A broadened sense of law is important in the botanical analogy of Psalm 1. “He shall be like a tree.” The analogy is elaborated in “tree,” “fruit,” and “leaf.” With the nourishing water these must be understood in the context that the man is viewed as a plant, evident in the statement that “God planted a garden.” (Gen. 2:8) which Adam is enjoined to “dress it and to keep” (Gen. 2:15), The most important trees of the garden, of the knowledge of good and evil and the tree of life, are within the man. The garden outside is a mirror image of the garden within, the garden that he is. Expelled attempts at self-germination, growth and harvest miss the point. In his original relation the Creator-Gardener performed these functions for him.
Deity as the gardener and man his plant views the human relation to God in vegetative terms, seed, root, bough, branch, blossom, bud and harvest. The man symbolized in the tree and specific varieties, as well as the field in which he is grown, suggests many associations from the wooden “tree” of Passion to the Tree of Life of New Jerusalem. He is like a tree and a gardener is the sense of it, and that gardener had a gardener.
Mary Magdalene, standing beside the open tomb, thought the risen Christ was the “gardener.” (John 20:15) Jesus wept in the Garden of Gethsemane for the “plants.” The man whose sight was restored said, “I see men as trees walking.” (Mk. 8:24) Thus the tree of Psalm 1 is a new species germinating inside the man in botanical processes, call it human photosynthesis and transpiration, in short, botanical humanity is nourished by the divine light and water that wells up within (John. 4:14).
If the righteous man is a tree, what kind? Evergreen, his leaf does not wither. Drought cannot occur beside the stream. “Root” strong, his “trunk” withstands the flood. The fruit of this tree occurs “in season.” The unwithering leaf represents constancy against changing seasons. He is said to “prosper” as evergreen, not unique to Psalm 1. Natural botanical cycles occur throughout the prophets as vegetative epic. It is an epic, not merely an image or analogy. The godly evergreens are like living men!
The ungodly have a problem in Psalm 1. They are not like trees, though elsewhere in the psalms, do spread like the “green bay” (37.35). In Psalm 1 they are like “chaff,” switching metaphors to the cycles of the production of wheat. The wicked are dust blown with the wind. No root, no branch, stalk or fruit, no wonder they cannot “stand in the judgment” (5). They perish naturally, but preserve the true grain until harvest. Chaff is castoff, but necessary to grain production, the outer shell that allows the wheat to ripen perfectly, thus part of the production of the divine fruit, against their will. What can they do, those tests and oppositions that squeeze in the ripening purity even while the elements, the seasons and rough weather, further tests and oppositions, bake the impurities out of the seed. The godly emerge like the wheat head, whole and hardened. This appeared in Epiphany, Fall, 1987.
There is a new species, but old in the maelstrom of oppositions. This directly concerns the righteous who first look like bookworms who meditate “in the law day and night,” rising at midnight to pray, but that “law day” that “will not pass away” is everywhere revealed in the heaven (19:1-4) and earth in natural processes, “He shall come down like rain on new mown grass” (72:6).
There is a new species, but old in the maelstrom of oppositions. This directly concerns the righteous who first look like bookworms who meditate “in the law day and night,” rising at midnight to pray, but that “law day” that “will not pass away” is everywhere revealed in the heaven (19:1-4) and earth in natural processes, “He shall come down like rain on new mown grass” (72:6).
So heaven is a speech with implied statutes of Psalm 19; moon and the sun are grand examples of its adjudication. Law in this greater context is characteristic of the natural but not the human. Those who meditate day and night are not reading words on a page, but seeing and feeling in the universe the natural drama of God’s handiwork. The righteous meditate the law they are involved in as outdoorsmen, not as indoor creatures, Wordsworthians who seek worship in a building not made with hands. Humanity is seen within these natural forces.
No comments:
Post a Comment