The opening lines of the book called Isaiah’s sixtieth chapter perfectly capture redemption’s cadence.
Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the LORD has risen upon you.
For behold, darkness shall cover the earth, and thick darkness the peoples; but the LORD will arise upon you, and his glory will be seen upon you.
And nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your rising.
Isaiah 60:1–3 (ESV)’
If this is so, a subtle interchange between two closely related words drives the point home. Because cognate vocabulary maps differently from one language to another, this is easy to miss when reading in translation. The Hebrew words behind shine (אורי) and light (אורך) are in fact the same word, deployed first as verb and then as noun. The less obvious link between English ‘shine’ and ‘light’ is an unfortunate and inevitable loss in translation.
The reason this subtlety deserves a moment’s consideration is that the Isaianic voice persistently calls desolate Judah (‘Zion’ in its most common personification) to action. Yet the summons is never the call to an initiating action. It is always a response to what YHWH has just done or is about to do.
Arise! … Shine! … because your light has come!
We are talking not so much about cause and effect. The dynamic is rather best expressed as cause and response. The solicited response would never make sense, indeed would be impossible and perhaps unthinkable if YHWH had not acted first. But since he has done so, the summons is now a response to YHWH’s renewed mercies to Zion.
This cause-and-response dynamic splays out across this magnificent chapter, with its glory, its beauty, and its wealth of kings and nations streaming into Zion. Quite literally, Zion’s glory and its beauty are derived from YHWH’s glory and from YHWH’s beautifying intentions. Yet both Zion and her now subservient kings and nations participate with YHWH in the transformation of a city that will once again become both holy and beloved.
Whether those nations do so willingly and as a facet of their own redemption is a debated matter. My inclination is that this is so. Yet the passage also hints at pockets of resistance that shall know no future.
Down to its final verse, the chapter knows no good thing that does not flow from divine initiation.
The least one shall become a clan, and the smallest one a mighty nation; I am the LORD; in its time I will hasten it.
Isaiah 60:22 (ESV)
Yet not for a moment is the role of Zion’s sons and daughters, to say nothing of the children of the nations now caught up in YHWH’s project, anything less than exalted labor.
These lines are scribbled by a father, indeed a grandfather. My sixty-odd years somehow crystallize in the lives of my kin.
I would do anything for them. As years of harvest and locust have come and gone, my family, my kin, my flesh and bone have become a kind of existential bottom line.
In this, as in so many other things in this small life that has been mine to live, I am not unusual. What privileges we steward are most intensely known in family. Not in all families, but in many. We become within their embrace a kind of absolute, a non-negotiable. They become so to us.
Take everything else. Don’t touch my children.
The prophet plays a redemptive melody in the key of this family truth.
Let not the foreigner who has joined himself to the LORD say, ‘The LORD will surely separate me from his people’; and let not the eunuch say, ‘Behold, I am a dry tree.’
For thus says the LORD: ‘To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths, who choose the things that please me and hold fast my covenant, I will give in my house and within my walls a monument and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that shall not be cut off.’
Isaiah 56:3–5 (ESV)
In the prophetic imagination here spun into a temple story—the most sacred kind of story YHWH’s seer knows to tell—Jacob’s enigmatic deity speaks of his house and of his family and his family legacy. The divine Paterfamilias—half-hidden, half-known—makes vows in the dialect of what is most precious to him, that which is more his own than anything else.
The irony that pulsates through this speech is that YHWH speaks of those who by lineage and history are not his. Those who do not belong in any conventional sense the notion of kinship might conjure.
Curiously and potently, he makes promise that thrust his historical sons and daughters into second class.
YHWH’s declaration is absurd unless it is true. If it is true, it turns all that we thought we knew on its head.
For thus says the LORD: ‘To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths, who choose the things that please me and hold fast my covenant, I will give in my house and within my walls a monument and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that shall not be cut off.‘
Isaiah 56.5
The generous teachings of Jesus will, centuries hence, pivot on this same upsetting truth. Salvation is of the Jews but for the whole wide world.
As those surprised by the invitation find their way to YHWH’s sacred house, the prophet dares to suggest, they will find themselves his favorites. The most privileged. The most richly endowed with unforgettable glories that shall endure for centuries, for millennia, until ‘never’ and ‘forever’ become exhausted of meaning at redemption’s glad destination.
Better, these castrated, pagan foreigners hear spoken of their fate from the spokesmen of this incomprehensible God of Jacob with his strange, ominous, promising name.
The reversal of Zion’s fortunes is a theme so intensely passionate in the book called Isaiah that the prophet ransacks the full range of metaphor to make his case. Zion, the personification of a city that incarnates both the city’s deported-and-now-returned citizens and its own restored metropolitan glories, is about to learn that her God reigns.
How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him who brings good news, who publishes peace, who brings good news of happiness, who publishes salvation, who says to Zion, ‘Your God reigns.’
The issue in play is not so much theology proper or divine ontology. YHWH’s announced reign is not here a theoretical experience but rather an intensively lived experience. Zion is about to taste the power of her God in the form of restoration from the cataclysm that has leveled her walls, emptied her of her people, and snatched away her future. ‘Your God reigns’ must refer to the evidence that YHWH is not inert, but rather decisively present and active in the imminent turning of tables to Zion’s benefit.
The book’s fifty-second chapter presents the striking metaphor of the watchmen on the city’s walls breaking into song—or at the very least into noisy and joyous exclamation—as they leverage their privileged altitude to see the return of YHWH to Zion before their less elevated neighbors are so fortunate.
The voice of your watchmen—they lift up their voice; together they sing for joy; for eye to eye they see the return of the LORD to Zion.
Break forth together into singing, you waste places of Jerusalem, for the LORD has comforted his people; he has redeemed Jerusalem.
It is impossible to know whether the author intends actually singing. There is the lifting up of their collective voice, the double deployment of verb that can represent song but might also be a less melodic shout for joy (רנן), and a breaking forth into whatever that exuberant sound actually is. The Septuagint, in a show of translational modesty, underscores the joyousness of the sound and leaves its substance to the imagination. Translations ever since opt in roughly equal measure either for song or for joyful shouting.
Regardless, we have a somewhat odd image that nearly refuses to sound strange precisely because it is part of a metaphorical narrative where larger impossibilities are taking place within the ordinary space and time. We almost fail to register the entertaining spectacle of night watchmen giddy with shouted delight or bursting into manly song from atop their walled perches.
The smaller strangeness of the image fades before the brilliant impossibility of YHWH striding across Judah’s desolate terrain towards Zion with his rescued captives following just behind.
If YHWH has done all this, why strain at a cadre of watchmen who can’t stop laughing–or singing—as they take it all in?
It is tempting to see here a narrative playing-out of the new song that becomes the people’s boisterous response to YHWH’s improbable redemption in Isaiah and in several psalms.
Soon the whole city will be loud with grateful sound, redemptive surprise powering its decibels, raised above normal volume as watchmen stand atop high walls.
La potencia de la desesperación reside en parte en la pretensión de permanencia. Cuando estamos atrapados en la garra mortal de la tristeza, creemos que esto es todo lo que conoceremos. La promesa del amanecer parece impensable.
¿Por qué te abates, alma mía, y por qué te turbas dentro de mí? Espera enDios, pues he de alabarle otra vez. ¡Él es la salvaciónde mi ser, y mi Dios!
Salmo 43:5 (LBLA)
Hay una realidad más concreta que la desesperación, más fiable y cercana al núcleo de lo verdadero. La desesperación nubla nuestra visión de ella, es más, la hace parecer un espejismo, una burla, una seducción atormentadora que no merece el tiempo que requeriría tomarle la medida.
El salmista lucha por conseguir la distancia literaria y existencial con su propia emoción que le permita dirigirse a su alma como si fuera otra. La interroga, que es lo que se debe hacer en el momento insostenible de la distancia y la conversación con un ser personificado que es realmente uno mismo.
¿Por qué te abates? y ¿por qué te turbas dentro de mí?
Perdemos el hilo si imaginamos en nuestra ingenuidad que la pregunta del poeta es retrospectiva. Ya nos ha dado muchas explicaciones sobre el motivo de su malestar. Su autocuestionamiento apunta más bien a una dirección prospectiva. Sabe más que su alma personificada que su estado depresivo no es su destino. Envalentonado por el recuerdo de Uno que es externo a la vorágine de la tristeza, se recuerda a sí mismo que debe esperar en ese Dios.
Entonces estas sílabas que rescatan el alma:
He de alabarle otra vez.
La desesperación no es el destino. Puede ser un ataque, una vacilación, incluso un pecado inconfesable. Pero, como la mayoría de nuestros otros destructores, es un tigre de papel. Pierde el equilibrio en un grado crítico pero casi imperceptible cuando decimos en voz alta en su presencia que no siempre estaremos tan atados por su malicia como lo estamos ahora, aquí mismo.
A reflection offered to United World Mission’s US Leadership Team
27 September 2021
I think we may find ourselves in a season of Joshua-like courage.
I’m no doubt influenced in saying so by John’s kick-off video last week, but also by a long weekend walk in the autumnal Connecticut woods with my dog Rhea and three recent conversations with—respectively—Jonathan, Jessica, and Chad. Those convos were of such quality that they left me feeling as though we’re in the kind of season that becomes a point of reference for entire careers. The kinds of seasons that have retired LAMers at Penney Farms still talking about the 60s and 70s when young renegades like René Padilla, Samuel Escobar, and Orlando Costas burst on the scene without asking permission. LAM, to the astonishment of many and the horror of some, cautiously embraced these Latin American voices.
The rest is history.
I’m sure we could narrate similar tales come from critical hinges in 20th and 21st century history, for example, when it became possible to serve behind the Iron Curtain as the Berlin Wall trembled and eventually crumbled.
In each case, Joshua-like courage was required … and forthcoming.
I think we might be in another of those seasons. We may someday talk about the moment we’re living now in the UWM retirement community that John will build for us. Some sooner than others.
Here’s a text:
Josh. 1:1 After the death of Moses the servant of the LORD, the LORD said to Joshua the son of Nun, Moses’ assistant, 2 “Moses my servant is dead. Now therefore arise, go over this Jordan, you and all this people, into the land that I am giving to them, to the people of Israel. 3 Every place that the sole of your foot will tread upon I have given to you, just as I promised to Moses. 4 From the wilderness and this Lebanon as far as the great river, the river Euphrates, all the land of the Hittites to the Great Sea toward the going down of the sun shall be your territory. 5 No man shall be able to stand before you all the days of your life. Just as I was with Moses, so will be with you. I will not leave you or forsake you. 6 Be strong and courageous, for you shall cause this people to inherit the land that I swore to their fathers to give them. 7 Only be strong and very courageous, being careful to do according to all the law that Moses my servant commanded you. Do not turn from it to the right hand or to the left, that you may have good successwherever you go. 8 This Book of the Law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do according to all that is written in it. For then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have good success. 9 Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be frightened, and do not be dismayed, for the LORD your God is with you wherever you go.”
Joshua 1.1-9 (ESV)
Can you see in this opening to the first book after the ‘five book of Moses’ how utterly grounded—the more appropriate term is rooted—Joshua is called to remain?
7 Only be strong and very courageous, being careful to do according to all the law that Moses my servant commanded you. Do not turn from it to the right hand or to the left, that you may have good successwherever you go. 8 This Book of the Law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do according to all that is written in it. For then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have good success.
Joshua 1.7-8 (ESV)
And yet Joshua’s commission is anything but backward-looking. To the contrary, he is charged with stepping into very large shoes and with leading his people into the scary unknown. Not all of them wanted to go there. Not all of them wanted to go there under Joshua’s baton.
This happens in the midst of lots of drama, with Yahweh responding in Deuteronomy to Moses’ plea to be allowed to enter the promised land after he’d been told that was not gonna’ happen:
Deut. 3:23 And I pleaded with the LORD at that time, saying, 24 ‘O Lord GOD, you have only begun to show your servant your greatness and your mighty hand. For what god is there in heaven or on earth who can do such works and mighty acts as yours? 25 Please let me go over and see the good land beyond the Jordan, that good hill country and Lebanon.’ 26 But the LORD was angry with me because of you and would not listen to me. And the LORD said to me, ‘Enough from you; do not speak to me of this matter again.’
Deuteronomy 3.23-26 (ESV)
Deeply rooted …. forward-leaning.
I wonder if that’s where we find ourselves as UWM and as a USLT…
I might be tempted to leave Joshua and Joshua-like courage where it stands, not uprooting it from its native soil and forcing into some kind of relevance for us when that might not be what it’s there for.
Except for Psalm 1, one of my favorites.
Blessed is the man
who walks not in the counsel of the wicked,
nor stands in the way of sinners,
nor sits in the seat of scoffers;
but his delight is in the law of the LORD,
and on his law he meditates day and night.
He is like a tree
planted by streams of water
that yields its fruit in its season,
and its leaf does not wither.
in all that he does, he prospers.
Psalm 1.1-3 (ESV)
One of Israel’s poets has riffed on Joshua 1 and, in the process, democratized it. The way he redeploys the language of what for us is Joshua 1 make it indisputably a poetic restatement of the Joshua text. Then a final editor of this book of Israel’s praises—maybe the same persona, maybe not—has placed it as the very doorway into Israel’s hymns, laments, meditations, screams, and words of stabilizing wisdom.
So Joshua-like courage now becomes a summons for every daughter and son of Israel.
Again, we see that his blessed person is very, very deeply rooted. Now to say ‘grounded’ is not enough.
Yet this Psalm is no more antiquarian than the Joshua text, no more backward-looking that Joshua’s commission was. It is about wading forward into the psalms, wading forward into life with Yahweh, wading in as a responsible member of the community in which Yahweh has embedded each of us, wading in to forge a future out of sometimes unpromising raw material.
Joshua-like courage, now for everyone. Still deeply rooted …. and still forward-leaning.
It’s this line of thinking that has got its claws into me in this season of life within UWM (and FUSBC…) that has me seeking Joshua-like courage, which is no more innate in me than it was in Joshua. He, after all, needed strong exhortation to summon up this courage rather than simply employ a kind of heroic fearlessness that lay somehow on the surface of him, readily available.
That’s what I want to do and what I observe numbers of you doing.
I want to reminisce about this season someday on my rocking chair at Bernard Farms in central Vermont, when Autumn is falling and the voices of my LAM forebears in Penney Farms have gone quiet. It’ll be worth it.
A brief reflection offered to UWM’s Leadership Team
10 May 2021
John asked me to share something from the Old Testament’s ‘Wisdom Literature’. This happened last Thursday after I shared with him some anecdotes about teaching my ‘Escritos’ (roughly: ‘Old Testament sacred writings’) course at the Biblical Seminary of Colombia. I’m aware that these words will not be ‘inspirational’ in any conventional sense.
So allow me some non-conventionally-inspirational ruminations upon…
When God’s purpose is not to reveal doctrine in splendid clarity but rather to invite his people into a hard conversation.
What it’s like to teach at the Biblical Seminary of Colombia (and other places like it).
Why I loathe the expression ‘training leaders’ (and why most TEI missional scholars would lean away from ‘indoctrination’ and towards ‘constructive theology’…).
One very daring part of the Old Testament’s wisdom literature is the book called Ecclesiastes. This work’s principal speaker is named ‘Qohelet’ according to the Hebrew presentation, so I’ll use that name as a point of reference over the next minutes.
Qohelet starts, ends, and punctuates everything in between with the cry that ‘Everything is vanity!’ (הבל = a breath, momentary, absurd, incomprehensible, a bare illusion)
Along the way, Qohelet makes stupendous claims that are extremely difficult to partner with ‘biblical orthodoxy’.
Nothing has meaning.
Nothing produces any result/benefit/profit.
We’re no better than the animals.
Nothing ever makes a difference.
God loads us down with meaninglessness in order to weary or even to torment us.
And there’s no way out of this endless Doom Loop.
Then, just to keep us off balance, Qohelet pairs these ‘unorthodox’ declarations, which are spoken with brassy self-assurance, with other statements that are more comfortable for believing readers:
’So here’s what you do: Enjoy the food, sex, and shelter God has given you. They’re his gifts.’
‘Do your best to keep God’s commandments.’
Yet in spite of this whiplash-producing juxtaposition of declarations, never has Judaism or the Christian Church given serious, sustained consideration to the possibility that Ecclesiastes might be anything other than Holy Scripture. What are we to do with that?
Here’s where my students are right now:
They’re working painstakingly through chapter 6 via a methodology we call ‘Theological Conversation’. Each student does a deep dive into one of the chapter’s verses and presents his or her conclusions. Another student is assigned the responsibility of first response. After that initial exchange, it’s no holds barred on conversation that ensues.
“There is an evil that I have seen under the sun, and it lies heavy on mankind: a man to whom God gives wealth, possessions, and honor, so that he lacks nothing of all that he desires, yet God does not give him power to enjoy them, but a stranger enjoys them. This is vanity; it is a grievous evil. If a man fathers a hundred children and lives many years, so that the days of his years are many, but his soul is not satisfied with life’s good things, and he also has no burial, I say that a stillborn child is better off than he. For it comes in vanity and goes in darkness, and in darkness its name is covered. Moreover, it has not seen the sun or known anything, yet it finds rest rather than he. Even though he should live a thousand years twice over, yet enjoy no good—do not all go to the one place?
All the toil of man is for his mouth, yet his appetite is not satisfied. For what advantage has the wise man over the fool? And what does the poor man have who knows how to conduct himself before the living? Better is the sight of the eyes than the wandering of the appetite: this also is vanity and a striving after wind.
Whatever has come to be has already been named, and it is known what man is, and that he is not able to dispute with one stronger than he. The more words, the more vanity, and what is the advantage to man? For who knows what is good for man while he lives the few days of his vain life, which he passes like a shadow? For who can tell man what will be after him under the sun?”
Ecclesiastes 6:1-12 (ESV)
Yet these aren’t necessarily Qohelet’s wildest statements. There are others, like these:
2.7 So I hated life, because what is done under the sun was grievous to me, for all is vanity and a striving after wind.
3.19-20 For what happens to the children of man and what happens to the beasts is the same; as one dies, so dies the other. They all have the same breath, and man has no advantage over the beasts, for all is vanity.All go to one place. All are from the dust, and to dust all return.
And at the same time we’re trying to do justice to an assessment that shows up in the book’s epilogue, a kind of final summary … a tying up of loose ends.
It commends Qohelet for his expertise in shaping Israelites in the ways of wisdom. Then it adds this summary:
“Qohelet sought to find words of delight, and uprightly he wrote words of truth.
The words of the wise are like goads, and like nails firmly fixed are the collected sayings; they are given by one Shepherd.”
Ecclesiastes 12:10-11 (ESV, lightly emended and emphasis added)
So why does an old dude like me continue to invest the countless hours of preparation that are required in order to lead students through arguably depressing and unorthodox literature like Qohelet?
Some days, I’m not sure….
On other, brighter and clearer mornings—and I’m happy to report that these are the more frequent ones—this is what I think I see:
I do it for the sheer, inexhaustible, compelling beauty of the biblical text. It feeds me. It’s an intellectual task and and an existential compulsion that I can’t find a way to walk away from. Maybe this what the editor of Ecclesiastes has in mind when he says that Qohelet spoke ‘words of delight’ and ‘words of truth’
I do it because I don’t believe Colombia’s emerging Christian leaders basically need a list of things they need to believe. Or, even if they do need that, they can get it from someone who’s not me. I’m not interested in ‘training’ them in any narrow sense. I’m interested in sharing life and study with them to see whether there’s any way I can shape them as human beings whom I’d like to share a beer with. And whom I would trust at my wife’s bedside after a cancer diagnosis.
I do it because I believe that both Yahweh and the canonical Scriptures are bold and confident enough to set the table for a believing people’s ongoing conversation, knowing that they will be led into all truth as they refuse to over-simplify the most important things and as they process life honestly as it comes. This feels authentic to me, true to both the nature of Scripture and to life as I experience it. Scripture seems not to insist that redemptive conversations be easy conversations nor overly pious ones, nor conversations where the outcome is known from before things heat up.
I do it because I think one of the things theological education must be is frighteningly unpragmatic. I can’t tell you how or and I cannot quantify in what measure Andrés … or María … or Paolo … or Diego … or Tatiana … have been changed by immersion in Ecclesiastes. But I know them. I share life and community with them. I look them in the eye. And I know in by bones that they are better … richer … more human persons and servants of Jesus for having walked this way. So I’m gonna keep doing what I do until God makes me stop.
I think that, for most (not all) of our UWM colleagues who are TEI missional scholars, we could change the ‘I’ to ‘we’. And I suspect we could do the same to include many of you.
‘Vanity of vanities!’, says Qohelet. ‘All is vanity!’
What follows is my story. If you believe that learning the biblical languages should be quick or easy—and especially if you’re looking for tea and sympathy—read no further.
I had the good fortune to learn Hebrew under less than optimal conditions.
In truth, I did not come to the task with much passion. I considered myself a ‘New Testament guy’ and managed to pull off an M.Div. in ways that made it something of a bulked-up M.A. in New Testament. It was John and Paul who lit me up, not Moses and Jeremiah. I had learned Greek in university and nothing was going to get between me and the texts.
But Hebrew was a requirement of the M.Div. and I was not opposed. It had never occurred to me that I might do advanced studies in Bible in the future. I did not take Hebrew so that I could subsequently be admitted to a Ph.D. I simply wanted to know the Bible from as close in as I could and then to teach it as an outflow of that intimate connection. Anything else would have felt like a travesty, like walking past a cave full of diamonds and not poking your head in to see whether any of them lay on the surface for the taking.
My wife and I had just had a baby boy and another was on the way. She worked days at Hewlett Packard and I worked nights loading trucks at UPS in a questionable effort to avoid educational debt that might delay our intended missionary service. It was a grueling job for my twenty-something body, arguably as physically demanding as state-championship-level basketball had been for my teenage body a decade earlier. For two years, I loaded and for another two years I supervised loaders, which meant that I now layered organizational responsibility to the business of loading the trucks of guys who were too sick or drunk or depressed or uncommitted to punch in at 3:00 a.m. It was nobody’s only job. We were all at the end of the rope.
For me it was exhausting and necessary in equal measure, a way to get through seminary without starving.
On weekends, my wife and I refreshed ourselves by serving as youth pastors at our church. But that’s another story.
My aging Ford Pinto didn’t have heat and we were too poor to find out why and get it fixed. Often in the New England winter my 35-minute drive to work would take place behind the wheel of a car where the temperature was a single digit, Fahrenheit. I would often yell at the top of my lungs as I charged down the dark highway in order to stay awake, my whole body shaking from the cold.
After work, stinking from a night shift’s perspiration, I would drive to the day-care center on days when I didn’t have morning classes in order to pick up our infant son Christopher, whom my wife had dropped off two hours before on her way to work. Our cars would pass on Route 128, she heading west, me heading east. I would study all day while looking after Christopher. Once I woke up with the impress of the carpet on my face, having fallen asleep on the floor while crawling after my diapered-up boy.
Because my alarm clock went off at 1:30 a.m., I would regularly tell visiting friends at about 9:00 p.m., ‘You may stay as long as you want. But please turn off the lights when you’ve finished.’
On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays after the night’s work, I would drive past our apartment into the rising sun and continue on the additional half hour to the seminary. My car would shake almost uncontrollably at 58 mph, so I’d keep it steady at 57. Arriving at the seminary fifteen to twenty minutes after Hebrew class had begun, I’d throw a sweatshirt on to protect the other students from my sweaty stench. I’d stop by the cafeteria to snag two donuts and two cups of coffee in a sometimes failed effort to wake myself up and stay awake for the duration of Hebrew class, gulp it all down, and head down the hall to the last classroom on the left.
I’d let myself sheepishly into the classroom where class was already in session, find an empty seat, and begin to pay attention to the prof’s explanations of things that were by their vary nature alien and new. Our textbook was Thomas Lambdin’s classic Introduction to Biblical Hebrew, the work of the famed Harvard linguist who had written grammars of several ancient Semitic languages. Neither Lambdin’s book nor our prof—who had been Lambdin’s student—suffered fools. Terms like ‘compensatory lengthening’ and ‘inalterably long vowels’ were explained patiently but just once. After that you were expected to understand or figure it out at home.
I clearly remember boiling with rage in class one morning as I struggled to penetrate the logic of dagesh forte, dagesh lene, and whether a freakin’ syllable was open or closed. I felt as if I were being tortured for the satisfaction of Thomas Lambdin, of our prof, or of some unseen, malevolent curriculum writer. It was humiliating. I had graduated summa cum laude in university and this was just seminary.
It took everything I had in me and more not to fold my cards and go home. At times I wanted nothing else. But I wanted to read and teach the Bible more. So I stayed.
I did not ask the prof to tutor me privately. If I missed a quiz, I did not ask the prof to extend the available time because I had failed to read the syllabus and did not realize we had a quiz today. I felt I was the poorest student in the classroom because on any given day all the other students were at least fifteen minutes and one or two topics ahead of me. I did not blame the curriculum or suggest that the prof had enjoyed more privileges than me or that Hebrew is more difficult for students who come from rural Pennsylvania Dutch contexts. I did not ask whether we could use a different textbook with fewer irritating details in it. I did not ask ‘how many hours of study are expected of me?’
In time, I found a toe-hold in the language. Barely. Then I got the other foot up onto the cliff. Eventually, I found that I could read the Hebrew Bible. I still learn something new in its pages nearly every day.
The Hebrew Bible still regularly slaps me around and calls me ‘Boy!’. When people ask—as they do—‘How long did it take you to learn Hebrew?’, my only honest answer is ‘I don’t know yet’.
But I live with this book now. It’s God-haunted. It’s inexhaustibly rich and alternately reassuring and deconstructing in the way of a very wise and somewhat recalcitrant uncle whom you can’t live with and can’t live without. It defies creeds and confessions and insists that I think again, that I look more closely, that I consider the unthinkable. If you ask me about a passage from the Old Testament and tell me I can’t look at the text, all I’ll be able to do for you is stare, glassy-eyed. It’s inside of me now. It’s taken nearly forty years and it’s still not finished with me.
If Providence brings us together as student and professor with biblical Hebrew standing formidably astride the landscape before us, and if you feel that your conditions are not optimal for working as hard as our subject is going to ask us to work, be careful what you say.
I had the good fortune to learn Hebrew, under less than optimal conditions. I hope you have the same good fortune.
Ninguna voz habla más conmovedoramente desde el exilio que el escritor del salmo ciento treinta y siete. Junto a los ríos de Babilonia”, explica, “nos sentamos y lloramos por Sión”.
A estos captores de los judaicos exiliados, los cánticos de Sión les parecían un mero entretenimiento. El acento exótico, el extraño ritmo musical, debían parecer un respiro para el tedio del imperio. Todo lo que querían -no parecía mucho- era incitar a sus cautivos a cantar una o dos melodías de la Antigua Patria.
Cómo podían prever el doloroso popurrí de pérdida y lealtad que provocaría su petición:
¿Cómo cantaremos la canción del Señor en tierra extraña?
Salmo 137:4 (LBLA)
Parece un sacrilegio entonar las viejas melodías de Jerusalén en esta tierra maldita y babilónica. “¿Cómo cantaremos los cantos de Sión en una tierra extraña?”, les pregunta el salmista a sus compañeros judíos. Dios no es tan bajo como para ser cantado a petición, por quien sea y con cualquier propósito. Cantar la canción de Sión aquí, señala el salmo, sería el acto por excelencia de cobardía y aculturación.
Seguramente Dios no está en este lugar, seguramente no está en posición de recibir alabanzas al estilo de Sión aquí, aquí en este maldito terreno babilónico, donde YHVH no es alabado y su pueblo no es libre.
Es casi imposible, al borde de la muerte, imaginar la vida.
La muerte siempre hace gala de su inevitabilidad. Despojada de su ruidosa teatralidad, la muerte no es ni la mitad de temible. Pero prefiere que el secreto no salga a la luz.
Cuando leemos y cantamos los salmos, ensayamos el testimonio de hombres y mujeres -tan reales como nosotros, sólo que de hace mucho tiempo- que se vieron abrumados por la pretensión absoluta de la muerte, sólo para ver con sorpresa cómo YHVH invertía las cosas en un instante.
Bendito sea el Señor, que cada día lleva nuestra carga, el Dios que es nuestra salvación. Selah. Dios es para nosotros un Dios de salvación, y a Dios, el Señor, pertenece el librar de la muerte.
Salmo 68:19-20 (LBLA)
Uno se podría permitir una sacudida retrospectiva, mirando hacia atrás en el momento aparente de la muerte, por lo cerca que estuvimos de ser absorbidos por ella. Haber escapado de la muerte, por muy convincente que sea o por mucho tiempo que pase, es haberlo hecho a duras penas. Por los pelos.
La muerte es presuntuosa, pero no un enemigo menos siniestro por exagerar.
Tanto si el propio roce con la muerte se produjo a través de una repentina externalidad, de la lengua ácida de quien una vez nos amó, del regreso de la empinada pendiente de la adicción o de esa destrozada depresión que reclama cada miedo como propio, es bueno detenerse y recordar lo cerca que estuvo todo.
Por Dios, casi me muero. Increíble, casi nos perdemos por completo.
Entonces, tras hacer una pausa -y estremecernos por cómo podrían haber sido las cosas-, cantamos:
Dios es para nosotros un Dios de salvación, y a Dios, el Señor, pertenece el librar de la muerte.
It is foolishness to find our moment too easily in Scripture, as though the great matters that weighed upon prophets’ hearts melt away to reveal only the towering mountain that is us. It is another kind of folly to ignore patterns of divine and human conduct that might instruct us, nudge us from our ignorance onto a slight rise from which one can see more clearly.
In an era different from our own, an exasperated YHWH released his people to their own devices. One effect was that capable people withdrew from the pains of leadership. Only children stepped up.
For behold, the Lord GOD of hosts is taking away from Jerusalem and from Judah support and supply, all support of bread, and all support of water; the mighty man and the soldier, the judge and the prophet, the diviner and the elder, the captain of fifty and the man of rank, the counselor and the skillful magician and the expert in charms. And I will make boys their princes, and infants shall rule over them. And the people will oppress one another, every one his fellow and every one his neighbor; the youth will be insolent to the elder, and the despised to the honorable.
For a man will take hold of his brother in the house of his father, saying: ‘You have a cloak; you shall be our leader, and this heap of ruins shall be under your rule’; in that day he will speak out, saying: ‘I will not be a healer; in my house there is neither bread nor cloak; you shall not make me leader of the people.
For Jerusalem has stumbled, and Judah has fallen, because their speech and their deeds are against the LORD, defying his glorious presence.
Isaiah 3:1-8 ESV
If we are too often led by children in the grown-up bodies of women and men—and we are—then we ought to ask about causes. Where are the adults? Where are the discerning, the skilled? Where are the clear-eyed, the truth-stewarding, the level heads who know whispered conspiracy from fact and how to call a spade a spade? Where are those with the cojones properly to despise a fool in the good old way because fools spit on things that have taken generations to nourish?
They are on their couches.
Leadership is hard and largely uncompensated. One leads for others, largely at the cost of oneself. This is simply how things are. There’s no crying in leadership.
When a community or a nation is no longer inspired by large ambitions, those who should lead do not. We abdicate.
Children take over. We elect them, we anoint them, we hand precious things over to them.
We ought perhaps to ask whether YHWH’s hand—now, as then—has turned against us, allowed us our ease, subjected us to infants and imbeciles.
Then we ought to repair the great breach that has opened up, or at least summon the courage to make a beginning.
Canter Bridge 