Peace on Earth?

Seems fitting to post the annual Christmas card on Holy Innocents day this year. Also seems fitting that the bird kinda looks like it might be lying dead on the ground.

I wrote a short poem last month about Abraham's speaking up to God on behalf of the innocents--if that's what he's doing. He could be only trying to save his own family. Obviously it's a better, more instructive story if he's engaging God in moral argumentation, appealing to God's own better nature, and since this is mythology we're dealing with here, whatever is the better story is the story. Not, of course, just the better story according to our own views, extrinsic to it--as bears repeating over and over God names Israel after struggle with himself. Israel is appointed by God to struggle with God.

Something sits uneasily with me about citing Abraham's speaking up for the innocents, though, and what it is is the thing Kurt Vonnegut says, of course ironically but still, in his spoof disclaimers in a couple of his books that no names have been changed to protect the innocent because the innocent are protected by God Almighty (Sirens of Titan) or angels (Bagombo Snuff Box) "as a matter of heavenly routine". Who you've really got to look out for--in a way, though how exactly do you want to play this out?--are the guilty. Jesus Christ himself is a little ambivalent on this point--the gospel of Matthew starts out all burn em all but the gospel of Luke, for all its faults, ends up heavier on the go and sin no more. When I was a secret evangelical Christian kid it dawned on me one day that capital punishment is impermissible because you've got to give everyone every possible chance to repent and be saved. Framed differently, there's still something very right about that to me--though more than that there is the absolute unholiness of killing that that other strain in the Hebrew bible speaks to, requiring you to take your animals to the temple to be slaughtered because all killing calls for atonement. God, apparently, needs to be reminded of that, too.

A funny thing relating to Israel's being appointed to struggle with God only just struck me about a week ago. I'd gone back to Samuel to look at the founding of Israel as a state, a kingdom. Somehow it had stuck with me ever since I was a kid--from Sunday School or children's bibles?--that God didn't like the idea of Israel having a king but went along with it anyway. What I never understood about that until recently is that the territories settled by the Israelites were only united into a state once Saul was appointed king over them all. So if God doesn't like the idea of the Israelites having a king, he also doesn't like the idea of the Israelites being unified into a state. God tells Samuel, don't worry about it, it isn't you they want to replace with a king, it's me (and it occurs to me just now that there's an echo of the Tower of Babel in this--and also there's an inversion of the golden calf incident, where it isn't God they want to replace, it's Moses). And the thing that struck me last week or so is that once God finally lets the third king, Solomon, build him a temple, God and his priests are hardly part of the story anymore. The temple is built and then it's largely forgotten (though sometimes pillaged for its riches), and God is largely forgotten along with it. This is the thing: the temple, it turns out, is the prison in which God is confined. I mean, it struck me to put it that way; already for I guess years I'd been working up the thought that the problem with the theory of worship or whatever you call it that's developed in the Hebrew bible is that that it de-sacralizes everything outside the temple by banning "sacrifice under every green tree" and whatnot. And this idea that the Israelites have done their god a disservice and dishonour by confining him to the temple is just what Rabshakeh is getting at when he says on behalf of the invading Assyrians that God--who he claims has sent the Assyrians to destroy Judah--can't be expected to save Judah when its king, Hezekiah, has removed all of God's high places and altars. Hezekiah is one of the good kings according to the authors of the books of Kings and Chronicles because he restores temple exclusivity, but according to Rabshakeh this is exactly backwards, and why not suppose he has a point?

And then on Christmas Eve it struck me that Christianity replicates this phenomenon: Jesus Christ is the person in which God is confined. It does so even in the face of the gospel of Luke reminding you, in its genealogy of Jesus, that all are descended ultimately from "Adam, the son of God". But you were never meant to just accept these things.