Whatever it takes

Several times in the past week, as the River Thames extended into Chertsey, the Somerset Levels became a new Lakeland and the beach at Dawlish incorporated the former railway the Prime Minister has stood and declared that he/the Government will do . . .

WHATEVER IT TAKES

 

I admit that in first hearing this I felt a little stirred and comforted (though not directly of course, living a few hundred feet above a river).  That may have been its intended effect. 

But then he's kept on saying it and now I'm becoming more analytical.  Because it's nonsense, isn't it?

 

King Canute, despite his supposed error of sitting enthroned on a beach as the tide came in as if he could prevent it, wisely actually said "Let all the world know that the power of kings is empty and worthless and there is no King worthy of the name save Him by whose will heaven and earth and sea obey eternal laws," (Historia Anglorum, ed D E Greenway).  It seems likely he deliberately set out to show he could NOT do 'whatever it takes'.

The problem, of course, is that in the face of powers too vast for politicians to control the simple, obvious thing for human beings to do is to turn to God in repentence and prayer.

But when Mr Cameron says the Government will do whatever it takes he does not in fact mean what he says if, as I suspect, what it takes is repenting or prayer . . .

Tides

Looking at the wreckage - physical, psychological, economic - from the great tsunami tide in Japan my memory triggered a strangely reminiscent picture that I saw in the Maritime Museum in Liverpool.  It is called 'Waiting for the Tide'

In Hoodless's painting all the big things - the river, the steamer, the famous waterfront buildings - are peripheral to a chugging tug and a pile of stuff that is just lying there, as on docksides things do.  Waiting.

While the tsunami leaves everything washed up and waiting - waiting to be found, waiting to rebuild, waiting to return - other tides are waited for.

This is why, in so much Biblical imagery, the overwhelming wall of water that has so devastated thousands of lives is, rather, a picture of blessing - he will come like a pent-up flood that the breath of Yahweh drives along.  The Redeemer will come to Zion, to those in Jacob who repent of their sins, declares Yahweh.

There is a flood that rescues as well as a flood that destroys.