The Kitchen Sink
An occasional piece of paper
January 3, 2010
Vol. 13 No. 01

Everything But...

A lot of the Bible is written in elegant prose, but even some of the prose is intentionally poetic. And a lot more of the Bible than we usually suspect is just plain old poetry - the Psalms, Proverbs, and all of the prophets. Poetry is not that easy to figure out, its words are odd and rare, placed sometimes out of place - but that’s often how God speaks.

The formal title of Jesus is not so much the Christ or Messiah, as it is the Word. Not just any old word, but The Word, the one who defines the nature and character of all our human words. Yet how can a human being, - especially a baby who can cry, but not speak - be the Word?

Could there be a single word that sums it all up? My guess is that if there were just one, it would be a word of poetry, a metaphor, an image of something ordinary that is actually extraordinary. That would be a very challenging choice and I don’t have a candidate. Many might say “love,” but of course love has almost too wide a range of meanings to be the one word, alluring as it might be.

Instead, the Bible throws at us many words, dotting the maps of our minds with different nuances - Emmanuel, Messiah, incarnation, resurrection, the Word made flesh. The famous short story by Arthur Clarke, “The Nine Billion Names of God,” probably has the math right, for human beings express the infinite in an endless number of ways.

Personally, I keep going back to Emmanuel, literally Hebrew for “God with us.” It appears only once in the Gospels (Matt 1:23), citing Isaiah report of God’s sign (7:14) that a young woman shall conceive and bear a child, whose name will be Emmanuel. It’s that divinity intertwined with our humanity that attracts me. God is in us, with us, for us.