The Age of Noah
Lenten Vespers, Week Two
Homily:
Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from
our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
In addition to prayer, fasting, almsgiving, and repentance, Lent
is a traditional time for catechesis, that is, instruction in the faith.
For our Lenten vespers this year, we are following a
catechetical method of St Augustine, who broke up the story of the Bible into
six great Ages of the World. The first age was the Age of Myth, from Adam to
Noah. Tonight we enter the second age, from Noah to Abraham.
In this second age, Creation has been given second birth
through the waters of the Great Flood. Evil has been drowned, but not lost.
There is yet sin in Noah and his family, which they carry along with them into
a world made new. As for all those who drowned in the Great Flood, well, they
are not lost forever. Along with rest of Creation, they await the coming of the
Messiah, and the Resurrection of the dead. We will see them again when Jesus
descends to harrow hell.
This is the age, following Noah, when myth begins to
collapse into history. That is, the world of the Bible grows progressively more
recognizable as our own. The sons of Noah—Shem, Ham, and Japheth—spread out in
three different directions, their descendants venturing into the three known
continents of the ancient world. Ham’s family settles in Africa, Shem in the
Middle East, and Japheth in Europe. The various Semitic peoples and Semitic
languages of the modern Middle East are called such because they claim descent
form Shem.
Noah is also the first person in the Bible, mind you, to
cultivate grapes and vint his own wine. He overdoes it at first, but from here
on in wine, in moderation, will be considered throughout the Bible as nothing
less than a gift from God.
God also proclaims perpetual peace with humankind, that He
will never again start the world anew as He did in the Flood. The rainbow,
sayeth the Lord, will remind us that God’s war-bow has been hung in the
heavens, pointing upward, pointing away, as a sign of peace—as the rainbow
remains to this day. The signs of the age of Noah, the rainbow, the dove, are still
our ubiquitous symbols of peace.
This is known as the Noahide or Noachic Covenant, in which
God promises not an itemized contract but an open-ended and secure relationship
between Heaven and Earth, God and Man. It applies to all peoples everywhere and
even to animals, whom God forbids us to abuse.
One of the more remarkable aspects of this second age is its
universalism. Genesis lists all the nations descended from Noah, and more than
a few of them will prove to be the enemies of God’s people Israel in the
stories to come. We are all related, the Bible tells us. Humanity has a shared
history and a shared family. Even those we consider foes are really wayward
brothers and cousins. And to them, quite frankly, we may well appear rather
wayward ourselves.
The age from Noah to Abraham is an age of transition, of
fresh starts. The giants and monsters of old have been drowned, though a few
may still pop up from time to time. God has begun to reestablish His intended
peace throughout the universe, calling a truce between God, humanity, and the
whole of Creation. So viewed, the Flood was not a catastrophe but rather a
last-ditch effort to prevent catastrophic failure: to save the world and all
mankind, so fatally fallen and torn by sin, before we passed the point of no
return.
And now that the world rises anew on firmer if shaky legs,
God puts into motion His ultimate plan to save us all from sin and to restore
Creation to its intended glory. And that plan begins with the unlikeliest of
heroes, a childless old man descended from Shem, whose youth witnessed a world still
full of ancient wonders, yet whose adulthood would see a jaded world of
realpolitik so very like our own.
The second age closes, the third begins, with the call of a
man named Abram.
In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy
Spirit. Amen.
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