City Walls, pt 1by Matthew Clark | One Thousand Words
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Become a Patron PartnerI depend on the support of Patrons like you to make podcasts, music, books, and more. A one-time or monthly gift makes a huge difference!Click HereLittle Judah was bringing me his favorite rocks. He is six years old. Two of his older brothers and I were talking through the story of the Israelite’s slavery in Egypt all the way up to the Passover. It was a bright sunny day—everything in sight glad to be drying out and warming up after yesterday’s rain. Since it had rained, it meant the kids couldn’t play in the muddy yard. We all just had to be outside though, and so there we were on the front porch.
Judah would disappear for a few minutes, then return with another rock in his palm for me to see, interrupting the story in his delight. He was disappearing in order to go wash the rocks in the kitchen sink. He seemed to especially love the smooth parts where long tumbling and water-wear had made something as hard as stone feel soft to the touch. He would take my hand and guide my fingertips to the places that were particularly smooth, “Feel how smooth this rock is, Mr Matthew! Right here, see this spot here?” he repeated time and time again.
Judah’s stones remind me of the ones young David picked from the riverbed on the way to meet Goliath, and they remind of a lyric from a favorite album of mine by Matthew Perryman Jones, called “The Land of the Living.” From what I understand, Jones wrote the album after the death of his father. So, it’s a grief album. I was listening to it a lot during my own season of grief about a decade ago. The lyric I’m thinking of goes, “The stones for the city walls were pulled from the riverbed.”
In the opening song of the album, Jones describes being in that place of darkness after loss that feels like drowning. How will we survive this? He concludes that grief is a mystery, not to be solved, but to enter into, singing, “Fall into that mystery or it will pull you under.” Somehow, if we submit to that mysterious darkness, something like a baptism might happen to us, making a way for our hearts to be built into something new even after everything has been broken to pieces.
The best stones for the city God is building are the ones smoothed by the water-wear of baptismal grief. It’s these stones that will be lifted up by the Great Water-walker, Jesus, and incorporated into the structures that give shape and glory to the Kingdom of God, the structures that hospitably house the presence of our Wounded Healer, Christ.
Lately, I’ve been catching up on Bible Project podcasts, most recently a series on the theme of cities in the Bible. It was episode two of this series, “Why Cain builds a city,” that got me thinking along the lines of what I’m writing about today. Go give it a listen for all the nitty gritty details, but here’s the gist:
There’s a literary link built into the wordplay of the Hebrew of Genesis 1-4 that connects God’s creation of woman with Cain’s building of a wall around himself. After God says, “It is not good for the man to be alone,” he builds from the man’s side a creature that will make it possible for the human to rightly image God in the world. The word for this creature is Ezer, and Tim Mackie says a great translation would be “delivering ally.” This is what the woman is meant to be. The only other uses of this term in the Old Testament are in reference to God himself as humanity’s Delivering Ally, so it’s a beautiful and strong office to hold, isn’t it?
Tim and Jon go on to discuss how things fall apart, and Adam and Eve’s children suffer. Cain kills his brother Abel and is banished. Cain is terrified to go out into the wilderness. Why? Because it’s dangerous and people will hurt him. So, God offers him some protection. But the next thing Cain does is go and build a “city.” The idea of a city in the original text is very different from our modern idea. It just means a dwelling with a protective wall around it. So, Cain builds a wall around himself—that’s the idea. Why? Because his sin has left him lonely and afraid, and, even though God has offered him help, he can’t relax, so he takes matters into his own hands. He’s going to secure himself from his apparent vulnerabilities. He walls himself off.
Tim and Jon point out something very interesting at this point that is not visible in our English translations. The word for Ezer and the word for walling ourselves off have been intentionally chosen in the original language to sort of visually rhyme. In other words, the authors are playing with the words in such a way that we’re meant to pick up on the fact that what Cain is doing in walling himself off should be set in direct contrast against God’s way of addressing our vulnerability by providing an Ezer, a Delivering Ally. Walls and Ezers are opposing means of addressing human needs, limitations, desires, and fears.
It’s worth noticing that needs, limitations, desires, and a certain kind of fear are part of God’s design even prior to the arrival of sin in the world. Adam, before his Delivering Ally Eve arrives, needs another person if he’s going to get from the not-good of loneliness to the very-good of relational personhood, which is the only thing that can rightly image God’s true nature in this world, since God is three persons in relationship. The human, prior to the arrival of the Ezer and of sin, has limitations, desires, needs, and fears.
Could there be fear prior to the fall? If you think of fear as a type of healthy pain that helps us identify a legitimate need, I believe so. I’m afraid of falling off the cliff, so I step back. The food smells funky, I’m afraid I might get sick, so I throw it away. I’m afraid of being alone, so I call a friend. Fear is super helpful. Think about how the man felt after the naming of the animals failed to produce a proper counterpart. He may have felt a fear that he was doomed to loneliness. God takes that fear as a healthy indicator of a legitimate need, and then God, in his perfect love, meets the need for the man, alleviating the fear.
What I’m getting at is that humans were intentionally created as vulnerable. We need each other, and thrive only when given the opportunity to deeply attach in a loving context of collaborative care. We were never meant to be self-sustaining, or in any way complete outside of an interdependent relationality. I wrote a kid’s song for vacation bible school at my church years ago; the chorus says, “you can’t be a person without some more people.” The only way to be human is to enter into the vulnerability inherent in love, and have someone other than yourself meet you in those places of need, desire, limitation, and fear.
That’s the kind of life we were made for. And that’s the life that Cain refuses. Instead, he walls himself off. Like the lyrics of the song I mentioned above, Cain refuses to “fall into [the] mystery” of his own vulnerability, and builds a defensive, ragged rock wall of invulnerability around himself. But Christ is taken outside the city wall to be crucified, naked and vulnerable. He is our delivering ally, alleviating our fears through his wound-ability. Jesus does fall into the mystery of baptismal grief, and rises to build a city whose dazzling walls glimmer with smooth stones from the riverbed. The Gates of the City of God are made of pearls cultivated across the millenia, polished smooth and never closed, for the Lord himself will be its protector and provider.
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