Puzzles | Wayfarer

For Samaria’s plague is incurable;
it has spread to Judah.
It has reached the very gate of my people,
even to Jerusalem itself.
Micah 1:9 (NIV )

Back in the day, my hometown of Des Moines had two daily newspapers. The Des Moines Register was delivered in the morning and The Des Moines Tribune was delivered in the afternoon. Ours was a Tribune household. Families were usually one or the other. On Sunday, both Register and Tribune subscribers got the “Sunday paper” which was huge. It was filled with entire sections you didn’t get on weekdays, the comics had their own section printed in color, and there were a million flier ads for all the major department stores.

The “Sunday paper” was a weekly big deal. One of the reasons was that the Sunday Register had “Jumble” word puzzles that weren’t printed in the daily Tribune. My mom loved to spend her Sunday afternoons solving the puzzle of jumbled-up letters that would make words which would then provide the clues to a final word that was the punchline to an accompanying cartoon. I grew up loving to help, and I think it planted a seed in me. I’ve always loved word puzzles, and as I grew up I gained a fondness for learning new words, the history of words, and the use of creative wordplay in writing. It’s one of the reasons I’ve always loved Shakespeare. He was a master at playing with words in creative ways.

Today, this chapter-a-day journey begins a quick trek through the writing of the ancient prophet Micah. Micah was from a small town in Judah when ancient Israel had been divided into the two kingdoms of Israel (in the north) and Judah (in the south). It was a time of political, religious, and moral corruption, and Micah was speaking out to the people of both nations to warn them of God’s impending judgment. Micah correctly prophesied that both Israel and Judah would suffer destruction at the hands of the Assyrian Empire.

One of the things that is lost on modern readers is the wordplay that Micah used when he wrote his messages in Hebrew. Much like Shakespeare, Micah uses clever wordplay that weaves irony and sarcasm that would have made his messages memorable in their day. In today’s chapter, Micah uses the names of actual towns and cities where his audience lived and links them to sound-alike words in his message. As I mulled this over in the quiet this morning, I created a little word game for myself as I thought about some of the towns around where we live and how I might use them Micah-like:

You who live in Sully will be sullied by the rubble of your destroyed homes.

Those in Leighton will search for someone to lighten the burden of God’s judgment without success.

There will be no revenge for the people of Montezuma after the instrument of God’s wrath is finished.

The residents of Galesburg will reap the whirlwind of the Lord’s anger.

In the quiet this morning, the old Mary Poppins song came to mind with the message “A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.” The ancient prophet’s message was harsh spiritual medicine for his audience. I have to believe that the wordplay in his writing was intended to make the message both memorable and easier to swallow. That’s not a bad reminder for me, or anyone who finds themselves having to communicate a bitter pill.