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Posts Tagged ‘biblical reflection’

the opposition of wills: Luke 22

Posted in textures, tagged , , on April 26, 2010| Leave a Comment »

It requires a peculiar strength to assert one’s will as the penultimate thing.

He withdrew about a stone’s throw beyond them, knelt down and prayed, ‘Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will, but yours be done.’ An angel from heaven appeared to him and strengthened him.

In Gethsemane’s anteroom to judicial murder, Jesus knew exactly what he wanted: to live.

If there was glory in the arrest, the beatings, the cross that waited him, there was no pleasure. It came to Jesus’ lips as a most bitter, unwanted cup. He would have done almost anything to escape its venom.

Almost anything. On this the world hinges. (more…)

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emergency provision: Joshua 5

Posted in textures, tagged , , on April 12, 2010| Leave a Comment »

The early chapters of the book of Joshua twist together twin threads. First, there is Joshua’s assumption of the dead Moses’ leadership of Israel. Then, the occupation of the land promised to the Israelites a very long time ago.

Twin threads. The emerging nation, in this literary history, is required to ’embrace change’—as we say a little too often today—in two important ways.

First, they must choose whether they will follow YHWH’s newly anointed leader, who is very much unlike his famous predecessor. Second, they must learn to provide for themselves in a land that seems poised to cooperate with the effort. (more…)

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burying Moses: Deuteronomy 34

Posted in textures, tagged , , on April 10, 2010| Leave a Comment »

It is not difficult to imagine the scandal caused by the Hebrew Bible’s rehearsal of Moses’ burial. Vocalized as it is in the traditional text, the verb is active and has a single subject: and he buried (him) …. Indeed, the Hebrew particle that stands behind the English word him virtually assures that this reading is the intended one. It is hard in context to imagine another subject than YHWH.

There is little alternative: we should read … and (YHWH) buried him ….

Yet a witness as old as the Septuagint feels the scandal of this divine interment. So does a translation as recent as the NRSV. The former should be translated … and they buried him ... The latter reads … and he was buried …

YHWH, it appears, is not easily envisaged scraping out a crevice in the hard ground, then gently laying his friend Moses’ body into it, covering him tenderly against the ravaging hyena and the grave-robber. (more…)

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the deep magic: Luke 24

Posted in textures, tagged , , on April 4, 2010| Leave a Comment »

Death is turned back on a morning like this one.

If the witch had truly understood the deep magic, we are told in the cinematic paraphrase of C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, Witch, and the Wardrobe, she might have interpreted the deep magic rather differently.

In their fright the women bowed down with their faces to the ground, but the men said to them, “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here; he has risen! (Luke 24)

Hell’s formidable genius is unable correctly to decipher the meaningful scrawlings of truth. The witch and all who follow her are outwitted on Easter Sunday. Aslan is no longer dead, though his death was most real. Christ is risen. He is risen indeed. (more…)

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what to ask for: Luke 11

Posted in textures, tagged , , , on April 4, 2010| Leave a Comment »

When Jesus’ disciples ask him for training in prayer, he has just finished praying. Presumably they are moved to pray because the sight of Jesus in conversation with his Father stimulates them to desire the same.

It would seem, then, that the thing Jesus instructs his disciples to ask for is what he himself has been requesting.

One day Jesus was praying in a certain place. When he finished, one of his disciples said to him, ‘Lord, teach us to pray, just as John taught his disciples.’He said to them, ‘When you pray, say: “Father, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come.”‘

We are told to ask the Father that his reputation might be set apart as untouchable and untarnished. As well, we learn to desire that his rule might be realized in our space and time as it is known to prevail even now in heaven. (more…)

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hearing without seeing: Deuteronomy 26

Posted in textures, tagged , , on April 4, 2010| Leave a Comment »

The Bible regularly privileges hearing over seeing.

From time to time the priority of audition over vision is hammered home from complementary angles. On the one hand, Israel is commanded to listen. On the other, she is forbidden to craft a visual representation of her speaking Lord.

Then Moses and the levitical priests spoke to all Israel, saying: ‘Keep silence and hear, O Israel! This very day you have become the people of the LORD your God. Therefore obey the LORD your God, observing his commandments and his statutes that I am commanding you today.’ The same day Moses charged the people as follows: ‘When you have crossed over the Jordan, these shall stand on Mount Gerizim for the blessing of the people: Simeon, Levi, Judah, Issachar, Joseph, and Benjamin. And these shall stand on Mount Ebal for the curse: Reuben, Gad, Asher, Zebulun, Dan, and Naphtali. Then the Levites shall declare in a loud voice to all the Israelites:

“Cursed be anyone who makes an idol or casts an image, anything abhorrent to the LORD, the work of an artisan, and sets it up in secret.” All the people shall respond, saying, “Amen!”’

Context makes clear that the forbidden idol here is not merely a hidden—that is to say, extra-official—image, but any image shaped to present YHWH to human eyes.

The logic of this persistent privileging of the ear over the eye as the organ of choice for a new nation is not too difficult to discern. Israel’s ongoing proximity to her redeeming Lord demands a mental, an intellectual grappling with his person and his presence. Clearly, both ear and eye are organs of sense, so the affirmation of the value of hearing YHWH and the prohibition of seeing him does not reduce to a mere preference for the abstract over the sensual. The distinction is not so much one of kind as of degree. (more…)

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acquainted with grief: Isaiah 53

Posted in textures, the great sadness, tagged , , on March 16, 2010| Leave a Comment »

It would have been difficult to sketch out the trajectory established by the ‘servant songs’ of the book of Isaiah and arrive before the fact at anything like the profile of Jesus. Retrospect and reflection are a different matter.

The New Testament writers found it natural to view Jesus within the frame established by the enigmatic figure of Isaiah’s ‘servant of the Lord’. These writers connected the dots, as it were, and found in the ancient prophetic text an intimation of a deeply effective agent of the Lord who would know painful rejection, sorrow, and shame. This looked, to them, just like Jesus.

He is despised and rejected by men,
A Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.

A defensible interpretative strategy allows the New Testament’s citations and allusions to draw our exegetical attention not only to the ancient words that are actually cited but to the larger contexts and passages to which those indicators point. In following this readerly strategy, one might permit the sparing but substantive allusions to the famous portrayal of the servant in Isaiah 53 to bring to mind that chapter’s entire Gestalt of the servant. Though the New Testament does not actually refer to Jesus by the poignantly beautiful descriptor ‘acquainted with grief’, these memorable words are thus treated as a component part of the servant’s—now viewed as Jesus’—profile. (more…)

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contempt: Psalm 1

Posted in textures, the great sadness, tagged , , on March 15, 2010| Leave a Comment »

The seat of mockers is a dangerous resting place. Contempt is among the most corrosive and self-destructive of human postures, particularly because of the power with which it seals off its subject from course correction or guidance from outside her bubble.

Contempt de-credentials all comers before they have had opportunity to make their appearance, let alone their case. Because the quality is potently anti-social, those whose circumstances or choices permit them to evade the company of the contemptuous are called blessed.

Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers. (Psalm 1:1 ESV)

If contempt is most damaging to its subject, it is at the same time a painful whip upon those who are closest to her and who absorb its venomous lash. (more…)

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getting one’s kicks: Proverbs 10

Posted in textures, tagged , , on March 3, 2010| Leave a Comment »

A man’s amusements speak loudly of his soul. The activities to which a woman gravitates in her leisure—when she is most free to choose her options—indicates what she would do most of the time if she were able.

We are, in a manner of speaking, most similar to the thing that makes us smile.

As mischief is sport for the dullard,
So is wisdom for the man of understanding.

The proverb’s potency lies in its ability to place wisdom in the context of sport, of fun, of diversion. We are asked to imagine the good man or woman who is capable of breaking into a spontaneous and broad grin before some spectacle of prudent speech or discerning action.

There is nothing wrong with the grin, only its employment upon prurient, tawdry, or worthless objects.

Wisdom, we learn, is not unlike a well-turned double-play, a birdie on the 18th hole, a hat trick, a photo finish.

The good person breaks into cheers, applauds, jumps up and down, or settles back in quiet admiration of this thing of beauty.

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critical care: Matthew 24

Posted in textures, tagged , , on February 5, 2010| Leave a Comment »

The biblical eye surveys the landscape both retrospectively and prospectively. It discover evidence of YHWH’s intense care for his own in history and in hope.

Even in apocalyptic literature—that tone of voice that continues to speak even as civilization’s lights go out and chaos roams the streets—YHWH is not seen to have failed his own. Indeed the weak and the marginal emerge in such lines as history-makers of a kind. Their Lord shapes events and circumstances to preserve them, to protect them, and—in the literature’s darkest hues—to make sure things do not go so bad for them as they might have done:

Pray that your flight will not take place in winter or on the Sabbath. For then there will be great distress, unequaled from the beginning of the world until now—and never to be equaled again.If those days had not been cut short, no one would survive, but for the sake of the elect those days will be shortened.

Jesus speaks here of a time when affliction will be no stranger to his followers. Quite bluntly, he promises them that they will endure a tribulation so great that the world’s bloodstained chronicles can offer no precedent for it.

Yet this dark and future chapter does not rumble on mechanically. Its determinism, its underpinnings of inevitability, are delimited precisely at the point where they might have led to the extinction of the faithful.

Mercy, sometimes, comes down to this: evil, in its heyday, remains an underlord, its pretensions to supremacy snatched from its arrogant hands.

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