Canter Bridge

Though the Johannine Jesus’ response to news of Lazarus’ illness suggests a startling conflict of emotions, the equanimity of his conversation with Martha and Mary hews to a more placid line. I find the whole picture anything but posed and ungenuine. If Jesus is the person the Fourth Gospel has been suggesting, one might almost anticipate such experience and behavior in the context of the sickness and death of ‘the one whom (Jesus) loves’.

Deep friendship is the backdrop of this story. Those who have known this gift understand something of its potency, something of the forcefulness one confronts when its riches have been invaded by the contrary force of death. (more…)

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The Johannine presentation is not shy about making exalted claims on Jesus’ behalf. The categories are large: he is light, he is life, he is the way, he is truth. One anticipates apotheosis rather than degradation of the gospel’s central figure. Indeed, apotheosis might be considered a guest too late for this party, since Jesus is presented from the outset in categories so fulsome and pristine that in the history of interpretation they’ve (mostly unhelpfully) been explained against a Platonic rather than a Hebraic background.

Yet one finds neither pristinization, re-pristinization, apotheosis, or an untroubled crescendo of recognition of Jesus’ glory and celestial origins. (more…)

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A handful of well-received twentieth-century writers were particularly adept at probing the deep structure of reality and the meaningful juxtaposition of suffering and redemption that resides there. J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis come to mind. These men spun tales nourished by the notion that deep suffering lodges itself in the anteroom to liberation and even to glory. (more…)

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There was a time in the circles of my youth when too much talk of love in connection with ‘the things of God’ was taken as the surest sign that one had ‘gone liberal’. This is a deep shame.

To be sure, people who speak critically in this way have seldom set out to pursue bloody-minded hatred. They are usually quite loving people, particularly with others whose profile is proximate to their own. Their intention is to be faithful stewards of a truth that comes from God. Having observed others merrily casting away sacred things for the sake of happy Groupfeel, they have become incensed and mistakenly fallen back upon a suspicion of love itself. (more…)

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