As the story goes, the flood that God unleashed had just about done that, when “God remembered Noah and all the wild animals and all the domestic animals that were with him in the ark. And God made a wind blow over the earth, and the waters subsided” (Gen 8:1, NRSV). God remembered the little delegation of living creatures adrift on the angry sea, and God remembered that Noah, at least, had been righteous—not perfect, not without faults, but a person of integrity, who acknowledged the God-ness of God. And all God’s disgust turned to pity. And all God’s hurt turned to compassion. And all God’s disappointment once again turned to hope. And God resolved to save creation. God caused all the churning, lethal waters to drain away back into their caverns under the earth, and the great boat that carried the seeds of life came to rest on a high mountain, and God called Noah and his family and the animals with them out of the ark and onto dry land, with the expressed intention that they would be fruitful and multiply.
What had changed? Was there any prospect that human beings would be more pious after the flood than they had been before the flood? The future generations weren’t even born yet; they wouldn’t have learned any lesson. The Bible doesn’t say anywhere that the people who came after Noah were better than the people of Noah’s own generation. And the Bible doesn’t say anywhere that God expected them to be. Indeed, God hadn’t even yet seen what they were capable and incapable of when God told Noah, “I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth” (Gen 9:11, NRSV).
For Noah’s part, the only thing necessary to keeping the covenant that God memorialized with the bow in the clouds was to be fruitful and multiply. Of course, producing a next generation is itself a sort of act of faith and hope in the continued goodness of creation—to keep on being the creation, the creation that God loves so profoundly that, ultimately, when push came to shove, so to speak, God found himself unable to allow it to be blotted out forever. Perhaps the reason is that, as told in the Bible, though God had every justification to have done with humankind by whatever means God chose, the flood story has less to do with God’s anger and fury than with God’s sorrow and pain, less to do with God’s dignity and majesty than with God’s disappointment and regret, less to do with God’s rage and judgment than with God’s love and mercy. No pop-up children’s book of giraffes and hippos can do justice to the profound angst at work in the heart of God. Nor can a blithe assertion that God will bring an end to everything when things get wicked enough. The Noah story shows that God is personally and even emotionally caught up in the creation. And the Noah story shows that God has chosen, come what may, to stand by creation, to stand with creation, to stand for creation, eternally hopeful that it will fulfill God’s loving intention, that it will live up to its potential of genuine fellowship, creature with creature, and creature with Creator. God, in other words, has faith in God’s purpose.
The question of why Noah, of all the people on earth, was saved—he and his family—is answered in the first verse of our Old Testament reading today: “Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation; Noah walked with God” (Gen 6:9b–c, NRSV). One commentator has written that it took a great act of faith to begin building such a tremendously large boat while there was nary a cloud in the sky. But what prompted Noah’s venture into ship-building was not a reading of the weather. It was an understanding of God, and God’s purpose. And that understanding, that reading of the religious climate, was something that anybody with a sensitivity toward God and God’s desires could and should have had. But only Noah was not so preoccupied with feasting and celebrating human achievements and milestones that he could sense the anguish in God’s heart and hear the thunder rumbling beyond the horizon of human cares and human satisfactions. He was a righteous man, the Bible says. He walked with God. And he built an ark, based on his faith in God.
I find it interesting that Paul, in his letter to the Romans, explains the death of Jesus by saying that it was God’s way of showing his righteousness: “it was to prove at the present time that he himself is righteous and that he justifies the one who has faith in Jesus” (Rom 3:26, NRSV). Now, the word “righteousness” in the Bible means acknowledging and faithfully performing those duties upon which a relationship with another person is based. When spoken of in terms of one’s relationship to God, the concept of “righteousness” is intimately entwined with the notion of faith. Noah was “righteous.” Noah did the things that showed he was in a proper relationship with God. Ultimately, Noah built an ark in the trusting faith that God willed to save Noah and his family and two of every kind of animal from destruction in the flood that was to come, though the sun was shining brightly. But what does it mean to say that God is “righteous”—in Paul’s words, that God showed righteousness by putting forward Christ Jesus as a sacrifice of atonement? With whom does God need to be in a proper relationship? (After all, God is God!) What does it mean to suggest that God’s righteousness—God’s panoply of deeds honoring the duties of that relationship—is an expression of God’s faith?
Whatever we may mean by the “omniscience of God,” Genesis clearly shows that it cannot mean that God knew before entering into the adventure of creation that the earth would be corrupt and filled with violence; the fact that it was, in Noah’s time, grieved and saddened God. It was a surprise, as well as a sorrow. But when God remembered Noah and all the animals that were with him in the ark, what God was remembering was the hope that had prompted God to create the world and animals and human beings in the first place—a hope for companionship in eternity—and commitment to what God created—to love it, to cherish it, to care for it, to provide for it, come what may, even as a mother and father care for their child. God’s righteousness has to do with God’s own faith in God’s own purpose, and God’s own faith that you and I are worth saving from the consequences of our faithless and unrighteous disregard of God’s purpose when we disobey the limits God has set and when we refuse to perform the duties God has commanded—the rather predictable consequences of trying to be our own God (which is idolatry). And in a great supreme act of righteous faith in God’s purpose of a loving relationship through all eternity, God sacrificed Jesus his Son on the cross as proof to all—perhaps even proof to God himself—of God’s unshakable commitment to the creation—rocks, trees, fish, reptiles, birds, and you and me.
Salvation, Paul declares earlier in Romans, is not, then, a matter of our righteousness. We have in so many ways failed to honor our part of the relationship. Even our worship is imperfect, infected with our own interests, burdened with our concern of what is aesthetically pleasing to us. We turn the law, that God gave as a guide to perfect fellowship with God and with one another, into a drudgery and something by which we rationalize our own judgments upon one another, and an excuse for boasting of ourselves and condemning others. “But now, apart from the law, the righteousness of God has been disclosed, and is attested by the law and the prophets, the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe” (Rom 3:21–22a, NRSV)—for all who believe that God looks at the bow in the clouds and remembers his love for us, for all who believe that God looks upon our sin and sees the precious dearness that prompted him to give his own Son as an atoning sacrifice for our salvation.
But God remembered Noah and all the wild animals and all the domestic animals that were with him in the ark. And God made a wind blow over the earth, and the waters subsided . . . Then God said to Noah, “Go out of the ark, you and your wife, and your sons and your sons’ wives with you. Bring out with you every living thing that is with you of all flesh—birds and animals and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth—so that they may abound on the earth, and be fruitful and multiply on the earth.” (Gen 8:1, 15–17, NRSV)
“The one who is righteous will live by faith”