The Bible often speaks to the feelings of those who are victimized, or who see themselves as such. Often, especially in the Psalms, the language of Scripture seems to mirror directly the subjective responses of the individual. It cries out for revenge, sometimes in the bloodiest terms, or at least vindication. Show your power, Lord, and smash them! At least, stand up and show them you’re on my side! Scare them, humiliate them, put them in their place, show them who’s Boss!
Vindication! How well I know that desire. Sometimes I’m afraid that it is the deepest desire I have. Help me, God! Relieve my fear and humiliation and disappointment. Put me back in a place I remember. Make it all right again.
Then, there are the real victims.
The Hebrew people in Jeremiah have been forced into exile, far from their homes and orchards, under harsh foreign domination. It sounds like today’s Palestinians.
God shows to Jeremiah a vision of two baskets of figs, one with perfect, ripe young fruit, the other with fruit that is nearly rotten, inedible. As with the image of fruit that appears later in the Gospels (John 15), this is a stark image of judgment: the good fruit are the favored people, those who will be preserved and redeemed; the bad fruit, not so much. But here we are very far from self-pity or false victimhood. This is the voice of prophecy and the promise of justice. Those who are hurt by men will be comforted by God: they will be brought home, they will know abundance. It is, again, the promise that echoes through the Gospels.
This image is to be with us as a token and a reminder, even those of us who have never seen a real fig.
Two baskets. If we pick through our memories and our self-knowledge, each of us can sort what we find into two baskets like these.
For me, certain memories have been handled so much over a lifetime, recalled so many times and in so many ways, that finally I am not sure if they are real memories or something left over from a dream, truth in the literal sense or the truth of the imagination or spirit. These are things that I keep in the good basket. They are not always happy, or perhaps not yet happy; they have the potential or destiny to become so. They are indelibly real.
In one, I am a child with my family on a cross-country automobile trip, and we have stopped at a motel next to some great expanse of farmland. My brother and I are about twelve years old, both of us wiry and tough. For no reason, we decide to go running in the fields. We just run, not speaking, for what seem hours, up and down the rutted tracks, to some distant landmark and back. The fields and the warm evening absorb us. We are without limits.
In another, I am driving down the dark, decrepit back street where my grandparents lived and where my mother grew up. It is a run-down former mill town of southeastern Massachusetts. I am here on a business trip from my current home in southern California, the first visit in many years. My parents and grandparents have been dead for more than a quarter century; practically all relatives are dispersed and lost. I cruise down the street in a rented car, very slowly, grasping at every detail. A tall young woman hurries lightly down the sidewalk wearing a thin overcoat, her dark hair in a long, plain style of the 1940s. She turns the corner and is gone.
Now, I am a very young child, less than ten. It is a bright cold day, sometime in late winter or early spring. Those from the northeast may recognize this kind of day. A good layer of snow has melted, leaving the lawn completely under water. Then, overnight, the temperature dropped, thinly icing over the water that covers the grass. Somehow, the memory goes, I got out of the house in my bare feet, and I make my way across the yard, crunching gingerly through the thin crust into the freezing water beneath. The sun shines brilliantly on the transparent ice. The grass is green and soft.
Somewhere, C.S. Lewis makes the claim that in Hell, everything previous will seem also to have been Hell, whereas in Heaven, similarly, everything previously experienced, no matter what it seemed at the time, will be shown equally to be part of that same Heaven ( The Great Divorce, p. 69).
