Friday 3rd February
Read Genesis 2:21-25
“So the Lord God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping, he took one of the man’s ribs and then closed up the place with flesh. 22 Then the Lord God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man.
23 The man said,
‘This is now bone of my bones
and flesh of my flesh;
she shall be called “woman”,
for she was taken out of man.’
24 That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh.
25 Adam and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame.” (NIVUK)
Sometimes it is interesting to read what ancient theologians and commentators draw from a passage such as this. Gerhard von Rad, a great biblical theologian, observed that the reason God caused man to fall into a deep sleep was because the truly creative miracles are not meant for mortal eyes. God’s best work is best done in secret. “Man cannot perceive God in the act, cannot observe his miracles in their genesis; he can revere God’s creativity only as an accomplished fact.”
Admittedly, I thought it was simply kindness that God anaesthetised the man whilst performing orthopaedic plastic surgery, but the mystery of unseen creation is interesting to reflect on also.
It is perhaps more likely than the mystery seen by Alcuin of York (look him up, he was amazing in most things) who, in a catechism on Genesis (a catechism is simply a way of learning and remembering through question and answer), wrote this in response to the sleep of man and creation of woman.
Question: ‘Why do we read that the woman was built from the side of the man sleeping, and not formed from the earth like man?’
Answer: ‘It certainly means, for the mystery, that Christ slept on the cross for the Church, and the spring of our salvation flowed out of his side’.
Can you follow the logic in his thinking? I suspect it comes from reflecting on Paul’s observation that Christ is the second Adam, and that the church is regularly presented as the bride of Christ, a woman. Christ formed the church through His death on the cross, a death confirmed through the piercing of His side whilst He was ‘sleeping’ in death. So, the church (woman) was formed from the side of Christ (the true Adam). But I am only guessing.
Why do you think the author of Genesis 2 gave us this creative detail in the very beginning? ‘Tis a wondrous mystery…
