We were having practice last night for the upcoming Youth Fundraiser. I’m helping with the band, and last night we played through all the songs with the singers. One of the songs we’re playing is from the musical South Pacific. Like Broadway musicals of the period, the music of that song is a combination of pop and jazz elements.
There’s a brief moment of music between the first verse and the second where the guitar chords move rapidly through a series of changes that frankly I would never have thought to put together. Looking at the chord chart, the chords don’t make much sense– they don;t fit the key we’re in, they’re just plain, well, weird!
But when played correctly (the first few times don’t count!) they make tremendous sense to the ear. In the parlance of musicians, they are interesting changes. (By the way, thank you to musicians who allow me to use their parlance!)
Interesting changes are, in fact, essential to our enjoyment of music. Music with only one chord would be boring music. Music with only one note in the melody would be boring. My iTunes music library has 37 gigs of music– almost 17 days worth, if played continuously. So trust me, if I could only listen to one song, I’d find that boring– I need lots of variety, lots of different kinds of music suited for different moods and events in my life.
But change can have other connotations or meanings. For the ancient Greeks, whose philosophical wonderings became the foundation for the Western culture we all share, change was a sign of the imperfection of the world we inhabit. Change was proof that the world we inhabit is flawed and imperfect-- because it has so many different variations of things, because it goes through all sorts of different changes as it moves along. They reasoned that if it was perfect and complete, it wouldn’t need to go through so many changes– change is only necessary when things are incomplete, immature, imperfect. Change, while necessary in this world, was a necessary evil. It was a continual reminder of our essential imperfection.
They reasoned that the essential element of perfection was completion. That which is perfect is finished and has no further need of undergoing changes. The realm of the Divine was thought to be filled with perfect, unchanging Forms which were the spiritual archetypes of everything we find in the material realm. These Forms were complete– they contained within themselves everything that was needed to express their complete identity.
And the true Divinity was also perfect in that same way. The Divine could not experience want or need, because the Divine was complete in itself. The Divine could not change,for change was a sign of growth,of further development, of deepened understanding or broadened experience– all of which was impossible for the Divine. The Divine was by definition complete in itself, fulfilled, without any further need of any kind.
This way of thinking find expression in various places in the New Testament, perhaps no more more explicitly than where we are told in James 1:17 that “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.” (KJV,for emphasis) The Father of Lights is described by James here in some quaintly-turned phrases. God has no “variableness,” no change in intention or thought or action. God exhibits no “shadow of turning,” no sign of movement from the perfect position God holds within the light.That which is perfect in essence and perfect in its position has no need to move, and casts no shadow that reveals a change of position.
This view of God, fully in line with the Greek understanding of things, is a bit at odds with the more Semitic views of God expressed in the Old Testament. The depiction of God in the Old Testament shows a God who plays, who experiments, who experiences all manner of feelings (rage, anger,love, tenderness, wrath, empathy, to name a few) and who exhibits at times some changing even of mind and intention. Raging about the faithless children of Israel in the wilderness, God offers to destroy them all and start over with Moses. Moses intercedes for the people of Israel and appeals to God’s sense of how He might be viewed among the nations of the world, and “the Lord changed His mind.” (Exodus 32: 7-14) Search the phrase “God repented” in the KJV at Bible Gateway and you’ll find three Old Testament references to God “repenting” of an evil He intends to do the people of Israel for some serious failing they have indulged.
The point? Well, one point is that the Bible holds several different and sometimes hard-to-reconcile views about God. God is unchanging, except when God changes His mind. God is complete, perfect, like the image of the Divine held by the Greek world, except when God is experimenting (like all the different animals God makes for the first human in an effort to find a suitable companion for the human) or torn by Divine emotions when considering how best to deal with the people God has made. (See Hosea 11 for this kind of Divine back-and-forth, where God determines to destroy faithless Israel and then seems to take a breath, count to ten, and remind us and even God’s own self that God is Divine and not mortal, One whose ways are higher and different from the ways of mortal people. Also, I’m serious–see the above mentioned passages showing God relenting or repenting.)
Another point go all of this might be to see how all of these views about God change over time, evolve and take new shapes and forms as God’s people experience more of God and more of the world God has made. The nomadic and tribal people of the ancient Old Testament saw God as their accompanying warrior, directing them into battle and fighting on their behalf against their enemies. The more settled agrarian Old Testament people saw God as a shepherd, as the giver of the produce of the land. The urban, monarchical Old Testament Israelite saw God as a super-King, one who wielded authority throughout the creation in the manner of an earthly king who wields authority throughout his earthly realm. These images carry over into the New testament, finding expression in the parables and teachings of Jesus. But Paul, ministering in an urbanized and Hellenized (Greek-speaking and Greek-thinking) culture, never references God in the pastoral images of shepherd but rather expands the descriptions of God in Christ to include mystical ideas of the Cosmic Christ who inhabits all of creation and who holds it together moment to moment within the very being of the Divine (Colossians 1, for example). These additions mirror Hellenic culture and its religious practices and viewpoints.
Perhaps the Greek worldview that sees change as bad, as a sign of imperfection, is an outmoded viewpoint. Perhaps living in a dynamic and ever changing cosmos– a cosmos created in just that way by the God whom we worship– we could come to see change not as a sign of imperfection and lack but rather as the energy of the cosmos that provides unending creativity. Perhaps the impulse to change, to grow, to expand and deepen and broaden, is not a sign of the failure of the created order to be perfect but is in fact the gift of the Creator to all of the creation.
Perhaps change is not foreign to the Divine, but is our perception of an inherent quality of the Divine One. Perhaps what we experience by our own limited ability to perceive as “change” is really the inclusion of all possibilities within the realm of the Divine– all existing together, all in harmony, each one welcome and blessed and in the place where it was created to be. We come across something or someone different and think we have discovered a “change” when in fact we have simply stumbled across yet another example of the infinite variety of All That Is, made possible by the infinite and loving creativity of the Creator.
And like chords that make no sense to the eye as they are read but that make sweet sense to the ear when they are heard, perhaps rather than judge all of the differences and changes we encounter by our prior way of understanding things we should instead “taste and see the goodness of the Lord.” (Psalm 34) Perhaps before deciding not to play the chords we are given to play because they don’t make sense in terms of our previous understanding, we should try to play them.
Perhaps in our experience of them they will come to make even better sense than all we knew before.
Blessings!
