Some time after the floodwaters receded and the ground had dried, Noah decided to plant a vineyard and drink of its fruit. It’s not hard to imagine how months at sea would turn someone toward being a man of the soil. Nor is it difficult to understand how survivor’s guilt over the almost-global extinction of the human race would lead Noah to try and drown his sorrows in the bottom of a bottle. But that’s what he did. And that’s when things took a turn for the worse.

One night when Noah lay passed out naked on the ground, one of his sons, Ham, sees him and goes and tells his brothers about it. High on schadenfreude, his point isn’t simply to inform but to gossip. If social media were around back then, he would have posted about it, brazenly mocking his own dad. Not his most shining moment as a son. But his brothers, Shem and Japheth, take a different approach. Instead of furthering the shame, they delete the post from their feeds, lay a blanket on their shoulders, and walk backward toward their father to cover him without seeing his nakedness. When Noah wakes up and finds out everything that happened, in embarrassment and anger he curses Ham, but he blesses Shem and Japheth (Gen 9:18–27).

In the Bible, stories like this often have two sides to them, but the sides aren’t just a simple right and wrong. Genesis 9 has no obvious moral lesson. “Don’t see your dad naked” or “Don’t make fun of people” hardly need to be said and seem ridiculously out of place, especially at this juncture in Genesis. Thankfully, there’s deeper magic here. Following Paul’s lead in how he teaches us to interpret narrative pairs in Genesis, the two brothers represent two ways of relating to God through the two primary covenants of the Bible.

Ham represents the old covenant, which is why he comes first in the story even though he’s the youngest. He personifies the thing that exposes and makes us want to run for cover, that is, the law. If we didn’t realize we were naked already, the law makes it crystal clear. Adam and Eve find this out the hard way when they sinfully reach for the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in Genesis 3. Turns out that grasping for impossible standards (and the fruitless attempts at proving ourselves that comes with it) isn’t as fun as it first sounds. So they immediately hide from God in their nakedness, and the rest is history.

Built into the fabric of our existence as broken human beings is the fear of being found out, or on the other side of things, our own schadenfreude, or pleasure of watching others fail. Maybe that’s why Ham was quick to expose, because to turn the mirror in another’s direction is to turn it away from ourselves and what skeletons we’re hiding within. The unkeepable rules only serve to make things worse, whether we apply them to ourselves or hold them over others.

But, fortunately for us, there’s another brother in the story. Shem represents the new covenant. He represents the covering of our shame and the grace that feels like putting on well-fitting clothing or wrapping ourselves in a bandage or a blanket to cover our scars or unsightly disfigurements. Or the feeling of relief we might have when we wake up from a nightmare and realize it was just a dream.

It’s no surprise that genealogically Jesus comes from the line of Shem, not Ham, because he came to save us by the work of his nail-pierced hands, not to thrust the work back onto our shoulders. And his grace, we learn, isn’t preconditioned on our spiritual sobriety; instead, like Noah we are covered on our worst days, when we don’t know our left hand from our right — even when we’re least expecting it. Grace has a way of surprising us like that because it has the audacity to be given apart from works, not in response to them. God says in Romans 10:20, “I revealed myself to those who did not ask for me.” That’s good news for the humble, but bad news for those who like to flex.

This is the clash of ideologies in Genesis 9. Like these brothers who fought with each other as they grew up, so are the testaments they represent. Law and grace are oil and water. Better yet: mirror and blanket. They treat us differently yet lead us to the same finish line. Like Shem is the more blessed brother, so is the New Testament the more blessed covenant (Heb 8:6), because it’s built on a savior who covers a multitude of sins (1 Pet 4:8) at the cost of his own nakedness and who blissfully forgets our transgressions, in love.