Clothing and Nudity on a Biblical Scale

Clothing is a subtle yet powerful theme in the Bible.  So is nudity.

For instance, Adam and Eve's nudity is explicitly referenced in Genesis.  It is also their nudity that they realise and try to cover up.  And finally, in this short story alone, the pair is given hide clothing by God as they leave the garden.  (As a farewell gift or a mark of their shame?)

Noah too, only a few chapters later, has an episode involving nudity.  He got drunk one day and passed out naked in his tent.  His son Ham then stumbled in upon him and was cursed for it.  Not only Ham but his entire progeny.  (Why such a harsh penalty?!)  Ham's brothers had to walk in backwards after Ham to cover Noah with a blanket...

From here the theme of nudity and clothing persists in the Bible, right up to the book of Revelation where those who remain in the end are not naked but dressed in white robes.  Here the chosen people are not covered by (shameful?) hides and blankets but clothes that remind us of the original light of creation.  Or better yet,of  Joseph's magnificent coat given to him as a gift from his father to bespeak Joseph's glory.

Clothing and nudity is a subtle yet powerful theme from beginning to end.

And that's just it, or what I believe is one of the most fundamental patterns of the Bible: the peculiar movement that constantly emerges there from being naked in the beginning to being clothed in glory through grace at the end.

"Naked I came from the womb," declared Job, "and naked I will remain!"  But in faith and truth Job is not naked in the end.  Rather, like those who remain at the end in Revelation, he is clothed in glory through the grace of God.  He is not naked but decked in richer and more beautiful clothes than ever before...

It is the same pattern in the book of Job that holds on the broader Biblical scale.  From Adam and Eve to those who are dressed in the white robes in the end times.  Again and again the movement from being naked to being clothed in glory through grace emerges in the Bible.

Even the hides given to Adam and Eve and the blanket placed upon Noah fit this holy pattern.  Despite their shameful connotations.

Thanks be to Job.

From Eschaton to Apocalypse

I recently read The Road by Cormac McCarthy.  You may know it better from the film released awhile back starring Viggo Mortensen.  I won't give away any spoilers here but I will say what I took from the story.

To set the stage, the book provides an account of a father and son travelling through, and struggling to survive in, a post-apocalyptic world.  But "post-apocalyptic" is probably the wrong word to use.  A better description would be a world between eschaton and apocalypse, where the eschaton is the end time and the apocalypse is the new beginning.  The Road shows us the journey in between, from eschaton to apocalypse.  It shows us a father and son making their way through a world choking on the ashes of the old and with only a childish hope for the new.

That hope still exists in this "between" world is evident in the fact that the pair are travelling south.  They are trying to make their way to the sea and to the possibility for life that the sea represents.  More palpably it is evident in the son.  Not in the sense that the son has hope but in the sense that the son is the hope (of the father).  The son is the seed of the new world.  The son is the goodness from the old that must be carried forward into the new, and that needs to be preserved in the process.  No matter what the cost.  By whatever means.

With this setting The Road offers us something like a theodicy.  I say "something like" because a theodicy typically provides a defense of the justice of God. The goal is to get God off of the hook for evil, or to show that God is just despite evil.  The Road offers us something like a theodicy because instead of defending God's justice it gives us a reason for God's injustice.  It doesn't give us an explanation for all evil but it does give an explanation for certain immoral actions that all of us could understand.

The point I take from The Road then, to finally get to my point, is not so much that we are to survive by any means possible once the end time comes, as if we are to be like the cannibals that the father and son try to avoid, but rather that we are to protect and preserve the hope that is the son by any means possible.  The goodness of the son must survive to bring about the post-apocalyptic world that we all dream of.  No matter what the cost.  By whatever means.

Thanks be to Job.