Darkness

THE OLD TESTAMENT begins with darkness, and the last of the Gospels ends with it.

"Darkness was upon the face of the deep," Genesis says. Darkness was where it all started. Before darkness, there had never been anything other than darkness, void and without form.

At the end of John, the disciples go out fishing on the Sea of Tiberias. It is night. They have no luck. Their nets are empty. Then they spot somebody standing on the beach. At first they don't see who it is in the darkness. It is Jesus.

The darkness of Genesis is broken by God in great majesty speaking the word of creation. "Let there be light!" That's all it took.

The darkness of John is broken by the flicker of a charcoal fire on the sand. Jesus has made it. He cooks some fish on it for his old friends' breakfast. On the horizon there are the first pale traces of the sun getting ready to rise.

All the genius and glory of God are somehow represented by these two scenes, not to mention what Saint Paul calls God's foolishness.

The original creation of light itself is almost too extraordinary to take in. The little cookout on the beach is almost too ordinary to take seriously. Yet if Scripture is to be believed, enormous stakes were involved in them both, and still are. Only a saint or a visionary can begin to understand God setting the very sun on fire in the heavens, and therefore God takes another tack. By sheltering a spark with a pair of cupped hands and blowing on it, the Light of the World gets enough of a fire going to make breakfast. It's not apt to be your interest in cosmology or even in theology that draws you to it so much as it's the empty feeling in your stomach. You don't have to understand anything very complicated. All you're asked is to take a step or two forward through the darkness and start digging in.

-Originally published in Whistling in the Dark and later in Beyond Words

Daniel

NEBUCHADNEZZAR was in such a state when Daniel arrived at about four in the morning with a raincoat thrown over his pajamas that all the customary grovelings and mumbo-jumbo were dispensed with, and he received him the way any man might receive another at that hour—any man, that is, who'd just been scared out of his wits. The guards with their leash of panthers were dismissed, the slatted ivory blinds were pulled shut, and, sitting bolt upright in the middle of his bed with the covers clutched in a knot at his throat, the king stammered out his appalling dream.

He said there was this enormous tree so heavy with leaves and fruit that it gave shade for miles around and all the beasts of the field came to take their ease in it.

"That's you," Daniel said.

He said there was this creature who came down from heaven bearing orders that the tree was to be chopped down, its branches lopped off, and all its leaves and fruit scattered.”

I guess you know where those orders came from," Daniel said.

He said the mutilated stump that was Nebuchadnezzar had its heart changed to a beast's heart, and ate grass with oxen, and its hair got all matted like feathers, and its nails grew long and yellow like an owl’s.

"That's to help you get back in touch with reality," Daniel said. "You've gotten so used to being treated like a god, you've started believing you are one.”

When the thing finally happened, everybody was very tactful. Nebuchadnezzar would come grazing across the lawn on all fours, and they'd look the other way. He'd lift his leg on the marble balustrade, and business would go on as usual. He'd squat out there in the hanging gardens howling into the dusk as naked as the day he was born, but from everybody's polite expressions, you would have thought it was just the court musicians tuning up for the evening cotillion.

He was still lying out there on the grass one morning when the sun started to come up, and by the time it had cleared the tops of the tallest palms, he was back on two feet again and behaving quite normally. The way he explained it was that as he'd lain there watching the golden rays fan out across the sky, he'd suddenly realized that even a great king like himself must look pretty cheap compared with a god who could put on a show like that once a day and kept putting it on whether the audience was worth it or not because that was the kind of god he was.

"Now you're starting to talk sense," Daniel said.It wasn't long after this that Nebuchadnezzar got back to the office again, full time, with Daniel as his right-hand man. Except for a certain uneasiness in the presence of ruminants and an occasional friendly chat with his psychiatrist, it was comparatively clear sailing from there on out.

-Originally published in Peculiar Treasures and later in Beyond Words 

Cross

TWO OF THE NOBLEST PILLARS of the ancient world—Roman law and Jewish piety—together supported the necessity of putting Jesus Christ to death in a manner that even for its day was peculiarly loathsome. Thus the cross stands for the tragic folly of human beings, not just at their worst but at their best.

Jesus needn't have died. Presumably he could have followed the advice of friends like Peter and avoided the showdown. Instead, he chose to die because he believed that he had to if the world was to be saved. Thus the cross stands for the best that human beings can do as well as for the worst.

"My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" (Matthew 27:46). Jesus died in the profoundest sense alone. Thus the cross stands for the inevitable dereliction and defeat of the best and the worst indiscriminately.

For those who believe that Jesus Christ rose from the dead early on a Sunday morning, and for those also who believe that he provided food for worms just as the rest of us will, the conclusion is inescapable that he came out somehow the winner. What emerged from his death was a kind of way, of truth, of life, without which the last two thousand years of human history would have been even more tragic than they were.

A six-pointed star, a crescent moon, a lotus—the symbols of other religions suggest beauty and light. The symbol of Christianity is an instrument of death. It suggests, at the very least, hope.

-Originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words  

Creation

TO MAKE SUGGESTS MAKING SOMETHING out of something the way a carpenter makes wooden boxes out of wood. To create suggests making something out of nothing the way an artist makes paintings or poems. It is true that artists, like carpenters, have to use something else—paint, words—but the beauty or meaning they make is different from the material they make it out of. To create is to make something essentially new.

When God created the creation, God made something where before there had been nothing, and as the author of the book of Job puts it, "the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy" (38:7) at the sheer and shimmering novelty of the thing. "New every morning is the love / Our wakening and uprising prove" says the hymn. Using the same old materials of earth, air, fire, and water, every twenty-four hours God creates something new out of them. If you think you're seeing the same show all over again seven times a week, you're crazy. Every morning you wake up to something that in all eternity never was before and never will be again. And the you that wakes up was never the same before and will never be the same again either. 

-Originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words  

Covenant

OLD TESTAMENT means "Old Covenant," which means the old agreement that was arrived at between God and Israel at Mt. Sinai with Moses presiding. "I shall be your God and you shall be my people" (Leviticus 26:12) sums it up—that is, if you obey God's commandments, God will love you.

New Testament means "New Covenant," which means the new agreement that was arrived at by God alone in an upstairs room in Jerusalem with Jesus presiding. Jesus sums it up by raising his wine and saying, "This cup is the new covenant in my blood" (1 Corinthians 11:25).

Like Moses, Jesus believed that if you obey God, God will love you, but here he is saying something beyond that. He is saying if you don't obey God, that doesn't mean that God won't love you. It means simply that God's love becomes a suffering love: a love that suffers because it is not reciprocated, a love that suffers because we who are loved suffer and suffer precisely in our failure to reciprocate. By giving us the cup to drink, Jesus is saying that in loving us God "bleeds" for us—not "even though" we don't give a damn, but precisely because we don't. God keeps his part of the covenant whether we keep our part or not; it's just that one way costs him more.

This idea that God loves people whether or not they give a damn isn't new. In the Old Testament book of Hosea, for instance, the prophet portrays God as lashing out at the Israelites for their disobedience and saying that by all rights they should be wiped off the face of the earth, but then adding, "How can I hand you over, O Israel? . . . My heart recoils within me . . . . I will not execute my fierce anger . . . for I am God and not man, the Holy One in your midst, and I will not come to destroy" (Hosea 11:8-9).

What is new about the New Covenant, therefore, is not the idea that God loves the world enough to bleed for it, but the claim that here he is actually putting his money where his mouth is. Like a father saying about his sick child, "I'd do anything to make you well," God finally calls his own bluff and does it. Jesus Christ is what God does, and the cross where God did it is the central symbol of New Covenant faith.

So what? Does the suffering of the father for the sick child make the sick child well? In the last analysis, we each have to answer for ourselves.

Like the elderly Christ Church don who was heard muttering over his chop at high table, "This mutton is as hard to swallow as the Lamb of God," there are some who find the whole idea simply unswallowable—just the idea of God, let alone the idea of God in Christ submitting to the cross for love's sake. Yet down through the centuries there have been others—good ones and bad ones, bright ones and stupid ones—who with varying degrees of difficulty have been able to swallow it and have claimed that what they swallowed made the difference between life and death.

Such people would also tend to claim that, whereas to respond to the Old Covenant is to become righteous, to respond to the New Covenant is to become new. The proof, they might add, is in the pudding. 

-Originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words