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)

  But they do not suppose that the divine Glory, which the later rabbis referred to as the Shekinah , the “tabernacling Presence” of God, is there in the same way as in Exodus 40, 1 Kings 8, Isaiah’s vision, or the promises of Ezekiel 43 or Isaiah 40 and 52. Isaiah spoke, after all, of the sentinels on Jerusalem’s walls lifting up their voices and singing for joy, because “in plain sight they see the return of YHWH to Zion” (52:8). That never happened. The postexilic prophets—Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi—insisted that it would happen, but it hadn’t yet. Centuries later, the rabbis looked back on this period and produced a list, with a sense of gloomy resignation, of all the ways in which the Second Temple was deficient in comparison with the First Temple. Notable on the list of what was missing in the Second Temple was the Shekinah itself, the glorious divine Presence. In Jesus’s day, the hope was alive that the Glory would return at last. But nobody knew exactly what that would mean, how it would happen, or what it would look like. To these questions the New Testament writers offer an answer that is so explosive, so unexpected, so revolutionary, that it has remained entirely off the radar for most modern readers, including modern Christian readers. To take the most obvious example, the Gospel of John says: “The Word became flesh, and lived among us. We gazed upon his glory, glory like that of the father’s only son, full of grace and truth” (1:14). The word for “lived” here is eskēnosen , “tabernacled,” “pitched his tent.” John is saying that in Jesus the new tabernacle, the new Temple, has been built, and the divine Glory has returned at last. The “Word” who was and is God has become flesh. The vehicle of this glory is the “father’s only son”: picking up 2 Samuel 7 and the related psalms, the evangelist is declaring that the ancient promises and the long-awaited hopes have been fulfilled in this Messiah, this Jesus, this Davidic son of God. Through this Jesus we glimpse that the very phrase “son of God,” like the tabernacle itself, was a building designed for God himself to dwell in. Readers are invited to see the creative Word through whom all things were made coming as a human being and, as Isaiah had promised, unveiling the divine Glory before all the nations. Once we understand the image-bearing purpose of human beings, this is perhaps not so hard to imagine as some have supposed. As John’s gospel progresses, we come to realize that the moment when that Glory is fully unveiled is the moment when Jesus is crucified. This is part of John’s dramatic and revolutionary theology of the cross.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  (10:42–45) Here we see the full integration of what have seemed to subsequent generations to be two key elements of the meaning of Jesus’s crucifixion. A new sort of power will be let loose upon the world, and it will be the power of self-giving love. This is the heart of the revolution that was launched on Good Friday. You cannot defeat the usual sort of power by the usual sort of means. If one force overcomes another, it is still “force” that wins. Rather, at the heart of the victory of God over all the powers of the world there lies self-giving love, which, in obedience to the ancient prophetic vocation, will give its life “as a ransom for many.” Exactly as in Isaiah 53, to which that phrase alludes, the death of the one on behalf of the many will be the key by which the powers are overthrown, the kingdom of God ushered in (with the glorious divine Presence seen in plain sight by the watchmen on Jerusalem’s walls), the covenant renewed, and creation itself restored to its original purpose. Mark 10:35–45 contains within itself more or less the whole of the New Testament’s complex but coherent vision of how Jesus’s death, completing his vocation as Israel’s Messiah, overthrew the dark powers that had enslaved the world by coming to take the place of sinners. The new Passover was accomplished by the new exile-ending “forgiveness of sins,” and the latter was accomplished through the one taking the place of the many. If we were to summarize what Mark has now told us, in both this passage (though we have not had time to follow it through) and his gospel as a whole, we might just as well say that “the Messiah died for our sins in accordance with the Bible.” This, of course, points us to Paul, where we find that summary both stated and expounded. But, before we get there, some final reflections are in order on the death of Jesus in the gospels. First, it is vital to see that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are not simply telling us in descriptive language something that “really” belongs as a dogmatic formula. It is the other way around. The formula is a portable narrative, a folded-up story. The story is the reality—because it is the story of reality, historical reality, flesh-and-blood reality, Israel’s reality, life-and-death reality.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  Hold on to the same love; bring your innermost lives into harmony; fix your minds on the same object. Never act out of selfish ambition or vanity; instead, regard everybody else as your superior. Look after each other’s best interests, not your own. (2:2–4) The poem then sets out the story of Jesus himself not only as the example of how to do this but as, so to speak, the place where this kind of life is to be found. The “place” is the Messiah himself, “in whom” his people find their identity: “This is how you should think among yourselves—with the mind that you have because you belong to the Messiah, Jesus” (2:5). They already belong to him and this is how his “mind” worked, so theirs should work in the same way not only because they are copying him, but because his “mind” is at work in theirs. But this provides a clue to how Paul at least sees the logic of the cross underneath the surface of the poem. The Messiah was lord of all, yet became a slave. He was all-powerful, but became weak. He was equal with the Father, yet refused to take advantage of this status. Add to this the echoes throughout this passage from Isaiah 40–55, particularly the “servant” poems, and we can go one step farther: he was innocent, yet he died the death of the guilty. This is how the cross establishes God’s kingdom: by bearing and so removing the weight of sin and death. The kingdom of God is established by destroying the power of idolatry, and idols get their power because humans, in sinning, give it to them. Deal with sin, and the idols are reduced to a tawdry heap of rubble. Deal with sin, and the world will glorify God. There are many remarkable things about this poem, but we should note one in particular. Paul wrote this letter in the mid-50s of the first century, that is, less than thirty years after Jesus’s execution. Either he wrote this poem for use in this letter, which is quite possible, or he was quoting a poem that either he or somebody else had already written. The poem is a masterpiece of compressed biblical theology. One can only stand in awe at the combination of insight and expression that could encapsulate so much in a mere seventy-six Greek words. What this tells me is that already in the very early church it was common coin, first, that Jesus’s death established God’s kingdom; second, that this came about because of his servant-shaped identification with sinful humanity, sharing their death and so bearing their sin; and third, that this action was not something Jesus did despite the fact that he was “in God’s form” and “equal with God,” but rather something that he did because he was those things. In whatever way the New Testament tells the story of the cross, it is always the story of self-giving divine love.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  But what exactly does it mean? How does it make sense? Ought we even to try to fathom it out? Can we not rest in awe and wonder, as in the third verse of another classic hymn, “How Great Thou Art”: And when I think that God, his Son not sparing, Sent him to die, I scarce can take it in; That on the Cross, my burden gladly bearing, He bled and died to take away my sin. 8 It may indeed be true that we can scarcely “take it in.” It may even be ultimately true, as one popular contemporary jingle has it, that “I’ll never know how much it cost to see my sins upon that cross.” Though since the New Testament does tell us precisely what it cost (the blood of God’s own son), and since the jingle in question is as confused in theology as it is deficient in rhyme, we are not much farther ahead. But—and this is the point of writing this book—I believe it is vital that we try. All this brings us back where we began. Granted that the story of Jesus’s crucifixion as it is portrayed in the gospels and in art, music, and literature seems to have a power to move, console, and challenge people across widely different times, places, and cultures, what is it about this story, and particularly about the event itself, that carries this power? When the early Christians summarized their “good news” by saying that “the Messiah died for our sins in accordance with the Bible,” what precisely did they mean? Why, in short, did Jesus die? Why would anyone suppose that his death possessed revolutionary power? And why do so many people, without holding any particular theoretical answer to those questions, find nevertheless that the cross, in story, image and song, has a power to move us at such a deep level? The question, “Why did Jesus die?” in fact, subdivides. There is the “historical” question: Why did Pontius Pilate, egged on by the chief priests, decide to send Jesus to his death? Then there is the “theological” question: What was God hoping to achieve by Jesus’s death, and why was that the appropriate method of achieving it? Underneath these there is another, even more difficult one: What did Jesus himself think was going on? That one is both historical (giving an account of the mind and motivation of one historical person) and theological (even if you don’t believe that Jesus was the incarnate son of God, he was certainly very much in tune with Israel’s scriptures and the question of their fulfillment). Or to go on walking cautiously around these questions: What deep layers of meaning are hidden in the deceptively simple phrase “for our sins”?

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

  First comes religion. Augustus enumerates all the temples he fully restored or newly built, how he always deposited his victor’s laurels in Jupiter’s Capitoline temple, and how the Senate had decreed a total of 890 days of thanksgiving during his life. Next comes war. “Wars both civil and foreign, I undertook throughout the world, on sea and land, and when victorious I spared all citizens who sued for pardon.” For example: “The provinces of the Gauls, the Spains, and Germany from Gades [Cadiz] to the mouth of the Elbe, I pacified.” Then comes victory. Augustus writes of his “successful operations on land and sea” and of “victories on land and sea.” For example: “The Alps…from the Adriatic as far as the Tuscan Sea, I pacified without waging on any an unjust war.” Finally comes peace. By ancestral tradition, the temple of Janus was formally and officially closed when there was peace throughout the Roman Empire. That happened, says Augustus, only twice before his time, but thrice during it. In fact, that same phrase seen above in the Actium inscription reappears here in the Ankara one: ACTIUM (31 BCE): VICTORY…PEACE SECURED ON LAND AND SEA ANKARA (14 CE): PEACE SECURED BY VICTORIES ON LAND AND SEA From the inaugural dedication of his command-tent memorial in 31 BCE to the terminal declaration of his achievements in 14 CE, Augustus’s incarnation of Roman imperial theology is profoundly consistent across half a century. Its structural sequence is: religion leading to war leading to victory leading to peace. Its enduring mantra was: peace by victories on land and sea. Its succinct summary was: peace through victory. Furthermore, Augustus and Rome would not and could not have claimed to have invented that process. Their claim was only to have perfected it. Peace by victory, they would have said, is the way of the world, the destiny of nations, the normalcy of civilization, and the will of heaven. How else could one ever obtain global peace except through global victory. What other alternative is there? It is precisely as “that other alternative” that Paul takes the message of Jesus out from the Jewish homeland and across the Roman Empire. It is precisely because of this radically opposing vision that all those terms and titles of Roman imperial theology’s incarnation in Caesar are transferred and thereby transformed in Pauline Christian theology’s incarnation in Christ. Paul’s alternative vision is, of course, the subject of this entire book. But here, as an introduction to what follows, we look at one imperial title that Paul transferred to Christ. It is, in a way, the most ordinary and everyday title, and Paul seems to usurp it almost casually—but he actually uses it quite deliberately, repetitively, and emphatically. “OUR LORD” IS “THE LORD”

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  Dwight said that he had once seen Lawrence Welk in the dining car of a train. Dwight said that he’d walked right up to him and told him that he was his favorite conductor, and he probably did, for it was true that he loved the champagne music of Lawrence Welk better than any other music. Dwight had a large collection of Lawrence Welk records. When the Lawrence Welk show came on TV we were expected to watch it with him, and be quiet, and get up only during commercials. Dwight pulled his chair up close to the set. He leaned forward as the bubbles rose over the Champagne Orchestra and Lawrence Welk came onstage salaaming in every direction, crying out declarations of humility in his unctuous, brain-scalding Swedish kazoo of a voice. Dwight’s eyes widened at the virtuosity of Big Tiny Little Junior, who played ragtime piano while looking over his shoulder at the camera. He gazed with chaste ardor at the Lovely Champagne Lady Alice Lon, who smiled the same tremulous smile through every note of every song until she got canned and replaced by the Lovely Champagne Lady Norma Zimmer. He gloated over the Lovely Little Lennon Sisters as if they were his own daughters, and laughed out loud at the cruel jokes Lawrence Welk made at the expense of his slobbering Irish tenor, Joe Feeney. Joe Feeney was the latest addition to the Champagne Ensemble and obviously felt himself on pretty shaky ground, especially after the Lovely Champagne Lady Alice Lon was sent packing and then the Ragtime Piano Virtuoso Big Tiny Little Junior got replaced by the Ragtime Piano Virtuoso Jo Ann Castle, who pummeled the keys like a butcher tenderizing meat. When Joe Feeney sang he held nothing back. He worked himself up to the point of tears, and flecks of saliva flew off his wet lips. You had the feeling that Joe Feeney was singing for his life. About halfway through the show, Dwight would take out his old Conn saxophone and finger the stops in time to the music. Sometimes, when he got really carried away, he would forget himself and blow on it, and a squawk would come out.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  Of the eighty bereaved spouses we studied, a significant proportion—up to one-third—reported a heightened awareness of their own mortality, and that awareness was, in turn, significantly related to a surge of personal growth. Although return to a previous level of functioning is generally considered to be the end point of bereavement, our data suggested that some widows and widowers do more than that: as a result of an existential confrontation, they become more mature, more aware, wiser. Long before psychology existed as an independent discipline, the great writers were the great psychologists, and there are in literature rich examples of death awareness catalyzing personal transformation. Consider Ebenezer Scrooge’s existential shock therapy in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Scrooge’s astonishing personal change results not from Yuletide cheer but from his being forced to confront his own death. Dickens’s messenger (the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come) uses a powerful existential shock therapy: the ghost takes Scrooge into the future, where he observes his final hours, overhears others lightly dismiss his death, and sees strangers quarreling over his material possessions. Scrooge’s transformation occurs immediately after the scene in which he kneels in the churchyard and touches the letters on his own tombstone. Or consider Tolstoy’s Pierre, a lost soul who stumbles aimlessly through the first nine hundred pages of War and Peace until he is captured by Napoleon’s troops, watches the five men in line ahead of him be executed by firing squad, and then receives a last-minute reprieve. This near death transforms Pierre, who marches through the final three hundred pages with zest, purpose, and a keen appreciation of life’s preciousness. Even more remarkable is Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilych, the mean-spirited bureaucrat whose agony, as he lies dying from abdominal cancer, is relieved by a stunning insight: “I am dying so badly because I have lived so badly.” In the few days of life remaining to him, Ivan Ilych undergoes an extraordinary inner change, achieving a degree of generosity, empathy, and integration that he had never before known. Thus, confrontation with imminent death can propel one into wisdom and a new depth of being. I have run many groups of dying patients who welcomed student observers because they felt that they had much to teach about life. “What a pity,” I have heard these patients say, “that we had to wait till now, till our bodies were riddled with cancer, to know how to live.” Elsewhere in this book, in the chapter “Travels with Paula,” I describe a number of individuals facing terminal cancer who grew in wisdom as they confronted their deaths.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  We were at a work function, and Alan was talking with some colleagues, and I looked at him and thought: he’s so attractive. It was almost weird, like an out-of-body experience. And you know what was so attractive? For a moment there I forgot that he’s my husband and a real pain in the ass, obnoxious, stubborn, that he annoys me, that he leaves his mess all over the floor. At that moment I saw him as if I didn’t know all that, and I was drawn to him like in the beginning. He’s very smart; he talks well; he has this soothing, sexy way about him. I wasn’t thinking about all our stupid exchanges when we bicker in the morning because I’m running late, or why did you do this, or what’s going on for Christmas, or we have to talk about your mother. I was away from all that inane stuff and those absurd conversations. I just really saw him. That’s how I felt, and I wonder if he ever feels like that about me anymore.” When I ask Adele if she has ever told Alan of that experience, she is quick to let me know that she hasn’t. “No way. He’ll make fun of me.” I suggest that maybe the waning of romance is less about the bounds of familiarity and the weight of reality than it is about fear. Eroticism is risky. People are afraid to allow themselves these moments of idealization and yearning for the person they live with. It introduces a recognition of the other’s sovereignty that can feel destabilizing. When our partner stands alone, with his own will and freedom, the delicateness of our bond is magnified. Adele’s vulnerability is obvious in the way she wonders if Alan ever feels this way about her. The typical defense against this threat is to stay within the realm of the familiar and the affectionate—the trivial bickering, the comfortable sex, the quotidian aspects of life that keep us tethered to reality and bar any chance of transcendence. But when Adele looks at Alan out of the context of their marriage—switching from a zoom lens to a wide-angle—his otherness is accentuated, and that in turn heightens Adele’s attraction to him. She sees him as a man . She has transformed someone familiar into someone still unknown after all these years. Just When You Thought You Knew Her… If uncertainty is a built-in feature of all relationships, so too is mystery. Many of the couples who come to therapy imagine that they know everything there is to know about their mate. “My husband doesn’t like to talk.” “My girlfriend would never flirt with another man.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  Clearly it isn’t designed as a sophisticated piece of theology, or for that matter biblical exegesis, but that’s part of the point: the crucifixion of Jesus is a plain, stark fact, etched into real space and time and, even more important, into the real flesh and blood of a human being. People today, in a wide variety of ways, simply intuit that it has powerful and profound meaning for them. Others, of course, see nothing in it except an unpleasant tale from long ago. Despite the predictions of people who imagined that religion in general and Christianity in particular were losing their appeal in today’s world, the fact of Jesus’s crucifixion and the gospel story in which we find it retain a remarkable power in late modern culture. This appeal persists even among people who don’t hold any particular theory about its precise meaning or even any specific faith in Jesus or God. Why? Why does the cross of Jesus of Nazareth have this impact even today? In 2000, the National Gallery in London put on a millennial exhibition entitled “Seeing Salvation.” That was a case in point—especially remembering that European countries tend to be far more “secularized” than the United States. It consisted mostly of artists’ depictions of Jesus’s crucifixion. Many critics sneered. All those old paintings about someone being tortured to death! Why did we need to look at rooms full of such stuff? Fortunately, the general public ignored the critics and turned up in droves to see works of art, which, like the crucifixion itself, seem to carry a power beyond theory and beyond suspicion. The Gallery’s director, Neil McGregor, moved from that role to become director of the British Museum, a job he did with great distinction and effect for the next decade. The final piece he acquired in the latter capacity, before moving to a similar position in Berlin, was a simple but haunting cross made from fragments of a small boat. The boat, which had been carrying refugees from Eritrea and Somalia, was wrecked off the coast of the Italian island of Lampedusa, south of Sicily, on October 3, 2013. Of the 500 people on board, 349 drowned. A local craftsman, Francesco Tuccio, was deeply distressed that nothing more could have been done to save people, and he made several crosses out of fragments of the wrecked vessel. One was carried by Pope Francis at the memorial service for the survivors. The British Museum contacted Mr. Tuccio, and he made a cross especially for the museum, thanking the authorities there for drawing attention to the suffering that this small wooden object would symbolize. Why the cross rather than anything else? Another example struck me forcibly during the 2014 season of Promenade Concerts in the Albert Hall in London.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  DEDICATION For Leo Look! The Lion has won the victory! (Revelation 5.5) CONTENTS Dedication PART ONE: INTRODUCTION 1. A Vitally Important Scandal Why the Cross? 2. Wrestling with the Cross, Then and Now 3. The Cross in Its First-Century Setting PART TWO: “IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE BIBLE”: THE STORIES OF ISRAEL 4. The Covenant of Vocation 5. “In All the Scriptures” 6. The Divine Presence and the Forgiveness of Sins 7. Suffering, Redemption, and Love PART THREE: THE REVOLUTIONARY RESCUE 8. New Goal, New Humanity 9. Jesus’s Special Passover 10. The Story of the Rescue 11. Paul and the Cross Apart from Romans 12. The Death of Jesus in Paul’s Letter to the Romans The New Exodus 13. The Death of Jesus in Paul’s Letter to the Romans Passover and Atonement PART FOUR: THE REVOLUTION CONTINUES 14. Passover People 15. The Powers and the Power of Love Acknowledgments Scripture Index Subject Index About the Author Also by N. T. Wright Credits Copyright About the Publisher PART ONE Introduction 1 A Vitally Important Scandal Why the Cross? YOUNG HERO WINS HEARTS.” Had there been newspapers in Jerusalem in the year we now call AD 33, this was the headline you would not have seen. When Jesus of Nazareth died the horrible death of crucifixion at the hands of the Roman army, nobody thought him a hero. Nobody was saying, as they hurriedly laid his body in a tomb, that his death had been a splendid victory, a heroic martyrdom. His movement, which had in any case been something of a ragtag group of followers, was over. Nothing had changed. Another young leader had been brutally liquidated. This was the sort of thing that Rome did best. Caesar was on his throne. Death, as usual, had the last word. Except that in this case it didn’t. As Jesus’s followers looked back on that day in the light of what happened soon afterward, they came up with the shocking, scandalous, nonsensical claim that his death had launched a revolution. That something had happened that afternoon that had changed the world. That by six o’clock on that dark Friday evening the world was a different place. Nonsensical or not, they were proven right. Whether we believe in Jesus, whether we approve of his teaching, let alone whether we like the look of the movement that still claims to follow him, we are bound to see his crucifixion as one of the pivotal moments in human history. Like the assassination of Julius Caesar around seventy years earlier, it marks the end of one era and the start of another. And Jesus’s first followers saw it as something more. They saw it as the vital moment not just in human history, but in the entire story of God and the world. Indeed, they believed it had opened a new and shocking window onto the meaning of the word “God” itself.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  So what does Paul mean here? Doing it declares it: breaking the bread and sharing the cup in Jesus’s name declares his victory to the principalities and powers. It states the new, authorized Fact about the world. It confronts the shadowy forces that usurp control over God’s good creation and over human lives with the news of their defeat. It shames the dark powers that stand in the wings, waiting for people to give them even a small bit of worship so that they can use that power, sucking it out of the humans who ought to have been exercising it themselves, to enslave people and render them powerless to resist the temptations that the powers have within their repertoire. The bread-breaking meal, the Jesus feast, announces to the forces of evil like a public decree read out by a herald in the marketplace that Jesus is Lord, that he has faced the powers of sin and death and beaten them, and that he has been raised again to launch the new world in which death itself will have no authority. I know that for some readers this sort of talk seems dangerous. Am I not encouraging a kind of magic in which robed priests try to manipulate created elements to produce special effects? Isn’t that the kind of thing that the Protestant Reformers protested against? Yes, the Reformers did protest against what they saw as a kind of magic, but that didn’t stop them developing their own rich and serious sacramental theology. The abuse doesn’t take away the proper use. Magic is, in fact, a parody of the truly human vocation. Image-bearing humans, obedient to the Creator, are meant to exercise delegated authority in the world in order that life can flourish. Magic is the attempt to gain power over the Creator’s world without paying the price of self-giving obedience to the Creator himself. But the sacraments are the very opposite of this. They are the celebration that Jesus has paid the price and that he has all power on earth and in heaven. They are the powerful announcement of his victory. They can and should be used, as part of a wise Christian spirituality, to announce to the threatening powers that on the cross Jesus has already won the victory. All this talk of “victory” means what it means because, as we have seen, on the cross Jesus died for our sins; the blood of the new covenant was shed for the forgiveness of sins. Sins, to say it once more, were the chains by which the dark powers had enslaved the humans who had worshipped them. Once sins were forgiven on the cross, the chains were snapped; victory was won. This opens up several vistas on the church’s mission. For this we need one last chapter. 15 The Powers and the Power of Love

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  All this helps us to understand the symbolic meanings of a crucifixion in that world. The early Christians very quickly gave Jesus’s cross meanings that were deep, rich, and revolutionary, but this was done in the teeth of the meanings that the cross already possessed. It already had a social meaning: “We are superior, and you are vastly inferior.” 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.

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

  This was Paul’s own experience. He expresses it most concisely in a single sentence in his letter to the Galatians. About himself, he writes, “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me” (2:19–20). Paul’s “crucifixion” is metaphorical; though Jesus was literally crucified, Paul had not been. Its metaphorical meaning, its more-than-literal meaning, is clear: Paul had experienced an internal crucifixion, an internal death. The old Paul had died, and a new Paul had been born: “It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.” Crucifixion and resurrection, dying and rising, are radical images of internal transformation. The difference is as great as the difference between life and death, and the path leads through death to life. Dying and rising with Christ is the means to life “in Christ,” a phrase Paul uses over a hundred times in his letters. He uses the synonymous phrase “in the Spirit” more than fifteen times. The phrases refer to an identity and way of life centered in Christ, in the Spirit. Paul’s transformation involved an “identity transplant”—his old identity was replaced by a new identity “in Christ.” We will quite often refer to this “identity transplant” as a “Spirit transplant.” We have in mind an analogy to modern medicine’s heart transplant, in which an old heart is replaced by a new heart. In Paul’s case, his spirit—the old Paul—had been replaced by the Spirit of Christ: “It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.” This is central to what we meant in Chapter 1 when we spoke of Paul as a Jewish Christ mystic. He not only had ecstatic experiences of the risen Christ, but had become one with Christ by dying and rising with him. His identity was now a mystical identity “in Christ.” Paul had had a Spirit transplant. Paul uses the language of participatory at-one-ment not just about himself, but also for all who would live their lives “in Christ.” In his letter to Christians in Rome, he writes about dying and rising with Christ as the meaning of baptism, the ritual of initiation into the new life “in Christ”: All of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death. Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. (6:3–4) Being baptized symbolized joining Jesus in his death, being “buried with him by baptism into death.” It was followed by resurrection: “just as Christ was raised from the dead…so we too might walk in newness of life”—the newness of life that results from a Spirit transplant through dying and rising with Christ. Paul also writes about internal transformation through participation in the death of Jesus using the language of sacrifice:

• From Laid and Confused: Why We Tolerate Bad Sex and How to Stop (2023)

  On a sweltering summer evening, I took myself to the Museum of Sex in New York City to enjoy the industrial air-conditioning and browse their collection of over fifteen thousand sexual artifacts. Surrounded by tittering friend groups and couples on third dates, I stood solemn and alone in front of a “blood circulator” from 1911, a steel crank-like device with a rubber protrusion designed to treat ailments like gout, rheumatism, and “women’s problems” like hysteria and insanity. (The inventor, G. C. Pulsocon, was imprisoned for fraud a few years later, but his invention—which produced up to two thousand vibrations per minute—lived on as a popular underground sex toy.) I marveled at a jade phallic amulet from the former Roman Empire, the surface of which depicted an unidentifiable creature performing cunnilingus on a nude woman. To my left, a man cautiously placed his arm around his date as they gazed upon a contemporary anal plug with horse hair flowing from it, a device I recently learned is used in a fetish called “pony play.” I hurried past them, as his date, transfixed by the plug, whispered, “I had no idea.” I stopped in front of the Rabbit, the item I’d come to see. When we talk about the modern era of sex toys it’s hard not to mention the one that made it big, that managed to bypass censure and infiltrate mainstream consciousness, ushering in a new era of sexual consumerism. The first iteration of the Rabbit resembles an actual rabbit; it was designed as such to get around Japan’s obscenity laws. In 1997, a new model called the Rabbit Habit boasted internal and clitoral stimulation so pleasurable that it earned a role on the first season of Sex and the City in 1998. In “The Rabbit and the Hare,” Charlotte learns of the Rabbit’s wonders and ventures to a sex shop to investigate. (“Oh, it’s so cute! I thought it would be scary and weird, but it isn’t,” she remarks. “It’s pink! For girls!”) Carol Queen, the sexologist and activist at San Francisco’s legendary sex shop Good Vibrations, declared in a Forbes interview that “Sex and the City took vibrators out of the shadows.” The day after that episode aired, Queen said she arrived at work to find a line of women waiting outside the store, asking for the Rabbit. Sex and the City helped boost demand for higher-end vibrators that people felt comfortable buying inside of a sex store. In the years since, the global sex toy market has swelled to a $33.64 billion industry.7

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  If Paul is hinting at “punishment” in this passage, it can only mean what it means in Isaiah, which has to do with the “servant” fulfilling Israel’s vocation—and simultaneously with the “servant’s” embodying YHWH himself, the powerful “arm of YHWH,” to take upon himself the consequence of Israel’s rebellion, idolatry, and sin, so that Israel and the world may be rescued. He will draw onto himself the actual results of Israel’s sin—the pagan hostility against God’s people—in order to exhaust it and so make a way through. But if the “servant” is indeed the “arm of YHWH” under the guise of a suffering, bruised, and unrecognizable Israelite, then a new possibility emerges at the heart of Romans 3:21–26. The primary fault of the human race, according to Romans 1, is idolatry. The primary response, from the one God himself, is to “put forth” the Messiah as the place of meeting, the ultimate revelation of the divine righteousness and love. The Fresh Revelation of God In the original Exodus narrative, Israel’s God reveals his name to Moses and then, toward the end of the story, his Glory (Exod. 3:13–15; 33:17–34:9). This divine Glory, which finally comes to dwell in the tabernacle (40:34–38), resting (we assume) on the kappōreth, is what the tabernacle was made for, the reality for which the golden calf of Exodus 32 was a horrible substitute. In Paul’s revised Exodus narrative too I suggest that we are meant to see Jesus, “put forth” by God as the hilastērion, as the revelation of God’s personal presence. This then forms the divine answer to the problem that, with universal sin, the human race had fallen short of God’s glory. The aspect of God’s character that is highlighted in the present passage is of course his dikaiosynē, his covenant justice; but this is seen precisely in Jesus, not as a general truth that might be inferred from his death. He is the place where heaven and earth meet.

• 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: