Sunday, June 18, 2006

He Stretched a Plank

Several days ago I was watching television and several stories from the apocryphal Infancy Gospel of Thomas were recounted. I had used at least two of the stories from this gospel as teaching tales in my book, The End of Reason. But there were other stories and one story, in particular, had eluded my grasp and I did not understand it. The story went that Jesus, while still a boy, was helping his father Joseph. Joseph had received an order from a rich man to construct a bed of specific proportions. When Joseph placed the wood in pairs before him, he found that one plank was shorter than another and that the bed could not be built. Seeing this, Jesus placed the planks next to each other. He grasped one end of the short plank and stretched it so that the length of the plank was now identical to the one beside it. Joseph wondered at this miracle. As this story was recounted, I understood at once what it meant.

In the workings of the world, men have specific expectations of God and fall into disbelief when God does not work in ways that they imagine He would or should. We are all of us subject to these expectations, though we should detach ourselves from them to see the truth of things. We expect, for example, Christ to heal the blind and raise the dead just as the Jews of his time expected Christ to become king, raise an army, and drive out the Romans. But this story, that he stretched a plank, seems odd and unnecessary; surely another plank could be found of the correct size. Yet the story, though it may be literally true, makes sense from a particular perspective. Such is the operation of God in the world, and this story is a parable of it.

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