Hope

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 Healing Our Broken Humanity: Practices for Revitalizing the Church and Renewing the World (2018)

  The new church is not an outreach but a church of and for the homeless, a church on the street. It’s a community made up of small “pocket bodies” wherever people live. After fourteen years of ministry among the homeless of San Francisco, the buses are gone, owing to police pressure on people living in vehicles, which resulted in no more “camps” of homeless people. So, since 2009, they have met where people gather, holding services at one of the local piers and at a big intersection in their neighborhood.20 It’s a ministry supported interdenominationally and, further down the line, it will include a warehouse where worship and preaching will be constantly happening, with services such as food, showers, laundry, and shopping cart check-in available. The Praying and Humble Community (Matthew 6:5-18 )Prayer is at the heart of our life together. This prayer is simple, quiet, and unobtrusive. It doesn’t seek recognition, and it’s not characterized by performance or dramatic public displays of spirituality. It doesn’t dazzle. It doesn’t say, “Hey, look at me!” It’s simple, humble, and honest. It’s complemented by our personal and social commitment to love our enemies and forgive others. In our busyness we don’t want to pray or seem to find the time to pray. But we need to pray and do so continuously. In times of trouble we need to trust God and come to God in prayer. Grace writes elsewhere, “We become the children who will pray the prayer that gives us some peace and understanding. Prayer leads us to the mystery of God and we cannot fully understand God’s being, will, action and mercy towards us.”21 Jesus says to us, “This, then, is how you should pray: ‘Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kin-dom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us today our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.’” (Mt 6:9-13 ) Notice that every petition and conviction in this prayer reflects the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount. This prayer is at the heart of that sermon. This prayer reminds us to live a transformed life together as God’s people and to be about what God is doing in the world. When I (Grace) was in my PhD program, one of my professors, Ovey Muhammed, asked us, “What does it mean when we pray, ‘Let thy kin-dom come’?” It sounded like a trick question, so I put my head down so that he would not ask me directly. Many of us had prayed this prayer all our lives, so we were thrown off guard by this simple question about the Lord’s Prayer.

• From Healing Our Broken Humanity: Practices for Revitalizing the Church and Renewing the World (2018)

  The church doesn’t have a social ethic—the church is a social ethic.”12 Put another way, “The church doesn’t have a social strategy, the church is a social strategy.”13 As the new humanity in Jesus Christ, our life together is political. We’re not talking here about Republicans or Democrats or some other form of party politics. We’re talking about the politics of the realm of God. Together, as God’s new creation, we display a new and redeemed politic before a watching world. Too often we get caught up in the political concerns and spirits of our age. But instead we should show the world a new and redeemed politic by choosing to be the church. What if post-Christendom, secularism, materialism, sexuality, immigrants, refugees, nationalism, and Islam aren’t things to be feared but instead opportunities to truly be the church? What if the church could truly be a sanctuary for people needing refuge? In the age of President Trump, certain churches in the United States are becoming sanctuary churches for undocumented workers and their families.14 What if these social changes are opportunities to embrace fuller discipleship, to reform our beliefs and practices, to dig deeper into the stories that shape us and our society, to see God’s presence within expressions of doubt and questioning, and to practice a distinct social ethic? What if these are opportunities to cultivate a distinct community with a distinct love and ethic and grace and holiness and reconciliation and hope and welcome? What if these are opportunities to discern how we’ve become thoroughly secularized and how to be the new humanity and new creation in Christ? What if these are opportunities to ask what really shapes our identities and desires and to repent? What if these are opportunities to join with God in God’s mission, to live full and joyful lives, to listen to the hopes and longings of others, to embrace fresh confidence in the gospel, to open our hearts and homes and lands and families, and to invite the Spirit to convert its church? The church remembers, tells, and embodies the story of Jesus Christ. It shows the world what God calls the world to be. The church does not withdraw from the world. The church does not stand in self-righteous judgment on the world.15 Instead the church serves Jesus and his world. Hauerwas writes, “The church can never abandon the world to the hopelessness deriving from its rejection of God, but must be a people with a hope sufficiently fervid to sustain the world as well as itself.”16 The church, sure of its unique identity, must engage fully with the world—showing the world what God destines it to be. The church witnesses to Jesus as a peaceable, virtuous, ethical, just, serving, and diverse-but-unified community.17 God calls the church to be an alternative society. The church is a parallel and distinct community, subverting the present powers and age, providing a standard and vanguard for the world as a foretaste of the age to come.

• From Healing Our Broken Humanity: Practices for Revitalizing the Church and Renewing the World (2018)

  As a result the corporation contracted by the government to expand the freeway offered compensation and housing relocation for those most affected by the construction noise. Our neighbors had collaborated for the sake of justice. Partnerships also happen at a national and global level. Take the Sustainable Development Goals, for example.12 These offer quantified and time-bound targets to address hunger, poverty, education, gender equality, child mortality, maternal health, environmental sustainability, disease prevention and cure, and more. Goal 17 stresses the importance of developing global partnerships. For the sake of the world’s most vulnerable people, we need to encourage more and more national and global partnerships. Governments, businesses, nonprofits, religious organizations, and other groups need to collaborate for justice. Combining Justice with Peace, Beauty, Reconciliation, and LoveSometimes we think of justice as a harsh or cold thing. Maybe that’s because we often associate it with judges and legal systems. But justice is beautiful. Justice draws together mercy, humility, beauty, compassion, and love. Cornel West puts it this way: “To be human you must bear witness to justice. Justice is what love looks like in public—to be human is to love and be loved.”13 When justice prevails the world is a more peaceful, beautiful, reconciled, and loving place. This is a taste of the age to come. We look forward to the age when God will replace war, famine, disease, racism, sexism, and the like with peace, plenty, diversity, inclusion, beauty, reconciliation, love, and justice. Creation and humanity groan for this day. This justice is our hope and vision. Justice is beautiful, and through God’s justice and love, God restores all things. It is beautiful to see trees being planted to replenish the earth, it is beautiful to see a refugee living in her new home, and it is beautiful to see a wrongly convicted man set free. Justice brings beauty and life. Receiving and Offering Forgiveness and EmbraceMiroslav Volf says, “Forgiveness is an element in the process of reconciliation, a process in which the search for justice is an integral and yet subordinate element.”14 In this he means that forgiveness and embrace are at the heart of Christian faith and certainly at the heart of reconciliation and justice. There is no forgiveness and reconciliation apart from justice. Forgiveness and reconciliation don’t only occur after complete justice has been done (after all, justice is rarely, if ever, entirely satisfied in this life). What is the idea at the heart of Volf’s proposal? It is simply this: following the way of Christ, Christians seek both justice and reconciliation, and they do this through the will to embrace the other and through actual embrace. This isn’t cheap grace. But it is offering forgiveness and embrace while justice is pursued, even when justice hasn’t been completely fulfilled. We choose to offer forgiveness and embrace as an act of grace and while we seek justice. This is risky. It involves self-denial and unconditional love.

• From Healing Our Broken Humanity: Practices for Revitalizing the Church and Renewing the World (2018)

  Here’s another way to put it: You’re here to be light, bringing out the God-colors in the world. God is not a secret to be kept. We’re going public with this, as public as a city on a hill. . . . Now that I’ve put you there on a hilltop, on a light stand—shine! Keep open house; be generous with your lives. By opening up to others, you’ll prompt people to open up with God, this generous Father in heaven. (The Message ) We love the image of the church being salt-seasoning that brings out the God-flavors of this earth, light that brings out the God-colors in the world, and an open house that shows God’s extravagant welcome and generosity. The church has a distinct identity and a unique social ethic and politic.4 Narrative shapes this social ethic, polity, and community. Story forms our life together. It shapes our mission and service in the world. This narrative is the story of biblical Israel and the work of Jesus Christ.5 This is a grand, cosmic, eschatological, and trinitarian story. It’s the story of creation, of biblical Israel, of the person and message and work of the Jewish Jesus, of Pentecost, of the formation of a chosen people, of the redemption and restoration of all things in Christ, and of the coming reign of God. This narrative puts Jesus at the center of the church’s theology, discipleship, community, message, ethic, politic, mission, and more. The church is a community we long to belong to. We need community to survive, as it is the community that nourishes us and teaches us what it means to love. Dorothy Day reminds us the importance of community when she writes, “We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.”6 The church is the community formed by the story of Jesus.7 It is a diverse community, made up of every nation, tribe, people, and language, who show extraordinary unity in diversity. God calls the church to embody that unity in diversity and that story of Jesus in its social ethic, peacemaking, life together, and mission in the world.8 The church remembers and tells the story of Jesus Christ. It shows the world what God calls the world to be. The church does not withdraw from the world, and the church does not stand in self- righteous judgment on the world.9 The church serves Jesus and his world.10 We are a life-giving community. The church, sure of its unique identity, must engage fully with the world—showing the world what God destines it to be. The church witnesses to Jesus as a peaceable, virtuous, ethical, loving, just, servant, and reconciling community.11 The Meeting House in Toronto is one of Canada’s biggest churches. It’s a poignant example of a distinct and life-giving local church, a wonderful example of a church that embodies the story of Jesus.

• From Healing Our Broken Humanity: Practices for Revitalizing the Church and Renewing the World (2018)

  That was the beginning of my journey, and these nine practices come out of listening to thousands of Christians from all over the world talk about the practices that they know can heal our broken world. Our hope is that this book will be used by small groups, ministry professionals, activists, and laypeople. We hope this book will help you discover new, transforming practices that revitalize the church and its mission and that transform the world. We hope that through these nine practices you’ll discover fresh expressions and depths of reconciliation, justice, unity, peace, and love. How to Get the Most Out of This BookThis book can be read individually, but we also believe it is helpful to read in community. We encourage you to read this book in your small group, as a ministry team, as a college class, or in some other group setting. You may choose to gather a group of friends and read this book together in a home or a coffee shop. Here’s how your group can get the most out of this book. [image "Figure 1. Practices for getting the most out of this book" file=Image00003.jpg] Figure 1. Practices for getting the most out of this book Pray for open hearts. Spend time together in prayer and meditation, asking God to prepare your hearts as you read the chapter together. Ask the Spirit to make you open to what God wants to do in your lives, group, church, and neighborhood. Ask God to give you an open and receptive heart. Read the chapter. Before your meeting, read through the chapter for the week. Many of the chapters refer to Scripture too, so read with your Bible open. Read slowly, reflectively, and prayerfully. Take your time and allow the ideas and challenges to sink in. (If you are reading this book together in your small group, you might choose to do one practice per week over nine weeks, or two practices per week over four weeks, and then one in a final week.) Journal your thoughts. As you read the chapter, journal your thoughts. Journal what God is saying to you. How is God asking you to respond and change? What impresses or challenges you? What do you agree or disagree with? What questions do you have? How is the Spirit trying to get your attention and change your life? What is he saying to your group, church, and neighborhood? How is God calling you to think or act in response to your reading? Discuss what you are learning. Meet in a small group or college class, with some friends at home or at a coffee shop, or as part of a ministry team. You will get a lot more out of this book when you read it with others. Together you can think about the book’s challenges and implications.

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

  How do you think weak people (orphans and widows) heard this threat? Write a “woe” statement for today that resembles those from First Isaiah. Chapter 3 SECOND AND THIRD ISAIAH (Chapters 40–55, 56–65) There is a long silence in the book of Isaiah after chapter 39. That rhetorical silence corresponds to the long displacement in exile of the leading inhabitants of Jerusalem (see Psalm 137). But then, as the geopolitical world turned against the imperial power of Babylon, the tradition of Isaiah erupted in a new torrent of imagination in chapter 40 and following. These are not the words of the old prophet from the eighth century BCE; they are, nonetheless, oracles that derived from and remain faithful to the older Isaiah tradition. This poetry bears witness to the powerful convergence of theological imagination and historical reality, whereby the political reality of a new emergent Persian power is transposed into and understood as the emancipatory action of YHWH. THE HOLY WAY HIGHWAY This new poetry appeals to the imagery of a highway of homecoming in 35:8. That imagery stands at the beginning of the new poetry: “In the wilderness prepare the way of the LORD, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.” 40:3 ISRAEL, JUDAH, JERUSALEM, ZION, CANAAN—WHO IS WHO? The term Israel came to be used in a variety of ways over the course of time. Israelites is the name given to all the descendants of Jacob, who was also called Israel (Gen. 35:10). Jacob, or Israel, had twelve sons, the ancestors of the twelve tribes of Israel. One of these sons was Judah. Things became confusing hundreds of years later when, two generations after King David’s reign, the kingdom of Israel split into two nations. The northern kingdom continued to call itself Israel and the southern kingdom took the name of its largest tribe, Judah. But after the northern kingdom was destroyed by Assyria in the eighth century BCE, Israel once again became available as a name for all the descendants of Jacob, including the Judeans. At this point the names became somewhat interchangeable. Though the political name of the nation that was left remained Judah (and later Judea), and though the terms Judaism, Jew, and Jewish derive from this name, Israel continued to be used side by side with these terms. The other three names are easier to distinguish. Jerusalem is the city in Judah that King David adopted as his capital. Zion is another name for Jerusalem. Canaan identifies the physical land that the Israelites occupied, because it was originally inhabited by Canaanites. The poetry imagines Jerusalem joyously on its way home because YHWH has made a new decision about world history. That new decision is called gospel, meaning good news or good tidings. The gospel tells of YHWH’s new initiative: Get you up to a high mountain, O Zion, herald of good tidings; lift up your voice with strength, O Jerusalem, herald of good tidings; lift it up, do not fear;

• From Healing Our Broken Humanity: Practices for Revitalizing the Church and Renewing the World (2018)

  The mission of the church in the world is to proclaim and embody the gospel of reconciliation, which is God restoring all things and people to Godself, and reconciling people to each other and to creation. Note the mention of creation. The World Council of Churches reminds us that making peace on earth means making peace with the earth.14 We Christians have neglected to work toward climate justice by reconciling with all of creation, and it is long overdue. The consequences of not reconciling with creation are consequential and disastrous. This gospel of reconciliation calls the church to be an ethical people who seek peace and justice, and that includes creation. John W. De Gruchy speaks of reconciliation this way: To say that God was reconciling the world in Christ is another way of saying that God was busy restoring God’s reign of justice. One implication of this understanding of the relationship between the gospel of reconciliation and justice is that, for Paul, theology and ethics are inseparably bound together. To be reconciled to God and to do justice are part and parcel of the same process. . . . Reconciled to God, the church is a multi-ethnic community, the embodiment of a new humanity. As such it is “a novel entity on the world stage” mirroring in microcosm “the hope of the world and the universe, at present divided and at odds with its creator.” . . . The church is God’s reconciled and reconciling community, God’s new humanity, a sign and witness of God’s purpose for the whole inhabited universe or oikumene .15 This type of reconciliation requires a personal and corporate change of heart. Only God can make this possible as he leads us to repentance, justice, humility, peace, community, and a transformed spirit. L. Gregory Jones and Célestin Musekura say that God enables this kind of personal and collective change and that such transformation requires “community practices for making peace.”16 Let’s look now at how we practice reconciliation. How Do We Practice Reconciliation?So how do we move toward reconciliation? Here are some core practices that help. 1. Develop a biblical theology of reconciliation. We’ve unpacked some of the dimensions of this theology already in this chapter. Before we can practice reconciliation, we need a biblical theology that undergirds and directs reconciliation. Reconciliation isn’t primarily a technique, strategy, or method. We mustn’t let pragmatism hijack the church’s call to reconciliation. As we mentioned above, in the final chapter of Reconciling All Things Katongole and Rice offer ten theses for “recovering reconciliation as the mission of God.”17 We encourage you to get this book and read through these proposals. They will help you and your church build a robust theology of reconciliation. The final section also asks you to reflect on key biblical passages. 2. Pursue the five landmarks of reconciliation.

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

  and they shall never again be plucked up out of the land that I have given them, says the LORD our God. Amos 9:11–15 Hosea can imagine a revivified agriculture after a season of radical negation: On that day I will answer, says the LORD, I will answer the heavens and they shall answer the earth; and the earth shall answer the grain, the wine, and the oil, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . And I will have pity on Lo-ruhamah, and I will say to Lo-ammi, “You are my people”; and he shall say, “You are my God.” 2:21–23 And Micah will witness to God’s readiness to forgive with compassion, faithfulness, and loyalty: Who is a God like you, pardoning iniquity and passing over the transgression of the remnant of your possession? He does not retain his anger forever, because he delights in showing clemency. He will again have compassion upon us; he will tread our iniquities under foot. You will cast all our sins into the depths of the sea. You will show faithfulness to Jacob and unswerving loyalty to Abraham, as you have sworn to our ancestors from days of old. 7:18–20 Such promises do not come, in prophetic imagination, too soon. They come after the disaster. If they arrive too soon, they serve only to support the illusions of the present arrangements. CONCLUSION In these three major Minors we may find a script for truth telling among us, the truth that our present life contradicts God’s purposes and cannot be sustained, the truth that such a contradiction will have sorry outcomes, and the truth that God intends well-being for a post-disaster community. This is a very different script of social reality from the dominant script among us. But of course, it was back then as well! QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION Read Amos 3:2; 8:1–3; Hosea 4:1–3; and Micah 6:9–16. What are the consequences of the people’s behavior? Now read Amos 9:11–15; Hosea 2:21–23; and Micah 7:18–20. What are the words of hope found in these texts? What would a modern-day prophet write about consequences for people’s behavior today? What words of hope would we expect to find? Chapter 6 THREE PROPHETS FROM THE PERSIAN PERIOD Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi As we have discussed, the destruction of Jerusalem in 587 BCE at the hands of the Babylonians was a catastrophe that came to dominate the entire landscape of the Old Testament. It is impossible to overstate the traumatic impact of that loss. It entailed not only political displacement—temple was destroyed, the king exiled, and the city razed—but it also resulted in an acute theological displacement, as though the promises of God no longer pertained.

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

  and wail with bitter lamentation, and say, “We are utterly ruined; the LORD alters the inheritance of my people; how he removes it from me! Among our captors he parcels out our fields.” 2:4 These prophetic scenarios run well ahead of the facts on the ground; but the prophets know, given their focus on covenantal reality, that the purposes of God cannot be outflanked, not even by the clever and powerful. The other truth of prophetic imagination that continues to be operative is the envisioning of an alternative alignment of the political economy. That is what the cluster of covenantal words entails: justice, righteousness, steadfast love, knowledge of God. It was, in that ancient context, difficult to construe reality outside the blueprints that had been constructed by the powerful. That construed reality, blessed by establishment religion, assured itself of an entitlement by God as God’s chosen people that could count on security and certainty with no serious threat or vulnerability. But these prophets knew that that claim was not a given grounded in God; it was a self-serving construction by those who controlled the media. Prophetic imagination has the task of thinking and speaking, analyzing and anticipating out beyond such “settled reality.” Of course the powerful elite wanted and welcomed no such “outside the box” utterance; one signal about its resistance to such dangerous rhetoric is the narrative concerning the expulsion of Amos by the priest at Bethel: “. . . never again prophesy at Bethel, for it is the king’s sanctuary, and it is a temple of the kingdom” (7:13). HOPE FOR THE FUTURE It is the case that each of these three prophetic books, perhaps in belated development, turns toward a good outcome for Israel. After the coming catastrophe of which they are certain, these prophetic witnesses imagine a new scenario of well-being for Israel. Amos can imagine a recovery of the Davidic dynasty after its fall, a recovery of prosperous agriculture after the plundering of an invading army, and the “restored future” of a safe, prosperous life: On that day I will raise up the booth of David that is fallen, and repair its breaches and raise up its ruins, and rebuild it as in the days of old. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The time is surely coming, says the LORD, when the one who plows shall overtake the one who reaps, and the treader of grapes the one who sows the seed; the mountains shall drip sweet wine, and all the hills shall flow with it. I will restore the fortunes of my people Israel, and they shall rebuild the ruined cities and inhabit them; they shall plant vineyards and drink their wine, and they shall make gardens and eat their fruit. I will plant them in their land,

• From Healing Our Broken Humanity: Practices for Revitalizing the Church and Renewing the World (2018)

  no different than 2,000 or 3,000 years ago when the Hittites had their gods, the Phoenicians had their gods, the Egyptians had their gods, and the Jews had their god. . . . If (since) the kingdom of heaven is not segregated, local churches on earth, wherever possible, should not be either.5 We agree. This new humanity in Christ is first expressed in tangible ways in the diversity in unity of the local, multiethnic church. New-humanity churches make at least four important commitments. First, they move away from ethnic segregation and foster diverse, multiethnic, or intercultural churches. As DeYmaz says, this diverse, multiethnic, new-humanity church was envisioned by Christ (Jn 17:20-23 ), described by Luke (Acts 11:19-26; 13:1 ), and prescribed by Paul (Ephesians).6 What a thrilling community to be a part of in this age and in the age to come! DeYmaz says that multiethnic churches have seven core commitments. 1 . They depend on the Spirit to help them be a diverse, multiethnic, new humanity in Christ Jesus. 2 . They take intentional steps to be multiethnic. 3 . They empower diverse leaders. 4 . They develop crosscultural relationships. 5 . They pursue crosscultural competence, including cultural intelligence. 6 . They promote a spirit of inclusion. 7 . They mobilize for impact.7 We encourage you to read Mark DeYmaz’s books on building multiethnic churches. You can find a list of his books at markdeymaz.com. Second, new-humanity churches foster cultural intelligence (often abbreviated as CQ) among their leadership and in their congregation. Cultural intelligence is the ability to understand different cultures and function effectively in situations of cultural diversity. The Cultural Intelligence Center says that cultural intelligence requires four skills: (1) CQ drive: a passion and confidence to adapt to multicultural settings; (2) CQ knowledge: an understanding of the similarities and differences between cultures; (3) CQ strategy: planning for multicultural conversations, relationships, and interactions; and (4) CQ action: seeking out multicultural relationships, and adapting when relating and working interculturally.8 Third, new-humanity churches commit to welcoming, fostering, and relishing diversity in all its forms: gender diversity, socioeconomic diversity, theological diversity, physical diversity, ethnic diversity, and so on. They are hospitable. Fourth, new-humanity churches are led by people who are committed to diversity and hospitality. These are lifelong learners about such things as leading multicultural teams, building multiethnic churches, and doing mission and ministry in pluralistic, diverse situations. This is transformative leadership. It refuses to accept the status quo. It is satisfied with nothing less than a diverse congregation and leadership team that fully reflects the new humanity in Jesus Christ. Hospitality and Being a Global ChurchOne of the reasons we must embrace diversity is that we are a part of a global church. The shape and make-up of this global church is rapidly changing.

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

  These two prophets seek to rally the identity and vocation of Jews in a time when faith is hard and prospects are lean. Such a time, they assert, is a time for vigorous action. The rebuilding of the temple is thus an act of faith, confident in the reality of God, and an act of defiance against the established imperial order of the world, even the imperial order that funded the project. We might well read these prophets in our own time of “small things” when the church seems to lack energy, courage, and imagination. In just such a time it is urgent to enact visible faithful gestures (like the temple building) that defy business as usual. Thus the prophetic imagination given here outruns historical possibility. That is the quality and depth of faith held here to which we are invited. The second part of Zechariah, chapters 9–14, moves into a more visionary possibility, no longer expending energy on present circumstance, not even the prospect of the rebuilt temple. The poetry yields the lines that are familiar among Christians who use them to praise the triumphal entry of Jesus: Rejoice greatly, O daughter Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter Jerusalem! Lo, your king comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey. 9:9; see Matt. 21:2–5; Mark 11:2–7 The poet imagines a coming king for Israel, gloriously triumphant when God’s own rule will be established in and over a world of hostile nations. (In the New Testament, the reference would surely concern a challenge to the rule of the Roman Empire; in our own context it might concern the rule of market ideology.) That expectation, against all worldly circumstance, is echoed by the repeated formula of chapter 14 that is fully convinced of a newness to be given by God: A day is coming . . . 14:1 On that day . . . vv. 6, 8, 9 This cluster of uses anticipates the day of God’s future when even the harnesses of the horses will be inscribed: “Holy to the LORD” (14:20). What a breathtaking prospect! In a world flattened to our control, vexed by greed, brutality, and exploitation (about which these Jews knew plenty), the alternative is the holiness of God that will countenance no such perverseness. The oracle can imagine God’s holiness, God’s holy city, God’s holy people, and God’s holy way in the world that will finally not be resisted. God, in God’s holiness, will prevail! This prophetic vision rejects the jungle of brutality that the earth has become. Haggai and Zechariah call for “strong hands” that are unafraid (Zech. 8:9)! MALACHI

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

  ]… clearly reflects the Classical, Hippocratic idea that the body itself, if left to its own devices, would naturally tend to a balanced condition of health, providing no environmental (external, i.e. “foreign”) factors interfered…. It is very interesting to note that it is precisely where such an ideology is least satisfying, in cases of chronic disabilities of generally healthy people (blindness, deafness, infertility, paralysis—the overwhelming majority of [Epidaurian] afflictions), that we see divine intervention. Lynn R. LiDonnici, The Epidaurian Miracle Inscriptions , p. 3 This, then, is a simple fact of our own modern-day experience: certain people, apparently once ill, are now well; they claim that they were suddenly cured by divine power; and no adequate medical explanation of the cure can be found. John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew , vol. 2, p. 516 In that preceding example of the AIDS patient in the movie Philadelphia , healing of the illness was brought about by the supportive companionship of those important to the patient. His stress was alleviated, his immune system was strengthened, and the ravages of the disease were delayed if not destroyed. That is certainly not the best one could wish, but neither is it the worst one could imagine. Thus supportive companionship can be seen as a first level of healing. In the case of Tom Hanks’s character, it could only postpone inevitable death. But with some forms of chronic or long-term pain—especially psychosomatic ailments, where stress or oppression, strain or exploitation have resulted in somatization or embodiment of the general distress as a specifically localized problem—supportive companionship can slowly but surely eliminate the disease itself. Rodney Stark, speaking of ancient epidemics, gives the following statistic: “Modern medical experts believe that conscientious nursing without any medications could cut the mortality rate by two-thirds or even more” (89). I cite that to remind us that supportive companionship could be crucial even for epidemic diseases. There is, however, another mode of healing that is very effective for certain people, under certain circumstances, with certain diseases, in certain places, and at certain times. I am speaking here of healing and even curing by religious faith. In the movie Philadelphia , as far as I can remember, religious faith was not a factor. There it was simply a case of supportive human companionship. But what about transcendental religious faith? Faith heals, and that’s a fact. Apart from intentional fakes or tricks, aside from deliberate quacks or charlatans, faith heals or even cures some people of some illnesses or diseases under some circumstances. In 1960 I visited the Roman Catholic healing shrines of the Virgin Mary at Lourdes in France and at Fatima in Portugal. In 1965 I visited the pagan healing shrines of the god Asklepios at Epidaurus in Greece and at Pergamum in Turkey.

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

  At the time I wrote The Historical Jesus I thought pro-Roman Sepphoris in Herodian Galilee was the most likely location for the creation of such a story (1991:387). I now find the time and place that Theissen proposed for his pre-Markan passion source the more likely location for my proposed Cross Gospel source: in the Jerusalem community at the time of Agrippa I in 41–44 C.E. Agrippa I was the grandson of Herod the Great and the Hasmonean princess Mariamme, but he lived almost exclusively in the imperial household at Rome from age five to age fifty, under the emperors Augustus and Tiberius and alongside the emperors-to-be Caligula and Claudius. In the last years of Tiberius he was imprisoned for an indiscreet remark desiring the emperor’s speedy replacement by Gaius Caligula. Six months later, with Tiberius dead and Caligula enthroned, Agrippa was released, given the northern territories of Philip in 37 and the central territories of Antipas in 39. Finally, in 41, after Caligula’s assassination and the enthronement of Claudius, the rest of the Jewish homeland was added to his kingdom. He was now king of the Jews, like his grandfather Herod the Great; and, if all went well, he might someday be Agrippa the Great. He was, to be sure, already fifty years of age. But Tiberius had become emperor at fifty-six and ruled for another twenty-three years. Caligula, on the other hand, had become emperor at twenty-nine and lasted only four years. The future was open and, in any case, he was now Jewish king of the entire Jewish homeland. Daniel Schwartz’s carefully critical and magnificently detailed study concludes that Agrippa was not involved in any subversive activity but that he wanted to be “Rome’s most important man in the East.” For that he needed to cultivate the Roman emperor Claudius far more than he would and to placate the Syrian governor Marsus far more than he could (143–144). Agrippa was the last hope of averting disaster between Roman power, the Jewish homeland, and even the Jewish Diaspora. And it does not seem that the brevity of his reign was what made that hope hopeless. This is Schwartz’s very perceptive judgment: “Agrippa’s short reign seems to be most notable due to two interrelated ironies. On the one hand, under Agrippa all of Palestine was re-united under a Jewish monarch—only to allow all of it, rather than a third as formerly, to return to direct Roman rule after his death. In other words, while it briefly appeared that through Agrippa Judaea could avert the steamroller of Roman history, it turned out that he helped smooth its path. And, on the other hand, a man who knew better than anyone that the fate of Judaea, and of the Jews of the Mediterranean world, was dependent upon Rome, was stubbornly viewed by too many people as harbinger of the type of anti-Roman Jewish nationalism embodied by some of his ancestors.

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

  It is, I will argue, on that precise and contemporary divide that Jesus took his stand, and it is against that divide that he proclaimed the kingdom of God. Like all the prophets before him, he spoke of justice and righteousness in a very specific situation of injustice and unrighteousness. Situation always focuses but does not exhaust such challenges. One final point. I have no presumption that what is primary is always better than what is secondary, or that what is original is better than what is derivative. The historical Jesus or earliest Christianity, as constructed by our best endeavors, could well be realities to be opposed from our contemporary viewpoint. It is vision and program that are determinative for that judgment. And what must be asked most specifically is whether the kingdom of God denotes a realm of domination or one of empowerment. But Jesus’ companions can do exactly what Jesus himself was doing. The kingdom is not his monopoly; it is for anyone with courage enough to accept it. Jesus announces its presence, its abiding, permanent possibility. He does not initiate its existence. He does not control its access. It is the kingdom, not of Jesus, but of God. It is the will of God for Israel and therefore for earth. It is not a new idea from God. It is not a change in divine plan. It is not a new strategy in transcendental justice for this world. Imagine, as an alternative example, that Jesus had settled down with his family at Nazareth or with Peter at Capernaum and had sent out disciples to bring or send back to him those in need of healing or teaching. That would have symbolized a God of domination and a kingdom of control and mastery. If that were the historical Jesus I had discovered, he would be promoting domination—kinder and gentler, to be sure, than Caesar’s, but still domination and not empowerment. Even the term disciples is probably not the proper term for that inaugural community. It presumes a master and students, a teacher and pupils. And even though teaching can be empowerment rather than domination, it can also be the opposite. I prefer, therefore, in the light of those three seminal texts, to describe the kingdom of God not as a discipleship of equals , with Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza (189), but as a companionship of empowerment . Disciples (or students) can all be equal with one another and still subordinate to a teacher. The root question is whether God, and hence the kingdom of God, and thence Jesus as the announcer of its permanent availability, are to be seen within a model of domination or empowerment. THE COMPANIONSHIP OF THE KINGDOM I term the group around Jesus the Companionship of the Kingdom . The term companions is deliberately chosen in preference to disciples , which is simply the Greek word for students .

• From Healing Our Broken Humanity: Practices for Revitalizing the Church and Renewing the World (2018)

  In that large city we can see a witness to life together in Riverside Church as different people from around the world worship and engage in ministry and life together. In Sunday morning worship there, you can see intercultural ministry being lived out as people of different walks of life come together to worship. The global church needs a compelling vision of a healed and whole Christian community like Riverside Church demonstrates. We need a redeemed Christian social imagination.4 The global church needs fresh postures before a watching world. Now, we need to be careful here. We’ll never address racial injustice with tokenism, pragmatism, cultural accommodation, or window dressing. Merely replacing white male leaders and speakers with women and people of color won’t solve any problems. In fact it’ll just entrench problems. We need long-term, systemic, and theological solutions to animosity and division in the church and world. That requires addressing the underlying issues. These include internalized racism and a diseased and disfigured Christian imagination. We need to get to the root of racialized, individualistic, privatized, and rootless identities. And we need to embrace and express a compelling, biblical vision of the church. Only this way can we truly be the new humanity in Christ. Only this way can we truly be the church. Only this way can we have a strategic social ethic. Only this way can we show the world what God intends the world to be. Only this way can we embrace a compelling vision of a healed, whole, and multiethnic Christian community—one body in Jesus Christ. One Messiah. Our unity comes from our Messiah, Jesus Christ. We are united with him in his death and resurrection as his body. He has created this new humanity and is the source and sustainer of our new life in him. As Paul says, the Messiah is the image of the invisible God. He is the source of new and eternal life for all those who trust and believe in him, and he is the fullness of God. He reconciles humanity to God and to one another through his death and resurrection (Col 1:13-23 ). Any life, hope, vitality, forgiveness, and unity the church knows is only found in and through its Lord and Messiah. This is the ministry of reconciliation—between God and humanity, between whites and peoples of color, between rich and poor, between young and old, between Democrats and Republicans, between commerce and the earth, and the list goes on. Our reconciliation, redemption, and unity in diversity are in Christ alone. But let’s not make any mistake—this is about justice, peace, freedom, reconciliation, and hope for all peoples and all creation. It goes beyond us. This is because everyone and everything has “been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church” (Col 1:16-18 ).

• From Healing Our Broken Humanity: Practices for Revitalizing the Church and Renewing the World (2018)

  This only happens when we prioritize and value their agency and voice, and when we redistribute power and resources. Restoring justice is fundamentally about following a just God and being a just church. God hates injustice. God is just. The biblical story is one of a just and loving God reaching out to humanity to restore justice, wholeness, healing, and redemption. The church is an alternative community. God calls this church to embrace, proclaim, embody, and practice restored justice. We do this by practicing a restored ethic, a restored hope, a restored community, a restored peace, a restored truth, a restored love, and a restored reconciliation. Opening Our Hearts to the Suffering of OthersAs Christians we need to educate ourselves about justice and injustice. This begins by asking critical questions of ourselves, our churches, and our culture, and responding courageously to the answers. What is justice? What causes injustice? What biblical and theological themes are relevant? What does Jesus say about justice and injustice? How do people experience injustice, and what does it do to their lives, families, and communities? How has the church been complicit in injustice? How have our theologies facilitated the exploitation of indigenous and First Nations peoples? In what ways have these theologies accelerated and enabled the plundering and warming of the earth? How has the church’s posture and attitude entrenched divisions along ethnic, gender, and class lines? How can we acknowledge our sin and our complicity? What does it look like for the church to lament, repent, change, and seek forgiveness, justice, and reconciliation? What role does the church play in restoring justice? How is injustice expressed in racism, sexism, poverty, ecological degradation, war, debt, and so on? How can we—called by our just God to be a just church—help address these injustices and restore true justice? But we will never understand injustice and justice until we open our hearts and lives to the suffering of others. John Dear tells the story of Oscar Romero. In the early years of his ministry as a priest he was not especially interested in the lives and plight of the poor. But when Romero became archbishop, he was challenged by Salvadorian Jesuit priest Rutilio Grande to learn from the poor. Grande challenged Romero to enter the lives of the poor, to listen to their suffering, to see injustices, and to speak on their behalf. On March 12, 1977, Rutilio Grande was murdered for speaking up for the poor. Standing over Grande’s dead body that night, Romero decided to give his life to championing the cause of the poor, suffering, and oppressed. He challenged the government and military, and he spoke out against the torture, disappearances, murders, and injustices suffered by the Salvadorian people. Opening his heart to the suffering of others, Romero opened the seminary in downtown San Salvador to hundreds of homeless, hungry, and fearful people.

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

  The person of Jeremiah and consequently the book of Jeremiah are rooted in the old covenant of Sinai that is reflected in the traditions of Deuteronomy. Jeremiah himself is said to be from among “the priests who were in Anathoth” (1:1). That locates him in the northern tribal territory of Benjamin, apart from the southern tribal area of Judah that is the home of the Davidic tradition. His home town of Anathoth, moreover, is the home of Abiathar, the priest banished by King Solomon (1 Kgs. 2:26–27). This linkage suggests that Jeremiah is a product of a religious, pious northern tradition that was in principle opposed to the dynastic power of David in the south. Jeremiah could imagine a societal order in which dynasty and temple were nonessential and quite dispensable. Where king and temple were the ordering institutions for Isaiah, the ordering institution of Jeremiah was the Torah of Sinai, that is, the Ten Commandments and the extensive imaginative interpretation of them in the four books of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. The focus of Torah in Deuteronomy is especially on social justice for the vulnerable—the widow, the orphan, the immigrant—those without social protection in a patriarchal society. The Jeremiah tradition insists that the Jerusalem establishment has in wholesale ways violated Torah requirements. Breaking the covenant leads to covenantal sanctions (curses) that would bring the destruction of Jerusalem: Yet they did not obey or incline their ear, but everyone walked in the stubbornness of an evil will. So I brought upon them all the words of this covenant, which I commanded them to do, but they did not. 11:8 Breaking covenant with YHWH (or Yahweh, or God; see glossary) results in a failed society. But from the same tradition Jeremiah can imagine a covenantal renewal initiated by God: The days are surely coming, says the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. . . . I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. . . . for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more. 31:31–34 The new covenant—the renewed covenant of Sinai—is one in which Israel will be glad to assent to the Torah commandments that make for a viable covenant community. The book of Jeremiah moves from reprimand for violations of covenant, to the prospect of a renewed covenant that is based on divine forgiveness. EZEKIEL

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

  The book, covering a long stretch of time, features the failure of the city, its king and priests, the demise of the city at the hands of the Babylonians, and the anticipated recovery of the city. Below are verses that reflect each of these aspects of Isaiah. The prophet describes the jeopardy and failure of the city: And daughter Zion1 is left like a booth in a vineyard, like a shelter in a cucumber field, like a besieged city. 1:8 The prophet anticipates the deportation of the royal family from the city: Days are coming when all that is in your house, and that which your ancestors have stored up until this day, shall be carried to Babylon; nothing shall be left, says the LORD. 39:6 The prophet announces a gospel of comfort to the destroyed city: Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid, that she has received from the Lord’s hand double for all her sins. 40:1; cf. 52:7 Isaiah anticipates the restoration of the city: But be glad and rejoice forever in what I am creating; for I about to create Jerusalem as a joy, and its people as a delight. I will rejoice in Jerusalem, and delight in my people; . . . 65:18–19 The prophet assures that the city will again become prosperous: Your gates shall always be open; day and night they shall not be shut, so that nations shall bring you their wealth, with their kings led in procession. 60:11 Isaiah does not doubt that God’s commitment to Jerusalem will succeed as the international destination for all nations in their quest for well-being: For out of Zion shall go forth instruction, and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore. 2:3–4 Isaiah is such an important book in the Jewish and Christian traditions that we will spend two chapters discussing it in more detail. JEREMIAH

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

  I remember being struck by the general similarity between the ailments involved in stories of healing at all those shrines (as well as by ailments whose reminders could be seen: there were many crutches at the back of the grotto at Lourdes, for example, but no prosthetic limbs or empty coffins). Similarly, Lynn LiDonnici’s list of fourth-century B.C.E. votive offerings at Epidaurus includes this rather laconic one (96–97): A 16. Nicanor, lame. When he was sitting down, being awake, some boy grabbed his crutch and ran away. Getting up he ran after him and from this he became well. One can, of course, rationalize or psychologize the seventy or so tales of healing in the Epidaurian inscriptions. My Greek guide at Epidaurus extolled Greek culture and spoke of ancient gods, priests, and miracles. My Turkish guide at Pergamum ignored Greek culture and spoke of ancient doctors, psychiatrists, and patients. One can also, according to one’s taste, jeer at ancient credulity or sneer at modern skepticism. Neither response is particularly helpful. Real people with real ailments—including paralysis, blindness, deafness, dumbness, growths, and wounds—were clearly healed at Epidaurus. The patients, having read the miracle inscriptions of those healed before them, spent the night in a special building called the Abaton. They hoped for a dream through which or in which Asklepios would heal them so that they could awake healthy in the morning. Compare, then, these two testimonials, again from LiDonnici (84–85, 110–111, slightly simplified): A 1. Kleo was pregnant for five years. After the fifth year of pregnancy, she came as a suppliant to the god and slept in the Abaton. As soon as she had left it and was outside the sacred area, she gave birth to a son who, as soon as he was born, washed himself at the fountain and walked about with his mother. After this success, she inscribed upon an offering: “The wonder is not the size of the plaque, but the act of the god: Kleo bore a burden in her stomach for five years, until she slept here, and he made her well.” B 14. A woman from Troizen, concerning children. This woman, sleeping here, saw a dream. It seemed to her the god said that she would have a family and he asked whether her wish was for a male or a female, and she said she wished for a male. After this, within a year a son was born to her. In that first case, a miraculous ailment obtains a normal cure. In the second case, a normal ailment obtains a miraculous cure. But, whatever about that second instance, no amount of psychologizing explains the first condition. Five-year pregnancies do not happen, and it is not just post-Enlightenment rationalism to say so. What happens in such cases is simply this: devotional inflation. Real healings and even real cures do take place. Women like Kleo who have lost all hope bear children, for example.

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

  But covert resistance uses the “weapons of the weak … the tenacity of self-preservation—in ridicule, in truculence, in irony, in petty acts of noncompliance … in resistant mutuality, in the disbelief in elite homilies, in the steady grinding efforts to hold one’s own against overwhelming odds—a spirit and practice that prevents the worst and promises something better” (1985:350). The third and final point distinguishes once more “between the open, declared forms of resistance, which attract most attention, and the disguised low-profile, undeclared resistance that constitutes the domain of infrapolitics.” It then goes on to identify three different aspects or strata of that covert resistance. The first stratum is ideological resistance through the “development of dissident subcultures” such as millennial religions, myths of social banditry and class heroes, world-upside-down imagery, and myths of the ideal king. The next stratum is status resistance through a “hidden transcript of anger, aggression, and disguised discourses of dignity,” such as tales of revenge, carnival symbolism, gossip, and rumor. The final stratum is material resistance through “everyday forms” such as “poaching, squatting, desertion, evasion, foot-dragging” (1990:198). My proposal is that there is a close correlation between those three strata of covert resistance and the processes of healing. This is particularly true where unhealth (especially sickness) leading to disease derives from social discrimination, exploitation, and oppression. That brings me back to the epigraph about disease and unresisted discrimination and to that black internist who wanted not just medical diagnosis but social revolution. I think she was on the right track. There is a third process of healing besides the two already mentioned (though it can, of course, intertwine with them): besides supportive companionship and religious faith , the practice of covert resistance can contribute to healing. (As an aside, while such resistance is covert and disguised to the oppression it opposes, it is quite obvious to those who practice it.) We can understand why people went to Asklepios or Mary for healing, but how did people decide to go to Jesus for healing, and/or how did Jesus know he could heal? Watch, in what follows, how ideological resistance-healing moves from the ideological level of the kingdom of God through the status level of the companionship of the kingdom to the material resistance-level of eating together. Healing involves directly both sickness before and illness after disease; and thereby, but only thereby, does it touch disease itself. Healing and Miracles [One] observation on miracles and the modern mind concerns what might be called the academic sneer factor. If a full debate on the possibility and reality of miracles were to take place on American university campuses today—a highly unlikely event—such a debate would be tolerated in many quarters only with a strained smile that could hardly mask a sneer. Before any positions were articulated or discussed, the solemn creed of many university professors, especially in religion departments, would be recited sotto voce: “No modern educated person can accept the possibility of miracles.” John P.