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 Letter to the Hebrews (The New Daily Study Bible) (2002)

  (2) Sin is the failure to see the sacredness of sacred things. Nothing produces a shudder like sacrilege. The writer to the Hebrews says in effect: ‘Look at what has been done for you; look at the shed blood and the broken body of Christ; look at what your new relationship to God cost; can you treat it as if it did not matter? Don’t you see what a sacred thing it is?’ Sin is the failure to realize the sacredness of that sacrifice upon the cross. (3) Sin is the insult to the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit speaks within us, telling us what is right and wrong, seeking to check us when we are on the way to sin and to spur us on when we are drifting into lethargy. To disregard these voices is to insult the Spirit and to grieve the heart of God. All through this, one thing comes out. Sin is not disobedience to an impersonal law; it is the wrecking of a personal relationship and the wounding of the heart of the God whose name is Father. The writer to the Hebrews finishes his appeal with a threat. He quotes Deuteronomy 32:35–6, where the sternness of God is clearly seen. At the heart of Christianity, there is always a threat. To remove that threat is to diminish the effectiveness of the faith. Ultimately, it is not the same for the good and the bad alike. No one can evade the fact that, in the end, judgment comes. THE DANGER OF DRIFTINGHebrews 10:32–9 Remember the former days. Remember how, after you had been enlightened, you had to go through a hard struggle of suffering, partly because you yourselves were held up to insult and involved in affliction and partly because you had become partners with people whose life was like that. For you gave your sympathy to those in prison; you accepted the pillaging of your goods with joy; for you knew that you yourselves hold a possession which is better and which lasts. Do not throw away your confidence, for it is a confidence that has a great reward. You need fortitude so that, after you have done the will of God, you may receive the promise. For, in a short time, a very short time, ‘He who is to come will come and he will not delay. And my just man shall live by faith; but, if he shrinks back, my soul will not find pleasure in him.’ We are not men to shrink back from things and so to come to disaster, but we are men of a faith which will enable us to possess our souls.

• From The Letter to the Hebrews (The New Daily Study Bible) (2002)

  In the giving of the law at Mount Sinai, three things are stressed. (1) The sheer majesty of God. The story stresses the shattering power of God, and in it there is no love at all. (2) The absolute unapproachability of God. Far from the way being open to God, anyone who tries to approach him meets death. (3) The sheer terror of God. Here is nothing but an awe-stricken fear which is afraid to look and even to listen. Then at verse 22 comes the difference. The first section deals with all that can be expected under the old covenant – a God of lonely majesty, complete separation from men and women, and overwhelming fear. But to Christians has come the new covenant and a new relationship with God. The writer to the Hebrews makes a list of the new glories that await Christians. (1) The new Jerusalem awaits them. This world with all its impermanence, its fears, its mysteries and its separations goes, and life for Christians is made new. (2) The angels await them in joyful assembly. The word used for joyful assembly is panēguris, which is the word for a joyful national assembly in honour of the gods. To the Greeks, it described a joyful holy day when everyone rejoiced. For Christians, the joy of heaven is such that it makes even the angels break into rejoicing. (3) God’s elected people await them. The writer to the Hebrews uses two words to describe these people. He says literally that they are the first-born. Now, the characteristic of the first-born son is that the inheritance and the honour are his. He says that they are those whose names are written in the registers of heaven. In ancient times, kings kept a register of their faithful citizens. So, those who await the Christians are all whom God has honoured and all whom God has reckoned among his faithful citizens. (4) God the Judge awaits them. The writer to the Hebrews never forgot that, at the end, Christians must stand the scrutiny of God. The glory is there; but the awe and the fear of God still remain. The New Testament is never in the slightest danger of sentimentalizing the idea of God. (5) The spirits of all good men and women who have achieved their goal await them. Once they encircled them in the unseen cloud; now Christians will be part of that company. They go to join those whose names are on God’s roll of honour.

• From How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian (2015)

  From this noble line shall be born the Trojan Caesar [Augustus], who shall extend his empire to the ocean, his glory to the stars, a Julius, name descended from great Julus! Him in days to come, shall you [Venus], anxious no more, welcome to heaven, laden with Eastern spoils; he, too, shall be invoked in vows. (1.279–290) Rome’s destiny and Augustus’s divinity were ordained from the beginning by Jupiter, and nothing would stop that heavenly decree from its fulfillment. Augustus, as the new Aeneas, was predestined to “bring all the world beneath his laws” (4.231). Next, that destiny was prophetically foretold by twin proclamations from a dead father to a living son, with one from the Trojan start and the other from the Latin end of the story. The spirit of the dead Anchises tells Aeneas: Glorious Rome shall extend her empire to earth’s ends, her ambitions to the skies. . . . This in truth is he whom you so often hear promised you, Augustus Caesar, son of a God [divi genus ], who will again establish a Golden Age in Latium amid fields once ruled by Saturn. (6.781–794) As this prophecy continues, the new vision of the reign of Saturn’s Golden Age is summed up in these overquoted lines: “You, Roman, be sure to rule the world (be these your arts), to crown peace with justice, to spare the vanquished and to crush the proud” (6.851–853). That ended Book VI of the Aeneid . Then, as Book VII begins, we get another prophecy of Rome’s destiny, but this time at the Italian end of the journey from Troy. The spirit of Faunus, the “prophetic sire” of King Latinus, tells Aeneas: Strangers shall come, to be your sons, whose blood shall exalt our [Latin] name to the stars, and the children of whose race shall behold, where the circling sun looks down [from east to west] on each ocean, the whole world roll obediently beneath their feet. (7.98–101) You will notice two major points in Rome’s destiny: it is decreed by God, and it is cosmic in scope—as befits, of course, the Golden Age or the reign of Saturn. It is about the whole Earth and the entire world. Finally, Venus asks her divine husband, the God Vulcan, to create weapons for Aeneas. On the shield he shows “the history of Italy and the triumphs of Rome” (8.626). This allows Virgil to depict the climax of that triumphant history as “the Battle of Actium”: On the one side, Augustus Caesar stands on the lofty stern, leading Italians to strife, with the senate and the people, the Penates [Gods] of the state, and all the mighty gods; his auspicious brows shoot forth a double flame, and on his head dawns his father’s star.

• From I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

  In the two short blocks before it reached its destination, the street housed two day-and-night restaurants, two pool halls, four Chinese restaurants, two gambling houses, plus diners, shoeshine shops, beauty salons, barber shops and at least four churches. To fully grasp the never-ending activity in San Francisco's Negro neighborhood during the war, one need only know that the two blocks described were side streets that were duplicated many times over in the eight-to ten-square-block area. The air of collective displacement, the impermanence of life in wartime and the gauche personalities of the more recent arrivals tended to dissipate my own sense of not belonging. In San Francisco, for the first time, I perceived myself as part of something. Not that I identified with the newcomers, nor with the rare Black descendants of native San Franciscans, nor with the whites or even the Asians, but rather with the times and the city. I understood the arrogance of the young sailors who marched the streets in marauding gangs, approaching every girl as if she were at best a prostitute and at worst an Axis agent bent on making the U.S.A. lose the war. The undertone of fear that San Francisco would be bombed which was abetted by weekly air raid warnings, and civil defense drills in school, heightened my sense of belonging. Hadn't I, always, but ever and ever, thought that life was just one great risk for the living? Then the city acted in wartime like an intelligent woman under siege. She gave what she couldn't with safety withheld, and secured those things which lay in her reach. The city became for me the ideal of what I wanted to be as a grownup. Friendly but never gushing, cool but not frigid or distant, distinguished without the awful stiffness. To San Franciscans “the City That Knows How” was the Bay, the fog, Sir Francis Drake Hotel, Top o' the Mark, Chinatown, the Sunset District and so on and so forth and so white. To me, a thirteen-year-old Black girl, stalled by the South and Southern Black life style, the city was a state of beauty and a state of freedom. The fog wasn't simply the steamy vapors off the bay caught and penned in by hills, but a soft breath of anonymity that shrouded and cushioned the bashful traveler. I became dauntless and free of fears, intoxicated by the physical fact of San Francisco. Safe in my protecting arrogance, I was certain that no one loved her as impartially as I. I walked around the Mark Hopkins and gazed at the Top o' the Mark, but (maybe sour grapes) was more impressed by the view of Oakland from the hill than by the tiered building or its fur-draped visitors. For weeks, after the city and I came to terms about my belonging, I haunted the points of interest and found them empty and un-San Francisco.

• From The Letter to the Hebrews (The New Daily Study Bible) (2002)

  THE writer to the Hebrews has just been thinking of Jesus as the one who leads us into reality. He has been using the idea that in this world we have only pale copies of what is truly real. The worship that we can offer is just a ghost-like shadow of the real worship which only Jesus, the real high priest, can offer. But even as he thinks of that, his mind goes back to the tabernacle (the tabernacle, remember, not the Temple). Lovingly he remembers its beauty; lovingly he lingers on its priceless possessions. And the thought in his mind is this: if earthly worship was as beautiful as this, what must the true worship be like? If all the loveliness of the tabernacle was only a shadow of reality, how surpassingly lovely the reality must be. He does not describe the tabernacle in detail; he only alludes to some of its treasures. This was all he needed to do because his readers knew its glories and had them fixed in their memories. But we do not know them; therefore, let us see what the beauty of the earthly tabernacle was like, always remembering that it was only a pale copy of reality. The main description of the tabernacle in the wilderness is in Exodus 25–31 and 35–40. God said to Moses: ‘Make me a sanctuary, so that I may dwell among them’ (Exodus 25:8). It was constructed out of the free-will offerings of the people (Exodus 25:1–7), who gave with such lavish generosity that a halt had to be called to their giving (Exodus 36:5–7). The court of the tabernacle was 150 feet long and 75 feet wide. It was surrounded by a curtain-like fence of fine, twined linen seven and a half feet high. The white linen stood for the wall of holiness that surrounds the presence of God. The curtain was supported by twenty pillars on the north and south sides, and by ten on the east and west sides; and the pillars were set in sockets of brass and had tops of silver. There was only one gate. It was on the east side, and it was thirty feet wide and seven and a half feet high. It was made of fine, twined linen and with blue, purple and scarlet yarns. In the court, there were two things. There was the bronze altar, seven and a half feet square and four and a half feet high and made of acacia wood sheathed in brass. Its top was a bronze grating on which the sacrifice was laid; and it had four horns to which the offering was bound. There was the laver. The laver was made from the brass mirrors of the women (glass mirrors did not exist at that time), but its dimensions are not given. The priests bathed themselves in the water in it before they carried out their sacred duties.

• From The Letter to the Hebrews (The New Daily Study Bible) (2002)

  (1) The Book of Wisdom (4:10ff.) has the idea that God took Enoch to himself when he was still young to save him from the infection of this world. He was taken away while he lived among sinners. He was snatched away in case evil should change his understanding or guile deceive his soul. This is another way of putting the famous classical saying: ‘Those whom the gods love die young.’ It looks on death as a reward. It means that God loved Enoch so much that he removed him before age and degeneration descended hand in hand upon him. (2) Philo, the great Alexandrian Jewish interpreter, saw in Enoch the great model of repentance . He was changed by repentance from the life that is apart from God to the life that walks with God. The writer to the Hebrews reads into the simple statement of the Old Testament passage the idea that Enoch did not die at all but that in some mystic way God took him to himself. But surely the meaning is much simpler. In a wicked and corrupt generation, Enoch walked with God; and so, when the end came to him, there was no shock or interruption. Death merely took him into God’s nearer presence. Because he walked with God when others were walking away from him, day by day Enoch came nearer to God, and death was no more than the last step that took him into the very presence of that God with whom he had always walked. We cannot think of Enoch without thinking of the different attitudes to death. The sheer serenity of the Old Testament statement, so simple and yet so moving, points forward to the Christian attitude. (1) There are those who have thought of death as mysterious and inexplicable . The nineteenth-century writer and artist William Morris wrote: Death have we hated, knowing not what it meant. Francis Bacon, the philosopher, said: ‘Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark.’ To some, it has always been the terrifying unknown, giving rise to what Hamlet called ‘that dread of something after death’. (2) There are those who simply have seen in death the one inevitable thing in life .

• From How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian (2015)

  Ecstasy is an altered state of normal awake-consciousness and as such is a hard-wired possibility of our human brain. It is not supernatural but natural; or better, it is a serene negation of that inept distinction. Ecstatic vision and ecstatic audition, ecstatic relocation and ecstatic transformation may be produced by fever or focus, medication or meditation, physical isolation or sensory deprivation. Here, however, is the intractable challenge. The event of an ecstatic trance derives from the chemistry in the brain, but the content of an ecstatic trance derives from the theology in the mind. What entranced prophets saw in heaven validated and empowered what they brought with them from earth. The result combined both the very best understanding of the covenantal God of nonviolent distributive justice and the very worst understanding of the covenantal God of violent retributive justice. The basic message—clear, consistent, and courageous across three hundred years—demanded just distribution on earth or else stern retribution from heaven. What are the metaphor, model, and matrix for that mode of prophetic consciousness—from divine covenant through heavenly council to transcendental complaint? The answer is brilliantly revealed in one single historical incident during the Assyrian Empire’s southward attacks against Egypt in the late 700s BCE . PROPHETIC MATRIX “Thus Says the Great King”ASSYRIA WAS THE MOST powerful and also the most ruthless empire of its time. It used atrocity as imperial policy so that, where terror preceded its army, the army might not need to follow. The curses in its vassal treaties and the actions in its military reprisals were not directed just against rebel rulers and their dynasties, but explicitly against their lands and populations as well. Hezekiah of Judah, seduced by promises of Egyptian support, rebelled against King Sennacherib of Assyria. The biblical account of what happened next is quite extraordinary, with almost sixty verses verbatim across two chapters in both 2 Kings 18–19 and Isaiah 36–37. The date of Sennacherib’s campaign was 701 BCE or, possibly, a second campaign in 688 BCE . I focus here on four major aspects of the opening scene in the drama of Jerusalem’s deliverance from the Assyrian threat. The first aspect concerns speech and text. Having devastated nearby Lachish, Sennacherib sent three of his highest officials, named by their titles, to meet three of Hezekiah’s at the southeastern corner of the city walls to negotiate Jerusalem’s surrender—or else. Sennacherib’s last-named official is identified as “the Rabshakeh,” or vizier. It is he who delivers the imperial message. (Is he a northern Israelite elite-scribe deported to Assyria in 722–721 BCE ?) The full story is related in 2 Kings 18:1–36 (= Isa. 37:1–21), and the Rabshakeh’s address is historically quite accurate. Such diplomatic threats were normal Assyrian imperial protocol—before the military attacked. The Assyrian Rabshakeh carries a letter and reads it to Hezekiah’s negotiators before delivering it to them.

• From The Letter to the Hebrews (The New Daily Study Bible) (2002)

  (2) The prophets used many methods. They used the method of speech . When speech failed, they used the method of dramatic action (cf. 1 Kings 11:29–32; Jeremiah 13:1–9, 27:1–7; Ezekiel 4:1–3, 5:1–4). The prophets had to use human methods to transmit their own part of the truth of God. Again, it was different with Jesus. He revealed God by being himself . It is not so much what he said and did that shows us what God is like; it is what he was. The revelation of the prophets was great and came in many forms, but it was fragmentary and presented by such methods as they could find to make it effective. The revelation of God in Jesus was complete and was presented in Jesus himself. In a word, the prophets were the friends of God; but Jesus was the Son . The prophets grasped part of the mind of God; but Jesus was that mind. It is to be noted that it is no part of the purpose of the writer to the Hebrews to belittle the prophets; it is his aim to establish the supremacy of Jesus Christ. He is not saying that there is a break between the Old Testament revelation and that of the New Testament; he is stressing the fact that there is continuity, but continuity that ends in consummation. The writer to the Hebrews uses two great pictures to describe what Jesus was. He says that he was the apaugasma of God’s glory. Apaugasma can mean one of two things in Greek. It can mean brilliance, the light which shines out, or it can mean reflection, the light which is reflected. Here, it probably means brilliance. Jesus is the shining of God’s glory among us. He says that he was the charactēr of God’s very essence. In Greek, charactēr means two things – first, a seal, and, second, the impression that the seal leaves on the wax. The impression has the exact form of the seal. So, when the writer to the Hebrews said that Jesus was the charactēr of the being of God, he meant that he was the exact image of God. Just as, when you look at the impression, you see exactly what the seal which made it is like, so when you look at Jesus you see exactly what God is like. In his commentary, the nineteenth-century scholar and churchman C. J. Vaughan has pointed out that this passage tells us six great things about Jesus. (1) The original glory of God belongs to him. Here is a wonderful thought. Jesus is God’s glory; therefore, we see with amazing clarity that the glory of God consists not in crushing men and women and reducing them to miserable submission and slavery, but in serving them and loving them and in the end dying for them. It is not the glory of shattering power but the glory of suffering love.

• From The Letter to the Hebrews (The New Daily Study Bible) (2002)

  (1) Jesus is the living way to the presence of God. We enter into the presence of God by means of the veil, that is, by the flesh of Jesus. That is a difficult thought, but what he means is this. In front of the Holy of Holies in the tabernacle, there hung the veil to screen off the presence of God. For anyone to enter into that presence, the veil would have to be torn apart. Jesus’ flesh is what veiled his godhead. Charles Wesley, in his great hymn ‘Hark the herald angels sing’, made this appeal: Veiled in flesh the godhead see. It was when the flesh of Christ was torn upon the cross that people really saw God. All his life showed God; but it was on the cross that God’s love really was revealed. As the tearing of the tabernacle veil opened the way to the presence of God, so the tearing of the flesh of Christ revealed the full greatness of his love and opened up the way to him. (2) Jesus is the high priest over God’s house in the heavens. As we have seen so often, the function of the priest was to build a bridge between the people and God. This means that Jesus not only shows us the way to God but also, when we get there, introduces us to his very presence. Someone might be able to direct a tourist who asks the way to Buckingham Palace and yet be very far from having the right to take that person into the presence of the Queen; but Jesus can take us the whole way. (3) Jesus is the one person who can really cleanse. In the priestly ritual, the holy things were cleansed by being sprinkled with the blood of the sacrifices. Again and again, the high priest bathed himself in the brass basin of clear water. But these things were ineffective to remove the real pollution of sin. Only Jesus can really cleanse people. His is no external purification; by his presence and his Spirit, he cleanses their innermost thoughts and desires until they are really clean. From this, the writer to the Hebrews goes on to urge three things. (1) Let us approach the presence of God. That is to say, let us never forget the duty of worship. It is given to everyone to live in two worlds – this world of space and time, and the world of eternal things. Our danger is that we become so involved in this world that we forget the other. As the day begins, as the day ends and repeatedly throughout the day’s activities, we should turn aside, if only for a moment, and enter God’s presence. We all carry with us our own secret shrine, but so many of us forget to enter it. As Matthew Arnold wrote in his poem ‘Absence’:

• From I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

  To describe my mother would be to write about a hurricane in its perfect power. Or the climbing, falling colors of a rainbow. We had been received by her mother and had waited on the edge of our seats in the overfurnished living room (Dad talked easily with our grandmother, as white-folks talk to Blacks, unembarrassed and unapologetic). We were both fearful of Mother's coming and impatient at her delay. It is remarkable how much truth there is in the two expressions: “struck dumb” and “love at first sight.” My mother's beauty literally assailed me. Her red lips (Momma said it was a sin to wear lipstick) split to show even white teeth and her fresh-butter color looked see-through clean. Her smile widened her mouth beyond her cheeks beyond her ears and seemingly through the walls to the street outside. I was struck dumb. I knew immediately why she had sent me away. She was too beautiful to have children. I had never seen a woman as pretty as she who was called “Mother.” Bailey on his part fell instantly and forever in love. I saw his eyes shining like hers; he had forgotten the loneliness and the nights when we had cried together because we were “unwanted children.” He had never left her warm side or shared the icy wind of solitude with me. She was his Mother Dear and I resigned myself to his condition. They were more alike than she and I, or even he and I. They both had physical beauty and personality, so I figured it figured. Our father left St. Louis a few days later for California, and I was neither glad nor sorry. He was a stranger, and if he chose to leave us with a stranger, it was all of one piece. 10Grandmother Baxter was a quadroon or an octoroon, or in any case she was nearly white. She had been raised by a German family in Cairo, Illinois, and had come to St. Louis at the turn of the century to study nursing. While she was working at Homer G. Phillips Hospital she met and married Grandfather Baxter. She was white (having no features that could even loosely be called Negroid) and he was Black. While she spoke with a throaty German accent until her death, he had the choppy spouting speech of the West Indians. Their marriage was a happy one. Grandfather had a famous saying that caused great pride in his family: “Bah Jesus, I live for my wife, my children and my dog.” He took extreme care to prove that statement true by taking the word of his family even in the face of contradictory evidence.

• From The Letter to the Hebrews (The New Daily Study Bible) (2002)

  As for the angels, he says: ‘He who makes his angels winds and his servants a flame of fire.’ But, as for the Son, he says: ‘God is your throne forever and forever, and the sceptre of righteousness is the sceptre of your kingdom. You have loved justice and hated lawlessness; therefore God has anointed you, even your God, with the oil of exultation above your fellows.’ And, ‘You in the beginning, O Lord, laid the foundations of the earth, and the heavens are the work of your hands. They shall perish but you remain unalterable. All of them will grow old like a garment, and like a mantle you will fold them up and they will be changed. But you are ever yourself, and your years will not fail.’ To which of the angels did he ever say: ‘Sit at my right hand till I make your enemies your footstool’? Are they not all ministering spirits, continually being despatched on service, for the sake of those who are destined to enter into possession of salvation? I N the previous passage, the writer was concerned to prove the superiority of Jesus over all the prophets. Now he is concerned to prove his superiority over the angels. That he thinks it worth while to do this proves the place that belief in angels had in the thought of the Jews of his day. At this time, such a belief was on the increase. The reason was that people were more and more impressed with what is called the transcendence of God. They felt more and more the distance and the difference between God and themselves. The result was that they came to think of the angels as intermediaries between God and human beings. They came to believe that the angels bridged the gulf between God and men and women; that God spoke to them through the angels and the angels carried their prayers into the presence of God. We see this process particularly in one instance. In the Old Testament, the law was given directly by God to Moses, without the need of an intermediary. But, in New Testament times, the Jews believed that God gave the law first to angels who then passed it on to Moses, direct communication between human beings and God being unthinkable (cf. Acts 7:53; Galatians 3:19). If we look at some of the basic Jewish beliefs about angels, we will see those beliefs reappearing in this passage. God lived surrounded by his angelic hosts (Isaiah 6; 1 Kings 22:19). Sometimes the angels are thought of as God’s army (Joshua 5:14f.). In Greek, the word for angels is aggeloi, and in Hebrew it is mal’akim. In both languages, the meaning is messenger as well as angel. In fact, messenger is the more common meaning. The angels were really the beings who were the instruments in the bringing of God’s word and the working of God’s will in the world.

• From The Letter to the Hebrews (The New Daily Study Bible) (2002)

  In Jeremiah’s words about the new covenant, there is no mention of sacrifice. It would seem that Jeremiah believed that, in the new age, sacrifice would be abolished as irrelevant; but the writer to the Hebrews can only think in terms of the sacrificial system, and very shortly he will go on to speak of Jesus as the perfect sacrifice, whose death alone made the new covenant possible. THE GLORY OF THE TABERNACLE Hebrews 9:1–5 So, then, the first tabernacle, too, had its ordinances of worship and its holy place, which was an earthly symbol of the divine realities. For the first tabernacle was constructed and in it there was the lamp stand and the table with the shewbread, and it was called the holy place. Behind the second curtain, there was that part of the tabernacle which was called the Holy of Holies. It was approached by means of the golden altar of incense, and it had in it the ark of the covenant, which was covered all over with gold. In the ark, there was the golden pot with the manna and Aaron’s rod which budded and the tables of the covenant. Above it, there were the cherubim of glory, overshadowing the mercy seat; but this is not the place to speak about all these things in detail. T HE writer to the Hebrews has just been thinking of Jesus as the one who leads us into reality. He has been using the idea that in this world we have only pale copies of what is truly real. The worship that we can offer is just a ghost-like shadow of the real worship which only Jesus, the real high priest, can offer. But even as he thinks of that, his mind goes back to the tabernacle (the tabernacle, remember, not the Temple). Lovingly he remembers its beauty; lovingly he lingers on its priceless possessions. And the thought in his mind is this: if earthly worship was as beautiful as this, what must the true worship be like? If all the loveliness of the tabernacle was only a shadow of reality, how surpassingly lovely the reality must be. He does not describe the tabernacle in detail; he only alludes to some of its treasures. This was all he needed to do because his readers knew its glories and had them fixed in their memories. But we do not know them; therefore, let us see what the beauty of the earthly tabernacle was like, always remembering that it was only a pale copy of reality. The main description of the tabernacle in the wilderness is in Exodus 25–31 and 35–40. God said to Moses: ‘Make me a sanctuary, so that I may dwell among them’ (Exodus 25:8).

• From How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian (2015)

  My purpose in all this is not simply to solve the problem posed in my title How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian, but also to broach the possibility that there is an internal solution within the Christian Bible itself. Two Exploratory ProbesMY FIRST EXPLORATORY PROBE starts in the book of Leviticus, which includes this rather stunning announcement from God: “The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine; with me you are but aliens and tenants” (25:23). In other words, since the land is life itself, householders are but agents and stewards of God as owner, and they are only tenant farmers on another’s land and resident aliens in another’s country. (It is as if God announced today: Capital belongs to me; you are all doubtful creditors and bad debtors.) It is easy enough to imagine the purpose of taking one’s ancestral land off permanent sale. The theory is that originally God distributed the land fairly and equitably among the tribes, clans, and families of Israel. That distributive justice must never be annulled, and the rest of Leviticus 25 spells out in some detail what must happen if land needs to be sold temporarily, but never permanently. Every fiftieth year was to be the Jubilee Year of liberation, redemption, and restoration. During that Jubilee Year, all rural property sold temporarily through necessity was to be returned to its original ancestral owners: And you shall hallow the fiftieth year and you shall proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you: you shall return, every one of you, to your property and every one of you to your family. . . . In this year of jubilee you shall return, every one of you, to your property.” (25:10, 13) In fact, the buyer of such alienated rural property did not actually own the land but only its produce, pending the land’s return in the next Jubilee Year. The buyer is instructed, “If the years are more [to the next Jubilee], you shall increase the price, and if the years are fewer, you shall diminish the price; for it is a certain number of harvests that are being sold to you” (25:16). It is interesting, by the way, that the Jubilee Year started “on the day of atonement” (25:9). It is almost as if the very necessity of having a Jubilee Year pointed to something sinful that required forgiveness. In any case, all of this is quite clear in theory: land may be sold temporarily but never permanently. So how did that beautiful distributive justice work out in practice? Think of one rather extreme example of its annulment—but possibly a paradigmatic one for very many less extreme instances.

• From The Letter to the Hebrews (The New Daily Study Bible) (2002)

  THE writer to the Hebrews, still thinking of the supreme effectiveness of the sacrifice which Jesus made, begins with a flight of thought which, even for such an adventurous writer, is amazing. Let us remember again the letter’s basic thought that the worship of this world is a pale copy of the real worship. The writer to the Hebrews says that, in this world, the Levitical sacrifices were designed to purify the means of worship. For instance, the sacrifices of the Day of Atonement purified the tabernacle and the altar and the holy place. Now he goes on to say that the work of Christ purifies not only earth but also heaven. He has the tremendous thought of a kind of cosmic redemption that purified the whole universe, seen and unseen. So, he goes on to stress again the way in which the work and the sacrifice of Christ are supreme. (1) Christ did not enter a holy place that had been specially created for worship; he entered into the presence of God. We are to think of Christianity not in terms of church membership but in terms of intimate fellowship with God. (2) Christ entered into the presence of God not only for his own sake but also for ours. It was to open the way for us and to plead our cause. In Christ, there is the greatest paradox in the world, the paradox of the greatest glory and the greatest service, the paradox of one for whom the world exists and who exists for the world, the paradox of the eternal king and the eternal servant. (3) The sacrifice of Christ never needs to be made again. Year after year, the ritual of the Day of Atonement had to go on, and the things that blocked the road to God had to be atoned for; but, through Christ’s sacrifice, the road to God is always open. Men and women were always sinners and always will be, but that does not mean that Christ must go on offering himself again and again. The road is open once and for all. We can draw a faint analogy of that. For a long time, a particular surgical operation may be impossible. Then some surgeon finds a way round the difficulties. From that day, that same road is open to all surgeons. We may put it this way: nothing need ever be added to what Jesus Christ has done to keep open the way to God’s love for sinning humanity. Finally, the writer to the Hebrews draws a parallel between human life and the life of Christ.

• From The Letter to the Hebrews (The New Daily Study Bible) (2002)

  (3) There was the altar of incense . It was of acacia wood sheathed in gold; it was one and a half feet square and three feet high. On it, incense, symbolizing the prayers of the people rising to God, was burned every morning and evening. In front of the Holy of Holies , there was the veil , which was made of fine, twined linen, embroidered in scarlet and purple and blue, and with the cherubim upon it. Into the Holy of Holies , no one but the high priest might enter – and he only once a year, on the Day of Atonement, and only after the most elaborate preparations. Within the Holy of Holies stood the ark of the covenant . It contained three things – the golden pot of the manna (see Exodus 16:31–3), Aaron’s rod that budded (see Numbers 17:8), and the tables of the law. It was made of acacia wood sheathed outside and lined inside with gold. It was three feet nine inches long, two feet three inches wide, and two feet three inches high. Its lid was called the mercy-seat . On the mercy-seat, there were two cherubim of solid gold with overarching wings. It was there that the very presence of God rested, for he had said: ‘There I will meet you, and from above the mercy-seat, from between the two cherubim that are on the ark of the covenant’ (Exodus 25:22). It was of all this beauty that the writer to the Hebrews was thinking – and yet it was only a shadow of reality. In his mind, there was another thing of which he was to speak again: the ordinary Israelite could come only to the gate of the tabernacle court; the priests and the Levites might enter the court; the priests alone might enter the holy place; and none but the high priest might enter the Holy of Holies. There was beauty, but it was a beauty in which the ordinary people were barred from the inner presence of God. Jesus Christ took the barrier away and opened wide the way to God’s presence for everyone.

• From The Letter to the Hebrews (The New Daily Study Bible) (2002)

  Then Abraham said: ‘The moon must be God and the stars his host!’ So he knelt down and adored the moon. But after the night had passed, the moon sank and the sun rose again and Abraham said: ‘Truly these heavenly bodies are no gods, for they obey law; I will worship the one who imposed the law upon them.’ The Arabs have a different legend. They tell how Abraham saw many flocks and herds and said to his mother: ‘Who is the lord of these?’ She answered: ‘Your father, Terah.’ ‘And who is the lord of Terah?’ the young Abraham asked. ‘Nimrod,’ said his mother. ‘And who is the lord of Nimrod?’ asked Abraham. His mother told him to be quiet and not push questions too far; but already Abraham’s thoughts were reaching out to the one who is the God of all. The legends go on to tell that Terah not only worshipped twelve idols, one for each of the months, but was also a manufacturer of idols. One day, Abraham was left in charge of the shop. People came in to buy idols. Abraham would ask them how old they were and they would answer perhaps 50 or 60 years of age. ‘Woe to a man of such an age’, said Abraham, ‘who adores the work of one day!’ A strong and fit man of 70 came in. Abraham asked him his age and then said: ‘You fool to adore a god who is younger than yourself!’ A woman came in with a dish of meat for the gods. Abraham took a stick and smashed all the idols but one, in whose hands he set the stick he had used. Terah returned and was angry. Abraham said: ‘My father, a woman brought this dish of meat for your gods; they all wanted to have it and the strongest knocked the heads off the rest, in case they should eat it all.’ Terah said: ‘That is impossible, for they are made of wood and stone.’ And Abraham answered: ‘Let your own ear hear what your own mouth has spoken!’ All these legends give us a vivid picture of Abraham searching after God and being dissatisfied with the idolatry of his people. So, when God’s call came to him, he was ready to go out into the unknown to find him. Abraham is the supreme example of faith. (1) Abraham’s faith was the faith that was ready for adventure . God’s summons meant that he had to leave home and family and business; yet he went. He had to go out into the unknown; yet he went. In the best of us, there is a certain timidity. We wonder just what will happen to us if we take God at his word and act on his commands and promises. Bishop Lesslie Newbigin tells of the negotiations which led to the formation of the United Church of South India.

• From The Letter to the Hebrews (The New Daily Study Bible) (2002)

  THE ADVENTURE AND THE PATIENCE OF FAITH Hebrews 11:8–10 It was by faith that Abraham, when he was called, showed his obedience by going out to a place which he was going to receive as an inheritance, and he went out not knowing where he was to go. It was by faith that he sojourned in the land that had been promised to him, as though it had been a foreign land, living in tents, in the same way as did Isaac and Jacob, who were his coheirs in the promise of it. For he was waiting for the city which has foundations, whose architect and builder is God. T HE call of Abraham is told with dramatic simplicity in Genesis 12:1. Jewish and middle-eastern legends gathered largely round Abraham’s name, and some of them must have been known to the writer to the Hebrews. The legends tell how Abraham was the son of Terah, commander of the armies of Nimrod. When Abraham was born, a very vivid star appeared in the sky and seemed to obliterate the others. Nimrod sought to murder the infant, but Abraham was concealed in a cave and his life was saved. It was in that cave that the first vision of God came to him. When he was a youth, he came out of the cave and stood looking across the face of the desert. The sun rose in all its glory, and Abraham said: ‘Surely the sun is God, the Creator!’ So he knelt down and worshipped the sun. But when evening came, the sun sank in the west and Abraham said: ‘No! the author of creation cannot set!’ The moon arose in the east and the stars came out. Then Abraham said: ‘The moon must be God and the stars his host!’ So he knelt down and adored the moon. But after the night had passed, the moon sank and the sun rose again and Abraham said: ‘Truly these heavenly bodies are no gods, for they obey law; I will worship the one who imposed the law upon them.’ The Arabs have a different legend. They tell how Abraham saw many flocks and herds and said to his mother: ‘Who is the lord of these?’ She answered: ‘Your father, Terah.’ ‘And who is the lord of Terah?’ the young Abraham asked. ‘Nimrod,’ said his mother. ‘And who is the lord of Nimrod?’ asked Abraham. His mother told him to be quiet and not push questions too far; but already Abraham’s thoughts were reaching out to the one who is the God of all. The legends go on to tell that Terah not only worshipped twelve idols, one for each of the months, but was also a manufacturer of idols. One day, Abraham was left in charge of the shop. People came in to buy idols.

• From How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian (2015)

  Before the ages, in the beginning, he created me, and for all the ages I shall not cease to be. (24:3, 6, 9) Finally, in the book of Wisdom, Wisdom is again personified magnificently as “the fashioner of all things . . . a spirit that is intelligent, holy . . . all-powerful, overseeing all / and penetrating through all spirits . . . more mobile than any motion; / because of her pureness she pervades and penetrates all things” (7:22–24). Again: For she is a breath of the power of God, and a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty; therefore nothing defiled gains entrance into her. For she is a reflection of eternal light, a spotless mirror of the working of God, and an image of his goodness. (7:25–26) And again: She is more beautiful than the sun, and excels every constellation of the stars. Compared with the light she is found to be superior, for it is succeeded by the night, but against wisdom evil does not prevail. (7:29–30) As I read these verses over and over again, I have one very basic question: If Wisdom, as the immanent presence and external face of God, is not a person but a personified process, how do we know that the biblical God is not also a personified process rather than a person? Restorative Charity or Distributive Justice?THE SECOND ASPECT OF the Wisdom tradition raises a very delicate question. In our preceding chapters, from law through prophets to psalms, we have seen two correlative emphases: nonviolent distributive justice on earth or else violent retributive justice from heaven. I compare this now with the Wisdom tradition and then ask that question. On one hand, the Wisdom tradition seems, at first glance, as focused on distributive justice as both the law and the prophets. Think of “righteousness, justice, and equity” (Prov. 1:3; 2:9) or this most prophet-style assertion: “To do righteousness and justice / is more acceptable to the Lord than sacrifice” (21:3). Or again, “The field of the poor may yield much food, / but it is swept away through injustice” (13:23). Also, again and again, the tradition mentions the tandem pair of the poor and the needy: “there are those whose teeth are swords, / whose teeth are knives, / to devour the poor from off the earth, / the needy from among mortals” (30:14). Again: “They thrust the needy off the road; / the poor of the earth all hide themselves” (Job 24:4). And again: “My child, do not cheat the poor of their living, / and do not keep needy eyes waiting” for “the bread of the needy is the life of the poor; / whoever deprives them of it is a murderer” (Sir. 4:1; 34:25). Furthermore, the tradition mentions those other vulnerable ones—the widows and orphans: “The Lord tears down the house of the proud, / but maintains the widow’s boundaries. . . .

• From I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

  Reverend Thomas took his text from Deuteronomy. And I was stretched between loathing his voice and wanting to listen to the sermon. Deuteronomy was my favorite book in the Bible. The laws were so absolute, so clearly set down, that I knew if a person truly wanted to avoid hell and brimstone, and being roasted forever in the devil's fire, all she had to do was memorize Deuteronomy and follow its teaching, word for word. I also liked the way the word rolled off the tongue. Bailey and I sat alone on the front bench, the wooden slats pressing hard on our behinds and the backs of our thighs. I would have wriggled just a bit, but each time I looked over at Momma, she seemed to threaten, “Move and I'll tear you up,” so, obedient to the unvoiced command, I sat still. The church ladies were warming up behind me with a few hallelujahs and Praise the Lords and Amens, and the preacher hadn't really moved into the meat of the sermon. It was going to be a hot service. On my way into church, I saw Sister Monroe, her open-faced gold crown glinting when she opened her mouth to return a neighborly greeting. She lived in the country and couldn't get to church every Sunday, so she made up for her absences by shouting so hard when she did make it that she shook the whole church. As soon as she took her seat, all the ushers would move to her side of the church because it took three women and sometimes a man or two to hold her. Once when she hadn't been to church for a few months (she had taken off to have a child), she got the spirit and started shouting, throwing her arms around and jerking her body, so that the ushers went over to hold her down, but she tore herself away from them and ran up to the pulpit. She stood in front of the altar, shaking like a freshly caught trout. She screamed at Reverend Taylor, “Preach it. I say, preach it.” Naturally he kept on preaching as if she wasn't standing there telling him what to do. Then she screamed an extremely fierce “I said, preach it” and stepped up on the altar. The Reverend kept on throwing out phrases like home-run balls and Sister Monroe made a quick break and grasped for him. For just a second, everything and everyone in the church except Reverend Taylor and Sister Monroe hung loose like stockings on a wash-line. Then she caught the minister by the sleeve of his jacket and his coat-tail, then she rocked him from side to side.

• From The Letter to the Hebrews (The New Daily Study Bible) (2002)

  Under Jewish ceremonial law, if someone touched a dead body, that person was unclean. Such people were barred from the worship of God, and everything and everyone they touched also became unclean. To deal with this, there was a prescribed method of cleansing. A red heifer was slaughtered outside the camp. The priest sprinkled the blood of the heifer in front of the tabernacle seven times. The body of the beast was then burned, together with cedar and hyssop and a piece of red cloth. The resulting ashes were placed outside the camp in a clean place and constituted a purification for sin. This ritual must have been very ancient, for both its origin and its meaning are extremely obscure. The Jews themselves told that, once, a Gentile questioned Rabbi Jochanan ben Zakkai on the meaning of this rite, declaring that it sounded like pure superstition. The Rabbi’s answer was that it had been appointed by the Holy One and that no one should inquire into his reasons, but the matter should be left there without explanation. In any event, the fact remains that it was one of the great Jewish rites . The writer to the Hebrews tells of these sacrifices and then declares that the sacrifice that Jesus brings is far greater and far more effective. We must first ask what he means by the greater and more effective tabernacle not made with hands. That is a question to which no one can give an answer which is beyond dispute. But the ancient scholars nearly all took it in one way and said that this new tabernacle which brought people into the very presence of God was nothing other than the body of Jesus. It would be another way of saying what John said: ‘Whoever has seen me has seen the Father’ (John 14:9). The worship of the ancient tabernacle was designed to bring people into the presence of God, but only in the most shadowy and imperfect way. The coming of Jesus really brought men and women into the presence of God, because in him God entered this world of space and time in a human form, and to see Jesus is to see what God is like. The great superiority of the sacrifice Jesus brought lay in three things. (1) The ancient sacrifices cleansed the body from ceremonial uncleanness; the sacrifice of Jesus cleansed the soul. We must always remember this – in theory, all sacrifice cleansed from transgressions of the ritual law; it did not cleanse from presumptuous or high-handed sins. Take the case of the red heifer. It was not moral uncleanness that its sacrifice wiped out but the ceremonial uncleanness that resulted from touching a dead body. An individual’s body might be clean ceremonially, and yet the heart of that person might be torn with remorse.