God who births
and suffers alongside
Today we’re starting out in Genesis 3 (dun dun dun!), because I recently noticed something that I’ve never noticed before. But first we have to start in Galatians. Follow me here. In Paul’s letter to the churches in Galatia, he laments over the way the judaizers have succeeded in dissuading them from the true gospel. Instead, they have adopted this heresy that one needs to become a little bit Jewish in order to become a Christian. Why? Well, The Galatian church was largely gentile, and in the Roman empire Judaism was a legally recognized religion, while Christianity wasn’t. and there was this ambiguity at first because for a while Jesus followers were considered a sect of Judaism… until they were officially deemed illegal. This meant that Jewish believers were looking for a little protection. If the judaizers preached that in order to become a Christian, gentile converts must first be circumcised before they can publicly associate with one another, when questioned by empirical authorities about their proselytization, they had political cover. “Look at that dude over there! He’s circumcised because of me!” They could talk out of both sides of their mouths.
This ulterior motive had wide-reaching consequences and wound up affecting who people were willing to eat with, including Barnabas. When Paul found out, he was BIG mad. So, in his letter to the Galatians, he goes to great lengths to argue that to believe is to belong to the family of God as children of Abraham. Circumcision literally does not matter one way or the other because the true Israel of God, the church, is indwelled by the Spirit, united in Christ, children of the Father, and comprised of Jews and gentiles- men and women. And while Paul is making this incredibly important argument, he likens himself to a woman in labor- in great pain. Here is where we revisit the beginning.
Genesis 3:16 reads “and to the woman the LORD said, I will greatly multiply your pain in childbirth,” followed shortly by “Your longing will be for your ish.” Hop back to 3:3 where the serpent said to the woman that “on that day your eyes will be opened, and you will become like God.” Like God. What if in a sense this was true, but not in the way we typically imagine.
Since God is infinite and eternal, we are only able to know the things that God has self-disclosed. God disclosed that his response to tov- to goodness- is delight, but his response to sin was as if to say “Feel the way I feel. Experience what I experience.” Jewish interpretations regularly liken God to a cosmic mother who birthed the universe, and similarly in our tradition, our regeneration or baptism in the Spirit- becoming “reborn”- is at its core a birthing metaphor. What if God’s labor for creation wasn’t painless. What if Eve really was becoming like God. What if her birth, was like God’s birthing. What if her longing and sorrow is like God’s too. If sin and suffering have broken God’s heart every day since the beginning, then that sorrow isn’t something foreign. From the beginning, God is inviting us to know what God is like, revealing what he’s like little by little. What if that includes becoming like God through the revelation of heartache? And whether your exegesis leads you to lean towards that referring to sorrow in literal birth or sorrow in raising children (like watching them grow up to murder one another as Eve did), it doesn’t change the fact that the shared sorrow became one of the primary points of connection between Eve and her creator. Isn’t that truth of so many of us? God meets us in our sorrow because sorrow is the godly response to sin, injustice, and suffering. And the godly response to sorrow is to draw close.
Are these passages complex. Yes. Is there a lot more here. Yes. “God’s sorrow towards sin and suffering shows us that even God’s curses aren’t punishments, they’re invitations towards intimacy and dependence.” His kindness is still visible. And as the story of scripture progresses, we can notice this pattern through the blessings and curses if we look for it. God is always revealing what God is like. God is always inviting. And of course, there is still the hope of Genesis 3:15. The protoevangelium is the first prophetic illustration of the gospel, and it comes before the curses. The promise comes before the pain. The hope before the heartache.
If stories start at the beginning, and end at the end, and the middle connects the beginning to the end, then what if the reality that one day everything sad will become untrue, no more crying and no more tears, includes God’s own sorrow in response to the sin, suffering, and injustice that his creation has endured? Our suffering savior anticipates his own relief from suffering, but for now God is with us in sorrow. God is not concerned about the agony of God’s own labor pains, only that we allow ourselves to be crucified with Christ and allow God to re-birth us into newness of life. Because of the selflessness of the Father, Son, and Spirit, to believe is to belong, just as Paul argued. Even when the pain is multiplied beyond what we think we can endure, he is with us in that pain, suffering alongside, revealing tenderest places of God’s own heart; because God-with-us is always who God is.
As always,
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