Crown of creation or apex predator?
Endowed with dominion or called to service?
Forged in a divine image or descended from apes?
What is the human animal, anyway? Must we choose only one of the foregoing images? Some combination of those images? None of the above?
For millennia, poets and mystics, philosophers and scientists have struggled to articulate what it means to be human. Among the countless proposals, no consensus of any kind has emerged on this question, including among religious traditions and theologians. Even biblical writers do not answer this question directly, and one could construct multiple points of view about humanity using various biblical passages.
“Humanity” is the theme for the second Sunday of the Season of Creation in this year’s lectionary cycle, which we observed yesterday. And even though biblical books represent a wide array of perspectives, those books do seem to offer a singular note of caution about this theme: whatever it means to be human cannot be isolated from the rest of God’s creation.
This is a cautionary note because separating ourselves from the rest of God’s creation is precisely what makes us stumble into arrogance and fall into tragedy—we might recall that the so-called “fall” of humanity in the third chapter of Genesis is mostly a falling away from intimacy, and relationship, and communion.
Embracing the essential and non-negotiable social character of humanity has always been challenging for our species, but especially so in modern Western society. Nearly everything from public school curricula to advertising and popular entertainment trains us to aim always for self-sufficiency as one of our primary virtues—but this is entirely delusional. Every single breath we take relies on the trees growing from the soil and the algae blooming in the oceans to provide the oxygen for our breathing.
No one is self-sufficient, not one single creature of God in what Roman Catholic and feminist theologian Elizabeth Johnson calls the “community of creation.” All life on this planet—all of it—is interdependent.
The lectionary last week featured the ancient story of creation from Genesis, except for the creation of humanity, which the lectionary assigns for this week (Genesis 1:26-28). I think that’s a helpful strategy, a way to underscore that the wider world of God’s creation is clearly good without us. But splitting up the story that way also comes with significant risk—we risk perpetuating a deadly isolation from the rest of God’s creation.
Let’s be sure to note that we humans don’t even have our own day in the creation story from Genesis; we’re created on the same day as all the other mammals—the “cattle and crawling things and wild beasts”—and I note this not to denigrate our humanity, as if threads of relationship diminish us; to the contrary, being woven into the vast web of creation with all other animals is a thing of startling beauty.
The beauty itself evokes, it seems to me, the deep communion for which we all yearn, even when we can’t quite name it that way. Biblical writers often evoke this sense of an ancient wound with which all of us live, and for which only communion can offer healing.
Author Kate Forster writes about all this in the frame of consolation, which she invites by paying attention to the wider world of animals—“consolation” because the notion that we reside at the top of the animal heap leaves us precariously alone.
“I think it’s a deep consolation,” Forster writes, “to know that spiders dream, that monkeys tease predators, that dolphins have accents, that lions can be scared silly by a lone mongoose, that otters hold hands, and ants bury their dead.”
We aren’t speaking about “their life and our life,” she says, “nor your life and my life.” No, there is only “just one teetering and endless thread” of life, “and all of us are entangled with it as deep as entanglement goes.”
I love that phrase, and I think it summons a poignant beauty from Paul’s letter to the Philippians, also assigned for the second week of this season (2:1-8). “As deep as entanglement goes” is also where God has gone in Jesus, and where we still encounter that divine presence in all the entanglements of life itself.
Paul is apparently quoting from an ancient hymn of praise to Christ in this portion from his letter, a hymn of praise for the Jesus who lives a fully human life—going all the way to the cross and tomb, as “deep as entanglement goes”— and by doing so, shows us God with us.
Early in Christian traditions theologians argued that Jesus saves humanity by showing us what it means to be truly human. Hearing stories about Jesus, we catch a glimpse of what it means to act humanly, what it means to live in authentically human relationships, what it looks like for the fully human person to thrive and flourish—free at last from the shackles of bitter resentments and the cycles of violent retributions.
All four Gospel writers grapple with this notion of a divine humanity by using a title for Jesus that we usually see translated as the “Son of Man.” This strange title has a long history in the Hebrew Bible, where some prophets will refer to themselves as “Son of Man” as a way to underscore their own humanity, without any prestige, just an ordinary person like anyone else. For other biblical writers, it’s a title of divine authority, for one who is designated by God to represent who God is.
Both of those meanings merge in the indigenous translation of the Christian Testament, The First Nations Version. In the lectionary passages for this day, that version renders that ancient title as “The True Human Being.”
Mark’s Jesus (10:41-45) describes imperial rulers as those who “show their power over people and push them around.” But this will not be so for those who follow me, Jesus says, for those who live like “The True Human Being” in humble service.
Standing in that long line of Hebrew prophets, Gospel writers present Jesus as the truly human one who lives with divine authority. Just imagine what this might imply for the claim that we humans are created in the “image of God,” as the short but galvanizing portion from Genesis declares, an image that remains stubbornly undefined, not only in Genesis but in the rest of the Bible.
Isn’t time—way past time, actually—for us humans to stop assuming that the divine image grants us godlike power to dominate other humans and subjugate all other animals. And why is “godlike” even associated with “domination” at all? How might the world change if instead of a swaggering coercion, God’s image is instead a posture of humble service that sets God’s creatures free?
Quite honestly, that very possibility slapped me awake like a clap of heavenly thunder as I tried to preach on these texts. Reconfiguring the divine image would surely shift dramatically how that short portion from the very first chapter of the Bible is usually read, especially when Creator God gives humanity “dominion” over all the other animals.
The history of that little phrase is ghastly and horrific—which is putting the matter quite modestly—not least because that sense of dominion has too often applied to particular humans who are counted among those “other animals.”
Lurking around in that troubling word “dominion” is of course the Latin word for “lord”—dominus. Strikingly—and I mean this ought to jolt us all awake—the Gospel writers and Paul insist that that the “dominion of the dominus,” the power of the Lord Jesus, appears most vividly in humble service to others—to all other creatures of the same God.
Now is the time to define these powerful biblical words that have remained so despairingly vulnerable to distortion and even torturous manipulation; Earth herself is crying out for this religious intervention, and this is it: To “have dominion” is to serve others and to set them free; this is the very image of God, and the only definition that matters for what it means to be human.
