Posted in textures, tagged biblical reflection, Numbers, textures on February 22, 2008| Leave a Comment »
Threat and danger concentrate the mind exquisitely. They bring matters of life and death to the fore. Lesser arguments drop away.
Israel’s constitutional narrative considers through the lens of threat and danger the fledgling nation’s trek out of servitude in Egypt, into the still lethal wasteland of wilderness, and then into a land of promise that was—importantly—a place possessed by others who were not eager to hand it over to a wannabe people and their peripatetic god. (more…)
Posted in textures, tagged biblical reflection, Mark, textures on February 21, 2008| Leave a Comment »
The gospel writers occasionally seem to have lost the thread of communication theory.
What end is served, for example, by quoting one of your story’s main figures in a language that your readers do not understand? Such an obfuscating move might be put down to the desire to impress, the practice of linguistic elitism. There, the ability to toss off a foreign phrase rather than a desire to communicate weighs heaviest in the writer’s mind. (more…)
Posted in textures, tagged biblical reflection, Mark, textures on February 20, 2008| Leave a Comment »
In a short career studded with the jaw-dropping actions we call miracles, Jesus’ most spectacular confrontation with the crowded spaces of the gospels’ spiritual geography goes under the title ‘the Gadarene demoniac’.
This was the fellow who wandered among the tombs, the ineffective chains of citizens’ arrest hanging from his body, cutting himself and crying out in a madman’s chaotic and irresolvable delirium. Every detail underscores that his life—if it can be described as such—takes place at the margins, in the netherworld of those who have been ejected from human society and will never return. To call this man a castoff is to underestimate the spiritual slavery that led to his ‘cutting off’—as the Pentateuch unceremoniously calls such a thing—from his people. (more…)
Posted in textures, tagged biblical reflection, Mark, textures on February 19, 2008| Leave a Comment »
In the gospel accounts of his life, Jesus’ authority over all things—an advised rather than careless description—becomes increasingly evident as his little cohort follows him around the land. The confidence that emerges in fits and starts runs a course that is at cross purposes with fear, its primary alternative. (more…)
Posted in textures, tagged biblical reflection, Mark, textures on February 18, 2008| Leave a Comment »
It might have been the sheer numbers of people who followed Jesus into the region of the Sea of Galilee that spooked the custodians of religious stability. On the one hand, it is not easy to fault them. Religious madmen and the gullibility of the throngs had caused considerable harm to the Jewish people’s destiny, encased as they were in Imperium’s airless wax. (more…)
Posted in textures, tagged biblical reflection, Leviticus, textures on February 9, 2008| 1 Comment »
When we might have expected paternal wrath or rebellious fury or grief’s loudest howling, Aaron gives us only silence. It is an enigmatic, even mysterious, stillness. In the wake of the summary execution by Yahweh of his sons Nadab and Abihu for the offense of offering unsolicited ‘strange fire’ on Yahweh’s altar, Aaron’s quiet is patient of more than one interpretation:
Now Aaron’s sons, Nadab and Abihu, each took his censer, put fire in it, and laid incense on it; and they offered unholy fire before the LORD, such as he had not commanded them. And fire came out from the presence of the LORD and consumed them, and they died before the LORD. Then Moses said to Aaron, ‘This is what the LORD meant when he said,
“Through those who are near me
I will show myself holy,
and before all the people
I will be glorified.”‘And Aaron was silent.
Perhaps Aaron’s silence speaks of his resignation before YHWH’s judicial response to his sons’ innovation. His closed mouth may even represent assent to the circumstance, a tacit recognition that the death of reckless religionists—even when they are flesh and blood—is right and proper. (more…)
Posted in textures, tagged biblical reflection, Exodus, textures on February 5, 2008| Leave a Comment »
It is well to temper one’s definition of tedium with humility. In the absence of this discipline, we all too hastily dismiss as boring and irrelevant aspects of reality that from other angles may appear enthralling and pertinent.
Or, at the least, worthy. (more…)
Posted in textures, tagged biblical reflection, Matthew, textures on February 3, 2008| Leave a Comment »
A proper perspective will frequently elicit the inherent simplicity from a mass of details rather than impose an external simple-ness. Such is Jesus’ view of the Hebrew legal complex, a hermeneutic for which Jesus himself would scarcely have claimed novelty. (more…)
Posted in textures, tagged biblical reflection, Exodus, textures on February 3, 2008| Leave a Comment »
To enter the world of the Hebrew slaves, finding their way in more sense than just one in the shadow of Mt. Sinai, is to intrude upon an odd world. Even its protagonists—Aaron for example—defy classification. One one hand, he is the spokesman of YHWH’s own prophet. On the other, he responds to the threat of the mob by thinking up some very nice gold bulls to represent YHWH himself before a mob that he might have hoped he could turn into a worshipping congregation. (more…)
Posted in textures, tagged biblical reflection, Matthew, textures on January 29, 2008| Leave a Comment »
Jesus’ earthy parables often offended the sense of justice that had accrued over centuries to conventional wisdom and salt-of-the-earth logic. His contemporaries, like ours, managed fairly established assumptions about what a good man was like and how a bad man was likely to behave. Even for those unschooled in the legal minutiae of Israel’s long dance with Torah would have agreed with a high level of consensus about the kinds of behavior that were worthy of respect, the kinds that cried out for retribution, and the unspoken moral code that lay behind all of this. (more…)
Canter Bridge 