Adam and the Ark

There is beautiful symbolism in this morning's Old Testament reading --

The passage comes to us from Genesis 8, midway through the story of Noah. God remembers Noah (He also remembers all the animals on the ark -- God remembers the animals!) and causes the floodwaters to subside. The ark comes to rest on the mountains of Ararat, and God bids Noah and company to go forth again into the world -- the new world. Noah builds an altar and presents burnt offerings to the Lord. The Lord is pleased by the aroma and declares, "I will never again curse the ground because of man... While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease."

I am the jubilant owner of a copy of the brand-spanking-new Ignatius Catholic Study Bible, Old and New Testament (RSV2CE, if that sort of thing interests you -- it does me). It weighs as much as your grandmother's fruitcake, and its unwieldiness might conceivably make one less inclined to haul it out and actually, you know, use it. But its physical heft is more than offset by the treasure trove of study features within its covers.

I've seriously thought about getting one of those enormous wooden book easels -- the kind libraries used to use for dictionaries -- to display it so that it's always open and at the ready, with no need for daily weight training to move it from the bookshelf to the table. ;-)

As I was reading the footnotes for today's verses, my eye fell upon a note for tomorrow's reading, in which God commands Noah to "go forth and multiply, and fill the earth." The footnote tells us that "Noah thus becomes a new Adam, who fathers the human family after the flood through his three sons."

Bells began to ring in my head.

1 Corinthians 15:45 calls Jesus "the last Adam, a life-giving spirit." So we have Noah, a new Adam, who foreshadows Jesus, the last Adam.

Then I remembered learning that there are scriptural foundations for the Blessed Virgin Mary as a symbol of the Ark of the Covenant and that the early Church Fathers taught this as well.

So we have the ark of Noah, carrying the new Adam, foreshadowing the ark of Mary, carrying the last Adam.

This is sheer poetry. It's also nonfictional prose, but only God could write a Story-with-a-capital-S with the kind of imagery that send shivers down your spine because it is so profound.

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