If I ever have a cat, I will name him “Schrodinger.”
I will never have a cat. Which is too bad, because that’s such a great cat
name.
In 1935, Austrian physicist Edwin Schrodinger
proposed a thought experiment that involves a cat locked in a box with a
mechanism that could, under certain circumstances, kill it. His point was that
until you open the box, you can logically conceive the cat as both alive and
dead at the same time.
And he was taken up
between the heaven and the earth.
Two interesting features about this picture: First, Absalom has
no mule, and, second, Absalom hangs in a tree. The mule was a royal beast, the
limo of ancient Israel. Three times the official ceremony of transferring a
throne refers to an exchange of mules. (1 Kings 1.33,38,44) Absalom’s mule
abandoned him; his kingdom rode out from under him. Absalom was “hanged” in the
tree. (v.10) That Hebrew verb describes the death of the God-accursed. (Dt
21.23)
Schrodinger’s cat: No kingdom beneath, no Heaven above, locked
in a man-eating forest with a deadly foe who can kill him or spare him. And
meanwhile back at headquarters David sits suspended between hope and despair,
his beloved rebel simultaneously dead and alive. “Absalom,” as Walter
Brueggemann remarks, “is suspended between life and death, between the sentence
of a rebel and the value of a son, between the severity of the king and the
yearning of the father. He is no longer living, because he is utterly
vulnerable, but he is not dead.”
Then someone opens the box.
“As
he entered a village, ten men, all lepers, met him. They kept their distance
but raised their voices, calling out, "Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!” (Lk
17.12-13) “And, behold, a woman
in the city, which was a sinner,
when she knew that Jesus sat at meat in the Pharisee's house, brought an
alabaster box of ointment.” (Lk 7.37) “The woman was a Greek, a Syrophenician by nation; and she besought him that he would cast forth the devil out of her daughter.” (Mk 7.26) “And, behold, there was a man named Zacchaeus, which was the chief among the publicans, and he was rich. And he sought to see Jesus who he was; and could not for the press, because he was little of stature. And he ran before, and climbed up into a sycamore tree to see him: for he was to pass that way.” (Lk 19.2-4)
We
meet them daily: neglected, rejected, suspected, suspended between the empty
air of their own failed efforts and the silent sky of a righteous Heaven. And
the Son of David sits on His throne and wonders, because He has trusted us with
a set of orders: Deal gently, for my sake. He once dismissed the royal beast
that bore him to let His feet dangle above Calvary’s accursed ground. He once
bounced a powerless prayer off a brass Heaven which hovered over Calvary’s
cross. He satisfied a righteousness wrath in order to purchase a righteous
gentleness.
Then
He shut up His beloved rebels in earth’s box alongside His trusted servants.
What will Our Lord find when He opens that box?
Letting the Cat out of the Bag,
Doug
Additional idea: “The Kojak Effect” – men with shaved
heads perceived as more manly, less handsome: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443437504577545163545785108.html
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