Naked

Genesis 2:4-25

²⁵ They were both naked, the man and his wife, and they were not ashamed.

Hebrews 1:1-14

³ This Son is the radiance of the Sh’khinah, the very expression of God’s essence, upholding all that exists by his powerful word;

John 1:1-18

¹⁷ For the Torah was given through Moshe; grace and truth came through Yeshua the Messiah.

At the Hermitage, lately we’ve been talking about vulnerability. Off we go to the dictionary—Vulnerable

adjective  1. capable of or susceptible to being wounded or hurt, as by a weapon: a vulnerable part of the body. 2. open to moral attack, criticism, temptation, etc.: an argument vulnerable to refutation; He is vulnerable to bribery. 3. (of a place) open to assault; difficult to defend: a vulnerable bridge.

The first thing I noticed was that all the definitions seem to relate to a state of hostility; war; attack and defense. (Except for the bridge one, which I left out, mostly because I’m pretty sure Jesus didn’t play bridge.)

On to synonyms for vulnerability: susceptibility, weakness, insecurity, instability, openness, defenselessness, and uncertainty, to name a few.

None of the dictionary definitions, or synonyms, address any of the positive aspects of being vulnerable. Still, there is a strong cultural current that is ‘currently’ moving (Pun intended, sorry!) in the direction of vulnerability as a positive thing. There is even a Ted Talk on “The Power of Vulnerability,” which is an oxymoron if I ever heard one.

Still, look at the scriptural themes that echo that idea. ‘You must die to live.’ The last shall be first.’ ‘The greatest among you will be the servant of all.’ ‘He emptied himself, taking the form of a slave.’ ‘His power was brought to perfection in weakness.’

So I think it’s fair to say weakness might not be a bad thing. So, now I’ve gone the long way round to get to the word “Naked.” The Greek word is: gymnotēs, from gymnos—“naked.” (I thought it was cool that the word gymnasium means “a place (or school) for naked exercise.”)

What grabbed me first in today’s readings was the phrase, “naked and not ashamed.” I’m fairly sure that the Hebrew word “naked” in Genesis meant nothing more than “physically unclothed,” but in the New Testament, a word that means the same thing: ‘physically naked’, is often deliberately used to mean a type of spiritual nakedness, with the intention of recommending such nakedness as consistent with Christian practice.

So here in Genesis we have a picture of innocence and purity exemplified by unashamed nakedness. In Hebrews we have a picture of a human being who is literally “the radiance of God,” as well as “the expression of God’s essence.” In John we have a stern reminder that the Law was given through Moses, not through the Messiah; instead, the gift given to us through the Anointed One was “grace and truth.” I can’t help but think that this is an admonition against the dangers of putting Law before Love. (When I was teaching Karate I often rebuked my students for what I called “making up rules.” It’s a human foible, the habit of deciding that things should be a certain way, and from that point on, refusing to consider other options, as well as enacting a kind of moral coercion to enforce such purely idiosyncratic rules, without ever observing that those very same rules were self-generated.)

I also noticed that the words of the Gospel were not “given by,” but “given through.” It would seem that this is a defining characteristic of God’s gifts ---God’s power, God’s Spirit, God’s Light—all are gifts given through human agency. Always. As my grandmother used to say, “No ifs, ands or buts about it!”

In our discussion about ‘vulnerability’ we noted that the difficulty of practicing the same (especially for the military veterans whom my fellow resident at the Hermitage serves) is that of getting out of the context of combat, battle and war. It’s a significant challenge, to change the metaphor enough to allow our unconscious cultural assumptions to stop interfering with our acceptance of the idea. One of the alternatives to the word “vulnerability” that we came up with was, “trust.” That didn’t quite fit the bill, but came a little closer to the constructive meaning we wanted to imply. The root of vulnerable comes from the Latin word for “wound.” It occurred to me that what we are really after is the sort of honesty that is comfortable with being breakable.

I felt a pull to look in the Tao te Ching and found this from Ursula LeGuin’s English version:

“What seeks to shrink

must first have grown;

what seeks weakness

surely was strong.

What seeks its ruin

must first have risen;

what seeks to take

has surely given.

This is called the small dark light:

the soft, the weak prevail

over the hard, the strong.”