Anger

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  I was reminded of my childhood reflections: Why did my mother have to be a nun and my father a brother? Now that façade was sundered, and I saw Father and Sister Catherine in a new light—as manipulators, driven by zealotry for a cause they decided was higher than the sacrament of marriage. My mother picked up the conversation and went on to recount how a year or two after the families had been separated and they had agreed to forgo the life of a married couple, the two of them confronted Father. “It was at St. Gabriel’s House,” she said. “Right in the refectory. We told him that we wanted our family life back, that God did not call us to be religious, but to be parents to our five children.” “What was his reaction?” I asked. “He got angry and told us we would lose our faith if we left,” my mother went on, “and so would the five of you. From the day each of us walked into the Center, long before the trouble started, we had looked up to Father as our spiritual advisor. He was telling us to stay for the good of our souls, and so we felt we had no option but to stay.” My father added, “He told us our vows of celibacy were inviolable.” In the silence that followed, I pondered his words. My father, the intellectual, the man of logic, a student of the writings of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, a man of principle—why didn’t he challenge Father about the incongruity of one set of vows superseding another set of vows? But I swallowed my instinct to ask that question. This was not a moment to interrogate my parents. They had just revealed the backstory that led to the life we lived for so many years. It was evident to me that they themselves had misgivings along the way and had suffered on account of it. My mother, almost as though to introduce some comic relief, let spill another anecdote. She laughed as she started to speak. “A couple of days later,” she said, referring to their yielding to a celibate life, “we arrived back at our little apartment at St. John’s House to find that someone had removed our double bed while we were gone and had replaced it with two twin beds, and anchored between them was a piece of plywood the length of the beds and five feet tall.” “You’re not serious?” I said. “Dead serious.” “As though you couldn’t pop into one twin bed together?” I howled with laughter. “Who do you think did it?” “I’m sure Brother Henry ordered it done,” she said. “Of course,” I replied. “Carrying out orders from on high” was the way my mother phrased it. It all seemed so counter-Catholic to me, and I asked my parents why they thought Father and Sister Catherine took such a radical step.

• From Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  For nearly forty years after life at the Center, we were once again a complete family, until my father died peacefully during a nap, four months shy of his ninetieth birthday. My mother, for the next eleven years attended daily Mass and was abundantly cheerful—enjoying her five children, ten grandchildren and eleven great-grandchildren. She passed away as this memoir was going to print. She read it in its entirety and it had her blessing. F Afterword riends have asked me why I’m not angry, why I don’t hate my parents, and why I seem so “normal.” To be honest, I have spent little time analyzing why I’m happy. That is not to imply that I have been free of any anger; rather that the anger I have felt has been directed, not at my parents, but at Catherine Clarke. From an early age, I had a subliminal conviction that my parents were somehow victims of the powerful Leonard Feeney and Catherine Clarke. It appeared to me that my parents, my siblings and I were thrust together in a world that was foreign to our kinship. With the benefit of adulthood and maturity, I came to realize that my parents were free to have left the Center and thus to have prevented our family from being sundered. They allowed their religious zealotry to supersede their parental obligations and the joys associated with them. When I try to understand why my parents did what they did, I cannot. I could never have made such a sacrifice. Nor do I pretend that I didn’t wish my childhood had been different. Those endless hours consumed craving family life, wondering if we were the only thirty-nine children in the whole world who were being raised in a religious order, forbidden to call our parents “mummy” and “daddy.” This incomprehension is real, as is the pain. What anger I have experienced is aimed fully at Catherine Clarke, the power behind the throne of Leonard Feeney. Tall and powerful, she exuded an Amazonian force. As a mere child, I was her challenge—unmalleable, a free spirit in the claustrophobic world of the Center. She and I engaged in a battle of the wills, and try as she might, she was unable to forge me into a submissive member of the community. And so she banished me. At the time, I felt like a failure, but in truth it was she who had failed. I was David to her Goliath. Despite the pain and the anger, I am most conscious of the many ways in which I have been blessed, not the least of which is that I’m hardwired to tackle

• From Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017)

  Shame is a difficult thing. People certainly try to shame me for being fat. When I am walking down the street, men lean out of their car windows and shout vulgar things at me about my body, how they see it, and how it upsets them that I am not catering to their gaze and their preferences and desires. I try not to take these men seriously because what they are really saying is, “I am not attracted to you. I do not want to fuck you, and this confuses my understanding of my masculinity, entitlement, and place in this world.” It is not my job to please them with my body. It is, however, difficult to hold on to what I know in the face of what I feel when I am reminded so publicly, so violently, of how certain people see me. It is difficult to not feel like I am the problem, and like I should do whatever it takes to make sure I don’t compel such men to taunt me in the future. Fat shaming is real, constant, and rather pointed. There are a shocking number of people who believe they can simply torment fat people into weight loss and disciplining their bodies or disappearing their bodies from the public sphere. They believe they are medical experts, listing a litany of health problems associated with fatness as personal affronts. These tormentors bind themselves in righteousness when they point out the obvious—that our bodies are unruly, defiant, fat. It’s a strange civic-minded cruelty. When people try to shame me for being fat, I feel rage. I get stubborn. I want to make myself fatter to spite the shamers, even though the only person I would really be spiting is myself.

• From Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  Later that evening, the five of us Little Sisters sat on the edge of Sister Maria Crucis’s garden as she weeded and watered the small patch of miniature marigolds and pansies that surrounded her favorite statue of the Virgin Mary. While the others lent her a hand, I turned my back, pretending to be bird watching. “Look,” I exclaimed. “There’s a rose-breasted grosbeak at the top of the walnut tree.” Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a glimpse of Sister Maria Crucis as she dropped her trowel and squinted upward in the fading light. She could always be counted on to engage in bird watching. “Oh, it’s gone,” I said. “Too bad you missed it.” There had been no bird. Before heading to bed that night, I lingered in the bathroom so I wouldn’t have to say good night to her or accept the kiss she planted on my cheek before turning out the lights. I continued my strike the next morning at second breakfast and was beginning to enjoy the power I felt in being able to shut her out. She brought this on herself for not trusting me. Our silent battle raged for days until even I started to tire of the energy it took to stay at war. How long would we keep up this state of conflict? Forever? One thing I did know: I would not apologize for something I hadn’t done. After nearly a week of standoff, as once again we were crossing the yard to go to Benediction, Sister Maria Crucis turned to me, her eyes filled with tears. “What can I do?” she asked. “Will you never speak to me again? Is there nothing I can do to make up?” With all the composure I could muster, I replied, “You didn’t trust me, and you didn’t believe me when I told you the truth.” “I am so sorry,” she replied. “Will you ever forgive me?” “Yes,” I said, doing my best not to let a tear show in my own eye. And with that, the standoff was over. It was an awkward moment, one I’d never experienced before. Children didn’t accuse Angels and Angels didn’t apologize to the children. I was embarrassed. On the surface, life seemed to go back to normal. But with that confrontation, I discovered that I, too, could be a force to be reckoned with. The power equation had shifted. It was no longer a one-way street—at least with Sister Maria Crucis. 36 The Attack 1963 O n a sunny June morning, only the clicking of metal knives and forks on melamine plates as we ate our fried eggs and toast broke the obligatory silence at second breakfast. Ahead lay another ordinary day of tutoring. Two weeks remained before the start of our summer vacation, and my mind had turned to wondering what Sister Catherine had planned as this year’s project.

• From Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  I felt a surge of anger—anger at Father and Sister Catherine who, for all those years I was a child, acted as though I had two parents whose sole objective was to dedicate their lives to God as members of a religious order. I was reminded of my childhood reflections: Why did my mother have to be a nun and my father a brother? Now that façade was sundered, and I saw Father and Sister Catherine in a new light—as manipulators, driven by zealotry for a cause they decided was higher than the sacrament of marriage. My mother picked up the conversation and went on to recount how a year or two after the families had been separated and they had agreed to forgo the life of a married couple, the two of them confronted Father. “It was at St. Gabriel’s House,” she said. “Right in the refectory. We told him that we wanted our family life back, that God did not call us to be religious, but to be parents to our five children.” “What was his reaction?” I asked. “He got angry and told us we would lose our faith if we left,” my mother went on, “and so would the five of you. From the day each of us walked into the Center, long before the trouble started, we had looked up to Father as our spiritual advisor. He was telling us to stay for the good of our souls, and so we felt we had no option but to stay.” My father added, “He told us our vows of celibacy were inviolable.” In the silence that followed, I pondered his words. My father, the intellectual, the man of logic, a student of the writings of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, a man of principle—why didn’t he challenge Father about the incongruity of one set of vows superseding another set of vows? But I swallowed my instinct to ask that question. This was not a moment to interrogate my parents. They had just revealed the backstory that led to the life we lived for so many years. It was evident to me that they themselves had misgivings along the way and had suffered on account of it. My mother, almost as though to introduce some comic relief, let spill another anecdote. She laughed as she started to speak. “A couple of days later,” she said, referring to their yielding to a celibate life, “we arrived back at our little apartment at St. John’s House to find that someone had removed our double bed while we were gone and had replaced it with two

• From Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  T 5 Then Came the Decline, and a Fall 1946 and 1949 he first sign of a change in the air came after the United States bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Leonard Feeney decried the bombings. They were a moral outrage, he said, a callous disregard for human life and an un-Christian act. He blamed a godless society for such atrocities and channeled his indignation at the faculties of colleges and universities, arguing that liberalism was corrupting the morals of students. Within a couple of years, a number of his adherents—intellectuals like himself —had become convinced by the passion of his arguments. One of those was Dr. Fakhri Maluf, the man who had invited my father to the Center. In September 1947, Fakhri published an article in the Center’s quarterly entitled “Sentimental Theology” that boldly proclaimed, “There is no salvation outside the Catholic Church.” In other words, the only way for a person to be saved and reach heaven after this life was to be Roman Catholic. Over the centuries, no less than half a dozen popes had championed that dogma and it was so stated in the Baltimore catechism that was part of every parochial school child’s religious education. But in the aftermath of World War II, the Catholic Church turned its focus to fostering ecumenism between Catholics and non-Catholics. The previous hard-line position was deemed too doctrinaire. Feeney railed against ecumenism, against the professors at Harvard for their liberalism, and against Catholic colleges and universities for compromising their

• From Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017)

  I have worked with personal trainers off and on over the years, recognizing that perhaps the support of a professional might help me improve my physical fitness. These days, my trainer is a young guy born and raised in Indiana named Tijay. He is short and compact and has an unbelievable body. His whole life is fitness. He literally glows with youth, health, and the vigorous enthusiasm of having the world as his oyster. He is a big advocate of chicken breasts as a source of protein and mustard as an accompanying condiment because it is fat free and very low in calories. Not a session goes by when he doesn’t mention some aspect of his diet that makes me so sad for him and his palate. I worry he doesn’t know about spices or flavor or anything that makes food delicious. Tijay never seems to know what to make of me because I do not glow and I am not young and I am not cheerful. He runs me through my paces, always offering me encouragement. He is not a nightmare trainer out to break my soul. He is genuine and kind and dedicated and I suppose I am his albatross. I am his project. He’s just so cheerful. He is a true believer in the benefits of a “healthy lifestyle.” He makes it all seem so easy, as I pant and sweat and ache. I want to murder this man when we work out. I am generally terrified I will drop dead at any moment, my heart pounding in my chest as I struggle to catch my breath. Sometimes, when he asks me to do something that seems well beyond my big body’s abilities, I want to scream, “Don’t you see that I’m fat?” I once asked this very question and he said, very calmly, “That’s why we’re here,” and I walked to my nearby water bottle, drank freely, muttering, “Fuck you,” under my breath. In truth, I curse at him frequently and he takes it all in stride. Each visit, he adds an exercise or intensifies an exercise we have previously done. Each visit, I stumble to my car with rubbery legs and wonder how I will find the strength to return. I sit in my car, sometimes for up to ten minutes, drenched in sweat, drinking water. I take selfies that I post to Snapchat with angry words about how much I hate exercise, and when I share these selfies on Twitter, people offer encouragement and advice, even though I am looking for neither. I am just sharing my suffering. I am looking for commiseration.

• From Reading Biblical Literature: Genesis to Revelation (2016)

  Lecture 14—Elijah, the T roubler of Israel 97 will manipulate the system so that she can take the land without paying for it. Jezebel fabricates a legal case against Naboth that ends with his execution. The moral of the story seems to be that might makes right. ‹ But Elijah pronounces a different moral. He warns that those who wrongly perpetrate violence will suffer violence themselves. Ahab and Jezebel have destroyed an innocent man, and they, in turn, will be destroyed. The final chapter of 1 Kings shows the grim truth of the prophet’s warning. Elijah’s Departure ‹ The final part of Elijah’s story is told in 2 Kings 2. By this point, it’s clear that Elijah’s time has run out, even though his work is not complete. The still, People assumed that Elijah ascended to heaven and never died; indeed, the book of Malachi promises that Elijah will return to reconcile parents and their children. Reading Biblical Literature: Genesis to Revelation98 small voice had told him to anoint three people who would bring down the government, but Elijah has enlisted only one of them, the prophet Elisha. He has also warned that Queen Jezebel will come to a hideous end, yet she is still free. ‹ What’s intriguing about this part of the story is that it’s an ending that is not really an ending. In fact, Elijah’s departure actually opens up the prospect of much more to come. Elijah and Elisha travel down to the Jordan River valley. As they walk together, a chariot pulled by horses made of fire comes charging across the landscape. Then, there is a great whirlwind that carries Elijah up to the sky until he vanishes from sight. ‹ There are many parts of Elijah’s story that we might remember: his life on the margins and his flair for street theater; his anger at injustice and his penchant for self-absorption. But the most striking part of his story is the way it resists closure. Its ending holds the prospect of a new beginning. Suggested Reading Blenkinsopp, “Prophecy in the Northern Kingdom.” Hens-Piazza, 1–2 Kings. Questions to Consider 1. A central theme in Elijah’s story is his conflict with King Ahab and Queen Jezebel. What did the king and queen find so troublesome about the prophet? What did the prophet find so troublesome about the king and queen? 2. The middle section of Elijah’s story tells of his journey to Mount Horeb (Sinai), where he voices an angry sense of isolation and despair. In what ways is the narrative critical of the prophet? In what ways might this episode enhance a reader’s appreciation for the prophet?

• From Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017)

  84Some years ago, I looked up this boy from my past, wanted to know what had become of him. He does not have an uncommon name, but his name isn’t John Smith, either, so I had a chance. I looked and looked and looked. It became a minor obsession. Every day I scrolled through the hundreds of hits that came up when I searched his name on Google. I tried combinations of his name and the state where I knew him, but he no longer lives there. I tried to guess what he had become when he grew up—my first two guesses were politician or lawyer, so you can probably guess the kind of person he is. I found him. He is neither a politician nor a lawyer, but I wasn’t far off. People don’t change. I wondered if I would recognize him. I shouldn’t have. There are some faces you don’t forget. He looks exactly the same. Exactly. He looks older, but not by much. His hair is darker. I know how long it has been since I last saw him in years, months, and days. It has been more than twenty years but fewer than thirty. I would recognize him anywhere. He wears his hair in the same style he always has, real glossy-catalog preppy. He has a wide face. He’s an executive at a major company. He has a fancy title. He has the same smug facial expression, that sort of “the world is mine” cockiness innate to some people, people like him. Ever since I found him, I Google him every few days or so like I’m trying to make sure he doesn’t go missing. I need to know where he is. I need to understand, at all times, the distance between him and me, just in case. I don’t know why I’m telling you this. Or I do. I Googled him when I wrote this book. I don’t know why. Or I do. I sat for hours, staring at his picture on his webpage on his company’s website. It nauseates me. I can smell him. This is what the future brings. I think about tracking him down the next time I’m in his city. I am there sometimes. If I told my friends there what I was doing, they would try to stop me, so I would wait and keep my plans to myself, commit a sin of omission. I am good at waiting. I could make the time to find him. He wouldn’t recognize me. I was skinny when he knew me and much shorter. I was very small and cute and smart but not smart. I am not that girl anymore. I could find him and hide in plain sight. I saw to that. He wouldn’t see me. He would look right through me. I know where he works and his e-mail address and his phone number and fax number. I don’t have these things written down, but I know.

• From Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017)

  But I followed her to the dressing room and I told her she was beautiful. And she was indeed beautiful. She nodded, tears were streaming down her face. We both went on with our shopping. I wanted to tear her mother’s face off. I wanted to call my person and hear a kind voice. I wanted something to pull me out of the spiral of self-loathing I felt myself tumbling into. I wanted to burn the store down. I wanted to scream. When the young woman left the store with her mother, she was still crying. I cannot stop picturing her face, that look in her eyes that I know too well, how she was trying to fold in on herself in a body that was so visible. She was trying to disappear and she couldn’t. It is unbearable to want something so little and need it so much. 53I never imagined myself to be the kind of person who got a tattoo. They were certainly frowned upon by my family as a mark of criminality, at best. But in the after, I wasn’t a good girl and I didn’t have to follow the rules as I once knew them. My parents, I knew, would freak out because they were still holding on to the idea of who they thought I was. But my getting a tattoo was not about them. It was about me doing something I wanted, that I chose, to my body. And so I got my first tattoo when I was nineteen. I started with a woman with wings. The artist said getting the tattoo would hurt as he wiped my arm with rubbing alcohol, swiped a plastic razor over the hairs, removing them from his flesh canvas. I waited for pain but I felt nothing. I sat quietly and watched as the ink seeped into my skin. When I look at the arcs of ink, more than twenty years later, I still see a woman with wings, a woman who can escape anything she wants, even her body. I got my next tattoo not long after, a tribal design, black and red, just below the first tattoo on my left forearm. I wish I could say I had some kind of thoughtful approach to my tattoos, but I didn’t. I just wanted to have control over (the marking of) my body. I recognize the inherent tension in my getting tattoos while also wanting to be invisible. People notice tattoos. My tattoos often inspire conversation. People ask me about the significance or meaning of my tattoos and I don’t have good answers. Or, rather, I don’t have the kinds of answers people want to hear: convenient, easy ones.

• From Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017)

  I couldn’t spend time with this person’s colleagues without a rigorous critique of everything wrong with me that I needed to try and improve. Most of the time, as you might imagine, we were not together in public because I was just not good enough. I never looked nice enough. I talked too loud. I breathed too loud. I slept too loud. I was too warm while I slept. I moved too much while I slept. I basically stopped sleeping. I just hugged as small a sliver of the edge of the bed as I could and I stayed awake so my sleeping wouldn’t be such a nuisance. I was always tired. I didn’t wash dishes correctly. There is a right way and a wrong way to wash dishes. I know that now. Don’t get water on the floor. Drain the dish rack. Be careful how you organize the dishes in the dish rack. One of my favorite things to do now is to wash dishes any old way. I spill water on the floor and I smile because these are my fucking floors and these are my dishes and no one cares if there is water on the floor. I didn’t eat food correctly. I ate too fast. I chewed too loudly. I chewed ice too often. I didn’t put things away correctly. I didn’t arrange my shoes by the front door the right way. I swung my arms while walking. I would be told these things and then have to try and remember all the things I shouldn’t do so I wouldn’t be so upsetting by just existing. We would be walking, and I would remember, Okay, hold your arms at your side. Do not swing your arms. I would spend all my time just reminding myself, Don’t swing your arms. And then I might get distracted and forget and accidentally let my arm move an inch or two and I would hear this exasperated sigh, so I would redouble my efforts to make myself less upsetting to this person I loved. DON’T SWING YOUR ARMS, ROXANE. Sometimes, I catch myself trying not to swing my arms even now and I get so angry. I get so fucking angry and I want to swing my arms like a windmill. These are my arms. This is how I walk.

• From Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017)

  With the dramatic reveal of Rachel Frederickson, the Season 15 winner of The Biggest Loser, those of us who watch finally had an unimpeachable reason to be visibly outraged about the show and its practices, even though the show has been on the air and offering a damaging narrative about weight loss since 2004. When her season began, Frederickson weighed 260 pounds. At her final weigh-in, on live television, she weighed 105, a 60 percent loss in mere months. During this reveal, even trainers Bob Harper and Jillian Michaels gaped at Frederickson’s gaunt body. She had disciplined her body the way she’d been asked to, but apparently, she had disciplined her body a bit too much. The biggest loser, we now know, should lose, but only so much. There are so many rules for the body—often unspoken and ever-shifting. In an interview, Harper would later say, “I was stunned. That would be the word. I mean, we’ve never had a contestant come in at 105 pounds.” There was a wide range of responses in the press and on social media in the wake of seeing Rachel Frederickson’s new body. Her body, like most women’s bodies, instantly became a public text, a site of discourse, only now because she had taken her weight loss too far. She had disciplined her body too much. As of late, several former contestants have leveled many accusations against the show, alleging that producers used forced dehydration, severely restricted caloric intake, and encouraged the use of weight-loss drugs and more to help contestants reach their goals, to make for better television. Even more damning was a medical study of one season’s participants, led by metabolism expert Kevin Hall. The study found that thirteen of the fourteen contestants’ metabolisms continued slowing even after their significant weight loss. This slowed metabolism contributed to the contestants gaining back most, if not all or more, of the weight they had lost on the show. The results are a stark reminder that weight loss is a challenge that the medical establishment has not yet overcome. It is certainly not a challenge a reality television show has overcome. It’s no wonder that so many of us struggle with our bodies. In the two months after her big reveal, Frederickson gained twenty pounds and reached, apparently, a more acceptable but still appropriately disciplined size. She explained that she lost so much weight because she was trying to win the $250,000 prize, but those of us who deny ourselves and try so hard to discipline our bodies know better. Rachel Frederickson was doing exactly what we asked of her, and what too many of us would, if we could, ask of ourselves.

• From Reading Biblical Literature: Genesis to Revelation (2016)

  Reading Biblical Literature: Genesis to Revelation104 in verse 3, the prophet depicts an explosion of feeling. God vents the rage that comes from a sense of betrayal, threatening to put his wife into the street. ● Rather than condoning domestic violence, the text here is assuming that the intensity of divine anger matches the intensity of divine love. God is outraged because the relationship matters, and he does not want to give up on it. ‹ But then, in chapter 2, beginning with verse 14, Hosea pictures God recognizing that anger can never win Israel back. If God wants the relationship to continue, he must speak tenderly to Israel’s heart. Hosea says that God wants Israel to call him her husband once again. T o enable people to do that, the prophet offers a vision of reconciliation. He pictures a context in which the cycle of violence ends and life is characterized by justice, love, and mercy. Israel and Assyria ‹ Hosea lived at the time when the Assyrians were expanding their empire. They initially dominated the area between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, in what today is the country of Iraq. But beginning in 745 B.C., they embarked on a campaign of military conquest. Over the next two decades, they conquered territory from the Persian Gulf in the east to the border of Egypt in the west. By 733 B.C., the Assyrians had captured most of the land in north and central Israel. ‹ Against this backdrop, Hosea 11 pictures God as the devoted parent of a rebellious child. The opening line says, “When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son.” Yet the child took up with the wrong crowd and kept sacrificing to Baal. The more God reached out to him, the more the child rejected his parental love. ‹ Hosea expresses the heartfelt anguish of God. He pictures God as a parent, teaching the child to walk or tending to him when he was sick. The tragedy is that when Israel grew up, this child of God ran away and would now suffer the destructive consequences of his actions. Hosea says that the people will return to the land of Egypt, as if going back to slavery again. He explains that he means that Assyria will be their king.

• From Reading Biblical Literature: Genesis to Revelation (2016)

  Reading Biblical Literature: Genesis to Revelation 114 ‹As the lyrics go on, God’s grief turns to anger at this sense of betrayal, and by chapter 3, he is thinking of a “divorce.” Here, Jeremiah is referring to people participating in fertility cults and acts of devotion to other deities. He portrays the people as a promiscuous wife, much as Hosea did on the same issue. ‹In conveying the confrontational side of the prophet’s message, however, the underlying sense of love doesn’t disappear. Instead, it turns into God’s longing for reconciliation, and that’s where the constructive aspect comes in. In the last half of chapter 3 and the beginning of chapter 4, God asks “faithless Israel” to return. The Shattering of Illusions ‹If reconciliation between God and Israel is the goal, what would prevent that from happening? For Jeremiah, a major problem is that people are living with the illusion that nothing is wrong and their position is secure. He tries to shatter that illusion through his words and actions. ‹A pivotal moment is a speech he delivers at the temple. Keep in mind that people understood the temple to be a visible sign of God’s presence among them. Further, many assumed that as long as God was present, he would protect them; thus, the temple gave them a sense of security. But for Jeremiah, it is absurd to think that God will ignore unethical conduct simply because the people maintain the temple rituals. ‹In chapter 7, Jeremiah delivers his Temple Sermon. He positions himself at the gate leading into the temple and calls out that the people must change their way of living. Not surprisingly, people entering the temple are annoyed. ‹Jeremiah’s initial argument fits the constructive side of his message. He says that if the people link ethical conduct to worship in the temple, things will be fine. But they must act justly with one another, not oppress the vulnerable, and not worship other deities. ‹For the rest of the speech, the critical side of the message predominates. Jeremiah accuses people of treating the temple like a robbers’ den. He pictures people engaging in all kinds of unethical behavior in daily life, then coming Lecture 17—Jeremiah on Anguish and Compassion 115 Jeremiah’s commission to prophecy is somewhat unsettling because he learns that his life is not his own; God has set him apart for purposes that are not of his choosing.

• From Reading Biblical Literature: Genesis to Revelation (2016)

  Reading Biblical Literature: Genesis to Revelation36 ‹ God may be the existent one who has announced that he will free the people from slavery, but his first major obstacle is Moses, who turns out to be an uncooperative prophet. As soon as God commands Moses to lead the people out of slavery, Moses objects, claiming that the people won’t listen to him and that he can’t speak in front of the pharaoh. Finally, God grows impatient. His intent is to free the people, yet he can’t get on with it because his chosen prophet keeps making excuses. Exasperated, God tells Moses to take his brother Aaron along to help out. The Pharaoh ‹ In the third part of the narrative, the pharaoh emerges as a major figure. Here, the story subverts the iconic picture of an Egyptian ruler with absolute power. The pharaoh has pretensions to invincible power, but in his contest of wills with God, those pretensions will come undone. ‹ Moses goes to Egypt to meet the pharaoh and demand the release of the people from slavery. But the pharaoh commands the taskmasters to make the slaves work even harder. Moses then calls for 10 plagues or disasters to fall upon Egypt. After each plague, the pharaoh responds; the key to following the narrative is to watch how these interactions unfold. ‹ In Exodus 7:14, it is clear that the pharaoh is obstinate. A common English translation is that his heart remains “hardened.” Thus, Moses announces the first plague: The water of the Nile will turn to blood. With the second plague— frogs swarming out of the river—the pharaoh vacillates. He offers to let the people make a sacrifice if their God will take the frogs away. Moses does as the pharaoh asks, but when things improve, the ruler hardens his heart again. The pattern is repeated through successive plagues. ‹ The interaction becomes more complex with a plague of sickness and painful sores on people and livestock. In this case, the narrator says that God is the one who hardens pharaoh’s heart. It’s a striking comment that underscores the limits of the pharaoh’s control. Not only is he losing his grip on the people, but he is losing his grip on himself. God can do what he wishes with the pharaoh’s heart. And by hardening it, God keeps pharaoh engaged in the contest.

• From Reading Biblical Literature: Genesis to Revelation (2016)

  Reading Biblical Literature: Genesis to Revelation 196 The issue of resources generates conflict, but conflict generates change. And this is another important theme in Acts. The author recognizes that there was no golden age of peace and harmony but that conflict is a persistent feature of social life. For him, the question is how conflict will be addressed. ‹Ultimately, Peter and some of the other disciples have the Hellenists take on the task of distributing food. They give the job to disciples named Stephen and Philip and to five other men. It’s a constructive response to conflict in the community, but the division of labor proves unstable. Stephen is not content to distribute food while the original disciples preach. Interestingly, newer leaders, such as Stephen, become key spokespeople for the Christian message. At this juncture, they move the story forward, while the old guard remains in the background. ‹Stephen’s version of the message of Jesus quickly provokes opposition from the wider Jewish community in Jerusalem. They charge that he is denigrating both Jewish law and the temple. Thus, in chapter 7, Stephen recounts the story of Israel, from Abraham up to the time Solomon builds the temple. The theme of the speech is how God accomplishes his purposes despite conflict within Israel. What makes Stephen’s speech distinctive is the way he recounts these episodes around the theme of conflict. ‹For Stephen, the pattern of conflict culminates when Jesus is put to death. This is where the speech reaches its rhetorical climax. Stephen’s opponents have charged that his message about Jesus somehow denigrates the Law of Moses. But Stephen argues that the narratives in the law recount ongoing opposition to God. And that opposition culminates in the execution of Jesus, which Stephen refers to as murder. The highlight of Stephen’s speech is that the true lawbreakers are Jesus’s opponents; they are the ones who support the unlawful taking of life. ‹Those listening to Stephen are outraged, and they continue the pattern of rejection by dragging him out of the city and stoning him to death. But like Jesus, before he dies, Stephen asks that God not hold this sin against his murderers.

• From Reading Biblical Literature: Genesis to Revelation (2016)

  Lecture 22—Resistance, Adaptation, and the Maccabees 147 ‹ Antiochus also turned the temple into a pagan sanctuary. He put up statues to various deities and set up altars where people could sacrifice swine and other animals that Jews considered unclean. The crowning touch came in mid- December of 167 B.C., when Antiochus put what the writer calls a “desolating sacrilege” in the temple. That sacrilege was a pagan altar that was placed on top of the Jewish altar of burnt offering. Other sources add that Antiochus dedicated the temple to Zeus, whom the Seleucids worshipped as the god of heaven. Resisting Change ‹ The story of resistance to these changes begins in chapter 2. It was a movement initiated by a man named Mattathias, who came from a family of priests. One of his sons was named Judah, and his nickname was Maccabee, which means “the hammer.” Judah played such an important role that his nickname is used for the resistance movement as a whole, which is called the Maccabean revolt. ‹ The incident that sparked the revolt took place in Modein, northwest of Jerusalem. An officer of the king came there to induce Mattathias and others to adopt non- Jewish practices and to offer a pagan sacrifice. T o sweeten the deal, the officer promised to give them gold and silver and to grant them the title “friends of the king.” But Mattathias insisted that he would live by the covenant of his ancestors. ‹ At that moment, another Jewish man stepped forward to show that he was willing to adapt to the new situation and offer the sacrifice demanded by the king. But Mattathias was outraged at what he considered apostasy. He killed both the Jewish man and the king’s officer and fled to the desert. From there, he assembled a fighting force and engaged in guerilla warfare against the Seleucids and their supporters. ‹ With the death of Mattathias, his son Judah Maccabee became the leader. Judah transformed the resistance movement into a large-scale military campaign that resisted Seleucid oppression and reestablished Jewish control of the temple in Jerusalem. ‹ In the middle of chapter 4, Judah and his men returned to Jerusalem, found the temple in a shambles, and began the process of rebuilding. In mid-December of

• From Reading Biblical Literature: Genesis to Revelation (2016)

  Lecture 15—Justice and Love in Amos and Hosea 101 he warns that the sanctuaries of the country will be destroyed and the royal house will fall by the sword. ‹In response, one of the priests from the sanctuary at Bethel accuses Amos of conspiracy against the government and tells the prophet to return to the south. Amos reiterates that disaster is coming. A society that crushes its poorest members will eventually be crushed, and the people will be taken away into exile. That is, of course, what happened several decades later, when the armies of Assyria brought an end to the northern kingdom. Hosea ‹In the book of Hosea, the focus shifts from issues of social justice to the problem of unfaithfulness to God. Hosea’s basic assumption is that God loves his people deeply, yet he says that God is anguished because estrangement has occurred. Hosea shows us a God who feels outrage because he has been rejected, yet a God who wants nothing more than to be reconciled with those he loves. ‹The opening chapter introduces the theme by involving Hosea in a public scandal: God tells the prophet to marry Gomer, a promiscuous woman, whose children will come from her adulterous relationships. The scene is intentionally shocking. To have Hosea marry someone who would sleep around with other men made a mockery of basic values. Yet the prophet was to live in this scandalous relationship to show how scandalous it was for God to have his people prove unfaithful to him. ‹The underlying idea is that God’s relationship with Israel involves mutual commitment. For Hosea, God showed his commitment by delivering his people out of slavery in Egypt and bringing them to the land of Canaan, as he had promised. That meant, in turn, that people were to be faithful to God. Yet Hosea lived in a context where it was common for people to participate in local cults, particularly that of Baal. ‹In Hosea’s eyes, worshipping Baal seemed to violate Israel’s unique relationship with the God who delivered them from slavery. For him, that relationship was not one among many. It centered on a religious covenant that gave Israel its

• From Reading Biblical Literature: Genesis to Revelation (2016)

  159 LECTURE 24 Mark on the Crucifixion and Resurrection T he Gospel of Mark introduces Jesus and his message about the kingdom of God. For Jews of the time, hope for the kingdom usually meant a golden age of peace. But in Mark’s narrative, the kingdom is redefined in terms of healing and forgiveness, suffering and service. In the second part of Mark’s gospel, the process of redefining the kingdom continues. Jesus is given royal titles, but the opposition to his purported kingship ultimately intensifies and leads to his crucifixion. As a writer, the author of Mark must grapple with this apparent contradiction between kingship and crucifixion, between power and weakness. His challenge is to narrate a story in which crucifixion does not negate Jesus’s kingship but defines it. Jesus in Jerusalem ‹ In Mark 11, the setting shifts from Galilee in the north to the city of Jerusalem in the south. Jesus approaches the city in a dramatic royal procession, riding a colt. The crowd in Mark’s gospel makes the royal theme explicit, saying, “Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Blessed is the coming kingdom of our ancestor David!” From Mark’s perspective, Jesus is the coming king. But how will his kingship be carried out? ‹ As the story progresses, we find that the positive reception by the crowd is matched by a negative reaction from Jewish authorities. A pivotal moment comes when Jesus makes a prophetic critique of the central religious institution of the time: the Jerusalem temple. ● In the courtyard in front of the temple were merchants, selling animals to pilgrims for sacrifice, and moneychangers to exchange travelers’ foreign coins. ● Jesus chases both the merchants and their customers out of the temple and overturns the tables of the moneychangers. He announces that the temple is not serving the purpose for which it was built—to be, in an echo of Isaiah, “a house of prayer for all nations.”

• From Reading Biblical Literature: Genesis to Revelation (2016)

  Reading Biblical Literature: Genesis to Revelation196 The issue of resources generates conflict, but conflict generates change. And this is another important theme in Acts. The author recognizes that there was no golden age of peace and harmony but that conflict is a persistent feature of social life. For him, the question is how conflict will be addressed. ‹ Ultimately, Peter and some of the other disciples have the Hellenists take on the task of distributing food. They give the job to disciples named Stephen and Philip and to five other men. It’s a constructive response to conflict in the community, but the division of labor proves unstable. Stephen is not content to distribute food while the original disciples preach. Interestingly, newer leaders, such as Stephen, become key spokespeople for the Christian message. At this juncture, they move the story forward, while the old guard remains in the background. ‹ Stephen’s version of the message of Jesus quickly provokes opposition from the wider Jewish community in Jerusalem. They charge that he is denigrating both Jewish law and the temple. Thus, in chapter 7, Stephen recounts the story of Israel, from Abraham up to the time Solomon builds the temple. The theme of the speech is how God accomplishes his purposes despite conflict within Israel. What makes Stephen’s speech distinctive is the way he recounts these episodes around the theme of conflict. ‹ For Stephen, the pattern of conflict culminates when Jesus is put to death. This is where the speech reaches its rhetorical climax. Stephen’s opponents have charged that his message about Jesus somehow denigrates the Law of Moses. But Stephen argues that the narratives in the law recount ongoing opposition to God. And that opposition culminates in the execution of Jesus, which Stephen refers to as murder. The highlight of Stephen’s speech is that the true lawbreakers are Jesus’s opponents; they are the ones who support the unlawful taking of life. ‹ Those listening to Stephen are outraged, and they continue the pattern of rejection by dragging him out of the city and stoning him to death. But like Jesus, before he dies, Stephen asks that God not hold this sin against his murderers.