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And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, to divide between day and night, and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and for years. And let them be for light in the firmament of the heaven, so as to shine upon the earth, and it was so. And God made the two great lights, the greater light for regulating the day and the lesser light for regulating the night, the stars also. And God placed them in the firmament of the heaven, so as to shine upon the earth, and to regulate day and night, and to divide between the light and the darkness. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, the fourth day. And God said, Let the waters bring forth reptiles having life, and winged creatures flying above the earth in the firmament of heaven, and it was so. And God made great whales, and every living reptile, which the waters brought forth according to their kinds, and every creature that flies with wings according to its kind, and God saw that they were good. And God blessed them saying, Increase and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let the creatures that fly be multiplied on the earth. And there was evening and there was morning, the fifth day. – Genesis 1: 14-23
In Brothers Karamazov, the boy Smerdyakov mockingly asks the pious Grigoriy how there could have been light on the first day if God did not create the sun until the fourth day. He grows up to be a nihilist who murders his father without remorse.
On the first day, God said, “Let there be light.” God did not need to sun to make the light. His light – both the uncreated light and the created light – illumined all that He made on the First, Second, and Third Days of Creation. He created the sun and moon and stars as servants of the light; they are not light itself. Likewise, God did not need the brain to create mind. Being the Uncreated Mind, He created countless bodiless intelligences, the Angels, before this world came to be. Man’s physical organs of thought – both the brain and the heart – He created as servants of the mind; they are not mind itself.
To make clear that the sun, moon, and stars are not gods, God inspires Moses to state that the Lord made them “…for signs and for seasons, for days and for years.” God made all the vast physical cosmos, whose awesome grandeur and unimaginable dimensions human science has confirmed in our time, to be a calendar for man, a servant of man. For man alone is made in the Image of God. One human heart is potentially greater than the entire physical cosmos, for into the heart of the baptized the Holy Trinity comes to dwell.
All man’s ills – of mind, heart, and body – arise when he worships creatures and not the Creator as the source of his life. All man’s ills – of mind, heart, and body – arise when he forgets the nobility of his divine calling. During Great Lent, we re-learn that God is God, and that we must worship Him alone. We re-learn that He made us in His Image and that we must recover the primordial Likeness. By re-learning our original nobility, we come to lament our present poverty, and we aspire to the Paradise that we lost through sin.
This commentary was taken from The Eternal Sacrifice: The Genesis Readings for Great Lent by Fr. Steven Allen. You can order a copy from Lulu at http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/FrStevenAllen
