NOTES for Gen 6:1-22
The story of the corruption of the human race before the flood raises an extraordinary number of questions; few passages of Holy Scripture can compare with it in this respect. Yet here is what is surprising: at first glance these questions seem obvious, but on closer examination they turn out to be largely idle. Indeed, we are very interested in who the sons of God were who went in to the daughters of men; we almost cannot live without finding out who the giants were, the men of renown from of old. Yet what would change for us depending on one answer or another?
Here, as in many other places, the biblical narrative uses marriage as a symbol of a person's relationship with God, and this is a highly meaningful symbol. Religious worship turns out to be akin to the essential union of different beings that marriage is. It is characteristic that the human person appears here as the feminine principle, needing protection and needing the object of worship to take responsibility for him. Therefore the matter concerns events of religious history. In a figurative sense, the Bible most often calls "sons" those who share in the nature of someone or something. 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 Genesis 6 are beings who share in an immaterial, spiritual nature; simply put, bodiless spirits. Thus before us is a story about the emergence of paganism, about how the human person, "becoming futile in his thinking," as the apostle Paul puts it, began to worship created spirits instead of worshiping the one God. From this the giants appeared on the earth: people who, thanks to union with these spirits, possessed abilities unusual for human beings and not intended by the Creator. That, essentially, is all. But this is by no means the only thing that matters in the narrator's story.
Reading about what led to the flood, one cannot fail to notice the words that the narrator of Genesis puts into the Creator's mouth. "My Spirit shall not forever be disregarded by human beings," He says when paganism arises. This is a grand, astonishing promise in which the great mercy of God is revealed to us. For when the Lord says that the seduction of the human race into a great deception will be temporary, He thereby promises to conquer and end this madness. More than that, His will is that a union of love should bind the human person with the very source of the world's life, with 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 says that He desires to return to eternity the person who has fallen away from it.
One also cannot fail to notice the words: "...the Lord regretted that He had made man..." Usually we think that God, like an unfortunate 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 grant us life. The key words in this phrase come later, where the narrator says that the Lord "was grieved in His heart." In the prayer attributed to King Manasseh (2 Chron. 36:22a ff.), it says of God: "You are the Lord Most High, good, long-suffering, and greatly merciful, and You repent over human evils"; this quotation entered one of the prayers of the sacrament of repentance. This is what Scripture is saying: the Lord grieves over the evil that we commit. The grief and repentance "over human evils" of which the narrator speaks in chapter 6 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.