Anger
Anger is the body mobilized against an obstruction — heat rising into the chest and jaw, the gaze narrowing, the hands wanting a target. It is not a failure of composure but a verdict already reached: something here is wrong, and the wrong has an address. Vela reads anger as a primary emotion with its own dignity, distinct from the cruelty it is so often mistaken for, and attends to how often it is the honest first response to harm.
Working definition · Mobilized objection—heat and pressure toward obstruction, harm, or unfairness.
8921 passages · in 1 cluster
Vela’s read on this emotion
Anger is one of the most moralized of the emotions Vela reads, and the moralizing usually runs in one direction — toward suppression. The reading runs against that reflex. Anger is information before it is a problem; it names the place where a boundary was crossed, and the writers worth following have refused to apologize for it.
The reading is densest where anger has had to be argued for as legitimate. The testimony of the AIDS years — the personal essays and oral histories that came out of ACT UP, the activist coalition that confronted the early epidemic — keeps rage as a load-bearing register, not a lapse. Audre Lorde wrote about the uses of anger as a precise instrument rather than a loss of control. The memoir of survived family harm holds anger that took years to permit itself — anger at a parent, at an institution, at the self for not being angrier sooner. The contemplative inheritance is not silent here either: the Hebrew prophets and the Psalms of imprecation keep an unembarrassed register of anger directed at injustice and even at God.
Anger is not the same as resentment, contempt, or cruelty. Resentment is anger banked and cooled — grievance kept in storage. Contempt has given up on the other and looks down; anger still believes the other can be reached. Cruelty wants harm for its own sake; anger wants the wrong addressed. The four are kin and the reading keeps them separate, because the writers most honest about each have kept them separate.
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Long-form guide in the magazine
An essay on how this word lives in language, in the tagged corpus, and in figurative art when curators pair passage with image — not a list of stages, not permission to feel.
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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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8921 tagged passages
From Martin Luther (2016)
The whole Reuchlin affair became a fight that pitted the new Humanism against the old Scholasticism, and in both circles it became a grand cause célèbre. Of course the Humanists valued all literature, especially ancient literature, so the idea of destroying these Hebrew texts was repulsive. And the Scholastics, such as Pfefferkorn and the Dominicans, evinced not a little anti-Semitism. But Reuchlin’s position was also compromised, because he was promoting not just Hebrew texts but the Kabbalah, which promoted not a typically biblical view of the Old Testament but a kind of Jewish mysticism bordering on the occultic practices forbidden by the God of the Old Testament. Still, this was not the principal difficulty that Rome and the Scholastics had with Reuchlin. Nor was the battle with him waged on a purely academic level. In fact, things got dirty almost immediately, when Pfefferkorn circulated a pamphlet claiming Reuchlin had been bribed. Reuchlin in turn wrote a pamphlet defending himself, which the Cologne theologians then worked to suppress. They finally succeeded, and the inquisitor officially ordered that the pamphlets be confiscated. In 1513, as things escalated, Reuchlin was ordered to appear before a court of the Inquisition, where he refused to recant what he had said. But still, things were not clearly resolved, so in 1514 the case was sent to Rome. Luther had been following it closely from the beginning and clearly took Reuchlin’s side. When he heard the case would go to Rome, he was pleased and wrote to Spalatin about it. The viciousness of the Cologne theologians had become impossible to ignore, especially the grating sarcasm of Ortwin Gratius, who had mocked Reuchlin in a poem. Luther’s letter to Spalatin is dated August 5. When he wrote to his dearest friends, Luther’s energy and humor were sometimes irrepressible: Greetings. Up to this point, most learned Spalatin, I considered Ortwin, that little “poet” in Cologne, to be an ass. But as you can see he has [now] become a dog, even more, a ravenous wolf in sheep’s clothing, if not even a crocodile, as you sense so keenly. I assume that finally he himself “caught on” to his asininity (if I may use Greek in Latin), since our John Reuchlin pushed his nose in it. But since Ortwin has considered stripping off [his donkey skin] and clothing himself with the majesty of the lion, he has now instead ended up as a wolf or a crocodile due to an unfortunate leap, since he exceeded his ability in trying to accomplish this metamorphosis. Good Lord, what can I say? Then Luther expressed his satisfaction that the case had come to Rome at last. He was obviously a long way from the views he would hold of the papacy and the cardinals in a few years.
From Come As You Are (2015)
The rule did two things. First, it genuinely took away performance pressure from Camilla and frustrated expectations from Henry. They could both relax and forget about it, which made them both feel better. It had another impact, too. Henry had already shifted the way he thought about foreplay and was thinking of their entire relationship as an opportunity to tease Camilla’s ticking pilot light. The new rule took that to another level. See, taking orgasm off the table put Camilla’s little monitor in a puzzling situation. If Henry was, say, going down on her, and she felt so aroused that she thought she might have an orgasm, she’d remember that she wasn’t supposed to have an orgasm, and then the little monitor would keep checking her arousal level and comparing it with her goal state of not having an orgasm, which means her monitor would keep thinking about orgasm and how close she was to it. Embedded in the thought “Don’t have an orgasm” is “… have an orgasm.” And if I say to you, “Don’t think about a bear,” what’s the first thing that happens? Orgasms aren’t as automatic as thoughts, but in the right, sex-positive context, if you make orgasm against the rules and then give the person a lot of time to try not to have an orgasm… I’ll just say it’s a fun game and you might want to try it sometime. Which brings me to the orgasm your partner can’t stop themselves from having. Henry is just about as smart as Camilla. I know this because one day she called me and said that he had stuck to their agreement better than she had—he was using a vibrator on her and she had been close and actually wanted to have an orgasm, but he stopped before she got there. She was frustrated. And even a little pissed. But hey, the rule was her idea. He was being a gentleman. He did this two more times—got her close, then backed off. Because he is such a gentleman. And eventually he got her so close that she genuinely couldn’t stop herself from having an orgasm. Which is a neat trick—women don’t have a “point of no return” for orgasm the way men do for ejaculation. To get a woman to be unable to stop herself from coming takes a high level of persistent arousal. And yes, again, being a sex educator is the best job in the world when people tell you stories like this. nonjudging 1: “no good reason”Here’s something I hear a lot: “If there is no solution to an uncomfortable feeling, there’s no point feeling it.” Sure there is! The point of feeling a feeling you can’t do anything about is to let it discharge, complete the cycle, so that it can end.
From Come As You Are (2015)
Sex researcher Meredith Chivers often says, “Genital response is not consent.” Let’s add to that, “And neither is pregnancy.” Genital response is no more an expression of pleasure, desire, or consent than the fertilization of an egg is. I hope that is totally obvious to you by now. We metaphorize our bodies; we use descriptions of our physiology to stand in for descriptions of our states of mind. “I’m so wet” and “I’m so hard” are intended to say, “I’m into this.” These metaphors are so entrenched that people believe they’re literal. Indeed, some people actually want us to believe that women are lying—whether deliberately or because we’ve been culturally oppressed out of the capacity to recognize our own desires—when our genitals are responding but we say we’re not turned on. I hope that by now, six chapters into this book, you know better. You know that men’s and women’s sexualities are made of the same parts, just organized in different ways, and you know that no two people are alike. You know that what activates your accelerator or hits your brakes is context dependent. You know that women’s sexuality is even more context sensitive than men’s, that developmental, cultural, and life history factors all profoundly shape how and when our bodies respond. You know that sex-related and sexually appealing are not the same thing. Women are not liars, in denial, or otherwise broken. They are women, rather than men, in a world that wants women to believe they can’t understand their own internal experience. lubrication error #3: nonconcordance is a problemThe third way to be dangerously wrong about nonconcordance is to decide that it’s a symptom of something. Suppose you recognize that nonconcordance exists, you acknowledge that it’s learning without necessarily indicating liking or wanting, and then you read the research that shows a correlation between nonconcordance and sexual dysfunction.23 And so you decide that, because nonconcordance is associated with dysfunction, nonconcordance must be a problem. Which brings me to a sentence every undergraduate who takes a research methods class will memorize: “Correlation does not imply causation.” It refers to the cum hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy—“with this, therefore because of this”—which means that just because two things happen together doesn’t mean that one thing caused the other thing. The quintessential example in the twenty-first century is the relationship between pirates and global warming.24 This is a joke made by Bobby Henderson, as part of the belief system of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Henderson wanted to make a point about the difference between causation and correlation, so he drew a graph that apparently plotted increase in global temperature with the precipitous drop in the number of seafaring pirates. Did the loss of pirates cause global climate change? Of course not. It’s absurd, right? That’s the point. Actually, we can hypothesize a third variable that influenced both the reduction in pirates and the change in global climate: the Industrial Revolution.
From Come As You Are (2015)
This is a tricky one because, on the one hand, nonjudgmental awareness is a key to healing from sexual pain, but on the other hand, many women have been told all their lives that pain with sex is normal, it’s just part of life, have a glass of wine, why are you complaining, get over it. Can we be nonjudgmentally aware of our pain and also take it more seriously than our culture has taught us to believe we “should”? I had a chance to talk with Caroline Pukall, coauthor of When Sex Hurts: A Woman’s Guide to Banishing Sexual Pain. She pointed out that some women tolerate pain with sex “just because they have this belief that, ‘I guess some pain is to be expected.’ ” She went on, “There’s something about women bearing pain longer than they need to,” perhaps in other domains of their life, as well as in sex. They tolerate pain because they think that is their only option, that effective treatments aren’t available (they are!), or that the hassle of seeking treatment isn’t worth the potential benefit (it is!). And medical professionals sometimes reinforce this tendency by not taking pain seriously or assuming that if there is no infection or injury, the pain is “all in her head.” If women (and our medical providers) had the same criterion velocity about our genital pain that men have about their own genital pain, women would never hesitate to seek treatment. Our willingness to tolerate greater effort—in this case, pain—is learned. And it can be changed, simply by becoming aware of it and allowing the possibility that it could be different. This is the kind of story that fills me with righteous anger: A woman in a wheelchair approached me after a public talk and told me that my presentation was the first time she had ever heard that there are effective treatments for vaginismus, chronic tension of the pelvic floor muscle, which makes penetration of the vagina either impossible or very painful. Her doctors had never mentioned that her vaginismus might be treatable. Why didn’t they tell her? Was it because the doctors didn’t know? Was it because they didn’t feel comfortable talking about sex with any twentysomething woman? Was it because it didn’t occur to them that a woman in a wheelchair has just as much right to a satisfying sex life as any other woman? I don’t know. But I can’t help wondering if those doctors would have ignored complaints of sexual dysfunction and pain from a twentysomething man in a wheelchair. Here is an ultrashort primer on the nature of pain: All pain is created in the brain, in response to the body’s signals that there is some kind of threat.10
From Come As You Are (2015)
The first step to move from knowing what’s true to loving what’s true is expanding what it means to “know what’s true.” step 1: your feelings are always trueBeyond the facts of your sexuality are the facts of your feelings about your sexuality. Notice how you feel. When simply knowing something is true isn’t enough to release you from the myths and lies, you can return to the little monitor in charge of your frustration or satisfaction. When you experience your sexuality in the way your monitor expects, she feels good. When you experience your sexuality in a way that creates a discrepancy between your experience and the monitor’s expectations, the monitor gradually becomes frustrated… and then angry. Eventually she pushes you off an emotional cliff into the pit of despair, as she gives up and decides you can’t achieve your goal. We saw in chapter 8 that there are three ways you can address the gap between where you are and where you expect to be. You can ask yourself, “Is this the right goal for me?” or, “Am I putting in the right amount of the right kind of effort?” or, “Are my expectations of how much effort this particular goal requires realistic?” All three of these are different kinds of reality checks. We’ve seen these reality checks in action throughout the book: in chapter 5, when Laurie decided to stop trying to want sex with Johnny and just allowed herself not to, she closed the gap between where she was and where she wanted to be, which opened the door to affection without performance demand. In chapter 8, when Olivia meditated her way to an extended orgasm, she was practicing being present as she was, rather than pushing forward to some goal. She kept the same goal—ecstasy—but she changed the kind of effort she was investing. And in chapter 7, when Merritt, instead of trying on the aspirational identity of a woman who loves sex, embraced the identity of a woman who did not want sex, she was changing the kind of effort she invested, to attain her goal of trusting herself. The result was not sinking down forever into a state of not wanting sex—on the contrary! Allowing herself to be where she was opened the door to where she wanted to go.
When Babatha’s first husband, Jesus, died in 124 CE, he left four hundred denarii as a trust fund for their infant son, Jesus. Since Babatha was now a widow with a young orphaned son and no patriarchal “protection,” the council of the provincial capital at Petra appointed two male guardians to administer the paternal inheritance. For eight years, from 124 to 132 BCE , Babatha fought those two male guardians in court over the inadequacy of their monthly return from loaning out the money in that fund. They were paying her only an annual 6 percent, when a normal return should have been 12 percent. She claimed that if she herself took over and posted bond for the fund’s administration, she could get an annual return of 18 percent. But she never won her case before she ran out of time. The skeletons of seventeen people were finally found in the “Cave of Letters”—eight women, six children, and three men—and, presumably, Babatha’s bones were among them. Despite her undoubted financial competence, she never got her way in a patriarchal world of Roman law. She finally hid her documents beneath that stone in the cave where, again presumably, she met her death. When, in this chapter, we speak of mothers and fathers, wives and husbands, widows and orphans, patriarchal bias and exclusive language, think always of Babatha as she hovers in the background throughout our discussion. She will be especially present—as a single mother—whenever our biblical texts speak as if the only competent householder is a father or at least a male. The very first words of the Lord’s Prayer are literally “Father of us” in the Greek of Matthew 6:9. It is simply “Father” in Luke 11:2. It was, as we saw in the last chapter, “Abba, the Father” in the earlier Aramaic-Greek combination of Paul and Mark. The problem is immediately obvious. How can the “greatest prayer” open with a male-oriented title and a patriarchal mode of address? Why give God a humanlike and male-only name? Would a nonhuman-like name not be better—say “Spirit,” or “Creator,” or even simply “God”? And, if one wishes a humanlike title, why not “Mother” rather than “Father” or “Parent” rather than either? Seventy years ago, for example, James Joyce gave us this Islamic-Christian feminine version in Finnegan’s Wake: “In the name of Annah the Almaziful, the Everliving, the bringer of Plurabilities, haloed be her eve, her singtime sung, her rill be run, unhemmed as it is uneven!” (104.1–3). Whether outside or inside Christianity, how can the “greatest prayer” address God as “Father”? I grant immediately that “Father” is applied to God from within a traditional and patriarchal society, but in probing that address this chapter considers three points. First, I look at the role and power of metaphor in general, but especially in religion and theology. Can we ever imagine God except in metaphor—whether it is named or unnamed, overt or covert, conscious or unconscious?
From Martin Luther (2016)
Like Luther, Wycliffe spoke out against monasticism and against the special caste of the priests, even coming out against transubstantiation for much the same reason Luther would 150 years later. He spoke against the wealth of the church and even spoke harshly against the papacy itself; when the peasants of England revolted, Parliament and the English church both blamed Wycliffe for having fomented it by his teachings, just as Luther would in future years be blamed for the Peasants’ War. Wycliffe died of a stroke in 1384 while in the very act of saying Mass, but at the Council of Constance in 1415 he was posthumously denounced as a heretic, and in 1428 his bones were exhumed from their “Christian burial” and burned. His ashes were then thrown into the river Swift, which flows through the English village of Lutterworth.* Another reformer before Luther was the Bohemian Jan Hus, who was born in 1369 and became a theologian at Prague University. Hus was greatly influenced by Wycliffe and spoke strongly against indulgences and the papacy, specifically criticizing the pope for his use of military power, holding that the church could not wield the sword. Hus was condemned as a heretic at the Council of Constance and suffered burning at the stake in 1415. But his followers, known as Hussites, continued the movement long after his death. But many inside the Vatican itself knew how corrupt the church had become and how badly reform was needed. Just after the death of Pius II in 1464, Bishop Domenico de’ Domenichi wrote a blistering critique of the papacy, saying that the laypeople were calling the church “Babylon, the mother of all fornications and abominations of the earth!” He said that the “dignity of the Church must be reasserted, her authority revived, morals reformed, the Curia regulated, the course of justice secured, the faith propagated.”12 What’s more, the devil’s hordes in the shape of the Turks were on the march, and Domenico and many others knew that if things in Rome did not change dramatically, all of Christendom would be lost to the martial religion of Muhammad. But such prophetic cries were as wasted as though someone had been preaching to Nero or Caligula about Roman decadence and the looming threat of the Visigoths. The subsequent election in 1471 of Pope Sixtus would in fact catapult things dramatically in the wrong direction. Like his predecessors and successors, Sixtus saw the cry for reform only as a wearisome threat to his power, and thus with his ruby slippers kicked it away. Anyone crying out for reform must be shooed out of the room like a fly—or crushed like a beetle.
From Martin Luther (2016)
[image file=image_rsrc6KR.jpg] Cardinal Albrecht of Brandenberg. Wishing to add another archbishopric to his résumé, Albrecht incurred a staggering debt to the Vatican that led him to invite Johannes Tetzel to preach the papal indulgence, which kicked off the Reformation. Here was where the theological rubber met the road, because the church could officially say what it liked, but this was the local and particular reality of the whole indulgence business, in all its ugliness. Luther saw and heard with his own eyes and ears the effect this was having on simple people, trying to live out their Christian lives. They had no idea they were being used by the church for its own distant ends, to build buildings they would never see and far worse than that, as we shall see. Luther was certainly bothered that money was being sucked away from those who had so little, but it bothered him more that the church via this practice of indulgences was actually leading the faithful away from Christ. That was the far greater scandal, and someone must speak out. Luther did not imagine doing so in any grand way. He was a priest with a pulpit, and that was the forum God had given him. So in February 1517, Luther preached on the subject of indulgences, and then in March he did so again. He was far from the first priest to do so, and he explained to his flock that the paper they purchased meant nothing if they were not genuinely contrite for any sins they had committed. And if they were genuinely contrite, the paper still meant nothing, because God forgave their sins anyway. But to be sure, the most diabolical and cynical aspect of indulgences had to do with those that could be purchased to alleviate the suffering of one’s relatives in purgatory. Who could allow one’s loved ones to suffer the tortures of the damned when one had only to pay some money? What price could one put on that? Tetzel’s pitch along these lines was recorded, and it’s clear he spared none of his skills to pinch every pfennig possible from his rapt listeners:
He is ordered east by land and heads west by sea, away “from the presence of the Lord” (1:3). Next, when God sends a storm that threatens to sink the ship, the non-Jewish sailors realize that it is due to Jonah, “for the men knew that he was fleeing from the presence of the Lord, because he had told them so” (1:10). Reluctantly they cast him overboard, and the sea immediately calmed. “Then the men feared the Lord even more, and they offered a sacrifice to the Lord and made vows” (1:16). The non-Jewish mariners respect God more than does the Jewish prophet. The silliness of this recalcitrant prophet does not even merit divine anger. God simply sends alternative transportation—that famous “large fish”—to bring Jonah home. And so, after an appropriate psalm of thanksgiving for his deliverance (2:1–9), “the Lord spoke to the fish, and it spewed Jonah out upon the dry land” (2:10). Then, Jonah’s mission is repeated: “The word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time, saying, ‘Get up, go to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim to it the message that I tell you’” (3:1–2). This time Jonah heads obediently eastward. What happens next is surely one of the strangest events in the entire prophetic tradition. Jonah proclaims the shortest sermon in the history of homiletics, the briefest threat in the history of prophecy: “Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” (3:4). And the Bible’s smallest threat results in the Bible’s greatest repentance: The people of Nineveh believed God; they proclaimed a fast, and everyone, great and small, put on sackcloth. When the news reached the king of Nineveh, he rose from his throne, removed his robe, covered himself with sackcloth, and sat in ashes. Then he had a proclamation made in Nineveh: “By the decree of the king and his nobles: No human being or animal, no herd or flock, shall taste anything. They shall not feed, nor shall they drink water. Human beings and animals shall be covered with sackcloth, and they shall cry mightily to God. All shall turn from their evil ways and from the violence that is in their hands. Who knows? God may relent and change his mind; he may turn from his fierce anger, so that we do not perish.” (3:5–9) And the result of that instant, total, and massive repentance is that “when God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil ways, God changed his mind about the calamity that he had said he would bring upon them; and he did not do it” (3:10). Finally, Nineveh’s deliverance “was very displeasing to Jonah, and he became angry” (4:1). He retires outside the city, constructs a shelter from the sun, and waits to see what will happen. God grows a bush to shade him, immediately destroys it, and sends a hot desert wind in its place. Jonah, of course, complains: “It is better for me to die than to live” (4:10).
MY FOURTH POINT ASKS whether that intensification of rhetorical invective opens up our understanding of the time and place, problems and concerns of Matthew’s whole parable gospel. And the fifth point asks whether Matthew’s Jesus is presented through a challenge or attack parable. I answer both those questions together, as they are closely interconnected. In the years after the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE , the centrality of priests and sacrifice in the Temple was replaced—forever—by that of rabbis and study of the Torah. Matthew wrote his gospel within that paradigm shift. It represents an intra -familial clash in Judaism between Christian-Jewish scribes and Pharisaic-Jewish scribes because, as Matthew says later, “Every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old” (13:52). Strife within the family can, of course, be extremely bitter, since opposition can never create total separation. Still, even in that tense situation, Matthew is careful to attack Pharisaic practice rather than theory: “The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat; therefore, do whatever they teach you and follow it; but do not do as they do, for they do not practice what they teach” (23:2–3). Still, within the tactics of ancient invective, we should presume that Pharisaic opponents were just as nasty about Matthew as he was about them. And both sides were wildly caricaturing opposition rather than accurately describing character. On the one hand, therefore, rhetorical invective was probably quite mutually nasty and equally bitter on both sides of the debate between Christian Judaism and Pharisaic Judaism in the first century. On the other hand, there is a very special problem with the rhetorical violence placed by Matthew on the lips of Jesus (or against him, as in that final case). The problem is not just that Matthew has so enthusiastically escalated the violent rhetoric of the Q Gospel’s Jesus over the far milder language of Mark’s Jesus—even or especially when Mark is severely criticizing the Twelve. The major difficulty—and my own criticism—is the glaring discrepancy between, say, Matthew 5 and Matthew 23. How can Matthew have Jesus begin with forbidding anger, insult, and name-calling, begin with demanding greetings, prayers, and love for enemies, and then do exactly the opposite throughout the rest of the gospel? I do not think that Matthew sees himself as outside the Jewish community. Indeed, the very nastiness of his language indicates a stern family feud in the 80s between Christian Jewish scholars and Pharisaic Jewish scholars. But, with the fourth question answered like that, the fifth is answered as well. Matthew’s presentation of Jesus is not a challenge parable, but an attack parable. The unfortunate result of his gospel as attack—especially in the light of Matthew 23 versus Matthew 5—is that he has created a Jesus ultimately open to Matthew’s own favorite accusation—hypocrisy. That gives a very clear answer to this chapter’s basic question.
In other words, for Jesus in Matthew’s new law—the fulfilled and renew ed Torah—the positive nonviolence of loving enemies is derived from and modeled on the very character of God. By now, my first question seems answered with an absolute negative. Jesus solemnly forbids any rhetorical violence in the opening frame of those six moral escalations and any ideological violence in their closing frame. But, if the question of ideologically based rhetorical violence by Jesus starts—fortunately—with a negative answer, it later receives—unfortunately—an equally positive answer. That will be my second step in this second point. The alternative answer—also in Matthew—is that Jesus is rhetorically violent. On the other hand, then, watch what happens after those inaugural commands from Jesus at the start of the new Torah. Focus on just one word, a word that is, on the one hand, an insult by name-calling, and, on the other, rather far from prayer for persecutors or love for enemies. That word is “hypocrites.” As soon as Matthew finishes those six commands, these follow immediately: Whenever you give alms, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be praised by others…. Whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites ; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by others…. Whenever you fast, do not look dismal, like the hypocrites , for they disfigure their faces so as to show others that they are fasting. (6:2, 5, 16) Maybe that repeated use of “the hypocrites” might be excused its rhetorical violence despite a startling location right after those framing antitheses forbidding insulting names and demanding loving prayer. But Matthew later elevates that name-calling into a ghastly chapter-long chant—on the lips of Jesus: Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! (23:13) Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! (23:15) Woe to you, blind guides (23:16) You blind fools!…How blind you are! (23:17, 19) Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! (23:23) You blind guides! (23:24) Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!…You blind Pharisees! (23:25, 26) Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! (23:27) Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! (23:29) You snakes, you brood of vipers! How can you escape being sentenced to hell? (23:33) My present emphasis is not just against nasty name-calling in general, but about the glaring discrepancy between this gospel parable’s Jesus in Matthew 5 and the one in Matthew 23. Jesus opens by absolutely forbidding ideologically based rhetorical violence, but closes by doing himself precisely what he has earlier forbidden. Think, therefore, about this: Does Jesus change his mind or does Matthew change his Jesus? MY THIRD POINT ALSO has two steps. The first one asks whether that contradiction between the Jesus of Matthew 5 and the Jesus of Matthew 23 is just some random exception or whether Matthew’s Jesus is regularly presented as rhetorically violent.
I take very, very seriously that the Bible’s first mention of “sin” is not just fratricidal murder, but escalatory violence itself. Escalatory violence means that we have never invented a weapon we did not use, never invented one that was not surpassed by the next one, and never slowed down the speed of that replacement. We got, for example, from the first iron sword to the first hydrogen bomb in less than three thousand years. The death of the nonviolent Jesus as the revelation of God’s nonviolent character is a sacrifice (a making sacred) that atones for our sin of escalatory violence. Furthermore, as Paul insists so repeatedly, all Christians are called to reject “that world” that rejected Jesus. We are baptismally committed to resist nonviolently the normal violence with which “the rulers of this age…crucified the Lord of glory” (1 Cor. 2:8). Not just the Romans, but every government our world has ever known would have removed or silenced Jesus one way or another . Those who demand justice nonviolently are sometimes silenced by injustice violently. Public execution is simply the older and cruder method. God did not “will” the death of Jesus as a vicarious punishment for the human sin of escalatory violence. But did God “will” it as a consequence for that sin? The execution of Jesus was certainly a consequence of normal imperial violence and a witness against it on behalf of God. So did or did not God will it? In answer, we need another distinction beyond that of externally added punishment or internally derived consequence. If we decide to use anthropomorphic, or human-just-like-us, language for God, we should at least allow the same distinctions for God that we make for ourselves. Parents or householders, for example, may will something directly, deliberately, or emphatically for their children. They may also will some other things reluctantly. They may tolerate them, accept them, allow them, but positively not want them for those same children. There are, in other words, consequences of freedom that must be accepted even if never willed. So also with what God “wills.” Every martyr needs a murderer and God’s will allows such events as the positive and negative results of human freedom. God “wills” our human freedom. All else is consequence. My guiding proposal for the Abba Prayer as hymnic prose poem is that there is an equal or synonymous poetic parallelism between the first half, about God’s name, kingdom, will, and the second half, about our bread, debt, and temptation. They are, in other words, two different ways of describing the same reality, but with, of course, vibrations of difference between them. Furthermore, each half is itself in crescendo or climactic parallelism building up through the three component challenges. “Bread” and “debt” come to a climax in “temptation”—but that will be seen later. “Name” and “kingdom” come to a climax in “will”—and I turn to that now. Here it is in summary: God’s name is God’s reputation for justice and righteousness.
Two major points, in reply. First, it is easy and tempting to dismiss Silver’s claim as an indirect attack on the American welfare system. In speaking of Amos, for example, he draws explicit attention to the fact that “the central image is one familiar to modern Americans, namely the blight of poverty amid affluence” (124). Next, “Modern liberalism … is the closest contemporary analog to the program of the prophets,” and “not unexpectedly, the prophets opposed expansionist militarism and patriotism” (129). Finally, he admits to “some trepidation, for it is predictable that some of you will angrily slam this book closed and accuse me of such as ‘importing the twentieth century into ancient Israel’ or engaging ‘not in historical scholarship, but in a conservative polemic against liberal social reformers’” (134). But, be all that as it may, and apart from presuppositions and intentions, what about arguments and conclusions? Second, then, is that a good case against classical Jewish prophecy? One objection. The prophetic message was utterly traditional and deeply rooted in covenant faith and Jewish monotheism. The prophets were not radical liberals but, if anything, conservative traditionalists. Another objection. A 250-year-long insistence indicates that their message was not exactly accepted, followed, or widely practiced. A final objection. Nothing anyone could have done or not done in the Jewish homeland would have deterred imperial foreign policy coming out of the Mesopotamian plains or the Nile delta. But if the Jewish homeland was almost certainly destined for imperial domination in any case, it may have been more important to have a tradition for which people would live and die, a tradition that insisted that such imperial domination was not right and not just. That is how a people survives not just in the short run but over the long haul. Why Set Justice Against Ritual? There is one element in that 250-year prophetic tradition demanding justice in the name of covenantal monotheism that needs special attention. It has often been misinterpreted, especially since the Reformation. Protestant scholars sometimes insisted on the prophetic statements against cult and ritual as an equivalent to their own opposition to Roman Catholicism. I give you here examples from five of the prophets mentioned above. Once again, notice that it is God who is rejecting ritual in the absence of righteousness and dismissing worship in the absence of justice. The prophets speak for God. Hear this word, you cows of Bashan who are on Mount Samaria, who oppress the poor, who crush the needy, who say to their husbands, “Bring something to drink!”… Come to Bethel—and transgress; to Gilgal—and multiply transgression; bring your sacrifices every morning, your tithes every three days; bring a thank-offering of leavened bread, and proclaim freewill offerings, publish them; for so you love to do, O people of Israel! says the Lord God…. I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.
The Jesus of Matthew is regularly and rhetorically violent, but that is not Jesus himself; it is Matthew who is speaking . Still, we should be grateful that Matthew accurately revealed the Jesus of the challenge parable in Matthew 5 before steadily changing him into the Jesus of the attack parable in Matthew 23. What, then, comes next? Mark depicts Jesus through a pedagogical challenge parable, but Matthew has changed that image by writing a polemical attack parable. What about Luke-Acts? Why, to begin with, do I combine what we call the Gospel according to Luke with the Acts of the Apostles to speak of the Gospel according to Luke-Acts? Is that combination challenge or attack or both? And, whichever it is, to whom is it directed? CHAPTER 9Rome as the New JerusalemTHE PARABLE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO LUKE -ACTS “APHRODISIAS ,” SAID OCTAVIAN, WHEN not yet Caesar Augustus, “is the one city from all of Asia I have selected to be my own,” and its citizens carved that accolade on the archive wall of their theater. Since the Greek goddess Aphrodite was the Roman goddess Venus, from whom Augustus’s family was allegedly descended, that city was most fortunately named at that precise historical moment. Two thousand years later, Kenan Erim, who excavated the site and is buried inside the gate of Aphrodite’s temple, claimed, “Of all the Graeco-Roman sites of Anatolia, Aphrodisias is the most hauntingly beautiful.” And the poet L. G. Harvey proclaimed it “beautiful enough to last forever.” Located in ancient Caria, Aphrodisias is about 150 miles inland from the mid-Aegean coast of Turkey. In the first century, it contained a unique monumental passageway with three levels on either side. On both sides, the two top levels were adorned with bas-relief carvings that smoothly integrated Greek tradition with Roman domination. It was dedicated to the “Olympian Imperial Gods” of the Julio-Claudian dynasty (Theoi Sebastoi Olympioi ). That was the only time I ever saw the imperial divinities described as “Olympian.” In the twenty-first century, Aphrodisias contains—from that ruined Augusteum or Sebasteion structure—the greatest museum of Roman bas-reliefs in the world. But my present focus is not on any of that, but rather on an inscription from the city’s Jewish synagogue discovered in 1966. It is, by the way, the longest Jewish inscription from antiquity. In the early 200s the right-hand doorpost was carved with the names of those who had donated money to that building. The full list—complete with each individual’s family relations or job description—contains 126 names identified in three classes according to their relationship to Judaism. But watch very carefully the comparative statistics of those relationships. Of those 126 persons, 69 individuals (55 percent) are Jews, 3 individuals (2 percent) are “proselytes” or converts, and 54 individuals (43 percent) are “God-worshipers.” There is only one women named, but that “Jael”—recall Judges 4–5—comes first as “sponsor” of the whole operation. Furthermore, the first 9 persons in the “God-worshipers” list are all identified as city councilors.
Above all, there is that outrageously provocative comment by the owner at 5 P.M .: “Why are you standing here idle all day?” And we can imagine their reply (through gritted teeth?): “Because no one has hired us.” (Then—as now—one blames the unhired worker for laziness!) Would nobody have picked up, protested, and then debated that particular aspect of the parable? I propose—for those three reasons—that at least some, most, or all of Jesus’s audience would have raised questions not just about the owner’s generosity, but about the system’s perversity. How is it that at high harvest in the vineyards, when, with time pressing, labor should have been at an absolute premium and paying top denarius, there were so many day laborers still looking for work when it was almost sunset? Strange, is it not, how all that turned out for the owner’s and not the workers’ advantage? The intention and purpose of that challenge parable were to raise the audience’s consciousness about the distinction between personal or individual justice and injustice, on the one hand, and structural or systemic justice and injustice, on the other. If everyone talked only about the owner and not the system, Jesus’s challenge would have failed. Move on Jesus, try it again somewhere else, or remove it from your repertoire forever. Look, one final time, at those accusatory words about “idleness.” They are not actually necessary if the story is about the master’s generosity. But they are vitally necessary to provoke the audience—or at least day laborers in it—to protest against them and, thereby, raise the issue of—in my words—the distinction between personal and individual justice or injustice (the master) and structural and systemic injustice (the economy). That is a challenge parable hard—and very successfully—at work. I turn next to another parable about money—from a challenge about paying out money to one about lending out money. IN CHAPTERS 4 AND 5 I discussed several parables of Jesus for which we have only one extant version. I look finally at a parable that has three versions, two inside and one outside the New Testament. This is the parable of the Master’s Money. One version, in Matthew 25:14–30, has three characters to whom a man, departing on a journey, entrusts valuable resources for investment: It is as if a man, going on a journey, summoned his slaves and entrusted his property to them; to one he gave five talents, to another two, to another one, to each according to his ability. Then he went away. The one who had received the five talents went off at once and traded with them, and made five more talents. In the same way, the one who had the two talents made two more talents. But the one who had received the one talent went off and dug a hole in the ground and hid his master’s money.
In November 1095, at the Council of Clermont in south-central France, he gave a lurid description of what Muslims were doing to Christians in Jerusalem. “Enter upon the road to the Holy Sepulchre,” he said (as a scribe known as Peter the Monk recorded later), “wrest that land from the wicked race, and subject it to yourselves.” The result was that all cried out in miraculous unison: “It is the will of God! It is the will of God!” The “First Crusade” is what we now call what followed. It started with the persecution of Western Jews and ended with the slaughter of Eastern Muslims. Jerusalem fell in the middle of July 1099, and Urban II died about two weeks later. That was one vision of God’s “will.” Anselmo d’Aosta became archbishop of Canterbury in 1093. Philosopher and theologian, monk and bishop, mystic and saint, Anselm preferred nonviolent debate to violent crusade. His idea was to defend the incarnation and crucifixion of Jesus by confronting those he called “infidels”—that is, Jews and Muslims—with reason and logic alone. He started his book Why Did God Become a Human Being? (in Latin, Cur Deus Homo? ) in 1095 while still in England. That, by the way, was the same year that the seeds of the First Crusade were planted when the Byzantine emperor begged Urban II for assistance against the Muslim Turks threatening Constantinople from as near as Nicea. Anselm finished his book in 1098 after that visit to Rome, but while still in Italy under royal exile from England. His purpose, as he tells us in the book’s prologue, was to argue against “infidels, who despise the Christian faith because they deem it contrary to reason.” To do so he would leave “Christ out of view (as if nothing had ever been known of him)” and prove “by absolute reasons” and “plain reasoning” that both the incarnation and crucifixion of Christ were necessary, so that all may “enjoy a happy immortality, both in body and in soul.” It is from Anselm’s book that we got that argument for vicarious satisfaction or substitutionary atonement outlined above. Again and again throughout his presentation, Anselm mentions the “will of God.” Here are just a few examples: It is then plain that no one can honor or dishonor God, as he is in himself; but the creature, as far as he is concerned, appears to do this when he submits or opposes his will to the will of God . (1.15) So heinous is our sin whenever we knowingly oppose the will of God even in the slightest thing; since we are always in his sight, and he always enjoins it upon us not to sin. (1.21) Since, then, the will of God does nothing by any necessity, but of his own power, and the will of that man [Christ] was the same as the will of God, he died not necessarily, but only of his own power.
Furthermore, still in the last half of that internationally volatile eighth century and still in the southern Kingdom of Judah, the prophet Micah gives that same message more gently, as a human question rather than a divine indictment: Negative: With what shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before God on high? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? Positive: He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God? (6:6–8) The northern Kingdom of Israel did not survive the 700s BCE, but for the southern Kingdom of Judah the 600s and 500s moved from catastrophe to euphoria. Still, that prophetic demand for distributive justice against ritual prayer continued. The 600s BCE. The fullest exposition of that disjunction between prayer and justice appears in the prophet Jeremiah soon after the Assyrian Empire succumbed to the Babylonian Empire at the end of the 600s BCE . Jeremiah is commanded by God to stand before the gates of Jerusalem’s Temple and address the worshipers who enter there to pray. They are not to think that prayer alone is enough, that the Temple is like a den, a hideaway, a safe house for those who have robbed and despoiled the poor. “Do not trust,” God says, “in these deceptive words: ‘This is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord.’…Has this house, which is called by my name, become a den of robbers in your sight?” (7:4, 11). Notice, then, the repeated “ifs” italicized in this warning: For if you truly amend your ways and your doings, if you truly act justly one with another, if you do not oppress the alien, the orphan, and the widow, or shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not go after other gods to your own hurt, then I will dwell with you in this place, in the land that I gave of old to your ancestors forever and ever. (7:5–7) On the other hand, if they continue to substitute worship for justice, God threatens to destroy the Temple itself, so that they will be unable to do so any longer. That divine threat, by the way, almost cost Jeremiah his life: “The priests and the prophets and all the people laid hold of him, saying, ‘You shall die!’” (26:8). But, eventually, “the officials and all the people said to the priests and the prophets, ‘This man does not deserve the sentence of death, for he has spoken to us in the name of the Lord our God’” (26:16). The 500s BCE.
But what do the prophets say about prayer—in all its aspects, from simple words of request and gratitude to more formal acts of ritual and sacrifice? This is where something strange occurs. They do not insist—as we might expect—that God demands both prayer and justice. They do not say we must both pray with fervor and act with justice. Instead, they insist that God does not want prayer, ritual, liturgy, or sacrifice, but wants instead that righteous justice rule not only the land of Israel, but all the earth. Why put it that way? Why that negative opposition—against prayer—rather than a simple and serene assertion of the positive—for justice? Why do the prophets repeatedly set up a clash that creates a chasm between prayer and justice? And does that help or hinder this book on the Lord’s Prayer? I look first at the evidence. That rejection of ritual prayer in favor of distributive justice appears in prophets from Amos, Hosea, First Isaiah, and Micah in the 700s BCE , through Jeremiah in the late 600s BCE , to Third Isaiah in the late 500s BCE. (There are, by the way, three chronologically successive sections in the book of Isaiah: First Isaiah, chapters 1–39, from the later eighth century BCE ; Second Isaiah, chapters 40–55, from the earlier sixth century BCE ; and Third Isaiah, chapters 56–66, from the later sixth century BCE. ) I emphasize those dates for Israel’s prophets because they were turbulent and even terrible years both at home and abroad. On the international level, in the period 911 to 539 BCE , the Assyrian Empire came to power and then fell before the Babylonian Empire, which rose and then in turn succumbed to the Persian Empire. On the local level, during those imperial transitions, first, the northern half of the Jewish homeland, known as the Kingdom of Israel, was destroyed by the Assyrians. Next, the southern half, known as the Kingdom of Judah, was destroyed by the Babylonians and its entire leadership taken into exile in Babylon; later, under Persian control, the exiles were allowed to return. Throughout those seismic disturbances, that prophetic challenge of distributive justice rather than ritual prayer remained constant and consistent. In what follows, therefore, watch how the negative usually precedes and even overshadows the positive. And wonder to yourself why they speak that way. Why is justice set against prayer rather than joined together with it? The 700s BCE. I begin with the prophet Amos, from the first half of that eighth century BCE . He was shocked to the soles of his peasant sandals by the ever growing inequality between rich and poor during the long rule of Jeroboam II over the Kingdom of Israel in the northern half of the Jewish homeland. His metaphors are brutal and shocking and must have seared at least the ears if not the hearts of his aristocratic hearers. But I focus here, in this first statement, on the striking dichotomy between prayer and justice.
From Come As You Are (2015)
I wrote this book to share what I’ve learned—what has helped me and what I’ve seen help other women. I wrote it for my sister and my mother, for my sister’s stepdaughters, for my nieces, and most of all for my students. I wrote it to share the science that taught me that I and my sister and my mother and my friends are all normal and healthy. I wrote it to grant us all permission to be different from one another. I wrote it because I am done living in a world where women are lied to about their bodies; where women are objects of sexual desire rather than subjects of sexual pleasure; where sex is used as a weapon against women; and where women believe their bodies are broken, simply because those bodies are not male. And I am done living in a world where women are trained from birth to treat their bodies as the enemy. I wrote this book to teach women to live with confidence and joy. If you can remember even one of the ideas in this book—no two alike, brakes and accelerator, context, nonconcordant arousal, responsive desire, any of them—and use it to improve your relationship with your own sexuality, you’ll be helping me with that goal. And if you share any of these ideas with even one other person, you’ll be expanding the global space in which women can live with confidence and joy. In a way, it’s a small goal. I’m not trying to prevent cancer or solve the climate crisis or build peace in the Middle East. I’m just trying to help people live with confidence and joy inside their bodies—and maybe, just maybe, if enough people learn to live with confidence and joy, we can ultimately live in a world where everyone’s sexual autonomy is respected. Do I think that living with confidence and joy and respecting everyone’s sexual autonomy could play a role in preventing cancer, solving the climate crisis, or building world peace? Yes, actually. But that’s another story. where to look for more answersI don’t have all the answers—I don’t even have half the answers. The science is constantly growing and expanding, so more insight, more clarity will come. In this book I’ve presented some of the answers that I’ve seen help women, and I hope I’ve done it in a way that heals and renews and expands your sexuality.
By analogy, says the Lukan Jesus, that is what I am doing—I am finding/saving the lost ones—“tax collectors and sinners”—and, once found/saved, nobody should grumble, but rather all should rejoice. Luke then moves from the Lost Sheep and the Lost Coin to the Lost Son, to what we traditionally call the parable of the Prodigal Son. Jesus begins, “There was a man who had two sons” (15:11), and the parable goes on to tell first about the younger son (15:12–24) and then about the elder son (15:25–32). The younger son asks for and receives “the share of the property that will belong to” him, but then goes into a distant country and wastes his inheritance “in dissolute living.” Later, starving in the midst of famine, he feeds pigs that eat better than he does. He decides to return home, where his father welcomes him with open arms, clothes him, and organizes a feast for him, saying, “For this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found!” (15:24). The elder son returns from working in the fields, and the servants tell him about the feast in progress. Angry, he refuses to enter, and complains to his father: “For all these years I have been working like a slave for you, and I have never disobeyed your command; yet you have never given me even a young goat so that I might celebrate with my friends” (15:29). The father responds: “You are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found” (15:31–32). The parable ends, and we are not told whether the elder son relents. Once again, that parable fits well with Luke’s opening context. The younger, prodigal, or lost son represents those “tax collectors and sinners” (15:1) and, like them, he has been “lost and is found” (15:24, 32). Hence, they had to “celebrate” (15:23, 32). The elder son, who “became angry and refused to go in” (15:28) to the feast, represents those Pharisees and scribes who “grumbled” because Jesus “welcomes sinners and eats with them” (15:2). Indeed, all three parables—but especially that third one—metaphorically defend this earlier incident in Luke: Levi gave a great banquet for him in his house; and there was a large crowd of tax collectors and others sitting at the table with them.