Good morning…
From worm to harrow, from insect to iron, from the Bible verse that concluded yesterday’s post on the evolution of our God-given-self, I did not know the meaning of the noun harrow. Harrow, as a verb, is more familiar to me. To actively harrow means to rob, ruin, ravage. To strip, spoil, severe. To destroy, devastate, demolish. When we feel puny as a worm or fragile as an insect, the verb harrow feels like a violent violation of our vulnerability. Maybe the noun harrow will bring us more relief?
Dictionary.com tells us that harrow, as a noun, “is an agricultural implement with spikelike teeth or upright disks, drawn chiefly over plowed land to level it, break up clods, root up weeds, etc.” OUCH. No relief here. With Dutch origin, harrow means “rake,” a heavy iron frame used to drag over plowed land, to break up hardened clumps, to remove pesky weeds, before covering and cultivating life-giving seed. A tidbit of relief is revealed. It seems to me that moving from worm to harrow, from insect to iron has something to do with God’s transformational power.
To further expand my curious mind, Dictionary.com uses a surprising example of harrow as a “verb used with an object.” Dictionary.com highlights the harrowing “(of Christ) to descend into (hell) to free the righteous held captive.” The human life of Jesus was robbed and ravaged, stripped and severed, destroyed and demolished as the Divine descended into hell to free us, righteous held captives. Is this definition really in our secular dictionary?
I myself do not like our world’s definition of the word righteous, so exploring further I learn that in Hebrew thought a righteous person is not one who lives a religiously pious life, the common interpretation of this word, he or she is one who follows the correct path, the pathway of God. Might this personalized pathway be a swath of inner soil harrowed, broken up and de-weeded, intended to cultivate God’s true seed within us?
From the harrowing cross, Christ descends down to join us in our own personal hell (mental, financial, relational, emotional, spiritual) to free us from crawling like caterpillars, captivated by the competitive crowd. In the womb, we were created with the unique DNA of a breath-taking butterfly. In the world, we are trapped in the body of a wiggly worm until God meets us in the hell that holds us captive, harrowing for us a personalized pathway, releasing us each to fly flamboyantly free.
“Don’t fear: I am First, I am Last, I’m Alive. I died, but I came to life, and my life is now forever. See these keys in my hand? They open and lock Death’s doors, they open and lock Hell’s gates. Now write down everything you see: things that are, things about to be” (Revelation 1:17-19, MSG).
…Sue…
