April 2009 Archives

Spoiler alert: If you haven't yet seen Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino, don't read any more here.

Clint was all Clint in his latest, Gran Torino, but he did a mighty fine Jesus, too. I'm assuming, given the spoiler alert above, that you've already seen the movie. I loved it, especially for its ending. But of course the power of that ending would be nothing without the story and character development that led to it.

By the end, we long for a dramatic blood-letting, a great ass-whooping of the nasty thugs, and we know that Clint is just the guy to do it.

Ah, the stately cedars of Lebanon. They are celebrated in the Bible as the tree of choice for the great Jerusalem temple built by Solomon with the help of his Phoenician friend Hiram, the king of Tyre. Solomon's own palace complex included "The House of the Forest of Lebanon" (1 Kings 7:2-5). So grand, these trees were the metaphor of choice to describe an indomitable king of Israel compared to his "thornbush" rival (2 Kings 14:9), the illustrious fate of a righteous person (Psalm 92:12), and the haughty might of Assyria at the peak of its power (Ezekiel 31:3). A generation after the great Babylonian war machine had razed Solomon's glorious temple, and the people could rebuild, it was to the cedars of Lebanon that they looked for the strength and grandeur that would grace their second temple (Ezra 3:7).  

Too big to fail? An article recently published in my hometown newspaper noted that global warming is jeopardizing these storied trees. 

That bit about the lion lying down with the lamb isn't actually in the Bible, not exactly, but never mind. It's such an evocative image, and we all know what it means -- peace, radical peace, serene and idyllic, right up there with beating swords into plowshares (which is in the Bible, twice for good measure). Right now, it's peace on my old office futon.