Calling
Well there’s nothing like discovering you have got hold of the wrong end of the stick! Seems I read this picture totally wrong – though I was always told in college that “there are many meanings”…
Stephen Cottrell aligns this picture with Luke 11:11-12,
11 Which one of you fathers would give your hungry child a snake if the child asked for a fish? 12 Which one of you would give your child a scorpion if the child asked for an egg?
The suggestion, that God will indeed give his son a scorpion when he is craving food (p58).
This picture is quite clearly wilderness. Gone are the green grass, the tall trees and the blooming flowers of Consider the Lilies. This is a brown, barren landscape. Cottrell suggests,
He is asked to receive the thing he fears, the thing that could kill him (p59)
That pretty much sums up where Jesus’ life was heading, once he left the wilderness of temptation. Will he take up his calling?
And for us? What do we struggle with? What is our calling? Can we take it up? Or will we drop it and run?
These thoughts are reflecting on Spencer’s painting The Scorpion (seen here at the bottom of the second page).
This year for Lent, I am reading Christ in the Wilderness by Bishop Stephen Cottrell, published by SPCK, reflecting on Stanley Spencer’s paintings of that title.
I’m not necessarily going to blog every day on it, just when something leaps out at me – and they will be thoughts rather than full blog posts
Pam's Perambulation 