Let's get married

Haiku for staying sober.

Laban asks Jacob,

What wages shall I pay you?

Give me your daughter.

Jacob loves Rachel.

She is beautiful. I’ll work

seven years for her.

Her father agrees:

Better you than another.

Seven years flew by.

At the wedding feast,

much wine. In the lamp’s dim light

sisters look the same.

Next morning. Behold:

Leah, the older sister!

Jacob’s not impressed.

The deal was Rachel!

Jacob protests. We agreed;

You pulled a swiftie!

Laban makes defense:

The elder must marry first.

That is our custom.

Take the honeymoon

week, then wed the younger one.

Do seven more years.

Left without much choice

Jacob completed the week,

then he wed Rachel.

(Don’t use the bible

to argue marriage practice;

it’s fraught with problems!)

© Ken Rookes 2023

All in the family

 

All in the family

Haiku of embarrassing nomenclature

Instructed by God,

prophet Hosea marries

prostitute Gomer.

It happens. A man

becomes smitten. Takes a chance;

It might just work out.

Marriage and message

jumbled in the prophet’s life.

Call that commitment!

Filled with sin, the land

has played whore with other gods.

A faithless marriage.

Prophet and harlot

have a child. Name him “Jezreel,”

place of death and blood.

A daughter this time.

Call her “Not Pitied.” Israel

is not forgiven.

A third child, a son.

Make his name “Not my people.”

I am not your God.

Yet, in the end, grace;

hope. They will be called “Children

of the living God.”

© Ken Rookes 2022

Questions

Haiku of entrapment

Questions to test him.

Two to cause him to stumble,

one that shuts them up.

Sadducees bowl up

marriage and resurrection.

He hits them for six!

He quotes the scriptures,

affirming resurrection:

God rules the living!

A lawyer enquires:

Which commandment is greatest?

The answer is Love.

For God and neighbour,

love is the first requirement.

All else is detail.

Asks his own question:

How is David’s son the Christ?

They have no answer.

Questions that challenge,

call, confuse and confound. We

ask, and we answer.

© Ken Rookes 2020

No resurrection?

Haiku for questioners

No resurrection?

Not the way Jesus saw it.

Does that make him right?

Sadducees say no,

life is finite. We live once,

end of the story.

Myself, I waver;

does that mean I’m lacking faith?

Please don’t condemn me.

Should that day arrive

and we stand before God’s throne,

all must trust in grace.

The Sadducees bring

their convoluted question:

whose wife will she be?

Jesus laughs them off;

marriage has no purpose then,

in the life to come.

Offering his own

complex logic, Jesus proves

that the dead are raised,

God rules the living,

that is what really matters;

serve the living God.

© Ken Rookes 2019

The Holy Longing

Janis Joplin was once asked what it was like being a rock star. She replied: "It's pretty hard sometimes. You go on stage, make love to fifteen thousand people. Then you go home and sleep alone."
   Jesus was once asked, as a test: If a woman marries seven times and all her husbands die before she dies, whose wife will she be after the resurrection? He answered that, after the resurrection, we will no longer marry or be given in marriage.
   These two answers, Janis Joplin's and Jesus', are not unconnected. Each, in its own way, says something about the all-embracing intent of our sexuality. What Janis Joplin is saying is that, in our sexuality and our creativity, we are ultimately trying to make love to everyone.
   What Jesus is saying is not that we will be celibate in heaven, but rather that, in heaven, all will be married to all. In heaven, unlike life here on earth where that is not possible, our sexuality will finally be able to embrace everyone. In heaven, everyone will make love to everyone else and, already now, we hunger for that within every cell of our being. Sexually our hungers are very wide. We are built to ultimately embrace the universe and everything in it.
-Ronald Rolheiser OMI
The Holy Longing

These men

These men, leaders among their people,

strut their masculine importance

as they confidently command the teacher’s attention.

They put forward their testing question;

it has a decided hint of misogyny,

and more than a suggestion of male power.

Is it OK for a man to remarry

after discarding his woman?

Is it OK to use and abuse,

to beat and mistreat,

and to replace with a younger model,

the old one, when she has become worn and tired?

Your hearts are hard, impervious,

he tells them,

shaped by millennia of patriarchy and law.

But no, it isn’t right

for a man to do so;

nor a woman, for that matter.

Your partnerings are from God.

Your intimate comings together, too,

are precious gifts;

celebrate their blessings

and allow them to flourish.

© Ken Rookes 2015

Whose wife will she be?

When we have finished living,

after we die,

we will continue to exist; in some form.

So Jesus is recorded as saying

as he responds to the improbable scenario

put to him by a group Sadducees

endeavouring to ridicule

notions of resurrection.

This state of eternal existence will be quite unlike

that which we have previously known,

here among earth’s red dust;

he tells them.

Don’t expect family reunions,

welcoming friends

or the lovers embraces

so favoured by our imaginative reassurances

in times of grief.

And there will be no opportunity

to complete or to add

to the life that has been concluded.

The goodwill we have sown,

the love we offered,

the peace we made,

the grace by which we lived

and the hope, joy and laughter

we spoke, danced and sang;

these alone will stand.

Gentle, sometimes unnoticed,

they witnesses to the reality

of our faith and worship.

 

It is enough.

Would it be so terrible

if the Sadducees were right?

© Ken Rookes 2014

It is enough.

Would it be so terrible

if the Sadducees were right?

© Ken Rookes 2014

questions that matter

"So here are these Sadducees, learned men who are members of the branch of Judaism that does not believe in a resurrection after death. These Sadducees finally get to encounter Jesus. This is their moment--this is their time in the sun. Yet, this is what they say: Teacher, if seven brothers die in succession and each marries the same woman, one after another, to whom is she married in heaven?

Excuse me? Here they are before the Christ--the Anointed One--and this is the best they can do?

There is a Jewish saying that says, “Rake the muck this way; rake the muck that way. It’s still muck. Meanwhile we could be stringing pearls for heaven.”

How often do we waste our time raking the muck instead of stringing pearls for heaven? How often do we waste our time playing word games instead of seeing the Christ right in front of us?

There’s a character in one of Saul Bellow’s novels who says, “I had boasted…how had I loved reality. But…unreality. Unreality, unreality! That has been my scheme for a troubled…life.” Well, let us ask ourselves if that is our scheme as well? Do we avoid the reality of questions that matter?"

http://day1.org/814-love_the_questions

Let's get married.

The nightmares of recent weeks
did not retreat with the decision
to allow his betrothed
to leave quietly, and have the child
in a far place among distant relatives.
There the shame
would not be so bitter.
the girl was young and pretty,
and would soon find a new husband,
and a father for her child.
The pain of her apparent rejection
was sharpened by the love
still twisting the stomach
of the gentle carpenter,
who had toiled with mallet
and chisel for many years
so that he might take a wife.
He had not seen it coming;
refused to believe it
until the swelling evidence
could no longer be denied.
So, when, in a dream, the angel
spoke of the strange purposes
of an even stranger God,
Joseph grabbed the offered straw.
Copping the nudges and the sneers,
he took Mary home to be his wife.



© Ken Rookes
An old one for this week.