Word of the Week – Fathom

Word of the Week – Fathom

If you’re anything like me, you’re aware that fathom is a unit of measurement (though fuzzy on the details of what it equals, perhaps) but use it most often as a synonym for “understand” or “comprehend.” Ever wonder how these meanings are related? Because they totally are.

Fathom comes all the way from Old English as both a noun and a verb, both coming from the same meaning. The verb was “to embrace or surround” and the noun was “the length of outstretched arms,” so about 5-6 feet on average.

By about 1600 it was used as a verb in the sense of “to take soundings,” which is to figure out the depth of water. That, in turn, led to “get to the bottom of something” in a metaphorical sense by about 1600. Which led directly to today’s current meaning. Because once you’ve gotten to the bottom of something, you understand it and comprehend it.

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Jesus and Traditions

Jesus and Traditions

We’ve been talking about the really cool lessons I’ve learned through the reading of a book called Jesus and the Jewish Roots of the Eucharist by Brant Pitre.* First I talked about the Daily Bread, and then last week about why the Passover was the perfect backdrop for Jesus’s New Covenant…which is to say, we looked at that original covenant.

Now I want to pause and address the idea of traditions. The ones instituted by God, yes, and also the ones that men “added to” Scripture.

As Christians today, we’re quite familiar with the ones Jesus called out, right? For instance, the practice of corban—when you would dedicate your wealth to God and therefore have an excuse not to use it to care for those to whom you were obligated, like your parents. Or when the Pharisees chide the disciples for plucking grains of wheat as they walked through a field and eating them on the Sabbath (not outlawed by the Law, but by added traditions) and Jesus argues with them.

But did you know that there are many manmade, added-on traditions that Jesus not only didn’t argue with, but which He kept, respected, and even fulfilled?

I think one of the first ones of these I learned about was one that surrounded His birth. There were very strict regulations—manmade ones, mind you—about where flocks could be kept in relation to cities and towns. The sheep and their waste had to be well outside the cities. Like, miles.

Bethlehem, however, was only five miles from Jerusalem. That put it well within range of “no livestock allowed.” Yet there were flocks with shepherds to whom the angels appeared. Who? How?

They were the temple flocks—because that was the one exception to the rule. Temple flocks were kept in the pastures between Jerusalem and Bethlehem at the time of Christ, and they were not tended by just any shepherds. They were tended by Levites—because none but priestly hands were ever to touch the lambs that would be offered for Passover (another manmade, added tradition, recorded in ancient Levitical texts in the years between the testaments).

These Levitical shepherds took their job very seriously. So seriously that they not only had sheepfolds, they built watch towers so that they could see the entire pastureland. These towers, as it happens, also then gave them the best view of the road leading to Jerusalem. Because of this, in those texts written by the priests, we see that they’d written poems and songs with their own prophecies, one of which was that they, from their watchtower, would be the first to see the Messiah when he came.

They were probably thinking he’d come by that road. A king.

I find it really, really cool to realize that they were the first to hear the good news of Christ’s birth—while they were watching their flocks by night.

God honored that extra, manmade, added-on tradition, held in the hearts of His priests. Those shepherds—the ones who tended the Passover lambs—were the first to hear that THE Lamb of God had been born.

Ever wonder how we know what songs the angels sang to them in the field that night? Because some of those priests, those shepherds, those Levites were among the first followers of Christ. They were part of the earliest Church. They preserved and shared that song of praise, and it has been sung in Christian liturgy ever since. I get to sing it every week—it’s called “The Gloria.” (Does that give you shivers?? That totally gives me shivers!!)

Another “extra” tradition is what we know today as Hanukkah. This festival commemorates the miraculous preservation of oil in the Temple during the days of the Maccabees, which kept a lamp—the sacred lamp kept in the Holy of Holies—burning during some of the darkest days of Israel. You won’t find this story in what we call Scripture. But it is Jewish history preserved in many other places and still celebrated today.

Jesus kept that festival—you’ll find that recorded in the Gospels using one of its other names, either the Festival of Lights or the Feast of Dedication (depending on your translation). He celebrated it. He didn’t call it out. Yet many Christians today feel they have “permission,” so to speak, to doubt that this miracle ever happened, because it’s not in “scripture.”

I say if it’s good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for me. 😉

And there are so, so many traditions that sprang up surrounding the Passover, which Jesus not only didn’t correct, but which He fulfilled. That’s why I want to talk about it in this context, as part of my series.

First, let’s look at some beautiful and gob-smacking traditions surrounding the manna.

In the years between the original Exodus and the time of Christ, the Jews had mused a lot about this miraculous bread and what it really was. We have their thoughts preserved for us in writings like the Talmud and the Targum, as well as in Exodus, Joshua, the Psalms, and the Catholic Wisdom of Solomon (not part of the Protestant Bible).

In the Psalms, the manna was referred to as “the bread of the angels,” which led the Jews to believe that this bread existed in Heaven, and some mused that if was truly the supernatural bread that fed the angels, then it must have pre-dated the Fall.

Consider the implications of that for a moment. If you believe that theory, then it means that the strange bread that fell like dew was stored up in heaven, where it had been created in the first days of the universe, before Man had damaged the world with sin. It was food not affected by the fall—which couldn’t be said of anything we grow on earth, that we have to toil for, that is subject to blight and disease. Yes, the manna would rot after 24 hours…but only by the word of God, evidenced by the fact that it didn’t one day of week, when it would remain fresh for the Sabbath.

So if manna pre-existed the fall and (obviously) the Exodus, that meant that it was stored in heaven. And if the angels ate it then, they were still eating it now, which meant it still exists in heaven. By that theory, it is something kept in a heavenly storehouse—in a heavenly Tabernacle that our earthly ones were meant to imitate—which the angels ground like wheat, and which God literally poured out for His people during the forty years of the Exodus “like rain,” but which has not “run out.” It stopped because they didn’t need it anymore, not because God didn’t have enough to keep giving it.

Which led to another of these traditions, these expectations. Those looking for the new Moses, the new Messiah, who would lead them to a permanent Promised Land (heaven), expected that this new Moses would behave in some key ways like the original Moses. First and foremost: he would reintroduce manna.

Jesus was well acquainted with these expectations—all first century Jews knew of it, though whether they believed it or not was a big part of what determined which sect they belonged to. The Sadducees, who did not believe in a bodily resurrection or a physical heaven, had no reason to believe in an angelic bread on which those bodies could feast, nor to expect it to make a reappearance, because they didn’t expect any other messiah to ever come. The Pharisees, on the other hand, did.

And again, Jesus did not correct this expectation, this tradition—He fulfilled it. He in fact instructed His followers to pray for that “daily bread,” that miraculous manna, to be given to them every day. And then He instituted a tradition of His own that gave us what? Bread. Which is offered every day.

Jesus, my friends, gave us a new manna…just like these extra, man made, added-on traditions had said the Messiah would do.

I’ve already mentioned in a previous post that the Bread of Life sermon in John 6 is bookended with references to the manna (if you haven’t read that recently, take some time to do so!). Have you ever wondered why? This is why. Because these people to whom he was speaking in the synagogue at Capernaum, were looking for a new manna. And He was basically saying, “You want new manna? Well, I am that new manna. I am the bread of life. To partake of that heavenly life, you have to eat my flesh and drink my blood.” Their response? They left him. It was too hard. It was taboo. It was gross. And Jesus didn’t pull back. He pushed harder. He told them it was the only way to partake of eternal life. He mentioned that He—in the flesh, in the very flesh He would offer to them, in the very flesh that would become that new manna, that bread, that Passover lamb—would ascend back to heaven, where that manna was stored.

It’s a hard teaching. It was hard for the first-century Jews, and it’s proven a stumbling block for plenty of Christians throughout the ages too, who’d rather soften it, pull back, and call it nothing but a symbol.

But the manna wasn’t a symbol. That first manna, it didn’t represent bread. It was bread. It had nutritional value. It kept them alive for forty years. And when God said “put some in the Ark, in the Tabernacle, to be preserved forever as a testament,” it didn’t rot. It stayed fresh and able to be viewed for thousands of years.

We can’t mean to say that Jesus’s offering, His manna, was less than that, can we? That it is less of a miracle? Less “real”?

Jesus knew the expectations of the people around Him. He knew the traditions. Yes, He challenged some of them. He fulfilled others. Some He observed quietly, without any commentary that we still have. Others He called out. Many He clearly approved of, because He made a point of incorporating them into His great sacrifice. (Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that He inspired that unfolding understanding through the years because He already knew what He would do.)

I understand the pitfalls of traditions—that sometimes we can make the wrong ones. Sometimes they let us fall into a routine that doesn’t mean anything to us anymore. Sometimes we can use them as a crutch. But there’s a very real reason that God created traditions. And it’s also just part of humanity to build on the work of those who came before us, so that we reach a deeper understanding of things over time.

It’s true in science. It’s true in medicine. It’s true in literature. And it’s true in faith. We are standing on the shoulders of the theologians and believers and saints who have come before us, and that is a beautiful thing.

But if we dismiss everything “added,” we honestly don’t understand how we ended up where we are. A prime example of that is the Last Supper. Jesus was following during that meal, not just the tradition that God handed out word-for-word to Moses, but the tradition that had developed over the intervening centuries: the Passover Seder.

And that’s what we’re going to talk about next time.

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Word of the Week – Cheat

Word of the Week – Cheat

Back in the days of absolute monarchy in Europe, property wasn’t quite what we think of it as today. Oh, you could own things…but the Crown could confiscate it at any moment. For that matter, if you died without an heir, guess where your holdings went? Yep–back to the Crown. Ultimately, everything in a country belonged to its monarch.

And they didn’t forget it. In fact, they had someone whose sole job was to reclaim land or possessions for the Crown (lower lords had these too) in certain cases. This person was called an escheater, because they handled the echeat–this reversion of property to the monarch or lord. The word came from French echete, which means “inheritance,” which in turn comes from the Latin excadere. Both of these are legal terms and legal offices.

But here’s the thing…the people who held those offices? Yeah, they were notoriously corrupt, just like tax collectors were infamous for being. They would seize property they had no business seizing and keep it for themselves. They would skim off the top of what they handed over to the king or lord.

So though cheater was a legal term for that office from the mid-1400s onward, by the late 1500, it had come to mean “someone who deprives unfairly” and cheat had become a verb that meant “trick, deceive, impose upon.”

The idea of someone being unfaithful in a relationship didn’t come along as a meaning of cheat and cheater until the 1930s. Not that the concept was new, of course, but that was the first this word had been used for it. 😉

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Why the Passover?

Why the Passover?

Last week I talked about how communion is our “daily bread,” and how “daily bread”—a phrase Jesus gives us in the Lord’s Prayer—is in fact a callback to the manna God provided in the Old Testament. If you haven’t read that one yet, you can find it here.

But of course, if we’re going to be talking about Jesus’s sacrifice and the institution of the Last Supper and truly understand all it means, we have to look at the Feast during which He gave us this meal: Passover.

If you’re anything like me, you’ve read the story of the original Passover enough times that you could recite the gist of it without any trouble. Even so, there are things that I’d never paused to consider, and many of those things were expounded upon and then referenced by the Jews and Jesus. So having a good grasp of them is crucial to understanding the context in which Jesus acted and spoke.

First, something that really stood out to me when I was studying it this time was that when God instituted the Passover, He didn’t do it even then as a one-time thing. He created it as a tradition. Isn’t that just remarkable? How often in life do we really know when something is going to be such a big deal, so earth-shattering, so amazing that it will become an annual holiday we observe?

I didn’t know when I woke up on October 23, 2005, that I was going to have my first baby that day. I didn’t know when I woke up on September 26, 2020 that my son was about to be diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes. My husband certainly didn’t realize on that warm January afternoon last year that he was going to slip, sprain his ankle, and it would impact his health for the next fifteen months.

But God obviously knew what He was doing (yeah, go ahead and laugh at the absurdity of that statement. I did.). And He did it on purpose. Which is to say, He did it with purpose, and He made it clear from the first word to Moses that this purpose was not just for NOW but for FOREVER. He didn’t just give him instructions to carry out, he gave him instructions for how to turn what was about to happen into a memorial to be remembered for all time.

Few things in history have such gravity. Few things were handed down with such direct orders. Not just do this but you will always do this. On this day of this month. Obey these traditions. Why?

Because it matters. Because it was so, so important that God’s people never forget what He was about to do.

Because it was the foreshadow, the foundation of what He would do later.

So God instituted the Passover tradition, and it was to be planned out well. On the tenth day of the month, each family was to select a lamb. (I wrote about that part already, here.) On the fourteenth day of the month, they were to slaughter the lamb. Some of its blood was to be smeared on the doorposts and lintels of their houses. They were to roast it whole, innards still in there. They were to eat it with unleavened bread, sandals on, travel clothes in place. Ready to leave.

Let’s pause for  just a moment and talk about the unleavened bread. Why? Because I love to bake, and this fascinates me, LOL.

So—yes, this is a total side note—I just learned about einkorn flour. Einkorn is the original wheat, what they would have eaten in the days of the Old Testament. It’s a kinda finicky grain, and it doesn’t have a high yield, so it didn’t take long for mankind to start breeding better-yielding varieties like spelt. Einkorn has been preserved only as an heirloom, hobbyist strain. Because of that, it has never been altered, neither by natural cross-breeding of strains nor by genetic alteration.

Today when we make a nice sandwich loaf, we use yeast. But yeast, as something you can buy on its own, is relatively new. It’s always been there, but not as a separate product. Back before you could just purchase a packet of jar of the stuff, you were relegated to the yeast that occurs naturally in your grain, and in order to have a fluffy loaf, you had to give those natural, “wild” yeasts time to do their work. And that could take a while.

We’re not talking an hour or two. We’re talking overnight. We’re talking a starter of fermented dough and water that is continually added to, sourdough style, used until it’s nearly gone, then fed again. That leaven, that yeast can go for years or decades or even centuries if you pay attention to it, add more, and use a little bit—it only takes a couple spoonfuls!—to start your new bread to rising. (“A little leaven leavens a whole loaf,” you know.)

This ancient grain, though, doesn’t have the same gluten that newer grains possess, and the rising process took way longer than our all-purpose flour does today. Rising times are typically double. (Flavor is, too. Just sayin’.) So the fact that the Israelites weren’t to give their bread time to rise meant a whole lot more. I admit that I’ve read that part before and thought, “Sheesh, it doesn’t take that long. What was the big deal?” But it was. Because it didn’t take a couple hours, it took half a day or more. My first sourdough loaves with this ancient grain took fifteen hours. Fifteen!! And these weren’t all inactive hours, either. It requires a lot of tending, turning, kneading, rising, moving, dusting…not a simple, hands-off experience.

It all started to make sense, then, LOL. That was the bread-baking God was telling them to forego. He said to simply mix the flour and water and bake the bread like that, then and there. What you ended up with was a flat cake of bread, usually baked in a circle. Make a note of that—it’s going to come up again in a couple weeks. 😉

Anyway, back to Passover. The meal was to be eaten in haste, together as a family. Note that this is part of the instructions, as clearly as killing the lamb and smearing its blood. The sacrifice alone was not enough. The blood being shed was not enough. They had to eat the lamb.

Why?

This goes back to the very nature of a covenant, which is something that moderns don’t really do much anymore. But in the ancient world, covenants were the things by which families were made. They weren’t a legal contract that said “you do this, I do that.” They were an oath that said, “I am yours and you are mine.” Marriage was not a contract, it was a covenant. When God made Abraham His child, it was a covenant. When He took Israel as His people—something He likens over and over again to marriage—it was a covenant.

Covenants are always, always sealed with a meal. I’ve looked before at the meaning of the word companion, which literally means “one you break bread with.” Why do we have a reception after a wedding? After a baptism? After pretty much all our big-deal life events? Because sharing a meal with someone means, “We’re opening our family to you.” It means, “We are no longer strangers, we are bound together.” Which is also why it feels weird to have a meal with a stranger, in a way it doesn’t feel weird to sit beside them on a bus or in a classroom. Meals invite conversation. Opening of hearts. Who do you eat most with in life? Your spouse, your children, your parents, your siblings. Meals, in a very important way, give us life. Sharing that has historically been one of the most sacred things two humans can do, and it’s why hospitality has such deep roots in ancient cultures.

The Passover meal is the part that God told Moses was to be repeated every year, forever. Obviously the Angel of Death was not going to make an appearance again, year after year. Firstborn sons were not going to be killed on that night, forever. But He instituted a tradition with that meal, and through it, He gave a way for His people not only to remember the history, but to remember the covenant.

The people demonstrated their acceptance of this covenant by participating in the meal. Again, not just obeying the command to kill a lamb and use its blood, but to eat it.

Later, after the Law was given by Moses, each tribe appointed elders to represent them. And Moses took those elders up onto the mountain to basically make this new covenant official, and have you ever noticed what they did? There, up on the mountain? They beheld God, and they ate and drank. (Exodus 24:9-11)

I had never noticed that before! Had you?

Those elders saw God. Not, presumably, His face, but Him in a key sense. And the natural response to this was to eat and drink. Because this created that covenant with Him. This sealed them in relationship with Him.

We see, then, why it came as no surprise to His disciples when Jesus instituted a new covenant through…a meal. That same meal, in a way. He did it during the Passover celebration. And yet, in some key ways, He made BIG changes. We’ll talk more about those later.

For now, just dwell on that. The old covenant—both the original given to Abraham and the one made between God and all of Israel—was sealed with a meal. With the eating and drinking of flesh and wine. With a slain lamb and its blood.

A lamb that not only had to be killed, sacrificed, but consumed. And that meal was remembered every year through the Passover tradition. It was being relived that night in the Upper Room. The Twelve were thinking, then, about how God had delivered them out of Egypt.

And that was the stage on which Jesus made it clear a new deliverance was coming.

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Word of the Week – Fizzle

Word of the Week – Fizzle

Fizzle. You’ve used the word, I’m sure. I have. Heard it countless times. And we all know what it means.

But I bet you have no idea where it comes from–I sure didn’t!

Fizzle, as it happens, has the same Middle English origins as feisty, from the now-obsolete use of fist that meant…gas. You may or may not recall my post years ago on feisty, and how I will never ever use it for a historical heroine, knowing that it literally meant “stinking and gassy” and was used for dogs, LOL. Turns out, fizzle is indeed related.

From the 1500s all the way up into the 1800s, fizzle meant–brace for it–“to pass gas without a sound.”

Hoo, boy. This is a little boy’s dream word, isn’t it? LOL.

In the mid-1800s, scientists began to use it to describe the noise that air or gas makes when forced from a small aperture…which, as we all know from playing with balloons, bears a certain resemblance to a bodily noise. It was used particularly for the stopping of that sound…you know, when it fizzled out. From there, especially among American college students, it began to take on its metaphorical meaning of “to come to a sudden failure or stop after a good start.” Said college students would use it when their fellows didn’t answer a professor’s questions correctly.

Another word I’m going to have to be mindful of now in my historicals, LOL.

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