Word of God, and undertakes the responsibility of proclaiming it in word and action.
And, as in today’s story, when we have truly experienced the power of that message and the love of God in our own lives, we cannot but do what that man did—broadcast it far and wide.
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Wednesday of Week 5 of Ordinary Time – First Reading
Commentary on Genesis 2:4-9,15-17
We have a very different creation story today. This section is chiefly concerned with the creation of Man, the human person. It is much older than the narrative from which we read yesterday (Gen 1:1—2:4) and comes from the ‘Yahwistic Source’ rather than the ‘Priestly Source’. It is not, as is sometimes said, a second creation narrative. Rather it focuses on the creation of Man as distinct from the creation of the world, and is only complete with the separate creation of Woman and the appearance of the first human couple.
Here God is depicted as creating Man before the rest of his creatures, which are made for Man’s sake. It is not realistic, but this is not history and it is certainly not science. The meaning is to show the priority of Man in the order of things on this earth.
In the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, when no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no vegetation of the field had yet sprung up—for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no one to till the ground, but a stream would rise from the earth and water the whole face of the ground—then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being [literally a living “soul”].
The picture is of God working like a potter moulding the human body out of the clay of the earth. In the Hebrew there is a play on the words adam (‘man’) coming from adama (‘the ground’).
In this version of creation, humanity does not—as in yesterday’s reading—appear at the end of a long process of creation when all the lesser creatures were brought into being first, but comes into existence at the very beginning before anything else, even before the plants necessary for his survival.
Only then did the Lord God plant a garden in the east, in Eden (note: the garden is not named Eden, but is in Eden). In this garden, he put the Man. In the garden he also placed every kind of plant that was pleasant to look at, and provided fruit that was good to eat. As well, there was the “tree of life” (a symbol of the immortality which the Man was intended to enjoy) and the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil”.
The name “Eden” is used here as the name of a region in southern Mesopotamia (southern Iraq today), but does not actually correspond to any known site. The term comes from a Sumerian word eden, meaning ‘fertile plain’. A similar-sounding word in Hebrew means ‘delight’, so Eden is understood as a ‘garden of delight’. Through the Greek translation of the Hebrew, we get the word ‘Paradise’ which literally means a ‘pleasure park’.
The man’s responsibility was to cultivate the garden and look after it. The man was also told that he was free to eat nearly all and any of the plants in the garden (including, apparently, fruit from the “tree of life”). The overall impression given is that life was easy and exceedingly pleasant.
But there was one special exception. The man was not to eat the fruit from the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil”. Otherwise he would be doomed to death. Eating the fruit, as we shall see, did not bring about instant death. After eating the fruit, they survived, but death would come as the end of a miserable existence of toil and sorrow. Sin, by separating us from God, can only lead to death.
The Man was master of his world, but with this one exception, it was made clear that God was master of the Man and that this relationship would be acknowledged by the Man’s obedience to this command of the Lord God.
The whole world is God’s gift to us, but we need to remember that we have to enjoy it responsibly and not do it harm. Also, we need always to conform our living to that vision of life that we have received from God through Jesus Christ and his Word. For us, Jesus and his Way is truly a tree of Life:
I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.
(John 10:10)
Monday of Week 5 of Ordinary Time – Gospel
Commentary on Mark 6:53-56
In last Saturday’s Gospel reading, we saw Jesus and the Twelve landing at a remote place by the lake shore to spend a day of quietness and reflection. But as soon as they disembarked, they were met by a huge number of people for whom Jesus, as their Shepherd, was filled with the deepest compassion. After teaching them at length, he arranged with his disciples for the 5,000 people there to be fed.
After this, the disciples were sent off in their boat to Bethsaida. On the way, they ran into a huge storm. In the middle of it, Jesus appeared walking on the water. When he got into the boat and commanded the wind and the waves, there was total calm. In our weekday readings from Mark, these two scenes are passed over at this point (but we will be reflecting on them at another time).
Today we have a passage summarising what Jesus was doing for the people. It indicates the tremendous hunger of the people to be healed and made whole by Jesus. The people recognise him immediately and go everywhere to see him, bringing along those in need of healing. Jesus, in turn, was visiting towns and villages. The sick, strong in their faith, only asked to be allowed to touch the edges of his outer garment, and everyone who touched him was healed and made whole.
Let us pray that our influence on others at home, at work, and elsewhere may have a truly healing effect.
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Thursday of Week 5 of Ordinary Time – First Reading
Commentary on Genesis 2:18-25
We continue the story of the creation of Man. The Man, here clearly understood as male, is still alone on the earth with only the plant life which had been given to him in the Garden.
Now once more, from the soil of the earth, God brings into being all the animals and birds. They are brought to the Man who gives names to them all, a sign that he is responsible for them and is over them:
… and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name.
But the Man still needed “a helper as his partner”. The animals and birds could not fill that role. Without female companionship and a partner in reproduction, the Man could not fully realise his humanity and the command to increase and multiply.
The Man was put into a deep sleep and, as he slept, one of his ribs was removed and the gap covered with flesh. The rib, in its turn, was formed into a Woman, and God then brought her to the Man.
On seeing her the Man is delighted and bursts into song:
This at last is bone of my bones
and flesh of my flesh;
this one shall be called Woman,
for out of Man this one was taken.
Note also here, there is a play on the similar-sounding Hebrew words ishsha (‘woman’) and ishah (‘her man’). The writer then reflects that:
Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh.
They become literally “one flesh”. Classical Hebrew has no specific word for ‘body’. The sacred writer also stresses the fact that conjugal union is willed by God. We have here a beautiful image of marriage, one that has been experienced again and again. Often, it is only when the union is broken by the death of one partner that the closeness of the union is fully realised.
As a final comment, the writer says that, though naked, they “were not ashamed”. This is a sign of their innocence. Nakedness is still a source of shame in our modern world. We are still uncomfortable with nudity.
One by-product of this discomfort is pornography, watched in darkness or read in secret. And there is the exploitation of nudity, where people are reduced to being objects of sexual desire, or reduced to objects of contempt and ridicule. Yet, artists have been constantly enthralled by the beauty of the human body in its natural state, and have created some of the most beautiful creations in painting and sculpture.
The story of the creation of Woman as ‘helpmate’ to the Man also reminds us that perhaps the most ecstatic experience of human living is when a couple, passionately bonded body to body, express their love for each other in a way that cannot be surpassed. Here, body, mind and spirit fuse in one perfect expression of union. Indeed it is not good that a man or a woman “should be alone”.
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Saturday of Week 5 of Ordinary Time – First Reading
Commentary on Genesis 3:9-24
The Man and the Woman now experience the results of their disobedience to God. It begins with a lovely, but sad dialogue between God and the Man and the Woman. God is looking for them in the Garden, asking “Where are you?” God, of course, knows where they are, but he needs to elicit the confession of their sin. The Man says they are hiding because they are naked. Nakedness now fills them with a sense of shame and guilt. They can no longer face their God. Their original innocence is gone, and from now on nakedness is linked to immorality and base desires.
God asks the Man:
Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?
God now interrogates the Man, who blames the Woman, who blames the serpent. God’s judgements, however, are pronounced in the reverse order. What follows provides explanations for the origin of some present-day realities: agriculture, prepared or cooked food, childbearing, family of husband and wife.
We now see a pathetic shifting of responsibility to someone else. First, the Man blames the Woman—the “woman whom you gave to be with me”—even God is being held partly to blame! “Yes, I ate the fruit, but she made me do it.” She, in her turn, blames the serpent for putting temptation in her way:
The serpent tricked me, and I ate.
The Hebrew for the verb “tricked” is hiss’iani and suggests the hissing of the snake.
All now pay the price of their wrongdoing.
The serpent
The serpent is condemned to crawl the earth, forever eating the earth, hinting that in the original creation, the snake was once upright. He will be cursed for ever among all the animals.
From now on, a strange enmity will exist between the Woman and the serpent, and between her offspring and the serpent’s:
…he will strike your head,
and you will strike his heel.
Later theology would see here not just enmity between snakes and humans, but the serpent is identified with Satan, whose eventual defeat seems implied in the contrast between ‘head’ and ‘heel’. Later generations saw in the passage the first promise of a Redeemer for sinful humanity. In that case, the Woman’s offspring is Jesus Christ.
The New Jerusalem Bible has the following comment:
“The Hebrew text, by proclaiming that the offspring of the snake is henceforth at enmity with the woman’s descendants, opposes the human race to the devil and his ‘seed’, his posterity, and hints at ultimate victory. It is the first glimmer of salvation, the proto-evangelium or ‘pre-Gospel’.
The Greek version has a masculine pronoun (‘he’, rather than ‘it’ will bruise…), thus ascribing the victory not to the woman’s descendants in general, but to one Son in particular, and thus providing the basis for the messianic interpretation given by many of the Fathers. The Latin version has a feminine pronoun (‘she’ will bruise…) and since in the messianic interpretation of our text, the Messiah and his Mother appear together, the pronoun has been taken to refer to Mary.” (edited)
The Woman
The Woman will experience great pain when giving birth. She will have a strong desire for her husband, but he will ‘rule over’ her. Women’s historical subordination to the male is presented as a consequence of human events, not an ideal in its own right. Responsibilities of procreation will compromise the freedom of both genders. The Man will ‘rule over’ her, but he will need her to continue his family line.
The Man
In the garden the Man had just to pick the fruit from the trees. Now the tilling of the unfriendly and infertile soil will become a laborious and painful task, resulting often in brambles and thistles. From now on his life will be one of hard physical labour, until the day he goes back to the soil from which he was originally made. Agriculture was a major step in human evolution, but one beset with difficulty and hard work. Unlike the abundant fruit of the Garden just waiting to be picked, bread, for instance, requires many steps and much human cooperation in its preparation. And at the end, the Man will return to the earth from which he came—the first clear indication of human mortality.
In a final touch, we are told that God made skins for the Man and his wife to wear to cover the shame of their nakedness. Some see in this a new alienation between humans and animals, which did not exist in the Garden. Animals now were being killed by humans for food, clothing and other purposes—and humans were often being killed and eaten by animals. Later, the prophet would dream of a day when:
The wolf shall live with the lamb;
the leopard shall lie down with the kid;
the calf and the lion will feed together…[i.e. Paradise regained] (Is 11:6)
At the same time, the Man and the Woman were now able, like God, “…[to know] good and evil”. They now knew all the possible extremes, they knew about sex, mortality and moral distinctions of good and bad, right and wrong. There was a danger that they could reach out to the Tree of Life and win immortality. They must be removed from the Garden and sent back to the earth from which they had originally come. They will have to settle for the modified immortality of succeeding family generations—a human family tree.
To the east of the Garden in Eden, cherubim and a flaming sword were placed to keep the Man and the Woman out and away from the Tree of Life.
Lastly, the Man now gave his wife the name of Eve, which means “bearer of life”. She would be the mother of every person to be born in succeeding ages. This second naming of Woman reflects the couple’s new role as procreators. Much later, spiritual writers liked to take the Latin form of her name Eva and turn it round to read Ave, the word of greeting used by the angel at the Annunciation to Mary, our new Mother.
Obviously, all of this is less a historical account than an explanation why things are the way they are. It is part of the answer to the question we raised earlier: If everything God created was so good, why is there so much pain and suffering in the world? Human pain and sorrows are not intended by God. Evil is the result of our own misbehaviour.
Again, the New Jerusalem Bible comments:
“The punishment is appropriate to the specific functions of each: the woman suffers as mother and wife, the man as bread-winner. The text does not imply that, without sin, woman would have given birth painlessly or that man would not have had to work with sweat on his brow, any more than that, before sin, snakes had feet” [i.e. did not have to crawl on their bellies].
Sin upsets the order willed by God: Woman, instead of being Man’s associate and equal, becomes his seductress, while he for his part reduces her to the role of child-bearer. Man, instead of being God’s gardener in Eden, has to struggle against a now hostile environment. But the greatest punishment is the loss of intimacy with God. These penalties are hereditary. The doctrine of hereditary guilt is not clearly stated until Paul draws his comparison between the solidarity of all in the Saviour Christ and the solidarity of all in sinful Adam (Rom 5). This is the ‘original sin’.
We should avoid a fundamentalist, literal understanding of all this, as if we were dealing with ‘real’ history. What is being said is that the human race, as far back as we can go, has been infected with sinful acts against truth, love and justice and, as a consequence of its own choices, has suffered hardships of all kinds.
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Wednesday of Week 5 of Ordinary Time – Gospel
Commentary on Mark 7:14-23
After defending himself against the accusations of some Pharisees and scribes about his not observing the traditions of the elders, Jesus now turns to the people. He enunciates what for him are the main principles:
- Nothing that goes into the body from outside can make a person ritually or religiously unclean.
- What makes a person unclean is the filth that comes from inside their mind and is spoken through their mouth or expressed in action.
This was a major issue in the earliest days of the Church and was dealt with by the Council of Jerusalem. The story is told in the Acts of the Apostles (chap 15).
The first Christians were all Jews who continued to observe Jewish customs. But when non-Jews began to be accepted into the Christian communities, should they also be obliged to follow these laws and customs? It became clear that, from a religious point of view, no food could be called unclean. This helped to break down the barriers between Jew and Gentile. It has been pointed out that, immediately after this, Jesus entered gentile territory, something he did not often do in his own ministry (see tomorrow’s commentary).
Even Jesus’ disciples seemed shocked by Jesus’ teaching (probably reflecting the reactions of some of the early Jewish Christians). Jesus repeats what he says in the light of the Kingdom he was proclaiming:
He said to them, “So, are you also without understanding? Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile, since it enters not the heart but the stomach and goes out into the sewer?” (Thus he declared all foods clean.) And he said, “It is what comes out of a person that defiles.”
Real uncleanness is in the ‘heart’—i.e. in one’s mind. Real uncleanness comes from within ourselves in the form of:
…sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, debauchery, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.
As Christians, we do not normally worry about clean and unclean foods on religious grounds, but we can sometimes judge people’s religious commitment by their observance or non-observance of purely external things—a nun not wearing a habit, a person not taking holy water on going into the church, or someone taking Communion in the hand versus by mouth.
We may have gotten rid of the problem of unclean foods, but there are many other ways by which we focus on trivial externals while ignoring the real evils, the places where real love is absent—in ourselves.
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Monday of Week 5 of Ordinary Time – First Reading
Commentary on Genesis 1:1-19
Today we begin reading the Book of Genesis and the story of Creation. Although Genesis is at the beginning of the Bible, that does not mean that it was the first book to be written, still less that it represents an “eyewitness account”. In fact, experts distinguish a combination of accounts written at different times. The form we now have is a later, sophisticated work, written with a specific purpose in mind. It is not a scientific account and it does not clash with more recent scientific discoveries because it is written on a completely different level.
It is more about God, and our relationship with God, than about how the world actually came to be. The central message is that there is only one God, and that he is the source of all that is; he is totally good, and everything he creates is good. Genesis acts as an introduction to the five books of the Pentateuch, the Law of Israel, and shows how God brought order into a chaotic universe.
Our present selection of readings covers the first 11 chapters, which deal with what is called the ‘primeval history’ or pre-history, the Creation, the various ‘falls’, and ends with the incident of the Tower of Babel. The rest of Genesis is concerned with the origin of God’s people, with the first patriarch Abraham and his immediate descendants—Isaac, Jacob and Joseph and his brothers. We will cover the second part of Genesis in Weeks 12-14 of Cycle I. The last word of Genesis is “Egypt”, and leads immediately into the Book of the Exodus, describing a much later period where we find the Israelites living in Egypt.
Today’s reading begins with God bringing into existence (out of nothing) what we might call the infrastructure of our world. This section introduces the whole Pentateuch and, in a way, the whole Bible. It shows how God brought (created) an orderly universe out of primordial chaos (of nothingness). It forms a background for the call of Abram and the real beginning of the biblical story in chapter 12.
This first version of the creation story is attributed to the ‘Priestly Source’ (vs the ‘Yahwist Source’). As such, it is less detailed and more theological. Its primary focus is on God’s role. It aims at a complete logical classification of beings whose creation is deliberately fitted into the framework of a week that closes with the Sabbath day of rest. The text makes use of the primitive science of its day. It would be a mistake to look for points of agreement between the picture given here and the data of modern science (hence, the futility of the debate between the so-called ‘Creationists’ and ‘Evolutionists’).
The text uses a scenario found in some creation myth stories, but the emphasis here is very much on our world as the creative work of a single transcendent and all-good God, existing before the world he brought into being.
Recounting the origin of the cosmos and its glorious centrepiece, earth, it shows God masterfully orchestrating the events of creation. Each phase follows more or less the same basic pattern established on Day One: divine command, result, divine approval, enumeration of the day. The effect is anything but monotonous. Like a musical theme with variations, the story shows the world gradually becoming more mobile and complex, until, by the sixth day, it is ready for self-perpetuation through procreation (for detailed discussion, see The Harper-Collins Study Bible introductory section on Genesis).
“In the beginning” is not seen as a beginning from infinity as suggested by the opening of John’s Gospel:
In the beginning was the Word… (John 1:1)
It is not a creation from nothing; it is the beginning of recorded history rather than the origin of being which the philosophers seek to understand. The earth was a formless void and darkness covered the abyss (deep). There was a total lack of order and no light. God was absent. But with God there came order, an astounding and undeniable feature of a universe whose existence is often attributed to pure chance.
A “wind from God” hovered over the chaotic watery wastes of the deep. This is not the creative wind of the Spirit. Creation is said to have been brought into being either by the “word” or the “act” of God. But some translators do see the Spirit of God present in the phrase.
The deep (or the abyss) is the primordial ocean according to the ancient Semitic understanding of the universe. After God’s creative activity, part of this vast body forms the salt-water seas (Gen 1:9 and following); part of it is the fresh water under the earth (Ps 33:7; Ezek 31:4), which wells forth on the earth as springs and fountains (Gen 7:11; 8:2; Prov 3:20). Part of it, “waters above the heavens” (Ps 148:4), is held up by the dome of the sky (Gen 1:6 and following) from which rain descends on the earth (Gen 7:11; 2 Kings 7:2,19; Ps 104:13).
The rest of today’s reading deals with the first four days of creation. First, there is light, but the sources of the light are not yet mentioned. Light is created, but not darkness, which is a purely negative concept. The creation of light is mentioned first, since the succession of days and nights is to be the frame in which the work of creation takes place. God saw the light as good, and God separated light from darkness. It was “good” in the sense of being both acceptable and also intrinsically good:
God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night.
There was evening and morning, the first day
In ancient Israel, a day was considered to begin at sunset. According to the highly artificial structure of the creation story, God’s activity is divided into six days to teach the sacredness of Sabbath rest on the seventh day in the Israelite religion. We should remember, too, how in the Gospel the Sabbath begins on the evening of Friday. That was why Jesus had to be buried before sundown on Good Friday, when the Sabbath would begin (see Mark 15:42).
On each of the succeeding days the same formula will be followed:
God said: Let there be…
– What was commanded comes into being.
– God sees that his work is good.
– The number of the day is given.
God then made a dome or vault in the midst of the waters, separating waters from waters. The vault, that is, the sky or the heavens, now divided the waters above the dome from the waters below it. This is the universe as the ancients understood it in their visual observations, from a vantage point they believed to be the centre: a flat earth and a curved and solid heavenly dome surrounded above and below by primordial waters. The water below produced springs from which rivers and lakes originated; the water above explained the rain, which came through apertures (“windows”) in the vault (the understanding of cloud-forming evaporation was still centuries away!).
Evening and morning made the second day
The waters under heaven now are brought together and reveal dry land, thus producing “Earth” and “Seas”:
And God saw that it was good.
Next vegetation and plants appear bearing all kinds of fruits and seeds. (What is remarkable is that the succession of creations harmonises with a contemporary understanding of evolution: vegetation, swarming creatures, fish, birds, animals [mammals] and human beings.) Again:
…God saw that it was good.
Evening and morning, it is the third day
Lights are now created in the vault or dome to divide the day from the night. Light has already been created, but now its dissemination is divided among the heavenly bodies. These will also mark seasons, days and years, and give light to the earth. There is one great light to rule the day and a lesser one to rule the night, as well as the stars—to separate light from darkness. The names ‘sun’ and ‘moon’ are deliberately omitted because these were often treated as gods by neighbouring peoples. For God’s people, they are no more than heavenly lamps dividing day and night and marking the seasons and times for festivals.
God saw it was good. Evening and morning it is the fourth day
Through all this there is the underlying refrain:
And God saw that it was good.
The message is clear: there is only one God and he is totally good and everything he does is good—very good. Why then is there so much evil and suffering in the world? The answer to that question will come later.
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Tuesday of Week 5 of Ordinary Time – First Reading
Commentary on Genesis 1:20—2:4
God completes the work of creation we were considering in yesterday’s reading.
Evening and morning, the fifth day
On the fifth day God creates swarms of living creatures from the waters (rivers and seas, and salt and fresh water are not distinguished) and the birds of the air. These include:
…the great sea monsters and every living creature that moves, of every kind, with which the waters swarm and every winged bird of every kind [i.e. everything that flies, including insects].
The Hebrew word for ‘create’, bara, is a verb whose only subject can be God. There are three objects of creation mentioned: the universe as a whole, sea monsters controlling the waters, and human beings, who control the land. And:
God blessed them, saying, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.”
And, as before:
…God saw that it was good.
Evening and morning, the sixth day
On the sixth day it is the turn for land-based creatures—all kinds of domestic animals (cattle, sheep), creeping things (reptiles, snakes, insects and small animals), and wild animals. It was God who brought all these into being. And he saw that they were good.
Also on the sixth day he creates human beings, saying:
Let us make humans in our image, according to our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over the cattle and over all the wild animals of the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.
The “us” in this passage certainly does not denote many gods, but God taken together with the retinue of the divine court. The plural can also express the majesty and fullness of God’s being, and the common name for God in Hebrew is elohim, a plural form (recall also that, in the past, the pope and some royalty used the term ‘we’ in speaking of themselves).
While some translations of the Bible use the word “man” in lieu of “humans”, the original translation of the word used is a collective noun for the whole human race, male and female, and so we read later in the sentence, “let them have dominion”. The New Revised Standard Version Bible updated edition (NSRVue, the translation cited in these commentaries) is more accurate in using the term “human” (note, the separate creation of man and then woman is found in the second creation account).
In our image
The human image, in some paradoxical way, resembles a God who has no visual image—perhaps in his speech, his intelligence and moral sense. We should note the opposite, namely, that the Bible does not hesitate to depict divine manifestations in human form. God is even presented with human feelings—sadness, disappointment, anger, vengeance and so forth.
This close relationship with God distinguishes human beings from the animals. It also involves a distant sharing in God’s nature: intellect, will, dominion and authority. We are like God in our access to truth and wisdom, if on an infinitely lower level. We are like God in ability to love. All this paves the way for an even higher image: our sharing in the divine nature through the gift of grace (God’s love experienced and active in our lives). Being in God’s image, humankind is given dominion over all other living things, including wild animals—in the sea, on land and in the air.
Now we have the first piece of poetry in the Bible—forty-percent of which is poetry:
So God created humans in his image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.
Male and female God created them
Both male and female are created equally in the image of God, who is beyond gender and inclusive of both. Compare this also to the later narrative of woman’s creation (see this Thursday’s reading).
They, too, are told to increase and multiply, to fill the earth and be responsible for it and for all the animals, birds and living things within it. And to both humans and all the fish, animals and birds are given the fruits and seeds of every tree and plant. It is a description of a golden—and vegetarian—age, when human beings and animals were at peace with each other, all having only plants for their food. That will change with the coming of Noah (Gen 9:3).
The work of creation of both heavens and earth is now finished, completed in the six days when work was allowed:
God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good.
God rested on the seventh day
With his work completed, God rested on the seventh day. And in this way God blessed the seventh day and made it ‘holy’, because on that day he had rested from his work of creation. In future, his people would work on six days but would, in imitation of Yahweh, ‘keep holy the Sabbath day’. It would be a day of prayer and worship and of rest from all kinds of work.
The Sabbath (Hebrew, shabbat) is of divine institution, for on that day God himself rested. The word shabbat is avoided here since, according to the Priestly author, the Sabbath was not imposed until the giving of the law on Sinai, when it then became the sign of the covenant (Exod 31:12-17). However, even at the creation God set an example which was to be followed.
The last sentence of the passage brings to a close one of the creation stories in Genesis, but it can also be read as the beginning of the next section:
These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created.
Reflecting on today’s reading, we cannot be unaware that our responsibility to be stewards of God’s creation has frequently led to serious abuse of our environment at all levels and is a major concern today. We have mistaken stewardship for domination and control rather than good management.
The whole of creation is put into our hands to supply our needs. But we realise more and more that we ourselves are part of that creation, and that there is an essential symbiosis, a mutual interdependence. From mighty galaxies to sub-atomic particles there is a seamless robe of being into which we must fit, in a way that benefits all.
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