Bad Stewards: Nadab and Abihur and a broken covenant Lessons in caring for God’s world “Stewards are both a ruler and servant; they exist to please their master.” The tail lifts. Water flows down as if from a waterfall, framed by the clear sky. A lone bird mirrors the tail’s flow, effortless, graceful in the air. It surfs above the ocean, the whale beneath it. As photographs go, I think it’s stunning. It is a sign of the covenant. A covenant is a legal binding agreement between man and God. Man is to be a steward over all of creation. But we have broken that covenant as a people by our treatment of the earth; we need to see again, to be reminded of the covenant. Sebastião Salgado is a Brazilian photographer. After too many years spent chronicling the darker sides of human nature, he changed course and turned his camera away from the modern man. In the wildest forms of nature and the earliest forms of human culture – remote tribes untouched by technology – he discovered things that restored his hope. That journey lasted eight years, and went on to form the exhibition ‘Genesis’ (showing at the Natural History Museum, London over the summer). Describing it as a ‘new beginning’, Salgado says that “this project is designed to reconnect us to how the world was before humanity altered it almost beyond recognition.” When I first read those words, it made me think of God, covenants and the environment. Let me explain. Like Salgado’s exhibition, Genesis 1:26 also serves as an introduction, and it also talks about ‘us’:
Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” But ‘the ground’ is a poor translation. The Hebrew word is ‘earth’, or – as Salgado says in his introduction – the world. It is the world – the environment – that we are given care of. So why do we struggle so? Why do so many people feel increasingly disconnected from the aches of the planet? Why have we messed it up so? The problem is not our view of ecology, and nor is it our understanding of science. The problem is in the way we see ourselves. The problem is how we steward. To start, we should remind ourselves of God’s view of things. While we may feel disconnected, God does not. Psalm 33:4-5 reminds us:
For the word of the Lord is right and true; he is faithful in all he does. The Lord loves righteousness and justice; the earth is full of his unfailing love. Yet if the earth really is full of God’s unfailing love, how come it’s so hard to spot? Jesus tells us. In Matthew 22 when asked which the greatest commandment is in the law, He replied:
“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with your entire mind.” This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: “Love your neighbour as yourself.” All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments. Jesus’s definition of love extends further than those we have chosen or helped to create. It even goes beyond people, reaching out to encompass our community (church and wider), our nation and – you guessed it – this earth we stand on. In the same way that the Psalm uses the widest, most inclusive language of all to describe the extent of God’s unfailing love, Jesus tells us to love God will all our heart, soul and mind. And you can be sure that when he uses the word neighbour, it’s about as far from the singular form of the word as is possible to get. The truth about love – as God sees it – is that we are made in it and for it. We are most like God when we live in love with the whole of creation: people and things, the earth and the city, the air and the sea. Yet too often we try to divide things up, to create a hierarchy. We ask which is the greatest? Surely people matter more than plants? What can we get away with glossing over? What can we choose to love less? And when we
start to think like that, we get destructive, starting with ourselves. We destroy the covenant that God has made with us – making us in His love-saturated image. Why do we do this? Why do we choose to care less about certain things, certain people, certain aspects of God’s creation? Nadab and Abihur, the first priests of the new nation Israel, can help us with this. They were a part of a genesis, a new community. The instructions they received from God (see Leviticus 9) were specific, focused and purposeful. Yet they messed up. They played with fire… literally. Fire is a well-used scriptural metaphor. By the time we get to Revelation we have seen God as a ‘consuming fire’, we have seen a pillar of smoke and fire cover the Israelite people as they pass over from the slavery of Egypt to freedom and we have witnessed the Spirit manifesting Himself as ‘tongues of fire’ on the day of Pentecost. God is fire that forms community. Barriers melt away, people speak in one understandable voice, and a nation is formed. When the fire falls, there’s often a covenant being made. But the first priestly stewards don’t use fire in quite that same way. Leviticus 10 states that:
Aaron’s sons Nadab and Abihu took their censers, put fire in them and added incense; and they offered unauthorized fire before the Lord, contrary to his command. So fire came out from the presence of the Lord and consumed them, and they died before the Lord. Nadab and Abihu offer their own fire in their own way. And their creation consumes them. They break ranks in their representation of Israel; they are covenant breakers. Nadab and Abihu may have existed in a time shrouded by history, but their selfish, small-minded attempts to put themselves at the centre of the action do not seem at all out of place in this modern world. The cared less that they had broken God’s commands and care more about doing things their own way. How like us. When we have been told to care for the poor, we still buy clothes made cheaply by child labourers, trapped as slaves in terrifying working conditions. When we have been told to love the Lord our God, we dump waste into waters and spew carbon into the air as a bi-product of modern, efficient, satisfying lives. When we have been told to trade fairly, to treat others with dignity and integrity, we conduct our affairs with a blind eye turned to the ethics of banks, companies and governments.
We follow our own ways, form our own creations, offer our own fire, and we breed destruction. When we want to become owners of the earth – not stewards – we destroy it. Sebastião Salgado needed renewal after seeing the worst of humanity. Where did he find that restoration? He turned to the earth. Why? Because the earth is filled with God’s ‘unfailing love’. Love is relational. Love renews us. Love heals through the song of the nightingale just as the flowers and their scents lift our spirits. This is how we connect. That is why we sing and send flowers at funerals: we need the promise of life in death. Connection, not disconnection. Connection with Him. The earth is His love, it is His likeness. He is the fire, not us.
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