SOMETHING THERE IS THAT DOESN’T LOVE A WALL
I’ve used the mild days this week to pick up winter’s debris around our yard and to mend some of the damage caused by snow, ice, and freezing temperatures. Doing so brought to mind one of Robert Frost’s best-known poems. In “Mending Wall,” he describes how he and his neighbor go after the spring thaw to mend the wall that defines the boundary between their farms.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it, And spills the upper boulders in the sun; And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
“Good fences make good neighbors,” Frosts neighbor says. Frost, on the other hand, seems doubtful of this proverb’s veracity, thinking instead that there’s something inherent to reality itself “that doesn’t love a wall.
Our human impulse to love a fence or a wall has been around a very long time. The earliest walled city in the world is located on the West Bank. Jericho is a mostly Palestinian city and hence hemmed in by Israel’s 30-feett high and 10-feet wide concrete walls that seal it off from its Palestinian neighbors. Jericho’s earliest wall was built shortly after the permanent settlement was established circa 8300 BCE. This wall is dwarfed by Israel’s modern wall. The Upper Paleolithic wall around ancient Jericho was only 12 feet high and six feet wide at the base. Pretty impressive for a village that housed fewer than 1,000 inhabitants. It probably could not have turned back a determined early Bronze Age army intent on capturing ancient Jericho and its 1,000 or so inhabitants, however.
If it was not built for military defense, then why was it built? Some archaeologists propose that Jericho’s walls and those of other ancient near eastern cities were really not about military defense and keeping foreigners out. Instead, they propose that walls may have been designed to impress the people who lived behind them. Walls were all about projecting an image of prestige and power to puff up residents’ self- importance. Or maybe building a wall, which required a lot of complex social organization, was how a local ruler consolidated social power by organizing everyone for a common project.
Walls eventually did serve a defensive purpose, however. Many centuries after its original Upper Paleolithic wall was built, Jericho’s residents had replaced it with new and improved Bronze Age walls to keep out those pesky invaders who’d escaped from Egyptian slavery and were marching around the city doing nothing more than blowing on trumpets and praying. They were wrong. No matter how strong those impressive walls looked, they “came tumbling down” because they were no match for Joshua, son of Nun.
Archeologists and sociologists assert that keeping strangers out isn’t the only purpose ancient city-states built walls. Walls can serve to imprison people within rather than keep them out. Historian Owen Lattimore observes that the Great Wall of China was built not just to keep out threatening barbarians but also to keep Chinese taxpaying farmers from fleeing to land outside the Middle Kingdom. The wall erected between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers by the early Mesopotamia kings likewise may have been built less to keep raiding Amorite barbarians out than to keep the kingdom’s laborers and farmers from escaping what was essentially a form of enslaved bondage.
The ancient Hebrews are one exception to this universal desire to build walls that simultaneously exclude strangers and control insiders. The Torah that God delivers to Moses on Mt. Sinai instructs the Israelites to welcome the stranger or sojourner, remembering how they once were alien workers who had been ill- treated behind the mud-brick walls of Egypt. Their spiritual forebearers Abraham and Sarah had fled the walled cities of Mesopotamia to move with caravans of migratory workers and traders into Caanan. Since Jesus was crucified outside the gates of Jerusalem, the author of Hebrews tells us, we are to follow Jesus outside those walls that human nature is eager to build between people. (Heb 13:13). Jesus’ commandment to love as God first loves us (our assigned lectionary reading for this coming Sunday) is about compassion, not control; about the expansiveness of a boundless love, not about how good fences make good neighbors.
God, the Bible repeatedly insists, is a bridge-builder, not a wall-builder.
This Sunday’s gospel reading is paired with a reading from The Book of Acts. It describes Peter and the conversion of Cornelius. Between Peter and Cornelius there should have been a very high wall: One was Roman; the other, Jewish. One was a military officer accustomed to commanding; the other, a common fisherman; One was a foreign, colonial occupier; the other, a member of an oppressed people. Yet Luke describes how God’s Spirit breaks down these cultural, political, emotional walls and makes into one in Christ these two very different people. “You yourselves know that it is unlawful for a Jew to associate with or to visit a Gentile,” Peter says. “But God has shown me that I should not call anyone profane or unclean.” So when Cornelius sends for Peter, he breaks down the walls that separates them and builds a bridge across the chasm of their differences. “I truly understand that God shows no partiality,” Peter proclaims, “but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to God.” (Acts 10:28-29, 34). And then in this Sunday’s reading from John 15, Jesus describes how even the wall that separates servants and masters no longer matters. “I do not call you servants any longer … but I have called you friends.” (John 15:15)
We are living in a time when individuals and societies everywhere are building walls rather than establishing bridges across our differences. In such a world, God in Christ calls us to be bridge-builders rather than wall-builders. As Robert Frost muses, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” That “something” is God’s Spirit of reconciliation that constantly seeks to overturn all the walls we humans instinctively want to build. God’s Spirit is always working to overturn the stones of every wall in order to build a bridge, not a wall. To make, as Frost says, “a gap where even two can pass abreast.”
Easter blessings,
Pastor Thomas