Yesterday we celebrated not only the New Year (on the secular calendar) but also St. Basil and the Circumcision of the Lord.
Some blogger wrote that circumcision was a silly rite God had ordained to keep Israel humble. I think the blogger meant, to humilitate His people.
If that was the case, it seems to have backfired. Circumcision became a matter of national and personal pride and "uncircumcised" became a pejorative.
I don't know why God ordained that particular thing as the way of entering into the Old Covenant, but I'm sure someone can tell us and that its meaning will turn out to be anything but silly. I have a feeling anything the Lord Himself does or suffers to be done to Himself has to be much more than silliness.
P.S. Here it is, a wonderful exposition of the meaning, for Christians, of the Circumcision, by one of my favorite people in the world, Fr. George Dion Dragas. It was for the sake of all these deep Christian meanings, then, that God instituted the rite of circumcision in the first place.
Another Look at Genesis 3:13-15
13 hours ago
5 comments:
No, the author did NOT mean to humiliate his people; but to humble the pride of human reason that would regard such a rite as silly, and so teach His people to rejoice and celebrate God's apparently foolish ways of blessing and giving life. Basic 1 Cor. 1 and 2 stuff. And the author did go on to say that once we have laid aside the pride of fallen reason, we may discover with this as in all the ways of God a deep and profound wisdom indeed.
Guess what? It wasn't your post to which I was alluding! And right now I can't remember whose it was, but someone else's.
But now that you remind me, yes, it was within the context of an attack upon human reason.
LOL and blushing. Well, if it was a LUTHERAN post, I assure you my comments still apply. :)
Circumcision is not mentioned in the earliest version of Genesis, the Book of J, though the other covenant story, of Abraham cutting up birds (Gen 15) is. Suggesting that they started circumcising first (copying the Babylonians?) and wrote in afterwards that God had ordained it.
But of course if you despise human reason you can think anything you like. Wibblewibblewibble with a finger on the lips is as true as Principia Mathematica.
As true as wibblewibblewibble or as false...
As for J, I don't know what to make of that hypothesis. And that's what it is, as I understand it, a hypothesis.
But neither am I very concerned one way or the other, as I don't think that's the most important level with which we have to deal in Genesis...
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