Canter Bridge

The quality of times can be measured by the willingness of their denizens to procreate. Hope for the future emerges out of the textured experience of the present. So does despair. (more…)

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Jesus made plain to those who would follow him that the cost of doing so was everything they owned and everything they were. His was an exclusive claim upon their loyalty and the virtual extinction of their self-determination. Yet in the odd economy of the ‘kingdom of God’ whose imminence and presence he proclaimed, there was to be recompense for such extreme self-surrender:

Then Peter said, ‘Look, we have left our homes and followed you.’ And he said to them, ‘Truly I tell you, there is no one who has left house or wife or brothers or parents or children, for the sake of the kingdom of God, who will not get back very much more in this age, and in the age to come eternal life.’

To this day, many who declare themselves followers of Jesus, both prosperous and paupered by the economies of their time, declare this guarantee to have been made good in their lives. Indeed, it bears a striking and recurring prominence in Christian testimony. (more…)

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The institution of slavery and the concept of duty no longer arouse us to noble thoughts. We find the first offensive and the second pedestrian. More often than not our moral aesthetics not only incapacitate us for sympathetic reading. They also betray us by the extreme selectivity with which we assign deficits to the moral codes of other times and other places while skating over the incoherences that afflict us in this time and this place. (more…)

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Even among a people less awkward about the unseen than we, the sick woman of Luke must have been shattered by the sudden strangeness of events. Grasping at Jesus as he passed by, she made meaningful contact and felt her long-standing illness reshaped into wholeness as she did so.

She came up behind him and touched the fringe of his clothes, and immediately her hemorrhage stopped. Then Jesus asked, ‘Who touched me?’ When all denied it, Peter said, ‘Master, the crowds surround you and press in on you.’ But Jesus said, ‘Someone touched me; for I noticed that power had gone out from me.’

For a disquieting moment, the narrative lurches in the direction of magic. Impersonal force seems to surge from Jesus into a person who makes the right mechanical move: ‘If only I could touch him …’ (more…)

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While at table in the home of a certain Simon—one must not fall prey to the pious instinct to hold it against this host that he is a Pharisee—Jesus’ conviviality with the assembled men is interrupted when a ‘sinnner woman’ falls at his feet. She anoints them with a bottle made for the job but adds the improvisation of bathing them with her tears. Her hair serves her for a towel.

There is disapproval round about, not only on the lips of those who think Jesus ought to have known what sort of woman this one is and prevented her making such a scene. Simon himself allows the reader to discern a certain distance from matters of passion, need, and brokenness. In answer to Jesus’ little parable about which of two debtors who are forgiven what they owe is likely to love most, he can hardly fail to answer correctly. Clearly, the one who has been forgiven more. Yet with tell-tale precision, Luke has him begin his response with the words ‘I suppose …’ (more…)

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One thinks of the crowds thronging to Jesus because of his more dramatic performances, say, the noisy exorcisms and the healing of lingering diseases. Yet when Luke summarizes Jesus’ labors, he begins his abbreviation of the crowds’ vigor by referring to what they heard Jesus say:

He came down with them and stood on a level place, with a great crowd of his disciples and a great multitude of people from all Judea, Jerusalem, and the coast of Tyre and Sidon. They had come to hear him and to be healed of their diseases; and those who were troubled with unclean spirits were cured.

What words, what voice, what personal mystique must have touched them with such impressive potency? (more…)

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The careful observer of life’s nuts and bolts soon learns that he can put up with almost anything for a little while. When you can glimpse the end of pain, you become almost invincible.

So it might have seemed entirely plausible to the young enthusiasts who gathered admiringly around Jesus that they should accompany him to his destination. He had, after all, had problems in the Samaritan villages precisely because his face was set like stone for Jerusalem. Everyone knew where Jesus was headed. (more…)

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Gabriel, ‘man of God’, has a busy year in the infancy narratives that represent more than any other material the writer Luke’s determination to set in order the jumbled accounts of Jesus’ life. He is twice sent to announce the unusual conception of Jewish boys. The responsive nature of his embassy as much as his suggestive name indicates that a higher power stands behind the events that begin to unfold promisingly in these lines. Gabriel, clearly, is doing as he is told. (more…)

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