We Are Stuck In The Sixth Day

The garden

The first chapter of Genesis is a list of days, and at the end of almost every one of them God looks at what has been made and calls it good. Light is good, the dry land is good, the plants with their seeds are good, the fish and the birds are good, the cattle and the creeping things are good. On the sixth day God makes human beings, male and female, in the divine image, and then looks at everything at once and calls it very good. That word comes before any word about sin, any rule, or any test. It is the first thing the Bible says about us.

The second chapter tells the story again, closer to the ground, with a man made from the dust and a woman made from his side, set in a garden to work it and keep it. It ends with a sentence that is easy to read past: "And the man and his wife were both naked, and were not ashamed." In Hebrew the word for naked there is arummim. One verse later, the serpent appears, and the writer calls him arum, crafty. The two words sound almost the same, and the old storyteller put them side by side on purpose, so that the plainness of the people and the cleverness of the snake rub against each other.

The serpent's promise is that if they eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, their eyes will be opened, and they will be like God. They eat, and their eyes are opened, and the first thing they see is themselves. They see that they are naked, and they sew fig leaves together to cover it. Then they hear God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hide among the trees. When God calls out, "Where are you?", the man answers, "I heard your voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself." Within a few more lines he has blamed the woman, and the woman has blamed the serpent.

Read slowly, the order of events is striking. Their bodies were the same bodies, the garden was the same garden, and God was the same God, still walking there in the evening and still looking for them. What changed was the way they looked at themselves, as if from outside, measuring and finding something wrong. The first fruit of that new knowledge was a feeling, and the feeling was shame. Covering, hiding, fear, and blame all followed from it, in that order, in the space of a few verses.

Look at who does the blaming in the garden. God asks questions, "Where are you?" and "Who told you that you were naked?", and it is the man who hands down the first verdict, pointing at the woman, and the woman who hands down the second, pointing at the serpent. Guilt on earth is something human beings decide about each other. In the Bible, we understand guilt to be the original sin of shaming each other. To be blameless is to be without guilt. What we now know is that guilt is only for God to give. No human made criterion matters. The Book of Job opens with God himself calling Job blameless and upright, a man who feared God and turned away from evil. Then Job loses his children, his herds, and his health, and his friends spend chapter after chapter proving he must have done something to deserve it. God had named him blameless, and the people around him named him guilty. At the end God tells the friends they were wrong and has Job pray for them. Paul carried the same word into his letters, writing to the Ephesians that God chose people before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before him in love, which puts blamelessness at the very beginning, before anyone had done anything at all. When a crowd brought Jesus a woman caught in adultery and asked whether to stone her, he told the one without sin to throw the first stone, and when they had all walked away, he said, "Neither do I condemn you." Paul wrote to the Romans that there is now no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus, and asked, "Who shall bring any charge against God's elect? It is God who justifies."

The word itself remembers this. In Old English, gylt meant a debt or an offense, something a person owed, a status other people could put on them. Guilt is an assignment, the verdict a family, a town, or a court hands down. Shame is the feeling that comes with it, the sense of being condemned as a whole person. Psychologists often use the word guilt for a feeling, and June Tangney and her colleagues spent years studying the difference between feeling bad about something you did and feeling bad about who you are. What they found about that second feeling, the one this essay calls shame, matches the garden exactly. It pushes people toward hiding, denying, and lashing out at someone else. When people can look at what they did without being condemned for who they are, they are far more likely to own it, apologize, and make it right. Responsibility leads toward repair. The verdict, in the Bible's telling, was never ours to hand out.

Knowing right from wrong is still a gift. A person who cannot tell good from evil cannot protect a child, cannot keep a promise, and cannot refuse an unjust order, and the Bible spends the rest of its pages teaching people to tell the difference and to set things right when they go wrong. The garden story shows something else arriving alongside that knowledge, a fear of being seen and a habit of condemning, and both have stayed with us ever since. It may be that this fear, and the guilt we pass back and forth to escape it, more than any change in what we are, keeps us from seeing the goodness God saw on the sixth day.

The day still waiting

Each of the first six days in Genesis ends with the same line: "And there was evening, and there was morning," the first day, the second day, all the way to the sixth. The seventh day is different. God finishes the work, rests, blesses the seventh day, and makes it holy, and the line about evening and morning never comes.

These were never days the way we count days. The sun and the moon are not made until the fourth day, so the first three days had no sunrise to measure them. A psalm says that a thousand years in God's sight are like yesterday when it is past, and the Second Letter of Peter repeats it, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years. Augustine of Hippo spent years writing a long commentary on Genesis and concluded that the six days could not be ordinary days at all. The people who first told and heard this story did what people always do with something too large to hold. They fit it into the calendar they had. The Jewish people kept the seventh day on Saturday, and Christians later kept it on Sunday, and both were ways of carrying a picture of God's rest through an ordinary week.

Those weekly Sabbaths are metaphors, and they are our ancestors' metaphors, which makes them deeply important. The Talmud says the Sabbath is one sixtieth of the world to come, a small taste of something that has not fully arrived. In 1951 the rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote that people build cathedrals out of stone and the Jewish people built theirs out of time, a holy place entered once a week by stopping work, lighting the candles, and sitting down together. Every Saturday and every Sunday, for thousands of years, families have practiced the seventh day so that their children would know what to look for.

The Bible is honest that the seventh day itself is still out ahead of us. The Letter to the Hebrews says the promise of entering God's rest still stands, and that it remains for some to enter it. Paul goes further in his letter to the Romans. He writes that the whole creation waits with eager longing for the children of God to be revealed, and that creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now.

I have made two children, and there was never a real timeline for either of them. Nobody gets to schedule a birth, and nobody gets to schedule what a child becomes. We keep trying anyway, with creation itself, as if we could project manage it, set a due date for heaven, and measure the progress. In the Book of Job, when God finally speaks out of the whirlwind, he asks Job whether he was there when the foundations of the earth were laid, and whether he knows when the mountain goats give birth, or can count the months until the deer deliver their young. God never accuses Job of anything in those chapters. He shows him a creation far larger than any human schedule, and then tells Job's friends that Job spoke rightly and they did not.

We do not know what the first five days really looked like, because we were not there, and God reminded Job of exactly that. What we do know is that God blessed the seventh day, made it holy, and held it open. Salvation is about us, all of us together, and creation is in labor waiting on us. The seventh day is up to us, and what it is waiting on is for us to stop hiding, stop handing down verdicts on each other, and learn to love the way we were made to.

Babel

A few chapters after the garden, the whole earth speaks one language, and the people settle on a plain in the land of Shinar. They learn to bake bricks instead of gathering stones, and to use tar for mortar, and they say to each other, "Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth." God comes down to see the city, confuses their language so they cannot understand one another, and scatters them anyway.

The people of Babel are afraid of two things, of being scattered and of having no name. Those are the fears of people who feel they do not count, and their answer is to build something tall enough that no one could overlook them. The tower is the fig leaf grown into architecture, a covering made of bricks, a way to feel safe and significant by piling up achievement. What it produces is a city full of people who can no longer understand each other.

Our own institutions can work the same way. In 1932 the United States Public Health Service began a study in Macon County, Alabama, of about 600 Black men, roughly 400 of whom had syphilis. The men were told they were being treated for "bad blood." They were never told what they had, and when penicillin became the standard cure in the 1940s, it was kept from them, so that the researchers could keep watching the disease run its course. The study ran for forty years, until a whistleblower named Peter Buxtun took it to the press in 1972. The men of Tuskegee were known about in great detail, in charts, measurements, and autopsy reports, and in all that time almost no one in charge came to know them as men.

The philosopher Martin Buber wrote in 1923 that people can meet the world in two ways, as an It, something to be used and studied, or as a Thou, someone to be met. Ivan Illich spent his life showing how schools, hospitals, and helping professions could turn people into clients of the very systems meant to serve them. John McKnight, who taught at Northwestern, spent decades showing that neighborhoods are full of gifts that professionals rarely bother to count. Each of them was describing a tower, a structure built to know about people from above, so tall that the people at its base become hard to see.

The book of Acts tells a second story that answers the first. Fifty days after Passover, the followers of Jesus are gathered in Jerusalem when a sound like wind fills the house and they begin to speak in other languages. The city is crowded with pilgrims, Parthians, Medes, Elamites, people from Mesopotamia, Egypt, Libya, and Rome, and each of them hears the message in their own native language. At Babel, one shared language broke into confusion. At Pentecost, many languages remained many, and everyone understood. God left the people as different as they were and made them able to hear each other.

That is the difference between the two stories, and it is the difference that matters for any institution. A tower gathers people by making them uniform and visible from the top. Pentecost gathers people by letting each of them be heard in the language they were born into.

Hope and time

On the plantations of the American South, enslaved people were often marched to church on Sunday to hear white preachers read from the Letter to the Ephesians, "Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters." The sermons promised them heaven after death, a reward for patience and obedience now. Frederick Douglass, who escaped slavery in 1838, wrote seven years later that he saw the widest possible difference between the Christianity of Christ and the Christianity of the slaveholders. One of the things he saw clearly was how a promise about the future could be used to keep people quiet in the present.

In April 1963, sitting in a Birmingham jail, Martin Luther King Jr. answered a group of white clergymen who had asked him to be patient. He wrote that he had been hearing the word "Wait" all his life, and that "Wait" had almost always meant "Never." King was a man of deep hope, and he knew how hope could be turned against the people holding it.

Thomas Aquinas, writing in the 1200s, taught that hope belongs to people on the way. Hope reaches toward something good that is not here yet, and once the good arrives, hope is finished. The saints in heaven, he said, have no hope left, because they already have what they hoped for. Paul says something close to this in Romans: hope that is seen is no longer hope, because who hopes for what he already sees? In his letter to the Corinthians he lists faith, hope, and love, and says the greatest of these is love, and in the same chapter he says that love never ends.

If the seventh day is waiting on us, then a life spent only hoping for heaven can become a way of staying on the sixth day, reaching for a rest that someone else will deliver later, waiting to be good enough, building the tower one more floor. Jesus seems to have seen this too. He told the crowds on the hillside to look at the birds and the lilies and to stop worrying about tomorrow, and he told them to seek the kingdom of God first, now, in how they lived.

The strongest objection to all of this comes from the same people Douglass and King spoke for. Hope kept enslaved people alive. The spirituals they sang about crossing the Jordan and going home were songs about heaven that the people singing them also heard as songs about freedom on this side of the river. The liberation theologians of Latin America, starting with Gustavo Gutiérrez in 1971, insisted that hope for God's kingdom has to change how the poor are treated right now. Hope, in their hands, refused to wait. What they condemned was the counterfeit, the kind of hope that tells suffering people to sit still. The hope they practiced looked a great deal like love already at work, building the seventh day in the middle of the sixth.

We love because he first loved us

The First Letter of John says it three ways in one chapter. God is love. We love because he first loved us. And then, a verse earlier, the line that reaches all the way back to the garden: "There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear." The man in the garden said he hid because he was afraid. John's answer, written many centuries later, is that love is what ends the hiding.

If human beings are made in the image of a God who is love, then love comes first in us too, before shame, before we learn to cover ourselves. The scientists who study how children grow have found something that fits. In 2006 Felix Warneken and Michael Tomasello, working in Leipzig, watched toddlers barely a year and a half old, and when a grown-up dropped a clothespin and reached for it, the children crawled over and handed it back, without being asked or rewarded. The anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy has argued that human babies evolved to be cared for by many hands, mothers, fathers, grandmothers, aunts, and neighbors, and that our species learned to pay close attention to each other's feelings because our children's lives depended on it. We are made for each other from the start. A good deal of what gets called human nature, the grasping, the hoarding, the fear of the stranger, may be what people do once they have learned to be ashamed and afraid, and then built systems that reward those fears.

Jesus was plain about what this love looks like. When a lawyer asked him what he had to do to inherit eternal life, Jesus had him answer it himself, love God with all your heart and your neighbor as yourself, and told him, "Do this, and you will live." Then he told the story of a Samaritan who stopped on the road for a beaten stranger that a priest and a temple worker had already walked past. In Matthew, when the nations are gathered for judgment, they are sorted by whether they fed the hungry, welcomed the stranger, clothed the naked, and visited the sick and the prisoner, and no one is asked what they believed. The First Letter of John says Christ died for the sins of the whole world, and that whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Paul wrote to the Galatians about being made right through pistis Christou, a Greek phrase most Bibles translate as faith in Christ, and a number of scholars, Richard Hays among them, read it as the faithfulness of Christ. Paul, the same writer who told the Ephesians they were saved by grace through faith, told the Galatians that the only thing that counts is faith working through love. Believing in Jesus means believing in the way he lived, and the way into heaven is to love the way he loved.

Jesus was just as plain about what keeps people out. He told a rich young man to sell what he had and give it to the poor, and the man went away sad, and Jesus said it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. In Jericho there was a rich tax collector named Zacchaeus, so short he climbed a sycamore tree to see Jesus pass. Jesus stopped under the tree and invited himself to dinner. Before the meal was over, Zacchaeus stood up and said he would give half of everything he owned to the poor and pay back four times over anyone he had cheated. Jesus said, "Today salvation has come to this house." Zacchaeus was held fully accountable, and the accountability was repair. Love is accountability, and in the gospels it always looks like repair, the riches let go and the people paid back.

In the winter of 1940, a German Jewish woman knocked on the kitchen door of a parsonage in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, a mountain village in southern France. Magda Trocmé, the pastor's wife, opened it, brought her in out of the cold, and fed her. Over the next four years the villagers of Le Chambon and the plateau around it hid thousands of refugees, most of them Jewish, many of them children, in their homes, farms, and schools, while the Vichy police and later the Gestapo searched the area. The philosopher Philip Hallie went there years later to understand how it happened, and he found people who did not think of themselves as heroes. They talked about it as the plain thing a neighbor does. For four years, under the threat of arrest, a whole village lived as if the stranger at the door was already one of its own.

That is what the seventh day looks like when people catch a glimpse of it. It comes in waves, in a kitchen in 1940, in a block where neighbors check on each other after a flood, in a hospital room where someone holds a stranger's hand. Rebecca Solnit spent years studying earthquakes, floods, and fires, and found that ordinary people in the first days after a disaster tend to share, cooperate, and care for strangers, while the panic and looting everyone fears are far rarer than the stories suggest. For a little while, people stop hiding from each other. Then, most of the time, the old arrangements return, and the wave passes.

Astronauts who see the earth from space often come back changed. The writer Frank White called it the overview effect in 1987, the sudden sense, looking at the whole planet hanging in the dark, that the borders and divisions on it are small and the life on it is precious. Psychologists who study awe have found smaller versions of the same thing among people standing under tall trees or looking at the night sky: they feel smaller, and they become more generous. Wonder reveals the goodness that was there all along. Love is what we do once we have seen it. Shame is what keeps us from looking up.

The unveiling

The last book of the Bible is called Revelation, and the Greek word behind it, apokalypsis, means an uncovering, a pulling back of the veil. People have used it for two thousand years to mean the end of the world, and the book does have its share of fire, beasts, and judgment. Its last two chapters, though, read like Genesis run backward. There is a river and a tree of life, as there was in the garden, and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. God's dwelling is with people, and God wipes every tear from their eyes. And then comes a short line that answers the man hiding among the trees: "They will see his face."

The Bible begins with people covering themselves and hiding from God's presence, and it ends with people standing uncovered and looking God in the face. Everything in between is the long story of how frightened, ashamed people learn to be seen again. Read that way, the apocalypse is the unveiling of a goodness that shame has kept covered, the same goodness God named on the sixth day and entered on the seventh.

The goodness of creation was declared before there was anyone to agree with it. The birds, the fish, and the creeping things were called good on their own days, before human beings were made. Paul says all of that creation is now waiting, groaning like a woman in labor, for the children of God to show up as who they are. The forests and the rivers are waiting on us. That is a heavy thing to carry, and a hopeful one, because what they are waiting for is something people are able to do.

We have spent a very long time trying to earn heaven, build heaven, and hope for heaven, as if someone else would deliver it later. The seventh day was blessed before any of us did anything at all, and it has been held open ever since. Shame keeps us hiding from it. Guilt keeps us busy handing out verdicts. Love, the accountable kind that pays people back and lets the riches go, is how we walk in.

We are stuck at six. The seventh day is blessed, and it is waiting on us. Reparations are a divine and natural process. To repair is to make heaven good on earth and begin the 7th day.