Thought for Today
Leviticus 26:1 You shall make for yourselves no idols and erect no carved images or pillars, and you shall not place figured stones in your land, to worship at them; for I am the LORD your God.
2 Kings 2:23 He went up from there to Bethel; and while he was going up on the way, some small boys came out of the city and jeered at him, saying, "Go away, baldhead! Go away, baldhead!" 24 When he turned around and saw them, he cursed them in the name of the LORD. Then two she-bears came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of the boys.
Luke 20:24 "Show me a denarius. Whose head and whose title does it bear?" They said, "The emperor's." 25 He said to them, "Then give to the emperor the things that are the emperor's, and to God the things that are God's."
Last night, during dinner at my Masonic Lodge meeting, I was part of a discussion about what language Jesus spoke. Regrettably, every recording we have of Jesus’ voice was lost along with those 18.5 minutes of White House tapes from the Watergate incident. The Bible never tells us anything about what language Jesus spoke.
We do know that when Jesus returned home to Nazareth, “Luke 4:16 he went to the synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written . . .” The scrolls were written in Hebrew. However, most scholars assure us that Hebrew was not a spoken language in Jesus’ time. The most common spoken language in New Testament times in the region was Aramaic. From personal experience, I know that my own youthful friends who were required to read from the scrolls for their own bar mitzvah had actually merely memorized the relevant passages. Although those friends did study Hebrew at their synagogue, none of them ever became fluent in speaking or reading that language. They all spoke and read Texican, just like everybody else.
The Bible never tells us what language Jesus spoke. Neither does the Bible tell us much about what Jesus looked like. Generally, the Bible avoids physical descriptions of people. Did Moses really look like Charlton Heston? Did Pharoah look like Yul Brenner? Probably not. Just as those recordings of Jesus were ‘lost,’ so too have all of the photographs and portraits of Jesus been lost . . . maybe in the same incident?
We do know that the prophet Elisha was follicly-challenged. Elisha was also sensitive on the subject. Calling attention to his baldness evidently never worked out well for those who did point it out.
Our earliest ancestors-in-the-faith understood our human proclivity for allowing the symbol to usurp the truth being symbolized. The danger in idols or carved images was not some inherent evil in sculpture or physical art. The danger is in our tendency to lose sight of the thing being symbolized. Those ancestors saw that ultimately those around them began to worship the golden calf or other symbols.
Interestingly, the Romans used coinage with an image of the current emperor stamped on the face. Ultimately, like so many empires before them, the emperor came to be thought of as a god. Our ancestors-in-the-faith knew that there is only one God. They also knew that even were they able to avoid our human proclivity for confusing the symbol with what it symbolizes, there is no way to capture in a symbol a representation of our omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent God. In mathematics, the concept of infinity is the symbol ∞. We could use that symbol to represent the idea of eternity, infinite time. But how do we capture the rest of our limited, human concept of our God?
The other problem with physical imagery and specificity about language spoken in the Bible would be our tendency to somehow try to limit the applicability of the message. If we knew that Jesus truly spoke Texican and looked like a typical cowboy, where would that leave all those around the world who are not blessed to be Texan?
When we read the Bible, when we think about the biblical heroes, about the Patriarchs and Prophets, about Jesus and his disciples, we can read, hear and understand the universality of the truth about God’s love for God’s Creation and God’s creatures. All of it and all of us. And we realize that all always means all.
Stay safe, know that God so loved the world, trust God,
Pastor Ray