Christianity, Culture

Snow

by Phillip Ross • December 21, 2006 • 0 Comments

I understand that Colorado is being deluged with snow. Here’s a poem I wrote following an overnight four foot snow (average) in December 1996 in Central Pennsylvania.

The Lord Also Snows
by Phillip A. Ross

Thus says the Lord:

I come to you as snow,
Living water blowing where I will,
On the wings of the Spirit.

I come to you as snow,
In the quiet of the night
For the beauty of the new morn.

My purity feeds your deepest springs,
And fills the wells from which you dip
The source of life.

I cleanse away the sins of iniquity,
And cover your folly
With a blanket of purity.

Who can face my brilliance in the light of day?
Who is not overwhelmed by my generous abundance?

But woe betide to the unprepared,
To whose who do not know my way,
Who will not heed my prophets.

I come to you gently in my season,
In beauty unsurpassed,
A beauty of consequent magnitude.

I hide not my coming from you,
Hide you not from my coming.

Published in the collection, Daybreak on the Land, The National Library of Poetry, 1997, â€œEditorâ€™s Choice Awardâ€, and in Visions of Faith, Triumph House, Peterborough, United Kingdom, 1998.

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Christ came to free people from bondage to the law of Moses, but not through the absolute abandonment of all law. Paulâ€™s training as a Pharisee made him the most biblically competent of the Apostles, which is reflected by his dominance as an author of the New Testament letters. My intention here is not to impose a foreign metanarrative upon the text, but to reveal the actual metanarrative of the Old Testament in the light of Christ as Paul presented it to the Galatians. That metanarrative was not what he had been taught as a Pharisee, nor what they had been taught by the Temple establishment. It was shockingly different, but it made undeniable sense of the Old Testament. The Temple establishment version was full of ancient mystery and symbolism that was difficult to understand, and cast the role of Israel as the hero of the story. Paulâ€™s version, on the other hand, was clear, simple, and practicalâ€”though it required the abandonment of much well-established Temple superstition. Paulâ€™s version cast the role of Jesus Christ as the hero.

While understanding the story of the Old Testament in the light of Christ is not difficult, abandoning our own false presuppositions about it requires some personal tenacity. Jesus continues to challenge our ideas about who we are and our role in history, Godâ€™s story. The story that Paul grew up with was the story about the importance and purity of the Temple. But the story that he learned from Jesus was about the corruption and failure of the Temple. Similarly, Christians today are Sunday-schooled in the importance of the institutional church, but the actual ongoing story in the light of Christ is about the corruption and failure of the church as an institution. In the following pages you will see that this story has played out over and again throughout history because of the pertinacity of sin.