Anyway, we have the need for the redemption of the human race, which
must be God's greatest creative act. Therefore in it we must expect to find
God revealing himself through what he has created in the world to his
people living in that world.
One vital preliminary step in that redemptive process was the Exodus of
the people of Israel from Egypt. There was the abuse of technology lying at
the root of this particular problem --the forced labour of the Children of
Israel making bricks sadly not the first and a long way from being the last
of technological abuses. God revealed himself to Moses in the burning
bush, a phenomenon which still may puzzle scientists and technologists.
This was only the first of a series of extraordinary occurrences in which
God revealed His power and led to the escape of the Children of Israel
across the Red Sea and their eventual arrival in the Promised Land. These
events certainly showed to the Jews that their one creator God was in
control of the world around them and was therefore the supreme God, far
greater than those gods of the Egyptians. These events also showed God's
love for His people and how he provided everything for them.
At this point we come to another significant concept in Judaeo-Christian
thought which is that history is linear; there has been a beginning and
there will be an end. With the annual flooding of the Nile in Egypt and of the
Euphrates in Mesopotamia, those poeples could hold a cyclical view of
time, every event repeating itself from year to year. Somehow the Israelites
developed the linear concept which was to lead to one point of culmination
and vital significance the redemption of the world by a Messiah. We have
the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, leading up to
God, or the Son of God himself in Jesus Christ coming as Messiah. There
is a progression, an advance to Jesus Christ the Carpenter.
The redeemer of the world, the Messiah, had to reflect both the nature of
God the creator and man the created. The Christian claim that Jesus, as
part of the Trinity, is coequal with God, stretches back to the New
Testament. In St. John's Gospel, Jesus said, "If you have seen me, you
have seen the Father, I am in the father and the Father is in me". (Jn. 14.9)
Therefore in Jesus, we must look both for love and creativity. The creativity
we find both in Colossians, "We have Christ as Head of Creation" (Col.
1.15-18) and also in the start of St. John's Gospel, "In the beginning was
the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God". God spoke
and the world was created through the Word.
But why should the Word have been a carpenter, for after all carpentry is
not a frequent image in the Old Testament ? Abraham took wood with him
to sacrifice Isaac but this hardly counts as carpentry. The Ark of the
Covenant, the framing of the Tabernacle, parts of the Temple, all had to be
built of wood. Why was Jesus not a potter ? Jeremiah was sent to the
potter for inspiration (Jer. 18.2) and be shown how a potter could reform his
clay into different pots. This craft might have been considered suitable for
after all Jesus came to refashion people's lives. I can understand why
Jesus might not have been a smith because the smiths were so often
fashioning weapons of war: "Behold I have created the smith who blows
the fire of coals and produces a weapon for its purpose". (Is. 54.16)
Possibly one reason may be that a really good carpenter must have a deep
feeling for the wood with which he is working. In my own case, I never had
the patience to work with wood and found copper, brass and iron were
much easier because they were more homogeneous. Each piece of wood
is distinct and individual. The grain runs differently, or a knot comes just in
the wrong place. To fashion each piece of wood to its best advantage takes
real skill. What a training for the Saviour who would have to deal with all
the idiosyncrasies of human personality. The master craftsman can see the
full potential of each separate piece.
But skills learnt in the carpenter's shop do not form directly the basis of any
of the miracles of Jesus. There is the tale in the Apocryphal Gospel of
Thomas of how Joseph was asked to make a special bed for an important
customer. He must have measured the wood wrongly because one beam
was found to be too short. So Jesus came to the rescue and he and his
father took hold of opposite ends and pulled out the beam to its correct
length. (The Apocryphal New Testament, Oxford, p, 63)
In fact, the four Gospels contain few accounts of Jesus performing miracles
with objects in the created world. We can understand the significance of
turning water into wine or feeding the multitudes with bread for our later
Holy Communion. Calming the storm, the devils entering the Gadarene
swine, the withering of the fig tree are other examples where the miracles
did not involve healing people but were connected with the realm of nature.
We do not know all the lessons Jesus learnt during his forty days in the
wilderness when he was tempted by the devil and rejected the easy way of
compelling people to follow him through physical signs, and this may be
why he avoided them.
This is a lesson that all who aspire to be 'fishers of men' must learn. Like
Christ, we have to leave the inanimate, whatever skills we have gained as
master craftsmen, and have to turn to animate, living persons. Creativity
lies not in things but in people and can appear in all sorts of forms. At the
centre of our faith lies the Cross, that parody of the skill of the carpenter.
The Cross shows how people have that terrible capacity to turn good into
evil. The tree, that might have been carved into something beautiful in the
hands of a master carpenter, became an instrument of torture in the hands
of ruthless sinful men. And yet God was able to turn even that into the
greatest creative act the world has ever known, the ultimate sacrifice for its
redemption. Perhaps the symbol of the Cross is the answer to why Jesus
was brought up as a carpenter. The result of that sacrifice of the carpenter
on the tree is our redemption.
Surely this must point to the possibility of the redemption of technology
also. The human race may use those building blocks supplied to us by God
in His creation of the world either for good or for evil. The redemption of the
world through Christ on the Cross should lead to a new life with God and
the possibility of creating a better world around us. Then we might be able
to share St. Paul's vision,
"We are God's work of art, created in Christ Jesus to live the good life as
from the beginning he had meant us to live it". (Eph. 2.10)
O Jesu, Master Carpenter, who at the last through wood and nails
purchased our redemption; wield well your tools in this your workshop, that
we who come to you rough-hewn may be fashioned to a nobler beauty by
your hand; for your name's sake, O Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.