David

TO SEE WHAT THERE WAS ABOUT DAVID that made Israel adore him like no other king it ever had, as good a place to look as any is the account of how he captured Jerusalem and brought in the ark.

Jerusalem was a major plum for the new young king, a hill town considered so untakeable that the inhabitants had a saying to the effect that a blind man and a cripple could hold it against the U.S. Marines (2 Samuel 5:6). Just to remind people who it was that had nevertheless finally taken it, David's first move was to change its name to the City of David. His second move was a brilliant maneuver for giving his victory the stamp of divine approval by trotting out that holy box of acacia wood overlaid with gold that was known as the ark and contained who knows what but was as close as Israel ever officially got to a representation in space of their God, who dwelled in eternity. David had the ark loaded onto a custom-built cart and made a regular circus parade of it, complete with horns, harps, cymbals, and psalteries, not to mention himself high-stepping out front like the mayor of Dublin on Saint Patrick's Day. When they finally made it into town, he set up a big tent to keep out the weather, had refreshments passed around on the house, and, just so nobody would forget who was picking up the tab, did the lion's share of the praying himself and personally took up the collection afterward.

So far it was none of it anything a good public-relations department couldn't have dreamed up for him, but the next thing was something else again. He stripped down to his skivvies, and then with everybody looking on, including his wife—a high-class girl named Michal, who gave his administration tone as the late King Saul's daughter—he did a dance. Maybe it started out as just another Madison Avenue ploy, but not for long.

With trumpets blaring and drums beating, it was Camelot all over again, and for once that royal young redhead didn't have to talk up the bright future and the high hopes, because he was himself the future at its brightest and there were no hopes higher than the ones his people had in him. And for once he didn't have to drag God in for politics' sake either, because it was obvious to everybody that this time God was there on his own. How they cut loose together, David and Yahweh, whirling around before the ark in such a passion that they caught fire from each other and blazed up in a single flame of such magnificence that not even the dressing-down David got from Michal afterward could dim the glory of it.

He had feet of clay like the rest of us, if not more so—he was self-serving and deceitful, lustful and vain—but on the basis of that dance alone, you can see why it was David more than anybody else that Israel lost its heart to and why, when Jesus of Nazareth came riding into Jerusalem on his flea-bitten mule a thousand years later, it was as the Son of David that they hailed him.

2 Samuel 5-6

-Originally published in Peculiar Treasures 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