withered hands and wild-eyed wonder...

I was in town shopping and the man in the check out line had a withered hand, drawn up in a half claw against his chest; more like a T-Rex fore claw than a man’s hand. My initial feeling was pride for the man because he was working; not allowing a disability, a physical setback to keep him from living life. He didn’t seem worried that people might stare at him, or might whisper when they walked past his checkout line.

However, when I got in the car and was driving down the road I suddenly thought about the story in the Bible where Jesus healed the man with the withered hand, in a synagogue, on the Sabbath day. It struck me just how visually astounding this miracle would have been. To see a man with this bent up, withered, claw-like hand, pull it out of his robe whole; muscled forearm and complete dexterity where twisted wreckage had been.

Then I thought of the Pharisees and that in the midst of this miracle, faced full on with wonder, the only thing they could think of was that it was the Sabbath and that this was somehow impermissible. No compassion, no love, no wonder. Their hatred for Jesus and their tenacious grappling for power and control left their hearts so shriveled that they had lost their sense of wonder.

No love, no compassion, no wonder…not even a whisper of excitement, of that childlike intensity and wild-eyed wonder at the seemingly impossible. They had lost the impetus in the search for truth and traded it for the form; traded sorrow for crepes and shrouds, joy for hollow laughter and banal jokes. It reminded me of what C.S. Lewis told us in “The Great Divorce” through the one of the Bright People, trying to reason with a Ghost who had lost all true reason in the pursuit of human wisdom.

“…Once you were a child. Once you knew what inquiry was for. There was a time when you asked questions because you wanted answers, and were glad when you had found them. Become that child again: even now.”

Jesus came to remind them of something written in their own Pentateuch. Deuteronomy 7:7-8:

“It was not because you were more in number than any other people that the LORD set his love on you and chose you, for you were the fewest of all peoples, (8) but it is because the LORD loves you…”

As I drove away and thought of that man with the lazy eyes and the withered hand, I thought of Christ and how he loves us so much that he reminds us time and time again by example to keep first things, first. As humans we seem predisposed towards the legal; towards a list that tells us we can do this and this and make it. We are objective creatures and indeed truth is by nature objective, but it is an objectivity beyond our control and that makes us nervous. The Pharisees wanted to autonomy and this new Truth (which was really Ageless) threatened their autonomy and so rather than see the wonder in the miraculous, the heart of a Father that SO LOVED THIS WORLD, they chose instead to plot and scheme behind closed doors and murder the Son of God.

BUT, do we not in our own way plot and scheme behind gilded doors of our souls and justify our actions and nullify our laws because we forget we did nothing to merit grace and can do nothing to maintain it? It is interesting is it not, that the sum of all commandments is wrapped in Love. On these hang ALL the law and the prophets.

the Puppet Master

I believe it was William Shakespeare that once penned the words, “All the world’s a stage.”  There have been many before and since (particularly the ancient Greek dramatists and poets) who would say that we are indeed actors or worse, pawns on some great, divine game board.  The unseen Force moves us without thought or consideration for our feelings, but with sovereign disdain ordains the paths we walk and we are hopeless.  In the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam[1], the poet utters these terrifyingly lost words:

 

71

The Moving Finger writes, and, having writ,

Moves on; nor all your Piety nor Wit

Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,

Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.

72

And that inverted Bowl they call the Sky,

Whereunder crawling cooped we live and die,

Lift not your hands to It for help—for It

As impotently moves as you or I.

All of these wrote without knowledge of the One, True God, or if the truth was spoken to them then the god of this world put a veil to darken their eyes.[2]  So all that they could not understand they simply wrote off as an impersonal and sometimes fickle (as with the Greeks) god who cared nothing for pitiable humanity that crawled beneath the sky and sought some happiness to find only misery. 

 

This morning in my devotions a thought struck me.  I guess on some level it could be considered to be in the same thread as Shakespeare’s famous quote, or Tamam and his song, or the dramas of the Greeks in which the impersonal will of Zeus is carried out with terrifying consequences for humanity.  It struck me that mankind from the beginning were like marionettes, suspended on chords of Love from the supreme and sovereign Puppet Master.  This may seem a bit crass, but please, hear me out and see what I mean at the end.  If I have written absolute rot when all is finished, then write me off as a heretic, but this came to my mind in my time with God and I want to get it out on paper. 

The chords are Love and through Love, God, the supreme and sovereign Puppet Master moved His creation with gentle and graceful movements, each step, each motion exactly orchestrated to His plan resulting in a dance that brought total glory to His name.  In His sovereignty He created a caveat to this dance, a twist.   He gave us the sharpest blade of all, Choice, with which we could choose to cut the strings and try to dance on our own.  So opportunity came and we snatched up Choice and like a dreadful Excalibur, held high and severed the chords of Love that attached us to our Puppet Master’s hands.

For a moment it seemed as though we had freedom.  We took our first awkward and unsteady dance steps and the sound of our freedom echoed clumsily on the tiny wooden stage of our box.  Then came that sickening moment when all the world gave way and what had once supported us and given us movement and true freedom was gone.  We were unable to stand, unable to dance on our own and then and only then did we see the depth of the lie that was “personal freedom.”  Our blade of Choice had been our complete undoing and in one horrible moment we landed, broken and useless on the tiny wooden stage—unable to rise, unable to dance and unable to move—a broken marionette on the stage of life. 

But the Puppet Master was not finished.  When He gave us the Blade, He had foreseen what we would do with it and had created a way for restoration.  He sent His Son to come down to our little stage.  The Puppet Master chose to become the Marionette and controlled by His own Supreme will through the Father, He came and danced among us.  Each step controlled beautifully by the Puppet Master.  He showed us how our Choice had severed those chords and He showed us how we could become reattached to the Puppet Master and His loving hands.  Many of the marionettes who could not see their brokenness ridiculed and with that same Blade that had turned their dancing into twisted failure, cut down the Son, but their triumph turned to nothing for all that their slaying did was release the Son from His wooden dancer and return Him alive and well to the Puppet Master having completed His work. 

Then the Puppet Master called to us and we who realized our brokenness, from our twisted shapes huddled on the stage, breathed a prayer and asked the Puppet Master to please reattach the strings.  His hand slipped down into the dark and dusty, broken box and carefully reconnected us to Him with Love and lifted us from the stage.  Once again we danced in joy, led by His all-knowing, all-seeing vantage point from above.  Not mindless puppets, but willing marionettes dancing for love of the Puppet Master. 

I don’t know, maybe what I’ve written is simple.  Maybe it is heresy, but I don’t think so.  I have struggled to see just how God who is without a doubt Sovereign, could give broken and foolish man the choice to serve Him or reject Him and still maintain His sovereignty.  Love is the only answer I can find.  He still holds all things in balance and perfect proportion even when He allows the “strings” to be severed.  As Pastor Wolfe said, “God in His sovereignty, sovereignly limits His sovereignty which takes a truly sovereign God to do.”  And only Love can fully explain strings that control us while still giving Choice.   

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[1] Translated by Edward Fitzgerald

[2] II Corinthians 4:3-4