Jesus

by Leonard Sweet

  Suddenly in the story, streams rise up from within and below. The surface of the ground is watered.

  Wait a minute: When dirt and water mix, what do you get? Mud. Clay. How were you and I created? The Bible begins with an artistic image of God as a Potter fashioning humans in God’s image. But no potter can work with dry clay. In order for the Master Potter to mold and make a human according to divine design, the clay must be moist. The most important questions every human being must answer, and can only answer for him-or herself, are these: What keeps your clay moist? What moisturizers keep our clay pliable and susceptible to the Master’s touch?

  GOD PLAYS IN THE DIRT

  God, the Master Potter, scooped out of the ground a clump of clay, molded and made it into the first human, and then breathed into that human the breath of God. Until God breathed the divine spirit into Adam, humans were just a mass of matter, a moist duvet of dirt. But when matter united with spirit, and that spirit was God’s Spirit, a soul was conceived, and the first Adam became a human being. God created adam from adamah, earthling from earth, and added spirit to the mix to create a living soul. When spirit is removed—from dust and dirt we came; to dust and dirt we return.5

  The earliest image of God in the Bible? God is playing in the dirt, making mud pies. Maybe we were meant to play in the dirt, and to get our hands dirty and wet.6 The first time we meet God, we see that our Creator is not afraid of getting dirty. The Bible begins with God getting the divine hands dirty and wet. The more we know about the human body, the more we realize that a healthy human needs exposure to dirt to protect from disease. Getting dirty is at the heart of keeping physically fit and spiritually clean.

  What makes a being “human” is soul. Humans are “God-breathed.”7 Human beings don’t have souls. Humans are souls. But humans aren’t born with fully developed souls. They must grow in soul. Soul moments are growth spurts in loving God with our whole hearts, minds, and spirits.

  There is a difference between cold hearts and dirt hearts, or between cold souls and dirt souls. Dirt souls are undeveloped souls, souls to which water hasn’t been added.

  Every human is born with a dirt soul. You grow a dirt soul into a soul that bears fruit, but to grow a fruit-bearing soul, you need to add water and spirit—not just any spirit but God’s Spirit. It is the undeveloped soul that is the source of our problems today, not so much the cold soul or mean soul as the underdeveloped soul, the unwatered and underbreathed soul.

  THE GARDEN OF GOD’S TEMPLE

  In the macro creation account of Genesis 1, there is the portrayal of God establishing the cosmos as the Lord’s temple, meant to be filled and flooded with God’s presence. This is why God “rested” on day seven, a verb that is used almost exclusively in ancient Near Eastern literature to describe how divine beings take up residence in their temples.

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  The first, the fairest garden that ever was, Paradise, He [Christ] was the gardener, it was of His planting. So, a gardener. And ever since it is He that as God makes all our gardens green, sends us yearly the spring, and all the herbs and flowers we then gather . . . but He it is who gardens our “souls,” too, and . . . waters them with the dew of His grace, and makes them bring forth fruit to eternal life.

  —LANCELOT ANDREWES10

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  But every temple needs a garden, and every garden a temple. In Genesis 2, the garden is a microcosm of the cosmos and God’s mission for the macrocosm. Garden and temple, the two places that pinnacle and ritualize the divine presence.8

  The first things we know about the garden of Eden are twofold. First, God put Adam there, as it later says, “to tend and keep it [the garden].”9 The world’s oldest profession is not what we think it is. You might call this the real prime directive: we are all gardeners—groundskeepers, housekeepers, beekeepers, earthkeepers. Our relationship with the world is as gardener to garden—a symbiosis of mutual care and dependence. Gardening and shalom-making are the same: be the image of God to the part of the world where God has placed us.

  But notice there are two parts to God’s prime directive: conserve and conceive. We are to conserve what God created. Not preserve but conserve. You preserve pickles. You don’t pickle the planet. Our directive is more than giving this garden planet nursemaid-like attention in an ecological purism that snubs everything not aboriginal. Nor is our directive to do whatever we feel like doing to the planet and its resources, as if the garden is here to serve us or we’re in the liquidation business. Cruelty and cupidity are not what the Creator had in mind when entrusting humans with “dominion” over creation.11 This is made clear at the end of the story, when part of each person’s divine judgment includes the question: How have you cared for the earth?12

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  The time has come to begin the begat . . .

  —ADAM TO EVE IN THE MUSICAL FINIAN’S RAINBOW (1947)13

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  Gardens are the result of collaboration between human and divine, between art and nature. God planted the first garden Himself but left the garden unfinished. We are put there to continue what the Master Gardener started and to bring the planet under cultivation. Adam and Eve couldn’t garden the earth alone. They needed to cultivate new Adams and Eves. Of course, part of cultivating is leaving some wild alone. But it is also taking what God gives and doing something wondrous with it. God does not call humanity to simply receive, to merely consume. God calls us to give back and participate, to procreate and conceive, to take the wilderness and make it marvelous. Not to wipe out the wilderness, but to make the wilderness wonderful.

  OUR PRIME DIRECTIVE

  While giving humans the responsibility for conserving what God has created (“tend the garden”), we are to continue God’s creativity and “conceive” (“till the garden”). God created humans not just to take care of the garden but to make it more beautiful and marvelous. Augustine’s classic The City of God may have been better called The Garden City of God.

  God did not put us here to consume but to conceive. The prime directive gives us an ethic of conception (“I conceive, therefore I am”), not consumption (“I consume, therefore I am”). This is the real meaning of originality: going back to origins and recapitulating the new out of the original. “Conceiving” is not “co-creating,” but “sub-creating” (as J. R. R. Tolkien liked to put it).14 We are subcontractors who are privileged to participate in God’s creation project. God creates the “new.” Our prime directive is to sub-create the new out of the old, the old-new. What Isaiah and then later Jesus called “a new thing”15 are those things that are always present but undetected until now in the Master’s storehouse. The future beats with an ancient vibe. Humans are created in the image of a God who has been cultivating the earth. Thus, our mission is to cultivate the earth.

  Second, God is an arborphiliac and chlorophiliac. God loves trees, and God loves green. The first things the Lord put in the garden were trees, which makes one wonder if God’s favorite color isn’t green. This garden planet called Earth in the garden galaxy called the Milky Way is miraculously conceived so that the waste product of trees (oxygen) is the life-breath of humans, and the waste product of humans (carbon dioxide) is the life-breath of trees. Deforestation is a form of lung removal (pneumonectomy).

  THE TREES IN THE GARDEN

  There were two kinds of trees God planted in the garden, however. The first were designed to bear fruit—“good for food.”16 But there was another kind of tree that God created, making one wonder if God isn’t, besides an arborphiliac and chlorophiliac, also a venustraphiliac: trees that had no other function than to be “pleasant to the sight.”17 From the very beginning, God was in the beauty business, which (as it is defined today) is better called the ugly industry, since ugliness (sin, death, lust) is consumption without conception. The Creator evidences a beauty bias. G
od wants to beautify our lives. Beauty is not something that stimulates or satisfies an appetite for something else. Beauty is its own reward. It is the scent of God on the universe, a keyhole-peek of the kingdom in the here and now and a sonogram of God’s own heart. This is why art is so powerful—it can rival the God it is created to reveal.

  For Russian icon painters in training, it all begins with the transfiguration. Apprentices traditionally dip their first brush tips onto a palette dedicated to the creation of an icon of the transfiguration of Christ. Of all the events in Jesus’ life, the transfiguration most manifests God’s transfiguring beauty, which is integral to the integrity of the divine-human relationship, a transfiguring beauty that icon painters aspire to infuse in all their art.18

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  The real sin against life is to abuse and destroy beauty, even one’s own—even more, one’s own, for that has been put in our care and we are responsible for its well-being.

  —KATHERINE ANNE PORTER 20

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  Of all the trees in the garden of Eden, two are highlighted as being in the “midst” and being of special importance: the Tree of Life, and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.19 The Tree of Life is the fount of eternal life. The Tree of Knowledge is a tree that invites the feeder to enter into a relationship with the mystery of good and evil, a mystery reserved for God alone. In Hebrew the word for “knowledge” really means “intercourse with,” and “intercourse” means the highest degree of intimacy possible between two entities. To eat of the fruit of “good and evil” is to unite oneself to “good and evil,” to “know” it personally. The garden was then crossed by four rivers, a layout for a dream garden that still goes by the name of “paradise garden” to this day.

  What comes next is extremely important. This is the first time in the Bible that God spoke to humans. First words are always remembered and celebrated. What were the first words out of God’s mouth? “And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, ’Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat.’”21 The first words out of God’s mouth are positive, not negative. God speaks “yes” before “no”: “but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”22 If the first commandment in the Bible is “Eat freely,” one wonders what the last commandment might be.

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  He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To him who overcomes I will give to eat from the tree of life, which is in the midst of the Paradise of God.

  —JESUS25

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  If we quickly jump ahead to the end of the story, and leap from Genesis to the maps, we find ourselves where we began in the story. This time, though, we’re in a garden city with the Tree of Life and River of Life flowing from the throne of God. There we receive the promise of the coming of Jesus, God’s ultimate “Yes!”23 And the last commandment in the Bible is this: “Let anyone who desires drink freely from the water of life.”24

  The Bible has bookend commands: The first command is “Eat freely.” The last command is “Drink freely.” And everything in between is a banquet.26 Not a snack. Not a smorgasbord where we choose what we like and leave what we don’t like. Rather, a life-course meal on which we feast on Him in our hearts with thanksgiving. The Jesus life is a dinner party. .. or more precisely, a garden party.

  JESUS MEETS ALL HUMAN NEED

  It is no surprise, therefore, that Jesus was repeatedly presented as food.27 And He had a great deal to say about food and eating.28 Jesus, in a word, is the reality of what food points to. He is the reality of what drink points to. Christ is real food and real drink; what we consume on earth is but a shadow.

  In this regard, the gospel of John (which is the new Genesis) portrays Jesus as meeting all human need:

  • He is life.29 Life is the beginning of all human need.

  • He is light.30 No life can live without the sun, the light of the world.

  • He is air.31 “Spirit” means “breath” in Greek. We need air to live.

  • He is food.32 Life doesn’t exist without food.

  • He is drink.33 Life doesn’t exist without water.

  • He is shelter.34 We need a place to abide in order to live.

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  I am the food of grown people.

  —AUGUSTINE 35

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  THE FIRST NEGATIVE NOTE IN THE BIBLE

  Suddenly, something is not right. The first negative note struck in the Bible is here: “It is not good that man [adam] should be alone.”36 Aloneness is what God had been creating against. God exists in relationship37 and created Adam to enable the Creator to be in relationship with the creation. But adam was alone, and aloneness is the ultimate anti-force in the universe. Long before sin entered the picture, the God who filled the void with light and life and color and clamor identified aloneness as a “not good” state of being.

  In a stunning turn in the story, the next thing God created to correct this condition was the animals. In as high a doctrine of creation as one can find in all of ancient literature, the first candidates for companionship were the beasts of the field (represented by the lion, the king of the beasts and symbol of Mark’s gospel); the birds of the air (represented by the eagle, the king of the birds and symbol of John’s gospel); and the domesticated livestock (represented by the bull, the king of farm animals and symbol of Luke’s gospel). The last things God created were the earthlings, ish and ishah (represented by the human, the capstone of creation and symbol of Matthew’s gospel).

  Up until now, there was only a whole perfect being called adam, who came from the adamah. When Adam named Eve ishah, he also called himself into a new state of being and named himself: ish. Man and woman found their identity together and in each other. In Hebrew ish is “man”; ishah is “woman.” The ishah physically comes from ish, from his “side,” his “rib,” a place that is neither superior nor inferior to its source.38

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  Freely you have received, freely give.

  —JESUS 39

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  The word we weakly translate as “helper” in Hebrew is ezer. But astonishingly, ezer is masculine in gender, even though it refers to Eve. Ever more amazingly, the word ezer is most often used to refer to YHWH in relation to Israel. YHWH is Israel’s ezer, Israel’s “strong deliverer,” “mighty companion,” “saver.” Here Eve, the woman to the man, the ishah to the ish, saved Adam from his isolation and solitariness. She was his ezer—his “deliverer,” his “companion,” his “saver.”

  THE BRIDE IS CONCEIVED

  When God prepared to create the perfect ezer for adam, the literal translation of God’s intent was this: “I will make for him a partner according to what is in front of him.” The verbal root neged (“in front of ”) suggests a face-to-face union of equals. There is no hint of superiority or inferiority between Adam and the ezer that is God’s gift. This is also why all the animals that initially auditioned for the role of ezer failed to qualify. The fact that they were, like Adam, created out of the dirt put them literally under his already created feet. Adam tried his hand at partnering with God in sub-creating—naming each creature as it passed before him. But no beast, no bird, and no farm animal could go face-to-face with Adam. Thus none could be his ezer.

  The Almighty created the first Adam out of matter that God had already created: dirt. Adam’s “companion” (ezer) was fashioned differently. To create a genuinely new ezer for Adam, there was only one raw resource that met the criterion: adam. The ultimate partner would come from the same source. So God split the adam.

  It required surgery to separate the ishah from the ish. The adam was put into a di
vinely induced deep sleep (tardemah), so he was oblivious to any pain and to the surprising, side-splitting action God took on his behalf, creating a wholly new creature drawn from half of him: wo-man. The word sex comes from the Latin secare, which means “to cut or divide.”

  Once the woman was split apart from him, God “brought her to the man,”40 an image that foreshadows the bridal attendant taking the bride to the bridegroom. The sudden appearance of this new human being inspired the man to shout (and maybe even speak) for the first time. Although he was not privy to how the woman had been created, the face-to-face and beside quality of the one standing before him was immediately discernible: “bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.”41 Up to this point in the text, the man has been consistently referred to as adam. Now, confronted with his new ezer, a final naming ritual took place. “Adam” named both of them together—she was “woman,” ishah, and he was declared to be “man,” ish.

  When the first Adam’s side was split, a bride was conceived, a bride worthy of the husband leaving home and family to join in marriage.42 It is a striking image, since the wife left the homestead and father in ancient Near Eastern marriages, just as Jesus left His home and Father for His bride.

  Both “forsake” and “cling” are terms used to describe Israel’s covenantal relationship with YHWH.43 The relationship between man and woman, husband and wife, is framed as a covenant. Marriage is not about improving land holdings, upping your status, or picking up a new herd of sheep. A covenant relationship means a loyalty and faithfulness that sometimes require the groom to leave home and father and be united to a bride.