Worship in the Desert
“The desert and the dry ground will be glad. The dry places will be full of joy. Flowers will grow there… Everyone will see the glory of the Lord. They will see the beauty of our God.” (Isaiah 35:1-2)
Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges told the story of a Babylonian king who constructed a labyrinth so complex that all who dared enter became lost. In time, an Arabian king visited the Babylonian court. His royal host, intent on mocking his rival’s simplicity, invited him to navigate the maze. The hapless guest meandered to and fro in humiliation, escaping at nightfall only by calling upon divine aid. Uttering no complaint, he told the king of Babylon that he also possessed a labyrinth and would be delighted to show it to him someday. Returning home, the second king mustered his army, waged war against the Babylonians, and took their king captive. He tied him to a swift-footed camel and rode into the desert for three days. “You lured me into your labyrinth; now I will show you mine, which has no stairways to climb, doors to force, or walls to block your way!” Then, loosening the Babylonian king’s bonds, he left him to his fate in the heart of the Arabian sands.[1]
Images orient us in the world.[2] For the ancient Israelites, the sanctuary and its symbols attuned them to their primordial garden home amid a desolate wilderness. The sanctuary was an echo of Eden, where God dwelled with His creation and they with Him.[3] José Granados noted that this view of the world as a symbolic home gave way in modern times to an understanding of the world as a labyrinth, a puzzle to be solved only from beyond its walls. If the ancients grasped the world by dwelling in its symbolic richness, moderns sought to master it by distancing themselves, unraveling its mysteries from the height of their scientific observatory. This resulted in what sociologist Max Weber called the “disenchantment of the world.”[4]
In the postmodern era, Granados observed, another set of conditions prevails. Symbols are often reduced to the “malleable avatars” of digital culture that can be manipulated at our whim. Having extricated ourselves from the constrictions of modernity, we now create and recreate symbols and images to suit ourselves. As freeing as this may seem, in the digital desert, “every symbol is a mirage, a projection of capricious subjectivity.”[5] Such liberation only results in becoming disoriented in a seemingly meaningless void.
Is it possible to escape the disenchanted and detached world of modernity without wandering after illusions in the desert? Can we find our way home to a place of divine dwelling? What images might orient the people of God in the shifting sands of contemporary culture? And how might these images inform Christian worship, whose task is to shape our imaginations toward God and His world?
To explore these questions, my presentation at this year’s Andrews University Music and Worship Conference will enter the “tangled thicket” of John’s figurative world.[6] The prologue to his Gospel announces that the Word became flesh and dwelled (or “tabernacled”) among us (1:14). As the New Temple (2:19-21), John’s Jesus becomes a life-orienting image for would-be worshipers, a symbolic home for those roaming the deserts of ancient and contemporary spectacles. Even as God becomes flesh, the created world becomes a “storehouse of symbols” that can reveal its Creator, offering a multitude of signs through which God’s glory shines.[7] Indeed, Jesus transfigures the darkest and bleakest of deserts into a worshipful dwelling brimming with beauty and joy.
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Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph and Other Stories 1933-1969, tr. and ed. By Norman Thomas di Giovanni (New York: Dutton, 1978), 89-90.
Margaret Miles argued that images are “life-orienting” and, therefore, religion cannot afford to abandon them to the secular realm. See Margaret R. Miles, Image as Insight: Visual Understanding in Western Christianity and Secular Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985), 152.
See Gordon J. Wenham, “Sanctuary Symbolism in the Garden of Eden Story,” Proceedings of the World Congress of Jewish Studies 9 (1986); and Angel M. Rodriguez, “Eden and the Israelite Sanctuary,” Ministry Magazine, 74(4), April 2002, 11-13, 30.
In his 1917 Vocation Lectures, Weber said, “The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world.” See Max Weber, Science as Vocation, tr. and ed. by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Free Press, 1946).
José Granados, Introduction to Sacramental Theology: Signs of Christ in the Flesh, tr. By Michal J. Miller (Washington D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2021), 13-14.
Ruben Zimmerman, “Imagery in John: Opening up paths into the tangled thicket of John's figurative world,” in J. Frey, R. Zimmermann, J. G. Van der Watt & G. Kern (Eds.), Imagery in the Gospel of John: Terms, Forms, Themes, and Theology of Johannine Figurative Language (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006).
John Painter, “John 9 and the Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel,” Journal for the Study of the New Testament, 9(28), 1986, 31-61.