Walking on ice has always freaked me out just a little. Every year at freeze – up in November I look out at the new ice on Lac La Hache and feel torn between the temptation to venture out on it and the terror of what could happen if I did. The temptation is the absolute wonder of walking or skating on a sheet of clear glass that allows a perfect view of what lies below one’s feet in the lake. It’s like another world. The terror is what it would be like to break through that ice. But there is little deception in new ice at freeze – up; everyone knows it’s dangerous.
It’s March now, spring ice time. The ice is usually at least a couple of feet thick on Lac La Hache in March, even though the spring thaw has begun. Surely it must be safe if it’s that thick. Well, maybe; except for candle ice.
Thick spring ice can be very deceptive. If you like to watch an ice cube melt in a glass of single malt scotch—and I don’t because I am an impatient purist—the ice cube just gets smaller and smaller. On a lake, the melting of ice is way more complex than that. It’s more complex because the melting of lake ice involves a series of partial thaws and then refreezing as daytime temperatures follow nighttime temperatures or as spring weather patterns change. This freeze – thaw cycle can produce a honeycomb of water and long hexagonal candle – like crystals of ice. This is called candle ice, a form of rotten ice that develops in columns perpendicular to the surface of the lake. They are extremely hard to see because they are usually under the snow. Even though the ice may be a foot or two thick over all, step on one of these candle ice columns and you are through the ice in an instant, snowshoes and all. When I was working as an assistant ranger for the B.C. Forest Service in my younger years, venturing across a frozen lake on snowshoes in the spring was often required as part of my work. But it was always fraught with concern.
Then and now, I can’t help imagining the terror of accidentally stepping on a candle ice column to plunge through the ice. I can’t help imagining coming up against the ice, my face pushed against the underside; helpless and hopeless; powerless and perishing, drowning and dying. And as I imagine this, being locked in the “ice water mansion” of some wilderness lake, I can also imagine a huge mighty fist of steel smashing through the ice and grabbing me by the hair and dragging me out of the water to save my life. And in my imagination, I think I have just conjured up something akin to what the New Testament calls the mercy of God.
Mercy is spoken of over and over in both testaments of the Bible as a characteristic of God. I have often wondered what is meant by it. To me, to say “God is merciful” is to say something almost technical, certainly theological. It’s not really that helpful for me. My mind tends to work more in pictures and experiences rather than in theories and ideas. But the picture of being helplessly trapped under the ice, unable to do anything for myself and then having some tremendous force take a mighty action to save my life by smashing through the ice and plucking me to safety; that is pictorial and experiential for me. That is mercy I can understand.
Just for fun I decided to look up the word mercy in my New Testament. There are lots of places to look. The place that immediately came to my mind was the well – known passage in Ephesians where Paul writes: “But God is so rich in mercy, and He loved us so much, that even though we were dead because of our sins, He gave us life when He raised Christ from the dead” (Ephesians 2:4–5).
When I looked up the biblical Greek word for mercy that Paul used in the original, it was the word eleos. When I looked up that word in my Greek dictionary what I found were descriptions of the powerful helping the powerless, of the mighty rescuing the perishing, of the benevolent having compassion on the helpless, of the wealthy forgiving the debt of the hopelessly indebted. The words powerless, perishing, helpless and hopeless spoke to me, conjured up pictures for me. The pictures were oddly very similar to the “ice water mansion” picture of mercy that was on my mind as I looked out on the deceptive, rotting spring ice of Lac La Hache. And all of those pictures somehow bring me to the picture of Jesus on the cross.
“When I survey the wondrous cross,” wrote Isaac Watts in 1707. What did Watts see? He said he saw “love so amazing, so divine.” When I survey the wondrous cross I get a picture of mercy—mercy of the kind that smashes through the ice to rescue the helpless and hopeless and powerless and perishing. Rescues the likes of me. “Even though I am dead because of sin,” the Apostle tells me, even though I am as good as buried because of sin—sin in general, my own sin in particular—God is rich in mercy.
Sin seems so deceptive. It always seems to take me unawares. It’s like falling through the ice. That’s part of the tragedy of sin. But the horror of it is that it traps me, it sucks the life out of me daily and eternally. The horror of it is that it seems impossible for me to break through, to break out of its grasp. Being entombed by sin is like being trapped under the ice; I am helpless and hopeless and powerless to break its cold, hard grasp on me. I am dying because of it, gasping for life because of it, perishing because of it. And I can’t break out of its icy death – hold on me.
I am beginning to learn that is exactly why Paul calls God ‘rich in mercy.’ When I can’t break through sin, when I can’t break its hold on me, when I am struggling for life but dying because of it, there is Christ on the cross, the mighty iron fist of God breaking sin’s icy grasp. There is Christ, risen from the grave, the first fruits of the resurrection, the proof that I can trust Him to rescue the perishing, save the dying, give new life to the dead.
Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison, Kyrie eleison.
