“How pulchritudinous on the mountains are the feet of those who bring good news!”
That’s my translation of Isaiah’s famous prophecy, which sadly is the only way I can get to use pulchritudinous, a word which I bumped into the other day. Both inelegant and pretentious, this Latin-derived word simply means beautiful.
Not a word we would want to use, let alone speak, but as a word it is right up there with supercalifragilisticexpialidocious and antidisestablishmentarianism.
Earlier this year it was my privilege to congratulate Tom Shakespeare – how’s that for a name - who chairs my daughter’s oversight group, on his correct use of the word antidisestablishmentarianism in an appropriate context on BBC’s Question Time, no less.
And the greatest sports headline of all time has to go to Paul Hickson, sub-editor at The Sun, following Glasgow Celtic’s unexpected defeat at the feet of Inverness Caledonian Thistle some 24 years ago: Super Caley go ballistic, Celtic are atrocious. Brilliant!
The Bible has some long words, not least names in the Old Testament. How about Mahershalalhashbaz (Isaiah 8:1) or Zaphnathpaaneah (Genesis 41:45), which seem somewhat excessive? And the New Testament?
Luke – being a doctor of course – chooses to use a ridiculously long word in his second letter to Theophilus, what we now know as the book of Acts, the story of the early church. He wasn’t to know it, of course, but he penned the longest word in the New Testament.
The context is the apostle Peter sharing the Gospel message with the centurion Cornelius, quite possibly the very first time he had such a conversation with a non-Jew, about the resurrection victory of Jesus following his shameful death on the cross.
Then the apostle gives the crunch line: “He was not seen by all the people, but by witnesses whom God had already chosen—by us who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead.” (Acts 10:41) Strangely the phrase ‘whom God had already chosen’, five words in English, is just one word in the original Greek: prokecheirotonēmenois.
It's a difficult word seeking to answer a difficult question, why did the risen Jesus only appear to what are to us, the select few, say around 550 – to include the “five hundred brothers and sisters” (1 Corinthians 15:6) mentioned by the apostle Paul?
Why didn’t the risen Jesus appear to Pilate or the high priests, why didn’t he stand in the temple courts to show that he was alive? Why not do what would be for us the obvious?
But this seems to be the way God works in his world. Even at Jesus’ birth, which we are about to celebrate, why did the angels take their message only to a group of shepherds? By any account these outcasts are disqualified by law as reliable witnesses.
And at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, even the devil seems nonplussed. “Why not throw yourself down from the highest point of the temple to be caught by angels?” Surely a guarantee of instant celebrity! In its own way, a sensible suggestion. It’s what we would have done, if the truth be told.
All we can say is that this is God’s modus operandi, and here the word prokecheirotonēmenois gives us an insight. Actually, it’s several words stuck together. Cheir/hand and toneó/raise refer to the voting process, people being deliberately selected for a particular task by the raising of hands.
Those who witnessed the risen Jesus were carefully chosen by God, key people entrusted with a task of the first order. Privileged yes, but an awesome responsibility.
These are key people – but again, probably not the ones which we would select. As far as we can see, ordinary folk – no-one from the Jewish establishment or the Roman elite.
And then the prefix pro meaning before. As one commentator commented “God is always in charge because He is always "previous!" I don’t think we fully realise the extent of God’s presence in his world – it’s so obvious we don’t actually see it.
So Peter seeks to convince Cornelius but what he may not know is already known to us as readers of the narrative. Cornelius has been prepared by God for his encounter – the previous day he had a remarkable experience, a vision of an angel who actually set up the encounter between him and Peter.
The result is that effectively Peter is pushing on an open door so that the Holy Spirit falls on, believe it or not, Gentiles, non-Jews!
This was to become a key encounter in the life of the early church, so much so that Luke gives us one and half chapters to this single incident to include Peter’s lengthy explanation to the church in Jerusalem.
It’s as if Peter can’t quite believe this himself: “If then God gave them exactly the same gift as he gave to us when we believed on the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I to think that I could hinder the working of God?”
Here we see the pro of prokecheirotonēmenois in action. God is ahead of the game, so-to-speak. His hand, his selection, his rich blessing,
Comentarios