open spaces

For each finite thing I saw an end –
            but your command is exceedingly broad.   Psalm 119:96

Broad. Wide. Spacious.

This is the Psalmist’s experience of the “commands,” the “mitzvot” of the Lord. I’m struck by how little we really see. Think about it – what “mitzvot” would the Psalmist be experiencing as so “broad” and “spacious”? Leviticus? Numbers? Deuteronomy? I’m pretty sure we feel pretty cramped in those legal spaces. But he sees something more far reaching than the Great Plains.

We mimic Jesus announcing with such bravado, “Strait is the gate and narrow is the way that leads to life and few there be that find it.” We, of course, include ourselves in that “narrow few.” Yet perhaps the very narrowness of which Jesus speaks, perhaps the very reason so few find this way to life, is that so few of us, relatively speaking, have the capaciousness of soul to truly take in the wide open spaces of God and his “mitzvot.” Most of us, religious and irregilious, are far too busy constructing our constricting little boxed explanations for life and the world and vigorously defending them.

But the psalmist has found a plain. A wide open space full of possibilities.

Western intellectuals that we are, we often affirm confidently that every statement of Scripture has but one interpretation if understood correctly (and guess who has that correct interpretation?). It’s almost as if we think a word is equal to no more than the sum of its letters and a sentence no more than the sum of its words.

Really?

I’m struck by how little we really see.

Paul, rabbi that he was, could look at a seemingly straightforward statement like Deuteronomy 25:4 “Don’t muzzle the ox when it’s treading out the grain” and see something much more. “Doth God take care for oxen? Or saith he it altogether for our sakes? For our sakes, no doubt, this is written: that he that ploweth should plow in hope; and that he that thresheth in hope should be a partaker in his hope” says Paul (on a day when he was feeling very Shakespearian…1 Corinthians 9:9-10). Paul moves from ox and threshing to hope and gospel and messenger. Judged by our typical “what did the original author intend” measuring rod, that seems a bit of a leap. And it is – but only for those who don’t yet know the famed wisdom of Rafiki and who don’t know how to “look harder.”

Paul sees two “layers” in Deuteronomy 25:4 and then went so far as to say that the lower layer was “altogether” what God had really meant all along.

Paul saw two layers. Other rabbis said that every word of the Torah had 70 faces and 600,000 meanings. Maybe they overstate the case. Maybe they didn’t count nearly high enough. Perhaps we need to ask ourselves just how inspired the Word really is if we view it in such definable, finite terms. The infinite God giving us a finite revelation. Such a finite Word seems hardly “living and active”…seems more like a specimen jar and smells of formaldehyde.

Open spaces.

Reminds me of Alan Jacobs description of C.S. Lewis in The Narnian:

Lewis’ mind was above all characterized by a willingness to be enchanted and it was his openness to enchantment that held together the various strands of his life – his delight in laughter, his willingness to accept a world made by a good and loving God, and (in some ways above all) his willingness to submit to the charms of a wonderful story, whether written by an Italian poet of the sixteenth century, by Beatrix Potter or by himself. What is “secretly present in what he said about anything” is an openness to delight, to the sense that there’s more to the world than meets the jaundiced eye, to the possibility that anything could happen to someone who is ready to meet that anything. For someone with eyes to see and the courage to explore, even an old wardrobe full of musty coats could be the doorway into another world.

Or even an old Book filled with what some consider but musty words.