I always sort of wondered what Pip meant in Lord of the Rings when he goes, "the closer you are to danger, the further you are from harm." What does that even mean?
So last week, we finished studying Judaism in my History of World Religions class. We learned a lot about the "Talmud" and "oral Torah", or the sets of interpretations and rules created to help people "implement the Torah into their every day life without inadvertently disobeying it." For instance, the Torah says that "you shall not boil a kid in its mother's milk." The Talmud developed a massive amount of regulations around this passage - it forbids cooking any meat in any milk, forbids eating them at the same meal, and forbids putting dairy on the same table as meat. This because you never know where you bought the meat, you never know where the milk came from, and you might accidentally disobey the Torah and cook a kid in it's mothers milk unless you "put a fence around the Torah." That is the goal of the oral Torah - to "put a fence around the Torah" and help people live purely by not allowing them the possibility of sin.
I like fences. I put up a lot of fences in my life. Usually I have a "good intention" - to stop from sinning. First off, that's wrong because I'm confusing "not sinning" with "following God," and they aren't always synonymous. I can be "not doing" all sorts of things and I'm not necessarily walking closer with God. Secondly, I'm focusing entirely on myself and my sin rather than God. Thirdly, I'm forgetting that God is the one who protects me from sin, not me. But most importantly... I am so focused on my sin, on my failures, on the danger of being close to sin, that I've failed to realize that I'm choosing control and safety over dependence on and intimacy with Him. Because either we will be in control, or God will be in control, but we cannot both be in control. My white picked fences (or barbed wire fences...) aren't about holiness, they're about power and me attempting to keep a pleasant image of myself intact. Any chance that I will cease to "look good" and "act good" and I get nervous. But God calls me to those places where a trip and a fall is only one step away, and when I fall He picks me up, and when I panic because of the danger, I turn to Him.
"The closer you are to danger, the further you are from harm." So the higher up the tightrope is, and the closer to the edge your house is built, and the darker the sky is on the night that you set sail... the more you look for Him. Risk! Strike out! Live where the only hope is Him.
No building fences around the Torah, Laura-girl. Get close to danger. Don't build a fence - let Him make you a sword.
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