000 Allen FMT (i-xxii) - The Presbyterian Leader

46 Proper 4 [9]/Year A
cosmic world. To exercise dominion is not to have license to do whatever
one wants (such as despoiling the earth) but is to help the various elements
of creation live together in covenantal community. The female and the
male are equally created in the divine image. This passage implies egalitarianism
with no sense of hierarchy.
This passage is important to the New Testament. For the apocalyptic
theology that is a part of many of the New Testament writings contends
that the end time (the eschatological world, the realm of God) will be like
the beginning times (the world at creation and before the fall). The ministries
of Jesus and the church thus witness to God’s intent to remake the
fallen world into the quality of life depicted in Genesis 1 and 2. Furthermore,
the Scriptures often directly cite or allude to this passage (e.g.,
Matt. 19:4; Mark 10:6; Acts 17:29; Rom. 14:2; 1 Cor. 11:7; 2 Cor. 4:6; Eph.
4:24; Col. 3:10; 1 Tim. 4:4; Heb. 4:4, 10; Jas. 3:9; 2 Pet. 3:5).
While the hope of apocalyptic re-creation has not come to pass, the
preacher can point out that Genesis 1 can be for us, as for the early Jesus
movement, a paradigm of God’s purposes for cosmic community. The
generativity with which God imbued the world at creation is still at work
in the creation to create and re-create.
Genesis 1 is assigned to Trinity Sunday because of the plural, “Let us
make humankind in our image” (Gen. 1:26). While Christian exegesis has
sometimes interpreted this pronoun as a reference to the Trinity, in its
exilic or postexilic context the plural undoubtedly referred instead to the
members of the heavenly court, the heavenly beings alongside God, a
common motif in ancient Near Eastern literature.
Proper 4 [9]/Year A
Genesis 6:9–22; 7:24; 8:14–19+ (Semicontinuous)
This reading is the first of a series of semicontinuous readings from Genesis
and is the only one from the primeval history (Genesis 1–11). This history
explains why God called Sarah, Abraham, and their descendants.
God had sought to bless the whole world directly through creation and
re-creation, but human beings so violated God’s purpose of living in mutual
support that God decided to attempt another means of blessing the world:
by using one human family (Israel) as a model of the way all could be blessed.
Today’s passage is a semicontinuous telling of the flood, the complete
text of which is Genesis 6:1–9:17 (see First Sunday in Lent/Year B). This
story is similar to other ancient Near Eastern tales of floods destroying