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Isaías 25.1-5 se constituye en una oda de celebración ante la victoria sobre los ‘tiranos’ y los ‘crueles’ de la tierra que YHVH lleva a cabo en defensa de los pobres e indefensos. La tradición isaíanica está convencida de lo que se podría titular ‘la ética del Éxodo’. Es decir, YHVH no es imparcial ante la tormenta que los vulnerables sufren cuando el poder se concentra en manos de unos pocos poderosos.

El agradecimiento que motiva este paisaje es patente en los versos 4 y 5:

Porque tú has sido,
en su angustia,
un baluarte para el desvalido,
un refugio para el necesitado,
un resguardo contra la tormenta,
una sombra contra el calor.
En cambio, el aliento de los crueles
es como una tormenta contra un muro,
como el calor en el desierto.
Tú aplacas el tumulto de los extranjeros,
como se aplaca el calor bajo la sombra de una nube,
y ahogas la alharaca de los tiranos.

Un libro tan realista como Isaías asume la triste realidad que los que viven sin poder van a sufrir en manos de los que lo poseen. El elemento positivo de su mensaje no consiste en que YHVH no permita que esto suceda, al contrario, la injusticia es una realidad.

La tradición que el profeta Isaías promueve insiste en que YHVH considera semejante injusticia como motivo de guerra y que en consecuencia, él sale a pelear a favor de los que en un momento dado se convertirán en sus rescatados, sus redimidos, sus agradecidos.

One might imagine that knowing Jesus were a matter of mastering certain details. His antecedents, his persona, his intentions, his purpose.

Contrary to subjectivity’s noisy heralds—for they are legion—these matters are indeed essential to knowing him, to knowing anyone. The elevation of ‘relationship’ and ‘experience’ as self-evident and absolute priorities is, one hopes, a passing fad. Yet it will cause heavy casualties before its demise. One must know some facts if one is to truly know a person. This once did not require statement and we’ll get there again or civilization will have passed us by entirely.

Yet John’s gospel reminds us of the relational, moral character of knowing Jesus. Revelation, though it bears myriad and critical facts, is not an abstract process. It occurs as Jesus and his followers relate responsibly and—in our case—obediently to each other. Continue Reading »

The prevailing emotion that threatens my ambiguous relationship with equanimity as I read Malcolm Webber’s ‘Church-Integrated Leader Development’ is grief. I put things in just this way because there are other sentiments in play. An injured sense of justice, for example, and here and there a dollop of anger.

Yet grief is definitely the thing. I feel that sense of loss that comes when things might have turned out rather more profitably than they have, when well-intentioned human beings forfeit what might have been theirs, when complex but not insurmountable matters are sacrificed on the altar of simplicity and short-term rhetorical gain.

Mr. Webber means well. In fact, he wants precisely what I want. This is why I feel grief’s prick rather than the damp but otherwise forgettable discomfort of indifference. Continue Reading »

The density of the biblical proverbs allows the mistaken impression that the editor of these sayings is playing purposelessly with syllables. A quick read breezes by what it mistakes for truism when in fact a patient loitering around the saying is capable of uncovering a deeper truth.

Proverbs 15.13 is a case in point:

A glad heart makes a cheerful countenance,
but by sorrow of heart the spirit is broken.

One might suppose that a would-be poet with a penchant for lining up nice-sounding words has painted gold leaf around the mundane. ‘Happy = happy, sad = sad’ might be all this saying has to offer. Ornament trumps substance. There is, by this reading, very little here.

But the proverbialist is more intelligent than this and has accrued the right to be heard with more respect. What he is getting at is the deep inevitability of what one might call personal osmosis. What is on the inside will eventually find its way out. A man or a woman can keep up the charade of happiness only so long when the rot of sorrow is in the bones.

The proverb observes the priority of what a different era might call the life of the soul. If the soulful essence of a man trembles with joy, the face will show it, perhaps in the moment but necessarily over the long haul. By contrast, what the proverb describes as the spirit—here something like the observable genius of a particular human being—will eventually show the cracks, fissures, and seismic separations that occur when the heart, deep down, is stricken by sorrow.

The collector of biblical proverbs knows that a human being is an integral unit. One can play at contradiction, one can enact a theater of the self by which masks are changed as often as circumstances require. Yet eventually, incessantly, irrevocably, the true state of a woman finds its way to the face, where discerning onlookers note the fleeting shadow that casts itself across the eyes when the heart, deep below, is sick.

Chipmunks are the garbage fish of suburban backyards. They are the bottom-feeding carp to, say, the smallmouth bass that is the inventive squirrel or the rainbow trout whose role is filled by the Northern Cardinal. A fallen Blue Jay may merit a sigh as we carry his defunct body tenderly to the garbage can. But nobody mourns a fallen chipmunk.

This common rodent expires unmourned while creating only slightly greater cosmic ripples than a squashed mosquito.

Until today. On this cool, blue-skied Spring afternoon in Indianapolis, crippled Sammy chased chipmunks as they darted among the logs of our wood-pile. Actually, he didn’t so much chase them in space and time as he intended to chase them with all his canine soul.

Rosie, his older Rhodesian Ridgeback sister, started the ball rolling, bending her muscular agility to the never-successful task of tracking the little rodents with her customary acrobatics. Sammy, barely up from the edges of the grave that threatened to devour him just days ago, lurched over on his three functioning legs to the scene of the unfolding drama.

Blindness and a 75%-rate of working limbs was not to deter this stalwart lad from making his futile stab at rodent mayhem. In some rough-and-ready choreography with Ridgeback sister Rosie, the Samsters stumbled this way and that, hinting at aggressive exertions in the direction of chipmunk prey even if his mind was much more the actor than his now-crippled body.

This boy has spirit. Custodians of the ground squirrel population of the American Midwest need not fret. Sammy will not soon be despoiling chipmunk families.

But, boy, would he like to! And that, for today, is enough.

In the light of the myriad ethical issues that preoccupy the biblical anthology, it is most remarkable that its powers of observation and instruction are so often drawn to that little organ we call the tongue. Biblical ethics in diverse garb agree that this little muscle possesses the powers of both life and death.

It is perhaps not surprising that the theme should be drawn into the orbit of another recurring image, that of the tree of life.

The tongue that brings healing is a tree of life,
but a deceitful tongue crushes the spirit.

The tree of life is patient of multiple understandings. One that ought not be lost in the shuffle corresponds to what grammarians call an objective genitive. That is, the subject (in this case, the tree) produces the item that clings to it in a grammatically genitive construction. Life, here, is the tree’s object. The tree produces the conditions which in turn create life in a recurring fashion.

One lives and lives well when such a tree graces the square of one’s community, for its leaves, its fruit, its sheer persistent productivity see to the nourishment of the people who live in its shade. Continue Reading »

Two experienced veterinarians in a room at our beloved Michigan Road Animal Hospital expressed astonishment at the dog Johnny and I brought in to see them this evening. Dr. Fletcher, looked twice toward the heavens, in gratitude. ‘Es casi milagrosa‘—’it’s almost miraculous’—she says to me. Language, loss, and renewed hope each bond people.

Dr K, who saw Sammy last Friday in his extremity, rises to the occasion. Sammy’s left front leg is useless but he has learned to lurch around without its help. Regaining his canine emotional balance, he even made some pathetic but joy-worthy attempts to snap at his sister Rosie as she ran laps around him this afternoon.

The boy is fighting back.

He’s going to make it.

Sammy is not out of the woods. Yet he is proving before our watching eyes what loving care and a dog’s refusal to give in can do against calamity’s claims.

Sammy wants to play. Good grief, he wants to play.

He cannot, of course. His legs will not carry him to it. Yet he wants to play. Something tells me he will have his way.

There is joy in Mudville this evening. The fat lady is swallowing hard, trembling with stage fright, suddenly, undeniably unsure of her task.

I could tell by the trembly edge in my wife’s voice over the phone that the news was bad. Catching me early on the last day of a business trip, she reported that Sammy’s wanderlust had finally got him into deep trouble.

His nocturnal adventures in our back yard had morphed into a determined and ultimately successful effort to squeeze through the gap in our neighbor’s half-fallen fence and being the unchaperoned wanderings in the neighborhood that would prove his undoing. When Sammy didn’t appear for his breakfast at 6:30, Linda had awakened Lucas in a bid to outnumber the sickening possibilities a blind dog might encounter on his own in the night. Continue Reading »

As a compendium, the Bible is born in a resolutely communal manger.

Solitary, introspective philosophies of the kind common to, say, Europe in the second half of the twentieth century, must scrounge energetically to find biblical precedents for the lonely path they travel. In biblical perspective, the first man and woman have barely begun to wake to each other’s charms before they are commanded to make a horde of other creatures just like them. Similarly, biblical trajectories of human history tend to reach their pinnacle in sanctified mob scenes.

In short, the Bible is rarely about me. It very often is about us.

Against such a default plurality, the proverb’s realism about life’s deepest experience stands in stark relief. Those fellow travelers of a redeemed and redeeming people will nod with understanding as it reminds us that deep singularity haunts the journey, even when the din of other voices rings loudly:

The heart knows its own bitterness,
and no stranger shares its joy.

Some things, we are allowed to consider, must be carried alone. Some tears tolerate no articulate explanation, some joys explode with solitary passion.

One walks, even in a very large company, alone.

There is no escaping solitude, only a wizened embrace of its inescapable, enduring presence. This is not all we possess. Yet it is, necessarily, a portion of our inheritance. And of mine.

Something there is in YHWH’s justice that sets propriety to one side and makes grown men shout as though mad.

When a person or a community has ached for justice to be done, become familiar with the sour bile of longing, wondered times beyond counting whether it is vain to wait any longer when nobody seems to care, then correct decorum hardly matters. When YHWH (finally!) bares his arm to humiliate the arrogant and lift up the humble, the turning of tables is not met with quietly mumbled liturgies and neatly pressed shirts.

To the contrary, clothing becomes drenched with sweat as praise erupts from the lungs and legs of women and men who never thought they’d live to see the moment. Continue Reading »