Yhwh

IN EXODUS 3:13-14, when Moses asks God's name, God says it is YHWH, which is apparently derived from the Hebrew verb to be and means something like "I am what I am" or "I will be what I will be." The original text of the Old Testament didn't include vowels, so YHWH is all that appears.

Since it was believed that God's name was too holy to be used by just anybody, over the years it came to be used only by the high priest on special occasions. When other people ran across it in their reading, they simply substituted for it the title Lord. The result of this pious practice was that in time no one knew any longer what vowels belonged in between the four consonants, and thus the proper pronunciation of God's name was lost. The best guess is that it was something like YaHWeH, but there's no way of being sure.

Like the bear in Thurber's fable, sometimes the pious lean so far over backward that they fall flat on their face.

-Originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words

Yahweh

YAHWEH IS ONE OF GOD'S NAMES, and Moses was the first one he told it to. Maybe it means "I am what I am" or something along those lines, and maybe it doesn't. At other places in the Bible he is given names like Elohim, El Shaddai, and the Lord. Jesus called him mainly Abba, which is Aramaic for "father." Yahweh doesn't seem to care too much what people call him as long as the lines of communication are kept open.

He "inhabits eternity," says the prophet Isaiah (57:15). That means before there was anything, he was, and long after there's nothing much left, he still will be. But you can't apply tenses like was or will be to Yahweh literally any more than you can apply the names of colors literally to the sounds of the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards playing "Amazing Grace." He doesn't inhabit time like everybody else. He invented time.

"If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there thy hand shall lead me," says Psalm 139 (vv. 9-10), which means that any place you can possibly think of is a place where Yahweh is because there's no place you can possibly think of that's a place where Yahweh isn't. He no more exists in space than Norman Rockwell exists in the covers of the Saturday Evening Post. Space is the canvas he paints creation on.

But all this doesn't mean for one second that he doesn't keep on turning up in time and space anyway. On the contrary, that's what the whole Bible is all about. Adam and Eve heard the sound of him "walking in the garden in the cool of the day," says Genesis (3:8), and one way or another he's been down here throwing his weight around ever since. He sounds off through prophets. He raises Cain through kings. He leaves all the splendor and power of nature for his calling card and makes the whole thing fresh, like bread, every time the sun rises. He makes himself known through the best impulses and wildest longings of the human heart, and Saint Paul goes even so far as to say that when people bog down in their prayers, "that very Spirit intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words" (Romans 8:26).

The time he outdid himself, of course, was when "he so loved the world that he gave his only Son that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life" (John 3:16). To put it another way, his final word to the world was the Word itself wearing flesh like a uniform and dwelling among us full of grace and truth (John 1:14). What is Yahweh all about and what do human beings have it in them at their best to be? Yahweh's answer to those formidable questions is not a theological blockbuster, but a biological human being, in a way the only real, honest-to-God human being who ever was. Jesus was his name and Christ was the title that went with his job. "He who has seen me has seen the Father," Jesus said (John 14:9), and "God is love," said John (1 John 4:8); and the basic plot of the whole True Romance of history seems to be just that Love will have us lovely before he's through or split a gut trying. He will badger us, bulldoze us, clobber and cajole us till in the end we all make it "to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ" (Ephesians 4:13).

Even Nebuchadnezzar, you say? Even Hiram and Herod and the queen of Sheba? Even Jacob and Jael and Judas, of all people? Is it possible that he intends to do a job on Saddam Hussein and Genghis Khan, not to mention Groucho Marx and Madame de Pompadour and Warren Gamaliel Harding, for Christ's sweet sake? Exactly. For Christ's sweet sake. And not the least staggering thought is that it seems he has similar plans in mind not only for the author of this outrageous compendium, but for every last Jack and Jill who read it and even the ones who don't.

Nobody ever claimed it was going to be easy, least of all Jesus, who continually said to take up our crosses and follow him, not just our picnic baskets and tickets to Disneyland. A lot of barnacles are going to have to be scraped off and a lot of horse manure shoveled out and a lot of rooms stripped bare and redecorated before the final product emerges bright as a new penny, to mix a metaphor or two. But peculiar as we are, every last one of us, for reasons best known to himself, Yahweh apparently treasures the whole three-ring circus, and every time we say "Thy kingdom come," it's home we're talking about, our best, last stop.

"I am the Alpha and the Omega," Yahweh says, "the beginning and the end" (Revelation 21:6), and he will have everybody aboard at last, because if even just a couple of stragglers fail to show up, the party simply won't be complete without them.

-Originally published in Peculiar Treasures and later in Beyond Words 

X-Rated

THE TERMS adult books, adult movies, and adult entertainment imply that, whereas the young must be somehow protected from all those bare breasts and heaving buttocks, adults will simply take them in their stride. Possibly the reverse is closer to the truth.

The young seem to have a knack for coming through all sorts of heady experiences relatively unscathed, and paperback prurience and video venery are less apt to turn them on than to turn them elsewhere. The middle-aged, on the other hand, having fewer else-wheres, settle for what they can get.

After a while, the X-rated titillations tend to turn tawdry and tedious, but even days later, they keep on flickering away somewhere in the back of the mind to a captive audience of one.

The chances are that the loneliness and sadness of it then may leave deeper scars on a forty-five-year-old adult than the gymnastics of it on a thirteen-year-old child. 

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

Xerxes

KING XERXES OF PERSIA, otherwise known as Ahasuerus, has the distinction of being the only person in the Bible whose name begins with an X. There's not much else you can say for him. He was a blowhard and a show-off, and anybody with an eighth-grade education could wrap him around his little finger without half trying. Or her little finger.

There was Haman, for example. Haman was Xerxes' right-hand man and a raging anti-Semite. There was also a Jew named Mordecai, who lived in the capital, and one day when Haman came prancing by, Mordecai refused to flatten himself out and grovel in the dust like everybody else. It was the break Haman had been waiting for. He told Xerxes about Mordecai's insubordination and rudeness and said it was a vivid illustration of how the Jews as a whole were a miserable lot. He said if you let one of them in, they brought their friends, and Persia was crawling with them. He said the only laws they respected were their own, and it was obvious they didn't give a hoot in hell about the king or anybody else. He then said that, as far as he was concerned, the only thing to do was exterminate the whole pack of them like rats and offered the king ten thousand in cash for the privilege of organizing the operation. Xerxes pocketed the cash and told him to go ahead.

But then there was also Queen Esther, a good-looking Jewish girl who was both a cousin of Mordecai's and Xerxes' second wife. As soon as she got wind of what Haman was up to, she decided to do what she could to save her people from the gas chamber. Xerxes had a rather short fuse, and you had to know how to handle him, but she planned her strategy carefully, and by the time she was through, she'd not only talked him out of letting the Jews get exterminated, but had gotten him to hang Haman from the same gallows that had been set up for Mordecai. She even managed to persuade Xerxes to give Mordecai Haman's old job.

Unfortunately, the end of the story is less edifying. Not content with having saved their people and taken care of Haman, Esther and Mordecai used their new power to orchestrate the slaughter of seventy-five thousand of their old enemies. The whole unpleasant account is contained in the book of Esther, which has the distinction of being the only book in the Bible in which the name of God isn't even mentioned. There seems every reason to believe that God considered himself well out of it.

-Originally published in Peculiar Treasures and later in Beyond Words  

X

X IS THE GREEK LETTER CHI, which is the first letter of the word Christ. Thus Xmas is shorthand for Christmas, taking only about one-sixth as long to write. If you do your cards by hand, it is possible to save as much as seventy-five or eighty minutes a year.

It is tempting to say that what you do with this time that you save is your own business. Briefly stated, however, the Christian position is that there's no such thing as your own business.

-Originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words