Canter Bridge

‘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. Continue Reading »

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. Continue Reading »

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. Continue Reading »

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’. Continue Reading »

Nehemiah’s memoir shows signs of paranoia. This is not unusual in women and men who undertake great tasks at formidable cost. It does not take preternatural focus and a grand project’s fatigue to create enemies, only to render them the principle fact on the ground.

Sanballat, Tobiah, and Geshem could no doubt speak as reasonable men. Their request, in fact, was to counsel together with Nehemiah. They were not strangers to the Jewish community. Indeed, they had their advocates on the inside.

Yet Nehemiah, probably correctly, perceived that they were at the core opponents of the restoration project to which he had bent his energies, to say nothing of the wellbeing of those enthusiasts, true believers, and fence-sitters who had climbed down to throw in their lot with him. The prospects that would follow upon failure were unattractive. Continue Reading »

It is perhaps not for us to judge Ezra’s decisions when his people’s survival was at stake.

To say this is immediately to risk the kind of biblicism that fails to reckon with narrative that is not fit for morality lessons or reduction to principles. A story like this exists because the events it describes actually happened in a people to whose clothing the smoke of extinction still clung. Such a people finds it impossible to regroup gently.

Their hope is that there is mercy in severity. If that mercy does not appear, they are worthy of disdain. Yet this does relieve us of the readerly duty to read sympathetically, even when this requires a hermeneutical discipline that is not native to us. Continue Reading »

The shadow of angels flits furtively across the Bible’s pages. Only rarely do these mysterious messengers tarry long enough to be named. More often, they remain invisible or—if glimpsed—simply do their work and go back to where they came from.

Wherever that is.

The few studied reflections on angels in the Bible’s pages suggest that they are the Lord’s agents, standing at the ready to do his work without ever taking any of the credit.

The Old Testament, several steps closer to its mythic origins and several degrees more candid about things unseen, suggests that the angels—some of them at any rate—are what non-Israelites would consider to be gods. That is, they are powers lesser than YHWH himself and beholden to his will but no less formidable to human dimensions for all of that. They rush to do YHWH’s bidding. Continue Reading »

If God were to act within the small parameters of ordinary people, what evidence would be left in the wake of his visit?

Peter has done the unthinkable, crossing lines of demarcation that had been conceived, established, refined, and maintained with impeccable care and unspeakable cost. That he should do so is all the more unthinkable for his own dedication to divisions that he and his people considered the opposite of arbitrary. The delineation of two virtual races of humanity—Jew and gentile—was hardly regarded as a national choice. It reflected, rather, the path of the Creator’s scalpel.

The dietary laws were to die for not for nutritional or even mere religious reasons. They were, rather, the most concrete and universal of ways—for who does not eat, and that every day?—of observing what God has done. Continue Reading »