Genesis 11:1-9

Genesis’s account of the Tower of Babel, itself an explanation for the dispersion of humanity and their diverse languages, hinges on the daring of human endeavor. “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves” (Gen 11:4). God’s response may at first be surprising to us: “this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them” (Gen 11:6).

Marilynne Robinson, in her recent extended essay Reading Genesis, remarks on this familiar story: “The Lord sees neither failure nor frustrated intention nor a chastening of presumption in the tower and its destruction but potential for human success in doing the impossible. This is an astonishingly high estimate of human capability.”[1]

This anthropological reading of the Genesis account, and God’s response to human capability, recognizes something fundamental to our human nature and history: that in our lives, our relationships, our creations, we so often work at cross-purposes to our life in God, our relationship with God, and with God’s creation. If the destruction of the Tower of Babel demonstrates God’s “astonishingly high estimate of human capability” it’s a capability that is just as often bent on dominance and destruction—the will of the nations, mighty armies, the strength of the horse, as the Psalmist puts it (Ps 33:10, 16-17)—as it is on relationship and cultivation.

And yet, this “high estimate of human capability” is exactly what lies at the heart of Jesus’s exhortation to humility. “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me” (Mk 8:34). Jesus presumes a kind of greatness among his followers in their ability to accept, to choose, a radical, stark, and ultimately painful rejection of all that they know, all that they have been taught to esteem and hope for. If building a tower to the heavens, uniting all people under its sway and its one language demonstrates human capability, so too does the rejection of such endeavors.

We see all around us, in the rapid advances of technology and emphasis on productivity and efficiency, the promise of human capability—and its shadow side. We see the seeming success of pride and dominance, and the casual cruelty that goes along with it. But we hear in Jesus’s call to follow him a call not to reject human capability but to understand that its greatness is not in what we do, what we make, what we build, what we buy and sell, but in who and how we are—to God and to ourselves, to each other and the rest of creation. It is in this choice of another way, the way of denial, the way of the cross, this radical, stark, painful choice, that we prove true God’s “astonishingly high estimate of human capability.”

Amen.

[1] M. Robinson, Reading Genesis (New York, 2024), 73.