Binding and Loosing while the rain pours down

Binding and Loosing while the rain pours down

By Bobby Neal Winters

Jesus gave Peter the power to bind and to loose.  A lot of time has been wasted by Protestant and Catholics over what that means and its scope.  Before there were even Protestants, the Eastern Orthodox argued with the Catholics over it.  There have been enough people arguing over it for a long enough time that clearly I am not needed. 

What I am curious about though is the particular phrasing: binding and loosing. Jesus was speaking metaphorically, but metaphors refer back to concrete objects.  What sort of concrete objects pop to mind, if Jesus were talking to someone like this.

Well, Jesus was a carpenter. 

My avocation of woodworking is not far from that.  I use wood glue to put boards together.  A lot of folks use screws, but I am not sure there were even screws back then.  If there were, they would’ve been expensive.  There were nails, but all of the nails were individually made and quite expensive.

However, one thing was much less expensive and widely available: rope.  You could cut your joinery with such tools as they had available, and tie the pieces of wood together.  So Jesus could have been referring to a familiar image from his own profession.  Peter, you are building a church. What you put together will be put together; what you take apart will be taken apart.   

I will come back to this later, but in the meantime let me talk about Noah, that is to say, the story of Noah and the Ark.

Those of us who went to Sunday School as children are quite familiar with this story.  Sunday School teachers love it.  It’s got animals in it; it’s got drama. There is a rainbow at the end.  They always--and I do mean always--skip the bit after the rainbow, but we can too.

Even though I’ve been through this multiple times over the course of my 6 decades of life, I noticed something new this time.  In the creation story, God creates the Cosmos by separating the waters from the waters.  At the end there is the water above the firmament--in the sky--and the water beneath the earth.

While it did rain for forty days and forty nights, the Flood consists of more than rain. It was more than rain coming from above the firmament.  Water billowed up from below as well.  In effect, God undid his creation.  It was the end of the world.  But then the waters went back from whence they came, so the world was created again, created anew.

At that End of the World, God went to Noah to build the Ark. God had created the world, he was certainly capable of building an Ark for Noah, but he chose Noah to do it. So God gives us the information and the inspiration to help ourselves if we are obedient to him.        

But it occurred to me that this makes Noah a carpenter. A carpenter like Jesus.

The first Christians, called the Church Fathers, thought of Noah’s Ark as a symbol of the church.  In our baptism ceremony, this is referenced to God saving those on the Ark through water.

So it occurs to me--and please talk to me privately and correct me gently if I am wrong--that Jesus talking to Peter is very much like God talking to Noah. Jesus is saying, build the boat; put the church together.  However you build it, that’s the way it’s going to be done. 

The carpenter is telling the fisherman to build a boat.

While we might disagree on manners of worship and church organization, I bet a lot of us can agree that it’s raining in a metaphorical sense and it doesn’t look like it’s going to stop even after 40 days.  

Well.  Time to go back to the woodshop and get some more glue on my hands.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.