The first thing is what matters most 

Taken from the earth 

The new year is still fresh, stretched out before us like a thick layer of untouched snow. Behind us lie only a few deep footprints from the first days of 2026. What lies ahead still looks paradisiacal. This is roughly how I imagine the garden of Eden must have looked as well: in Genesis 2, God creates out of the dust of the ground (rather like children making a snowball?), moulds and kneads it – a human form begins to take shape… God sets it on its feet, breathes breath into its nostrils and behold, Adam! A little earth-being, made from dust; the future still lies open before him, unfilled. Now it begins. 

The spirit above the waters makes earth 

But let us go back a little further, because according to another creation story it had already begun earlier. That story opens with the ‘spirit of God hovering over the waters’ (v’ruach elohim merachefet ‘al-pnei hamayim; Gen 1:2b), unable to gain a foothold, until God speaks (vayomer elohim…; Gen 1:3). The spirit thus comes down from above the waters through the word and only then gains ground. More than that: through the word the spirit of God creates (on the third day) ground. And, in Genesis 2, from that ground (min ha’adamah) the human (Adam). 

Incarnation 

The word (‘God spoke’) is therefore crucial for God, and the evangelist John understood this as well. The opening of his gospel, John 1:1, ‘rhymes’ with Genesis 1:1ff.: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’ (En archē ēn ho Logos, kai ho Logos ēn pros ton Theon, kai Theos ēn ho Logos). He then continues in verse 14: ‘And the Word became flesh and pitched his tent among us.’ (Kai ho Logos sarx egeneto kai eskenōsen en hēmin). The Word that was there in the beginning, that was God, gains ground when it becomes ‘flesh’. Flesh (sarx) as in steak: the material aspect of the human being, even more concrete than ‘body’. The evangelist is therefore explicitly not speaking of the spirit here. Almost as if he fears his readers might look for the Word in the wrong place, he stresses through God’s incarnation that it is about the body of this human being. For with our bodies we, and through the incarnation God as well, are part of earthly reality. Jesus Christ, also called the second Adam, is thus made of the same material as the first Adam: dust. Earth-dust, raw material – whatever one calls it: matter. Just like us. 

At heart, God is concerned with matter 

The incarnation in Jesus Christ is thus the most intimate way in which God relates to matter: the Word itself becomes matter. God’s Word gains a foothold. And if we return from here to the beginning, to Genesis, the question arises: is this really a starting point? We tend to think of a historical beginning. Reading Genesis and John together opens up another perspective: the creation stories point to what has the greatest value for God. The first word, God’s narrative, concerns matter, our material world. 

Only dust? 

‘Dust you are, and to dust you shall return’ is a text often used at funerals, when we relinquish a human body and entrust it to God by laying it in the earth or having it cremated. This text comes from Genesis 3:19, the chapter that tells how things go wrong between humans and God in the garden of Eden. Although God had forbidden it, the humans eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (through the fault of the serpent). That this provokes a curse from God (Gen 3:1–19), in which it is said of the human being that they are dust and will return to dust, does not diminish the value or worth of being material – on the contrary. ‘Dust you are, and to dust you shall return’ means precisely that everything in every human life must take place here, on this earth, for us and for God. Human beings are dust and do not have to become more than dust (not God, for instance) in order to be God’s beloved. And they remain so, curse or no curse. In this way God comforts humans that their future is not detached from the earth, but on the earth. The human being, created to till the earth (Gen 2:5), is now sent out to do exactly that outside the garden: to work the earth from which the human was taken. 

The beginning points to what matters most 

Here, on this earth, it must happen, because God has a deep love for matter. That has far-reaching implications, especially when one considers that faith is often thought of and spoken about as something spiritual. It is spiritual, indeed, but – as Genesis and John together indicate – never detached from concrete matter, always bound up with it. And it also has far-reaching implications in the light of the concrete social issues we face – whether climate, housing, energy, agriculture or migration. Biodiversity matters. Housing matters, when you reach the age of leaving home. Forms of energy that do not exhaust natural resources matter immensely. Farmers matter, and so does a solution to the nitrogen problem. And reception centres for asylum seekers matter. For at the beginning it stands that for God the earth (and all that lives on and in it) is not merely a backdrop against which humans play the leading role. God loves matter deeply, with a love that extends beyond human beings alone. That stands at the beginning, perhaps not because it was the starting gun, but because it is the first thing, the most important. Anyone who reads the rest of the biblical books in the year ahead with an eye for matter may well encounter surprising and new things.