Where Are You?
The lectionary for today gives us the reading from Genesis 3 about God confronting man after the Fall. Having disobeyed God’s command, Adam hides among the trees, covering himself with stuff. Created to look towards God and to be sustained by that gaze, he cannot any more bear to be seen. His hiding is a spontaneous response, not the result of divine condemnation. An ancient Midrash explains that God’s question, ‘Where are you?’, was asked out of consideration for Adam, to afford him time to recover his self-possession. God, the omniscient, needed no information about Adam’s whereabouts. We can draw a lesson from this. The question, ‘Where are you?’, is, according to the nineteenth-century exegete August Dillmann, ‘the call that, after every sin, resounds in the ears of every man who seeks to deceive himself and others concerning his sin.’ Am I still sensitive to that question, to the extent of my estrangement from God, from myself?
