WHY DID JESUS SPIT?

Spitting, your mother told you, is gross. She may have said uncouth, but probably not. She may have told you, if you had to spit, to spit outside.

Here's a little email interchange between me and an anonymous pastor friend, I'll call him, er, say, Jesse. I had some questions for him.

ME: I've been thinking about incarnational theology again.

JESSE: An excellent pasttime.

ME: I've been wondering if you have any insight into, or can point me to

someone with insight into Jesus' acts of spitting to cure the deaf

and the blind men in Mark?

I'm thinking about it in terms of baptism and the Lord's Supper: is this somehow connected: the desire of the Lord to connect the physical world with the spiritual in forgiveness and healing? I'm thinking also about the Fall, how creation itself is broken. When Jesus spit, was part of the message that he was healing, or

promising to heal, Creation?

JESSE: I haven't seen anything about healing creation, but the connection to the means of grace is something I've used before. Asking why He healed the senses through spit is like asking why He washes sins away and bestows spiritual life with water.

ME: Well, actually, most questions from the reformed have to do with that, so I am looking to connect as broadly as possible the incarnation and the work of the Incarnation. When people say, "Oh, baptism is just symbolic", with the implication that the sign points elsewhere and therefore we shouldn't put too much emphasis on the sign, then I think, "So we shouldn't put too much emphasis on the incarnation of Christ, should we?" That often stops 'em.

As to why, not sure I care. You are right: answer one part of it, we answer it all. "why did Jesus spit?" "Why did Jesus condescend to be born a man?" There HAS to be a connection.

The fact that there are other times he doesn't use matter in healing doesn't undermine these examples, I think. But it does confuse the issue just a bit. Was it Jesus' mood at the time? :)

JESSE: Actually, I don't have a satisfying answer, unless it's satisfying to know that He has redeemed our bodies as well as our souls for eternal life. Yet that still doesn't tell us "why." Why did Naaman have to dip seven times in the Jordan? When we have the answer to one of these questions, I think we'll have the answer to all of them. Part of the problem may be the disconnect that we assume between the physical and the spiritual. There are not two creations, but one. Easily overlooked physical events may have spiritual implications, consequences, or causes: a good reason to use the liturgy and pay attention to our posture and movements in worship.

Incarnational, indeed.

Jesse

If anyone has anything to add to the discussion, jump right in. Why did Jesus spit?

DACHAU

I just ran across an old journal I kept when I was a 19 year old kid traveling in Europe for the first time. About a week into the trip , while in Munich, West Germany, I visited the Dachau concentration camp museum. My notes:

January 7--Munich-Dachau:

A concentration camp, I have found, looks quite similar to an army barracks--that is--twenty-five years after being used...Dachau was the scene, from 1933 through 1945, of 31,591--or more--deaths: mainly Jews, Russians, or German resisters. I walked to the gate with a South African acquaintance, who was in the midst of a two-week whirlwind tour of Europe...

We first entered the museum, which resides in the main building at the head of an area that used to be barracks. In front of these stands the "roll-call" area, where prisoners used to be tortured--after anyone managed to escape--by being forced to stand at attention for one night and half a day.

The museum mainly consists of documents and pictures that have been blown up and posted within two or three large rooms, rooms that were used for storage. In a pinch, when there was a scarcity of room, these were torture chambers. The pictures digress from the original building of Dachau through the first prisoners in 1933, to 1938. They finally end in some photos of starving, bony men cheering as they are freed, and the aftermath when American soldiers find "the morgue" full of hundreds of dead bodies.

My friend and I walk down the rows of barracks, all gone now except for two or three; we walked where thousands of hungry, tired prisoners walked, or trudged, or crawled. At the end of the lane, to the left and through a gate, stands a statue of a hungry, dirty POW. Behind it is The Building. We walked in through an empty room to the Ovens. A sign hanging from a large wooden support read, "Prisoners were hung here." This was directly in front of the third of five ovens. There were open, showing what amounted to a great baker's oven, seven feet long and two feet wide. Walking through this room into the next, I felt something akin to depression as I tried to imagine the attitudes and consciousness of men accustomed to seeing others being tortured and hung. I couldn't imagine it.

We entered "The Showers" which were never used at Dachau (the showers at the Hartheim Castle, near Linz Austrian, were apparently "much better"). These are actually gas chambers, disguised so that prisoners wouldn't kick up a fuss while being taken there, etc. It is just an empty room with several holes in the ceiling, from which gas would have come.

And that was all. It didn't impress one, all clean and tidy, as being a dangerous unusual place. But the story behind it all makes one imagine that one sees machine guns and Nazis in the towers, and that one hears trudging footsteps, and a voice crying out in total, frustrated despair. I left quietly.

Obamacare, The House, and the Senate

From The Federalists Papers, article 73:

The oftener the measure is brought under examination, the greater the diversity in the situations of those who are to examine it, the less must be the danger of those errors which flow from want of due deliberation, or of those missteps which proceed from the contagion of some common passion or interest. It is far less probable, that culpable views of any kind should infect all the parts of the government at the same moment and in relation to the same object, than that they should by turns govern and mislead every one of them.

The populist, rash House has passed a travesty of a bill: emotional, power-hungry, the dream of any decent far leftist. Well, with the exception of federal funding for abortion for any female of any species. Things should not go so well in the Senate, where a "greater diversity" of situations and opinions should help bring some sanity to what is a crazy bad piece of legislation.

This is a great teaching moment in the history of the United States. Did the founders understand how treacherous simple democracies could be, and did they take steps to anticipate effective ways to stymie mob rule? The sedate, royal, sophisticated state of affairs in the Senate--all in comparison to the mob rule tendencies at the moment in the House--may be about to tell us something about the wisdom and greatness of the founder's vision.

As Abe Lincoln is known to have said: "You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but..."

Attention CORMAC MCCARTHY fans

There is a really good interview with the author of THE ROAD in today's Wall Street Journal. A few snippets:

WSJ: Does [the] issue of length [of a movie] apply to books, too? Is a 1,000 page book somehow too much?

McCarthy: "For modern readers, yeah. People apparently only read mystery stories of any length. With mysteries, the longer the better and people will read any damn thing. But the indulgent, 800-page books that were written a hundred years ago are just not going to be written anymore and people need to get used to that. If you think you're gong to write something like 'The Brother's Karamazov' or 'Moby Dick', go ahead. Nobody will read it. I don't care how good it is, or how smart the readers are. Their intentions, their brains are different."

WSJ: How does that ticking clock affect your work? Does it make you want to write more shorter pieces, or to cap things with a large, all-encompassing work?

McCarthy: "I'm not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing."

WSJ: You grew up Irish Catholic.

McCarthy: "I did, a bit. It wasn't a big issue. We went to church on Sunday. I don't even remember religion ever even being discussed."

WSJ: Is the God that you grew up with in church every Sunday the same God that the man in "The Road" questions and curses?

McCarthy: "It may be. I have a great sympathy for the spiritual view of life, and I think that it's meaningful. But am I a spiritual person? I would like to be. Not that I am thinking about some afterlife that I want to go to, but just in terms of being a better person. I have friends at the [Sante Fe] Institute. They're just really bright guys who do really difficult work solving difficult problems, who say, 'It's really more important to be good than it is to be smart.' And I agree it is more important to be good that it is to be smart. That is all I can offer you."

****

Well. Those of us who already knew McCarthy's work knew not to go to him for spiritual advice. He seems above all very talented at posing all of the hard questions, unflinchingly, but leaves the answers to others. There are times in his novels when he probably should have stopped typing, gone have a cup of coffee, and looked out the window. But I think he is the best writer in America today. And posing the hard questions is an important vocation.

My son Jeremy gave me a copy of THE ROAD for Christmas last year. It's time I read it.

"I was sick of it, too."

I got a nice note from my son Colin, living in deepest darkest Mexico.

But within reach of an internet connection, thankfully. One of his comments:

How are you all doing? Glad to see the blog continues. Got sick of seeing that stupid tray every time I clicked on the link.

Very cool tray btw, no joke.

Love,

C

Heroin and Confession

The Friday night prison Bible study continues apace. There has been a complete turnover of men from a few months ago, when for perhaps six months only two showed up regularly. We now pretty regularly seat seven. Not a huge group, but perhaps a start toward interesting a few of the shyer, or harder-core inmates in maybe sitting down with us. I've finally given up on finding anyone to help out, so I've made a commitment to go every Friday night myself.

A large, black, sweet ex-con has been returned to prison, and is back in the Friday night group. "I did pretty well for about ten months, but then I just started selling those narcotics again, and here I am back again." I told my old friend I was glad to see him again, but not there. "You're hurting people by selling that stuff, you know that don't you?" Yeah, he knows. How hard it is to find a new way when you're black and poor and the old ways have worked, financially speaking, in the past.

Last Friday, we started a scriptural word study on forgiveness. I'm not sure that's the best way to go about it, but they asked to do thematic studies rather than just reading consecutively through books of the Bible, which we'd been doing for years.

I realized once we got started I needed to back up though, and talk about the doctrine of sin. We found ourselves puzzling our way through the latter parts of Romans 7, and it was helpful! Then, back into the OT to discover what it has to say about forgiveness. Interestingly, the overwhelming number of passages regarding "forgive others" are NT. In the old testament, the writers are begging God for forgiveness. As Daniel said in his prayer, "not because of our righteousness, but because of your mercy."

Anyway. One of the guys started talking: "When I was doing heroin, I tried to hide the fact from God. Heroin was all I wanted to do; it consumed my every thought. God didn't look all that attractive to me. I was hiding from God. At some point, I finally got around to telling God, in prayer, that what I really, really wanted was more junk, to get high. It seemed when I finally honestly just told him that, then He started to answer my prayers."

I thought that was marvelous. I kept coming back to this with the others at the Bible study: his honest confession removed the obstacles to the Holy Spirit: heaven opened and he found help; he was delivered from his bondage to this terrible drug.. And then, later, we ran across this about forgiveness:

"I acknowledged my sin to you,

and I did not cover my iniquity;

I said, "I will confess my transgressions to

the Lord,"

and you forgave the iniquity of my sin.

Psalm 32:5

I had the man who had struggled with heroin addiction read this passage aloud, and bam. It really seemed to hit home. We then went on to talk about the relationship between confession and forgiveness, which I harp on all the time anyway. A few things are starting to gel, perhaps.

These guys keep running into one another. It is like a brotherhood of the jailed. Most have been serial offenders, and have been in Bible studies together in various institutions around the state. I have always suspected that for some of them, it is easier to be in than out. Three squares a day, a warm and safe bed, and they have friends in there. Many of them, at this level, are working on the outside during the day: menial jobs, assembly line jobs; one guy's job is to drive them to their workplaces and pick them up again.. And they run into familiar cons and ex-cons at their workplaces as well.

For others, time hangs heavy and they can't wait to be released. These are the ones with families awaiting their return.

MERCY

Now I have found the ground wherein

Sure, my soul's anchor may remain--

The wounds of Jesus, for my sin,

Before the world's foundation slain;

Whose mercy shall unshaken stay

When heaven and earth are fled away.

Father, Thine everlasting love

Our scanty thought surpasses far,

Thy heart still melts with tenderness,

Thy arms of love still open are;

Returning sinners to receive

That mercy they may taste and live.

O Love, Thou bottomless abyss,

My sins are swallowed up in thee!

Covered is my unrighteousness,

Nor spot of guilt remains on me,

While Jesus blood, through earth and skies

Mercy, free, boundless mercy cries!

With faith I plunge me in this sea,

Here is my hope, my joy, my rest.

Hither, when hell assails, I flee,

I look into my Savior's breast.

Away, sad doubt and anxious fear!

Mercy is all that's written there.

Mercy is all that's written there.

J. A. Rothe, trans. by John Wesley.