Did We Create Fear?

The man replied, “I heard your sound in the garden; I was afraid because I was naked, and I hid myself.” (Genesis 3:10, CEB translation)

There is no fear in love, but perfect love drives out fear, because fear expects punishment. The person who is afraid has not been made perfect in love. (1 John 4:18, CEB translation)

I should have invited my women’s Bible study to be a week off in our reflections during Lent.  Maybe then I wouldn’t find myself undoing my own sermon three days after I preached it.

Let me back up.  For Lent our preaching emphasis is “Eat Chocolate.” Having experienced a year of giving up, a year that started last Lent, we opted instead this year to focus on the blessings God has provided in our lives in the midst of wilderness times. Each week we focus on a different word. This week’s word is “awe.” In preparing my sermon and the devotional guide around the word, we noticed that the words that often get translated as “awe” are yara in Hebrew and phobeomai or phobos in Greek. You may recognize that Greek word because it is where we get the word phobia. That makes sense because these two words that we sometimes translate as “awe” do in fact mean fear.

So this past Sunday I preached about the kind of fear that is reflected in our awe of God. It is not a fear that involves threat, it is just that encountering God is so beyond our comprehension, so outside of our everyday reality, that it shakes us. That is, I argued, why Peter behaves so oddly in the moment of the transfiguration – suggesting they build tents and stay on the mountaintop where Moses and Elijah have appeared with a transformed Jesus – because he is terrified and doesn’t know what else to say. So the fear we have before God is a recognition that we are not God.

But then, for women’s Bible study, I did a deeper dig into those two words. And now I am rethinking this whole thing.

I still stand by the assertion that it is good for us to recognize that we are not God. It is good for us to remember who the creator is in this whole scenario. However, I am now not sure at all that our response in that moment should be fear.

Part of my hesitation came just before I started looking into these two words. I had decided that as an illustration for the Bible study, I should share one of my encounters with God. But as I ran through the litany of those encounters, I could not think of a single one that involved fear. I could think of some that made me tremble, but not out of fear. The trembling came from the energy of having the Holy Spirit flow through me – that is like being charged with electricity. But in any case, I was not afraid. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that those encounters were striking because of the absence of fear.

So to the Bible I went, or more specifically to my computer program that allows me to search for all the appearances of a word in the Bible. I started with yara. And I didn’t make it past Genesis. Why? Because the first appearance stopped me in my tracks. It is quoted above.  When God comes into the garden, after the man and the woman have eaten of the fruit and hidden from God, God has cried out, “Where are you?” The man responds with the above words: “I heard your sound in the garden; I was afraid because I was naked, and I hid myself.”

The first instance of fear in the garden is on the other side of eating the fruit. And it is the man who names the experience. Literally. It is the man who gives a name to fear. Now, God had invited the man into the creative and creating process of naming things earlier. When God created all the animals, God invited the man to choose their names. Understand how significant that is. Linguists and philosophers and poets alike have all named that something doesn’t really exist until it has a word to call it. As a vignette to prove that point, Eugene Peterson tells a story of learning to bird watch. As soon as he learned the names of birds, he saw them all the time. Before he learned their names, he heard sounds in the trees periodically, but had no idea how many birds were around him all the time. 

In other words, until something has a name, we cannot experience it. Naming something gives it reality. So it is significant that the first time fear is named, it is humanity that does it. Humans give reality to fear. Not God. Fear is a result of us knowing good and evil, which is what results from us partaking of the fruit. Before seeing and knowing evil, what did we have to fear? Once we did, we had a new emotion before us. And we named it. And that gave it life. We created fear.

Fear was not God’s intention for us. God did not name it. God did not introduce it into our world.  We did that. And I think God has been trying to get us to uncreate fear ever since.

I think that because of the second appearance of yara. It occurs in Genesis 15:1: “After these events, the Lord’s word came to Abram in a vision, ‘Don’t be afraid, Abram. I am your protector’…” God has shown up to invite Abram into covenant with God as the chosen family, and as the ones who will be protected. The ones who will be safe. And the very first thing God says to Abram is “Don’t be afraid.” Over and over in the Bible when God (or God’s angels) appears before someone, the first thing said is “Don’t be afraid.” I have been reading that as God’s appearance being so stunning and out-of-the-ordinary that people tremble. But what if instead it is God inviting us to forget the brokenness of relationship that happened when we ate the fruit? What if God is inviting us into a space of healing? What if God is inviting us back to the pre-fruit garden?

Our first words following eating the fruit were the words that invited fear to enter the world. God’s first words to us when God is trying to heal that wound are words that invite us to forget fear. God is fighting fear with no fear.

Yet over and over we react with fear anyway. We fear God and we fear each other. In fact, I think we grow so accustomed to encountering God in places of fear that we start to name fearing God as a virtue. The Proverbs tell us that fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. It is certainly true that fear of God is the beginning of knowledge – Genesis 3 tells us that. And there is wisdom, again, in recognizing that we are not God. But I actually now do not think God intends us to fear God. Because what we see over and over in the biblical narrative is that when God is showing up to invite us into relationship, the kind of relationship we had in the garden where we walked alongside God as partners and co-creators, God tells us first thing “Do not be afraid.” God is undoing the tragedy of the garden with those very words. But we keep insisting on that fear, and we even codify it as a virtue for how we should conceive of our relationship with God. But is that coming from God, or is that coming from us and our own insistence of holding onto the broken relationship of sin?

I think our insistence that we should fear the Lord is our own way of clinging to our brokenness. It is our own insistence on not living into the image that God sees and wants for us.

In addition to the regular refrain of “Don’t be afraid,” God also answers our fear by sending us Jesus. No one is afraid of Jesus. Jesus shows up as a baby. Then is raised in a working-class family. Becomes a wandering carpenter/preacher.  It is only when he begins to challenge the powers-that-be that he draws ire. And while the authorities do express fear at challenging Jesus, are they really afraid of Jesus or are they afraid of the crowd that follows Jesus? And then Jesus, who has the power of God at hand, chooses to lay all that down. Jesus experiences fear in the Garden of Gethsemane. Jesus takes on that thing that we invented.  And then Jesus walks through it. And comes out on the other side of death. And on the other side of fear.

And that is perfect love. And perfect love drives out fear.

Fear was our response to God when we broke the relationship of trust we had with God. Fear was our reaction when we expected punishment. Fear was what we put between us and God. But God… God over and over keeps inviting us to reject that understanding. God keeps inviting us to uncreate fear. God is calling us back to the garden, back before fear entered our vocabulary. Back before fear existed.

So, my friends, do not be afraid.  Yes, God is different than us. But that doesn’t bother God. God still wants to walk alongside us. God did walk alongside us. God does walk alongside us. All we have to do is quit letting fear drive us into hiding and step out into love.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash