like a worm on the hook

I posted here about St Cyprian and the notion of Christ as the bait with which God lured death onto his hook. And I posted here about the image of God fishing for Leviathan in Herrad von Landsburg's Hortus Deliciarum. Since then I've found a fascinating article on 'divine deception' in the writing of the Church Fathers. It's by Nicholas P. Constas and it appeared in 2004.

As Constas shows, the image of the fishhook and the idea of the passion as a form of deception appear in a great many texts and were not conjured up from nowhere:

[They were] derived from a theologically consistent conflation of several biblical passages, including Job 40-41; Psalms 104:26 (LXX 103:26); and Isaiah 27:1, all of which are concerned with mocking the cosmic dragon and dragging him up from the depths of the sea on a fishhook. Moreover, one does not typically go fishing in mythopoetic ponds without a worm, and so Psalms 22:6 (LXX 21:6, "I am a worm and not a man") was granted a central place in this tradition. Tied to Psalm 22, the fishhook was thereby anchored to the center of the Passion Narrative itself, for when Christ cried out in dereliction from the cross, it was this psalm's first verse which he chose to give voice to his pain. Patristic exegetes were thus confronted with the striking image of the crucified Christ writhing like a worm on a hook.

Constas also quotes Pseudo-Chrysostom, who says:

[J]ust like a wise fisherman ,it was necessary that he place his flesh like a worm on the brilliantly shining fishhook of his divinity, and cast it into the depths of this world, and thus catch the dragon on a hook, so that what was written in Job might come to pass, 'Thou wilt catch the dragon with a fish hook' (Job 40:25)" (PG 64:23, l 20-32).

What an astonishing image and what a very different culture it evidently comes from. The idea of God as perpetrating a deception or a trick is difficult for the contemporary reader but to the Church Fathers was 'a corollary of the World's encryption in the flesh, the veiling of the unspeakable Name in the deceptive utterances of language'. There is a trickiness at the centre of the incarnation and it is figured in these strange, even shocking, images.