Genesis 9:8-17
It has always fascinated me that the story of Noah and the Ark is such a fixture in children’s toys and books and Sunday School lessons. There are at least four Noah’s Ark ornaments on our tree every year from Ben’s childhood, and I have served in multiple churches with the scenes of this story painted on the walls of the Sunday School classrooms. I think we are drawn to it for our little ones because it is a story involving animals, and children love to look at and talk about animals from a young age. But if you really think about it, the story of the flood and the ark is a particularly frightening part of our Scriptures. The God who created all things is deeply troubled by the violence and destruction wrought by humanity, and decides that the only solution is to start over, to wipe out everything and begin with a clean slate. The birds of the air and the animals of the land, innocent victims though they are, will not be spared except for one pair of each. Those mated pairs, non-human versions of Adam and Eve, are meant to recreate the world and populate it anew. Then there’s Noah, a man we know almost nothing about, who was probably scoffed at and treated as some sort of crazed conspiracy theorist when he started building a massive boat in the middle of the desert. Noah and his wife receive the favor of God, along with their three sons and their sons’ wives, and are entrusted with the new creation after the waters recede.
I’m sure if I asked you to tell me the story of the ark, you’d tell me about pairs of animals going two by two, and forty days and forty nights of rain, and a dove with an olive branch in its beak, and finally a rainbow. You’d be right, and you’d probably remember more details of this story than almost any other story in Scripture, or at least any story in the Old Testament. It’s a colorful, fantastical, memorable story. But do we really know what this story means?
I remember learning this story at 5 or 6 years old and being troubled. Why would God let such a thing happen? What about the animals that couldn’t swim, the ones who didn’t get to ride with Noah? What made Noah so special? How could there possibly be only one good man worth saving in all the world? I still think they’re good questions, although my Sunday School teacher was a bit perturbed that I kept interrupting the story. From what I recall, my storybook Bible interpreted this as a story about God’s promises- God promised never to cause a flood like that again and would remind us of that promise every time it rained by placing a rainbow somewhere in the sky. I have spent every rainy day since looking for rainbows, but I have to admit that I am still sold on the storybook version.
When I was young, and for a longer time than I should probably admit, I thought rainbows and hairbows were the same thing. I thought when people said that God put a rainbow in the sky, that meant that somewhere, the rainbow was tied in a pretty knot like a ribbon in the world’s hair. It wasn’t until I took a class from a Hebrew scholar that I finally replaced that image with something closer to the intention of the story.
If you’ve ever seen a hunting bow, or an archer’s bow, or seen replicas of early human tools and weaponry, you’ve seen a real rainbow. What God placed in the sky as a symbol of the promise never to cause our destruction was not a hairbow, although that might have been nice too. God hung God’s bow in the sky. God gave up God’s weapon, laid down God’s arms and promised never to pick them up again against us. The covenant between Noah and God is a peace treaty, a disarmament agreement. And rather than strip humanity of our free will, even knowing how poorly we so often use it, God was the one to disarm. God recognized the full potential for good and for evil in humanity, and promised never to give us what we deserve. Instead, God chose mercy. God’s love for us outweighed any desire to punish or control us. And so God laid the weapons down. God hung God’s bow in the sky, never to wield it against anything God had made.
I wish someone had found a developmentally appropriate way to share that version with me in Sunday school. I wish that for so many people I meet who struggle to believe that God could ever possibly love them through their mistakes. I think if we all grew up with the truth of a disarmed God, we might have been a little less afraid, less afraid of ourselves and the ways we might mess up and earn reprimands from God. We might want to live up to that promise instead, to be the kind of people God believes we can be instead of being afraid of becoming just another choice for God to regret.
I’m glad, though, for the opportunity to tell the story again now. We enter the season of Lent, the season of wilderness walking. Lent is a time to identify what draws us away from God, and to explore what might draw us closer. We are meeting a God that has chosen to lay down power, to hand over agency and entrust himself into the hands of fickle and unpredictable human beings. In Lent we meet a God who lets himself get lost in the wilderness, who endures the temptations of the Evil One, who consents to a baptism that he does not need in order to show us the kind of freedom surrender can provide. In Jesus we meet the same God who might have destroyed creation, but instead saw it for the beautiful mess that we’ve made of it and said “Let’s start again, together.” In Jesus, the bow is not simply hung in the sky. In Jesus, the bow is broken, the spear shattered and the sword cast down. In their place we will see first the cross, and then finally the empty tomb. The weapons of death in Jesus will become instruments of our salvation, another promise, another rainbow in the sky. Every time you see a rainbow, you can remember that God has promised never to bear arms against you. And every time you see a cross, you can know that God will do anything, everything, to keep that promise. As we wander in the wilderness together, as we prepare for the sorrows of Holy Week and the joys of Easter, look for the ways God is keeping God’s promises to us. How will we respond to an unarmed God?
Mother A Writes 