Inspiration and Scripture

All these things Jesus said to the crowds in parables; indeed, he said nothing to them without a parable.  This was to fulfill what was spoken by the prophet:   “I will open my mouth in parables; I will utter what has been hidden since the foundation of the world.” – Matthew 13:34-35

I, somewhat facetiously, said a day or two ago that we know it is God and not goddess because He lays out the rules plainly.  That’s true enough about the Law.  Do this and you will live.  Do that, and it is death.  Yet life has both its pedestrian, masculine side and its exotic, mysterious, feminine side.  When it comes to what we are to be rather than only what we must do, we find the Lord talking about seeds and weeds and bread and vines. 

That’s the way that it works.  The Bible is not informational, certainly not solely informational.  It is not a book of facts or a flight schedule that tells us which plane to board for a trip to heaven.  That kind of thinking leads to the misunderstandings of extreme fundamentalism, of eschatological date-setting, of accusations of heresy over how long it took God to create the cosmos.  Has the sun indeed set on the Sixth?

I think the Bible is inspired literature.  I think the writers wrote, sometimes, lists of names because they were scribes and that is what scribes did.  I think Paul wrote greetings, salutations, and personal details in his Epistles because an epistle is a letter to one’s friends or potential friends.  Romans is possibly the richest Epistle in terms of doctrine but can we say it is more inspired than the simple little note Paul dashed off to Philemon about a useless runaway slave named Onesimus*? 

When a person becomes a Christian, he or she is baptized in symbolic death and resurrection.  God does not pull a man from the game and send in an angel to replace him.  Instead, by His Spirit, Christ comes to dwell in the man, in that flesh, though it be abused and wounded, even crippled and scarred.  We could all change our names to Christopher, for we are all Christ-bearers.  God makes new men out of old by inspiration in the fullest sense of the word.  As He breathed into red clay the Breath of Life, and Adam became a living soul, so the Holy Breath sanctifies the flawed and weak material bodies of those who will trust Him today.  We become sanctuaries of the Living God.

Are we surprised, then, that He took what is, in places, fairly prosaic literature and inspires it that His Spirit might make of it sacred Scripture?  It seems like something God would do.  He speaks to us through and by the limitations, the prejudices, and the flaws of those who wrote.  Like us they were but jars of clay, and, also like us, jars filled with an unimaginable treasure.  Whatever was in their minds as the pen moved, whatever the conditions that motivated them, whatever the context, though it may help us in understanding the language, does not limit the meaning. 

*For those who might not know, Paul has a little fun with the name Onesimus which means, literally, useful.  See verse 11 -- Formerly he was useless to you, but now he is indeed useful to you and to me.

Fourfold

Under their wings on their four sides they had human hands. And the four had their faces and their wings thus:  their wings touched one another. Each one of them went straight forward, without turning as they went.  As for the likeness of their faces, each had a human face. The four had the face of a lion on the right side, the four had the face of an ox on the left side, and the four had the face of an eagle.  Such were their faces. And their wings were spread out above.  Each creature had two wings, each of which touched the wing of another, while two covered their bodies.– Ezekiel 1:8-11

However strange and frightening these creatures maybe, they have human hands.  This may be even more frightening to us in some ways, but there is nothing else in the universe like the hand.  Joni Eareckson Tada learned to paint holding a brush between her teeth after she became a quadriplegic, and people can play guitars with their feet, but hands built the paintbrushes and the guitar.  There is no other instrument known to us with the power and potential of the human hand. 

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

If each creature had two wings outstretched which touched the wings of another, the only way I can picture that is if the four creatures formed a sort of square.  Since I started reading this passage last weekend, I have been thinking about four creatures with four faces almost as if there were four creatures composing each creature and how much like a fractal that seems.  I start to wonder about the fractal nature of things behind the local and visible, and if the whole universe would not be easier to understand if we went to Base-4 – 0,1,2,3. It gets spooking and weird and overwhelming pretty fast. 

We see four faces but it is the human face that is outward.  A lion’s face looks to the right, an ox to the left and an eagle behind.  Note that if the four creatures are standing with their wings touching, the eagle is looking inward and toward another eagle. 

As I said before we think of man as a tripartite being, but the body, soul, and spirit combine into a fourth that we might call the whole.  The ox would be the servant, the body, facing left toward the material, placidly alert with eyes set to the sides, potential prey yet powerful, easily frightened and somewhat impulsive.  The lion might be the soul which possesses destructive power of a different kind, not easily tamed, with the potential to be ennobled, but always dangerous.  Spirit might be represented by the eagle, which, as noted above, looks inward rather than outward, moving in another dimension, far-seeing, visionary with a completely different perspective than the earth-bound. 

Man can develop in any of the three directions, but he is meant to be balanced, each aspect tempering the others, each a complement of the whole.  This is a glimpse of the fourfold perfection of God Incarnate in Jesus – fully God, fully man, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.    

Spirit looks toward and relates to spirit, but the eagle and the man are on the same axis, if you want to think about it that way, so, too, with the lion and the ox -- like a cross.  Body and soul form the horizontal axis, while man receives from God via the spirit on the vertical.  It always comes back to the Cross. 

Bid the Mob Good Day

When they heard these things, all in the synagogue were filled with wrath.  And they rose up and drove him out of the town and brought him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they could throw him down the cliff.  But passing through their midst, he went away.  — Luke 4:28-30

This is a rather intriguing passage that sounds more like a scene from a Chuck Norris movie than from the Gospel.  There is no mention of arm-bars or round-house kicks so we are left to wonder exactly how it was that Jesus "passed" through the middle of a hostile crowd and walked off. 

Keep in mind that this occurred in Nazareth, the boyhood home of Jesus.  These were people who had known Him most of His life.  His mother, brothers and sisters (or cousins if you are Catholic) still lived there. 

What had Jesus done to stir up so much animosity?  He had declared His destiny.  After reading from what we know as Isaiah 61, Jesus said, "Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing." 

The Bible can be studied as literature and as history.  It can be discussed and examined as a basis for establishing a good and equitable and even a free society.  God is not opposed to our using His book in ways that make the world a better and more beautiful place.  At its highest level, though, the Bible is more than a record; it is a revelation.  It is the means for unveiling the Divine to us and ultimately in us.  Consequently, by the grace of God and the power of the Cross,  we may become living epistles for those around us, which would be, we might think, wonderful.  Except that a lot of people, even religious people, are rather offended by God if He is other than what they have come to understand Him as or what they want Him to be. 

As long as religious people can make their god into an image or in some other way clearly define the boundaries of what this god might be or be allowed to do, they are perfectly content.  The ones who attacked Jesus were accepting of a fully transcendent God, of One who Could Not Be Named.  And that God is very real and very much Reality.  Those good Jews were in no way common idolators.  The immanent — you might even say, invasive God, present in the universe, in Christ was simply too much for them to comprehend.  This manifestation of God's presence shattered their understanding.  Instead of accepting the Unveiling, they attacked it.

Hostility toward the immanent God did not end with the Crucifixion.  As Jesus told His disciples, "Remember the word that I said to you: ‘A servant is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you. If they kept my word, they will also keep yours."  When we become earthen vessels filled with the Light, when we are truly invaders behind enemy lines and not collaborators, we, too, are likely to be attacked.  There is no need to be taken by surprise if we find, on occasion, that "... a person's enemies will be those of his own household.".  It happens.  Our families, our friends, those who have supported us and assisted us in the past may turn away if not become outright antagonistic. 

The answer to this kind of antagonism is not to kick the mother-in-law in the head (as temporarily satisfying as that might be from time to time) or put a submission hold on the next-door neighbor.  It is, instead, to be so secure in our peace and our purpose and our confidence in Christ that the violence of the resistance has no hold on us.  We, like Jesus, are well able to "pass through" the objections that would hem us in on the precipice.  The world and even worldly religion will try to cast us down, but the mob and the press of public opinion or "consensus" can never control us or contain us.  We may have to face rage and walk in the middle of it, but it is, ultimately, the hopeless, helpless rage of impotence.  

The Man from Snowy River