“Surely the LORD is in this place, and I knew it not.” [Gen. 28.16] – May I speak in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Pale Fire, a novel by Vladimir Nabokov, provides us with a remarkable case study in human self-delusion. The first part of the book contains an unfinished autobiographical poem by John Shade, an American academic who has recently been murdered. The poem is followed by an extensive commentary written by Charles Kinbote, Shade’s colleague and literary executor. Kinbote has fled west with the only copy of Shade’s poem, in order to evade the attempts of other academics to recover it. The novel Nabokov gives us is, as it were, Kinbote’s edition of Shade’s poem.
Slowly but surely, it emerges from Kinbote’s commentary that he is insane. He believes that he is the deposed king of a northern European country called Zembla. Recently, there has been a Zemblan revolution, and Kinbote has been forced to flee to America and take a position at an Appalachian university. Kinbote is Shade’s neighbour as well as his colleague, and is personally devoted to Shade to the extent that he spends a good deal of time peering through his windows. In his commentary, Kinbote argues that Shade’s autobiographical poem is really about him, Kinbote. Gradually, we come to regard this reading of the poem as a sort of commentator’s mania, the egotistical function of a crazed mind. Shade’s poem is manifestly about his own life, not about Kinbote’s. The unexpected thing, however, is that Kinbote’s application of his imagined past to Shade’s poem does not diminish it: if anything, the poem’s beauty is magnified and renewed. Nabokov’s elicitation of the sad truth about Kinbote is surefooted but gentle, and this produces a funny, beautiful, and thought-provoking story. Kinbote’s unremitting falseness to Shade’s poem has, by the end of the book, become part of a story with a strange and graceful unity of its own.
What, you might ask, has all this to do with this evening’s readings? In short, it seems to me that the paradoxical relationship between Kinbote’s commentary and Shade’s poem in Pale Fire throws a good deal of light on what it means for God to redeem humanity. I should like to begin by looking at this evening’s reading from the book of Genesis. We hear in this passage of the dream in which Jacob is pronounced bearer of God’s promise to Abraham. This dream, crucially, appears to fulfil the unscrupulous manoeuvre by which, with the help of a change of costume, Jacob has tricked his brother Esau out of Isaac’s blessing. In doing so, he has won the lordship over his brothers intended for Esau, the first-born son. God’s promise to Jacob seems thus to function as an endorsement of a political coup.
This suggests, I think, a fruitful comparison between the salvation history which God institutes in Abraham, and Shade’s original poem in Pale Fire. Both are essentially stories. Jacob and Kinbote, moreover, both regard these stories as realities which bear ambiguous relations to their own lives. They desire, in short, to possess these stories as their own. By various expedients, therefore, both characters attempt to weave themselves into these stories. Jacob and Kinbote are alike insofar as their places in the stories they occupy appear to have been won on false grounds.
Of course, we cannot really cheat God. For Jacob, the embarrassing riches of God’s blessing find out whatever deceit was at work in his attempt to manoeuvre himself into receiving them. Jacob thinks nothing of taking advantage of his father’s failing powers in order to rob and wound his brother. Nevertheless, he is to be made the vehicle for the blessing of “all the families of the earth”! This is a strange and shaming promise, which Jacob’s unscrupulous tricks have robbed him out of deserving, or hoping to live up to by his own means.
The apparent incongruousness at work in God’s promise, on the other hand, is a sign of God’s love for His creatures, and His patient working out of His purpose in them. In his dream, Jacob sees a ladder set up between earth and heaven. The ladder, as the text portrays it, is a ladder for God to climb down, in order to stand next to Jacob on the earth which is promised him. The “dust of the earth”, in this passage, is both the offspring of Jacob and the Holy Land on which his offspring dwells. It is that which is sanctified by God’s presence. This promise thus recalls the dust from which man is created in the second chapter of Genesis. The rock on which Jacob sleeps, he anoints and sets up as the pillar for the house of God. The rock is therefore a symbol of God’s promise to establish a people. It is a representative of the land, the dust of the earth which God’s promise has made holy. Jacob’s re-naming of this land is a symbolic response to the unexpected and transforming presence of God: “Surely the Lord is in this place – and I did not know it!”
Jacob’s ceremony of setting up and re-naming foreshadows Christ’s re-naming of Simon as Peter, St. John’s account of which we heard tonight. As in the case of Abraham, God’s re-naming is creative, establishing a people as God’s own. The highly charged version of the re-naming episode we find in St. Matthew makes explicitly clear that Peter is the rock, or pillar, on which the house of God is to be built. The establishment of Jacob’s line as God’s people, the Jews, thus foreshadows the fulfilment of this people in the Church. God, in establishing His church, cuts out a rock and calls it His own.
Often, we would like to forget that we are Gods’s own, that we do not owe our being to ourselves. We would prefer to suppose, as Kinbote does in Pale Fire, that our apparent estrangement in the world indicates only that we are kings unrightfully deposed. Christ’s kingdom, however, is the kingdom to which we belong: And our estrangement in the world can only point us to Christ’s own estrangement and death at the hands of the kingdoms of the world. Christ’s kingdom is the kingdom in which the first are to be last, and in which humility is to be the measure of a man.
Such humility is exemplified by John the Baptist in our reading from St. John. Here, the Baptist’s acclamation of Christ before his own disciples enacts his testimony: “After me comes a man who ranks ahead of me because he was before me.” This turn of phrase is reminiscent of Jacob and Esau’s brotherly enmity: Jacob came after Esau, but was chosen ahead of him. In Christ, God fulfils His promise to bless the families of the earth, by dwelling as a human being with the poor and the outcast. God thus shames our brotherly disputes about who is first or chosen. In His life and death, Christ humbly submits to the contempt or indifference of those great ones who build the kingdoms of this world. In Christ, therefore, God agonizes, suffers, and dies under the weight of human deceit and human pride.
We have an echo of God’s solidarity with humanity in Christ, in the strange tenderness and poignancy with which Nabokov unmasks the madness of Kinbote’s deceit. Although he does not paper over Kinbote’s estrangement from the truth, neither does Nabokov choose to distance himself from it, or pronounce it something external to his authorship. Instead, he lets it stand as part of the story. This allows a sort of fruition of the beauty of Shade’s poem, and a poignant crystallization of the frailty and sadness of Kinbote’s life. In short, there is faithfulness at work in Nabokov’s telling of Kinbote’s rather unfaithful story. There is a redemptive agonizing in the unfolding of the narrative. This redemptive agonizing is also at work in the story of Jacob. Jacob’s failings are evident for all to see. The only condemnation he receives, however, is God’s unlikely and gentle weaving of his iniquity into the history of salvation. God stands at the bottom of the ladder with Jacob. God makes Jacob a part of the story anyway.
Christ is the human being in whom God’s mysterious faithfulness to mankind comes to fruition. God does not despise the dust of the earth, but becomes dust Himself, and victoriously raises it to new life through His death. This is the culmination of God’s mysterious working out of His purposes in His frail, proud creatures. In Christ, God scatters our attempts to construct more befitting stories for ourselves than our creation from the dust to which we shall return. For it is the dust of the earth which God has sanctified in Christ, redeeming it through His sharing in its death. In Lent, we are invited to reflect upon the ways in which we have been evading God’s call to die with Christ, in order that our lives might be sanctified by His. Death is, after all, so often the last place we think to look. “Surely the LORD is in this place, and I knew it not.” AMEN.