Don Friesen
Many of us know the camp song, "We are climbing Jacob's ladder," and no doubt the story of Jacob's ladder is a comfort to many, a potent biblical image conveying a connection between two worlds, the world in which we live and the world that transcends this world. But the song continues: "We are climbing Jacob's ladder / Every rung goes higher, higher," and for those of us afraid of heights this is a terrifying image!
I don't much like ladders, and this spring, noticing that one of our second-story eaves troughs has become detached from our house I have been scheming about how to get one of my children to go up there and fix it. We have a long extension ladder, and I could climb it myself, but once I get to the top I am so busy hugging the ladder that I have no hands free to do any work up there! I have to hug the ladder because my legs get all rubbery and simply cannot be relied upon.
I climbed some long ladders when I worked in an underground nickle mine, but the ladders in the mine were encased by rock, and even though I had to climb up or down 400 to 800 feet on occasion, my fear of heights was miraculously balanced by my claustrophobia.
I do not find a ladder a comforting image. I also remember an occasion during my childhood when I went on an overnight camp out with other campers and the mosquitoes were so bad that none of us slept a wink that night. The camp leader had the foresight to establish our camp near a swamp and even the twenty-foot high flames of the fire we built were no protection from the bugs. Exhausted, and swollen with mosquito bites, we set out in early morning for the main camp, but got lost! Eventually we spotted a forestry tower, and I climbed the rickety ladder one of my scariest experiences ever but I was able to locate the main camp and give instructions to our demoralized leader!
Jacob's Literary Ladders
I may not be fond of ladders, but Western literature has quite liked the ladder. St Augustine (354-430) said that "Christ is the ladder reaching from earth to heaven, ...from the carnal to the spiritual." For another ancient writer (Nicholas of Lyra) the rungs of the ladder represented the patriarchs in the genealogy of Christ supplied by Matthew's Gospel, and the ascent of the ladder represents the devotion of saints when they pray. In the Middle Ages Jacob's ladder became an analogue for spiritual growth and progress; in the Benedictine Rule, for example, the way to heavenly heights includes the rungs of humility, fear of God, obedience, perseverance, and so on, all the way to the top rung charity which is perfect and casts out all fear. (1 John 4:18, KJV; literary images cited in A Dictionary of Biblical Tradition in English Literature, by David Lyle Jeffrey)
For other writers, the ladder represents our intellectual and spiritual aspirations. St. John Climacus (579-649), a seventh-century monk, wrote a book entitled, The Ladder of Divine Ascent, a widely used handbook of the ascetic life in the ancient Greek Church. Thomas Gray (1716-1771), on the other hand, used the ladder image to picture the corporal bulk of "his hugeness... Henry the Eighth's most monstrous majesty," as he called it, ascending and descending the metaphorical ladder. And then, in Longfellow's Evangeline, the vision is reduced to a rope ladder hanging from a cedar tree, with hovering hummingbirds in place of the angels in Jacob's dream. Even literary images, it seems, are subject to deflation.
R is for Revelation, not for Rage, Rhyme or Reason
I have chosen the word, "revelation, as the biblical word for the letter, "R," though, like the letter, "S," the Scriptures provide a profusion of R-words important words like "repentance," "righteousness," "resurrection," "reconciliation" and "redemption". I have covered some of those themes under other letters, but as the ABC's of any subject cover the basics of that subject, so too the concept of revelation is fundamental to our faith.
The nature of revelation is a complicated subject, and subject to interpretation. In Christian theology, the word, "revelation," represents both the corpus of truth which God has disclosed and the process by which God communicates with us. (The Concise Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church) Christian philosophers have distinguished between truths of reason' and truths of revelation,' and traditionally Protestants have held that all revelation is sufficiently contained in the Scriptures, while Catholics say that part is also found in the tradition of the Church.
It gets even more complicated, and the locus of much theological debate, some views considering Scripture as virtually pure revelation, others holding that one cannot consider revelation apart from redemption, yet others regarding divine revelation as roughly equivalent to human insight, on par with garden-variety human enlightenment.
There's no way I can do justice to this immense concept, but let me make four basic observations about revelation. Firstly, God is a disclosing God. The Scriptures portray God as a God of revelation. God revealed himself to Jacob, says the book of Genesis. (Genesis 35:7) God revealed himself to Pharaoh. (41:25) God revealed himself to Israel during their captivity in Egypt. (Exodus 5:3) God revealed himself to Samuel at Shiloh. (1 Samuel 3:21) God revealed himself to Isaiah (Isaiah 22:14), and on and on it goes, God described by the prophet Amos as "the one who forms the mountains, creates the wind, reveals his thoughts to mortals, makes the morning darkness, and treads on the heights of the earth -- the Lord, the God of hosts, is his name!" (Amos 4:13)
God is a disclosing God, and God takes the initiative in disclosing Himself to us. The divine revelation, according to the Scriptures, cannot be equated with the best of human insight, but must be seen as that which comes to us from the other end of the ladder the upper end. God wants to reveal Himself to us, and the grandest use of the ladder is not when some Promethean mortal tries to scale its heights as when God delicately climbs down the ladder in order to bring us a swaddled baby.
Secondly, divine revelation is dynamic in nature. That is, revelation is not propositional. Revelation is not a doctrine, though it may create doctrine. Revelation is not the Bible, although it generated the Bible. For example God revealed Himself to Moses in the burning bush, but the event itself is the act of revelation; the Scriptures witness to, are signs of, and point to the revelatory event, and in so doing become revelatory themselves.
Thirdly, our Christian understanding of revelation is that something happened. The core of the Christian faith was revealed in history; it's not some gnostic secret we prattle on about. As our reading from the epistles declares, "(Jesus) was revealed in flesh, vindicated in spirit, seen by angels, proclaimed among Gentiles, believed in throughout the world, taken up in glory." (1 Timothy 3:16) Classic Christianity is not something we work out for ourselves. Jesus was born. He lived. He died. He rose. And along the way he healed people. He forgave people their sins and said to love everyone, including your enemy. He died in a cruel manner but forgave his executioners. And "Christianity was born when it occurred to some of the ones who had known him that his kind of life was the only kind worth living, and that in some invisible way Christ was still around to help them live it." (Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABC's of Faith, page 344)
And fourthly, revelation requires our imaginative response. If God is the Revealer, we are the revealee. I don't know if God hides hints of His presence or if we're just too thick to see them, but revelation requires someone to apprehend it. No doubt you've had experience with those three-dimensional or hologram images that are embedded in drawings that at first glance appear to be without any form or meaning. I have stared at some of them until my head began to hurt, and then suddenly my eyes adjusted and I could see the pattern. One has to let one's eyes relax and surrender to the embedded pattern.
Similarly there are moments in our own experience that, given a receptivity of spirit, reveal their eternal dimensions with great clarity. There are moments when what seems just an ordinary relationship achieves an unspeakable depth and intimacy; moments when everyday scenes take on a luminous beauty. I remember one such moment when I lived in the far north a moment alone, when I gazed at what would appear to others to be but an utterly barren landscape, yet its starkness held within it intimations of the sacred.
Surely the Lord Is in this Place
Our Old Testament story about Jacob reveals such a moment. Jacob was on the run after hoodwinking his father and brother. He was not looking for a revelatory moment, and it wasn't as if Jacob was well-schooled in revelatory moments. Prior to our story (Genesis 28), the only time Jacob mentions God is in a shameful way, using it bolster a bold-faced lie! (Genesis 27:20)
After cheating his brother of their father's blessing, Jacob learned that Esau planned to kill him and so he took off to hide out on his Uncle Laban's ranch. On the way he stopped at Haran and camped there for the night. He lay down to sleep, only a stone for a pillow, and as he slept "...he dreamed that there was a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven; and ...the angels of God were ascending and descending on it!"
In the dream the Lord appeared at the top of the ladder or perhaps even beyond it and confirmed with Jacob the covenant God made with Abraham, promising great blessings to Jacob and his descendants. (Genesis 28:13-15) Jacob awoke from his sleep, thought about the dream, and concluded, "Surely the Lord is in this place; and I did not know it. ...How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven." (28:16-17) Jacob realized this was no ordinary moment, and he took the ordinary stone that he had used for a pillow, set it on end, drizzled some oil on it, and set it there as a memorial stone to this divine encounter.
Stairways to Heaven
While at seminary one of my professors a professor of music lost his wife and seventeen-year-old son in a terrible, fiery traffic accident. His son was a fan of Led Zeppelin, and as a tribute to his son Orlando played Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven" on the seminary chapel pipe organ. It was not the version of "Stairway to Heaven" that I knew and loved, but it was the most moving rendition of the song I've ever heard. It became a path through carnage and tragedy to the foot of the divine, a ladder, or gateway to heaven.
The image of a ladder stretching from earth to heaven conveys the conviction that God is not remote or unapproachable; there is traffic between these two worlds. When in a tall building, some of us use the stairs to travel between levels, some of use the escalator, some of us use the elevator, and the odd dare-devil likes to climb up the outside of the building. Likewise there are various stairways to heaven. For example, God reveals Himself to some of us through intuition. In some indescribably mystical way we sense the reality of God. We sense in our deepest being that something or Someone created us, sustains and gives order to our lives.
God reveals Himself to others through emotion. Ethel Waters (1896-1977), the gutsy blues singer who played with Duke Ellington and for Billy Graham, credits the emotional preaching of her pastor for awakening her faith. (Conversions) The waters of emotion were buoyant waters for her as they are to those who hear her songs.
To others perhaps those who lack imagination and distrust their emotions God reveals Himself through reason. Western culture places a lot of emphasis upon reason, and perhaps realizing that our intellect cries out to comprehend God rationally, God provides reasoned revelations. Reason alone may not be sufficient to convince us of God's presence, but it can help surmount serious intellectual barriers.
Revelation is not incompatible with reason. Frederick Buechner says that there are two different ways of describing how you came to know something. "One way is to say you found it out. The other way is to say it occurred to you. Reason is involved in both. To say you found out that so-and-so was the best friend you had suggests that you reasoned your way to such a conclusion. To say it occurred to you suggests that, although the conclusion was not reached by reason, it was not incompatible with it." It may help to distinguish between knowledge given and knowledge earned. For example, you may have found out that Francis of Assisi gave all his money to the poor, called the sun his brother, and preached sermons to birds, but it occurred to you that he must be a saint! Or an idiot! Revelation on occasion means knowledge as grace. (Buechner, Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABC's of Faith, page 344)
God may reveal Himself through intuition, through emotion, through reason, and to others, perhaps, through tradition tradition with a capital T', which includes twenty centuries of church history, the canon of Scripture, the teaching of the Early Church leaders, the meditations of the medieval mystics, the renewal movements of the Reformation, and so on. The story is told of a rabbi, a Catholic priest, and a Protestant chaplain, and when they began to preach the rabbi said, "Thus saith the Lord!" The priest began, "As the Church has always taught," and the Protestant minister said, "Now, it seems to me," or, "in my own experience..." Nowadays, of course, it is sufficient to build a theology on whims alone!
I recently discovered a writer named Catherine Wallace. Catherine grew up Catholic and tells of being in English class when Sister Mary Robert an intimidating presence whom Catherine imagined as nine feet tall and a hundred years old appeared in the doorway and summoned, one by one, all of the girls in the class all, that is, but Catherine. Each girl was invited to join the convent except Catherine.
It strikes me as a rather cruel exercise, but, writes Wallace, "It was the social highlight of my adolescence: the nuns didn't want me.... Catholicism had set me free of Catholicism; God had set me free of God. I graduated, threw away my school uniform, went off to the university, and quit going to church: what a relief. I was done with religion." ("Call Waiting: The Comic Incompetence of Gideon," a lecture by Catherine M. Wallace)
Wallace became an English professor and years later was teaching a Great Books course at the university that included readings from the Bible. She had a passing familiarity with its stories, but she had never read the Scriptures with adult imagination and comprehension. She confesses that she was terribly serious about being an English professor and considered herself invulnerable to these silly old stories.
On one particular morning, however, Wallace sat in her office, re-reading the assignment for that day's class, which included the story of God speaking to Moses from the burning bush. In the story Moses and God argue about who's going to rescue God's people from the Pharaoh. God wants Moses to do it and Moses wants somebody else to do it! Wallace writes, "God comes across as persistent, patient, and affectionate. Zeus, I thought to myself, has thunderbolts for mortals like Moses. As gods go, this character Yahweh seems pretty strange. He is practically pleading." Moses claimed to be inarticulate, though he appears to hold his own in arguing with God! Wallace writes, "God assures Moses that, when the time comes, God will put words in Moses' mouth. I found myself urging Moses forward. Maybe all this other stuff is silly magic tricks,' I felt myself arguing, but you can trust this business of finding words in your mouth. That's real. God does that all the time, trust me. God puts words in my mouth all the time.'"
When Wallace realized her deep engagement with the story, she was shocked. "I sat there for a solid hour," she writes, "unable to continue reading, unable to prepare the class I was supposed to teach, my brains frozen or locked up.... I walked over to my classroom at the usual time, still unable to think, unable to think about being unable to think.... I stepped up to the lectern and took a deep breath and nothing happened. Nothing at all. The more attentive students began to stare. I tried again. Still nothing. Now the whole class was staring forty undergraduates, sitting there with spiral notebooks. With an inner laugh that would have made Sara laugh too, I gave in. OK, God,' I heard myself thinking, you win. Ok.'" It was the beginning of an awakening of faith for her.
I know not how, I know not why God's wondrous grace to us He has made known, but God finds us, whether or not we're looking for Him, and then, deeply moved by the encounter, we too build places of worship and remembrance in His honour, proclaiming, "Surely God is in this place!"
May God grant us the grace and the humility to find that spiritual treasure, and rejoice in our discovery! AMEN
All quotations of Scripture, unless otherwise noted, are from the New Revised Standard Version.