Jewels

"YOU WERE IN EDEN, the garden of God; every precious stone was your covering," the Lord said to the king of Tyre, "carnelian, topaz, and jasper, chrysolite, beryl, and onyx; sapphire, carbuncle, and emerald." But then, as the Lord goes on to explain, because the king fell from innocence into sin, "I cast you as a profane thing from the mountain of God, and the guardian cherub drove you out from the midst of the stones of fire" (Ezekiel 28:13,16).

One way or another, we have all fallen like the king. Yet we all also carry within us a memory of Eden. It is perhaps why jewels fascinate us so and why we value them above almost all things. In their starry depths we see glimmers of where we have come from and also of where, according to ancient prophecy, we are going: the city whose "walls are... chrysoprase... jacinth... amethyst... and the twelve gates... twelve pearls... and the street... gold" (Revelation 21:19-21).

-Originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words

Jesus

MAYBE ANY ONE DAY OF A LIFE, even the most humdrum, has in it something of the mystery of that life as a whole.

People had been flocking up to Jesus the way they always seemed to when word got around that he was in the neighborhood. A Roman officer came up to ask if he would do something for a paralyzed servant back home, and Jesus said he'd go have a look at him. When the officer said he hated to take that much of his time and asked if he couldn't just do something from right there where they were standing, Jesus was so impressed by the way the man trusted him that he told him he'd see to it that what he trusted would happen indeed, and when the officer got home, he found his servant up and around again. Later on, when Jesus dropped in at Peter's house, he found Peter's mother-in-law in bed with a fever, and all he did that time was touch the old lady's hand, but that turned out to be all it took.

A scribe showed up and in a burst of enthusiasm said he was all set to follow him any place he went, to which Jesus answered, "Foxes have holes, and birds have nests, but if you stick with me, you'll find yourself out in the cold" (Matthew 8:20). One of the disciples asked for a few days off to attend his father's funeral, and Jesus said, "Look, you've got to follow me. When life's at stake, burying the dead is for deadbeats" (Matthew 8:22). When he saw a big crowd approaching, he figured he didn't have enough steam left to do much for them that day, so he went and climbed into a boat for a few hours' peace, only to find that the disciples were hot on his heels and wanted to go along too. So he took them. Then he lay down in the stern of the boat with a pillow under his head, Mark says (4:34), and went to sleep.

Matthew leaves out the details about the stern and the pillow presumably because he thought they weren't important, which of course they're not, and yet the account would be greatly impoverished without them. There's so little about Jesus in the Gospels you can actually see.

He didn't doze off in the bow where the spray would get him and the whitecaps slapped harder. He climbed back into the stern instead. There was a pillow under his head. Maybe somebody put it there for him. Maybe they didn't think to put it there till after he'd gone to sleep, and then somebody lifted his head a little off the hard deck and slipped it under.

He must have gone out like a light because Mark says the storm didn't wake him, not even when the waves got so high they started washing in over the sides. They let him sleep on until finally they were so scared they couldn't stand it any longer and woke him up. They addressed him respectfully enough as Teacher, but what they said was reproachful, petulant almost. "Don't you see that we're all drowning?" (Mark 4:38).

It was the wind rather than the disciples that Jesus seems to have spoken to first, as soon as he'd gotten his eyes open. "He rebuked it," Mark says (4:38). "Cut that out!"you can almost picture him staring it down with the hair lashing his face as he holds on to the gunwales to keep from being blown overboard. He was gentler with the sea. "Take it easy," he said. "Quiet down." When it came the disciples' turn, he said, "Why did you panic?" and then "What kind of faith do you call that?" but they were so impressed to find that the wind had stopped blowing and the sea had flattened out again that they didn't get around to answering him (4:39-41).

On the far shore was a cemetery where a crazy man lived covered with scars from where he was always smashing at himself with stones and from the chains they tried to tie him down with when he got even more violent than usual. As soon as the boat landed, he came gibbering out from behind the graves and went tearing down to the beach, but as soon as he saw Jesus, he stopped in his tracks and quieted down. They talked together a little, and then Jesus healed him.

The Roman officer, the sick old lady, the overenthusiastic scribe, the terrified disciples, the lunatic—something of who he was and what he was like and what it was like to be with him filters through each meeting as it comes along, but for some reason it's the moment in the boat that says most. The way he lay down, bone tired, and fell asleep with the sound of the lapping waves in his ears. The way, when they woke him, he opened his eyes to the howling storm and to all the other howling things that he must have known were in the cards for him and that his nap had been a few moments of vacation from. The helplessness of the disciples and the way he spoke to them. The things he said to the wind and to the sea.

Lamb of God, Rose of Sharon, Prince of Peace—none of the things people have found to call him has ever managed to say it quite right. You can see why when he told people to follow him, they often did, even if they backed out later when they started to catch on to what lay ahead. If you're religiously inclined, you can see why they went even so far as to call him Messiah, the Lord's Anointed, the Son of God, and call him these things still, some of them. And even if you're not religiously inclined, you can see why it is you might give your immortal soul, if you thought you had one to give, to have been the one to raise that head a little from the hard deck and slip a pillow under it.

Matthew 8:5-34; compare Mark 4:35-41

-Originally published in Peculiar Treasures and later in Beyond Words

Jeremiah

THE WORD jeremiad means a doleful and thunderous denunciation, and its derivation is no mystery. There was nothing in need of denunciation that Jeremiah didn't denounce. He denounced the king and the clergy. He denounced recreational sex and extramarital jamborees. He denounced the rich for exploiting the poor, and he denounced the poor for deserving no better. He denounced the way every new god that came sniffing around had them all after him like so many bitches in heat; and right at the very gates of the Temple he told them that if they thought God was impressed by all the mumbo-jumbo that went on in there, they ought to have their heads examined.

When some of them took to indulging in a little human sacrifice on the side, he appeared with a clay pot, which he smashed into smithereens to show them what God planned to do to them as soon as he got around to it. He even denounced God for saddling him with the job of trying to reform such a pack of hyenas, degenerates, ninnies. "You have deceived me," he said, shaking his fist. You are "like a deceitful brook, like waters that fail" (Jeremiah 15:18), and God took it.

But the people didn't. When he told them that the Babylonians were going to come in and rip them to shreds as they richly deserved, they worked him over and threw him in jail. When the Babylonians did come in and not only ripped them to shreds but tore down their precious Temple and ran off with all the expensive hardware, he told them that since it was God's judgment upon them, they better submit to it or else; whereupon they threw him into an open cistern that happened to be handy. Luckily the cistern had no water in it, but Jeremiah sank into the muck up to his armpits and stayed there till an Ethiopian eunuch pulled him out with a rope.

He told them that if they were so crazy about circumcision, then they ought to get their minds above their navels for once and try circumcising "the foreskins of their hearts" (Jeremiah 4:4); and the only hope he saw for them was that someday God would put the law in their hearts too instead of in the books, but that was a long way off.

At his lowest ebb he cursed the day he was born, like Job, and you can hardly blame him. He had spent his life telling the people to shape up, with the result that they were in just about as miserable shape as they'd have been if he'd never bothered, and urging them to submit to Babylon as the judgment of God when all their patriotic instincts made that sound like the worst kind of defeatism and treachery.

He also told them that, Babylonian occupation or no Babylonian occupation, they should stick around so that someday they could rise up and be a new nation again; and then the first chance they got, a bunch of them beat it over the border into Egypt. What's even worse, they dragged old Jeremiah, kicking and screaming, along with them, which seems the final irony: that he, who had fought so long and hard against all forms of idolatry—the nation as idol, the Temple as idol, the king as idol—should at last have been tucked into their baggage like a kind of rabbit's foot or charm against the evil eye or idol himself.

What became of him in Egypt afterward is not known, but the tradition is that his own people finally got so exasperated with him there that they stoned him to death. If that is true, nothing could be less surprising.

-Originally published in Peculiar Treasures and later in Beyond Words

Jael

A CANAANITE WARLORD NAMED SISERA had recently been trounced by an Israelite strongman named Barak and was heading for the border to save his skin. On the way, he was invited to hide out with a Kenite woman named Jael, who belonged to a tribe that had not been involved in the skirmish at all. This was his second bad break that day.

Jael was all smiles as she issued her invitation and gave him the red-carpet treatment. She fixed him a drink and suggested he stretch out for a while on the couch. While he was asleep, she crept in and disposed of him by the ingenious if cumbersome technique of hammering a tent peg in one temple and out the other.

The female judge Deborah wrote a song in her honor in which she referred to her as "most blessed among women" for the job she had done, and Jael has been remembered as a great hero and patriot ever since.

In view of the fact that her victim (a) was her guest and (b) was asleep and (c) had never harmed a hair of either her head or her people's, it would seem that to call her deed heroic is to stretch the term to the breaking point. As for calling it patriotic, if she had done it for love of country—maybe. But (a) her country had no quarrel with Sisera and (b) if she killed him for anything but kicks, it was out of love for nothing more exalted than the idea of maybe getting a payoff from the Israelites the next time they hit town. It is not the only instance, of course, of how people in wartime get medals for doing what in peacetime would get them the chair.

Judges 4-5

-Originally published in Peculiar Treasures and later in Beyond Words

Jacob

THE BOOK OF GENESIS makes no attempt to conceal the fact that Jacob was, among other things, a crook. What's more, you get the feeling that whoever wrote up his seamy adventures got a real kick out of them.

Twice he cheated his lame-brained brother, Esau, out of what was coming to him. At least once he took advantage of the blindness of his old father, Isaac, and played him for a sucker. He outdid his double-crossing father-in-law, Laban, by conning him out of most of his livestock and, later on, when Laban was looking the other way, by sneaking off with not only both the man's daughters, but just about everything else that wasn't nailed down including his household gods. Jacob was never satisfied. He wanted the moon, and if he'd ever managed to bilk heaven out of that, he would have been back the next morning for the stars to go with it. But then one day he learned a marvelous lesson in a marvelous and unexpected way.

It happened just after he'd ripped Esau off for the second time and was making his getaway into the hill country to the north. When sunset came and nobody seemed to be after him, he decided that it was safe to camp out for the night and, having left in too much of a hurry to take his bedroll with him, tucked a stone under his head for a pillow and prepared to go to sleep. You might think that what happened next was that he lay there all night bug-eyed as a result of his guilty conscience or, if he did finally manage to drop off, that he was tormented by conscience-stricken dreams, but neither of these was the case. Instead, he dropped off like a baby in a cradle and dreamed the kind of dreams you would have thought were reserved for the high saints.

He dreamed that there was a ladder reaching up to heaven and that there were angels moving up and down it with golden sandals and rainbow-colored wings and that standing somewhere above it was God himself. And the words God spoke in the dream were not the chewing-out you might have expected, but something altogether different. God told Jacob that the land he was lying on was to belong to him and his descendants and that someday his descendants would become a great nation and a great blessing to all the other nations on earth. And as if that wasn't enough, God then added a personal P.S. by saying, "Behold, I am with you and will keep you wherever you go."

It wasn't holy hell that God gave him, in other words, but holy heaven, not to mention the marvelous lesson thrown in for good measure. The lesson was, needless to say, that even for a dyed-in-the-wool, double-barreled con artist like Jacob there are a few things in this world you can't get but can only be given, and one of these things is love in general, and another is the love of God in particular.

Jacob didn't have to climb his ladder to bilk heaven of the moon and the stars, even if that had been possible, because the moon and the stars looked like peanuts compared to what God and the angels were using the ladder to hand down to him for free.

Another part of the lesson was that, luckily for Jacob, God doesn't love people because of who they are, but because of who God is. "It's on the house" is one way of saying it and "It's by grace" is another, just as it was by grace that it was Jacob of all people who became not only the father of the twelve tribes of Israel, but the many-times great-grandfather of Jesus of Nazareth, and just as it was by grace that Jesus of Nazareth was born into this world at all.

Genesis 25:24-28:17

-Originally published in Peculiar Treasures and later in Beyond Words. Buechner has also depicted the life of Jacob in his novel Son of Laughter.