Wednesday, March 28, 2018

How beautiful the feet...

If you have watched Chariots of Fire ("bring me my bow of burning gold...") you ought to remember that scene in which Eric Liddel is knocked over the picket of a Quarter-mile race, gets up, and then overtakes the whole field from twenty yards behind the last.

It's a fantastic victory. If you've any heart at all you are holding your breath with all the onlookers, watching this glorious impossible thing being done.

And Liddel, of course, collapses again at the end of it because it really was impossible, according to human wisdom. And here's the thing: we're nearly all physically capable of things impossible according to human wisdom, if we don't have to think about them. We can pull muscles on reflex (as I found last Monday) to arrest a fall (and golly did it smart for hours after); some folk get nasty electric shocks and really do throw themselves across great distances, because all their muscles twitch at once before they've any time to smart from it and they really had no choice in the matter.

But Liddel, according to that film, wills himself to run beyond any ability he could count on a second time. It hurts, and you can tell that it's hurting him before he's even caught up the next runner, you can see in his face the dread of anticipation before he's even got up. And it's a stupid thing to do, really, even according to athletic wisdom. And still it evokes an admiring thrill, "such wonders the Lord has made!"

Something like that is the only sense I can make of the first obvious parsing of that half-verse in Today's second reading from Isaiah
And the Lord was pleased to bruise Him in infirmity...
We of course, have no right to bruise eachother, any more than a runner has any right to trip knock a fellow off the track. But the starter, the umpires, the on-lookers can't help but exult in such sportsmanship, such determination to put things right, once they have gone wrong.

There is a second parsing, of course, because the same text also means The Lord Himself was pleased to be bruised. But the Trinity takes a deal of getting-used-to; and even if Isaiah knew that, still Iscariot and his buyers hid it from themselves.

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