NOTES for Gen 1:24-31

Today we read words very dear to us about our likeness to our Creator. We are created in His likeness; His image is imprinted in us. At this thought the heart rejoices and strength for life increases. This is surely the highest of all truths. But let us think about why the Church offers us these words to remember precisely now, now when we stand at the doors of Great Lent, a time of repentant prayer in which, on the contrary, we must recognize our complete insignificance, sinfulness, and fallenness.

Remember how the Lord exclaims indignantly in the Psalter: "You thought wickedly that I would be like you." We were created in His likeness, but now He does not want to be like us. Have we squandered this likeness? Yes. And we understand this. "Your righteousness, O God, reaches to the highest heavens; You have done great things; O God, who is like You?" (Ps 71:19) Neither among the gods nor among the sons of God is there now anyone like God (Ps 88:7).

And still, no one has canceled the words about likeness. On the contrary, the Church reminds us of them now. There is enormous tension, stretched almost to the breaking point like a string between heaven and earth, between these two poles: likeness and unlikeness. But this is exactly what distinguishes our faith from Greek or Roman mythology, where the gods are created in the image of man. And in this very tension lies the essence of the fast.

The whole process of the Creation of the world described in the first chapter of Genesis is accompanied by this refrain: "Good!" And finally, at the end of the last, sixth day, the words sound: "Behold, very good." This is how God evaluates the results of His labor. Have you ever encountered the opposite evaluation of this world? Of course, one can always object that God created everything well, and then man, setting out on the path of the fall, spoiled everything. But then several more questions can arise. Can something be considered good if the seeds of the later "bad" are laid in it? Does God really give Himself the highest grade for an intermediate result? Can God really go off to rest without finishing the work? And if this work is finished, then it is imperfect, since it can be disfigured to such a degree. Yet Creation must in the end be perfect, since it is accomplished by the perfect God.

All these questions can be answered with a counter-question: "Has God really withdrawn from affairs? Does not the whole experience of God's relationship with humanity, shown to us in Holy Scripture, say that God continues to act?" So in this sense Creation is not completed; it is simply that, having appeared in the created world, man also participates in this process, more often hindering than helping God. But with the coming into the world of the perfect God-man, Christ, a turning point occurred in the opposition between creation and destruction, since in Christ man begins to cooperate with God, gradually bringing nearer that end of Creation about which everyone will be able to say in agreement: "Behold, very good!"

As He completes the creation of the world, God looks at His creation and delights in it. Of course, this image could be understood quite literally. Indeed, a world not yet damaged by the fall must have been beautiful; it truly was a perfect creation. And if every craftsman is glad to look at a beautiful thing he has made, something that has truly succeeded, is it surprising that God delights in the world He created and rejoices in His creation? But there is also something else, indicated by the meaning of the Hebrew word rendered in the Synodal translation as "good." In the Hebrew original there is a sense of wholeness, completion, and meaningfulness. The world is good when everything in it has its meaning and its purpose. From the point of view of the authors of the biblical books, a meaningless natural or historical cycle, needed by no one, must be regarded more as a curse than a blessing. The world should not be like that: aimless and meaningless. God did not conceive it or create it that way. Of course, no will, even one opposed to God, wants the world's existence to be aimless and meaningless. It is simply that those for whom human beings are only food have no intention of revealing to their victims the goal and meaning of the world's existence as they see that goal and meaning. But God does not think it necessary to hide anything from human beings. He tells us directly that He did not create the world for no reason. And He invites us to participate in carrying out His plans and purposes: freely, consciously, and responsibly.

In the poem of creation, God evaluates each of His creative acts as "good." "And God saw that it was good" is repeated as a refrain in the description of each day of creation, sometimes more than once, as, for example, on the third and sixth days. And at the end, when the world is finished, God looks at His creation and, according to the sacred writer, finds it "fully good." At first glance this can seem strange. It is one thing for a human being, whose work may or may not succeed: here the master's look at what he has made from the outside, and the statement that the work has succeeded, are entirely appropriate. God's work cannot fail; He does not have to review what He has made in search of a mistake. It is always joyful to admire well-made work; but is that all there is to it?

The corresponding Hebrew word, usually translated as "good," is in fact quite rich in meaning: it means not only "good," but also "finished," "completed," "sound," with the assumption that the thing created by the master fully corresponds to the intention with which it was made. So it is with the world: it is not merely beautiful and perfect; it is also finished, brought to that fullness in which it was conceived by God, and it is sound. Every thing in it is in its proper place, and every thing is perfect, just as, according to God's design, it ought to be.

The matter is not only external perfection. The world is also perfect in the sense that it does not simply exist for no reason, and every thing in it likewise does not exist by chance. God conceived and created the world with a certain goal in mind, and according to His design all creation was to take part in fulfilling it, but first of all the human person.

It is precisely this goal that makes the world meaningful: if there is no goal, there is no need to look for meaning; aimless existence cannot be meaningful. Of course, this goal is not known to every thing created by God. A stone, a tree, even an animal does not know it and is not meant to know it.

But it is known to the human person, the only being created in the image and likeness of God. Image and likeness imply, among other things, meaningfulness of existence as well: a stone, a tree, and even an animal may correspond to God's design while knowing nothing about the meaning of their existence, leaving this question to be answered by God who created them and by the human person to whom God entrusted them for governance.

The human person cannot exist in that way, not because his physical nature does not allow it, but because such existence contradicts God's design for the human person, who must understand who he is, where he comes from and where he is going, and why he lives in this God-created world. Then the whole world is opened to the human person as "fully good"; otherwise it will remain for him forever an unnecessary and absurd accident, in relation to which there is no point in speaking either of meaning or of purpose.

Today's reading contains a very vivid verse that truly says a great deal about the essence of the human being. "And God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them". Look: God created the human being, male and female. Elementary knowledge of arithmetic is enough to count: man and woman are two people, not one!

And from this several conclusions immediately follow. First, it is clear that we are speaking about humanity, about people, and not about "one specimen." Second, it is important to God that this humanity could not consist only of men or only of women. Reproduction has nothing to do with it; for God it is no problem to create a being that reproduces by division or budding. The point is precisely that the fullness of human qualities is revealed in mutual complementarity. Third, this clarification of the difference between man and woman is made only for the human being. It is not said of animals, "male and female He created them." And this means that the psychological and spiritual differences between man and woman have greater value and greater significance than the differences between animals of different sexes.

When reading about the beginning of the world, we need to remember that the Book of Genesis, like the whole Bible, is written not about the past but about the present. In a special ancient symbolic language, it reflects truths that will never change, regardless of the development of physics or history. This short account testifies to the inseparable connection between what surrounds us - light, water, earth, trees and grasses, fish, animals, and birds - and the One who stands behind all of it and is not part of this world. How can this mystery be conveyed? The world did not create itself, and we did not create it. There is the One who is responsible for this world, who grants the world existence and rejoices in its beauty, seeing that it is "very good." If we learn to contemplate this mystery, then everything good and beautiful in this world will speak to us about Him, about the One who created the world in the very beginning and gave it to us.

At first glance the biblical Poem of Creation may appear to be a purely mythological text, and many people view it exactly that way, as an ancient myth that entered the Bible because no other versions of cosmogony, the teaching about the origin of the world, existed in antiquity. Conversely, there are also readers who are certain that the biblical Poem of Creation is history that must be understood literally, exactly as it is written.

What, then, does the author of the poem have in mind? And when was it written? The commonly accepted view among Bible scholars today is that this poem, like the entire so-called Prologue of the Book of Genesis, the first eleven chapters of the book, appeared in Babylon during the Babylonian Exile. In those times people already knew enough about the world to reject a mythological picture of it. The issue is clearly not that the author lacked the means to describe the reality he wanted to describe. He simply uses the traditional language of the so-called cosmogonic poetry of his time; in his day there were already poems narrating the origin and formation of the cosmos, and the author creates a Yahwist version of such a poem. It is no accident that he begins the history of the world with God creating "the heavens and the earth." However one understands this "heavens and earth," and people have understood it very differently, one thing is clear: the issue is the universe in all its fullness and wholeness.

One can, of course, destroy this wholeness; the second verse of the first chapter speaks precisely of the "earth" torn away from "heaven," of destroyed wholeness, and then chaos appears in the world. More precisely, it is the part torn away from the whole that plunges into chaos: it becomes formless and without qualities, "formless and void" in the Synodal translation. This is exactly what the "earth" becomes when it is torn away from "heaven," a part of the universe separated from the whole.

Then the majestic picture of creation unfolds, already in space and time, which appear together with creation itself. And this creation contains a certain drama, which the author of the poem does not describe directly, but hints at: at first, on the "first day," all creation is permeated with light, not physical light, but the light of God's presence, which in Yahwist spiritual experience is often accompanied by radiance. But on the "second day" something happens in the world: the radiant "one day" (exactly so: one, not first in a series of other days) is replaced by chaos. Water bursts into the world, the very water mentioned in the description of the "earth" torn away from "heaven," water as a symbol of chaos. God overcomes this chaos by setting a limit to it and creating the world as if anew, inside the water, building there, in the space He created within the chaos, a new world in which we came to live. There, in this new world, the human being will also appear, so that in turn he may take part in the drama of the universe, where he will have a special role, and only on the human being himself will it depend how he fulfills it.

The biblical Poem of Creation recalls the cosmogonic poetry of the pagan world. In Egypt, Babylonia, and Greece there were similar works describing the origin of the world, its emergence from chaos and transformation into a cosmos, orderly and harmonious. This process was called cosmogony. At first glance it may appear that the sacred writer simply created a Yahwistic version of an ordinary cosmogonic poem, attributing to God what pagan authors attributed to gods or to the elements of nature. But in reality this is not quite so. The language and symbolic imagery of the biblical poem really do resemble the language and symbolic imagery of Near Eastern cosmogonic poetry. But the biblical poem also differs significantly from pagan cosmogonic poetry.

Above all, the beginning of the poem, its first two verses, stands out. The cosmogonies of the Egyptians, Babylonians, and Greeks all begin with a description of chaos, sometimes in the image of a great ocean existing from eternity. In the biblical author, however, God from the very beginning creates the world as cosmos, not as chaos. The sacred writer speaks of God creating "heaven and earth." Different commentators have interpreted these words in different ways, but in any case it is clear that the expression "heaven and earth" describes the whole universe, and a universe that is not chaotic but fully ordered.

God does not create chaos; He creates cosmos. Images that recall chaos appear only in the second verse of the poem, where it speaks of "earth" considered as if separately from the whole of which it is a part. Here the possibility of chaos really does appear: if the whole universe created by God is torn apart, then chaos can indeed reign in such parts cut off from the whole. But God does not want chaos and does not create it.

His will is constantly present in the world. Each "day of creation" is determined by God's word, which defines His purpose for that day and the meaning of what is happening. Of course, the forces of nature placed in the world by God act within it. But God does not abandon His creation. He is constantly near; the world is always under His attentive gaze. And all its becoming is not an accident, not the play of certain natural forces or spirits dwelling in the world, but the fulfillment of God's purpose for the world, for what it is meant to become.

In this sense, from the very beginning God conceived the world as His Kingdom. After all, what is a kingdom if not the authority of a king extending over a certain place where the laws established by him operate? And from the very beginning the world was precisely such a place. A place where God reigns. And if today the world is not wholly and not always like this, that is not the norm but only a deviation from it. A deviation that God will sooner or later bring to an end. The whole Bible is about this: as sacred history and as the history of Revelation, and also as the history of Salvation.