Fear

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 Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  The suds swirled down my torso like chrysanthemums in a Japanese wood-block print. And my body seemed to smoke. By the time I’d dressed, beers were being handed around. Black speakers thumped out music. The guys agreed I could sleep in the palatial luxury of the Lincoln, not that sleep was possible on that acid. Doonie helped me run an extension cord with a caged mechanic’s light so I could read. But with the nearby ocean buzzing like a hornets’ nest, I could only puzzle over the black letters squiggling off the edges of the white page. At some point, a looming figure glided up to the foggy side window, and I jerked huffing in air to holler, but the scream got stuck, just added itself onto the large round scream that all my life had been assembling in my chest. It felt like a huge lump of cold clay. Someday I was gonna holler so long, glass would shatter and walls explode. But it was just Doonie’s thin shape with black frazzled hair. His knuckles whapped the glass. I body-blocked the heavy car door open, saying, You scared the fuck out of me. Each word materialized between my lips like a tiny pink balloon that rose with other balloons in a birdlike drove . Doonie had his sleeping bag over his shoulder like a corpse. He said, Sorry, man. Mind if I grab the front seat? As I stared at him, his edges grew more solid, and when I told him to go ahead, there were no more balloons blipping from my lips. He plucked an azalea off the nearby bush, saying, Can you believe how this place even smells? I didn’t know the outside could smell like this. I breathed in the living green of it, then asked if the others were asleep. Yeah, Doonie said, except Dave keeps busting out hollering shit. He just sat up and said, We’re all gonna die! Like he’s in Nam or something. Doonie looked around. Man, ain’t it the Ritz up in here? Don’t you know, those side lights used to light up like the Superdome. I looked at the long bank of dead bulbs and felt a sinking at how dim and broken everything could get. I told him I sometimes felt like smacking Quinn for mocking me anytime I recited poetry. Nah, it ain’t like that, Doonie said. He just associates poems with some teacher telling him he’s a dumbass. He put his callused feet up on the dashboard behind the steering wheel. I asked him what Quinn’s momma was like. Doesn’t have one. I don’t know. How do you not have a mother? I said, but somehow I knew, because mine had always lived on the brink of evaporation. (Strange, we never—not one time—talked about the doped-up or drunk-assed backgrounds some of us were fleeing.) Doonie said, Quinn’s died or ran off or something. This is according to Dave, of course, so who knows.

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  But he does note the implications of Caesar’s march to Ariminum: The senators…voted that Caesar should surrender his office to his successors and dismiss his legions by a given day, or else be considered an enemy, because acting contrary to the interests of the country. When Caesar was informed of this, he came to Ariminum, then for the first time overstepping the confines of his own province …. Next he set out and marched straight upon Rome itself, winning over all the cities on the way without any conflict. (41.3.4–4.2) Even there, however, “overstepping” is a rather mild term for what was constitutionally and legally considered to be a treasonous invasion of Italy. I turn next to history as parable, to accounts that deliberately shroud fact in fiction by clothing history in parable. Here are four other Roman historians who, in the years between Velleius and Cassius Dio, turn Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon from history into parable, that is, into parabolic history or historical parable. All four of them explicitly mention the river Rubicon and the last three introduce a comment by Caesar that has become a proverbial cliché all by itself. Marcus Annaeus Lucanus (39–65). Lucan, who came from Roman Spain, was indicted for conspiracy against Nero and condemned to suicide. His epic poem Pharsalia, or Civil War —written around 60 CE —survived despite its prorepublican and antimonarchical emphases. Lucan summarized that war’s two sides in this justly famous line: “The conquering cause pleased the gods, but the conquered cause pleased Cato” (1.128). Cato the Younger lived from 95 to 46 BCE and sided with the optimates . He was a great conservative traditionalist whose fateful mistake was to think you could become an empire and still remain a republic. Lucan’s account is sternly negative and disapproving. It has Caesar’s “mighty soul pondering tumults and the coming shock,” as he arrives at the northern bank of the “little Rubicon.” A dreadful vision appears before him: In face most sorrowful and ghostly guise, His trembling country’s image; huge it seemed Through mists of night obscure; and hoary hair Streamed from the lofty front with turrets crowned: Torn were her locks and naked were her arms. Then thus, with broken sighs the Vision spoke: “What seek you, men of Rome? and whither hence Bear you my standards? If by right you come, My citizens, stay here, these are the bounds. No further dare.” But Caesar’s hair was stiff With horror as he gazed, and ghastly dread Restrained his footsteps on the further bank. (1.212–223) Caesar responds to that vision by appealing to the god Jupiter and the goddess Roma. He tells them: “[I am] your Caesar, conqueror by land and sea,…your soldier here and wherever you wish.” Furthermore, if the Roman gods have an enemy, it is not Caesar but Pompey: “His only be the guilt whose acts make me your foe.” And, without more ado, Caesar “gives the word and bids his standards cross the swollen stream.” (1.224–235).

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  Thebes is liberated, Oedipus marries the newly widowed Queen Jocasta, thus having unknowingly killed his father and married his mother. Sophocles’s great play opens on the tragic outcome for all concerned. That is the most famous riddle in the Greek tradition and, indeed, it is hard to decide whether success or failure in solving it would have been the better fate for Oedipus, Jocasta, and all of Thebes. But, one way or another, riddle parables are not childish games, but lethally serious adult contests. Success means great gain; failure means great loss. And, as we see next, the same fatal threat hangs over riddle parables in the biblical tradition. The second case, then, is that of Samson and the Lion . The story of Samson appears in Judges 13–16 and is, among other things, a severe warning against intermarriage between Israelites and non-Israelites. “Is there not a woman among your kin, or among all our people,” said his father and mother, “that you must go to take a wife from the uncircumcised Philistines?” (14:3). Samson was a Hercules-like figure who protected his people from threats and dangers, but was, unfortunately, a terribly slow learner when it came to women—not to speak of having a problem with anger management. At that time Israel’s particular enemies were the Philistines, who invaded Egypt possibly from Mycenean Crete in 1190 BCE . Repulsed by Egypt, they settled on the southern coast of Canaan and eventually became a serious military threat to Israel—despite what David’s slingshot did to their Goliath in single combat between the assembled armies. Samson’s preference for Philistine women involved, first, the unnamed woman of Timnah (14:1); then, the unnamed prostitute of Gaza (16:1); and, finally, Delilah of Sorek (16:4). I focus here on that first woman and, once again, a riddle contest results—eventually—in death. On his way to propose to the woman of Timnah, Samson was attacked by a young lion, but “he tore the lion apart barehanded as one might tear apart a kid” (14:6). Later, when he went back to marry his betrothed, he found that bees had made honey in the lion’s carcass, and he scooped it up and ate it on his way. His Philistine in-laws gave Samson thirty companions for the wedding feast. “Let me now put a riddle to you,” Samson said to them. “If you can explain it to me within the seven days of the feast, and find it out, then I will give you thirty linen garments and thirty festal garments. But if you cannot explain it to me, then you shall give me thirty linen garments and thirty festal garments” (14:12–13). Here is the riddle: Out of the eater came something to eat. Out of the strong came something sweet. (14:14) Not exactly a fair riddle, by the way, as it involved private information they could never have guessed.

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  My best answer is yes, because the male disciples had fled; if the women had not been watching, we would not know even the brute fact of crucifixion (as distinct, for example, from Jesus being summarily speared or beheaded in prison). The Women and the Vision of Jesus A similar situation arises with regard to the women and/or Mary seeing the risen Jesus. Those stories are not pre-Markan tradition or even Markan creation but post-Markan development. They were created not by Mark but, after him, by Matthew and John. Mark ended in 16:8, as we saw above, with the women disobeying the “young man” in the tomb, failing to spread the word of Jesus’ resurrection. Here is how Matthew rephrases his Markan source from disobedience to obedience: Mark 16:8 Matthew 28:8 So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid. So they left the tomb quickly with fear and great joy, and they said nothing to anyone, and ran to tell his disciples. The angelic command just before this passage (in Matthew 28:7) asks the women to “go quickly.” Their obedience is underlined by the repeated “left quickly” in 28:8. Next, each of Mark’s three comments is changed into its opposite: instead of “fled” there is “quickly” leaving to bring the good news; instead of “terror and amazement” there is “fear and great joy”; instead of saying “nothing to anyone” there is, as ordered, running “to tell his disciples.” But even those changes are not enough to offset Mark’s terrible negativity. So Matthew adds this unit: Suddenly Jesus met them and said, “Greetings!” And they came to him, took hold of his feet, and worshiped him. Then Jesus said to them, “Do not be afraid; go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me.” (Matthew 28:9–10) On the one hand, Jesus’ message in 28:10, “Go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me,” simply summarizes the angelic message in 28:7, “Go quickly and tell his disciples, ‘He has been raised from the dead, and indeed he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him.’” On the other hand, their “worship” prepares for the next unit on a Galilean mountain, when the disciples “worshiped him.” In other words, that apparition to the women in 28:9–10 is a pure Matthean composition, created to efface the Markan ending and prepare for the apparition of Jesus to the disciples. Furthermore, the women get a message-vision; the disciples get a mandate-vision. As Frans Neirynck concludes, “The account of the empty tomb in Matt. xxviii [1–10] presupposes no other version than that of Mark” (1982:289). What about the apparition of the risen Jesus to Mary Magdalene in John 20:14–17 and her report to the disciples in 20:18? Is this independent Johannine tradition or is it derived from Matthew 28:9–10?

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  26 The Reluctantly Baptized He kicked off his loafers and threw his long ugly body out across the water . —George Saunders, “The Falls” T wo days into my new sobriety, I’m spotting Dev on the monkey bars when a rise in my gorge announces the arrival of projectile dyspepsia. I yank him off the bars and sprint the block home with his jaw jaggling against my shoulder. Dropping him in the foyer, I scramble up to the bathroom just in time to pitch the contents of my stomach into the toilet. Mommy? Dev cries as he climbs up. Ts’ okay, I holler. I sit back on my knees as he hits the doorway. What’s wrong? I’m okay, my little peach pie. I yank a towel off the shower rod and wipe my sour mouth. Then I pitch forward again with dry heaves till I’m coughing like a cat with a furball. I feel his small hand on my back as he says, Did you get a bad food? Maybe that’s it, I say. I crane under the faucet and drink the warm metallic water straight from the spigot . Then I fall to my knees again, and what I just swallowed reemerges into the toilet’s blue water. When Warren comes home, Dev is staring into the silver hole of the TV, and I’m locked in the bathroom, evacuating my innards every way I can. I open the door to Warren’s concerned face and say, I guess this is detoxing. That night at Joan’s urging, I check in to the Harvard infirmary, where I log my first nights away from Dev since he’s been on the planet. When the internist asks how much I’ve been drinking, I can’t exactly say—a lot. In my narrow bed, I get IV fluids and B vitamins and packaged sandwiches for the weekend till I level out, which the doctor swears will happen in a few days. Joan shows up with a quart of orange juice and a list of women’s phone numbers, but I’d have to use the hall pay phone, so I’m stranded with my own head. Which (unfairly, it now seems) curses Warren’s hide for not being there to hold my hand. Why hasn’t his love filled the black hole I’ve been pouring booze into? Four days sober, I leave the infirmary feeling very shaky, on an Indian summer day. At home, I’m meant to be fixing dinner for the three of us, but I cut myself peeling a carrot, which leads me to some burst of undefended incompetence as wife and mother. So I swipe all the unwashed vegetables off the drain board and into the sink and throw myself into a chair. Poor Mommy, Dev says. He puts his hand on my leg. You need to relax! You shouldn’t have to take care of me. I’m supposed to take care of you. My mouth’s so parched, and—seeing Warren’s seldom used bottle of valium above the sink—I instinctively grab it.

• From From Judgment to Hope: A Study on the Prophets (2019)

  We may argue that prayer even when spoken in private is a political activity. Prayer requires an economic use of times and places. Prayer seeks to articulate reality, attribute aspects of reality to God, summon God to act, and nurture courage to persevere or provoke change in the conduct of the one who prays. The question is, strictly speaking, not whether prayer is political, but what politics pertain to this or that particular prayer.2 The studies offered here are discrete discussions of specific texts. The effect for me however, has been cumulative, and I hope it will be so for the reader. As I have moved from text to text, the company of silence breakers has become more evident to me. Since we now live in a society—and a world—that is fitfully drifting toward fascism, the breaking of silence is altogether urgent. In the institutional life of the church, moreover, the breaking of silence by the testimony of the gospel often means breaking the silence among those who have a determined stake in maintaining the status quo. It is my hope that these sketches of silence will help us to discern more clearly the way in which our sociopolitical circumstance, now as always, is an urgent contest between silence and silence breaking. I hope as well that these sketches of silence may constitute a summons to sign on more vigorously with the silence breakers who know, deeply and intimately, that silence kills. I finish with one more vignette concerning silencing from Lewis Hyde, who reports on a sermon by Charles Chauncy in 1742 titled “A Caveat against Enthusiasm.” Chauncy fears the enthusiasts in his context who wanted to sing and dance in worship: Chauncy gives his flock instruction on how to recognize the enthusiasts in their midst. That you can’t reason with them is the first sign, but, interestingly enough, all the others have to do with their bodies: “it may be seen in their countenance,” “a certain wildness . . . in their general look,” “it strangely loosens their tongues,” “throws them . . . into quakings and tremblings,” they are “really beside themselves, acting . . . by the blind impetus of a wild fancy.” It is precisely the feeling that one’s body has been entered by some “other” that Chauncy wishes to warn against.3 Chauncy saw that such people preferred bodily action rather than talk: And the ceremonies of enthusiastic religions tend to include the body, rather than talk. The celebrants dance and sing, they quake and tremble. But no one dances ecstatic dances in the churches of the rich. Nor do they speak in tongues or raise their hands in the gesture of epiphany the way the Christian enthusiasts do. The rich would seem to sense that the more you feel the spirit move in the physical body on Sunday, the harder it will be to trade in cash on Monday. Better to sit in one’s pew and listen to talk.4

• From Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History (2015)

  Solving as it did such a range of public problems by the transfer of people to the outer reaches of its jurisdiction, the British government naturally conceived of eliminating or relieving its growing prison population by the same means. The seventeenth-century colonies were thought of not only as crude, quite barbarous places, exile to which was in itself a punishment, but also to some degree as military garrisons, where stricter discipline could be imposed than in the home islands.6 So, in the seventeenth century, the practice developed of sending convicts, along with prisoners of war, to labor in the colonies, despite growing objections from the settlers that the colonies would be corrupted by such villainous characters and would come to be thought of as “a hell upon earth, another Siberia.” After the Transportation Statute of 1718 regularized, indeed mandated, the subsidized transportation of convicted felons to North America, the small irregular trickle of immigrant convicts grew into a steady flow. By 1776 an estimated total of forty thousand had been sent to the North American colonies, almost exactly the same number that were to come to Australia (New South Wales and Tasmania) through 1824, when the system changed. In the relatively small area of Maryland to which they were sent they came to constitute between 10 and 12 percent of the free adult working population.7 There is much in this early, North American phase of the transportation system that was similar to what came later in Australia. The criminal laws that sent these thousands to America as an alternative to capital punishment were largely the same as those that convicted Australia’s first settlers. The judicial system was the same, and the social background of the convicts and the kinds of crimes they committed were largely the same. Yet there were fundamental differences in terms of results, and this was not simply because Australia is five and a half times farther from Britain than is the East Coast of America.

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  If the Romans did observe the decree, the soldiers would have made certain Jesus was dead and then buried him themselves as part of their job. In either case, his body left on the cross or in a shallow grave barely covered with dirt and stones, the dogs were waiting. And his followers, who had fled, would know that, too. Watch, then, how the horror of that brutal truth is sublimated through hope and imagination into its opposite. A first example is in the Gospel of Peter , a fragmentary text not in the New Testament but discovered about a hundred years ago in Egypt. Here is 5:15–6:21, a section I judge independent of the New Testament gospels. It explicitly refers to the Deuteronomic decree and presumes that those who crucified Jesus took him down from the cross and buried him in compliance with that biblical law. Now it was midday and a darkness covered all Judaea. And they became anxious and uneasy lest the sun had already set, since he was still alive. [For] it stands written for them: the sun should not set on one that has been put to death. And one of them said, “Give him to drink gall with vinegar.” And they mixed it and gave him to drink [to hurry death by poisoning him]. And they fulfilled all things and completed the measure of their sins on their head. And many went about with lamps, [and] as they supposed that it was night, they went to bed [or: they stumbled]. And the Lord called out and cried, “My power, O power, thou hast forsaken me!” And having said this he was taken up. And at the same hour the veil of the temple in Jerusalem was rent in two. And then the Jews drew the nails from the hands of the Lord and laid him on the earth. And the whole earth shook and there came a great fear. That text bespeaks a very early Christian hope against hope that those who crucified Jesus would also, in deference to Deuteronomy 21:22–23, have buried him themselves. That is also the beginning of the process not of knowledge but of hope: he was buried, surely, by his enemies? And the answer to the fear that his enemies would not have bothered to do so is: they would have done so, surely, in obedience to biblical law? But once we move from burial by enemies to burial by friends, we no longer hear anything about Deuteronomy 21:22–23. Then it is simply a matter of burial before the Sabbath starts. You need Deuteronomy only to explain why his enemies might have buried him. The dilemma is painfully clear. Political authority had crucified Jesus and was thus against him. But, his followers knew, it also took authority or at least authority’s permission to bury him. How could one have it both ways? How could authority be both against and for Jesus at the same time?

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  The reason his last moments were watched and chronicled in such detail was that, according to medieval belief, a good death, especially one without pain, was a sure sign that the person had lived well and would go to heaven; a bad death would have suggested that he was a heretic. Luther’s last moments therefore became a final proof, for if he had died in agony, or despaired in his final hour, the Protestant movement itself would have been put into question. Everyone dreaded a sudden, unexpected end that left the individual unable to receive the last rites. In Lutheranism there was no such sacrament and no ritual framework for dying and so the death itself became its own testament. Lutherans themselves had made much capital out of the unhappy deaths of their enemies in the past. 20 Zwingli’s death on the battlefield at Kappel had been deeply shocking, and for Luther it proved God’s judgment, not just on Zwingli but on the sacramentarian movement as a whole. In 1536 it was the turn of his old enemy Erasmus, who died in Basle without the presence of a priest and without having made confession. He had gone straight to hell, Luther believed, adding acidly that although it was said that Erasmus called on Christ to have mercy on his soul, this was probably an invention. For himself, Luther hoped that he would have a minister of the Word with him when he died. 21 68. Workshop of Lucas Cranach the Elder, Luther on His Deathbed . Many copies were made of this image. In 1542 Luther’s old enemy Eck had been one of those fortunate (or unfortunate) individuals able to read their own obituaries. Believing that their antagonist was dead, Bucer had written a tract against him, and Eck responded with a counterblast, boldly affirming on the title page that he was very much alive. But just days after his riposte had appeared, Eck fell into a fever, soon becoming delirious. Insisting that it was too early to call a priest, he grew increasingly incoherent, and when the priest was finally summoned Eck could no longer follow the words of the rite. Finally, he died of apoplexy—“the penalty of those who are given to lust and drink,” “vomiting out his life in blood,” as the Lutherans noted. The dreadful manner of his passing was the final proof that Eck had been wrong in attacking the Reformation. 22 The Lutherans made the most capital out of Karlstadt’s death, circulating a malicious tale that shortly before he died, he had been preaching in Basle when he had seen a tall man standing in an empty choir stall. The man had then gone to Karlstadt’s house, where he found the preacher’s young son at home alone.

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  when sex becomes the lionBeyond the day-to-day stressors of life are the deep wounds that life inflicts and sometimes does not provide opportunities to heal. Given the prevalence of trauma of all kinds, especially sexual trauma—a conservative estimate is that one in five women is sexually assaulted in her lifetime, and it could be more like one in three10—it’s impossible to talk about women’s sexual health without spending some time discussing trauma. From child sexual abuse to sexual assault to all forms of interpersonal violence, women are disproportionately and systematically targeted, and thus they disproportionately bring to their sexual functioning the emotional, physical, and cognitive features of a trauma survivor. In other words, if women have more “issues” than men around sex, there’s good reason. (If you’re a survivor and still working through your experience, you may prefer to skip ahead to the next section.) Trauma results when a person has control over her body taken from her, she freezes, and then she can’t unlock. Whether the cause is a car accident or sexual violence, the survival mechanism kicks in: freeze, the petrified shutdown characterized by numbness and sometimes tonic immobility (paralysis) or a sense of disembodiment. Some people describe it as “going into shock.” This is the life-threat stress response, activated when your brain decides you can’t escape a stressor, nor can you fight it. It’s reserved for the most dangerous and violent contexts. Rape has been described by victim advocate and former police officer Tom Tremblay as “the most violent crime a person can survive.”11 Those who have not been sexually assaulted can perhaps more clearly understand the experience of a survivor by thinking of them as having survived an attempted murder that used sex as the weapon. Sexual violence often doesn’t look like “violence” as we usually imagine it—only rarely is there a gun or knife; often there isn’t even “aggression” as we typically think of it. There is coercion and the removal of the targeted person’s choice about what will happen next. Survivors don’t “fight” because the threat is too immediate and inescapable; their bodies choose “freeze” because it’s the stress response that maximizes the chances of staying alive… or of dying without pain. Trauma isn’t always caused by one specific incident. It can also emerge in response to persistent distress or ongoing abuse, like a relationship where sex is unwanted though it may be technically “consensual” because the targeted person says yes in order to avoid being injured, or they feel trapped in the relationship or are otherwise coerced. In that context, a survivor’s body gradually learns that it can’t escape and it can’t fight; freeze becomes the default stress response because of the learned pattern of shutdown as the best way to guarantee survival.

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  Your stress is the system of changes activated in your brain and body in response to those stressors. It’s an evolutionarily adaptive mechanism that allows you to respond to perceived threats. Or it was evolutionarily adaptive, back when our stressors had claws and teeth and could run thirty miles per hour. These days we are almost never chased by lions, and yet our body’s response to, say, an incompetent boss is largely the same as it would be to a lion. Your physiology doesn’t differentiate much. This fact will have important implications for your sex life, as we’ll soon see. Stress is usually taught as the fight-or-flight response, but just as the “pleasure center” isn’t just about pleasure, fight or flight isn’t just about fight or flight. Let’s call it fight/flight/freeze. Here’s how it works: When your brain perceives a threat in the environment, you experience a massive biochemical change, characterized by floods of adrenaline and cortisol to your bloodstream and a cascade of physiological events, such as increased heart rate, respiration rate, and blood pressure; suppressed immune and digestive functioning; dilation of the pupils and shifting of attention to a vigilant state, focused on the here and now. All these changes are like revving your engine before a race, or taking a deep breath before you duck underwater—preparation for the action to come. What action that will be depends on the nature of the perceived threat—that is, it’s context dependent. Suppose the threat is a lion—the kind of threat we were dealing with in the environment where the mechanism evolved in our early ancestors. The stress response cycle notices the lion and shouts, “I’m at risk! What do I do?” A lion, your brain informs you in much less than a second, is the kind of threat that you are most likely to survive by trying to escape. So what do you do when you see a lion coming after you? You feel fear, and you run. And then what happens? There are only two possible outcomes, right? Either you get killed by the lion, in which case none of the rest of this matters, or you escape and live. So imagine that you successfully run back to your village and scream for help, and everyone helps you slaughter the lion, and then you all eat it for dinner, and in the morning you have a respectful burial service for the parts of the carcass you won’t be using, giving reverent thanks for the lion’s sacrifice. And how do you feel now? Relieved! Grateful to be alive! You love your friends and family! And that is the complete stress response cycle, with beginning (“I’m at risk!”), middle (action), and end (“I’m safe!”). Or suppose the threat is a person with an angry expression on their face, who’s sneaking up behind your best friend, with a little knife in their hand? Your brain may decide this is a threat you can best survive by conquering.

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  So also, in Luke 24:1 and 24:22 the tomb of Jesus is found empty “at early dawn” or “early in the morning.” Next, the reaction. There are four close verbal similarities between Mark 6:49–50 and Luke 24:37–38 (I keep translations consistent with the Greek words): (1) But when they saw him walking on the sea, they thought it was a ghost [phantasma ] and cried out; for they all saw him and were frightened . But immediately he spoke to them and said, “Take heart, it is I ; do not be terrified .” (2) They were startled and terrified , and thought that they were seeing a ghost [pneuma ]. He said to them, “Why are you frightened , and why do doubts arise in your hearts? Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself.” Finally, the necessary invitation. There is a rather strange comment in Mark 6:48 when Jesus approaches the boat walking on the waters: “he intended to pass them by.” Similarly, at Emmaus in Luke 24:28, “as they came near the village to which they were going, he walked ahead as if he were going on.” In both cases, they must react to get Jesus to join them. The messages are surely most clear. Fishing all night without Jesus, the disciples catch nothing. Sailing all night without Jesus, the disciples get nowhere. Jesus returns and immediately there is a great catch or a safe harbor. The symbolism is devastatingly obvious, but it is a symbolism for a specific leader , namely Peter, in the former case, and for a leadership group in the second one. Here, then, is a question: How does one get a specific leader, namely Peter, dominant in that second case—over, that is, the leadership group? Hint: Who is it that gets to walk (or sink) on the water with Jesus, but only in Matthew 14:28–33? The Race to the Empty Tomb We have seen the exaltation of specific leader over leadership group and of each over the general community throughout the preceding conjunction of nature miracle and risen apparition . Those stories were not concerned with control over nature before Jesus’ death or with entranced apparitions after it; rather, they were quite dramatic and symbolic narratives about power and authority in the earliest Christian communities. That is what they were intended to be, and that is how we should read them. All of this process reaches something of a climax in John 20, where “the disciple whom Jesus loved” is exalted over three other individuals—first Peter, then Mary Magdalene, and finally Thomas. We already saw a competitive tension between the Beloved Disciple and Peter in John 21, but in that chapter, which scholars judge to be a later addition to John’s gospel, it is resolved in Peter’s favor. Here in John 20, in the original last chapter of that gospel, Peter loses badly.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  The lingua franca in educated circles at that time was Latin, which all students were required to speak at all times. As a measure of his father Hans’s social status, we may mark the fact that he did not himself speak Latin, so whatever schooling he got was far from the caliber of his son’s. At Luther’s first school, each day began with a Latin hymn and ended with another Latin hymn. Every morning the teacher would designate one of the students as der Wolf (the wolf), and it was this student’s responsibility to tattle on any students who spoke German or who otherwise misbehaved. The worst perpetrator of that day would be designated der Esel (the jackass) and all the following day must bear the ignominy and humiliation of wearing around his neck a carved wooden jackass on a string. Luther’s other remembrances are no less dour, but one reason it seems he is at least somewhat exaggerating is that the school maxim was decidedly positive toward education and students. It was “Neglecting a student is no less serious than deflowering a virgin.” Later in life, Luther described the general atmosphere of fear of authority at school as something that became chronic throughout all of life, so that even when someone meant him well, he could hardly conceive of it. Luther said that the irrational and ignorant fear of a good God that was perpetuated by the churches and theology of that time was connected to this, and it reminded him of a specific incident from childhood. He explained that it was the custom of that place and time for children to go begging in the streets for sausages. (This was not something poor children did, as some of the older biographies of Luther have averred, but something that all children did, so this is one more fable about Luther that must be peeled away from the true story.) One day a kindly man ran after Luther and his friends with sausages in his hands. His intention was to give them the sausages, but Luther and his friends ran away in fear, certain that this real-life Hanswurst* somehow meant them harm. Luther used this as an illustration of how even when God reached out to us in love and grace, we are often so suffused with the idea of him as a stern judge bent on punishing us that we tragically shrink from his loving grasp, thus to our own sad detriment denying ourselves the very thing for which we long.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Luther did not die that day outside Stotternheim. He arose from the soaked ground to stagger his final miles to Erfurt and his law studies. But what had happened there would not be forgotten. He was a serious and pious young man, and he had vowed to the Holy Mother of the Holy Mother of a Holy God—and therefore to God himself—that he would become a monk. And so become a monk he must and certainly would do. What can have gone through his mind during that last hour as he continued the six miles to the University of Erfurt and the life he had just vowed to leave forever? Was he exhilarated at what had just taken place? Was he frightened by what he had just done, something he knew that, as a solemn vow, was irrevocable? Did his mind now range over the possibilities of a loophole in the vow he had just uttered? We can never know. What we do know is that once he returned to the university, he told his fellow students about it, and they did all they could to talk him out of it. But the young man was immovable. To make the decision more final, he even sold his Corpus Juris. But there can be no question whatsoever that the most difficult part of what he had promised to do concerned his father, who would be shocked and outraged, who would feel betrayed and disappointed and horrified, and who would certainly rage against it and do all he could to force his son to change his mind. Hans Luther had worked tremendously hard to get his son to where he was now. So to see him stand on the verge of achieving his goal—a goal that concerned not only him but his whole family, and one in which they had invested sacrificially—and then take leave of his senses to throw away everything by becoming a monk—a monk!—would undo his father. So Luther shrank from the dreaded task. He would simply enter the monastery and inform his father afterward.

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  (25:14–18) A talent of gold weighed about 30 pounds and was worth about 6,000 denarii—with a single denarius representing a laborer’s daily pay. In ancient terms, the revenues from Antipas’s domains in Galilee and Perea were about 200 talents. In modern terms, that first slave had just received $2 million. In other words, Jesus is capturing his audience’s attention with a “fairy-tale” amount of money: After a long time the master of those slaves came and settled accounts with them. Then the one who had received the five talents came forward, bringing five more talents, saying, “Master, you handed over to me five talents; see, I have made five more talents.” His master said to him, “Well done, good and trustworthy slave; you have been trustworthy in a few things, I will put you in charge of many things; enter into the joy of your master.” And the one with the two talents also came forward, saying, “Master, you handed over to me two talents; see, I have made two more talents.” His master said to him, ‘Well done, good and trustworthy slave; you have been trustworthy in a few things, I will put you in charge of many things; enter into the joy of your master.” (25:19–23) The first two slaves converse with the master using the same language verbatim. Recall that, in the Good Samaritan parable, the priest and Levite were also described identically: “A priest was going down that road; and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side” (10:31–32). Those first two similar descriptions raise expectations for a very different third one: Then the one who had received the one talent also came forward, saying, “Master, I knew that you were a harsh man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not scatter seed; so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground. Here you have what is yours.” But his master replied, “You wicked and lazy slave! You knew, did you, that I reap where I did not sow, and gather where I did not scatter? Then you ought to have invested my money with the bankers, and on my return I would have received what was my own with interest (Greek tokos ). So take the talent from him, and give it to the one with the ten talents.” (25:24–28; italics added) Notice, for future consideration, that description of the master’s unfair and greedy character and how even the master himself agrees with it. There is a second and strikingly different version of this parable in Luke 19:12–26. First of all, it is combined and framed within another story about a would-be ruler who went abroad to obtain—successfully—a kingdom (19:12, 14, 27).

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Only one year before he began his legal studies, in 1504,* Martin had been traveling home to Mansfeld for Easter when the student’s sword that he carried—and that many students carried in those days—somehow badly cut his leg, severing a main artery. The bleeding was clearly life threatening, and so Luther’s traveling companion quickly ran to the nearby town to summon a doctor. During this time, Luther lay alone in the field, desperately applying pressure with his hand to stanch the bleeding, wondering whether he would survive the afternoon. He well knew that he could die there and then, so he cried out to Saint Mary in prayer, begging her to spare his life. Finally, a doctor appeared and sewed up the wound. But the doctor seems not to have done his job very well, because that night as Luther lay in bed sleeping, the wound reopened and he bled copiously once more. Luther feared for his life, again crying out to Mary to spare him. And again he survived, but not without a long time to think about what might have been. The injury was severe enough that it was some time before he could walk. He clearly had much time to rest and think about twice leaning over the pit of death.* Luther’s thoughts about death during this time must also have been exacerbated by the deaths of several people he knew. In April 1505 and then later in that year, two young Erfurt lawyers were swept from this life by the plague, which had freshened its attacks in that region. To see two young men die who had taken the same path Luther was now taking could not help but cause him to wonder whether he had made the right choice, whether if he too were suddenly to leave this world he would be prepared as he should be for what lay ahead. In fact, Luther later said that the last words of both of these lawyers had been “O, that I had become a monk!”18 The idea was that they knew that their eternal salvation was at stake, and in the nightmarish light of the eternity that yawned before them, they both piteously remonstrated against the worldly paths they had chosen. Luther surely participated in the requiem masses for both men. If these deaths were not enough, there would be two more from the plague, and both still closer to home. Two of his own fellow students during this time were struck down by death’s scythe. One was Hieronymus Buntz, who took part in Luther’s own master’s examination.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  As I stare up at the facade, it hits me that—at some point in the 1970s, I scored cocaine in this very building. At the elevator, the numbers glow down to me while I stifle an animal impulse to bolt. Help me, blind power, I think, get through. (Prayers of real desperation like this—however sparse—are starting to come unbidden. Sometimes one even leaves a sense of peace—or at least hope that peace is coming.) I fling my hanging bag on the bed and instinctively draw the drapes against light. Looking at myself in the bathroom mirror, I decide that the black dress I zipped on thinking it made me look employable as a professor in fact has shoulders padded like a linebacker’s. I flop on the bed and click the TV on to channel-surf when I notice that, just under the screen, sits a minibar. I can picture the frosty air it holds, its tidy array of bottles. Eyeing it like I would a crocodile sloe-eyed on the bank, I back out of the room and take the elevator downstairs again. The desk clerk says housekeeping can take it out eventually, but they’re overloaded. So I sit in the lobby, hands twisting in my lap, until it’s time for the drinks I can’t have.

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  Next, the money involved is pounds instead of talents—with a pound worth about 100 denarii, while, as you recall, a talent was about 6,000. Furthermore, the number of slaves and the amounts of money are also different: “He summoned ten of his slaves, and gave them ten pounds, and said to them, ‘Do business with these until I come back’” (19:13). Finally, the amounts accrued are also different: When he returned, having received royal power, he ordered these slaves, to whom he had given the money, to be summoned so that he might find out what they had gained by trading. The first came forward and said, “Lord, your pound has made ten more pounds.” He said to him, “Well done, good slave! Because you have been trustworthy in a very small thing, take charge of ten cities.” Then the second came, saying, “Lord, your pound has made five pounds.” He said to him, “And you, rule over five cities.” (19:15–19) Still, despite there being ten slaves in Luke, only three receive any attention in the final review. After those two, comes this third and final one: Then the other came, saying, “Lord, here is your pound. I wrapped it up in a piece of cloth, for I was afraid of you, because you are a harsh man; you take what you did not deposit, and reap what you did not sow.” He said to him, “I will judge you by your own words, you wicked slave! You knew, did you, that I was a harsh man, taking what I did not deposit and reaping what I did not sow? Why then did you not put my money into the bank? Then when I returned, I could have collected it with interest.” He said to the bystanders, “Take the pound from him and give it to the one who has ten pounds.” (19:20–24) But all those differences we noted between Matthew and Luke only draw forceful attention to how almost verbatim is that climactic interchange between the master and the third slave. There is the same description of the master as greedy, his own acceptance of that assessment, and the final mention of “interest.” Hold all of that in mind as we look at the third version. The parable of the Master’s Money is among those parables of Jesus present in gospels both inside and outside the New Testament. There is another and even more different version of it in the Gospel of the Nazarenes, an expansion of Matthew’s Greek text used by Christian Jews from western Syria in the first half of the second century. There is no extant manuscript of that gospel, and its scattered fragments are found only in quotations by early Christian theologians.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  He remarked that this was again the work of the Devil, who always attacked him “whenever I have something important that I have to do.” His body was rubbed with hot cloths and he revived. In Eisleben, Luther stayed in the house of Dr. Drachstedt, a major figure in the mining business with long-standing links to Luther’s family. 12 Meetings had to be organized around the old man’s illness, but even his precarious physical state was not enough to get the counts to agree. Negotiations dragged on for three weeks, with Luther desperate to get home. Meanwhile, he devised a daily routine. Just as mealtimes with the whole household were central to his life in Wittenberg, so in Eisleben he kept a common table, with guests. Mealtimes were devotional occasions, as they had been in the monastery. Then, every evening around eight o’clock, he rose from the table and left the big parlor to go to his room, where he would stand by the window, praying—“so earnestly and intently that we…keeping silent, often heard some words and were amazed,” according to his companions. Afterward, he would turn from the window, happy, “as if he had put down a burden,” and talk to his associates for another quarter hour before going to bed. Luther knew that he was facing death, and he talked about how “we old ones have to live so long that we see into the backside of the Devil, and experience so much evil, faithlessness and misery.” There was also talk at dinner about whether the dead would recognize one another, one of the very few occasions on which Luther speculated about the afterlife. He was sure that they would—just as, when Adam first met Eve, he knew at once that she was flesh of his flesh. 13 On the evening of February 17, when he went to his room with his two younger sons to pray, he was suddenly taken ill once more, with chest pains and coldness. Jonas and the Mansfeld preacher Michael Coelius immediately rushed to his room, and he was again rubbed with hot cloths. Countess Anna of Mansfeld was summoned to provide unicorn horn—actually the tusk of a narwhal—believed to be a powerful restorative, and Count Albrecht himself grated some of it into a glass of wine. Conrad von Wolfframsdorf, one of Albrecht’s councilors, took a spoonful of it first—perhaps because Luther feared that he would be poisoned, perhaps because he mistrusted such medicine. 14 At about 9 P.M., Luther lay down to nap, and slept peacefully for an hour. When he awoke, he asked those who had kept watch, “Are you still sitting up?”

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  The outer frames of the passion story in 10:32–42 and 16:1–8 have male and female disciples failing Jesus. But each of those twin failures is counterpointed with a twin success. Male disciples flee Jesus because they fear the crucifixion, but the centurion confesses him because he sees the crucifixion. Female disciples fail Jesus because of anointing, but another female succeeds precisely there. That needs some explanation. In Mark’s story Jesus had told the disciple three times, and very clearly, that he would be executed in Jerusalem and that he would rise after three days. That prophecy is repeated in 8:31, 9:31, and 10:33–34. It always concludes with the resurrection “after three days.” Bringing burial spices to Jesus’ tomb after those prophecies is certainly an act of love but hardly an act of faith. Indeed, for Mark it is a lack of faith. That, rather than flight or silence, is what makes 16:1–8 failure for Mark. It is not that the women fly the tomb with fear but that they approach the tomb with ointment. That is why Mark insists that the women “bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him.” But before Mark tells of that failure by named women in 16:1–8, he tells this story of stunning faith: While he was at Bethany in the house of Simon the leper, as he sat at the table, a woman came with an alabaster jar of very costly ointment of nard, and she broke open the jar and poured the ointment on his head. But some were there who said to one another in anger, “Why was the ointment wasted in this way? For this ointment could have been sold for more than three hundred denarii, and the money given to the poor.” And they scolded her. But Jesus said, “Let her alone; why do you trouble her? She has performed a good service for me. For you always have the poor with you, and you can show kindness to them whenever you wish; but you will not always have me. She has done what she could; she has anointed my body beforehand for its burial. Truly I tell you, wherever the good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her.” (Mark 14:3–9) This unnamed woman believes the prophecies of his death and resurrection given by Jesus in Mark 8:31, 9:31, and 10:33–34. She believes them and knows, therefore, that if she does not anoint him for burial now, she will never be able to do it later. That is why she gets that astonishing statement of praise, one unparalleled in the entire gospel: “[W]herever the good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her.” That accolade is given because, in Mark’s gospel, this is the first complete and unequivocal act of faith in Jesus’ suffering and rising destiny.