The Finger of God

No one would dare accuse Pope Francis of being shy and reserved. Once again, the Twitterverse exploded this week with another easily prevented, and unfortunate statement. Pope Francis, it seems, has endorsed ‘the bird.’ And while the identification of the middle finger with the virtue of honesty is not exactly clear to me, I can certainly confirm that, when it is used as it commonly is, it definitely is sincere, if nothing else.

In the earthy, abstract-defying language that is ancient Hebrew, many times we encounter, sometimes in the very words of the Prophets, expressions and turns of phrase which we today would largely consider vulgar, or at least in bad taste. I often laugh at the long-suffering capacity of the editors of Lectionaries to airbrush out these embarrassing deviations from sanitized, suburban versions of the Divine Writ, to make them safe for the ears of soccer moms and kindergarten children alike. All kidding aside, I understand why it may be inadvisable to translate these things literally and directly into contemporary languages. There are too many of these to mention, but one which springs to mind as Lent draws near is the stark assessment of the Prophet Isaiah of the sinful human condition, stating that, according to the sanitized translation, that our so-called righteousness is like that of a “filthy rag” (Isaiah 64:6). Would that it were that good. Isaiah does not just call our righteousness something akin to an unwashed dishtowel or a dirty sock. He literally calls it עִדִּ֖ים, iddim, a word which is directly related to the Hebrew verb for menstruation. Of course, in Jewish culture, ritual purity is and was considered extremely important, and so this adjective carries special weight. But to put the matter bluntly, and perhaps even in a vulgar way, Isaiah is not comparing our unrighteousness to an oversight in bourgeois hygiene. Our sinfulness is as appalling and ugly as wearing a used tampon. If this image provokes our disgust, that is precisely the point the Prophet is trying to make: our sins are, quite literally, the ugliest, most disgusting thing about us, far surpassing even the most appalling of living conditions or the grossest, nastiest habits humans practice.

Even Our Lord, being human and sinless, was not prevented in his speech from using what may be considered in context mildly insulting language: he directly calls King Herod “the fox”, or τη αλωπεκι (Luke 13:32). Saint Paul, of course not sinless, makes what many today would consider a racist remark, calling the people of the island of Crete “liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons” (Titus 1:13), a direct quote from Epimenides of Gnossus, whom Paul even calls “a prophet”! This casual racism was still quite prevalent in the first century Roman Empire; as Ovid shows, mendax Creta (lying Cretan) was a commonly held view. Even the Greek verb kretizo, etymologically derived from “Crete” or “Cretan”, commonly meant “to lie”. So Our Lord and his Apostles, it must be acknowledged, did utilize words and idioms that were not always sweet and gentle. Certainly, these and other examples challenge us to see Our Lord and the texts inspired by the Holy Spirit outside of an bourgeois, “Instagram Catholicism”, with all the difficult passages and sayings edited out, all the rough edges smoothed. In an era when so much of our public discourse, in media, government and business, is so carefully polished, crafted and edited, the refreshing bluntness of Sacred Scripture serves to shake us from our torpor.

I find it interesting that in these days, our public discourse is so manipulatively phrased, so formally good while materially mendacious, while our private discourse seems to degrade with each passing day, with so much casual vulgarity and crassness used in everyday language. Perhaps it has always been this way, but concomitant with the collapse of education seems to be the collapse of what we used to call ‘manners’. Not all vulgarity is necessarily sinful, as the Biblical texts time and again demonstrate. Sometimes vulgarity, or ‘bad manners’ in speech and action, can be used like hot spice on an otherwise bland dish. Yet just like spice can overpower a recipe, so too if vulgarity is widespread and pervasive, it loses its power to shock and to transgress, and so crosses the line into the merely banal. You cannot have ‘bad taste’ if you burn your tongue off.

Pope Francis’ tweet also led me to reflect on another aspect of “the finger”, which is once again related to the anthropomorphisms of the Old Testament, as well as the Hebrew language: the repeated references in Scripture to God’s digits and limbs. Scripture is replete with the praise of God’s “strong hand and outstretched arm”, a phrase so powerful it is found, in the Torah alone, at least seven times. “The finger of God” is mentioned several times also in the Torah, and even by Our Lord himself, when he states, “if it is by the finger of God that I cast out demons, the Kingdom of God has come to you” (Luke 11:20). The finger of God is synonymous with his power to create, and his power to save. Perhaps most famously, Michelangelo painted his fresco on the Sistine Chapel of the Creation of Adam, with that magnificently vigorous, yet tender, extension of God’s finger to the recumbent Adam.

Even the Church’s liturgy has used the image in order to sing God’s praise and invoke his power. The sublime hymn Veni Creator Spiritus calls the Holy Spirit dexterae Dei digitus, literally, “the finger of God’s right hand”. In so doing, the Latin beautifully weds the traditional Hebrew image of God’s finger with the traditionally Roman/Latin identification of the dexter, the right hand, with God’s strength, justice, and righteousness. In the light of Trinitarian theology, directing this invocation toward the Holy Spirit in particular is a stroke of genius, because it identifies with the sharpness of mystical intuition (perhaps the Spirit’s Gift of Understanding) the presence of the Holy Spirit in the Old and New Testaments. The Holy Spirit is the love exchanged from all eternity between the Father and the Son. This love, mysteriously, is also his power and his eternal omnipotence. God is one uninterrupted act of ceaseless, timeless love, and like all the qualities we may ascribe to God, there may be only one that is not apophatic, that is, known by the process of negation: it is that God is love according to his essence. Therefore, every one of God’s actions in time is a manifestation of that aboriginal charity.

Truly, I don’t mind Pope Francis trying to use the hands, and even the fingers of the hand, to teach us some lessons about honesty and resisting the lure of corruption. Yet at the same time, although I am sure the length of this short essay far exceeds the acceptable length of a tweet, some concepts merit being examined more closely, because with this, as with so much in the magnificent content of our faith, there is so much within arms length, if only we are willing to reach out and touch it, through prayer, study, and hard work.