Awe

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 The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  The only way this seems to make sense is if somehow, having been anointed with YHWH’s own spirit (42:1), the “servant” is now somehow embodying the powerful, redeeming love of Israel’s God himself. Like many other questions thrown up by the turbulent ocean of this mighty poem, this is not something on which we can be dogmatic. It is as though the prophet is pointing into the dark, hardly able to believe what he finds himself saying. But he claims to know three things: first, that redemption will come through the work of YHWH’s anointed; second, that it will involve intense suffering and death, through which the exile-causing sins of Israel would at last be dealt with; and third, that this achievement will be the work of YHWH himself. As the later passages put it: YHWH saw it, and it displeased him that there was no justice. He saw that there was no one, and was appalled that there was no one to intervene; so his own arm brought him victory, and his righteousness upheld him. (59:15–16) I looked, but there was no helper; I stared, but there was no one to sustain me; so my own arm brought me victory, and my wrath sustained me. . . . It was no messenger or angel but his presence that saved them; in his love and in his pity he redeemed them; he lifted them up and carried them all the days of old. (63:5, 9) It would be impossible to scoop up all the passages we have looked at in this part of the book and turn them by some alchemy into the theology of the New Testament. Nothing in the Second Temple world encourages us to suppose that Jews before the time of Jesus were composing the kind of fresh construct we discover among the early Christians. But when we find those early Christians saying that “the Messiah died for our sins in accordance with the Bible” and telling the story of the Passover-time death of Jesus both to make that point and to sustain the freshly narrated world in which they themselves were living, we should be in no doubt that these were the themes they intended to evoke. These were the narratives they saw rushing together into a new, decisive, revolutionary dénouement. This is the context in which they glimpsed the nonplatonic goal of salvation and declared, in Jewish rather than pagan terms, that this goal had been won. By the evening of the first Good Friday, sins had been dealt with and the powers defeated in fulfillment of the ancient divine promise. The Messiah had died for sins in accordance with the Bible. We now turn, therefore, to the key early Christian texts in which this revolutionary message was spelled out. PART THREE The Revolutionary Rescue 8 New Goal, New Humanity

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  Here is the foundation of the belief that with Jesus and the Spirit a new creation has come into being. Instead of the “microcosmos” of the Jerusalem Temple, Jesus himself and his Spirit-filled people constitute the new Temple, the start of the new world. Only by dwelling in and living out of this new reality could it make any sense for the first disciples to speak as they did of the ways in which the kingdom was in the most important sense already present, even though in another sense, with Herod and Caesar still on their thrones, it was also obviously future. The first followers of Jesus were thereby constituted as new-Temple people, which is why of course most of the controversies in the book of Acts focus on temples: the charges against Stephen (and his answer to them) in chapters 6–7 and Paul’s clashes with the local cult (Acts 14), with the temples in Athens and Ephesus (chaps. 17–19), and then with the Temple in Jerusalem itself (21:28–29; 24:6; 25:8). And the new life of this new community was itself anchored in worship, declaring “the powerful things God has done” (2:11), establishing a new pattern of life centered upon “the teaching of the apostles and the common life,” “the breaking of bread and the prayers” (2:42), a life that, to begin with at least, tried to hold together the ancient Temple and the ordinary domestic sphere: Day by day they were all together attending the Temple. They broke bread in their various houses, and ate their food with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and standing in favor with all the people. (2:46–47) Many of the subsequent scenes in Acts focus upon the new life of worship and the ways in which, through this new pattern of life, the apostles found themselves standing, priestlike, at the uncomfortable intersection of heaven and earth, drawing both together in scripture-based worship and intercession and indeed in danger and martyrdom. Scenes like Acts 4:24–31 make the point well enough. Another graphic example is provided by Stephen’s witnessing of Jesus’s standing at the right hand of God and then joining with Jesus’s own intercession by praying for his murderers (7:56–60). These are essentially priestly scenes. Acts tells the story of the early church as the story of the powerful personal Presence and the reconstituted worship of Israel’s God, the world’s creator.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  The only thing he can find that will do—to the predictable horror of his community—is the crucifixion scene, which he paints in fresh and shocking ways. I think of the way in which the first Harry Potter novel ends with the disclosure that Harry had been rescued, as a young child, by the loving self-sacrifice of his mother. We could go on. Skeptics may well continue to see the execution of Jesus as just one among thousands of crucifixions carried out by the Romans in the Middle East. But for reasons that seem to go beyond mere cultural traditions, this particular death still carries enormous evocative power. And just as in the Middle Ages many found that they could relate to that story by meditating on the “instruments of the Passion” (the scourge, the crown of thorns, the nails, and so forth), so today various human elements of the story—the cockcrow as Peter is denying that he knows Jesus, the kiss by which Judas betrays his master—have become proverbial. They seem to sum up the way in which we humans get things horribly wrong, but at the same time they do so within a larger and more powerful context of meaning. When we come to more explicitly Christian presentations, the same point emerges all the more powerfully, especially when we notice how the cross, even though it’s such a simple symbol, somehow resists being turned into a mere cliché. In Roland Joffé’s award-winning 1986 movie The Mission, the cross in various forms haunts the whole narrative. The story begins with the death of one of the early Jesuit missionaries to the remote South American tribe of the Guarani. The tribesmen tie him to a wooden cross and send him over the vast Iguazu Falls, providing the movie with its poster image. The story ends with the massacre of the unresisting leaders, carrying the symbols of the crucifixion in procession, as the Portuguese colonial forces, bent on enslaving the natives rather than evangelizing them, close in and open fire. The meaning of the cross—especially its stark opposition to the world’s ways of power— is allowed to hang like a great question mark over the entire narrative. More explicit again are the many ways in which the cross has been described in the classics of Christian literature. In John Bunyan’s famous Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), the hero, Christian, is trudging along, weighed down with a huge burden. Eventually he comes to a place where, in Bunyan’s matchless description: There stood a Cross, and a little below in the bottom, a sepulchre.

• From White Oleander (1999)

  THE GAMELAN orchestra was twenty small slim men kneeling before elaborately carved sets of chimes and gongs and drums. The drum began, joined by one of the lower sets of chimes. Then more entered the growing mass of sound. Rhythms began to emerge, expand, complex as lianas. My mother said the gamelan created in the listener a brain wave beyond all alphas and betas and thetas, a brain wave that paralyzed the normal channels of thought and forced new ones to grow outside them, in the untouched regions of the mind, like parallel blood vessels that form to accommodate a damaged heart. I closed my eyes to watch tiny dancers like jeweled birds cross the dark screen of my eyelids. They took me away, spoke to me in languages that had no words for strange mothers with ice-blue eyes and apartments with ugly sparkles on the front and dead leaves in the pool. Afterward, the audience folded its plush velvet chairs and pressed to the exits, but my mother didn’t move. She sat in her chair, her eyes closed. She liked to be the last one to leave. She despised crowds, and their opinions as they left a performance, or worse, discussed the wait for the bathroom or where do you want to eat? It spoiled her mood. She was still in that other world, she would stay there as long as she possibly could, the parallel channels twining and tunneling through her cortex like coral. “It’s over,” Barry said. She raised her hand for him to be quiet. He looked at me and I shrugged. I was used to it. We waited until the last sound had faded from the auditorium. Finally she opened her eyes. “So, you want to grab a bite to eat?” he asked her. “I never eat,” she said. I was hungry, but once my mother took a position, she never wavered from it. We went home, where I ate tuna out of a can while she wrote a poem using the rhythms of the gamelan, about shadow puppets and the gods of chance. 2 [image "image" file=Image00003.jpg] THE SUMMER I was twelve, I liked to wander in the complex where the movie magazine had its offices. It was called Crossroads of the World, a 1920s courtyard with a streamline-moderne ocean liner in the middle occupied by an ad agency. I sat on a stone bench and imagined Fred Astaire leaning on the liner’s brass rail, wearing a yachting cap and blue blazer. Along the outside ring of the brick-paved courtyard, fantasy bungalows built in styles from Brothers Grimm to Don Quixote were rented by photo studios, casting agents, typesetting shops. I sketched a laughing Carmen lounging under the hanging basket of red geraniums in the Sevillian doorway of the modeling agency, and a demure braided Gretel sweeping the Germanic steps of the photo studio with a twig broom.

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  In the first-century setting of Paul and his hearers, “Christ crucified” had an anti-imperial meaning. Paul’s shorthand summary was not “Jesus died,” not “Jesus was killed,” but “Christ crucified.” Jesus didn’t just die, wasn’t simply murdered—he was crucified. This meant that Jesus had been executed by imperial authority: crucifixion was a Roman form of execution. In Paul’s world, a cross was always a Roman cross. Rome reserved crucifixion for two categories of people: those who challenged imperial rule (violently or nonviolently) and chronically defiant slaves (not simply occasionally disobedient or difficult slaves). If you were a murderer or a robber, you would not be crucified, though you might be executed another way. The two groups who were crucified had something in common: both rejected Roman imperial domination. Crucifixion was a very public, prolonged, and painful form of execution that carried the message, “Don’t you dare defy imperial authority, or this will happen to you.” It was state torture and terrorism. To proclaim “Christ crucified” was to signal at once that Jesus was an anti-imperial figure, and that Paul’s gospel was an anti-imperial gospel. The empire killed Jesus. The cross was the imperial “no” to Jesus. But God had raised him. The resurrection was God’s “yes” to Jesus, God’s vindication of Jesus—and thus also God’s “no” to the powers that had killed him. The twofold pattern executed by Rome and vindicated by God appears twice early in the book of Acts. The authorities crucified Jesus, but God raised him up (2:23–24). A few verses later, in only slightly different language, it is repeated: this Jesus who was crucified by the authorities God has made both Lord and Messiah (2:36). Of course, these words are from Acts, not Paul, but we cite them to illustrate the obvious and immediate meaning of “Christ crucified.” Executed by Rome exposed the nature of the rulers of that world: they “crucified the Lord of glory” (1 Cor. 2:8), thereby revealing the character of the system of domination and violence that killed Jesus. Vindicated by God—raised by God—meant Jesus is Lord, and thus the powers that executed him were not. In language that confronted and countered Roman imperial theology: Jesus is Lord—Caesar is not. This is the primary meaning of Paul’s emphatic use of “Christ crucified” in its context in 1 Corinthians. In the brilliant, dense, and illuminating overture to the letter (1:17–2:16), Paul contrasts the “wisdom of God” and the “wisdom of the world” through a series of oppositions. Paul’s repetitions of the terms “wise” and “wisdom” and their opposites, “foolish” and “foolishness,” are like drumbeats dominating the section. “Powerful” and “power” (or “strong” and “strength”) are also set in opposition to “weak” and “weakness.” Paul uses and also reverses these contrasts in an almost breathtaking way. His rhetoric, his manner of thinking and expressing himself, requires attention. To illustrate, we quote most of 1 Cor. 1:18–2:8 and include spaces between lines to suggest taking time to think through what is being said:

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  What the Bible offers is not a “works contract,” but a covenant of vocation. The vocation in question is that of being a genuine human being, with genuinely human tasks to perform as part of the Creator’s purpose for his world. The main task of this vocation is “image-bearing,” reflecting the Creator’s wise stewardship into the world and reflecting the praises of all creation back to its maker. Those who do so are the “royal priesthood,” the “kingdom of priests,” the people who are called to stand at the dangerous but exhilarating point where heaven and earth meet. In saying this I am echoing what many theologians (including John Calvin, the founder of all “Reformed” theologies) have said before me. This is not surprising, because it is all there in the Bible. But this is not the story that normally comes through in popular preaching and teaching. Within this narrative, creation itself is understood as a kind of Temple, a heaven-and-earth duality, where humans function as the “image-bearers” in the cosmic Temple, part of earth yet reflecting the life and love of heaven. This is how creation was designed to function and flourish: under the stewardship of the image-bearers. Humans are called not just to keep certain moral standards in the present and to enjoy God’s presence here and hereafter, but to celebrate, worship, procreate, and take responsibility within the rich, vivid developing life of creation. According to Genesis, that is what humans were made for.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  WHEN THE RISEN Jesus met the frightened disciples in the upper room in Jerusalem, he commissioned them for a worldwide mission. In John’s gospel this comes out with lapidary simplicity: “As the Father has sent me, so I’m sending you” (20:21). This will mean, he says, “If you forgive anyone’s sins, they are forgiven,” and “If you retain anyone’s sins, they are retained” (20:23). For this awesome task they are given the gift of the Holy Spirit. In the next chapter, as this commission is focused for a moment on Peter’s rehabilitation, it comes with an explicit warning: this will mean suffering. “When you are old, you’ll stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you up and take you where you don’t want to go” (21:18)—a reference, it seems, to Peter’s own forthcoming crucifixion. Then Jesus says familiar words, but they are now full of new meaning: “Follow me!” In Luke’s gospel things are put slightly differently, but with the same overall effect: “This is what is written,” he said. “The Messiah must suffer and rise from the dead on the third day, and in his name repentance, for the forgiveness of sins, must be announced to all the nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are the witnesses for all this. Now look: I’m sending upon you what my father has promised. But stay in the city until you are clothed with power from on high.” (24:46–49) It is all too easy for us, in our individualized Western world, to jump at once to the “personal” meaning of this and ignore the larger whole. “Repentance” and “forgiveness”: yes, we think, I have repented of my sins, and I have been granted forgiveness. That, to be sure, is vital. But if we go there too soon, we may miss the breathtaking sweep of what is being said. Jesus’s followers are to go out into the world equipped with the power of his own Spirit to announce that a new reality has come to birth, that its name is “forgiveness,” and that it is to be had by turning away from idolatry (“repentance”). Something has happened, clearly, that has unleashed this new kind of power into the world. That something is the chain-breaking, idol-smashing, sin-abandoning power called “forgiveness,” called “utter gracious love,” called Jesus. It isn’t that first you have to repent and then, as a result, God may decide not to press charges on this occasion. It isn’t that somehow you thereby gain “forgiveness” as a kind of private transaction unrelated to the truth about the wider world. It is, rather, that forgiveness is the new reality. It is the way the new creation actually is. All it requires to belong to that new creation, with that banner over its doorway, is that you should turn from the idols whose power (did you but know it) has already been broken and join in the celebration of Jesus’s victory.

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  We are among those who define it more broadly. In five words, which of course need to be expanded, mysticism is union with God. A mystic is one who lives in union or communion with God. The difference between union and communion is relatively minor: the first involves a sense of “one-ness” with God; the second, a sense of connection with the sacred that is deep, close, and intimate, even though a sense of “two-ness” remains. Most mystics have mystical experiences—by which we mean ecstatic experiences in which there is a vivid sense of the presence of God, or the Sacred, or the Real, terms that we use interchangeably here. An ecstatic experience, as the roots of the Greek word suggest, is a nonordinary state of consciousness. One is “out of” or “beyond” ordinary consciousness and in this state has an overwhelming sense of experiencing God. God becomes an experiential reality. In this sense, mystics know God. They do not simply believe in God, but have moved from believing to knowing. A century ago, William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience provided the classic broad definition of mystical experiences. Such experiences, he said, involve a vivid sense of union and illumination. Since we have just spoken about the former, we turn to the latter. “Illumination” has more than one connotation in the context of mystical experiences. The experiences often involve light. Sometimes they involve seeing light or a being of light—a photism, to use James’s word. They can also involve seeing the world as radiant, as full of light. The earth is “full of God’s glory” (Isa. 6:3), that is, full of the radiant luminosity of the sacred. Because the light sometimes becomes yellow or golden in these experiences, Mircea Eliade, the twentieth century’s best-known scholar of comparative religions, called them “experiences of the golden world.” “Illumination” has yet another connotation in the context of mystical experiences. They often include a sense of “enlightenment,” a vivid sense of seeing more clearly than one ever has before. And what one sees is “the way things are.” To use another word from William James, they are noetic—they involve a strong sense of knowing, and not simply ecstatic feeling. People who have such experiences experience a radical perceptual shift—they see differently. Enlightenment as a transformed way of seeing is not only part of mystical experience, but continues afterward. Common images speak of this as like moving from darkness to light, from blindness to sight, from sleeping to being awake. Thus, for example, the Buddha after his mystical experience under the Bo tree, became the “enlightened one,” the “awakened one.” In the New Testament, the same effect is spoken of with the image of blindness and sight in a verse familiar from the hymn “Amazing Grace”: “I once was blind, but now I see” (see also John 9). Seeing is transformed; mystics see differently because of what they have seen.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  She smiled absently at me and pointed toward the living-room. The closer I seemed to get to the heart of all this mysterious din, the more crowded it was. The women who were watching were treading on each other’s feet, almost melting into a mass of compact flesh. I had to be really rough to reach the blue-gray cloud that was so thick that I could scarcely distinguish, through the smoke, the red embers of an earthenware brazier, like a shepherd’s fire in a fog. My eyes smarted from the smoke and became clouded with soothing tears. The noise was so loud, so full, that I seemed no longer to hear anything at all. One moment, I felt I was in sheer void, with no shapes or sounds around me any longer. Then my eyes grew accustomed to it and began to distinguish with difficulty what was going on. Above the red point of the brazier, the heavy smoke of the incense rose; beyond it, I saw the strange creature that haunted this place. A woman, dressed in gaudy veils, was dancing wildly, throwing out her arms, jerking her head back and forth with so violent a motion that it hurt my neck to watch her. She turned her back to us and I could see her long loose hair cast wildly around her like tangled black serpents. Right at the back of the room and seated on the floor, the terrifying Negro musicians were playing. There they are, I thought, the demons! But this was only a half-hearted joke. The man who played the bagpipes, with his eyes bulging out of his head, two white spots against a coal-black background, his cheeks ready to burst, blew hard into his goatskin instrument. The tambourine-player was drunk, had reached a peak of frenzy, and kept on throwing his instrument in the air, catching it again and screaming all the time, without ceasing meanwhile to thump on the taut skin with all his strength. The cymbal player, punch-drunk, hypnotized, shook his head with the epileptic rhythm of his four metal plates. These men, I was sure, were no simulators; possessed by ancestral rhythms, they were repeating gestures and ritual that, in their childhood or in their distant homeland, had left deep marks upon them, scars on their cheeks that had been incised to impose on them, for all time, a hideous grimace. Nor would it be play when they would tear apart with their hands the live white cock, splashing the bird’s warm blood all over themselves.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  I have not tried, in this book, to provide a complete account of what the New Testament says about the death of Jesus. I have looked mainly at the four gospels, Acts, and Paul with a glance or two at the book of Revelation. For a full account I would naturally want to add the relevant material from two other early Christian letters, the Letter to the Hebrews and the First Letter of Peter. They offer other angles of vision, though for what it’s worth I think they complement the picture I’ve been sketching. Hebrews, in particular, explores what it means to think of Jesus as simultaneously the ultimate high priest and the ultimate sacrifice. First Peter addresses a situation where followers of Jesus are facing fierce persecution and interprets the cross both as the once-for-all achievement of Jesus and as the model set for his followers by that achievement. It would be interesting to pursue these further in relation to the way we have approached the central New Testament writings, but that must be a task for another time, and perhaps another pen. What we can say beyond any doubt is that within the first generation of the church there was an explosion of revolutionary beliefs about what had been accomplished on the day Jesus died, but that the revolution had a definite shape that remained constant across different traditions and widely different styles of expression. The early “official” summary remained the gold standard: the Messiah “died for our sins in accordance with the Bible.” Those who expounded this belief did so with a robust understanding of each element. The great narratives of scripture, it was assumed, had finally arrived at their divinely intended goal. This was naturally controversial then, and it has been controversial ever since, just as every messianic claim was controversial in early Judaism, meaning as it did that other claims about where Israel’s history might be going were to be set aside. The early Christians stuck to the basic belief. Jesus had been raised from the dead; therefore, he really was Israel’s Messiah; therefore his death really was the new Passover; his death really had dealt with the sins that had caused “exile” in the first place; and this had been accomplished by Jesus’s sharing and bearing the full weight of evil, and doing so alone. In his suffering and death, “Sin” was condemned. The darkest of dark powers was defeated, and its captives were set free.

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  True, there is a lot more there than fear and trembling, but the question persisted. If God is doing all the willing and the working, why are we doing all the fearing and the trembling? If it all depends on us, we can see how we might be punished for our failure, but if God is doing everything in us and for us, why should there be any need for trembling fear? To begin with, Paul mentions “work” three times in that single sentence, once at the start, once in the middle, and once at the end. This seems to put an end once and for all to any discussion of whether there can be faith-without-works, the internal commitment without the external manifestation. There cannot be. The problem, as seen already, is not that there can be faith-without-works, but that there can be works-without-faith. You cannot have love without show, but you can always have show without love. In an effort to understand how God actually works within us to empower both intention and operation, we return to that earlier example from medical technology. In a heart transplant, a person’s old and damaged heart is totally removed and replaced by a new and undamaged one. It is possible that the new organ may be rejected by the body, but there are medications to help prevent this. What God did in Christ and what God thereby offers to everyone is an identity change, a character replacement, a Spirit transplant. God’s own holy Spirit, the Spirit of nonviolent distributive justice that is God’s own self, nature, and character, is offered freely and gratuitously to all people. It is what Paul calls a charis and we translate as a “grace.” It is a free gift offered without any prior conditions demanded by God or prior merits expected of us. Indeed, how could either of those even be imagined? Also, to continue the analogy, the medications against the rejection of God’s Spirit transplant are called prayer and meditation, worship and liturgy. Paul calls that process of Spirit transplant “God’s just-making” or “God’s just-ification” of the world. But what is truly extraordinary is not so much that the divine Spirit transplant is freely offered by God, but that it is freely offered to friends and enemies alike—yes, even to God’s enemies—according to Jesus: “For God makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous” (Matt. 5:45).

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  Even our sense of wonder may be shared by our nearest cousins, the apes. Jane Goodall, a leading primatologist, has suggested the existence of primal spiritual feelings in the chimps she had carefully studied over many years. Here she describes the behaviors of a troupe visiting an especially beautiful place with a waterfall and river: For me, it is a magical place, and a spiritual one. And sometimes, as they approach, the chimpanzees display in slow, rhythmic motion along the river bed. They pick up and throw great rocks and branches. They leap to seize the hanging vines, and swing out over the stream in the spray-drenched wind until it seems the slender stems must snap or be torn from their lofty moorings. For ten minutes or more they may perform this magnificent “dance.” Why? Is it not possible that the chimpanzees are responding to some feeling like awe? A feeling generated by the mystery of the water; water that seems alive, always rushing past yet never going, always the same yet ever different. Was it perhaps similar feelings of awe that gave rise to the first animistic religions, the worship of elements and the mysteries of nature over which there was no control?108 Ironically, despite the creationists’ rejection of their animal roots, religious awe may be yet another confirmation of the Darwinian continuity of the species and of our profound instinctual heritage. To many reasonable scientists, the attribution of “religious awe” to nonhuman primates would seem a stretch at best. At the very worst, it could be seen as an extreme case of anthropomorphism gone amok. However, there is a solid, empirically based tradition of studying the behaviors and emotions in chimpanzees as evolutionary antecedents to human morality. Beginning with Eibl-Eibesfeldt’s seminal work, Love and Hate: The Natural History of Behavior Patterns,109 and recently culminating in Frans de Waal’s beautifully written Our Inner Ape,110 a compelling case is made for certain social behaviors of monkeys and apes as precursors for various human moral behaviors, including highly refined deportment such as peacemaking. These forerunners include reciprocity of grooming, maintenance of social ranking and violence attenuation. Easy to appreciate are clear examples such as an adult chimp helping a juvenile climb a tree or zoo-confined chimps (who are known to be unable to swim) jumping into the moat in a futile attempt to rescue a drowning chimp. Such altruistic behaviors conjure images of fireman entering buildings engulfed in flames to rescue trapped families or soldiers running directly into the line of fire to rescue a fallen comrade.

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  “Unveiled faces” is a mystical image—the veil has been removed. So also is “seeing the glory of the Lord,” the radiant luminosity of the Lord “as though reflected in a mirror” (see also 1 Cor. 13:12: “For now we see in a mirror, dimly”). The result is that we “are being transformed.” All of these passages—and more could be cited—indicate that Paul had mystical experiences of the risen Christ. He experienced the post-Easter Jesus as the light and glory of God, the one who enlightened and transformed him. Paul was not simply a mystic. More precisely, he was a Jewish Christ mystic. He was a Jewish Christ mystic because, as already mentioned, Paul was a Jew and in his own mind never ceased being one. He was a Jewish Christ mystic because the content of his mystical experiences was Jesus as risen Christ and Lord. Afterward, Paul’s identity became an identity “in Christ.” And as a Christ mystic, he saw his Judaism anew in the light of Jesus. We cannot claim this foundation as a consensus view. Scholars and theologians have often written about Paul without grounding his vocation and message as an apostle of Jesus in his mystical experience of the post-Easter Jesus. They have treated Paul’s letters as if they were primarily about a set of ideas that need to be systematized and explained. But our view is neither new nor idiosyncratic. A century ago, the German New Testament scholar Adolf Gustav Deissman wrote in his book Paul: A Study in Social and Religious History: “Whoever takes away the mystical element from Paul, the man of antiquity, sins against the Pauline word: ‘Quench not the Spirit’” (1 Thess. 5:19). Deissman also affirmed that Paul’s phrase “in Christ” (which occurs over a hundred times in the genuine letters) “is meant vividly and mystically, as is the corresponding ‘Christ in me.’”1 We explore these phrases in Chapters 5 and 7. In addition to seeing Paul’s mystical experience of the risen Christ as transforming him from a persecutor of Jesus’s followers to a proclaimer of Jesus, there is one more crucial transformation to underline. And that is that his experience of the risen Christ transformed his perception of the authorities, the powers, that had crucified Jesus. Paul’s experience of the risen Christ carried with it the conviction that God had raised Jesus, that God had vindicated Jesus, that Jesus is Lord. But if God has vindicated Jesus, then the powers who killed him—Roman imperial authority in collaboration with Jewish high-priestly authority—are wrong. This sets up the fundamental opposition in Paul’s theology. Who is Lord, Jesus or empire? In Paul, the mystical experience of Jesus Christ as Lord led to resistance to the imperial vision, and advocacy of a different vision of the way the world can be. CHAPTER TWO HOW TO READ A PAULINE LETTER

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  God, who had set me apart before I was born and called me through his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son to me, so that I might proclaim him among the Gentiles. In his own words, Paul testifies that he had an experience of divine revelation (“God was pleased to reveal his Son to me”) that transformed him and gave him his vocation. Two verses later, in 1:17, he connects this experience to Damascus. After referring to some subsequent events in his life, he says, “Afterwards, I returned to Damascus.” In other letters Paul also speaks of having experienced Jesus. He does so twice in 1 Corinthians. In 9:1, he says that he has “seen Jesus our Lord.” Nothing in Acts or his letters suggests that Paul had ever seen the pre-Easter Jesus. The passage must refer to seeing the post-Easter Jesus—the risen Jesus as Christ and Lord. Later in the same letter, he speaks of Jesus appearing to him. In 15:3–8, he names people to whom the risen Christ appeared and includes himself in the list: “He appeared also to me.” Paul has had firsthand experience of the risen Christ—and, interestingly, one that he says belongs in a list of resurrection experiences had by Peter and other Christian apostles. In 2 Corinthians (which may combine several letters), Paul says he “will go on to visions and revelations of the Lord.” Note the plural: we should not imagine that the Damascus experience was his only experience of the risen Christ. Then he speaks of “a person in Christ who…was caught up to the third heaven.” Though Paul uses third-person language here, he almost certainly refers to himself. “Such a person,” he continues, “whether in the body or out of the body I do not know; God knows—was caught up into Paradise and heard things that are not to be told, that no mortal is permitted to repeat” (12:1–4). The passage speaks of entering another level of reality (“the third heaven,” “Paradise”), in an ecstatic state (“whether in the body or out of the body, I do not know”), where he heard “things that are not to be told.” We do not think that the last phrase means secret information that could in principle be disclosed. Rather, it is best understood as something beyond words—“things unutterable,” as an earlier translation put it. Again to use William James’s language, this is mystical experience as ineffable—as impossible to put into words, as beyond words. Another passage in the same letter uses the language of mysticism: And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit. (2 Cor. 3:18)

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  We could pile up plenty of other examples, each of which would increase the volume of the question: Why? Why does this death and the story in which we find it carry this power? It seems to go well beyond any one articulate explanation, and it certainly goes way beyond the boundaries of explicit Christian faith. I think of the Jewish novelist Chaim Potok, whose artistic hero Asher Lev searches for imagery to express the pain of modern Judaism. The only thing he can find that will do—to the predictable horror of his community—is the crucifixion scene, which he paints in fresh and shocking ways. I think of the way in which the first Harry Potter novel ends with the disclosure that Harry had been rescued, as a young child, by the loving self-sacrifice of his mother. We could go on. Skeptics may well continue to see the execution of Jesus as just one among thousands of crucifixions carried out by the Romans in the Middle East. But for reasons that seem to go beyond mere cultural traditions, this particular death still carries enormous evocative power. And just as in the Middle Ages many found that they could relate to that story by meditating on the “instruments of the Passion” (the scourge, the crown of thorns, the nails, and so forth), so today various human elements of the story—the cockcrow as Peter is denying that he knows Jesus, the kiss by which Judas betrays his master—have become proverbial. They seem to sum up the way in which we humans get things horribly wrong, but at the same time they do so within a larger and more powerful context of meaning. When we come to more explicitly Christian presentations, the same point emerges all the more powerfully, especially when we notice how the cross, even though it’s such a simple symbol, somehow resists being turned into a mere cliché. In Roland Joffé’s award-winning 1986 movie The Mission, the cross in various forms haunts the whole narrative. The story begins with the death of one of the early Jesuit missionaries to the remote South American tribe of the Guarani. The tribesmen tie him to a wooden cross and send him over the vast Iguazu Falls, providing the movie with its poster image. The story ends with the massacre of the unresisting leaders, carrying the symbols of the crucifixion in procession, as the Portuguese colonial forces, bent on enslaving the natives rather than evangelizing them, close in and open fire. The meaning of the cross—especially its stark opposition to the world’s ways of power—is allowed to hang like a great question mark over the entire narrative. More explicit again are the many ways in which the cross has been described in the classics of Christian literature. In John Bunyan’s famous Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), the hero, Christian, is trudging along, weighed down with a huge burden. Eventually he comes to a place where, in Bunyan’s matchless description:

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  In the languages of the day, “resurrection” didn’t mean “going to heaven”; it didn’t mean that Jesus, or perhaps his “soul,” had “survived” in some nonbodily sense. That was precisely what it did not mean. There were words to denote that kind of non-bodily postmortem survival. Many people in many cultures would have found it quite normal to envisage such a survival for someone recently dead. The word ‘resurrection’ was different. It meant a new bodily life after a period of being bodily dead. Many first-century Jews believed in “the resurrection of the body” in this sense. But for them it was to be a great final event in which all God’s people would be raised from the dead in the end. It would be the launching point of God’s new world, his new creation, the “age to come.” It would happen to all God’s people in the end, not to one person, inconveniently and out of sequence (as it were) in the middle of history, with all the muddle and mess of the world still going on around it. As I and others have argued in detail elsewhere, the only way we can make sense of the first century is to say that Jesus’s first followers really did believe he had been bodily raised from the dead and that this meant that God’s “new age” had somehow begun. The only way we can make sense of that belief is to say that they were not deluded or deceived, but were telling the truth, even though it was a truth for which the world was unready: that Jesus really was fully and bodily alive again, indeed more fully and more bodily alive than before. He had gone through death and out the other side, and his body itself was the start of the new creation. This wasn’t a matter of “resuscitation,” but of a new, transformed kind of body. And—though this takes more explanation, to which I alluded in the previous chapter—this new body seemed to be equally at home in the two interlocking dimensions of created reality, what the Bible calls “heaven” and “earth,” that is, God’s space and our space. All of this and much more is given with the extraordinary and totally unexpected event of Jesus’s resurrection. And with the resurrection we find the beginnings of the interpretation of the crucifixion. The cross meant what it meant in the light of what happened next.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  It had a political meaning: “We’re in charge here, and you and your nation count for nothing.” It therefore had a theological or religious meaning: the goddess Roma and Caesar, the son of a god, were superior to any and all local gods. As Jesus of Nazareth hung dying that Friday afternoon, all those meanings would have been deeply intuited and understood not only by the Roman soldiers, but by the weeping women at the foot of the cross and the disgraced disciples behind their locked doors. Unless we grasp and hang on to not only the physical horror of the cross, but also its multiple symbolic meanings in late antiquity, we will fail to understand why the early preaching of the cross was what it was. We will fail too to understand the questions the historian and theologian must ask: How and why did the cross so quickly acquire a radically different symbolic meaning? And what precisely did that revolutionary meaning say about God, the world, Israel, and the human race? All this means that when we are attempting to understand the crucifixion of Jesus, to think the early Christians’ thoughts after them, we are entering a dark and dangerous area. We should not expect to be able to “capture” this theme, to summarize it in an easy slogan. The early Christians’ shorthand summaries point beyond themselves into areas with which the thought of our own day, including contemporary Christian thought, is not nearly as familiar as it should be. Just as the resurrection of Jesus cannot be fitted into any other worldview, but must be either rejected altogether or allowed to reshape existing worldviews around itself, so the cross itself demands the rethinking of categories. We cannot capture it; to be Christian means, among other things, that it has captured us. If we make it our own too easily, fitting it into the theories and preachers’ illustrations that explain it all neatly, we will have shrunk it, reduced it to a size that we can manage and perhaps manipulate. The aim of the present book is to do the opposite: to point to new visions more robustly biblical and more deeply revolutionary of what the cross meant to the first Christians and even to Jesus himself. Within the world of Greece and Rome there is a remarkable feature that some have seen as helping to explain how the cross of Jesus so quickly acquired its specific meaning, that Jesus died “for us,” “for our sins,” and so on. The idea of someone dying for someone else, so familiar from Christian statements of the gospel, is far more clearly visible in ancient pagan literature than in ancient Jewish literature. (It is, in fact, hardly there at all in ancient Israel, though the exceptions are important too, as we shall see.) No fewer than six of Euripides’s plays have this as a major theme.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  17–19), and then with the Temple in Jerusalem itself (21:28–29; 24:6; 25:8). And the new life of this new community was itself anchored in worship, declaring “the powerful things God has done” (2:11), establishing a new pattern of life centered upon “the teaching of the apostles and the common life,” “the breaking of bread and the prayers” (2:42), a life that, to begin with at least, tried to hold together the ancient Temple and the ordinary domestic sphere: Day by day they were all together attending the Temple. They broke bread in their various houses, and ate their food with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and standing in favor with all the people. (2:46–47) Many of the subsequent scenes in Acts focus upon the new life of worship and the ways in which, through this new pattern of life, the apostles found themselves standing, priestlike, at the uncomfortable intersection of heaven and earth, drawing both together in scripture-based worship and intercession and indeed in danger and martyrdom. Scenes like Acts 4:24–31 make the point well enough. Another graphic example is provided by Stephen’s witnessing of Jesus’s standing at the right hand of God and then joining with Jesus’s own intercession by praying for his murderers (7:56–60). These are essentially priestly scenes. Acts tells the story of the early church as the story of the powerful personal Presence and the reconstituted worship of Israel’s God, the world’s creator. Second, then, there is the hope for the worldwide rule of this God. Out of worship and prayer there grows witness; and the “witness” is not simply about people saying, “I’ve had this experience; perhaps you might like it too,” but about people announcing that a new state of affairs has come into being. This too begins from the day of Pentecost, as we have seen, when the disciples announced to the startled crowds that the ancient prophecies had been fulfilled, that “forgiveness of sins” had happened as an event in real space and time, and that the whole world was now called to order in the name of its creator and restorer. To announce Jesus as Israel’s Messiah is to say that this is now happening and “forgiveness of sins” is the key to it all. This witness continues through the many different scenes of gospel announcement: Philip to the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8, Peter to Cornelius in Acts 10, and so on. It reaches a first decisive climax in chapter 12, when Herod Agrippa I begins a serious attack on the church but is forestalled, first by Peter’s angelic release from prison and then by his own sudden death. Luke’s comment makes the position clear: Herod died, “but God’s word grew and multiplied” (Acts 12:24). Here is the vital note of kingdom: the kingdoms of the world turn out to be, in ultimate terms, powerless against the kingdom of God.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  That is the primary problem of Romans 1. It is the problem to which Paul refers in the second half of 3:23. And it is the problem that is then addressed directly in 3:24–26, where Jesus himself is put forward by the creator God as the place and the means of the fresh meeting between the true God and his human creatures. That is why, when describing Abraham’s faith, Paul indicates that the patriarch reversed the idolatry: “He grew strong in faith and gave glory to God” (4:20). And that is why, immediately after the end of the whole argument, Paul sums up to the point he has reached in the cultic language of 5:1–2, where those who are justified have “access” to the divine grace and celebrate the “hope of the glory of God.” The first thing that is missing from the usual line of thought, then, is any attempt to show how Paul deals not just with “sin” itself, but with the idolatry that lies behind it and the ensuing loss of “glory.” The second thing missing from the usual account is any attempt to show how 3:21–26 fits with the line of thought Paul introduced in 2:17–24. (Here I develop further the point I mentioned briefly a moment ago.) This passage too has been squashed out of shape, in this case by readers assuming that Paul is here simply talking about “the Jew” as a special case within the “works contract.” In this “usual” reading, Paul is merely rubbing in the point that all humans are sinful. Jews may think they are morally superior to Gentiles, but in fact they are not. It is of course true that in 3:19–20 Paul does indeed conclude that nobody, whether Jew or Gentile, can be “in the right before God.” The Torah itself makes this clear. Paul then hammers the same point home again in 3:23: “All sinned, and fell short of God’s glory.” But this overall argument (that all human beings are sinful, and that Jews are no exception) cannot be allowed to nullify the specific and different point that 2:17–3:9 is actually making. This too is vital if we are to understand the inner dynamic of 3:21–26.

• From White Oleander (1999)

  “I have a date,” she said, reaching for the next book to sign. “After that,” he said, and I liked his self-confidence, though he wasn’t her type, being chubby, dark, and dressed in a suit from the Salvation Army. She wanted the shy blond, of course, way younger than her, who wanted to be a poet too. He was the one who came home with us. I lay on my mattress on the screen porch and waited for him to leave, watching the blue of the evening turn velvet, indigo lingering like an unspoken hope, while my mother and the blond man murmured on the other side of the screens. Incense perfumed the air, a special kind she bought in Little Tokyo, without any sweetness, expensive; it smelled of wood and green tea. A handful of stars appeared in the sky, but in L.A. none of the constellations were the right ones, so I connected them up in new arrangements: the Spider, the Wave, the Guitar. When he left, I came out into the big room. She was sitting cross-legged on her bed in her white kimono, writing in a notebook with an ink pen she dipped in a bottle. “Never let a man stay the night,” she told me. “Dawn has a way of casting a pall on any night magic.” The night magic sounded lovely. Someday I would have lovers and write a poem after. I gazed at the white oleanders she had arranged on the coffee table that morning, three clusters of blossoms representing heaven, man, and earth, and thought about the music of her lovers’ voices in the dark, their soft laughter, the smell of the incense. I touched the flowers. Heaven. Man. I felt on the verge of something, a mystery that surrounded me like gauze, something I was beginning to unwind. ALL THAT SUMMER , I went with her to the magazine. She never thought far enough ahead to put me in a Y program, and I never mentioned the possibility of summer school. I enjoyed school itself, but it was torture for me to try to fit in as a girl among other girls. Girls my own age were a different species entirely, their concerns as foreign as the Dogons of Mali. Seventh grade had been particularly painful, and I waited for the moment I could be with my mother again. The art room of Cinema Scene, with its ink pens and a carousel of colored pencils, table-sized paper, overlays and benday dots, border tape, and discarded headlines and photographs that I could wax and collage, was my paradise. I liked the way the adults talked around me; they forgot I was there and said the most amazing things. Today, the writers and the art director, Marlene, gossiped about the affair between the publisher and the editor of the magazine. “A bizarre bit of Santa Ana madness,” my mother commented from the pasteup table. “That beaky anorexic and the toupeed Chihuahua.