NOTES for Gen 6:1-22
The story of the corruption of the human race before the flood raises an exceptionally large number of questions; few passages of Holy Scripture can compare with it in this respect. But here is what is striking: questions that seem obvious at first glance turn out, on closer examination, to be largely idle. In fact, we are very interested in who the sons of God were who went in to the daughters of men; we simply cannot live without figuring out who the giants were, the mighty men of old. Yet what will change for us depending on one answer or another?
The biblical narrative here, as in many other places, uses marriage as a symbol of the relationship between a person and God, and this is a very meaningful symbol. Religious worship turns out to be akin to that essential union of different beings which marriage is. It is characteristic that the person appears here as the feminine principle, needing protection and needing the object of worship to take responsibility for the person. Therefore, the subject is events in religious history. In a figurative sense, the Bible most often calls those who share the nature of someone or something sons. This is the meaning of many biblical expressions, from "Son of Man" to "sons of disobedience." The sons of God mentioned at the beginning of the sixth chapter of Genesis are beings who share in a nonmaterial, spiritual nature; simply put, bodiless spirits. Thus before us is a story about the emergence of paganism, about how man, "becoming futile in his thinking," as the apostle Paul puts it, began to worship created spirits instead of worshiping the one God. From this came the giants on the earth, people possessing, thanks to union with these spirits, unusual abilities for human beings, abilities not intended by the Creator. That, in fact, is all. But in the narrator's story, this is far from the only important thing.
Reading about what led to the flood, one cannot fail to notice the words that the narrator places in the mouth of the Creator. "My Spirit shall not forever be neglected by human beings," He says when paganism appears. This is a grand, astonishing promise in which the great mercy of God is shown to us. For by saying that the seduction of the human race into a great deception will be temporary, the Lord thereby promises to defeat and end this madness. Moreover, His will is that a union of love should bind the human being to the very source of the world's life, to the Holy Spirit. And the Almighty sets a limit to people's earthly life in order to give us the possibility of meeting Him face to face! What an unexpected thought! Scripture says that God did not create death; here it also speaks of the fact that He desires to return to eternity the person who has fallen away from it.
One cannot fail to notice the words: "...the Lord regretted that He had made man..." Usually we think that God, like an unsuccessful engineer, regretted what He had "made" — no, of course that is not the point. Even human betrayal is not able to surpass God's will to give us life. The key words in this phrase come later, where the narrator says that the Lord "grieved in His heart." In the prayer attributed to King Manasseh (2 Chr. 36:22a ff.), it says of God: "You are the Lord Most High, good, patient, and very merciful, and You repent over human evils"; this quotation entered one of the prayers of the sacrament of repentance. This is what Scripture says: the Lord grieves over the evil we do. The grief and repentance "over human evils" of which the narrator speaks in the sixth chapter are a prophecy of the prayer from the Cross, in which the Lord says: "Forgive them, Father, for they do not know what they are doing." This mystery of mercy is the main thing in today's passage. The human understanding of repentance, characteristic both of us and of the narrator, must not prevent us from touching it.