In Genesis 1, God creates the world by speaking. God’s speech is His self-disclosure- when we speak, we reveal something about ourselves. The entire world depends utterly on God for its continued existence- His willing to sustain it in being thus reveals His inner life and quality. As we have discussed before, the sequence of events in creation week reveals God’s intention to elevate the world through dialogical communion with and in the human family: the Man who is created with the first-person plural “Let us” is the Man to whom God speaks a word with the possibility of response (Genesis 1:26-28). Man is created as male and female- a differentiated unity- because in this differentiated unity there is the potential for growth and maturation through dialogue, with each other and with God. We see this dynamic replicated in the liturgical life of the Church. The president of the liturgy plays the role of bridegroom to the church as bride- he is the one who, on God’s behalf, teaches and feeds the people. This is why St. Paul returns to God’s creation of Man as male and female when he speaks of the proper ordering of bishop and church (1 Timothy 2:5ff). Observe the triple relation which holds true between the president (i.e. the one who presides), the congregation, and God. The president calls the people to join him and the people respond: “Again and again in peace let us pray to the Lord.” From one perspective, the president has engaged the congregation in a dialogue in which he plays the masculine, initiatory role- the congregation, in responding with the words he calls forth, plays the feminine role. Yet in another sense both the president and people stand together as feminine in relation to God: after all, it is the whole church, president and people, which prays to the Lord.
This is the central mystery of maleness and femaleness in the life of the human family. The dyad is really a triad: male and female, integrated into one body, stand receptively to hear the voice of God. The creaturely masculine is called to receive the word of God and transmit it outwards to the creaturely feminine- which, depending on the relationship, may be one’s wife, one’s children, the congregation, one’s house, or the world at large. This is at the heart of what it means for God to exist in reciprocal dialogue with the world: the relation of God to the world is the relation of masculine to feminine. Yet within the cosmos there is replicated at every level of its being the polarity of masculinity and femininity, initiation and reciprocity. This is a major theme throughout the Book of Genesis. Genesis begins with the creation of the world, establishing the total dependence of the world upon God. Adam is called the “generations of the heaven and the earth” (Genesis 2:4), but even in the procreation of children, God is repeatedly reintroduced as the ontological principle undergirding the continued begetting of children. Cain is thus “begotten with the LORD” (Genesis 4:1). And Melchizedek, using the same word, blesses God as the “Begetter of Heaven and Earth” (Genesis 14:19). This is a major thread throughout Genesis, one which is consistently reinforced. God brings Abram out of Ur of the Chaldeans to a land of promise, and Abram comes to the “Oak of Moreh”, or “Oak of Instruction.” There God appears to Abram and promises to grant him the land of Canaan as the inheritance of his seed (Genesis 12:6-7). Every detail is here of significance: the oak is a mighty tree- it is the telos towards which a seed develops. And God is here promising at the Oak of Instruction that Abraham’s seed will inherit the land. In other words, Abraham’s offspring will grow and develop into a mighty tree.
In Genesis 1, God created the world through the divine Word- but it is not until the third creation day that the world begins to act in response to that Word. God commands the ground to send forth trees with fruit and grains with seed- and the ground, saturated with divine Speech, responds. We see in Genesis 12:6-7 that the principle of the world’s development into its glory- signified in a tree which binds together heaven and earth- is the word or instruction of God through Abraham. Hence, having been told that his seed would inherit the land at a tree, Abraham builds an altar and moves to the hill country- i.e. the higher ground. The text concerns a complex reciprocal dialogue in which God moves into the world through Abraham and carries the world back to himself through Abraham. This is the pattern of altar and sanctuary building in scripture: God discloses the pattern of the altar to his human representative, and that representative, having built the altar, ascends its steps with the people whom he leads to God. Subsequent to this story, we read of a famine in the land, which is redeemed through Abraham’s death and resurrection. Abraham goes “down” (Genesis 12:10) to Egypt, is delivered, and “went up from Egypt” (Genesis 13:1) with greatly increased wealth (Genesis 12:16, 12:20, 13:2).
As the story unfolds, we find that the word of God that dwells within Abraham not only multiplies his own seed- it multiplies the nations. Abraham journeys to Gerar, ruled by Abimelech. While in Gerar, Abimelech takes Sarah into his house so that God shut the wombs of Abimelech’s household. After Abimelech returns Sarah, Abraham “prayed to God” and all these wombs are opened (Genesis 20:14-18). The word of God is the principle for the multiplication of the world, as the word of God is the principle for the existence of the world. God, standing as Bridegroom, gives the word to the world and elevates it. This is why St. Paul refers to Jesus Christ’s washing of His Bride “through the word”, setting it forth as the archetype for all Christian marriage (Ephesians 5:25-30). The word of God goes into human beings so that they become the bridegroom in whom the cosmos as bride is taken up to God as the true Bridegroom. This is why the crowning act of creation is the constitution of Man, the Image of God, as Male and Female. It is in the unification of male and female that the grammar of the world’s glorification is set forth, and it is in the dynamic of real, concrete human relations through history that the glorification of the world is achieved. This is why the Bible is the way that it is. It is an intensely concrete family story, one which begins with the generation of the Only-Begotten Son before eternity dawned and is consummated with the marriage of that Divine Son to the Cosmos as His Bride.