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Posts Tagged ‘textures’

manna that you did not know: Deuteronomy 7-9

Posted in textures, tagged , , on March 8, 2008| Leave a Comment »

Israel reckoned with a guiding hand in the desert that she could not control and did not often comprehend. The rhetoric of Moses’ speeches on Moab’s plains takes pains to exclude all causes within Israel herself that might explain YHWH’s outlandish affection for her. Simply, the attraction is mysterious. (more…)

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when children ask: Deuteronomy 4-6

Posted in textures, tagged , , on March 7, 2008| Leave a Comment »

Much of the sinewy stuff of biblical faith is about showing up. We are given few levers over events, circumstances, and the outcomes that in retrospect we bundle together and label ‘history’. The core of our work is to present ourselves and to wait, not a passive, inactive waiting but a tour de force of preparedness for whatever happens. (more…)

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upon the eventual turning: Deuteronomy 2-4

Posted in textures, tagged , , on March 6, 2008| Leave a Comment »

Moses’ narration of events occurring from the time Israel encountered YHWH at Zion through to the dramatic moment in which he delivers his sermons to a people about to wet their feet in the Jordan is a damning tale.

From this lawgiver’s perspective, YHWH has been attentive to the people’s needs during their generation of wandering. This same postponed generation has seen YHWH guide them through the politics of semi-nomadism, the necessary passages through claimed turf, and cultivated in them a desire for a place to call their own.

Moses ask rhetorically what other nation has known a god to walk in its midst as YHWH has walked in Israel’s. What other nation has been given statutes and ordinances that produce community and life, as Israel has received? His delineation of Israel’s life among the nations is a familiar one: They worship idols while Israel worships the living God who has set up camp in their midst. (more…)

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long enough: Numbers 36-Deuteronomy 1

Posted in textures, tagged , , , on March 5, 2008| Leave a Comment »

When Moses ‘undertook to expound’ the Law that the Pentateuchal narrative places into his hands by means of a private encounter with YHWH on Mount Horeb/Sinai, his first words provoke a movement towards risk-laden opportunity:

The LORD our God spoke to us at Horeb, saying, ‘You have stayed long enough at this mountain.’

The destination is clear, promising, and potentially lethal:

Resume your journey, and go into the hill country of the Amorites as well as into the neighboring regions—the Arabah, the hill country, the Shephelah, the Negeb, and the seacoast—the land of the Canaanites and the Lebanon, as far as the great river, the river Euphrates. See, I have set the land before you; go in and take possession of the land that I swore to your ancestors, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give to them and to their descendants after them.

The context for this collective recalling of the people’s history is both important and dramatic. Israel stands on ‘the plains of Moab’, on the cusp of entering into the land that YHWH had promised to them. Moses, the Lawgiver, now takes leave of his people. His role in the Israelites’ cowardice forty years earlier is now given without explication as the reason that YHWH will not allow Moses’ footsteps to fall on the land of promise. His last act of leadership over the tribes of the sons of Israel is to deliver a series of valedictory speeches that come into our hands as the book of Deuteronomy. (more…)

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cohabitation: Numbers 34-35

Posted in textures, tagged , , on March 4, 2008| Leave a Comment »

Full of the dizzying details of land allotments and legal code, the Pentateuch can land hard atop the Bible reader’s aspirations to ‘read the whole thing’. The legal and inheritance sections of the ‘five books of Moses’ rarely appear in the most thumbed pages of the Bibles on our shelves and bedstands. (more…)

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a glimpse of the blind: Mark 10

Posted in textures, tagged , , on March 3, 2008| Leave a Comment »

It is as interesting to consider what the blind beggar Bartimaeus saw before Jesus restores his sight as after.

Picking up the thread of an Isaianic promise that the Lord’s servant would restore sight to the blind, the sightless Bartimaeus discerns in the appearance of Nazareth’s roving Jesus the visit of a messianic figure. To the embarrassment of some, he calls him ‘Son of David’ and begs him for mercy. (more…)

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a hundredfold: Mark 10

Posted in textures, tagged , , on March 2, 2008| Leave a Comment »

Jesus must have known his words would be overlaid upon the landscape of life like a template, checked for accuracy, doubted in anguished fashion, and celebrated when they seemed to describe the ironic intricacies of life more exactly than any others:

Peter began to say to him, ‘Look, we have left everything and followed you.’ Jesus said, ‘Truly I tell you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields, for my sake and for the sake of the good news, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this age—houses, brothers and sisters, mothers and children, and fields with persecutions—and in the age to come eternal life. But many who are first will be last, and the last will be first.’

(more…)

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advance guard, rear guard: Numbers 8-10

Posted in textures, tagged , , on February 22, 2008| Leave a Comment »

Threat and danger concentrate the mind exquisitely. They bring matters of life and death to the fore. Lesser arguments drop away.

Israel’s constitutional narrative considers through the lens of threat and danger the fledgling nation’s trek out of servitude in Egypt, into the still lethal wasteland of wilderness, and then into a land of promise that was—importantly—a place possessed by others who were not eager to hand it over to a wannabe people and their peripatetic god. (more…)

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only sleeping: Mark 5

Posted in textures, tagged , , on February 21, 2008| Leave a Comment »

The gospel writers occasionally seem to have lost the thread of communication theory.

What end is served, for example, by quoting one of your story’s main figures in a language that your readers do not understand? Such an obfuscating move might be put down to the desire to impress, the practice of linguistic elitism. There, the ability to toss off a foreign phrase rather than a desire to communicate weighs heaviest in the writer’s mind. (more…)

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proximity’s integrity: Mark 5

Posted in textures, tagged , , on February 20, 2008| Leave a Comment »

In a short career studded with the jaw-dropping actions we call miracles, Jesus’ most spectacular confrontation with the crowded spaces of the gospels’ spiritual geography goes under the title ‘the Gadarene demoniac’.

This was the fellow who wandered among the tombs, the ineffective chains of citizens’ arrest hanging from his body, cutting himself and crying out in a madman’s chaotic and irresolvable delirium. Every detail underscores that his life—if it can be described as such—takes place at the margins, in the netherworld of those who have been ejected from human society and will never return. To call this man a castoff is to underestimate the spiritual slavery that led to his ‘cutting off’—as the Pentateuch unceremoniously calls such a thing—from his people. (more…)

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