51. CREATION, A GOD´S GIFT
1. – God´s creative action is at the beginning of everything, but we first need to discover the faith experience to live world and life like a gift of God. This is what happens in the Bible. God´s action in history goes ahead: “My father was a wandering Aramean; he went down to Egypt to find refuge there…” (Dt 26, 5 – 9), “we were slaves in Egypt and the Lord led us out with prodigious deeds” (6, 20 – 24), “and he brought us here to give us this land flowing with milk and honey” (26, 9). Israel first discovers God like Lord of history, and later on he recognizes him like Lord of creation. We also, having discovered the living God who passes by saving, come to live creation like a God´s gift.
2. – It is obvious that there are many ways of thinking. For example, those who affirm: Everything is God, the world is God (pantheism); there are two principles, the Good and the Evil, in permanent fight (dualism); the material world is bad and, so, it must be rejected and overcome (gnosis); only the matter exists and it exists infinitely (materialism); God does not exist (atheism) or He cannot be known (agnosticism); the world is left by God’s hand, God does not intervene in history (deism), “we ought not use God as holes-cover of our imperfect knowledge” (D. Bonhoeffer), world evolution is hazard-made (positivism), “sizing up is not only the hazard, but the led Hazard” (Teilhard de Chardin).
3. – From present faith experience, From the faith’s experience, first Genesis chapter invites us to live the world and the life like a God’s gift, like a man’s task, like a Father’s praising motive, from whom everything comes. Priests exiled in Babylon wrote the statement about the fifth century, willing to maintain the believer´s identity in a strange country. Under literary forms and real images from that epoch, the narration contains a permanent value message about God, the man and the world
4. - In the beginning, when God began to create heaven and earth, the earth had no form and was void; darkness was over the deep and the Spirit of God hovered over the waters. (Gn 1, 1 - 2). The chaos, the emptiness, the abyss and the waters are images that take us to the beginning, when there was nothing. The idea of the creation coming out from nothing will be formulated later on (2 Mac 7, 28). The expression “heaven and earth” designates all the reality. The story accounts for the old vision of the world: The earth below, the heavens above, the canopy of heaven separating the lower and upper waters. We assume the modern vision of the world. The message is the same: God has created the whole universe. Under the image of the bird flying over the nest where its chickens are, the spirit of God appears hovering over the waters.
5. - The Genesis narration presents the entireness of the beings successively created, until it reaches the man. The ordination is summary and global; it does not pretend to present a scientific universe origin, but a faith vision. The ordination is in crescendo: the inferior beings appear first and are subordinated to the superior ones. The light (1, 3 – 5), the firmament (1, 6 – 8), the earth and the sea, the vegetation (1, 9 – 13), the heavenly bodies, the sun, the moon, the stars (1, 14 – 19), the water and air animals (1, 20 – 23), the earth animals, the man (1, 26 – 31) appear. At the end, in the peak of the creation, appears the man, God’s image: “So God created man in his image; in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” And God blessed them and said to them: “Be fruitful and increase in number, fill the earth and subdue it” (1, 27-28). The man, male and female, is a God´s image, he participates of his creator´s power, he dominates the earth, he has in his hands a task from which the universe destiny depends. The world is not only good, but even very good (1, 31).
6. - The sacerdotal narration presents the creation in the frame of a week that ends in the Sabbath’s rest (Gen 2, 1-4). The frame is religious. Everything is ordered to the man and the man in ordered to God. That is what the Sabbath celebrates. The world and the life are not only God’s gift and man’s task, but also a reason to bless the Father. We can live the Saturday like a delight, rest, travel to the heights, food, anticipation of the future (Is 58, 13 – 14). The letter to the Hebrews says: “It is clear that we have a Sabbath’s rest for God’s people”. We are invited to join God´s rest and to rest from our own jobs as God rested from His (Heb 4, 9 - 10).
7. - The world is not a hazard product, nor it is blindly oriented: “He who formed the eye, will he not see? (Ps 94, 9). The universe is an open book, it speaks us about God: “The heavens declare the glory of God” (Ps 19, 2). The world reflects God’s wisdom: “You disposed everything with measure, number and weight” (Wis 11, 10). Even more, the universe is inspired. God talks through the creation. God said it and it existed (Gn 1). And also: “At the beginning it was the Word, says Saint John., all things were made through him and without him nothing come to be (Jn 1, 1-3).
8. - Nevertheless, in the faith’s experience we can discover that we did not come to the world by a hazard, neither are we abandoned to our own luck, that we have been called by God to the existence: He “calls the non-existent so that they exist” (Rom 4,17). Every person is a unique reality, who can be recognized like a God’s creature: “You created my entrails, you have knitted me together in my mother’s womb” (Ps 139). Regardless of his multiple limitations, the man reflects a fullness that transcends him: “You have crowned him with glory and honour, you have given him dominion over the works of your hands”. “Lord, our God, how great is your name all over the earth”.(Ps 8)
9. - Many people do not see it like that, of course: “Yes, futile in nature all men who ignored God… looking at His works, they did not acknowledged the author” (Wis 13, 1). God´s word by which the world was made, “the world did not know it”, “he came to his own, yet his own people did not received him”. (Jn 1, 10 – 11). According to the Second Vatican Council, “The man can certainly know God with the natural reason, by means of things created”, but “in the humanity present condition” God´s revelation is needed so that all men “can easily know, with absolute certainty and without error” what in itself is not accessible to human reason (DV 6)
10. - The Symbol of the Apostles confesses that God is “ the Creator of heaven and earth”, and the one of Nicaea-Constantinople adds: “of all things visible and invisible”. The readings in the Paschal Night, that celebrate the history of the salvation, begin with the creation narrative. In the first century’s catechesis, the preparation of the catechumens follows the same line.
11. - The old four nights poem, evokes those events in which we acknowledge that our destiny is in the hands of God: the creation, the covenant, the exodus, the future. When we acquire conscience of it, “we were like those moving in a dream” (Ps 126), we discover that “God is love” (Ps 103), that he is in the origin of the being itself (Ps 139), that he manifests himself in the in the events of life (Gen 15,5-18), that he is with us (Ex 3,15), also in the difficult days or by night, that opens a way where there is nothing: in the dessert, at sea, in the death. In his name we lift the cup of the salvation (Ps 116).
12. - The history of salvation culminates with the experience of Christ. It is what Paul contemplates in the noisy loneliness of the prison (Eph 4, 1), God´s plan, and he sings it in the Letter to the Ephesians: “Blessed be God, the Father of Christ Jesus our Lord, who chose us in him before the creation of the world (Eph 1, 3-4)”. In his intention we occupy a place former and superior to the world’s creation. He elected us “before hand to be his adoptive sons” (1, 5).
13. – Like in other times God´s people was liberated, we now live a new exodus through Christ, “giving us the knowledge of his mysterious will” (1, 7 – 8). The mystery refers to the world and history sense, how God conceived it, summing up everything in Christ: “to make that everything have Christ as its head” (1 – 10). Paul proclaims, astonished, the secret, the deepest gravitation of the world and the history.
14. - Like in other times God’s people received an earth in heritage, we now receive a new earth through. Christ. The new creation is blooming: “The whole creation is groans and suffers the pangs of birth” (Rm 8, 22). The faith experience seals us, it marks us, it backs us up: “You were sealed by the saint spirit of the promise, who is the first pledge of what we what we shall receive” (Eph 1, 13 – 14).
15. - It is a God’s present. We need that God light the eyes of our heart in order to know which is the hope to which we have been called, which the wealth of the glory granted in heritage to the saints and which is the sovereign greatness of his power for us, the believers, according to the effectiveness of his powerful strength, displayed in Christ, “he placed all things under his feet and set him as head of the church, which is his body. He who fills all in all unfolds his fullness in the Church”. (1, 22-23).
*Dialogue:
- faith’s experience is first
- diverse positions
- we assume the world’s modern vision
- we live the world and the life as a God´s gift
- as a human task
- as a cause of blessing the father
- from the experience of faith
- we have been elected
- the feeling of world an history
- the new creation in blooming
- it is a God’s present