Today we are moving into a chapter called, "The Human Person as YHWH's Partner. Give it time to settle in.
The Old Testament yields a peculiar and important notion of humanness. ....in contrast to several ideologies of modernity, much that the Old Testament has to say about human personhood is strikingly odd..... The oddity, I suggest, stems from the fact that the Old Testament has no interest in articulating an autonomous or universal notion of humanness....
The Old Testament has no interest in such a notion, because its articulation of what it means to be human is characteristically situated in its own Yahwistic, covenantal, interactionist mode of reality, so that humanness is always Yahwistic humanness or, we may say, Jewish humanness. The Old Testament, for the most part, is unable and unwilling - as well as uninterested - to think outside the categories and boundaries of its own sense of YHWH and YHWH's partner. As a consequence, the primary categories of Israel's faith - sovereignty, fidelity, covenant, and obedience - pertain for topic as well. Israel makes this claim for all human persons, including those well beyond its own community.
This is humanity. This is humanity as God intends it to be. God the creator is Lord of the creatures that bear the image of God. So, as someone outside this people, I look to them to gain some insight into what it is to be the partner of God. Yes, Israel is the chosen people and yes, it is by their shining light that I am able to grasp what the people of God are to be. That is the same place Jesus is at as a young person growing up in within the covenant people with whom he lived in Nazareth. There in that storytelling the shape of humanity was utterly available and accessible. If you wanted to see what the truly human one was to be - read on. God creates a people by entering into a covenant and pulling them into their part of the relationship. This is where I personally love the unfolding of this story. God is all about the creation of a people whose life will reshape the life of the world. There will be a call to obedience that is offered after the people know that they have been grasped by the God who picks them out of all the rest of humankind in order to make 'something of nothing.' That is a thrilling adventure and one that carries great responsibility that will always be supported by the God who will not ever - ever - let them go.
Connection: From this people we begin to see what the shalom of God's creation will look like. We also see how we are a people grafted onto this vision so that our own humanity will brightly shine.
O God, who makes our humanity shine with life, we long for you to engage us and continue to show us the way in which our humanity will let your grace and love be known throughout the world. Amen.
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