“Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth:” Exodus 20:4.

The second commandment, seems on the surface to be bad news for artists, it sounds like "Don't paint any pictures", "No sculpture allowed."

Many years ago when I was on a painting expedition in the Himalayan Foothills of Pakistan, I asked the daughter of the family I was staying with if she would mind asking the Wizened old gardener who worked for them to sit for his portrait.  He refused at first, saying that God would be angry with him if someone were to depict his likeness.  She responded by offering to accept any negative consequences from above on his behalf in the event that all heaven should break loose in anger against him for having his picture painted.

This offer was accepted and the gardener duly sat for his portrait. Happy in the knowledge that if there was any trouble, someone else was going to be getting it, not him. His caution against being painted was due to his understanding and response to the second commandment which is not just in the Bible it’s in the top ten of the Bible’s most important statements - right?  Yes, it is, and it's not just in the top ten, it's in the top two! it comes in very near the top of the charts.  It’s huge!  But why?

Well, let’s go back to the story in Exodus 20, Moses has led the people out of Egypt and is laying the foundation for a new nation.  Its like they have had their war of independence, but now have to put together their constitution and start nation building.  The first order of the day was to disassociate themselves from Egypt. Egypt was a particularly artistic place, there were pictures everywhere.   The problem was that images had a tendency of telling the stories of life and eternity too literally.  In other words the pictures were telling the stories too well and little was being left to the imagination. People were being led astray from the meaning of the symbols to the symbols themselves, they were no longer “getting it”. It wasn’t working anymore.

So the Ten commandments outlawed pictures, enshrining the heroes and patriarchs in stories and words alone.  It was an innovation.  This dramatically more abstract system, encouraged imagination and greater intellectual creativity, because the stories were no longer illustrated. You had to supply your own mental images.  It was brilliant and it worked - for a time.

By the time Jesus came on the scene, the cycle was repeating itself, only this time, the beautiful words were being hacked and re hacked into rigid formulas that were imposed and enforced without imagination.  Meaning had once again been sacrificed in favor of literal dogma.

Christ moved things even further ahead. Pictures had failed, words had failed, now there was a new story, a living one. This was a revelation, it was refreshing, it made sense and it worked - for a time.

Despite the new clarity that Christ brought, the struggle for meaning continued over centuries. By the Middle Ages, with a mostly illiterate population, the church was again using images to tell it's story, keeping the words away from the common people and in a language they could neither read or understand. The official Church ruled supreme and was able to dictate to the populace at will with little to no resistance.

But as new translations  of the Bible began to become available, people started forming their own interpretations again, their own mental pictures. These new images seemed freer, bigger, more hopeful than those trapped in statues and stained glass. Thus the Protestant movement was birthed and with it once again, a turning away from, proscribed, literal tenets towards more abstract, creative thinking.

Despite the advances of the Reformers, and several theological and cultural cycles since, a new kind of graven image has again become enshrined in our culture:  The story itself.

The debate today for a historical or scientifically verifiable narrative has at times clouded the purpose and meaning of the sacred text.  Our tendency to resort to the comfort of dogma at the expense of imagination and meaning, perhaps reveals the motive behind the second commandment. Showing us that Moses understood the danger of our desire to live on spiritual auto pilot instead of in relationship, with all it's attendant wild, unpredictable beauty. Auto Pilot?  Yes, that's the idol we choose, predictable, known, safe, limiting, dumb, fixed, dead.

Perhaps if Moses was writing today he could have re-worded things a little, something a bit like this: "If I'd wanted you to know everything I would have shown it all to you up front, so don't limit me to what you know.  I'm bigger, and so are you.  Instead, let me set the pace, let's live together in the tension of unknowing, where trust surprises and delights. Let's run together in the adventure of living and there find life's true image, a portrait that cannot be rendered either in stone or in art or words, but only in life itself."

Not everyone gets it of course, but I know someone who did, and because of her, an old Pakistani gardener sat on the back porch of a house in the foothills one sunny afternoon in the spring and had his portrait painted. Blissfully unaware of the irony playing out around him, in that she who broke the law sinned not, while he who kept it sinned.  Thankfully she covered his sin with her grace, so all ended well. As it can for us too if we, like her, lean towards life and the beauty that cannot be rendered, even by art.

Photo-bombers of the Bible

Photobombing. Seriously? I had never heard of it until recently, (it takes a while for some of us to catch up, please be patient with us, ok?) a photobomb happens when someone purposefully or inadvertently crashes your picture and shows up unexpectedly in the background. It's nearly always humorous. The best ones add a hilarious kind of back story narrative to the man picture making it even more interesting to the viewer while the main subject of the picture is blissfully unaware that anything else is going on. A knowing rapport builds between the bomber and the viewer at the subjects expense and we all end up having a good laugh.

Did you know that the Bible is totally bombed out with these kinds of back stories? Amazing and unexpected characters crash the main narrative again and again, the question is, have you seen them, have you noticed?

Take for example the Mummy. What? You mean the Egyptian Mummy? For sure that's not in the Bible. Right? Well, it has probably been a while since you read the last couple of chapters of Genesis. They tell the story of Jacob blessing his sons, of his death and the death of Joseph. It's a gripping story, but then in the middle gets dropped this:

"And Joseph commanded his servants the physicians to embalm his father. So the physicians embalmed Israel. Forty days were required for him, for such are the days required for those who are embalmed; and the Egyptians mourned for him seventy days."(Genesis 50:2, 3 NKJV)

Cool, so what's the big deal, they were in Egypt, that's kind of what you would expect. Well let's look at the picture a little closer and see if we can detect the bomber.

Jacob, the father of the twelve tribes of Israel, God's prince, was mummified. His body was embalmed. If you thought that mummification was for Pharaoh or royalty alone, you would be mistaken. Pretty much everyone was embalmed in Ancient Egypt. It is estimated that during the course of ancient Egyptian civilization, over seventeen million people were mummified, in addition to millions more animals. Embalming was big business. It was huge. The metaphor that mummification represented was burnt into the common cultural framework of the entire ancient world.

Understanding the embalming process is essential to unpacking the power of this photobomb. When a relative died, you would shop around for the best embalming deal. Once you located the embalming shop with the right package, you paid your money and got what you paid for, budget, standard, premium, whatever you could afford. Jacob lucked out here, because his son Joseph was incredibly well connected, so when he died, Joseph called in the best in the business to embalm his father. The physicians.

The mummification process took seventy days. For the first thirty days, the corpse was cleansed, by the removal of all that was perishable or foul. The body was placed, during this time in a purifying basin so that the impurities could be washed away. The Egyptian name for this basin is best translated as 'lake'. Success during the first phase was critical. If the deceased person successfully made it across the 'lake', their newly cleansed form was ready to enter the final forty days of the process, the desiccation or drying phase.

During the next forty days the corpse, which was by now, just skin and bones, was reconstructed. The body was built back up again. The skin softened with balsamic oils, the body cavities stuffed with resin, gum arabic, cloths, wood wool and chaff. The face was carefully reconstructed with new artificial eyes, carefully applied makeup and a wig. (Looking good in the underworld was high on everyone's list). Finally the whole reconstructed body was wrapped in fine linen bandages inscribed with texts and interspersed with amulets.

Throughout the whole seventy days, prayers were spoken over the deceased person. As the physical process preserved the body, the readings, recitations and prayers prepared the person spiritually for their new role in their next life as a word picture that would guide their descendants. The resulting mummy became an eternal form of the person, it became a biographical statement. The persons story. A living word or hieroglyph. These prayers all centered around renewal. Always starting from the head, the prayers symbolically returned the organs of the body one by one. The eyes, to see again, the mouth to speak, the heart to recollect, arms to embrace and legs to walk.

This process of symbolic new birth prepared Jacob to continue with his children, or rather journey 'in' them. As they repeated his story and remembered him, he would live on in them as they also lived 'in' him. Just as he was now representing them in heaven, they would represent him on earth. This baptism/mummification reminded them that he lived and because he lived, so did they.

So check it out, see for yourself the other places where this photo-bombing mummy shows up. Maybe try Jonah, Jordan, Calvary, just for starters. It's pretty clear when you know what to look for, but most of all remember why it's important. It's important, because it reminds us that we are all connected, that we are part of one another and that we live and die together and there is no life that is not resurrection life.

Anyone who has learned to play the piano will tell you the first lesson begins with locating middle C. Most of us first play that note with our right thumb since we can easily progress up the scale from there with our other fingers.

Middle C is the first note in the C Major scale. A scale consists of seven notes completed by the first, one octave higher to make eight notes in all plus twelve semitones.

In the Bible, numbers work like a silent code in the background of the narrative. Knowing something about these numbers can help us unlock meaning in all kinds of apparently everyday things. Like music.

Three for example is the number of the Trinity, or Father Son and Holy Spirit. This incredible number mirrors many aspects of our existence. For example: birth, life, death; past, present, future; Jesus spent three days in the tomb; the moon's dark phase lasts three days; the three phases of a woman's life, etc. From a mathematical point of view three gave birth to all the numbers above it. For example: 3+1=4; 3+2=5; 3+3=6; 3+4=7; 3+5=8; 3+6=9.

As you may have noticed, from a logical standpoint, the center of the piano ought to be A. ABCDEFG. instead it is C, the third note alphabetically. I like to think that C Stands for Christ. He is at the beginning of the scale as he is at the beginning of life. Then as the scale progresses and the music plays it completes on C, reminding us that Christ is at the end of life. C is the central note on the piano, so Christ is at the center of life.

Four is an important number also in the Bible. The four seasons; the four winds; four points of the compass; the forty years wandering in the wilderness and Jesus's forty days fasting in the desert. As three represents heaven, four connects to earth. Together they add up to the perfect number seven which represents humanity and divinity, completing to eight, the number of Resurrection .

So seven represents man, being the first number to contain three and four, the heavens and the earth, spirit with flesh. The mummification process in ancient Egypt took seventy days, thirty days of cleansing with water and forty days of drying. This process was behind of the idea of baptism, representing as it did a burial to the old and a preparation for the new. The gospel story of Jesus expands and clarifies this thought by announcing that if anyone is in Christ, they are a new creation, old things have passed away and become new. It goes further to proclaim that we are all one in him.

So music tells us that Christ is at the beginning, center and end of life and that he makes all things new.

Finally, we should consider the number twelve, since there are twelve semitones in music. Let's start the list... Twelve months of the year, twelve hours of the day, twelve hours of the night, twelve tribes of Israel, twelve apostles, twelve gates to the New Jerusalem, twelve foundation stones, etc... Whereas seven is the result of 3+4, twelve is the result of 3x4. It represents multiplication, it's a powerful symbol of expansion and growth, of God walking in the world in mankind, his Church. The beginning of immense possibility. It's also the number of inclusion and completeness. Family, belonging.

What we hear then in music is first the content: Christ. Then the message: eternal life for all in Him and finally the distribution system: you and I, his people who spread the good news throughout the world.

In the beginning the Word was unspoken. Unknown, un-heard. Entombed in darkness, unborn. Growing, preparing for it's first utterance. Waiting to be spoken.

No sooner had the Word been spoken than twins were born to it. First, Memory and then Forgetting and these two were enemies.

Every time the Word was spoken, it would be remembered, but then gradually forgotten, until one day Memory wrote the word so it could no longer be forgotten. The spoken Word, now gave birth to the written Word and Memory grew stronger. Enraged by Memories' success, Forgetting fought back, destroying the written words wherever they were found. So Memory carved the Word on stones and the Word lived.

But it was hard to write on the stone and Forgetting limited the amount of words that could be written until Memory began to entrust the words to scrolls of papyrus and vellum. So the words multiplied, but the ink faded and Forgetting stole the words once again until Memory wrote with ink that did not fade.

The number of the scrolls increased now and spread throughout the earth. So precious, so life giving were the words on the scrolls that Memory placed them in temples where they were studied and taught to others by priests and so Meaning was born; but Forgetting was still at work, and made the words to be known but not understood, thus Forgetting gave birth to Ignorance.

Ignorance now ruled and war broke out among the people. The words were broken and scattered, the temples destroyed and scrolls lost. Forgetting had given birth to Chaos who buried the Word and hid it. In time those who cherished Memory in their hearts would find fragments of words and reconstruct Meaning, teaching the people once again, but the rulers would suppress and kill them until Ignorance ruled once more.

The more Ignorance slew those who loved the Words, the more determined they became to recover them from Chaos. Committing the recovered words to plates of wood and metal that could print. Memory now broke free from Forgetting and Knowledge was borne, rising to flow through the earth like a river.

Books were now compiled from the printed pages, libraries were built to house them, universities founded to teach. Meaning and Knowledge were nurtured. The people prospered. Still, the words were often burnt, and libraries destroyed, but the books were printed faster than they could be destroyed.

Memory was increasing exponentially now and soon distributed the Word electronically. The people now held in their hands more words than they could ever read, but still Forgetting rose up to capture and suppress Memory, this time with Lies. Then Memory countered with Truth who wrestled against Lies.

Lies took many peoples captive, but those who listened and thought and loved, heard the whisper of Truth and found their way back to Meaning, Memory and finally to the Word itself and there they found Life.

You've probably sat down and watched a History Channel documentary on one of those evenings when the next episode of Downton Abbey was still days away and you just couldn't handle another episode of Naked and Afraid. Chances are it was about some archeological dig, with a bunch of people scraping their way through a huge mound of earth.

As we watch they dig. Gradually they find stuff. Typically they find a bunch of broken plates, a few dog bones, but as they dig deeper, past the coke cans, they come to more ancient, more interesting things, an old wall perhaps, or the foundation of houses. Never satisfied, they keep on going, past the houses, to find even older ones, and then deeper still. Now they're finding glass, pottery, woven material, bronze coins. Eventually, they start finding arrow heads chipped out of flint, smokey patches of earth where fires once burned and then more bones. Finally they hit bottom and there is nothing.

By carefully unearthing each layer of civilization, the archaeologists are able to piece together the history of the settlement.  The guy that dropped the coke can had no idea he threw it down on top of a medieval cottage.  The folks who built the cottage may have had no idea it was on top of a Roman village, the Romans probably didn't know that their settlement was on top of a Bronze Age camp which in turn covered a Stone Age shelter.

Stories are a bit like that too. Especially the enduring ones, the ones we live by. They were all built on someone else's story.  The archeologist uncovers things that were buried deep beneath our feet, things that we did not know were there, even though we were standing right on top of them! The verbal archeologist digs too, tracing the flow of narratives from culture to culture, age to age in order to uncover meaning, truth.

Stay tuned to discover what gets unearthed here at Lectio Divina over the next few weeks and before you know it the next season of Downton will be upon us again.

Sometime in the night the day stopped growing old and started becoming new. Something was happening in the shadows and we didn't know it. The darkness was preparing us for the day, ripening us in its womb. Pushing us forward to life.

As the first flush of dawn feathered us with her wings, we resisted, turning for comfort to the warmth of our beds,  but the day was growing stronger. The spreading light awakening in us a desire for action, for birth.

So the day began. The sun climbed higher and we pursued our labors, creating, planting, sowing, reaping, breaking, mending. Then we started to tire as the light faded. Shadows now crossed the path and our thoughts turned to home.

The growing darkness beckoned us. Drawing us irresistibly forward to our beds and to the closing of our eyes in sleep.  The day was weaker now, a memory. The night was our future, our focus, and into its arms we surrendered. Closing our eyes on the day we navigated through the shadows with the eyes of our dreams. 

Deeper and deeper we sank into the night's black but fertile soil, in who's hidden workshop we were refreshed, renewed, remade. Until the dark, imperceptibly at first, began to grey, and like a butterfly flexing it's newly formed, yet un-stretched wings, we stirred, ready once again to soar into the new day, to rise again.

In the beginning

There is a lot about beginning in the Bible.  There is a lot about beginning in you. In your days and years and there is a great deal about endings too. Loosing and failing and hurting and dying. Then comes the finding, the saving, the healing, the embracing and these things become a beginning again and so wholeness comes and that which was broken is made to work once more and the path becomes straight once more and the songs start to be sung again.

As it is in the Bible, so it is in life, for the Bible is the story of life, our life. It's the story of heaven breathing into earth and bringing forth life. One day our breath will cease, our earth meld with the soil from which it was formed. Then our heaven will soar into those arms, the arms that have always held us, guided, silently witnessed our every breath. Then will be our beginning from what seemed like an ending, then will be the dawn that shines brighter, more beautiful than eyes of earth have ever seen.

What a miracle we are.

We’ve all been there; sitting in class watching some kid annoy another student and the moment they respond the teacher turns around, interpreting the reaction as the provocation. If the teacher fails to get to the bottom of the story and interpret it correctly, things can turn out badly for the one who reacted, while the instigator gets away with it.

Science and Art

And so we come to the Bible. Exegesis and Hermeneutics. These terms sound like they were invented by Seminary professors in an attempt to protect their jobs by throwing off the un-initiated, but they are really easy to understand. One (exegesis) is simply the science of figuring out what is being said, often by whom and when, the other (hermeneutics) is the art of understanding the meaning of what was said and it’s application.

Today there is an enormous debate raging between what the Bible says and what it means. This has always been so of course from the earliest days.

The reality is that facts don’t change but meaning does. One is a science and the other is an art. Fortunately the Good Book itself is amply furnished with examples that can help us balance these two components. Lets look at a couple of them.

In John 7:53-8:11 we read the story of the woman taken in adultery. In this emotionally charged account, the scribes and Pharisees demand of Jesus: “Now in the law, Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?” What Jesus said is well know: “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.”

According to the Bible, (Leviticus 20:10 and Deuteronomy 22:222) the Scribes and Pharisees were correct, that is what it said. So why was there even any debate?

In another instance Jesus is walking through the fields one day with his disciples and they glean some corn to eat as they pass though. The law allowed you to snack on a neighbors crops in this way, as long as you didn't bag any of it up for later, it was like the first "all you can eat" buffet idea. However in this instance there was a problem, it was the Sabbath day and no work was to be done on the Sabbath. The kind of work that was forbidden specifically included creative or commercial work such as gleaning, and the penalty for transgression was death. Check out Exodus 31:14: "Therefore you are to observe the sabbath, for it is holy to you. Everyone who profanes it shall surely be put to death; for whoever does any work on it, that person shall be cut off from among his people.…". So once again, the Pharisee's exegesis was correct, what Jesus and the disciples were doing was a clear violation of the law. Jesus however responds to them with a surprising statement: "If you had known what these words mean, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice,’    you would not have condemned the innocent." (Matthew 12:7 NIV)

So then who is right? And why? To unpack this a little we have to look at what Jesus said in Matthew 12:7: "If you had known what these words mean". He affirmed their 'scientific' understanding of the law and what it said, but berated them for their failure to artfully see the bigger picture, the meaning behind the words.

He pointed to the law of God's Desire upon which the law of Moses was constructed. The law to which Moses was and will always be subject.

This was the genius of Christ. He took every jot and tittle of the Mosaic Law and drew out the meaning, freeing it from itself and re-imaging it through the eyes of love, and mercy. He turned it around from something that we served to something that serves us. From a law we had to keep to a law that keeps us.

Was then Jesus pleased with the woman taken in adultery? Was he blessing her failure. No. But by showing the law that appeared to condemn her was actually the law that cared for her, he unleashed the mercy, the optimism, and the love that could now power her recovery.

The reason for the failure of the scribes and Pharisees to get it right stemmed from their motive. They were economically and socially committed to supporting the law. If Jesus were to show a better way of interpreting the law then they would need to change or go out of business.

They were thinking about themselves and about preserving their way of life. The woman was expendable. Jesus thought about the person of the woman and about her restoration, while modeling a new way of approaching the law to the leaders. He was all about a better tomorrow, they were all about the status quo, no matter how it was failing the people.

You've got to love Jesus for that! But you know, when you look down through history you see this kind of thing happening all the time. It seems we are predisposed to sticking to our exegesis of the text, because interpretation is so much more messy.

Seeking to grow in wisdom and understanding, working beyond what the Bible said yesterday to what it means today can sound a bit like the road less traveled, but if you are bold enough to take that road, it will surely lead to more justice, inclusion, mercy and love for all of us, inside or outside of the classroom.