Canter Bridge

Contrary to what Paul might have expected upon his return to the mother city Jerusalem, the Jewish leaders of the Jesus movement greeted his report of God’s work among the gentiles with jubilation and prudence. Capable of welcoming the complexity of a generous redemption that included the unwashed and impious in its broad embrace, they nonetheless advised Paul to take precautions against the arousal of zealous violence by Jerusalemite Jews of a less ecumenical spirit.

Arguably, such generosity of spirit and tactical posturing kept the Jesus movement intact as it was buffeted by the early crosswinds of ethnic complications. The reader is well advised to linger over it, to palpate the absence of rigidity that it implies, to sense the shrewd care of it all in the face of multiple threats to the movement’s integrity. (more…)

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The reader of Job must be prepared for complex turns and important nuance.

For example, Job’s bitter complaint against a God who does not watch over the poor as their lives are dismantled by the unjust rich suddenly turns at 24.22 into an assurance that God will in the end give the unjust their due. This is the very judgment whose absence Job has decried in 24.1. He is not, it would seem, quite the pure antagonist of conventional wisdom that he is so often made out to be.
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The graceless beauty of Elihu’s words should unsettle all readers of religious vocation or temperament. There is beauty in such crystal. Cold glass and steel, skillfully wrought, erect buildings and monuments that are breathtaking in scope and brilliance.

Elihu may be a fool. He is not a dullard.

His verbal artistry erects a theodicy that is intimidating in its self-confidence. Anyone who can speak like this, it seems for a moment, must know what he is talking about.

Yet Elihu does not.

Paul’s edifying words, delivered at the invitation of a synagogue leader in Pisidian Antioch, take up the theme of sophisticated error by rehearsing the enmity that the custodians of Israel’s legacy displayed towards Jesus. (more…)

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The book of Job lurches to an unexpected conclusion, one that troubles the logic of scholars and challenges the shape of the piety we know.

YHWH’s rhetorical tour de force persuades Job that he truly knows nothing. Job responds to this conviction by ritual humiliation. So far, somewhat conventional.

But then, a startling turn ensues. It turns out that Job has spoken ‘what is right about YHWH’ and the friends have not. Crucially, the reader is given to understand that Job’s right standing before YHWH depends not on the visceral enthusiasm of his confession, but rather on his aggrieved confrontation of a God who seemed both absent and condemning. Job had maintained his integrity in good times and in those that had famously become very, very bad. He does not fear to say so to God himself. (more…)

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It is easy for the man or woman who is easily impressed by the majesty of deity or nature to conclude that humankind is a footnote. Man seems a mere scratch on a mountainside, woman a murmured vowel in an epic cantata that celebrates greatness as largeness.

It is true that biblical poetry is capable of celebrating Leviathan’s immensity at humanity’s cost. Yet only mankind is glorious in a way that imitates its Maker. Only man and woman stride like gods—admittedly small ones—across the landscape. Only human beings are easily mistaken for their Creator in a manner that honors rather than belittles the Designer of this oddly self-reflective species.

The eighth psalm is an ode to the Ruler’s majesty. ‘How majestic is your name in all the earth!’, the speaker exudes God-ward in the opening and closing lines of the hymn. There is no mistaking who occupies center stage in this singing out of creation’s architecture. (more…)

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Those biblical psalms that begin plaintively nearly always end in confidence and intelligent resignation. A subtle but sure movement carries such prayers towards the closure of response.

‘To you I call, O Lord my Rock’, the writer of the twenty-eighth psalm tells his Creator, ‘Do not turn a deaf ear to me. For if you remain silent, I will be like those who have gone down to the pit.’

No theatrical poser, the pray-er spells out a life or death situation and the impotence that defines his inability to do anything but address Heaven. Yet, irresistibly, he is drawn towards what seems an antithetical or dubiously pious security.

The Lord is my strength and my shield; my heart trusts in him and I am helped. My heart leaps for joy and I will give thanks to him in song. (more…)

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‘He rushes at me like a warrior’, Job says of God.

In working up to this declaration of divine warfare against his broken life, Job is relentless regarding the plight of a man who once walked in friendship with God but has seen that amity turned inexplicably into violence:

He shattered me / He seized me by the neck and crushed me / He has made me his target / His archers surround me / Without pity he pierces my kidneys / And spills my gall on the ground / Again and again he bursts upon me. (more…)

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Who would have thought we’d end up just here, not six full years after September 11, 2001?

A flurry of recent conversations with individuals connected to the United States military have clarified for me just how deep is the divide between two nearly incompatible views. Faced with what our country’s forces are attempting to accomplish in the current crisis, we at home seem drawn irresistibly towards disengagement. Those in the line of fire quite often find this unthinkable and wonder how we got there while they were away fighting.

Network television routinely portrays as victims military families who feel that-far from victimhood-they have made noble choices and willingly bear the attendant sacrifices. Our media’s focus on casualty levels that—each number telling the terrible story of some family’s loss—bear no resemblance to the vastly higher toll of deep conflicts that have consumed our national efforts in the past. This disconnect is perceived by military men and women as missing the obvious point that military conflict kills human beings. Great efforts require such sacrifice, I hear military people saying, and not just the generals and colonels whose age and seniority might be suspected of distancing them from the emotional and physical disfigurement of those who do the bloody work. (more…)

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Job’s relentless honesty is all that he has.

All other assets have been lost to the crescendo of calamities that have come upon him as part of a cosmic drama that he will never understand. Job responds by cursing the days of his conception and birth, flinging at the unanswering skies his resentment of all powers that could have swallowed up that day and saved him the unceasing trouble into which he has fallen. Nothing he says is false. It is merely daring, as the speaking of truth so often is. (more…)

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It is possible for an ancient text to narrate community well-being and miraculous healing in one breath.

It is not so easy for us. Whether we are liberated or hamstrung by our naturalistic convictions is an open question.

The remarkable fact of today’s text is not so much that a profound sharing of life and resources coexists with the healing of a temple mendicant. It is rather that these events are presented as matters of the public record.

Peter and John, with nothing else to give to the man who lies at the gates of the temple in his daily quest for alms, heal the man and make alms unnecessary. The incident is not so much unique as representative. By the time we reach that public spectacle, the text has already alerted us to the face that ‘fear’ was in each one of the Jerusalemite followers of Jesus because ‘many signs and wonders were happening through the apostles’. (more…)

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