Canter Bridge

Although John the Seer reserves pride of place among the human virtues for that costly quality that we unjustly but necessarily abbreviate as ‘perseverance’, he is sure that the future does not flow from human exertion or construction. Rather, it is the doing of the Lord’s own generosity.

The eschaton is, before all else, gift.

Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.

Yet its singular and super-human provenance does not for one moment render this, God’s future, antisocial, individualist, or otherwise constrained.

No sooner does the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flood out from the place of deity itself than it courses through the city’s streets. It is the life-source of a most urban reality. What is more, it irrigates the tree of life, now standing inexplicably on both sides of the river, so that its leaves might heal the nations.

Reference to the twelve kinds of fruits is not to be missed. YHWH’s gifted eschaton remains decidely Israelite in its instrumentality. Jesus’ instruction that ‘salvation is of the Jews’ persists, in John’s visionary economy, through and beyond the end of history. Yet it is not in any restricted way for the Jews. Rather, it heals the nations.

No specifying adjectives are any longer licit. No grammatical restrictions, with their formative grip upon the reality we imbibe, are tolerated. The nations stand unconditioned, for the riverine course of YHWH’s provision now drenches every one and all.

Were we to read a few clauses further in, we would stumble upon John’s laconic, pregnant sentence that ‘the curse will be no more’. For now, we swim over our heads into the river that appropriates streets upon which we no longer need to busy ourselves sorting things out, breaking up fights, scratching for bread.

Wet, we dive, we laugh. Faintly, we remember hints at our earlier scrabbling about but, as we come up for air, they fade away. They were not large enough for this wet, resourced, healing current.

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Not for nothing do the terms ‘climax’ and ‘climactic’ figure importantly in multiple spheres of human endeavor.

One learns, in this life, to wait and to anticipate. One learns to long. Life educates one to grasp, white-knuckled, hopes and desires that a more prosaic mindset might counsel one to abandon.

A sober-mindedness stands behind such counter-cultural, stubborn hope. Despite appearances, such unyielding refusal to cave to the way things are is more truthful than the cynical compromises we are urged to make. One sees, out of this stubborness, possiblity that has become invisible to pragmatism’s intoxication. (more…)

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The biblical drama bends an ear to the ground, straining to detect the cry of innocent blood spilt into the soil by callous hands who seem too often to have got away with murder. The biblical anthology’s meta-narrative squirms and frets before the unresolved dilemma of the innocent victim, his voice muffled if not snuffed out, his death too often unobserved. A bullet in the head in some Polish wood, a prisoner’s last breath given up while even his guard is too bored to notice, the hasty grave-mound hoed out in some forgotten field.

Yet the first assassin—a fratricide, no less—learns in the book of Genesis’ Ur-drama that the blood of his murdered brother cries out from the soil into which it has flowed. Flood narrative and Torah ritual prescription both reckon with the enduring value of human life, blood standing in as visual, liquid condensation of the life for which it is essential. One barely gets started in the gospel narratives of Christ’s passion before the impact of innocent blood once more jolts the conscious. (more…)

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This morning’s newspaper chronicles, in a manner of speaking, the movements of kings, princes, and their armies. Such human jockeying for power and the ‘outcry in the streets’, the end of which the psalmist longs to see, sound a constant beat in the rhythm of human affairs.

Yet there is, in the newsprint of a dying print medium, no similar register of dark, demonic forces. One is left to understand that powerful men and women make the world, plowing deep, bloody furrows by their unrelenting ambition. (more…)

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From time to time the course of events hands to us a particularly pleasant fruit encased in a most bitter shell.

The genre of biblical literature—it is of course to be found outside the biblical text as well—that is called ‘apocalyptic’ addresses itself to the faithful who have lost control. Words like ‘power’, ‘influence’, and ‘clout’ have meaning in a society and an historical moment in which the pious can share in the shaping of their space, their time, their shared destiny. Often this privilege is denied. Then, apocalyptic speaks its word. (more…)

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