        Guilsborough Evensong : 7[th] March 2010 3[rd] Sunday in Lent.
                                       
O God, take my lips and speak through them. Take our minds and think through them. Take our hearts and set them on fire.
It was good to have a passage from Genesis for our first reading tonight.  I was beginning to fear that the Old Testament was going out of fashion and that we would be hearing less and less of those stirring tales from Genesis as we focussed on interpreting the Bible for modern readers largely through the focus of the New Testament.  I love the colourful variety of the Five Books of Moses, the Pentateuch.  
The story of Jacob's Ladder is one of the more colourful and memorable episodes in Genesis, the first of those Five Books.  It has caught the imagination and has had all kinds of weird and wonderful associations.  For any of you who are fans of surplus knowledge,  my researches show that   A horror film called Jacob's Ladder was made in 1990;  A toy found in Tutankamun's tomb was given the name; there's  even a body building treadmill called Jacob's ladder on the market today. .  
On the Island of St. Helena , with which I was once involved,  Jacob's Ladder is the remains of an inclined plane built in 1829 to haul manure up from the cattle sheds in Jamestown to the fields above .  The hauling equipment, a winch was used, is long gone and only the 699 steps now remain leading to a school at the top . At the end of the day the students get back home  without raising sweat by gliding down the banisters with great dexterity sitting on their files
In religious imagery, the ladder appears on the front of Bath Abbey with angels climbing up and down in stone;  and William Blake painted it, more like a ramp than a ladder. 
But for our Christian  purposes most people seem to interpret the allegory of the Ladder as  the movement of the soul heavenwards, or an allegory for the ups downs of life and an ascetic path to excellence.  King Richard II stabbed and dying in Shakespeare's play cries out   " Mount  mount my soul thy place is up on high whilst my base flesh sinks downward here to die."  Jesus himself seemed to have the ladder in mind when he said, as illustrated in our second reading this evening from St. John's gospel " that ye shall see the heavens opened and the angels of God ascending and descending  on the Son of Man."  
I like best the interpretation of St. John Chrystostom in the 4[th] century AD
"And so mounting as it were by steps, let us get to heaven by a Jacob's ladder. For the ladder seems to me to signify in a riddle by that vision the gradual ascent by means of virtue, by which it is possible for us to ascend from earth to heaven, not using material steps, but improvement and correction of manners."[[5]]
More generally, Genesis, I've rediscovered,  is a great book.  Years ago I bought a cassette tape of John Geilgud reading it.  With that tape in car Chrystal and I visited Death Valley National Park in California.  Coming over a rise in the car and gazing down upon the  almost 5000 square miles of wilderness and the vast salt pan immediately below us , known as the Devil's Golf Course,  we stopped to listen to Geilgud's mellifluous tones.  "In the beginning God created the Heaven and the earth and the earth was without form and void... "    It was unforgettable, the combination of wonderful words and breathtaking scenery.  
Beyond the allegory of Jacob's Ladder, however, it seems to me that the message for us all in the book of Genesis has been distorted somewhat by the controversy over Creationism which was highlighted last year when the 200[th] anniversary of Darwin's birth came round.  
If you'll excuse a commercial,  I have recently found a new translation of the Five Books of Moses by the Hebrew Scholar Robert Alter. It's proving quite inspiring, if hefty,  reading   
Genesis is the only one of the five books  of the Pentateuch that is a continuous narrative from beginning to end.  The legendary sequence which moves from the Garden of Eden to the Tower of Babel in Chapter 11,which Alter calls the Primeval History,  is by and large concerned with the past not the future. How it happened and who did what.  The second half of Genesis, the so called Patriarchal Tales are of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and Joseph and invoke the future. 
God repeatedly tells Abraham what he intends to do. And at the end of the book Jacob calls his sons and says "  Gather yourselves together that I may tell you that which shall befall you in the last days ".   In the second half of Genesis, then, the human creature is not represented so much against the background of heaven and earth, flood etc. but rather he is a tent dweller a keeper of sheep a family man and woman. 
As Robert Alter puts it " nowhere else in ancient literature have the quirkiness and unpredictability of  individual  character and the frictions and tensions of family life  - sibling rivalry, the jealousy of co-wives, the extravagance of parental favouritism  -  been registered with such subtlety and insight "
To me the fascinating thing is that although the book was probably written 500 years after the purported events they describe, the chief characters are imagined with remarkable clarity and complexity.  Jacob , relentlessly calculating yet also imprudently loving,  who as an old man becomes a weakened, almost pathetic,  head of the clan; Joseph  -  as Alter points out  -  evolving from spoiled brat to mature and shrewd administrator.  Judah at first impetuous,  in the end penitent and lovingly devoted to his father's weaknesses.   
The broad outlines that mark the charactyers of  these people have remained unchanging over the millennia.   You only have to look at the political class today to see them reflected.
As in many mystery stories the writer of Genesis works backwards.  The ending is known and the story is designed to arrive at the ending. 
If you know the people of the world speak many languages, that is the ending: The story of the Tower of Babel gets you there.  
The known ending of life is death: the story of the Garden of Eden and the forbidden fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good & Evil  arrives at that ending.  
Why do we suffer, why do we die?  " Well you see there was this Garden...." . The stories of Genesis have turned the human condition into a sequential narrative of how it came to be. Conflict and suspense are used to create a moral framework for our being here. 
There is some wonderful artistry at work too.  Look, for example, at the blessings that the dying Jacob bestows on this twelve sons. In Chapter 49  each blessing is an astute judgement of character explaining what will happen to the 12 tribes.  Here a beginning is invented for each of the historical endings  that the writer already knows. 
And I find it fascinating, too, that  we get differing points of view on some of the main characters   
Consider Jacob for example with that  ladder to heaven in our lesson. He will wrestle with God or His representative and be named Israel.  Yet he is impelled twice in his life to acts of gross deception, of his brother Esau and his Father Isaac.  Or what about Rebecca who as a young maid shows innocent generosity to the servant of Abraham giving him water from her own jar and then to his camels. Yet years later, as the mother of Jacob, she scandalously  helps her son  in depriving Esau of his patrimony.
Finally it is God Himself who is the most complex and riveting character in this book.  He seems at times to be as troubled and confused as he is moved  by the range of human feelings , as troubled and confused as the human being he has created.  
Made as we are in the image of God as Genesis says,  there is somehow a codependence between God and man.  It has been argued that God's existence in us is manifest in the goodness of human works, the good deeds that reflect his nature.  And so in reverence and ethical behaviour do our own troubled and conflicted  minds find holiness, or create it.  
So don't put Genesis to one side as a fairy tale, having no relevance beyond dubious history .  As you read and study it you will I feel sure realise, as I am doing while I digest this tome, that there is far more to it than meets the eye.  
Recognizing the glory of God, as one Jewish scholar has put it, is presumably our redemption, our ladder to Heaven,  and if you think about it, our redemption is presumably His. 

