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.

Page 118 of 216 · 20 per page

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  This is where the promise of “resurrection,” the promised restoration after the “death” of exile, fits in. And that leads us back once more to Isaiah 40–55, where the prophet declares that the Glory of YHWH will be revealed once more and all flesh shall see it, because sins have been forgiven, the people have been pardoned; the exile will be over, Babylon will be destroyed, the ancient covenant will be renewed, and creation itself will flourish as always intended. Once again we note that this is the passage in which we find, in chapters 52 and 53, the most striking of all biblical images about one person suffering and dying on behalf of the many. All this—the rich combination of story and promise, of Glory and Temple, of exile and restoration—would be in the front of people’s minds during the Second Temple period, that is, between the late fifth century BC and the late first century AD. Throughout that period, though the Temple was rebuilt and the sacrifices regularly offered until AD 70, when the Romans destroyed it once and for all, nobody ever suggested that the divine Presence had actually returned in power and glory. Like all holy places, the Temple undoubtedly retained a strong sense of memory, of “presence” in that sense. It does to this day, which is why devout Jews pray fervently at the Western Wall, often scribbling prayers, folding them up, and pushing them into the cracks between the massive, ancient stones. But they do not suppose that the divine Glory, which the later rabbis referred to as the Shekinah, the “tabernacling Presence” of God, is there in the same way as in Exodus 40, 1 Kings 8, Isaiah’s vision, or the promises of Ezekiel 43 or Isaiah 40 and 52. Isaiah spoke, after all, of the sentinels on Jerusalem’s walls lifting up their voices and singing for joy, because “in plain sight they see the return of YHWH to Zion” (52:8). That never happened. The postexilic prophets—Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi—insisted that it would happen, but it hadn’t yet. Centuries later, the rabbis looked back on this period and produced a list, with a sense of gloomy resignation, of all the ways in which the Second Temple was deficient in comparison with the First Temple. Notable on the list of what was missing in the Second Temple was the Shekinah itself, the glorious divine Presence. In Jesus’s day, the hope was alive that the Glory would return at last. But nobody knew exactly what that would mean, how it would happen, or what it would look like. To these questions the New Testament writers offer an answer that is so explosive, so unexpected, so revolutionary, that it has remained entirely off the radar for most modern readers, including modern Christian readers.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  This means that in order to appropriate this for ourselves, to benefit from this story, it is not simply a matter of believing a particular abstract doctrine, this or that theory of how “atonement” might be thought to “work.” No doubt that can help, though with the abstractions can come distortions, as we have seen. No, the gospels invite us to make this story our own , to live within the narrative in all its twists and turns, to see ourselves among the crowds following Jesus and witnessing his kingdom-bringing work, to see ourselves also in the long-range continuation of that narrative that we call, in fear and trembling (because we know its deep ambiguities), the life of the church. In particular, as followers of Jesus from the very beginning have known, we are to make the story our own by the repeated meals in which the Last Supper is brought to life once more. If that was how Jesus wanted his followers not only to understand, but also to appropriate for themselves the meaning of the death he was to die, there is every reason to take it seriously as the sign and foretaste of the eventual kingdom, carrying within it the assurance that we too are those who share in the “forgiveness of sins.” And, with that, the gospels give to those who read them the energy and the sense of direction to be Beatitude people for the world, knowing that the victory was indeed won on the cross, that Jesus is indeed already installed as the world’s rightful ruler, and that his way of peace and reconciliation has been shown to be more powerful than all the powers of the world. There is one particular moment in the gospel stories as told by Matthew and Mark to which we must return, because only in the light of the fuller picture can we begin to address it in all its complexity. This is the so-called cry of dereliction in Matthew 27:46 and Mark 15:34: “My God, my God, why did you abandon me?” I have stressed that all four evangelists saw Jesus as the living embodiment of YHWH himself, Israel’s God, and that they saw his kingdom-bringing achievement, up to and climactically including his death on the cross, as the achievement of the one God himself. This was not about a human being trying to twist God’s arm, as in the famous illustration (used by Albert Schweitzer) of Jesus throwing himself on the wheel of history and making it turn in the opposite direction. It was about the Lord of history coming in person, in the person who represented the promise-bearing people, to do what had to be done. How then can this embodied God cry out to “my God” that he has been abandoned?

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  It was far more revolutionary. It was about the kingdom of God coming “on earth as in heaven.” Within that new reality, the “forgiveness of sins” was neither simply a personal experience nor a moral command, though it was of course to be felt as the former and obeyed as the latter. It was the name for a new state of being, a new world, the world of resurrection, resurrection itself being the archetypal forgiveness of-sins moment, the moment when the prison door is flung open, indicating that the jailor has already been overpowered. As Paul said, if the Messiah is not raised, “your faith is pointless, and you are still in your sins” (1 Cor. 15:17). “Forgiveness of sins,” for the first disciples, was now to be seen as a fact about the way the world was , a fact rooted in the one-off accomplishment of Jesus’s death, then revealed in his resurrection, and then put to work through the Spirit in the transformed lives of his followers. Forgiveness of sins became another way of saying “Passover” or “new Exodus.” Or, as in Isaiah 54–55, following hard on the heels of the kingdom announcement of chapter 52 and the “servant’s” work in chapter 53, it would come to mean “new covenant” and “new creation.” The gospel was the announcement of this new reality. This new reality—hard to perceive except by faith in Jesus’s death-defeating resurrection, as all the early Christians knew well—was designed to come to ultimate fruition in the eventual new creation, the “new heavens and new earth.” I have written about this at length elsewhere (notably in Surprised by Hope) , and we do not need to repeat or labor the point. Ephesians 1:10 says it all: God’s plan was to unite all things in the Messiah, things in heaven and on earth. The final scene in Revelation (chaps. 21–22) spells it out: the new heavens and new earth function as the ultimate Temple, the new world in which God will wipe away all tears from all eyes. First Corinthians 15 describes the accomplishment of this final reality under the image of the messianic battle: Jesus, having already conquered sin and death, will reign until these and all other enemies are totally destroyed. Romans 8 describes it as the birth of the new creation from the womb of the old, weaving into that great metaphor a powerful allusion to the events of the Exodus, so that creation itself will have its own “Exodus” at last, being set free from its slavery to corruption and sharing the freedom that comes when God’s children are glorified. That is the ultimate hope. All of this is the “goal” of God’s rescue operation accomplished through Jesus. All of this is in direct fulfillment of the ancient hopes of Israel: it is all “according to the Bible”—though it was quite unexpected. Nobody had read Israel’s scriptures like this before, but the events concerning Jesus left his followers with no choice.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  But there is a problem with this reading. Here, in Romans 5:9, Paul refers back to “being justified by his blood,” which is a clear summary of 3:21–26, and then says that as a result of this “justification” believers will be saved by Jesus from the wrath or anger that is still to come . This doesn’t seem to fit. If the wrath had been dealt with in 3:24–26—in other words, through Jesus’s death, appropriated in present “justification”—then why would Paul speak of it in chapter 5 as still future? The answer, I think, is given in 8:1–4, to which we shall shortly come. In any case, with hope secured because of the Messiah’s death, Paul can stand back and survey the entire biblical narrative from Adam to the Messiah (5:12–21). If God’s call to Abraham and the covenant that he made with him were designed to rescue the world from its plight, this purpose has now been accomplished in the Messiah, only more so: the Messiah has inaugurated the new creation, not simply a return to the original one. Hence the “how much more” of vv. 15 and 17. Hence too the promise that those who receive the abundance of divine grace will “reign in life” (v. 17). Here again is the goal of salvation, the restoration of the truly human destiny, of the covenant of vocation in which humans are called as the royal priesthood. The passage is dense, but when we take it slowly it all makes sense—within this framework. The Adam project, for humans to share in God’s rule over creation, is back on track. In and through it all, Jesus’s death is referred to in several overlapping ways. It is “the gift in grace through the one person Jesus the Messiah” (v. 15), “the free gift” (v. 16), “the abundance of grace” (v. 17), the “upright act” (v. 18), and the “obedience” (v. 19)—the last of these echoing “obedient even to death” in Philippians 2:8. All this is seen as the work of “God’s faithful covenant justice,” an English phrase that is struggling to translate and unpack the dense language Paul uses in v. 21. And all, in particular, is about the inauguration of the reign of God or of “grace” (5:21). The idea of the “reign of grace” is a shorthand for God’s reign, that is, God’s kingdom, seen as the reign of divine grace. This is all, in other words, kingdom-of-God language. This is how God has inaugurated his sovereign rule on earth as in heaven. That is how he has rescued human beings to be part of that new reality, to be active participants, not merely beneficiaries.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  The cross is not mentioned specifically in this passage. But the close analogies with other similar passages make it clear that when Paul talks about the “son of God” “redeeming” those under the law, we are right to hear this as a reference to the crucifixion. This is the heart of the matter: that in a “new Exodus” (the passage is full of Exodus overtones), God has brought his plan to its long-promised fruition (the “fullness of time”), so that now all those who were enslaved, Jew and Gentile alike, can be welcomed as “sons” (Israel as “son of God” is another Exodus allusion). One more Exodus note: this action involves the fresh revelation of God himself, now to be seen as the God who sends the Son and the Spirit of the Son. Therefore, Paul asks, “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?” (4:9). In other words, those who have come to faith in Jesus the Messiah have come into a full knowledge of the one true God through seeing his revelation in action in his Son and his Spirit. But if they then get circumcised, they will be denying that this new revelation has happened; they will be pretending that the new age has not been inaugurated, and they will merely be wanting to find a slightly different way of continuing to live in the same old age they were in before. And the point for our purposes is that the cross of the Messiah has made all the difference. That is how the old age has been “crucified,” and they to it, as Paul says of himself in 6:14—and, as we shall see, in 2:19–20. But how has this “new Passover” come about? The answer, as we might have expected from someone steeped in the scriptural narratives, is “through God’s dealing with the problem of ongoing exile.” As we have seen all along in the present book, these two strands run together in the messianic events concerning Jesus. Passover takes precedence—it was, after all, the ultimate divine rescue operation and the ultimate revelation of God in action—but, granted the exilic state of Israel, “forgiveness of sins” needed to happen for this new Passover to take effect. And that is exactly what has happened:

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  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. Clearly it isn’t designed as a sophisticated piece of theology, or for that matter biblical exegesis, but that’s part of the point: the crucifixion of Jesus is a plain, stark fact, etched into real space and time and, even more important, into the real flesh and blood of a human being. People today, in a wide variety of ways, simply intuit that it has powerful and profound meaning for them. Others, of course, see nothing in it except an unpleasant tale from long ago. Despite the predictions of people who imagined that religion in general and Christianity in particular were losing their appeal in today’s world, the fact of Jesus’s crucifixion and the gospel story in which we find it retain a remarkable power in late modern culture. This appeal persists even among people who don’t hold any particular theory about its precise meaning or even any specific faith in Jesus or God. Why? Why does the cross of Jesus of Nazareth have this impact even today? In 2000, the National Gallery in London put on a millennial exhibition entitled “Seeing Salvation.” That was a case in point—especially remembering that European countries tend to be far more “secularized” than the United States. It consisted mostly of artists’ depictions of Jesus’s crucifixion. Many critics sneered. All those old paintings about someone being tortured to death! Why did we need to look at rooms full of such stuff? Fortunately, the general public ignored the critics and turned up in droves to see works of art, which, like the crucifixion itself, seem to carry a power beyond theory and beyond suspicion.

• From The Prophetic Imagination (1978)

  Jesus’ Ministry The ministry of Jesus is, of course, the energizing that leads to the radical beginnings precisely when none seemed possible. Everything hinges on the ministry and the narrative rushes to the ministry. Indeed, the birth narratives are told only because of the impact of Jesus’ ministry. The birth is only a hope; but the ministry is where the possibilities of hope must seriously engage the world of despair. Jesus is presented and trusted as the one whose very person made a difference. His words and acts were not without abrasion, but those who were open and received, who let gifts be given and reality be redefined, did not notice the abrasion. Indeed, it was not an abrasion to them, for the abrasion was against the old order whose death they had long since faced and affirmed. What people noticed is that life had been strangely and inexplicably changed. The change did not come by proper means, for Jesus’ means were as much in violation of proper order as the results violated rationality. (Means, like ends, are a scandal.) The strange newness happened in ways that did not wait for royal sanction, and they did not happen in any of the ways that administered things happen. Luke is especially aware that Jesus’ deeds took place among the marginal victims of society. Mark is more sensitive to the fact that hardness of heart can stop his work, indeed, that where there is no belief he could not energize (Mark 6:5-6). It was possible to resist the new energizing, but there were great numbers who were free to embrace it and had no need to resist. The whole movement is summarized in staggering simplicity: The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, the poor have good news preached to them. (Luke 7:22) And then the response. Of course, those who valued what is old resisted: The chief priests and the scribes and the principal men of the people sought to destroy him. (Luke 19:47) The Pharisees went out, and immediately held counsel with the Herodians against him, how to destroy him. (Mark 3:6)

• From The Prophetic Imagination (1978)

  the general despair. But a prophet has another purpose in bringing hope to public expression, and that is to return the community to its single referent, the sovereign faithfulness of God. It is only that return that enables a rejection of the closed world of royal definition. Only a move from a managed world to a world of spoken and heard faithfulness permits hope. It is that overriding focus that places Israel in a new situation and that reshapes exile, not as an eternal fate but as the place where hope can most amazingly appear. No objective norm can prevent a prophet of hope from being too grandiose or too trivial or simply a speaker for bread and circuses. It is likely that the only measure of faithfulness is that hope always comes after grief and that the speaker of this public expression must know and be a part of the anguish that permits hope. Hope expressed without knowledge of and participation in grief is likely to be false hope that does not reach despair. Thus, as Thomas Raitt has shown, it is precisely those who know death most painfully who can speak hope most vigorously. Newness That Redefines The prophet must speak metaphorically about hope but concretely about the real newness that comes to us and redefines our situation . The prophet must speak not only about the abandonment of Israel by its God but about the specificity of Babylon. Talk about newness in exile comes not from a happy piety or from a hatred of Babylon but from the enduring jealousy of Yahweh for his people. This jealousy, so alien to our perceptual world, includes rejection of his people, which sends them and even Yahweh himself into exile. It is a jealousy that stays with his people, making their anguish his anguish and his future their future. The hope that must be spoken is hope rooted in the assurance that God does not quit even when the evidence warrants his quitting. The hope is rooted in God’s ability to utilize even the folly of Israel. The memory of this community-about- to-hope revolves around such hope-filled events as that of Cain, the murderer of a brother, being marked protectively; of the chaos of royal disarray resolved in praise; of rejected Joseph observing to his brother that in all things God works for good; of Solomon, very Solomon, born in love to this shabby royal couple— and out of that comes a word that contradicts the exile.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  “Lavoratori! Workers!” As long as we were neither “Inglesi” nor “Americani”... At one of these encounters, some soldier was struck by the idea we so dreaded and had avoided: “Why haven’t they all been shot.” We went forward, close together, without lingering among the long rows of Faravelli trucks. A car with three wheels passed us, stopped, and awaited the first men of our column. The big red head of the Neapolitan sergeant showed itself and sang out the one syllable “Stop!” Then he stuck his head out and, with much gesturing, explained the direction we were to follow by order of the lieutenant. Ten miles ahead, the road branched in two: to the left, it went straight to Tunis and, to the right, through Bir-Halima, our last camp but one, before it also reached Tunis by a roundabout way. Of course, we were to take the right and stop at Bir-Halima. The sergeant concluded by furiously screaming: “Non è finita, la guerra!” After having let us go, the lieutenant had regained control of himself. But the men’s hopes had risen too high and too fast to let resignation replace their thwarted joy. As soon as we had left our guards, we had all immediately thought of the road to the left at the other end of which were our families and friends. But the three-wheeled car now carried the bust of the sergeant away and our grumbling column pulled itself together. None of us objected or even considered the risk. We had to hurry, so we started a race against time and against our clogs and empty stomachs and the heavy sacks of loot that we did not want to abandon. We had already trudged six hours of forced marching, after twelve hours of road work. Loaded down but sustained by hope, the men still found the strength to joke and show their high spirits: “Aren’t they going to have a surprise when they see us!” “And how about Lieutenant Liquorice [that was his nickname because he was thin and long, and his skin, mustache, hair, and boots were all black] when he doesn’t see us at all!”

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  THE TWO DISCIPLES who met the risen Jesus, without recognizing him, on the road to Emmaus said plaintively, “We were hoping that he was going to redeem Israel” (Luke 24:21). When Jesus, still incognito, began to explain to them what was going on, he was not saying, in effect, “You’ve got it wrong. Forget all that stuff about redeeming Israel. I’ve had a better idea.” No. In fact he said, “This is what had to happen: the Messiah had to suffer, and then come into his glory!” After that, “He began with Moses, and with all the prophets, and explained to them the things about himself throughout the whole Bible” (24:26–27). His answer was, to be sure, a radical redefinition of the “redemption of Israel.” It brought the entire expectation into a new focus, namely, his own unique role. The story of the Bible as a whole, he insisted, had been rushing forward toward the events of his own death and resurrection. The recent happenings were to be seen as fulfillment, not simply as a shocking turn of events. But to redefine is not to abandon. Many Jews of Jesus’s day had been praying and pondering what it might mean for God to fulfill his ancient promises at long last. There was no single template. Many groups, many teachers, many would-be prophets offered different interpretations. Jesus’s particular redefinition (and Luke’s showcasing of that redefinition) belongs on that map, even though it transforms it beyond anything previously imagined. The hope of Israel, expressed variously in the Torah, Prophets, and Psalms, was not for a rescue operation that would snatch Israel (or humans or the faithful) from the world, but for a rescue operation that would be for the world, an operation through which redeemed humans would play once more the role for which they were designed. It was the hope for a renewed world in which justice and mercy would reign forever. Jesus was explaining not that this hope had been abandoned in favor of “saved souls going to heaven,” but that this hope for new creation had been fulfilled in a shockingly unexpected way. The revolution had already taken place. By the evening of that Friday, had they but known it, the world had changed.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  But my point has been to trace briefly the rich materials through which Jews of the Second Temple period could, and sometimes did, reflect on the puzzles of their continuing exile, on the challenge of their ongoing but unfinished story, and on the question of how and when the promised resolution would appear. From all this, three themes emerge that are of particular relevance for our overall study. First, these ancient writings constantly insist that what God’s people in the Second Temple period needed was, from one point of view, the “end of exile,” and from another point of view, the “forgiveness of sins.” Israel’s sins were responsible for exile, so forgiveness and “return” would be the inside and the outside of the same thing. When, in the New Testament, we meet the gospel summary in which the Messiah “died for our sins in accordance with the Bible,” this is the natural home base of such language. Something has happened through which exile has been undone. The sins that caused exile in the first place have been dealt with once and for all, forever. This is part of the clue to the revolutionary vision of what happened on the cross. Second, this great and long-awaited event would be the ultimate new Exodus, the final great Passover. The victory over Babylon recapitulates the victory over Egypt. Images of Exodus crowd into passage after passage, so that even though in one text we may be dealing with Babylon, in another Syria, or in another ultimately with Rome, memories of the ancient slavery in Egypt are never far away. When we put these themes together—forgiveness of sins and end of exile, on the one hand, and Passover and Exodus, on the other, we find a composite notion of complete redemption transcending anything that Passover had meant before, transcending also anything that could be conveyed by the Day of Atonement on its own. When, in the New Testament, we find a strong emphasis on one particular set of Passover events fused together inextricably with the notions of dealing with sin, return from exile, and of course the kingdom of God and other related ideas, this combination of ideas provides the natural context of meaning. Third, the Passover context contributes, through its dramatic theme of the rescuing and guiding Presence of YHWH himself, the sense that the redemption, when it comes, will come through the personal, powerful work of Israel’s God himself. The Maccabean literature may indeed flirt with the possibility, borrowed from the non-Jewish themes of the “noble death” on behalf of others, that the martyrs may somehow have taken upon themselves the divine wrath. But the only biblical passage that might be read in that way—Isaiah 53—forms the climax of a matchless poem whose overall theme is the powerful and unchangeable love of the one God.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  According to that original revolution, rescued humans are set free to be what they were made to be. “Forgiveness,” achieved through God’s Son’s “giving himself for our sins,” is the key to the liberating victory. Sin matters, and forgiveness of sins matters, but they matter because sin, flowing from idolatry, corrupts, distorts, and disables the image-bearing vocation, which is much more than simply “getting ready for heaven.” An overconcentration on “sin” and how God deals with it means that we see things only with regard to “works,” even if we confess that we have no “works” of our own and that we have to rely on Jesus to supply them for us. (Equally, an underemphasis on “sin” and how God deals with it is an attempt to claim some kind of victory without seeing the heart of the problem.) The biblical vision of what it means to be human, the “royal priesthood” vocation, is more multidimensional than either of the regular alternatives. To reflect the divine image means standing between heaven and earth, even in the present time, adoring the Creator and bringing his purposes into reality on earth, ahead of the time when God completes the task and makes all things new. The “royal priesthood” is the company of rescued humans who, being part of “earth,” worship the God of heaven and are thereby equipped, with the breath of heaven in their renewed lungs, to work for his kingdom on earth. The revolution of the cross sets us free to be in-between people, caught up in the rhythm of worship and mission. Expressing the missional vocation in this way and basing it like this on the revolutionary victory of the cross help us to avoid some obvious dangers. Without the sense of the victory being already won, we might easily lurch from arrogance (thinking that we had to win that victory ourselves) to fear (thinking that the world was too powerful and that we should escape it or at least hunker down and wait for Jesus to return and sort everything out himself). The initial victory gives us the platform for work that is both confident and humble. However, without the sense that the victory is won through the forgiveness of sins, “mission” could easily detach itself from the calling to be people who themselves have been rescued from the grip of the powers, people who themselves know what it means to live as grateful forgiven sinners.

• From The Prophetic Imagination (1978)

  and your labor for that which does not satisfy? (Isa 55:1-2) By the time he has finished talking about bread he has in a deft move articulated the best Israelite promise (to David), the glory of Yahweh (at the expense of the Babylonian god Marduk), and homecoming: Incline your ear, and come to me; hear, that your life may live; and I will make with you an everlasting covenant, my steadfast sure love for David. (Isa 55:3) Now let me admit that it is perfectly silly to talk about new songs, many births, and fresh bread. These are metaphors that do not seem to touch the reality of today’s hardware and arsenal. Perhaps that is correct, but we must also observe that such items were silly the first time they were named in imperial, scientific Babylon. The hardware will not immediately surrender and the great kings will not readily abdicate power. Consider, for example, the wait through decades in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa and Nelson Mandela’s twenty-six years in Robin Island Prison. The prophet seeks only to spark the imagination of this people, and that in itself turns despair to energy. Second Isaiah gives his people a remarkable gift. He gives them back their faith by means of rearticulating the old story. He gives them the linguistic capacity to confront despair rather than be surrounded by it. And he creates new standing ground outside the dominant consciousness upon which new humanness is possible. A cynic might argue that nothing has really changed. And indeed, nothing really changed if only the fall of empires is anything and if it must happen immediately. But prophets are not magicians. Their art and calling are only with words that evoke alternatives, and reshaped hardware will not overcome despair in any case. That will come only with the recognition that life has not been fully consigned to us and that there is another who has reserved for himself his sovereign freedom from us and for us. He is at work apart from us and apart from Babylon. The godness of God takes the form of liberation for exiles. So Gerhard von Rad settled on that most remarkable of all texts that we should not speak until we decide if we trust it: Remember not the former things, nor consider things of old. Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? (Isa 43:18-19) Those not comforted can hardly believe such a thing can be uttered. But clearly they will have no personal joy, no public justice, no corporate repentance, and no family humaneness until the community receives a newness it cannot generate for itself. A second majestic text, I believe, is pertinent to the fatigue among us, the fatigue from not deciding or from having settled for Babylon. First about the Lord: He does not faint or grow weary, his understanding is unsearchable. He gives power to the faint,

• From The Prophetic Imagination (1978)

  rarely a foremost factor in ordering a community. Indeed, most communities find ways of treating it as the last question and never the first question about human reality. It could well be that the possibilities emergent from the ministry of Moses are too radical for any historical community, either in terms of theological presupposition or in terms of societal implementation. By way of analogy, it is clear that the militancy and radicalness of the earliest churches was soon compromised. Indeed, John Gager has argued that if they had not changed to embrace culture to some extent, they would have disappeared as a sectarian oddity. [1] Perhaps it must be concluded that the vision emerging from Moses is viable only in an intentional community whose passion for faith is knowingly linked to survival in the face of a dominant, hostile culture. That is, such a radical vision is most appropriate to a sectarian mood, which is marginal in the community. Such situations of risk do seem to call forth such radicalness. Conversely, situations of cultural acceptance breed accommodating complacency. Thus, in our utilization of sociological insight concerning the social dimensions of knowledge, language, and power, we must not be inattentive to our very own sociology and the ways in which it commandeers both our faith and our scholarship. [2] Perhaps the minority community of slaves and midwives was able to affirm the freedom of God just because there was no other legitimated way to stand over against static triumphal religion, for every other less-free God had already been co-opted. Perhaps the minority community of slaves is able to affirm the politics of justice and compassion because there is no other social vision in which to stand in protest against the oppression of the situation. As George Mendenhall has urged, the social purpose of a really transcendent God is to have a court of appeal against the highest courts and orders of society around us. [3] Thus a truly free God is essential to marginal people if they are to have a legitimate standing ground against the oppressive orders of the day. But then it follows that for those who regulate and benefit from the order of the day a truly free God is not necessary, desirable, or perhaps even possible. Given the social setting of most churches in America, these matters may give

• From The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)

  Our patients find it very helpful to be able to see the patterns of localized electrical activity in their brains. We can show them the patterns that seem to be responsible for their difficulty focusing or for their lack of emotional control. They can see why different brain areas need to be trained to generate different frequencies and communication patterns. These explanations help them shift from self-blaming attempts to control their behavior to learning to process information differently. As Ed Hamlin, who trained us in interpreting the qEEG, recently wrote to me: “Many people respond to the training, but the ones that respond best and quickest are those that can see how the feedback is related to something they are doing. For example, if I’m attempting to help someone increase their ability to be present, we can see how they’re doing with it. Then the benefit really begins to accumulate. There is something very empowering about having the experience of changing your brain’s activity with your mind.” How Does Trauma Change Brain Waves?In our neurofeedback lab we see individuals with long histories of traumatic stress who have only partially responded to existing treatments. Their qEEGs show a variety of different patterns. Often there is excessive activity in the right temporal lobe, the fear center of the brain, combined with too much frontal slow-wave activity. This means that their hyperaroused emotional brains dominate their mental life. Our research showed that calming the fear center decreases trauma-based problems and improves executive functioning. This is reflected not only in a significant decrease in patients’ PTSD scores but also in improved mental clarity and an increased ability to regulate how upset they become in response to relatively minor provocations.[21] Other traumatized patients show patterns of hyperactivity the moment they close their eyes: Not seeing what is going on around them makes them panic and their brain waves go wild. We train them to produce more relaxed brain patterns. Yet another group overreacts to sounds and light, a sign that the thalamus has difficulty filtering out irrelevant information. In those patients we focus on changing communication patterns at the back of the brain. While our center is focused on finding optimal treatments for long-standing traumatic stress, Alexander McFarlane is studying how exposure to combat changes previously normal brains. The Australian Department of Defence asked his research group to measure the effects of deployment to combat duty in Iraq and Afghanistan on mental and biological functioning, including brain-wave patterns. In the initial phase McFarlane and his colleagues measured the qEEG in 179 combat troops four months prior to and four months after each successive deployment to the Middle East.

• From The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)

  The first recording of the brain’s electrical activity was made in 1924 by the German psychiatrist Hans Berger. This new technology was initially met with skepticism and ridicule by the medical establishment, but electroencephalography gradually became an indispensable tool for diagnosing seizure activity in patients with epilepsy. Berger discovered that different brain-wave patterns reflected different mental activities. (For example, trying to solve a math problem resulted in bursts at a moderately fast frequency band known as beta.) He hoped that eventually science would be able to correlate different psychiatric problems with specific EEG irregularities. This expectation was fueled by the first reports on EEG patterns in “behavior problem children” in 1938.[1] Most of these hyperactive and impulsive children had slower-than-normal waves in their frontal lobes. This finding has been reproduced innumerable times since then, and in 2013 slow-wave prefrontal activity was certified by the Food and Drug Administration as a biomarker for ADHD. Slow frontal lobe electrical activity explains why these kids have poor executive functioning: Their rational brains lack proper control over their emotional brains, which also occurs when abuse and trauma have made the emotional centers hyperalert to danger and organized for fight or flight. Early in my career I also hoped that the EEG might help us to make better diagnoses, and between 1980 and 1990 I sent many of my patients to get EEGs to determine if their emotional instability was rooted in neurological abnormalities. The reports usually came back with the phrase: “nonspecific temporal lobe abnormalities.”[2] This told me very little, and because at that time the only way we could change these ambiguous patterns was with drugs that had more side effects than benefits, I gave up doing routine EEGs on my patients. Then, in 2000, a study by my friend Alexander McFarlane and his associates (researchers in Adelaide, Australia) rekindled my interest, as it documented clear differences in information processing between traumatized subjects and a group of “normal” Australians. The researchers used a standardized test called “the oddball paradigm” in which subjects are asked to detect the item that doesn’t fit in a series of otherwise related images (like a trumpet in a group of tables and chairs). None of the images was related to trauma.

• From The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)

  This is, of course, true for all of us. When the job goes bad, when a cherished project fails, when someone you count on leaves you or dies, there are few things as helpful as moving your muscles and doing something that demands focused attention. Inner-city schools and psychiatric programs often lose sight of this. They want the kids to behave “normally”—without building the competencies that will make them feel normal. Theater programs also teach cause and effect. A foster kid’s life is completely unpredictable. Anything can happen without notice: being triggered and having a meltdown; seeing a parent arrested or killed; being moved from one home to another; getting yelled at for things that got you approval in your last placement. In a theatrical production they see the consequences of their decisions and actions laid out directly before their eyes. “If you want to give them a sense of control, you have to give them power over their destiny rather than intervene on their behalf,” Paul explains. “You cannot help, fix, or save the young people you are working with. What you can do is work side by side with them, help them to understand their vision, and realize it with them. By doing that you give them back control. We’re healing trauma without anyone ever mentioning the word.” Sentenced to ShakespeareFor the teenagers attending sessions of Shakespeare in the Courts, there is no improvisation, no building scripts around their own lives. They are all “adjudicated offenders” found guilty of fighting, drinking, stealing, and property crimes, and a Berkshire County Juvenile Court judge has sentenced them to six weeks, four afternoons a week, of intensive acting study. Shakespeare is a foreign country for these actors. As Kevin Coleman told me, when they first turn up—angry, suspicious, and in shock—they’re convinced that they’d rather go to jail. Instead they’re going to learn the lines of Hamlet, or Mark Antony, or Henry V and then go onstage in a condensed performance of an entire Shakespeare play before an audience of family, friends, and representatives of the juvenile justice system. With no words to express the effects of their capricious upbringing, these adolescents act out their emotions with violence. Shakespeare calls for sword fighting, which, like other martial arts, gives them an opportunity to practice contained aggression and expressions of physical power. The emphasis is on keeping everyone safe. The kids love swordplay, but to keep one another safe they have to negotiate and use language.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  But this is not, however, the sense Paul has in mind. What Paul has in mind is a longer and more complex story, which he will unfold in chapter 7. This story is about the strange, unexpected divine purpose in giving the law, and this is what he has woven, as a foretaste, into the Adam-and-Messiah story of chapter 5. “The law,” he says, “came in alongside, so that the trespass might be filled out to its full extent.” The phrase “so that,” italicized here, is vital. Paul is hinting that the often dark and sad history of Israel, the long descent into the “curse” of Deuteronomy, was not itself outside the divine purpose. That descent under the law was to be the means by which redemption would come. Even the exile itself, the long sojourn under the law’s curse, was part of the eventual saving purpose. The “so that” indicates that this was God’s intention. It was not an accident. Nor was it a demonic intrusion into the divine purpose. We note in particular at the end of Romans 5 that Paul in his distinctive way has done exactly what we saw in the four gospels. He has told the story of “how God became king” in such a way as to demonstrate that the death of Jesus was the clue to that result. At this point we seem to be very close to a central and more or less universal early Christian perception of what the gospel was all about and how its power was unleashed. If that is so, we should be less than surprised that Paul, like the gospels in describing Jesus’s last days, discerns the meaning of those days as the new Passover, the new Exodus. Romans 6–8: The New Exodus As we read Romans 6–8, the first thing to get straight is that this is not Paul’s “description of the Christian life.” Yes, it often feels like that. We begin with the exciting moment of baptism (chap. 6), resulting in the bracing challenge not to let sin reign in our mortal bodies. We continue by puzzling over the description, in chapter 7, of the struggle with sin (“I don’t do the good thing I want to do, but I end up doing the evil thing I don’t want to do,” 7:19). We learn to rely on God and to follow him into holiness, through suffering, and to glory (chap. 8). That is how many Christians have been taught to read these chapters, with local variations on the confusing bit in the middle. (Does Romans 7 describe the “normal Christian life,” the pre-Christian life, or what?) And, to a considerable extent, this reading “works.” We can learn a lot and be fortified in our faith by approaching the chapters that way.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  That is why I argued in Surprised by Hope that evangelism needs to be flanked with new-creation work in the realms of justice and beauty. If we are talking about the victory over evil and the launch of new creation, it won’t make much sense unless we are working for those very things in the lives of the poorest of the poor. If we are talking about Jesus winning the victory over the dark powers and thereby starting the long-awaited revolution, it will be much easier for people to believe it if we are working to show what we mean in art and music, in song and story. The great philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said, “It is love that believes the resurrection,” and hearts can be wooed by glorious or poignant music, art, dance, or drama into believing for a moment that a different world might after all be possible, a world in which resurrection, forgiveness, healing, and hope abound. Gifts that stir the imagination can frequently unblock channels of understanding that had remained stubbornly clogged when addressed by reasoned words. And those who are working for justice and beauty, just like those who are working to bring a fresh new articulation of the good news so that people may believe, must themselves have the same things etched, perhaps nailed, into their own lives. It will be painful. That is part of the point, not that we seek the pain, but that we seek to follow Jesus. Holiness and mission are two sides of the same coin. Both involve bringing the reign of Jesus to bear in places where up to now the powers have had held sway. The powers will not give in without a fight. But, exactly as with Jesus himself and exactly as he told his first followers, the fight itself and the suffering it involves (of whatever sort) are not incidental. The insight at the heart of Jesus’s own vocation was that suffering would not simply be the dark tunnel through which Israel would pass to God’s future. It would somehow be the means by which that future would be achieved. Most Christians today do not see things like this. Once we realize that we are part of the revolutionary movement that began at the cross, it may become clear once again, as it was to the first generation of Jesus’s followers. Cruciform Mission

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  32 in 4:6–8.) The family in question, he makes clear in 4:17–22, is the family that shares with Abraham the true worship of God (i.e., “faith[fullness]”). Abraham, unlike those spoken of in 1:18–23, “grew strong in faith and gave glory to God, being fully convinced that God had the power to accomplish what he had promised” (4:20–21). The question Paul faces in 3:21–26 is then the double problem of human sin and idolatry, on the one hand, and the divine faithfulness, on the other . This central passage is flanked on either side by passages that speak of the divine faithfulness to the covenant with Abraham and his family as the means by which this human plight will be resolved. All this means a vital shift from the usual reading of Romans to a truly Pauline one. Paul is not saying, “God will justify sinners by faith so that they can go to heaven, and Abraham is an advance example of this.” He is saying, “God covenanted with Abraham to give him a worldwide family of forgiven sinners turned faithful worshippers, and the death of Jesus is the means by which this happens.” This joins up with the clear implication of 2:17–20: God called Israel to be the light of the world, the answer to the problem of human idolatry and sin. The usual reading of Romans 3:21–26 is therefore outflanked. It is a shallow reduction of what Paul is actually saying. Sin and God’s dealing with sin in the death of Jesus are undoubtedly central, but these are set within the larger questions of both idolatry (and therefore of true worship) and God’s commitment to rescue the world through Abraham’s family, Israel . Neither Romans 1:18–3:20 nor Romans 4 is simply concerned with “sin” and “justification,” as in the normal reading. They are indeed concerned with both, but they frame both within the question of cult and the question of covenant . If there are signs that Romans 3:21–26 is also about cult and covenant, we should assume that this is what Paul thinks he is talking about. We can come even closer. Romans 3:27–31, the bridge between our key passage and chapter 4, is all about the coming together of Jew and Gentile, circumcised and uncircumcised, on the basis of pistis , “faith”—which looks like an additional fulfillment of the hints Paul dropped in 2:25–29.