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Archive for the ‘textures’ Category

clashing cymbals: Exodus 15-16

Posted in textures, tagged , , on January 27, 2008| Leave a Comment »

Moses and Miryam each snag space for a song in Exodus 15. Staggering forward from the violent salvation of the Yam Suf (the ‘Sea of Reeds’), the screams of drowning Egyptians still clinging to them like smoke to a survivor’s clothes, the escaped Hebrew slaves sing. (more…)

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the reluctance of prophets: Exodus 2-4

Posted in textures, tagged , , on January 22, 2008| Leave a Comment »

Moses’ place in the story of Israel comes long before the establishment of a monarchy and the emergence of prophets as counterweight to the king. Yet the text presents Moses as the prophet par excellence. Patterns are established here that will mark the prophetic trajectory when its moment comes.

One of these patterns is counter-intituitive, at least if we begin from the modern perception of prophets as loud-mouthed, imposing, self-assured verbalists who spoke for God with little self-restraint and loved the perks that came with doing so. (more…)

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mobile bones: Genesis 50-Exodus 1

Posted in textures, tagged , , , on January 21, 2008| Leave a Comment »

Joseph in his maturity is one of the appealing characters of Israel’s patriarchal narratives. We have seen his youthful dreamery and felt a mild revulsion before it. Even the way he toys with his brothers when they come to Egypt in search of grain and do not recognize Joseph in his Egyptian finery leaves one to wonder whether there are still dark demons aflutter in this man’s soul, whether they can ever be tamed now that power’s corrupting agency has joined them there.

Yet in the end Joseph appears to have learned to love and, certainly, to forgive. (more…)

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a strange, strong instinct: Genesis 47-49

Posted in textures, tagged , , on January 20, 2008| Leave a Comment »

The patriarchal narratives seem almost inebriated by the destabilizing habit of placing posterity and blessing upon the shoulders of the wrong child. The first-born, time and again, sees circumstances trump his privilege. The lesser becomes the greater. Legacy draws its protagonist from the margins and stations him front and center. (more…)

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Take heart, it is I, do not fear: Matthew 14

Posted in textures, tagged , , on January 18, 2008| Leave a Comment »

As to seasick disciples on a turbulent Sea of Galilee, Jesus sometimes appears out of context, seeming very much to be a ghost. He comes at an angle from which we expect only threat and danger, messengers of an alien chaos that could only devour us.

Amazingly, to his disciples’ cry of ‘It is a ghost!’ (for who else comes walking on water through a storm but weird, destroying things?), Jesus’ reply echoes the long, biblical pattern by which unsought appearances of the divine are announced by just these words: ‘Don’t be afraid!’

But when the disciples saw him walking on the sea, they were terrified, saying, ‘It is a ghost!’ And they cried out in fear. But immediately Jesus spoke to them and said, ‘Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.’

Quite reasonably, we fear that chaos which we cannot control. Yet very much to our amazement, Jesus often approaches us most promisingly from out of that very disorder. He is not to be controlled. Yet we ought to welcome rather than fear him when he comes to us this way. Or if we cannot do that, then at least we may hear his words of friendly intimacy: ‘Take heart. It is I. Do not be afraid.’

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meekness’ ROI: Matthew 5

Posted in textures, tagged , , on January 5, 2008| Leave a Comment »

In Jesus’ teaching, blessing is a deep paradox. It does not come to those who seem most likely to have achieved it. Its credentials are counter-intuitive. Blessing descends in sharp contradiction to the appearances of candidacy. (more…)

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tedium’s fertile blessing: Genesis 8-11

Posted in textures, tagged , , on January 4, 2008| Leave a Comment »

With their feet newly planted on dry ground, the survivors of the biblical flood story learn from YHWH himself that the experience will never be repeated. Indeed, dependable regularity will mark the future rather than the systematic dismantling of creation that brought the floodwaters surging up from below and pounding down as incessant rain.

As long as the earth endures,
seedtime and harvest, cold and heat,
summer and winter, day and night,
shall not cease.

So reads the versed section of twin divine promises not to wipe the earth free of living creatures as he had done in the wake of humanity’s filling up the earth with nothing but bloodshed and violence. The rainbow is identified as YHWH’s covenantal sign that such destruction is not to be feared when the rains come down. (more…)

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this is the word spoken … : Matthew 3-4

Posted in textures, tagged , , on January 3, 2008| Leave a Comment »

The gospel according to Matthew, one of the four canonical literary glimpses of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection that are afforded us, peers attentively into Israel’s past. Indeed, this portrait of Jesus and his way in this world finds its guiding framework in the Old Testament. Matthew will frequently refer to a word or action of Jesus with a ‘this is that’ formula that anchors the thing to some fixed point in the witness of the Hebrew Bible. (more…)

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united nations: Zechariah 7–8

Posted in textures on December 28, 2007| Leave a Comment »

The books of Micah and Isaiah co-host a vision of nations thronging Jerusalem in anticipation of finding there divine instruction. In consequence, YHWH shall ‘reprove between nation and nation’, a judicial intervention that induces previously bellicose peoples to ‘beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks’.

So does Jerusalem/Zion stand in as the inspiring destination of a polyglot mass who can scarcely in the moment the vision was spoken have been imagined to participate in such pilgrimage. The highways to Jerusalem will be clogged with both Jews and Gentiles in this act of prophetic imagination. (more…)

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winds of change: Zechariah 1-3

Posted in textures, tagged , , on December 26, 2007| Leave a Comment »

From the late biblical book of Zechariah emanates the spirit that has made ‘Second Isaiah’ the most quotable row of the Old Testament vineyard. ‘Second Isaiah’ is a scholarly term referring usually to chapters 40-55 of the book of Isaiah, and sometimes to 40-66. There the hope-drenched, restorative message of Isaiah is writ large. (more…)

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