Creation & Redemption

The soul can be a dark place. I know mine can be. Darkness covered the face of the deep. Then God said "let there be light". Jesus is that light. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness will not overcome it. God's Spirit hovers over the deep, and a wind blew over them. Jesus blew into the mouths of the disciples, and they received the Holy Spirit. Every redemptive act is also an act of creation or rather re-creation. That is why life-changing events led to new names for the transformed. Images from creation are revisited and replayed whenever God saves or redeems.

The reverse, I think, is also true. Creation was an act of redemption. That is why the combat motif appeals to me. Creation, Incarnation, Crucifixion, Resurrection, Pentecost, we must bring all these events together into a single divine act. These are not only events that happenED. They are events that happeN, all the time. This is not to deny that there were really particular events in the past that are recounted by the Bible, but these events are seen as reaching into the present. The events of the Bible are to be "contemporized", relived in the present. Deuteronomy, for instance, takes the events of Moses' time reworks them into a call to Jews who hear them now, today, to see that story as the story of their lives.

None of this is very new. I've talked about it before. But only now am I fully realizing the way the creation stories in the Bible play the same roles. Further, I am starting to see how an inversion of this same process may be going on when creation imagery is used to talk about redemption. As the past story of ancient beginnings reveals something about creation in the present, so too redemptive acts later in the Bible reveal something about the act of creation.