Text: It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner (Gen 2.18)
I have had my first Valentine already from my supplier of office equipment. I do love my computer when I don’t hate it of course – but I hope you, and even I, will get some more romantic offers than that!
What if anything do we know about Saint Valentine? Round about 270 AD the Emperor Claudius II, who was having a spot of bother recruiting young men for unpopular wars in foreign parts (plus ça change, as they say), decided to ban marriages and engagements, so that young men would have less reason to stay at home. Perhaps this was put to him as a cunning plan’ but I rather doubt whether it will have done much for his popularity, or even for army recruitment. Open opposition to government policies was not generally recommended in those days, so it went underground into the catacombs in fact – where priests such as Valentine continued to marry young lovers secretly (and older ones too no doubt). If the ancient tradition is to be believed, he was caught by the secret police, imprisoned, tried and beheaded but not before he had turned the head of the jailer’s daughter, for whom he left a note from your Valentine’. Canonised by Pope Gelasius in 496 AD among those “whose names are justly reverenced among men; but whose acts are known only to God”, his feast day was fixed on 14 February, the day before the festival of Lupercalia, when young men would draw lots for the girls who would be their partners at least for the duration of the Festival. Relics of the saint are venerated in Dublin, Vienna, Roquemaure and Glasgow, but noone knows how much truth there is in the tales that are told about him, and in 1969 he lost his place in the Catholic calendar of saints not that that has stopped the growth of his cult.
We can smile indulgently at the legend of Saint Valentine, but what are we to make of the legends we read in our Bible, and especially in its early pages which purport to tell us how the world was made? Are we really supposed to believe that God removed a rib from the man that he had made and caused that to grow into the woman who would be his partner ? Surely not. Legends grow up because we need, or at least we like narrative explanations which encapsulate our understanding of why things are as they are. Why do we have to work? Why do we wear clothes? Why do we fear snakes? Why do we talk so many different languages? Above all, is there a God out there ? What is God like, and how do we relate to such a figure ? The book of Genesis begins to answer all these questions, and for at least the past hundred years it has been widely though not universally understood that these answers are in the form of legends. Does that mean we can dismiss them as fairy tales, along with Red Riding Hood, or more modern creations like Micky Mouse? If they are not true, are they lies? On the contrary, as one of the early pioneers of Biblical criticism put it, these stories are a particular form of poetry’, and as such they convey to us in legendary form certain truths about God and about the human situation. They are still stories of course, and in so far as they purport to tell us what God is like, we need to examine them through the lens of our knowledge of God as revealed to us through the Holy Spirit and especially in the person of Jesus Christ.
What are we to make of the poetry that we have heard this morning not just from Genesis, but from Revelation and in our Psalm too? First, we see God’s awesome power, in creation and in the glory and honour that is his due. We are dazzled and humbled by what we see, not only as we peer back into the mists of time, or when St John’s vision transports us into the throne room of heaven, but equally when we join the disciples in their little boat on the Sea of Galilee, and witness with them Jesus’ power over the wind and the waves. I don’t know whether events unfolded exactly as our Gospel reading tells us, but I am sure that the disciples saw in Jesus glimpses of that awesome power which we associate with God. Yes, awesome power is consistent with what we know about Jesus.
Turning back to our creation legend, the second thing we notice is the compassion of God. The legendary narrative to which we are invited to assent is not content with a God of great power hurling thunderbolts at hapless humanity. There will be plenty of that as he drowns the whole world in a great flood, or rains fire and brimstone on Sodom and Gomorrah, but in this story God sees that the man he has made needs a helper and partner, and he sets about providing one. There is a compassion and a humanity about God from the very beginning that we will at last see perfectly revealed in Jesus, not indeed in the Jesus whose power stills the storm, but in the Jesus whose compassion for his terrified companions in the little boat moves him to use his powers, in the short term to reassure them, and in the longer term to so strengthen their faith that they will know that they can trust him in the storms of life that will threaten to overwhelm them later on. Our psalm was a wonderfully apt celebration of the God who could both still the raging of the sea, and bless the earth so that the valleys stand so thick with corn that they shall laugh and sing (Psalm 65.7 and 14).
We worship a God of power, a God of compassion, a God of generous loving provision. But there is one difficulty about our reading from Genesis that must be addressed. In this version of the creation story, man is made first, and woman is created from him and for him. There is an implicit dominance of male over female which cannot simply be ignored. From Adam and Eve to St Paul there is a great deal in our Bible that echoes the cultural context of male domination within which it was written. Jesus himself lived in a society that was still very male-oriented, so that his twelve closest associates were necessarily all male.
However, we find in the gospel stories that he related to women and to men on an equal footing of respect and affection, seeing in both men and women the children of his heavenly Father. Moreover in the first creation story, no distinction is made between men and women both are created simultaneously in the image of God, who is himself neither male nor female but God. You can accuse me of cherry-picking if you like, but in the Anglican tradition we are not required to leave our critical faculties at the door of the church. It was Paul who perceived that in Christ all are equal Jew and Gentile, slave and free, men and women and I believe it is right to see in that perception an aspect of the truth about our relationships to one another and to God which both Church and society has yet to take fully on board. In Christ we are all equal, and the concept of partnership which we find in this early legend from the book of Genesis needs to be understood in that light. Within a relationship of mutual love and respect, partnership and help can perfectly well make room for the exercise of leadership by the woman or by the man at different times and in different circumstances. We are both enriched by a partnership of variable geometry. What matters is the love that binds two people to one another in a relationship that allows both partners to blossom and flourish, both separately and together.
We don’t know much about Saint Valentine, but I hope that all of us, whether we are happily partnered, have yet to find a loving partner, or perhaps live now with the ache of cherished memories from the past, can join to celebrate at this season a God whose loving compassion, in this precious gift, melts all our hearts. It is not good that man should be alone; I will make him a partner and a helper.