The Image of the Servant

Genesis 6:13 can be translated apparently a number of ways, but the general gist of it would seem to come through in the KJV:

"And God said unto Noah, The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence through them; and, behold, I will destroy them with the earth."

And so, if the conventional interpretations are held, it would seem inescapable that God, who brought the earth into existence through effortless, sublime command, has now decided to visit his judgment not only upon the sinful mankind that he created, but also upon their smallest of children and "all flesh, wherein is the breath of life" (6:17).  Leaving aside the--not inconsequential--matter of the drowned infants, there is also the seemingly unjustifiable destruction of the animals.  Of what are they guilty?  Could not the God who devised the instruments of plague and pestilence have whittled mankind down to Noah and his crew without destroying innocent creatures?

I will start, however, with the first--mistaken--postulate that I mentioned: that God "brought the earth into existence through effortless, sublime command."  That is the standard notion.  By contrast, the Gospel of John maintains that Creation was made through Jesus, and we have no idea what suffering that--even partial--sundering of the Godhead entailed (for indeed God can suffer, or the Bible lies about his sorrow over mankind from end to end.)

We are presented then, from the outset, with the picture of Jesus and his father as servant and master--brought to consummation with Jesus' incarnation and submission to God's will.  And we are presented in the Gospels with Jesus' enlargement of the servant-master relationship: that he who would be master must be servant of all, and that the most assiduous of servants is the master who attends to the needs of his charges--though his charges be nominally his subordinates.  The relationship between master and servant must never be forgotten, and it informs the questions before us.

We can now come to a more well-rounded appreciation of the question of the animals' fate.  The animals did not deserve to be punished as they were--that was the fault of mankind who, we will remember, were given custodianship of nature.  Neither, however, are we bound to the simplistic, standard notion that animals are never to be charged with guilt.  That easy generalization simply does not fit the thinking process present in the Bible.  Just ask Balaam's ass: "And the Lord opened the mouth of the ass, and she said unto Balaam, What have I done unto thee, that thou hast smitten me these three times?" (Numbers 22:28).

We might imagine posing the matter to the snake in the Garden, though we should probably despair of getting a straight answer.  More soberly, there is the admonition after the Flood: "And surely your blood of your lives will I require; at the hand of every beast will I require it. . . .Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man" (9:5-6).

And yet what then of the assertion that "in the image of God made he man"?  Most usually, the conception of man made in God's image is a moral conception--that only human beings possess moral lives, are subject to the requirements of this or that salvation economy, and are liable to eternal damnation.  (Torture an animal to the uttermost, then, and upon death it will either cease to exist, or go off to some storybook glade somewhere; the otherwise horrifying ill-use of animals can be justified endlessly if it furthers God's People or God's Purposes.)

Is that really how Genesis portrays the concept of man made in God's image?  In the "first story" of man's creation (the Sixth Day) we read: "And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion. . . ." (1:26).  Man is then created and endowed with dominion over a vegetarian world--and surely we do not entertain unseemly notions about what "dominion" entails.

In the "second story" of Creation Adam is formed by God from the dust, "And the Lord God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it" (2:15).  Again, it is said that man is created and charged with the care of Creation.

(Then, as I have said, Adam shows himself to be unsatisfied by the arrangement, leading to the creation of Eve and, thereby, the creation of the rest of mankind.  It was man's failing, not God's design, that lead to marriage and family life and all the ills of society.  It is, of course, no surprise that the master-servant paradigm fails so often in our approaches to life with our fellow humans--it was really not intended to be put to such use.  And then, of course, there are the endless horrors of Christian--and other religious--beliefs about families as "God's design"; by such means families are set a distance apart from our best communal attempts to understand human relationships, and families are so often lorded over by mini-God fathers visiting effectual damnation upon the weaker members.)

Then we have the wicked snake and The Fall, though any garden with a wicked snake in it would seem to be fallen already.  Much has been made of the snake's words, "ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil" (3:5), as though this bore on the notion that "the image of God" had to do with moral capability, but then of course God created man in his image, not with the capability to eat a fruit and attain his image.

And so then we have all the sordid events that lead to the Flood and its aftermath.  Now the animals will have a dread of man, and vicious predation and brutal justice will be the orders of the day.  Man has attained his greatest powers of lordship, at the expense of lording it over a corrupted realm.  It is very important to remember this fact, and to realize thereby that the primary sundering between mankind and God is not a break in the parent-child relationship, but a break in the master-servant relationship.  All of this folds back upon the original question of "the image of God."

The image of God--and this is not all that surprising--is properly related to our place as a representative of God in Creation.  Jesus demands that we display the holiness of God, not that we display mere submission to a holy God.  The flowers of the field can testify to the majesty of God.  (Just as a fig tree, let alone an animal, can show itself lacking before God.)  We do no honor to God as his sons and daughters if we do not do the things that God does, no matter how much noise we make about the greatness of God and the great extent to which we fail to deserve his mercy.

The Prodigal Son reorients himself to how he can serve in his father's household, and even as one of the "hired men" he would expect to have duties, and rights, and responsibilities.  He would have a place, and be a servant to all he would master, and stand as the master of the house on keeping the night watch--just as all of us in service are of little use unless we take ownership of the organization's mission.

Only in placing himself in servitude is the Prodigal Son (as Jesus unfolds the story) returned to the status of sonship.  The first expectation of salvation is an attitude of servanthood, and a person who does not recognize this attitude of servanthood as reflecting "the image of God" is a person who does not understand the themes under which Creation was formed.