The greatness is the ground

The smallness is the soil (part 1)

He touches the dust.

Once he breathed life into this dirt and made a human. Now a terrified one quakes before him, standing at the center of a circle that wants to kill her, sharp stones clenched in angry hands.

He traces his fingers in the soil.

A single scoop of adamah, and there was Adam.¹ Dust still holds the memory of that moment, sacred breath meeting sacred ground. How easily humans forget where they came from. 

He writes something no one can see. Then he rises up.

Now this same soil is the raw matter of re-creation. He breathes life into her flesh again, but this time it is forgiveness and reconciliation, freedom and absolution. Neither do I condemn you, because I created you.

He bends back down, getting close as he can to the earth, hands in the dust. Stones fall to the ground as sinners leave. Now they are left alone: creator and creature. 

Rising up from the earth again, he calls her Woman. The same name given at the dawn of time. Into the silence of the holy space between them, he gives her a new mission—go your way. 

She walks into a new world.

She rises, too. 

Do you see how the stories braid together? When God became a body, the divine got dirty. 

This marvel muddled every crisp category. Death-bent mobs have been furious ever since. Humans prefer to think their greatness came from above, descended like gods themselves. But the sacred secret is the soil and their smallness. They do not have to be gods (they do not get to be gods); they only have to be good. But this is hard as granite to learn.

Often we have to be unmade to remember what we are made of.

//

He is born in a cave, buried in another. A human from dust to dust.

While he walks the muddy earth, he tells stories of dirt. Dramas of seeds scattered, different soils and the paths they produce: the way of weeds, the way of fruitfulness. Tales of the tiniest weed planted on purpose, springing into a home for a heaven-full of birds. Simple reminders of growing seeds, how they sprout while humans sleep, how the earth itself bears fruit.

Parabolic puzzles that leave listeners chewing on strange truths days and years later. Wait, what did he mean by that?

Do you hear how the moments rhyme?

Every story starts from the soil or winds its way back. Prodigal son sleeping in a pigsty. Fool’s house built on sand. Bloodied traveler left for dead on the ground till a foreigner breathes new life into his bones. Vineyards, lost sheep, fig trees, buried treasure, lamp oil, new wine, leavened bread. 

Little wonder he knew the earth and its wild ways like the back of his hand. He made it, walked it, touched it. Every inch hallowed before we covered it with blood.

//

He gathers dirt, spits in his palm, mixes a mud. He smears paste onto a man’s blind eyes. Healing from humus, the richest part of soil, dark and fertile, organic matter made from decomposition. 

Every miracle holds dying and rising.

He takes bread, which earth has given and human hands have made. Breaks the earth-fruit, offers it to everyone, even the once-friend who betrays him. Every human dust to dust, every mouth hungry for life. 

In the garden, his tears of salt and sweat and blood fall to the dirt. Begging in his most human and holy moment if the cup could pass. Knowing that dying and rising is the only way of the earth he made: cycles and seasons, seeds and harvests, night and dawn. 

Unless a seed falls to the ground and dies. Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth.

The greatness has always come from the ground. Smallness is the soil from which everything grows.

(Part II coming next Saturday.)

1. Adamah (Hebrew for soil, ground, or earth), Adam (Hebrew for human).