The story of the Tower of Babel is one that makes its way into children’s bibles.
We teach it to kids – probably not because of any moral it has and which we might want them to take to heart, but because it is fun and easy to act out with building blocks in Sunday School. At just the age when your kids are discovering the joy of dropping and knocking over and destroying stuff, we tell them that this is something that God likes to do, too. (You’re welcome.) My little sister – in such a classic little sister move – used to smash my LEGOS and call it “playing Tower of Babel.”
If the story of the Tower of Babel has a moral, it isn’t an obvious one. It’s sometimes read as a kind of Hebrew take on the tale of Icarus flying too high; it’s sometimes read as a warning against hubris, against overreaching and pride. But it isn’t clear to me that, in the story, when the people say, “let us make a name for ourselves,” they are speaking with hubris. Wanting to make a name for themselves could be a prideful aspiration, but it could just as well be a commendable, noble one: a commitment to be good stewards of the intellectual gifts and creative vision God has blessed them with.
Ambition doesn’t have to be a dirty word. Pride is counted among the deadliest sins, but, then, so is sloth. And, anyway, why should God care if they build a tower so tall that the top of it comes heaving up through the sidewalks of heaven like the roots of an old tree? Why not smile and laugh or see this as an act of worship – as an expression of the people’s desire to be closer to Him?
When God comes down – and that God comes down as the people go up is a subtle but clever way the story suggests that God and human beings are working at cross-purposes here; if it isn’t hubris, isn’t pride, that’s putting God off, still: it’s something – when God comes down, God says, “This is only the beginning of what they will do. Nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.” There is no reason to read this as a negative evaluation. What if God speaks these words not in anger, but in awe? What if God marvels at the imagination and ingenuity of His human creations? What if God delights in the boundlessness of their capabilities and potential, which He Himself wove into them after all?
The “sin” behind the building of the tower isn’t hubris, isn’t some encroachment on God’s jealously guarded divine prerogatives. No, backing up a bit: In the opening chapter of the Book of Genesis, when God created human beings, He blessed them and gave them this charge: “Be fruitful and multiply. Go, fill the earth.” Fill the earth. God called them to leave Eden and travel to distant lands and settle there.
They were to strike out, to spread out. They were to venture out and live as caretakers in every corner of God’s wild, good world. Every place was to be named and known as a paradise: the mountains, the deserts, the forests, the islands, the frozen north. Human beings were to bless and to tend all the earth, and – and, it seems, and maybe this is more important even – to let the earth teach them new and different and wonderful ways to be human beings. They were to let the sea change them, to let the tundra change them. They were to let the sun and the night sky change them. So that, over time, over great spans of time, as they were changed, as they adapted and evolved, as life in each different environment transformed and transfigured them, they would come to look different: to be shorter or taller, to have lighter or darker hair and eyes and skin.
They would come to speak different languages, and, just as the native peoples of the Arctic have more and different words for “snow” and of the Amazon have more and different words for “green,” they would come to see, to actually see, more and different things. And to the degree that our words give shape to our thoughts, they would come to think in many and different ways about life and about beauty and about purpose and about love and about God. That is what God wanted and wanted for them.
When God created human beings, God commanded them to get out of the cocoon of Eden and spread into parts of the world that would change them into different kinds, into all different kinds, of human beings. But, at Babel, that is precisely what the people say they do not want to do: “Come, they say, let us build ourselves a city and a tower; otherwise, we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.” They are determined to live as one people in one place, to stay safe and to stay the same. So God takes matters into His own hands. God drives them out of Babel. God saves them from the sad, little bubble of a world they are building – a world where everybody is the same as everybody else and nobody knows nothing different. God saves them from being narrow and boring.
“Come, let us go down and confuse their language,” God says. There is no reason the word “confuse” needs to be translated that way. Almost everywhere else in the bible, the same Hebrew word is translated as “mix” – and is used of mixing ingredients while making bread.
“Confuse” makes it sound like God is being wrathful or punitive. “Mix” is more neutral. The Hebrew word is also, although less often, translated as “overflow.” I think it is actually quite lovely to read it that way here: to imagine God making our language “overflow” – overflow with meaning and nuance and beauty.
That was, as I said, God’s first dream for human beings. If you read the story of Tower of Babel alongside the story of the coming of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost (as most churches do this morning), something like this comes to seem pretty close to the mark. Pentecost is a sort of reversal of Babel – but only sort of: There is a gathering and not a scattering, a coming together from every corner and cranny of creation and not a spreading out to the ends of the earth, yes.
There is a miraculous un-confusing of human languages; God makes it possible, not impossible, for the people to understand one another, yes. But: The people don’t actually all speak the same language and all have only the same words at hand. This is not a recreation of the pre-Babel world. Unlike at Babel, on Pentecost, the people are different kinds of people – Parthians, Medes, Elamites, Mesopotamians, Judeans, Cappadocians, Cretans, Arabs – and are from different kinds of places – Pontus, Asia, Phrygia, Pamphylia, Egypt, Libya, Rome; and their differentness, all their differentness, is preserved, is put, in fact, at the heart of the new community God is gathering them into.
The Holy Spirit gives people the ability to speak many and different languages, and then interprets and translates among them, making empathy possible, making understanding possible. This chaotic agglomeration of human beings trying to make themselves heard and understood in all their different human tongues is shaped into a union and into a communion. The people share together in an experience of unity, of togetherness, and of oneness. But, again, unlike at Babel, on Pentecost, oneness is not confused with sameness. That, I think, is the sin of Babel: confusing oneness with sameness. And that is the healing, the mercy and the miracle of Pentecost: the gift of a togetherness that embraces differentness. Being different is a gift of the Spirit, every bit as much as being together and being understood is a gift of the Spirit.
Families, schools, small towns, society: they can really pressure people to be the same as other people. On a Sunday when we are baptizing two children into the faith and family of Jesus Christ, it is important to say that one of the things we, as a church, have to do for these girls is remind them that it’s okay to resist this pressure. There are many ways to be happy and to be successful and to be beautiful. There are many ways to be human. They can look how they look. They can like what they like. They can live their lives and not some other girls’ lives. They should never have to be the same to belong. God wants more for them.
There is a story told about one of the wise, old rabbis – Rabbi Zusya: Zusya’s disciples came to him as he lay on his deathbed weeping and trembling in fear. They asked him, “Rabbi, what do you fear? You are almost as wise as Moses and almost as righteous as Abraham. Surely the Holy One will judge you kindly.” Zusya answered them, “I do not fear that, when I stand in judgement before Him, God will ask me, ‘Zusya, why were you not more like Moses?’ – for I was not given the wisdom of Moses. Nor do I fear that God will ask me, ‘Zusya, why were you not more like Abraham?’ – for I was not given the righteousness of Abraham. What I fear is that God will ask me, ‘Zusya, why were you not more like Zusya?’ For what then could I say?”