Whiter than snow

As we prepared to depart Oslo, I shared with Rev. Terje Nilson that we’d be traveling to Bergen via the Bergenbanen, often cited as one of the most beautiful rail journeys in the world.

“When you get to Finse,” he advised, “pause and consider what is written in Isaiah 1:18.”

The thing about this train journey is that it begins on relatively low ground near the Oslo Fjord. It journeys south to Drammen at which point it makes a sharp turn to the north and simultaneously begins a rapid ascent. It’s climb upward into the mountains continues for hours until you reach Finse, an elevation of more than 2000 meters (well more than 1 mile) above sea level. Even though the weather on the costs is similar to Indiana currently, Finse is a different world.

At this point in the journey the train runs in and out of tunnels through mountains and courses across rail lines covered with reinforced beams, walls, and roofing to protect the train from avalanche. In one instant the train will be plunged into darkness and in the next it emerges into a blindingly, dazzlingly brilliant vista of white snow glittering in the sun. Snow is piled high over homes and roadways. It takes the eyes several minutes to adjust.

And so I recited Isaiah’s words of hope to the family as Terje had suggested, “ Come now, and let’s settle this, says the Lord. Though your sins are like scarlet, they will be white as snow. If they are red as crimson, they will become like wool” (CEB).

It’s easy on this journey to feel a bit discouraged about the direction of the world. A terrible war is raging in Ukraine. In Russia we see a Christiandom blessing the violence and greed of its political class.  

In Norway we have a front row seat to the continued slide of the West away from commitment to the form of Christianity we have known and found comfortable. What paradigms can or will emerge that will engage people with Jesus Christ or will their only be an apathetic, self-centered, malaise-filled materialism to replace Christian hope and practice? It’s easy to feel a bit despairing.

Then comes the word of the Lord, clarion and clear. The mercy of God exceeds all our mess. The old account was settled long ago. If the darkness and abyss of human action becomes clearer on a journey such as this, so too do the hope-filled promises of God by way of conversation with faithful persons in the presence of scripture.

As our train sliced through the drifts of snow I’m sure I grinned. As an Indiana farm boy I’ve seen snow. Once or twice I’ve seen A LOT OF IT. I’d never seen snow like this- nor as blindingly bright. I grinned to think that the author of Isaiah 1:18 surely hadn’t either. 

I smiled to think of the Hebrew prophet, who had perhaps seen a dusting of snow, glitter in the morning sun- white, pure, and brilliant as it melted quickly away- and compared all of this to God’s declarations of mercy for humanity that would be fully enacted in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.

I almost laughed within myself to imagine a conversation between the prophet and a United Methodist pastor from Norway. The prophet describes the mercy of God likening it to the whiteness and brilliance of snow. The Norwegian pastor, with typical Norsk humility, grins and thinks only to himself, “Buddy, you have no idea.”

The thing is that when we read scripture across cultures we can come to understand new dimensions of what God meant all along and perhaps dimensions that wouldn’t have been obvious even to scripture’s many authors. 

God doesn’t change, but God surely laid down trajectories of mercy, hope, and love in scripture that we continue to uncover the depths of by reading together with people whose experiences are vastly different from our own. There is hope in that. It is God’s hope spoken in ages past, available and decisive for all that is to come.