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 Cleanness (2020)

  He was one of the first friends I had made in Bulgaria, a journalist and a poet, an alumnus of the school where I taught. We had met at some function where he was held up as an example, since after college and graduate school in the States he had decided to come back, as almost none of our students ever did; if you came back it meant you had failed, our students thought, but D. hadn’t failed, it was an important example. The boulevard was blocked off after the intersection with Rakovski and we spilled out into the street, which was already full of people, as was the square in front of the Presidency. This had yellow police barricades in front of it but was otherwise protected only by the usual ornamental guard, two men in nineteenth-century uniforms staring blankly and unfazed, bayonets held stiffly at their sides. The police were gathered across the boulevard, in front of the former Communist Party headquarters, which served as Parliament offices now and where there was a much larger space kept free from protesters, the distance a bottle could be thrown, I thought—but they were relaxed, most of them held their helmets under their arms. Their riot shields were stacked in piles leaning against the bus they had traveled in on, the size of an American schoolbus, painted blue and white. They were smiling and talking with one another, with the protesters, toward whom they had expressed a benevolent neutrality, claiming in public statements that they were keeping the protests safe, that so long as they remained peaceful they had no intention of putting a stop to them; and the protesters reciprocated, one man stood now in front of them with a sign that read WE THANK OUR FRIENDS THE POLICE . The hope was that by saying it one could make it so, I thought, and so far the hope had held. Interspersed among the crowd were large white vans, teams of newscasters; cameramen stood on their roofs, next to the satellite dishes, scanning the crowd. People were milling about, many of them holding their signs above their heads to block the sun; it could have been a fair, almost, the crowd was bright with balloons, with spinning pinwheels children waved, with the sounds of whistles and handheld drums. Near the fountain, in the shade of a tree, a man had set out a table with these trinkets, most of all with the little Bulgarian flags that he held out to passersby, calling out po levche sa , one lev each. There were other street vendors, too; the air was sweet with roasted walnuts, and people were carrying little plastic bags of sunflower seeds, bottles of water still sweating with condensation.

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  "An' I'd tell 'em: Look! Look at Joe! He moves lovely! Look how he moves, alive and aware. He's beautiful! An' look at Jonah! He's clumsy, he's ugly, because he's niver willin' to rouse himself. I'd tell 'em: Look! look at yourselves! one shoulder higher than t'other, legs twisted, feet all lumps! What have yer done ter yerselves, wi' the blasted work? Spoilt yerselves. No need to work that much. Take yer clothes off an' look at yourselves. Yer ought ter be alive an' beautiful, an' yer ugly an' half dead. So I'd tell 'em. An' I'd get my men to wear different clothes: 'appen close red trousers, bright red, an' little short white jackets. Why, if men had red, fine legs, that alone would change them in a month. They'd begin to be men again, to be men! An' the women could dress as they liked. Because if once the men walked with legs close bright scarlet, and buttocks nice and showing scarlet under a little white jacket: then the woman 'ud begin to be women. It's because th' men _aren't_ men, that th' women have to be.--An' in time pull down Tevershall and build a few beautiful buildings, that would hold us all. An' clean the country up again. An' not have many children, because the world is overcrowded. "But I wouldn't preach to the men: only strip 'em an' say: Look at yourselves! That's workin' for money!--Hark at yourselves! That's working for money. You've been working for money! Look at Tevershall! It's horrible. That's because it was built while you was working for money. Look at your girls! They don't care about you, you don't care about them. It's because you've spent your time working an' caring for money. You can't talk nor move nor live, you can't properly be with a woman. You're not alive. Look at yourselves!" There fell a complete silence. Connie was half listening, and threading in the hair at the root of his belly a few forget-me-nots that she had gathered on the way to the hut. Outside, the world had gone still, and a little icy. "You've got four kinds of hair," she said to him. "On your chest it's nearly black, and your hair isn't dark on your head: but your moustache is hard and dark red, and your hair here, your love-hair, is like a little bush of bright red-gold mistletoe. It's the loveliest of all!" He looked down and saw the milky bits of forget-me-nots in the hair on his groin. "Ay! There's where to put forget-me-nots, in the man-hair, or the maiden-hair. But don't you care about the future?" She looked up at him. "Oh, I do, terribly!" she said.

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

  for both of us, and as far as finding jobs was concerned we had no prospects at all. We didn’t speak French, and even if we did we would never be able to get working papers. I belonged in school, anyway. The whole idea was ridiculous. Still, he and his wife wanted to do what they could. They had talked it over and come up with a plan they wanted us to consider. This was that I should come alone to Paris and live with them and go to school with my cousins, one of whom, Kathy, was my age and would be able to help me make friends and learn the ropes. While I lived with them my mother would be free to get away from Dwight and look for work. Once she got settled, really settled—say in a year or so—I could rejoin her. My uncle referred to a check he’d apparently enclosed, saying he was sorry he couldn’t send more. He hoped my mother would give every consideration to his plan, which seemed to him a good one. In the future he thought it would be best if she wrote him herself. “What do you think?” my mother asked. “I don’t know,” I said. “Paris.” She said, “Just think of it. You in Paris.” “Paris,” I said. She nodded. “So what do you think?” “I don’t know. What about you?” “He has some pretty good points. It would be a great experience for you, living in Paris. And it would give me some time to see how things go here.” I was trying to be sober and so was she, but we ended up grinning at each other. “Just don’t say anything about the check,” my mother said. DWIGHT WAS ALL for packing me off to Paris. The thought that I would soon be leaving softened him and disposed him toward reminiscence. He said that his travels during the war had given him a whole nother outlook on life. He gave me advice on how to treat Frenchmen, and counseled me to be broad-minded when confronted with their effeminate customs. I heard a lot about the French people’s appetite for frogs, and learned that this was how they came to be known as Frogs

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  Sal greeted death in a very different manner. His spirit expanded as his life drew to a close. His imminent death flooded his life with a meaning he had never previously known. Multiple myeloma, an extraordinarily painful bone-invasive cancer, was Sal’s disease; he had fractured many bones and was encased in a full body cast from neck to thigh. So many people loved Sal that it was hard to believe he was only thirty. Like Paula, he had been, at a time of greatest despair, transformed by the stunning idea that his cancer was his ministry. This revelation determined everything Sal did subsequently in life, even his agreeing to enter the group: he felt it might provide a forum to help others find some transcendent meaning in their illness. Although Sal entered our group six months too early, when it was still too small to give him the audience he deserved, he found other platforms—primarily high schools, where he addressed troubled teenagers. “You want to corrupt your body with drugs? Want to kill it with booze, with grass, with cocaine?” his voice thundered through the auditorium. “You want to smash your body in autos? Kill it? Throw it off the Golden Gate Bridge? You don’t want it? Well, then, give me your body! Let me have it. I need it. I’ll take it—I want to live!” It was an extraordinary appeal. I trembled when I heard him speak. The force of his delivery was augmented by the particular power that we always give to the words of the dying. The students listened in silence, sensing, as I did, that he was speaking truly, that he had no time for game playing or pretense or fear of consequences. Evelyn’s arrival in the group a month later provided Sal with another opportunity to work at his ministry. Sixty-two years old, embittered, and gravely ill with leukemia, Evelyn was wheeled into the group with a blood transfusion in process. She was candid about her illness. She knew she was dying: “I can accept that,” she said, “it no longer matters. But what does matter is my daughter. She is poisoning my final days!” Evelyn reviled her daughter, a clinical psychologist, as “a vindictive, unloving woman.” Months earlier they had had a bitter and foolish argument after her daughter, caring for Evelyn’s cat, had fed it the wrong food. Since then they had not spoken to each other. After hearing her out, Sal spoke to her simply and passionately. “Listen to what I have to say, Evelyn. I’m dying too. What does it matter what your cat eats? What does it matter who gives in first? You know you don’t have much time left. Let’s stop pretending. Your daughter’s love is the most important thing in the world to you. Don’t die, please don’t die, without telling her that! It will poison her life, she’ll never recover, and she’ll pass on the poison to her daughter! Break the cycle! Break the cycle, Evelyn!”

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  9. Orient to the here and now, contact the environment and reestablish the capacity for social engagement. Step 1. Establish an environment of relative safetyAfter my accident, the first inkling my body had of being other than profoundly helpless and disoriented was when the pediatrician came and sat by my side. As simple as this seems, her calm, centered presence gave me a slight glimmer of hope that things might turn out OK. Such soothing support in the midst of chaos is a critical element that trauma therapists must provide for their unsettled and troubled clients. This truly is the starting point for one’s return to equilibrium. The therapist must, in other words, help to create an environment of relative safety, an atmosphere that conveys refuge, hope and possibility. For traumatized individuals, this can be a very delicate task. Fortunately, given propitious conditions, the human nervous system is designed and attuned both to receive and to offer a regulating influence to another person.53 Thankfully, biology is on our side. This transference of succor, our mammalian birthright, is fostered by the therapeutic tone and working alliance you create by tuning in to your client’s sensibilities. With the therapist’s calm secure center, relaxed alertness, compassionate containment and evident patience, the client’s distress begins to lessen. However minimally, his or her willingness to explore is prompted, encouraged and owned. While resistance will inevitably appear, it will soften and recede with the holding environment created by the skilled therapist. One possible roadblock, however, happens between sessions; when they are without their therapist’s calm, regulating presence, clients may feel raw and thrown back into the lion’s den of chaotic sensations when exposed to the same triggers that overwhelmed them in the first place. The therapist who provides only a sense of safety (no matter how effectively) will only make the client increasingly dependent—and thus will increase the imbalance of power between therapist and client. To avoid such sabotage, the next steps are aimed at helping the client move toward establishing his or her own agency and capacity for mastering self-soothing and feelings of empowerment and self-regulation. Step 2. Support initial exploration and acceptance of sensationTraumatized individuals have lost both their way in the world and the vital guidance of their inner promptings. Cut off from the primal sensations, instincts and feelings arising from the interior of their bodies, they are unable to orient to the “here and now.” Therapists must be able to help clients navigate the labyrinth of trauma by helping them find their way home to their bodily sensations and capacity to self-soothe.

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

  Faced with the complications of affairs, divorce, and remarriage, some of my patients attempt a different course. Nonmonogamous people value the freedom of sexual expression, and they try to reconcile the perennials of love with the surprises of desire, hoping to resist the lassitude that creeps in with time. To repeat Marguerite’s words, this is not a recipe for everyone. The presence of the third is a fact of life; how we deal with it is up to us. We can approach it with fear, avoidance, and moral outrage; or we can bring to it a robust curiosity and a sense of intrigue. In his steamy affair, Doug courts it secretly. Bill’s devastation is born of a desperate attempt to deny it. Selena and Max invite it in fantasy, but draw the line there. Joan and Hiro escort the third straight into their bedroom. Marriage has become a matter of love; love is a matter of choice; and choice implies renouncing others. But that doesn’t mean the others are dead. Nor does it mean that we need to deaden our senses so as to protect ourselves from their allure. Acknowledging the third has to do with validating the erotic separateness of our partner. It follows that our partner’s sexuality does not belong to us. It isn’t just for and about us, and we should not assume that it rightfully falls within our jurisdiction. It doesn’t. Perhaps that is true in action, but certainly not in thought. The more we choke each other’s freedom, the harder it is for desire to breathe within a committed relationship. Pursue the logic, and you have the itinerary for an emotionally enlarging journey. It goes something like this: I know you look at others, but I can’t fully know what you see. I know others are looking at you, but I don’t really know who it is they’re seeing. Suddenly you’re no longer familiar. You’re no longer a known entity that I need not bother being curious about. In fact, you’re quite a mystery. And I’m a little unnerved. Who are you? I want you. Accommodating the third opens up an erotic expanse where eros needn’t worry about wilting. In that expanse, we can be deeply moved by our partner’s otherness, and soon thereafter deeply aroused. I’d like to suggest that we view monogamy not as a given but as a choice. As such, it becomes a negotiated decision. More to the point, if we’re planning to spend fifty years with one soul—and we want a happy jubilee—it may be wiser to review our contract at various junctures. Just how accommodating each couple may be to the third varies. But at least a nod is more apt to sustain desire with our one and only over the long haul—and perhaps even to create a new “art of loving” for the twenty-first century couple. 11 Putting the X Back in SexBringing the Erotic Home

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  Amen. (1:5–6) You are worthy to take the scroll; You are worthy to open its seals; For you were slaughtered and with your own blood You purchased a people for God, From every tribe and tongue, From every people and nation, And made them a kingdom and priests to our God And they will reign on the earth. (5:9–10) Blessed and holy is the one who has a share in the first resurrection! The second death has no power over them. They will be priests to God and the Messiah, and they will reign with him for a thousand years. (20:6) The third passage repeats the vocation (“royal priesthood”), but not the means by which it is achieved (the Messiah’s death); but the first two are quite clear. The death of Jesus, “freeing us from our sins” and “purchasing a people for God,” was not simply aimed at rescuing humans from “hell,” so that they could go to “heaven” instead—which is the picture most Christians have when they think about Jesus’s death. The great scene at the end of the book is the joining together of the “new heavens and new earth.” Being there in the presence of God and the Lamb will give back to the redeemed the role marked out for them from the beginning in Genesis and reaffirmed as Israel’s vocation in the book of Exodus. There God promises his newly rescued people that they will be his “treasured possession,” “a priestly kingdom and a holy nation” (19:5–6). The priestly vocation consists of summing up the praises of creation before the Creator; the royal vocation, in turn, means reflecting God’s wisdom and justice into the world. This is a direct outworking of Genesis 1:26–28, where humans are created in the divine image. The book of Revelation picks up this theme exactly where Israel’s scriptures left off. It says—shockingly, of course—that the ancient vocation had been renewed in a new and revolutionary way through the death of the Messiah. Once we get the goal right (the new creation, not just “heaven”) and the human problem properly diagnosed (idolatry and the corruption of vocation, not just “sin”), the larger biblical vision of Jesus’s death begins to come into view. A short aside may be needed at this point. Some readers may feel anxious about both elements of the vocation I am describing, the “royal” bit and the “priestly” bit. Let me say a word about each. For many people, not least those who got rid of monarchs in the eighteenth century, the very idea of kings or queens seems outdated, antiquated, unnecessary, and quite possibly abusive. People often ask me why I continue to talk about the “kingdom of God” when kingdoms in general have been such a disaster, making a few people rich and proud and a great many people poor and downtrodden.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  Conversely, the Day of Atonement, by itself, was not about rescue from slavery, the overthrowing of hostile powers. But the particular situation of Israel, from Babylon to the time of Jesus and indeed beyond, demanded that the hope of Israel should somehow bring these two together. The way to national liberation would be through the forgiveness of sins: as we have seen repeatedly in this book, sin is the grip that the “powers,” working through idols, have clamped on those who worship them, so that dealing with sin and breaking the power of the “powers” are two sides of the same coin. And this is where the narrative of Israel has arrived. It is no longer simply a matter of coming out of Egypt and constructing the tabernacle as the place of meeting, the new Eden where heaven and earth may come together. It is about a much darker place: Israel has committed idolatry, has sinned, and has ultimately gone into exile. At the heart of the new Passover, therefore, there would be a new kind of atonement: God purifies his people in and through the shed blood of Jesus, so that the covenant may be renewed, and not just renewed, but now effective for the whole world. (Something like this seems to be the meaning of 1 John 2:2.) At the heart of new apolytrōsis would stand the new hilastērion. And this would display the covenant faithfulness of Israel’s God, calling the whole world to worship. The hilastērion would therefore be the place of cleansing. When mortal humans come into the Presence of the living God, they bring with them pollution, particularly the ultimate pollution of death and anything to do with it. Sin matters because it is the telltale symptom of idolatry. (How can you come into God’s Temple if you have been surreptitiously worshipping other gods?) Idolatry, turning away from the source of life, results in sin, which already breathes the musty air of death. And death is the ultimate denial of the goodness of God’s creation—the very thing that the Temple, holding together heaven and earth, was supposed to affirm. How, then, can the Temple be cleansed so that humans, with the polluting smell of death upon them, can nevertheless come into God’s Presence? The answer supplied by the levitical rituals is that the sacrificial blood is the sign of God-given life, a life more powerful than death, a life therefore that purifies both sanctuary and worshipper. Cleansing thus enables meeting. The hilastērion points to both. That is why Paul can sum up the effect of Romans 1–4 by saying at the start of chapter 5 that we have “peace with God” and “access” by faith to his Presence. This is Temple language.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  Captivated by the Cross Someone recently drew my attention to an energetic, youthful organization calling itself the “Jesus Army.” It has, of course, a website, and I confess that when I first looked at it, I was expecting trite clichés and tired slogans. Not at all. It had the feel of fresh discovery and embraced a wider variety of spiritual traditions and practical programs than I had anticipated. But at its heart it remained deeply traditional, as you can see in the posting that caught my eye. This short piece places the spotlight on the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth, the event that forms the subject of this book. It draws our attention to the strange, perhaps even revolutionary power that this event still appears to possess, despite all the skepticism and sneering of today’s world: YOU can’t get away from it. It’s everywhere. The cross. In homes, in films, in paintings, in pop videos. Worn as an earring, on a necklace. Stitched or studded onto leather or denim. Tattooed onto skin . . . What would Coca-Cola or McDonald’s give to own a symbol that millions wear around their necks every day? The cross is the universal Christian symbol, acknowledged by millions of Christians everywhere as the single visual sign of their faith. Which is weird, isn’t it? Because the cross was originally a symbol of suffering and defeat. The Roman Empire killed thousands of its enemies by nailing them to wooden crosses. It’s like wearing a gibbet around your neck. Or hanging a little golden lethal injection from your necklace. Jesus Christ was executed 2,000 years ago by the Romans. But Christians believe Jesus didn’t stay dead—that Jesus beat death and rose again, beyond death’s reach. That makes the cross not a sign of death, but a sign of the end of death. A sign of hope, a sign of possibility—for every human being. That’s why Christians wear crosses. The Jesus Army wear and give away bright red crosses. Jesus Army member Chris, 38, says, “We give away hundreds of crosses. People like them. They glow in UV light, which makes them popular with clubbers! But all sorts of people like them and use them to help them to think about God or to pray.” “They’re designed to stand out” he adds. “The cross of Jesus means we can be forgiven and can have a new start. Even death’s been clobbered.” “It’s worth shouting about.” 1 There’s quite a lot to think about in that sharp little extract.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  For the moment, though, we must return to the question of how what Paul says in Romans 3:24–26 addresses the problem of human sin. As we have seen, in the Second Temple period, the hope for a final great act of divine deliverance, a new Passover, included the hope for the ultimate “forgiveness of sins.” Passover was not itself an “atoning” festival. Conversely, the Day of Atonement, by itself, was not about rescue from slavery, the overthrowing of hostile powers. But the particular situation of Israel, from Babylon to the time of Jesus and indeed beyond, demanded that the hope of Israel should somehow bring these two together. The way to national liberation would be through the forgiveness of sins: as we have seen repeatedly in this book, sin is the grip that the “powers,” working through idols, have clamped on those who worship them, so that dealing with sin and breaking the power of the “powers” are two sides of the same coin. And this is where the narrative of Israel has arrived. It is no longer simply a matter of coming out of Egypt and constructing the tabernacle as the place of meeting, the new Eden where heaven and earth may come together. It is about a much darker place: Israel has committed idolatry, has sinned, and has ultimately gone into exile. At the heart of the new Passover, therefore, there would be a new kind of atonement: God purifies his people in and through the shed blood of Jesus, so that the covenant may be renewed, and not just renewed, but now effective for the whole world. (Something like this seems to be the meaning of 1 John 2:2.) At the heart of new apolytrōsis would stand the new hilastērion. And this would display the covenant faithfulness of Israel’s God, calling the whole world to worship.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  David then brought it back, intending to build a permanent shrine in his new capital, Jerusalem. This became the subject of one of the most significant brief conversations in the Old Testament. The prophet Nathan, responding to David’s proposal to build God a “house,” declared that God would instead build David a “house.” This was an important passage for some Jews in the time of Jesus, and it was extremely important for the early Christians as they reflected on the meaning of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection: YHWH declares to you that YHWH will build you a house. When your days are fulfilled and you lie down with your ancestors, I will raise up your seed after you, who shall come forth from your body, and I will establish his kingdom. He shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever. I will be a father to him, and he shall be a son to me. (2 Sam. 7:11–14, slightly altered) The point is, of course, a pun on “house.” David asks permission to construct a building, but God promises him a family. Has God, speaking through Nathan, changed the subject? Is it just a verbal trick? No. First, because David’s son Solomon will be responsible for constructing the Temple in Jerusalem; and, second, because David’s ultimate son will be, in a tantalizingly special yet unspecific sense, God’s own son. In the shimmering possibilities of later readings, particularly the early Christian readings generated by Jesus’s resurrection (where “I will raise up your seed” suddenly took on a meaning never before imagined), the building that Solomon would construct was only a signpost to the ultimate divine answer to David’s request. If there is to be a place where the living God will dwell forever among his people, it will not be in a building of bricks and mortar; it will be in and as a human being, the ultimate son of David. Somehow everything that might be thought and celebrated about the Temple and about God’s intention of dwelling with his people would come into a new world of meaning when David’s projected “house” turned out to be a human being. The great royal psalms, such as Psalms 2, 72, and 132, celebrate this promise. Psalm 89, intriguingly, likewise celebrates the promise, but questions rather sharply why it isn’t being fulfilled as expected. We can imagine devout Jews through to Jesus’s day and beyond singing and praying those ancient prayers in the hope that one day deliverance would come, one day a true king would come, one day the living God would call the whole world to account and come back to live forever with his people.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  Hebrews, in particular, explores what it means to think of Jesus as simultaneously the ultimate high priest and the ultimate sacrifice. First Peter addresses a situation where followers of Jesus are facing fierce persecution and interprets the cross both as the once-for-all achievement of Jesus and as the model set for his followers by that achievement. It would be interesting to pursue these further in relation to the way we have approached the central New Testament writings, but that must be a task for another time, and perhaps another pen. What we can say beyond any doubt is that within the first generation of the church there was an explosion of revolutionary beliefs about what had been accomplished on the day Jesus died, but that the revolution had a definite shape that remained constant across different traditions and widely different styles of expression. The early “official” summary remained the gold standard: the Messiah “died for our sins in accordance with the Bible.” Those who expounded this belief did so with a robust understanding of each element. The great narratives of scripture, it was assumed, had finally arrived at their divinely intended goal. This was naturally controversial then, and it has been controversial ever since, just as every messianic claim was controversial in early Judaism, meaning as it did that other claims about where Israel’s history might be going were to be set aside. The early Christians stuck to the basic belief. Jesus had been raised from the dead; therefore, he really was Israel’s Messiah; therefore his death really was the new Passover; his death really had dealt with the sins that had caused “exile” in the first place; and this had been accomplished by Jesus’s sharing and bearing the full weight of evil, and doing so alone. In his suffering and death, “Sin” was condemned. The darkest of dark powers was defeated, and its captives were set free. Despite his repeated hints, none of Jesus’s followers initially regarded his death as anything other than a complete disaster. Nobody knew, on the evening of the first Good Friday, that any of this sequence of thought, from victory over the “powers” to dealing with sins, might even be thinkable. But once Jesus had been raised from the dead, and once his followers had thought their way through the great scriptural stories that alone could make sense of such a thing, they knew that the revolution really had begun. And, in knowing that, they knew that the same revolution had caught them up in its wake. What Jesus had decisively launched they must determinedly continue. And that brings us, in conclusion, to ourselves. Where do we fit into this story? PART FOUR The Revolution Continues 14 Passover People I HAVE ARGUED in this book that, according to the earliest Christians, when Jesus died, something happened as a result of which the world was a different place.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  When the Israelites finally entered the promised land, conquered it, and occupied it, the tabernacle was placed in a shrine at Shiloh until it was captured by the Philistines (another “exile” of sorts). David then brought it back, intending to build a permanent shrine in his new capital, Jerusalem. This became the subject of one of the most significant brief conversations in the Old Testament. The prophet Nathan, responding to David’s proposal to build God a “house,” declared that God would instead build David a “house.” This was an important passage for some Jews in the time of Jesus, and it was extremely important for the early Christians as they reflected on the meaning of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection: YHWH declares to you that YHWH will build you a house. When your days are fulfilled and you lie down with your ancestors, I will raise up your seed after you, who shall come forth from your body, and I will establish his kingdom. He shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever. I will be a father to him, and he shall be a son to me. (2 Sam. 7:11–14, slightly altered) The point is, of course, a pun on “house.” David asks permission to construct a building, but God promises him a family. Has God, speaking through Nathan, changed the subject? Is it just a verbal trick? No. First, because David’s son Solomon will be responsible for constructing the Temple in Jerusalem; and, second, because David’s ultimate son will be, in a tantalizingly special yet unspecific sense, God’s own son. In the shimmering possibilities of later readings, particularly the early Christian readings generated by Jesus’s resurrection (where “I will raise up your seed” suddenly took on a meaning never before imagined), the building that Solomon would construct was only a signpost to the ultimate divine answer to David’s request. If there is to be a place where the living God will dwell forever among his people, it will not be in a building of bricks and mortar; it will be in and as a human being, the ultimate son of David. Somehow everything that might be thought and celebrated about the Temple and about God’s intention of dwelling with his people would come into a new world of meaning when David’s projected “house” turned out to be a human being.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  The book of Acts, in particular, shows the church facing danger at every turn. I once saw a commentary on the book of Acts that was entitled “The Church Marches In.” That is a risky way of looking at it, implying an easily won military invasion. The church’s mission was from the start neither easy nor military. Nor was it an “invasion,” for that matter. The whole point was that the creator of the world was reclaiming his rightful possession from usurping powers. Acts is a book of cheerful (and sometimes not so cheerful) muddle and puzzle, as Jesus’s first followers blunder around trying to find out what they are supposed to be doing, nudged this way and pushed that way by the Spirit, facing sharp disagreement and potential division inside the movement and even sharper hostility from outside. Acts has plenty of martyrs, riots, and frustrating failures. The powers are fighting back. And yet Acts ends with Paul in Rome, under Caesar’s nose, announcing God as King and Jesus as Lord. Paul’s own interpretation of this strange phenomenon is worth quoting in full, because it opens up the point that must be made at the center of any account of Christian mission: the victory of the cross will be implemented through the means of the cross. One of the dangers of saying too easily that “the Messiah died for our sins” is to imagine that thereafter there would be no more dying to do, no more suffering to undergo. The same problem comes when we too eagerly celebrate the one-off victory as though there would be no more follow-up victories to be won. The opposite is the case, as Jesus himself had always warned. The victory was indeed won, the revolution was indeed launched, through the suffering of Jesus; it is now implemented, put into effective operation, by the suffering of his people. This is why Paul could write: We recommend ourselves as God’s servants: with much patience, with suffering, difficulties, hardships, beatings, imprisonments, riots, hard work, sleepless nights, going without food, with purity, knowledge, great-heartedness, kindness, the holy spirit, genuine love, by speaking the truth, by God’s power, with weapons for God’s faithful work in left and right hand alike, through glory and shame, through slander and praise; as deceivers, and yet true; as unknown, yet very well known; as dying, and look—we are alive; as punished, yet not killed; as sad, yet always celebrating; as poor, yet bringing riches to many; as having nothing, yet possessing everything. (2 Cor. 6:4–10) It was hard for Paul’s audience to understand this. They lived, as we do, in a competitive society where everyone was eager to look good, to be successful, to impress the neighbors. The beaten, bedraggled figure of Paul was hardly that of a leader one might to be proud of.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  Throughout its history, the people of Israel had to learn that God was well capable of acting in human affairs in a variety of ways, some of which would involve his people as active agents within his purposes and some of which would not. But the important thing was the faith in God’s sovereign right and power, a faith that was regularly expressed as hope in the face of adversity: the faith that Israel’s God was already, by right, the one true king of the world and that one day this kingship would be established forever. In Isaiah 52 the point is clear: Babylon, the greatest superpower of the day, was going to fall quite suddenly, and those held captive under its power would be freed. The dark power would be overthrown, the people’s sins forgiven, the exile undone, and the glorious Presence unveiled. All this is kingdom-of-God language, summed up in the excited shout “Your God reigns!” This event would be, above all, a “new Exodus.” To this day Jews keep the festival of Passover, as did their ancestors in Jesus’s time. Passover looks back in story and festival to the great act of promise-fulfilling liberation in which God overthrew Pharaoh and his armies, set his people free, and came to dwell in their midst. That event, like the new one Isaiah promised, was celebrated as a sign of God’s universal kingship (Exod. 15:18). There is, however, a difference between the original Exodus and the new one promised by the prophets. The original Exodus had nothing to do with the forgiveness of sins; the slavery in Egypt was never seen as a result of Israel’s sins. The Babylonian exile, however, was seen in exactly that way. Thus two themes combined into a new, complex reality. The “new Exodus,” freeing Israel from foreign oppression, would also be the “forgiveness of sins,” the real return from exile. This sets the stage exactly for the claims made by the early Christians about what Jesus’s death had accomplished. Forgiveness of sins and the overthrow of the enslaving power would belong exactly together. Both would form part of the core meaning of the coming of God’s kingdom on earth as in heaven. The same complex but coherent point emerges from that other great source of kingdom themes of political defiance and resistance: the book of Daniel. The book as a whole, despite remarkable shifts in genre and tone, has a constant theme: Israel’s God is sovereign over the nations of the world, and one day he will set his people free forever from pagan oppression.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  We should note what all this means. Modern Christians need to be reminded regularly that Jews in this period did not perceive themselves to be living within a story of an angry moralistic God who threatened people that he would send them to hell if they displeased him. Nor were they hoping that, if somehow they could make things all right, they would go to a place called “heaven” and be with God forever. Some ancient pagans thought like that; most ancient Jews did not. They were hoping, longing, and praying for what the prophets had sketched, what the Psalms had sung, what the ancient promises to the patriarchs had held out in prospect: not rescue from the present world, but rescue and renewal within the present world. Israel’s fortunes would plunge to a low ebb, and then lower, down to the very depths; but there would come a time when God would return in person to do a new thing. Through this new thing not only would Israel itself be rescued from the “death” of exile, the inevitable result of idolatry and sin, but the nations of the world would somehow be brought into the new creation the creator God was planning. And one of the central, vital ways of expressing this entire hope—rescue from exile, the rebuilding of the Temple, the return of YHWH himself—was to speak of the “forgiveness of sins.” Exile was the result of sin. As many biblical writers insisted (one thinks, for a start, of Deuteronomy, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel, and the Psalms), if exile was to be undone, sin would have to be forgiven. This can be seen in many places, but one striking example is found in Lamentations, the poetic quintessence of the theme of exile as a result of sin. Line after line indicates the direct connection: Israel’s sin is the cause of exile. Then at last, after the brief note of consolation in chapter 3, we find the sudden promise toward the end of chapter 4: The punishment of your iniquity, O daughter Zion, is accomplished , he will keep you in exile no longer. (4:22) This is exactly in line with the promise of Isaiah 40:1–2: 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 YHWH’s hand double for all her sins. Israel’s God comes as a warrior king who will defeat the idols of Babylon and set his people free and also as the gentle shepherd who will lead his flock and give special care to the mother sheep with their lambs (40:3–11).

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  This is what Paul says in his speech before Herod Agrippa II, a great-grandson of Herod the Great. He tells of meeting Jesus on the road to Damascus and of the very specific commission Jesus gave him: I am going to establish you as a servant, as a witness both of the things you have already seen and of the occasions I will appear to you in the future. I will rescue you from the people, and from the nations to whom I am going to send you so that you can open their eyes to enable them to turn from darkness to light, and from the power of the satan to God—so that they can have forgiveness of sins, and an inheritance among those who are made holy by their faith in me. (Acts 26:16–18) Now at last the satan’s power has been broken, so that forgiveness of sins and membership in a new family is open to all! This fits exactly with what Paul says when he reminds the Thessalonians of the message he had proclaimed to them from the beginning. People all over Greece, he says, are telling how the Thessalonians turned to God from idols, to serve a living and true God, and to wait for his son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead—Jesus, who delivers us from the coming fury. (1 Thess. 1:9–10) This is the message we hear also in two of the best-known speeches of Paul in Acts, first to the puzzled crowds in Lystra, urging them to turn away from foolish idols to the living God (14:15–17) and then to the court of the Areopagus in Athens (17:22–31). In the latter Paul speaks of the one true creator God. The pagan world gave plenty of indications, including poems and the haunting inscription “To an unknown god,” that people were aware of this true God. But the truth was badly distorted by the normal temples and what went on inside them. The Creator, however, was now introducing a new dispensation. He had drawn a veil over the past and was commanding everyone, everywhere, to turn away from these follies, warning of a coming day of reckoning at which the man he had raised from the dead would be the judge of all. This message was, of course, foolishness to the Greeks. Paul says as much elsewhere (1 Cor. 1:23). But the message retained power: the power of forgiveness, of a new world, a new creation, a new start. A new God? New to them, perhaps, but in fact this was the God who had made the world and looked after it all along, but of whom most peoples had been ignorant. And though Paul does not mention the crucifixion of Jesus in the two speeches just outlined, when we study his mature reflection in the letters, we can see what is going on.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  The Passover and Exodus themes cluster together in an almost bewildering and overdetermined fashion: the fulfillment of ancient promises, the liberation from slavery, the crossing of the Red Sea, the coming of God himself in the pillar of cloud and fire, the promise of inheritance. All these, in parables, healings, promises, and warnings, formed part of Jesus’s public proclamation and private teaching. Now they gathered to a greatness. Up to this point, it might appear that the theological significance with which Jesus was investing his death was simply about a great, freedom-bringing victory. That, indeed, is the overarching significance of the evidence, all the way from his initial kingdom announcement after his baptism through to his dark words about the imminent kingdom at the final meal. But how would this victory be won? What had to happen for the dark powers to be defeated? Here we come a step closer to the heart not only of Jesus’s own vocational vision, but of the whole New Testament picture of what actually happened, theologically speaking, on the first Good Friday. I have stressed that Jesus chose Passover as the moment for his final dramatic symbolic actions—including the death he believed he would suffer. He did not choose one of the other festivals. In particular, he did not choose the great and somber Day of Atonement. However, as we saw in Part Two, by the time of Jesus the long story of Israel had reached a point where two things ran together, at least potentially. The victory over the powers would be won by Jesus dealing with the people’s sins. Recall how the narrative now worked. Israel had been in “continuing exile,” according to Daniel 9 and many later texts, ever since the Babylonian destruction. Renewal, reform, and even revolution had taken place, but the plight was still a reality, visibly underlined at Passover time in Jerusalem by the presence of Roman soldiers and the Roman governor himself, up from his normal residence in the port city of Caesarea to keep a personal eye on things during the notoriously dangerous freedom festival. But the analysis of that extended plight was that Israel was still “in its sins.” That had been the view of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel—to say nothing of Ezra and Nehemiah, both of whom continued after the supposed “return from exile” to lament Israel’s sins and its consequent unredeemed, enslaved state. Thus, as long as Israel was still in bondage to hostile powers, what was needed was a new Exodus; but, because the cause of that bondage was Israel’s sins, what had to happen was for those sins to be dealt with. This combination of themes—the Passover victory, on the one hand, and the exile-ending “forgiveness of sins,” on the other—would then become characteristic of many strands in the New Testament.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  It is noticeable how, in the early preaching reported in the book of Acts, this notion of “forgiveness of sins” is highlighted as the key thing that will result from believing the good news about Jesus. Peter urged the crowds on the day of Pentecost: “Turn back [“Return,” in other words, “Repent,” as in Deut. 30:2]! Be baptized . . . in the name of Jesus the Messiah, so that your sins can be forgiven and you will receive the gift of the holy spirit” (2:38). John’s baptism had been aimed at the same things, repentance and the “forgiveness of sins” (Luke 3:3). Now, baptism in the name of Jesus the Messiah had the aim of bestowing the blessing of covenant renewal. The message is reinforced in the next chapter of Acts, with explicit evocation both of the promises in Deuteronomy and the prophets and of the larger hope for the renewal of all things: This is how God has fulfilled what he promised through the mouth of all the prophets, that his Messiah would suffer. So now repent, and turn back, so that your sins may be blotted out, so that times of refreshment may come from the presence of the Lord, and so that he will send you Jesus, the one he chose and appointed to be his Messiah. He must be received in heaven, you see, until the time which God spoke about through the mouth of his holy prophets from ancient days, the time when God will restore all things. Moses said, “The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me, one from among your own brothers; whatever he says to you, you must pay attention to him. And everyone who does not listen to that prophet will be cut off from the people.” All the prophets who have spoken, from Samuel and his successors, spoke about these days too. You are the children of the prophets, the children of the covenant which God established with your ancestors when he said to Abraham, “In your seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed,” When God raised up his servant he sent him to you first, to bless you by turning each of you away from your wicked deeds.” (3:18–26)

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  Paul, like most Jews of his day and many subsequently, believed that in God’s good purposes world history was divided into the “present age” (the time when the powers were still ruling) and the “age to come,” when God would assume his rightful power at last. The dark powers invoked in paganism had held the world captive in the “present evil age,” but now something new had happened: The Messiah . . . gave himself for our sins, to rescue us from the present evil age. . . . We were kept in “slavery” under the “elements of the world.” But when the fullness of time arrived, God sent out his son, born of a woman, born under the law, so that he might redeem those under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. . . . However, at that stage you didn’t know God, and so you were enslaved to beings that, in the proper nature, are not gods. But now that you’ve come to know God—or, better, to be known by God—how can you turn back again to that weak and poverty-stricken lineup of elements that you want to serve all over again? (Gal. 1:3–4; 4:3–5, 8–9) We speak wisdom among the mature. But this isn’t a wisdom of this present world or of the rulers of this present world—those same rulers who are being done away with. No, we speak God’s hidden wisdom in a mystery. This is the wisdom God prepared ahead of time, before the world began, for our glory. None of the rulers of this present age knew about this wisdom. If they had, you see, they wouldn’t have crucified the Lord of glory. (1 Cor. 2:8) God blotted out the handwriting that was against us, opposing us with its legal demands. He took it right out of the way, by nailing it to the cross. He stripped the rulers and authorities of their armor, and displayed them contemptuously to public view, celebrating his triumph over them in him. (Col. 2:14–15) It should be clear from the casual way in which Paul introduces most of these points that this is a regular and vital feature of his thought. He is not exploring or expounding a new idea. It is basic. When Jesus died, the “powers” lost their power. They can still rage and shout, but the power of Jesus is stronger. And it is the power—to say it again—of forgiveness. The past is blotted out. A new world has begun. A revolution has begun, in which power itself is redefined as the power of love. Paul had discovered in towns and cities, in private houses and public streets, in formal and informal settings, that the news of Jesus, crucified, risen, and reigning, was “God’s power, bringing salvation to everyone who believes” (Rom.