Eschaton

Come and play!

I don't feed my dog mud. Sometimes he thinks he's a cow and eats grass.

Up the hill.

The dog really isn't mine, but my son's. This dog is keeping me alive. To keep me alive isn't mine either. That belongs to doG.

When my son is busy, Delta forces me to get out and walk. I didn't have a dog for nearly 70 years. Now he comes into my living room, pushes me out of my chair, and pulls me up the hill to see the beauty and give him some time off leash on the rocks. 

In my country and neighborhood, there are many dogs and owners out every day walking their pets. I can't remember all their names. They are all loved and loving.

Our attitudes to the domestic canis are different from the epithets about them thrown about in ancient literature like the Bible.

Dogs do more than "eat the crumbs that fall from the master's table". I am past the time of scrambling on the rocks at my age. But I do occasionally descend the steeper slope, though not with the speed that I will take you down my rocky thoughts in this post.

I have been pondering for at least two days a seven-part sequence I dreamt up as I awoke -- on Friday, Halloween, was it? My thoughts were stimulated by the juxtaposition of the Amalek incident noted in 2 Samuel 1 with the Elegy over the death of Saul and Jonathan later in the chapter.

I wondered, remembering first the traditional 'Amalek as the evil inclination', whom David, the not-yet-king, had commanded to be put down like a dog by one of his company. How can I pick my way down this slope from this summary execution to the music of the elegy, one of the most moving performances I have yet heard of the biblical music. From sin to death to the beauty of sorrow. 

(Excuse me, there is a slight whine at my door. It is Saturday morning and Delta is hoping for a fried egg for breakfast, a weekly treat. After a little coaxing, he settled and waited patiently for his "more than crumbs".)

Amalek was a problem to Saul. He failed (see 1 Samuel 15) and was he not one of the prophets, as they say? Did he not know the love of God? The Amalekite soldier who killed Saul was caught with spoil, just as the people and Saul were caught when they had pity on Agag. Neither convenient decision was good.

I doubt frankly whether I would have got on well with David or any other local dogs of the time. I suspect that in David's world, the dog was a local scavenger. The Amalekite is not called a dog, but the giant whom David slew asked -- Am I a dog? Amalek has not become a famous insult like the common use of Philistine today. Amalek is to be entirely wiped out. 

Deuteronomy 25 with the instruction to erase the memorial of Amalek

The raw juxtaposition of the Amalekite with the Elegy is a jarring episode in the exposed character of the human, but the Amalekite while claiming the title of guest, is given away by the loot in his hands, the consecrated thing that was on Saul's head and the armlet. The result is his immediate execution. David himself had refused to touch the Lord's Anointed more than once.

The act that condemns the one who claimed to be a 'guest'

Then follows some of the most touching music in the Scripture all of it as always, embedded in the te'amim, the cantillation accents in the text. You can hear it sung here.

The last few verses of David's elegy over the death of Saul and Jonathan

Amalek is not ignored in the Hebrew tradition nor is the problem of pragmatism with respect to human life. Is the evil inclination necessary for life? I wonder whether we can see such discussions as supporting what the apostle Paul calls in Greek, 'the flesh'. Self-interest and self-service, convenient pragmatism is inside all of us, the archetype of the flesh, the adversary of the brooding Spirit.

The New Testament verse that I hear within this analogue is, as you may have guessed, from Romans 8: If you by the Spirit put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. I take this as singular even though the tenses are plural. This death is the singularity in the centre of my galaxy. 

What does it do for us? In a word, we are to consider ourselves dead with Christ so that we can be alive with him in the new resurrected life that has already begun. When we discover this, the redemption works backward in time and reveals to us life in ways we would never have imagined. Of course, it is not without cost. As Amalek is to be entirely wiped out, so all our convenience and our desires are to be put to death in the death of Christ. This death is anticipated in Scripture in the word libation, a pouring out of love. The music for the pouring out from before the foundation of the world (Proverbs 8:23), is a slow descending scale to the tonic from the third, g f#, e. Yahweh bought me, the beginning of his way, preceding his work from then. From everlasting I have offered libation from the beginning, out of the precedents of earth. 

 Proverbs 8:22-23 Wisdom purchased, Anticipation of Sacrifice.

Years ago, we had the film Apocalypse Now. My thought shortly after in 1980 was Apocalypse Then. I wrote and wrote under this title in the infancy of the internet, a book I have withdrawn, even illustrating it with art I should not have spent toner on.

As far as I could see in all dimensions, the end of time was in the middle. I don't separate Now and Then -- the self-giving of Christ Jesus, the costly purchase, a libation of love, and Playful Wisdom in the shape of a dog disturbing my complacency: Come and play. Rise up, my love, my fair one -- to the hill.

In the words of George Herbert, Easter:

Can there be any day but this? We count three hundred, but we miss, there is but one and that one ever.