Day: February 3, 2013

“We must not put the Lord to the test, as some of them did
and were destroyed by serpents.”

Serpents in the wilderness; the serpent in the garden. Dust and death. And yet something redemptive and healing. The story of the Fall is a story told in the form of myth let conveying great truth. O felix culpa! O blessed fault! as the theological tradition puts it. And as for snakes and serpents, they, too, serve an arresting and symbolic purpose. I am always amazed at the cultural cross-overs and coincidences of images. The staff of Ascelpius is the symbol of the medical profession to this day. It is a serpent entwined about a rough wooden branch. The serpent as a sign of healing.

And in the ancient Epic of Gilgamesh, a serpent figures there, too. Gilgamesh, having learned that there is no permanence from Utnapishtim, returns to Uruk, wiser to be sure. He has been allowed to return however with the plant of rejuvenation called “the old men are young again,” an ancient form of Viagra, I suppose. On the way homeward, he stops at a refreshing spring to go for a swim, leaving the plant on the bank where its odour attracts a snake who immediately eats it. A just-so story, told to explain the phenomena of snakes shedding their skin and growing a new one, it also illustrates the fatalism of that ancient culture. Gilgamesh loses a gift for his city simply through a kind of accident and not through any fault of his own.

How much more different is the biblical account of the serpent in The Book of Genesis! The serpent is said to be “more subtle than any other wild creature.” And what does that serpent do? It asks questions. Such is a feature of human rationality. The serpent is a symbol of an aspect of our humanity, for good and for ill. What kind of questions?

(more…)

Print this entry

“But that on the good ground are they which in an honest and good heart, having heard the word, keep it, and bring forth fruit with patience.”

“As all the fruits of the season come to us in their proper time, flowers in spring, corn in summer and apples in autumn, so the fruit for winter is talk.” Good ground and a good heart and, as a result, good fruit brought forth with patience. How wonderful in what is, literally, the bleak mid-winter, to be reminded of spring time and flowers, of the fruits of summer and fall! How wonderful to be reminded that we are the ground in which God’s Word has been sown. What kind of ground will we be?

The quote is from Basil the Great, one of the outstanding fourth century theologians, one of the Greek Cappadocian Fathers who has shaped so much of the intellectual and spiritual history of Christian thought and life, both east and west. I love the image. The idea that talk is the fruit of winter. Something is meant to be alive and growing in us, in the soil of our hearts, even in the frozen wastes of a Canadian winter!

But what kind of talk, we may ask? After all this is a world of talking heads and talk, as is so often said, is cheap. Basil’s image, so appropriate on this Sexagesima Sunday, relates to two things in today’s Gospel: the seed which is the Word of God and the ground which is our heart. There can be no fruit on a winter’s evening that is not borne out of an honest and good heart, as Luke so powerfully suggests.

The talk which is the fruit of winter, in Basil’s sense, must be our talk of God, the talk which allows God’s Word to have its sovereign sway within our lives, the talk which lets God’s Word shape our hearts and minds but only because that Word has been planted and sown within us.

(more…)

Print this entry