God Plays in the Dirt

My kids are disasters when given access to soil. Absolute feral cave dwellers. And I mean this as a compliment.

When you put children near dirt and give them permission (or simply fail to prohibit it quickly enough) something happens that is nothing short of primal. They drop to their knees without hesitation. They push their hands in. They smear it on their faces like war paint, looking like toddler versions of William Wallace in Braveheart yelling FREEDOM! They build things that collapse and build them again. They become, within approximately four minutes, unrecognizable as the clean children who left the house. Speech has become resounding "Unga-bungas" and unintelligible to the average person.

And they are absolutely delighted. Cackling and playfully unaware, or just not caring the mess that they have conjured up with record time.

I watch them do this and something in me recognizes it and its not nostalgia exactly. Something older than that. Something that feels like memory from before memory. Like the dirt knows them and they know the dirt. Almost intimately. That this is not something they learned but something they are returning to.

Which, as it turns out, is exactly what it is.

Made from the Ground

The Hebrew word for human is adam. The Hebrew word for ground is adamah. The word for human comes directly from the word for soil. We are, at the most literal and etymological level, dirt creatures. Earth beings. Humus, the Latin word for ground, the root of our words human, humility, and humor. This is what we are made of.

Then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature. (Genesis 2:7)

God got down in the dirt. He formed and He shaped. He worked the clay with (and I do not think this is too much to say) something like the delight of a child pushing hands into soil on a warm afternoon.

The word for formed here is yatsar. It's the word of a potter working clay. It is intimate, manual, and paitent. God did not speak humanity into existence the way He spoke light into existence. He took time and formed. He got His hands into the humus and shaped the creature who would bear His image from the ground that would sustain it.

There is theology in the method. God could have made humanity any way He chose. But He chose dirt. He chose the slow, tactile, hands-in-the-ground process of forming rather than the spoken word of calling into being. He chose humus. And that choice is not incidental; it is the declaration that the material world is not beneath the dignity of God. That dirt is not the opposite of the sacred and the ground itself is the medium through which God does some of His most intimate work.

My kids already know this. They figured it out by the time they were two.

What Was Lost in the Garden

And then something broke.

The creature formed from the humus reached for what was not given and chose to define good and evil on its own terms rather than receive the definition from the One who made both. And the ground, the adamah from which the adam was formed, was cursed.

Cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you. (Genesis 3:17–18)

The humus that was the medium of creation became the site of struggle. The ground that God played in to form humanity became the ground that resisted humanity. Thorns and thistles where there had been garden and now sweat and pain where there had been vocation and delight.

And more than the ground, the image itself was marred. Not erased and wiped out. The Church Fathers were careful about this. Irenaeus of Lyon, writing in the second century, argued that the image of God in humanity was not destroyed by the fall but obscured. Dimmed and tarnished. Like a coin worn smooth by too much handling, the image still there but harder to read. What was lost was not the image itself but the clarity of it and the capacity to bear it rightly.

Irenaeus used the word recapitulatio (recapitulation). The idea that Christ comes not simply to forgive sin but to redo humanity from the beginning. To go back to the start and walk the whole story again (from birth, through childhood, through temptation, through suffering, through death) and get it right where Adam got it wrong. To restore not just the individual but the whole trajectory of human existence, but knwoing the ground needed a new gardener. The humus needed the one who formed it to come back and work it again.

God Gets Back in the Dirt

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. (John 1:14)

Flesh. Sarx in the Greek. Not a spiritual impression nor a divine appearance that looked human from the outside while remaining untouched by the actual conditions of human life. Flesh. The stuff that gets tired and hungry and bleeds and sweats. The stuff that is unequivocally humus.

Athanasius of Alexandria wrote in the fourth century something that has never stopped being extraordinary: God became what we are so that we might become what He is. The direction of the incarnation is always downward before it is upward. God does not reach from above and pull humanity toward divinity. God descends and gets into the dirt, taking on the humus of the human condition from the inside.

The theological term is kenosis. It comes from the Greek kenoo, to empty. Paul describes it in Philippians 2:

Though he was in the form of God, he did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.

He emptied himself. The one who formed the humus became the humus. The potter became the clay. The one who breathed life into the first Adam entered the second Adam’s existence through the same dirt-level, ordinary, thoroughly embodied process of being born small and helpless and entirely dependent.

He did not arrive as raw divinity. He arrived as a baby in a feeding trough in a borrowed stable in a backwater town. He grew up in a carpenter’s house with sawdust on the floor. He walked the dusty roads of Galilee with dirty feet. He knelt in the dirt of Gethsemane and sweated drops of blood into the ground that His hands had formed at the beginning of creation.

The ground felt His weight. The humus received His sweat. The dirt that was cursed because of the first Adam absorbed the agony of the last Adam.

Gregory of Nyssa described the soul’s journey as epektasis. Somethings I've mentioned times before, but an endless stretching toward God, a continual restoration of the divine image that was obscured in the fall. But what Gregory understood, and what the incarnation makes undeniably clear, is that the restoration happens from the inside. God does not renovate humanity from a safe distance. He enters it. He inhabits the humus and He works the clay from within the clay.

This is kenosis applied to creation. The emptying of divinity into the material world not as a temporary strategy but as the permanent, irrevocable, and forever-commitment of God to the humus He formed and loves.

The Gardener in the Garden

And then the resurrection happens in a garden.

John is the only Gospel writer who tells us this. He is not being scenic, but rather He is being deliberate. The tomb was in a garden. The risen Christ appears in a garden. And Mary, standing outside the tomb weeping in the early morning dark, looks at the risen Lord of the universe and mistakes Him for the gardener.

Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, ‘Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him.’ (John 20:15)

She is not wrong.

Actually, she is more right than she knows.

The last Adam has come back to the garden. The one who formed the humus has returned to it. Not as the creature formed from the ground but as the Creator who descended into it and who became humus, who absorbed the curse of the thorns and thistles into a crown pressed onto His head, and who was buried in the ground and walked out of it on the third day.

The resurrection is not the escape from the material world. It is the redemption of it. The risen Christ still has a body. Still bears wounds. He still eats fish on the beach and breaks bread at tables and walks roads and stands in gardens. The resurrection body is the declaration that the humus is not temporary housing for the soul, but it is the permanent, redeemed, glorified medium through which the image of God will be born forever.

Irenaeus saw this with extraordinary clarity. The recapitulation is not complete until the body is raised. The full restoration of what was lost in the first garden requires the resurrection of the flesh formed from the second garden’s empty tomb. The humus must be redeemed not escaped. It's amazing, isn't it?

My kids playing in the dirt are not doing something they will grow out of when they become more spiritual. They are participating in something God declared good before the fall and is restoring through the resurrection.

Creation Is Redeemable

This is the word the incarnation and resurrection speak together over the material world:

Redeemable.

It isn't disposable and temporary. It isn't the holding tank we occupy until we escape to something more spiritual. The ground itself; the humus, the adamah, the dirt my children push their hands into with absolute delight, is the subject of God’s redemptive intention. It gets me weepy.

Paul says it in Romans 8 with a breadth that reminds me of this:

For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God… the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. (Romans 8:19, 21)

The creation is waiting, groaning, and longing. Not to be discarded and replaced, but restored and rescued. The thorns and thistles are not the final word on the ground. The curse is not permanent. The last Adam who wore the crown of thorns on His head was absorbing the curse of the ground into His body so that the ground itself could be released from it.

Athanasius and Irenaeus and Gregory are all saying the same thing from different angles: the incarnation is the beginning of the restoration of everything. Not just human souls. Everything. The humus (the ground) and the whole created order that was declared very good before the fall and has been groaning toward its liberation ever since.

The gardener in the garden is not a mistake Mary made. It is the truth she almost missed. The risen Christ is the gardener. He has been the gardener from the beginning. He formed the first garden. He will restore the last one and in between He descended into the dirt, wore the thorns, was buried in the ground, and walked out of it on the third day with the humus of the new creation on His resurrection feet.

What This Means for the Dirt on My Children’s Faces

It means everything.

When my kids drop to their knees in the soil and push their hands in and come up smiling through the mud, they are doing something that is not contrary to the spiritual life. They are participating in the material world that God formed, entered into, redeemed, and is restoring.

The dirt is not the problem. The dirt is the medium.

The humus that we are made from is the same humus the last Adam entered and redeemed. The ground that felt the weight of Gethsemane’s agony also felt the footsteps of the resurrection morning. The soil that absorbed the sweat of the first Adam’s cursed labor is being restored by the last Adam’s risen life.

Humility, from humus, isn't self-deprecation. It is the honest acknowledgment of what we are made of and the wonder that the One who made us thought it was worth descending into. Worth becoming and redeeming from the inside.

Gregory of Nyssa’s epektasis (the soul’s endless stretching toward God) does not happen by escaping the material world. It happens by being restored within it. By the image of God becoming clearer in the humus that bears it and by the dirt creatures being formed again by the hands of the One who got back in the dirt to finish what He started in the beginning.

My kids come inside covered in mud and I think about Mary in the garden mistaking the risen Christ for the gardener.

She was not wrong.

He has always been playing in the dirt.

And like my kids, He is not finished yet.