God has always had a special relationship with us creatures of mingled matter and spirit, which places us at the same time higher and lower than his mighty angels.
Seeds
Genesis 2:18-24
Psalm 127(128)
Hebrews 2:9-11
Mark 10:2-16
Sapling
“Of the theme I have declared to you, I will now that ye make in harmony together a Great Music. And since I have kindled you with the Flame Imperishable, ye shall show forth your powers in adorning this theme, each with his own thoughts and devices, if he will. But I will sit and hearken, and be glad that through you great beauty has been wakened into song.” These majestic words come from the Ainulindale, JRR Tolkien’s epic of creation at the beginning of his Silmarillion. The speaker is God, addressing the angels, at the dawn of time.
Tolkien imagined creation as music, as song. Like the Bible, this is creation through language. Words have power in the biblical worldview, extraordinary power: to use language to label something is to circumscribe it and understand it.
The idea was common in the ancient world as it is today. The Egyptians believed that even their gods could be controlled if their secret names were known. In the Harry Potter series, people are afraid of the very name of Lord Voldemort.
In the spiritual tradition of the Church, as in modern psychology, there is power in naming an experience or memory for what it is: then you can begin to deal with it.
Perhaps it’s not a surprise, then, that God alone names elements of creation in the creation narrative. Until this passage in Genesis 2: for the first time, someone other than God is given the power to name.
Not even the angels are afforded this privilege in Scripture. God has always had a special relationship with us creatures of mingled matter and spirit, which places us at the same time higher and lower than his mighty angels.
Jesus, who has always existed as the eternal Son of the Father, “for a short while” was made lower than the angels in becoming man in the Incarnation. Lower in what way? Humanity has to live with a degree of separation from God which the angels do not suffer; through the Fall, the world is broken and groaning and yearning to recapture the innocence and the divine communion of Eden, as indeed are we who dwell on it.
But the crucial words are those I’ve quoted above: “for a short while”. Through Jesus’ death and resurrection, he took up our humanity and crowned it with the glory and splendour of being united to the Father.
Just listen to how the writer to the Hebrews wants to emphasise this point: “it was his purpose to bring a great many of his sons into glory.”
The purpose of God, his will and design for us lowly and broken human beings, is to raise us up above the angels and adopt us in his eternal Son. That same eternal Son calls us brothers and sisters and as Hebrews says earlier, which angel can claim that privilege?
I think Tolkien has this in mind when he writes this in the Ainulindale, just after he writes of God showing his plan for the world to his angels (Ainur): “the glory of its beginning and the splendour of its end amazed the Ainur, so that they bowed before Iluvatar and were silent.”
The same words we read of Jesus in Hebrews: glory and splendour.
Language fails at this moment: that great power to circumscribe and understand breaks asunder into wordless silence. What better reaction can we have to the wonder of God’s plan for us in his Son, than to echo that of Tolkien’s angels: let us bow before the Lord in speechless awe.
Fruit
