Canter Bridge

What can be expected of small things?

What promise derives from little-ness?

The biblical logic delights in undermining the realistic answers to such questions, forged as they are by the hammer of probability, a tool that knows only how to work its materials with a rhythmic swing that is entirely constrained by extrapolating out into the future what it has known in the past. Probability revels in likelihoods as thought it were quite sophisticated. With supreme self-confidence, it is never surprised.

It is incapable of seeing like a child. All is not possible. Only a small range of outcomes is plausible. Above all else, be never surprised.

The biblical logic runs at cross-currents to such closed-system pragmatism.

Over and again, it elevates the last-born, raises the dead, speaks its principal truths through the mute and the stuttering. It barely lingers over matters of probability for it knows that nearly all things are possible. In fact, it sometimes loses the adverb in its joyful clinging to an unfettered God whose thoughts, as the tradition famously phrases it, are not our thoughts.

Micah is one who touches upon the divergent mentalities of, say, Jacob’s God and human calculation.

Their designs, proposals, chicaneries, even their imperial projects are all too plausible. This, in a world governed by YHWH, is precisely why their predicted outcomes are unlikely ever to occupy space and time. It is a metaphysical speculation several layers deep to wonder what YHWH delights in, yet one that is warranted by the biblical testimony itself.

YHWH, for sure, delights in the exquisite reversal. Let us hear Micah on this count:

Now many nations
are assembled against you,
saying, ‘Let her be profaned,
and let our eyes gaze upon Zion.’
But they do not know
the thoughts of the LORD;
they do not understand his plan,
that he has gathered them as sheaves to the threshing floor.

Arise and thresh,
O daughter Zion,
for I will make your horn iron
and your hoofs bronze;
you shall beat in pieces many peoples,
and shall devote their gain to the LORD,
their wealth to the Lord of the whole earth.

Israel makes a small and easy target for imperial ambition. There is enough ash and bone preserved in her substratum to justify the thought that Israel is one of those perennially defenseless—one might even say hopeless—nations, a sort of ever-and-again piece of roadkill on the imperial highway.

Yet the prophets insist that this is not her destiny even when it has become her circumstance.

The nations, Micah insists, do not know the thoughts of the LORD; they do not understand his plan, that he has gathered them as sheaves to the threshing floor.

Little Israel, it turns out, is meant to be understood as the thresher rather than the threshed.

Somehow, out of this dynamic reversal, this passing of history’s hammer to the perennial victor, this hope enshrouded in the encircling fury of circumstances emerges the notion of Israel as the reprocessing plant of humanity’s riches. Out the far end flow the caravans of refinished goods, of glorious wealth. They drive in the direction of Israel. They journey also to the highways of this world.

YHWH, this militaristic, egocentric, jealous deity of Jacob’s sacred history, turns out to have designs upon the whole world. One portion of his project is to crush, this is true. Another, seen usually in mid-crescendo, is to enrich. To bless.