Today’s Scripture Reading (January 31, 2017): 2 Chronicles 29
According to Greek Mythology, Daedalus and his son Icarus were imprisoned on the island of Crete by King Minos. Minos imprisons the father – son duo in the very labyrinth that Daedalus had created for King Minos to imprison the Minotaur, a half man and half bull monster that was born of Mino's wife and the Cretan bull. When Daedalus is drawn into helping an enemy of Minos survive the labyrinth and kill the Minotaur, Minos decides that the labyrinth can now serve as the prison for Daedalus and his son.
So Daedalus is confronted with two problematic escapes. The most immediate problem is the escape from the labyrinth, but the second escape is just as hard – how can Daedalus and Icarus get off of the island of Crete and back to the Greek mainland. So Daedalus invents a pair of wax wings which have stuck into the wax, feathers that Daedalus had been able to gather up. The idea is that flight might be the only way to both escape the labyrinth and the island. Daedalus test drives his created wings first and finds that they work. He gives a pair to his son with the instructions that Icarus must accurately replicate the flight path of his Dad if the two are going to survive the trip. To fly either too close to the sea or too close to the sun would be a mistake with deadly consequences. But once in the air, the experience of flying deafens Icarus to his father’s advice, and Icarus flies higher and higher until the heat from the sun melts the wax, and the feathers fall out of the wings leaving Icarus flapping his bare arms which will no longer sustain his flight. The result of the pride of Icarus is that he crashes and dies in the sea between Crete and the mainland – his resting place is named in his honor and is known today as the Icarian Sea – leaving the father to mourn the life of his son.
The story of Daedalus and Icarus is one of the prototypical stories used to describe father and son conflict. The father who is wise gives to the child instructions that the child needs for life. But the child does not recognize the wisdom of the father – in the story of Icarus the wisdom of the father is not recognized until it is too late – and therefore the son falls into the precise trap from which Dad’s advice was intended to protect him. Dad’s wisdom is proved in the folly of the son.
In the story of Ahaz and Hezekiah, the father-son conflict exists, but the roles are reversed. For Ahaz and Hezekiah, it is Ahaz who is deafened by pride, and it is Ahaz who seems to fly too close to the sun. And the result of the father’s folly is that the son is left to pick up the pieces of a life wasted by a false hubris. One of the things that Ahaz had done during his reign was to remove the gold and silver items that were intended for use in the temple and the sacrificial work of the priests, taking them from the temple so that he could enjoy their use personally. These items were not destroyed, so they did not have to be remade, but they did need to be re-consecrated for use in the temple. In this process, there would have most likely been a time of national repentance for the failure of the nation to recognize God in the days of Ahaz. What we might sometimes miss is the emotional toll that consecration and repentance might have had on Hezekiah. The son would be forced, not lonely to mourn the loss of his dad, but to publically recognize his father’s folly. No matter what the relationship was like between Ahaz and Hezekiah, this would have been one of the harder moments of Hezekiah’s reign – the day when the son would have to set right the results of his father’s having flown too close to the sun.
Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: 2 Chronicles 30
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