Reflection for the Week

As readers of the Genesis creation accounts today we must realize that we are foreigners to the text and its ancient Near Eastern context, which may strike us as strange and unfamiliar, yet we are not excluded from engaging with its God, narration, and drama in a somewhat recognizable pattern. Refigured lives then become a real possibility for those readers who are grafted into the revelatory story of God’s sculpting in time, both through creation and the ever-present redemptive outpouring of love in Christ, which graciously offers us a place and a role on the stage of the cosmic drama still in progress. This poetic and theologically-loaded biblical world production not only includes a narrative concordance that supersedes discordance with respect to time or changing portraits of the actual world, but it also proclaims that life triumphs over death and will continue to do so throughout God’s ongoing story.