Haunted Cosmos--Genesis 3:15
Day 14
I’m not sure why Ben Garrett tucked his treatment of Genesis 3:15 where he did in the book Haunted Cosmos: Doing Your Duty In A World That’s Not Just Stuff, because it seems to me to be foundational musings on what haunts our cosmos.
His thesis (and mine even before I waded into this book) is Everything Matters.
No, I don’t mean that every single instance of your day is critical to the next one so you have to be hypervigilant to the point of paranoid madness–but–in a way, that’s true.
We’ve learned, though, for the most part, what our limitations are, so I think a lot of the time, maybe most of the time, we are set on auto-pilot and we do the things during the day that we know match who we are and what is comfortable for us.
And because we are on auto-pilot most of the time, we get surprised when there is evidence that our trivial lives portend a greatness of interconnectedness with God and His cosmos that seems just outside of our reach.
Yesterday, the pastor’s (longish) message was on Jesus Christ and His resurrection in Matthew 28, with supporting passages from John 20 describing how Mary and the other women discovered Jesus’ empty tomb.
I marveled at the INTERCONNECTEDNESS of those two gospel passages and how the pastor wove them together–even down to the symbolism of how the angels that Mary encountered were situated at the head and foot of the slab where Jesus was laid and how their placement symbolically matches the placement of the angels on the Ark of the Covenant’s Mercy Seat.
I LOVE that frisson of interconnected feeling that I get when I realize that God’s cosmos, His universe made for me, which is so vast and complex that I can barely even understand it, is ticking right along like that BMW factory we toured in Greer, SC last week.
And I’m not responsible for it–I just have to marvel at God’s creation and glorify Him.
Later in the day, when I was rolling around with Ben Garrett’s chapter on Everything Matters, it occurred to me through his discussion of God’s response to Adam and Eve’s (and Satan’s) original sin, that Genesis 3:15 foretells the events of Matthew 28 and John 20:
Genesis 3:15 “And I will make enemies Of you and the woman, And of your offspring and her Descendant; He shall bruise you on the head, And you shall bruise Him on the heel.”
Our lives will be spent, in its entirety, fighting off the evil in our lives that is meant to defeat Jesus Christ in our lives.
We are going to be nipped in the heel–daily.
But through our faith in Christ–He will deliver the fatal blow against Satan and death.
Christopher Watkin writes in Biblical Critical Theory:
“An important function of the fall in the biblical narrative is in fact, and perhaps a little surprisingly, to limit evil to say that it is not original, that it has a beginning in history, and that int is not a feature of humanity as originally created, however inveterate and inescapable it is now. The biblical account of sin is not, as society would portray it, cruising, cruel, and counterproductive, but it limits evil, leads to democracy and equality, and legitimates hope and radical transformation.”
And the proof of that?
Matthew 28 and John 20.
Garrett asks if God’s cosmos are haunted:
“The cosmos is haunted by…many things: By God; by our sin; by the curse, by the Devil and his legions; by death; by the promise; by the Son and His victory on the cross; by life; by the beatific vision of the Garden restored and the world reborn; by the faithful Labor of Christ’s hands and feet who have died and have–by the Spirit–overcome death; by goodness, truth, and beauty raging with mirth against the wicked; by seed sown in tears yet brought in with shouts of joy; by sad hearts filled with gladness again.”
To me this isn’t a scary haunting but a recognition that there are CONNECTIONS everywhere–felt but mostly unseen.
Unless we turn off the auto-pilot.
Later last night, Karen and I watched The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, a worthy if not uneven animated prequel based on information from an appendix to the original Lord of The Rings books.
If I was cynical (ha!), I could boil the plot down to another Hollywood Girl Power movie where all the men are bumbling, evil, and unworthy and the women, the shieldmaidens of Rohan, are the wise and courageous ones–but because I was already primed to look for connections from the earlier messages on Matthew 28, John 20, and the snaky Genesis 3:15, I saw how Tolkien’s faith instructed his work–even his work that had been turned into a cartoon.
Holly Ordway writes in Tolkien’s Faith: A Spiritual Biography:
“Recognizing the warrior side of the Catholic understanding of Mary is particularly helpful in allowing us to see a wider range of prototypes for Eowyn, the shieldmaiden of Rohan.”
In Catholic iconography, Mary is often depicted crushing the head of a snake.
So from the morning message of Matthew 28 and John 20 which is foretold in Genesis 3:15 which Ben Garrett discusses in the Haunted Cosmos, to Tolkien’s understanding of Genesis 3:15 and the ancient symbolism of Mary portrayed in a sort of ridiculous animated cartoon Lord of the Rings prequel–EVERYTHING MATTERS.
Flick the auto-pilot off for just a minute. You’ll see. 🙂
Lord, we ask for strength to walk in Your victory over death, even when the heels of our lives are bruised and we are hurting.
Lord, guide us and help us live as bearers of Your light, standing firm against the schemes of darkness.
Amen.