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 The Argonauts (2015)

  One could argue that Winnicott is speaking metaphorically here—as Michael Snediker has said in a more adult context: “One doesn’t really shatter when one is fucked, despite Bersani’s accounts of it as such.” But while a baby may not die when its holding environment fails, it may indeed die and die and die. The question of what a psyche or a soul can experience depends, in large part, on what you believe it’s made of. Spirit is matter reduced to an extreme thinness: O so thin! In any case, Winnicott notably describes “the primitive agonies” not as lacks or voids, but as substantives: “fruits.” In 1984, George Oppen died of pneumonia with complications from Alzheimer’s. Mary Oppen died a few years later, in 1990, of ovarian cancer. After George’s death, several fragments of writing were found pinned to the wall above his desk. One of these read: Being with Mary: it has been almost too wonderful it is hard to believe During our hard season, I thought a lot about this fragment. At times it filled me with an almost sadistic urge to unearth some kind of evidence that George and Mary had been unhappy, even if at moments—some sign that his writing might have ever come between them, that they didn’t understand each other in some profound way, that they had ever exchanged ugly words, or differed on major decisions, such as whether George should fight in World War II, the efficacy of the Communist Party, whether to stay in exile in Mexico, and so on. This wasn’t schadenfreude. It was hope. I hoped that such things might have happened, and that Oppen, bobbing in the waves of bewilderment and lucidity that characterize a cruel neurological decline, would still be moved to write: Being with Mary: it has been almost too wonderful it is hard to believe And so, shamefully, I looked. I looked for evidence of their unhappiness, all the while repressing the fact that my search reminded me of a particularly dysfunctional moment in Leonard Michaels’s account of his tortured, explosive, and eventually disastrous relationship to his first wife, Sylvia. Upon learning that a friend had an equally horrible relationship with equally horrible fights, Michaels writes: “I was grateful to him, relieved, giddy with pleasure. So others lived this way, too…. Every couple, every marriage, was sick. Such thinking, like bloodletting, purged me. I was miserably normal; I was normally miserable.” He and Sylvia marry; a short, miserable time later, she’s dead from forty-seven Seconals. Of course the Oppens fought and hurt each other sometimes, you said when I told you about my search. They probably just kept it to themselves, out of respect and love for one another. Whatever I was looking for between George and Mary Oppen, I never found it. I did, however, find something I wasn’t expecting. I found it in Mary’s autobiography, Meaning a Life, which she published at the start of George’s mental decline. I found Mary.

• From Deceptions and Myths of the Bible (1975)

  Actually these stories refer to the resurrection of the Life Principle from that “bottomless pit” called earth, yet they all imply the forgiveness and salvation of all beings, including Satan. The Jews have never given “the devil his due”; to them he was, is, and ever shall be the enemy of God. Yet His Satanic Majesty is the energy aspect of God and therefore the creative power. As long as that power is on a low material plane, as in us, it is, of course, Satanic and evil, but that power when raised up is also the power of the spiritual planes. A long time ago we said that Demon est Deus inversus , and now we say that in respect to energy, Christus est Demon inversus . And so “none shall be lost, no, not one.” What then of the doctrine of eternal punishment? It is, like everything in literal scripture, false. Even the great Origen so pronounced it. 10. Because thou hast kept the word of my patience, I also will keep thee from the hour of temptation, which shall come upon all the world, to try them that dwell upon the earth. 11. Behold, I come quickly: hold that fast which thou hast, that no man take thy crown (Chap. 3). Having struggled long and risen high above the evil material forces life now receives that crown that is given “to him that overcometh.” But what is that crown? Something a divine, prehuman deity bestows upon it? No, that crown is its own creation—perfected life—the only divinity there is. Upon a fully evolved planet this sits like a crown of glory, and this it is the world is warned to hold fast, lest cosmic forces take it away. This is the temptation that “shall come upon all the world,” and every world someday. Today Venus is holding fast that crown, but it’s only a matter of time, not sin. Mercury has lost it. This part of Revelation is not only an outline of Evolution but also a cryptic account of the stages the life of this earth will pass through on its inward journey to Venus, thus scriptural confirmation of our previous assertion. How many have seen in this mysterious part of the scriptures an outline of Evolution? None, in fact it has not been seen in two thousand years. Here we would remind the reader of still another assertion, namely, that the planetary law will force man eventually to create in actuality his now imagined ideality—a God of moral and spiritual perfection—his present concept being but nature’s “primitive substitute for future reality.” 12. Him that overcometh will I make a pillar in the temple of my God, and he shall go no more out: and I will write upon him the name of my God, and the name of the city of my God, which is new Jerusalem, which cometh down out of heaven from my God; and I will write upon him my new name.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  Think back to those messianic themes. Jesus would indeed fight the battle, but it would be against the forces of evil, corruption, and death itself. And, like the Maccabean martyrs, who went to their deaths confident that God would raise them from the dead to new bodily life, Jesus came to believe that the only way one could defeat death itself, and thereby launch the new creation for which Israel and the world had longed, was to take on death itself, like David taking on Goliath in mortal combat, trusting that Israel’s God, the creator of life itself, would enable victory to be won. And, since death was seen in the scriptures as the ultimate result of human rebellion against God and the failure to obey him, if death were to be defeated, then idolatry, rebellion, disobedience, and sin would be defeated along with it. Death, like a great ugly giant, would do its worst, and pour out its full weight upon him. And the creator God would overcome it, showing it up as a defeated enemy. In human terms, as we have already seen, this was the craziest vocation one could imagine. The disciples knew that, and Jesus must have known it too. Nothing could have brought him to conceive of his vocation in these terms except his unshakeable faith in Israel’s God as the creator and his deep awareness of Israel’s scriptures as marking out the course he had to tread. Jesus really does seem to have believed not only that this was indeed the way to fight the battle, but that this was also the way to rebuild, to reconstitute, the Temple. This was the way in which Israel’s God would come back to his people as the rescuer, the deliverer, overthrowing the powers of the world, overcoming the folly and frailty of Israel itself. This was how, when the perfect storm had done its worst, Israel’s God would establish a new community, a people in whom the promises would be fulfilled, in whom the living God would come to dwell as in the Temple, revealing his glory to the world. This would, in other words, be the new Exodus. Work through the seven themes once more. The tyrant would be not the Jerusalem leaders (though they, in love with their own wealth and prestige, were in league with the dark powers), not even Rome (though Rome would nail him to the cross), but all the powers of the Accuser, up to and including death itself. The leader would be, of course, Jesus himself.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  I was also aware that my full recovery depended upon my obeying certain rules. I was especially struck by Eliot’s line “I rejoice that things are as they are.” For years I had told myself that black was white and white black; that the so-called proofs of God’s existence had truly convinced me; that I might not be feeling happy, but that I really was happy because I was doing God’s will; that sewing for hours at a machine without a needle was the most profitable way of spending time. I had deliberately told myself lies and stamped hard on my mind whenever it had reached out toward the truth. As a result I had warped and incapacitated my mental powers. From now on I must be scrupulous about telling the truth, especially to myself. I realized that this would not be a popular stratagem. I had noticed how frequently people rushed to put an optimistic gloss on a disaster or a difficulty, even when their interpretation seemed at obvious variance with the facts. As Eliot had said in another poem: “Human kind / Cannot bear very much reality.” It was probably natural for us to deny pain or at least to try to push it out of sight. I could see that this could be a useful survival technique. While you were marveling at your silver lining, you could be making all kinds of unconscious adjustments so that when the storm finally broke you were in fact prepared. But I could not afford to do this. I was like a recovering alcoholic, who could not allow herself even a sip of this positive elixir, because it could awaken old destructive habits. That was why I could not go along with Dr. Piet and his theories any longer. For me, they did not reflect the way things really were. By making a habit of gazing unflinchingly at reality, however unpleasant, I too might learn to rejoice in it. So now I had a new project: to construct my own recovery by correcting the bias of my mind toward delusion, thus helping it to regain its former integrity. But I was only on the very first steps of Eliot’s winding stair; I had no idea how far I still had to go. For one thing, I was not nearly as resigned to my fate as I pretended. As the year progressed, I sometimes felt that life was leaving me behind. Everybody else seemed to be moving on. Even Charlotte had decided to break out of her tranced existence in the moated grange of the Iffley Road, waiting for the lover to show up. “I’m getting out,” she had told me one evening. “I’m going to go to London, breaking with Mike. I’ll get a job there.”

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  So those who follow Jesus have, front and center within their vocation, the task of being the real “opposition.” This doesn’t mean, of course, that they must actually oppose everything that the official government tries to do. They must weigh it, sift it, hold it to account, affirm what can be affirmed, point out things that are lacking or not quite in focus, critique what needs critiquing, and denounce, on occasion, what needs denouncing. It is very telling that, in the early centuries of church history, the Christian bishops gained a reputation in the wider world of being the champions of the poor. They spoke up for their rights; they spoke out against those who would abuse and ill-treat them. Of course! The bishops were followers of Jesus—what else would you expect? That role continues to this day. And it goes much wider. The church has a wealth of experience and centuries of careful reflection in the fields of education, health care, the treatment of the elderly, the needs and vulnerabilities of refugees and migrants, and so on. We should use these to full effect. This facet of the church’s “witness,” this central vocation through which Jesus continues his work to this day, has been marginalized. Modern Western democracies haven’t wanted to be held to account in this way and so have either officially or unofficially driven a fat wedge between “church” and “state.” But, as we have hinted already, this has actually changed the meanings of both words. “State” has expanded to do some of what “church” should be doing; and the churches themselves have colluded with the privatization of “religion,” leaving all the things that the church used to be best at to the “state” or other agencies. “Religion,” as one recent writer says, then “dwindles to a kind of personal pastime, like breeding gerbils or collecting porcelain.”13 No wonder, when people within the church speak up or speak out on key issues of the day, those who don’t like what they say tell them to go back to their private “religious” world. But speak up and speak out we must, because we have not only the clear instruction of Jesus himself, but the clear promise that this is how he will exercise his sovereignty; this is how he will make his kingdom a reality. In John’s gospel Jesus tells his followers that the Spirit will call the world to account: “When he comes, he will prove the world to be in the wrong on three counts: sin, justice, and judgment. In relation to sin—because they don’t believe in me. In relation to justice—because I’m going to the father, and you won’t see me anymore. In relation to judgment—because the ruler of this world is judged.” (16:8–11)

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  They shall know that I, YHWH their God, am with them, and that they, the house of Israel, are my people, says the Lord YHWH. You are my sheep, the sheep of my pasture, and I am your God, says the Lord YHWH. (Ezek. 34:30–31) Ezekiel 34 is all about Israel’s God becoming king, to do for his people what other kings and rulers have failed to do. That is clear. But it is also clear that the prophet reserves a role for the eventual king (or “prince”) from the line of David. How these two relate he does not say. Somehow, when God is king, “David” (i.e., the coming king from David’s family) will be king. These will not cancel one another out. When we read, among the stories of Jesus, hints and promises about a shepherd who cares for the sheep, these are the resonances we should be picking up. A similar result emerges from a psalm that was well known and widely quoted and adapted at the time. It functioned, for Jews of the period and then for the early Christians, as a model of how YHWH would set up his kingdom over the turbulent nations—by establishing the true Davidic king: Why do the nations conspire, and the peoples plot in vain? The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against YHWH and his anointed. . . . He who sits in the heavens laughs; YHWH has them in derision. Then he will speak to them in his wrath, and terrify them in his fury, saying, “I have set my king on Zion, my holy hill.” I will tell of the decree of YHWH: He said to me, “You are my son; today I have begotten you. Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage, and the ends of the earth your possession. You shall break them with a rod of iron, and dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel.” (Ps. 2:1–2, 4–9) Here we have it. YHWH is in charge and will establish his own rule over the rest of the world from his throne in Zion. But he will do this through his “anointed,” through the one he calls “my son.” I have deliberately set out these passages at some length to show just how strong, just how deep-rooted in scripture, is the idea of YHWH himself coming to rule and reign as Israel’s king. Several of the themes one can observe in the sorry sequence of would-be kings from the Maccabees to bar-Kochba (see Chapter 9) emerge in a clear light: victory over the nations, the rescue of Israel from oppression, Jerusalem and the Temple as the proper dwelling place for God’s glory, and so on. But it is YHWH himself who will bring this about—or, in that final twist in Ezekiel 34, echoed in Psalm 2, YHWH himself acting in and through the Davidic king.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  Many of Jesus’s stories pick up Israel’s stories from long before, stories about God and Israel, the Exodus, the creation itself, the trials and tribulations of God and God’s people, and—not least—the horrible exile in Babylon and God’s repeated promises to restore his people’s fortunes at last. This, in particular, is the reason why some of Jesus’s key parables were about seeds being sown. The idea of a farmer sowing a seed—to be sure, one of the most natural and common sights in an agricultural economy—had been used centuries before by the prophets to promise that Israel’s God, having plucked up the plant that was Israel, would come back and sow once more the seeds that would bear fruit, fruit that this time would last (see, e.g., Isa. 1:9; 6:13; 37:31–2; Jer. 31:27; Ezra 9:2). Here is Matthew’s parable of the sower (parallels are in Mark 4:1–20 and Luke 8:4–15): That very day Jesus went out of the house and sat down beside the sea. Large crowds gathered around him, so he got into a boat and sat down. The whole crowd was standing on the shore. He had much to say to them, and he said it all in parables. “Listen!” he said. “Once there was a sower who went out to sow. As he sowed, some seed fell beside the path, and the birds came and ate it up. Some seed fell on rocky soil, where it didn’t have much earth. It sprang up at once because it didn’t have depth of soil. But when the sun was high it got scorched, and it withered because it didn’t have any root. Other seed fell in among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked it. And other seed fell into good soil, and produced a crop, some a hundred times over, some sixty, and some thirty times over. If you’ve got ears, then listen!” His disciples came to him. “Why are you speaking to them in parables?” they asked. “You’ve been given the gift of knowing the secrets of the kingdom of heaven,” he replied, “but they haven’t been given it. Anyone who already has something will be given more, and they will have plenty. But anyone who has nothing—even what they have will be taken away! That’s why I speak to them in parables, so that they may look but not see, and hear but not understand or take it in. Isaiah’s prophecy is coming true in them: ‘You will listen and listen but won’t understand, You will look and look but not see. This people’s heart has gone flabby and fat, Their ears are muffled and dull, Their eyes are darkened and shut; In order that they won’t see with their eyes Or hear with their ears, or know in their heart, Or turn back again for me to restore them.’

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  Jesus himself spent quite a bit of time explaining what he meant by this phrase, and I have tried to track those explanations and get to the heart of his meaning. Part Three of the book consists of one long final chapter, which could be entitled, “So What?” In other words, what does it all mean for us now? I sketch four ways in which people today have tried to understand the contemporary relevance of Jesus’s inauguration of God’s kingdom, and allow them to enter into discussion with one another. From this there emerges a sense, which is central to the New Testament itself, that Jesus’s way of running the world here and now is, however surprisingly, through his followers. The heart of their life is Spirit-led worship, through which they are constituted and energized as “the body of Christ.” The agenda which follows from this is set by those memorable sayings we call the Beatitudes, which offer a vantage point from which to explore the ways in which the project of God’s kingdom, which Jesus announced and which he believed would be accomplished through his death, can become a reality not only in the lives of his followers, but through the lives of his followers. This final chapter is only a signpost to the much larger proposals that might be advanced at this point, but it is clearly important, granted the subject matter of the book as a whole, that something at least should be said along these lines. I have been encouraged by the many ways in which Christians from very different traditions have been exploring these issues both in theory and in practice in recent years, and I hope that this book will give a firmer biblical and theological grounding, and perhaps shaping, to these explorations and efforts. I mentioned first-century Jews just now, and how they thought. I am of course aware that there were many different varieties of Judaism in the ancient world, as there are in our own day, and that all generalizations about Jews, or for that matter Greeks or Romans, are bound to ignore whole libraries full of complex detail. I have written about some of that elsewhere too (particularly in The New Testament and the People of God 2 ). But some things have to be made simple if we are going to get anywhere. This is the first book I have written since the death of my beloved father, at the age of ninety-one. Having read little or no theology or biblical scholarship until his mid-sixties, when I started writing, he then read everything I wrote within days of its publication and frequently telephoned me to tell me what he thought about it. I cherish some of his comments. “I’ve looked up ‘eschatology’ three times in the dictionary,” he once complained, “and I keep forgetting what it means.”

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  Forget the idea of me being some sort of a king. You just have to go and tell people to believe in me, and then you and they will all come and join me in heaven.” That is certainly not how Luke, telling the story, sees it, and it wouldn’t fit with all that we have seen of how Jesus himself saw his mission during his public career. Instead, Jesus’s answer here is designed to say that, yes, the kingdom is indeed now being launched. He is indeed Israel’s king; he is therefore, indeed, the Lord of the world. But the way his kingdom is being implemented is, once more, through these human beings . Modern Christians use the word “witness” to mean “tell someone else about your faith.” The way Luke seems to be using it is, “tell someone else that Jesus is the world’s true Lord.” The story of what happened next is written in such a way as to say, “This is how the kingdom is to come. This is how Jesus is starting to rule the world. This is what it will look like when God becomes king on earth as in heaven.” We therefore have to reread the book of Acts with a relentless determination not to be drawn down into the usual categories, into stories of spiritual experiences, remarkable healings, strange divine promptings and leadings, conversions, and so on. All of these matter. They matter very much indeed. But they are the modus operandi of the thing that really matters, the fact that through Jesus’s followers God is establishing his kingdom and the rule of Jesus himself on earth as in heaven. Underneath the exciting “spiritual” experiences there is a constant theme that emerges, for instance, when Jesus’s followers speak of having to obey God rather than human beings. The powers of the world do their utmost to stamp out the new vision, the new Way. But, despite the best efforts of chief priests and governors, of kings and mobs and courts and councils, Jesus is celebrated as Lord, even over the wild waves that shipwreck Paul and threaten to stop his getting to Rome to announce God as king and Jesus as Lord at the heart of the greatest superpower the world had ever known. An additional theme in Acts ties this kingdom work of the disciples with the theme we saw again and again in Jesus’s public career. Jesus, we remember, redefined “space” around himself, so that the “holy place” of the Temple in Jerusalem was upstaged by his own work, by his own person.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  This is the further manifestation of his sovereignty over them. Daniel 7, with its great judgment scene, belongs with such seminal passages as Psalm 2 in declaring that, though the nations may rage and bluster, God will eventually have them judged and put in their place. He will do so, what’s more, in the same way that he has chosen to act throughout his creation: through a human being. In Psalm 2 it is the king. In Daniel 7 it is “one like a son of man,” representing God’s people. Not surprisingly, people in the first century, both Jewish and Christian, saw the two pictures as one. The judgment scene in Daniel 7 serves as the backdrop for Jesus’s own sense of vocation. As we saw earlier, this is a key entry point for understanding what God’s kingdom as inaugurated in Jesus’s life, death, resurrection, and ascension might actually mean. There can be no doubt that Jesus’s first followers believed that Jesus had fulfilled this vision of Psalm 2 and Daniel 7. Jesus himself had constantly hinted at something like this, though until the great events of Calvary and Easter nobody had worked out either what it might mean or how it would be put into effect. But these events, seen in this light, mean that we have to take very seriously the early Christian belief that Jesus was indeed now exalted; he was now in charge; he was already, now, calling the nations to account. And he was going to do so through his followers, those to whom he had given his Spirit . This, whether we like it or not, is where we come in. Yes, God can and does work in all sorts of ways outside the church. There are many movements of thought and energy totally beyond the life of the church in which wise Christians can discern and celebrate God’s sovereign and gracious presence. Paul, in a moment of visionary affirmation, looks out on a world full of things to celebrate: “whatever is true, whatever is holy, whatever is upright, whatever is pure, whatever is attractive, whatever has a good reputation; anything virtuous, anything praiseworthy” (Phil. 4:8). We thank God for his wonderful work well beyond the borders of Christendom. God is the sovereign creator; he can and does do all sorts of things without our knowing, without our involvement. But we do not, because of that, lose sight of one of the church’s primary roles: to bear witness to the sovereign rule of Jesus, holding the world to account . And when I say “bear witness,” I mean it in the strong sense I spoke of earlier. Like a witness in a law court, we are not just telling about our private experiences. We are declaring things that, by their declaration, will change the way things are going. This means that the church has a task that, in our modern Western democracies, we have attempted to replicate in other ways.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  But if that is so, then forgiveness must mean that exile is now over. “Comfort, O comfort my people,” sang one of the greatest prophets. “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” (Isa. 40:1–2). And, as the prophecy that follows makes clear, this word of forgiveness is part of the overall message that Israel’s God is in fact king. He will be known as king through his victory over the tyrannical pagan kingdom of Babylon and his bringing his people back home to their land. This was to be the new Exodus: tyrant, rescue, vocation, God’s presence, inheritance. Just as physical healing is the up-close-and-personal version of what it looks like when God takes charge, to fix and mend the whole world, so individual forgiveness is the up-close-and-personal version of what it looks like when God does what he promised and restores his exiled people. As we saw, most Jews of Jesus’s day saw the Babylonian exile as only the start of a much longer period of history in which God’s people remained unredeemed, unrescued, and unforgiven. When Jesus was announcing forgiveness, both on the one-to-one personal scale and more widely, this was the story people would have had in their heads. And this was the story we must assume Jesus intended them to have in their heads. The First Announcement This is how we should understand both the big announcements and the intimate words of consolation. The most formal of the announcements comes, in Luke’s gospel (4:16–30), at the start of Jesus’s public career. Jesus goes back to his hometown of Nazareth and on the sabbath day goes to the synagogue—a place of worship, but also the communal “gathering place” (that’s what the word means), the place where people come together to discuss, to think things through, to study the law and to reflect on what it means. Jesus stands up to read from the prophet Isaiah and chooses another of the great passages about the coming new age, the release from slavery, the new Exodus, and restoration after the exile, which formed the hope that sustained so much Jewish life of his day. This is the passage often referred to as Jesus’s “Nazareth Manifesto”: He came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up. On the sabbath, as was his regular practice, he went into the synagogue and stood up to read. They gave him the scroll of the prophet Isaiah.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  The stories the Jews told (and when I say “told,” I mean not only told one another, read out aloud in their meetinghouses, studied privately, and turned into prayer, but also celebrated in national festivals, which involved most of the population and brought vast pilgrim crowds from all over the world) were not simply stories of small beginnings, sad times at present, and glorious days to come. They were more specific, more complex, dense with detail, and heavy with hope. Their theme came to its fullest flowering in the great story of the Exodus, when, roughly fifteen hundred years before the time of Jesus, Moses had led the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt, across the Red Sea (which miraculously parted to let them through), and through the desert to the promised land. The Jews lived on the hope that it would happen again. The tyrants would do their worst, and God would deliver the people. Understand the Exodus, and you understand a good deal about Judaism. And about Jesus. Jesus chose Passover, the great national festival celebrating the Exodus, to make his crucial move. We will look in more detail at the Exodus story a little later. It was celebrated annually at Passover and in other festivals too. But the Exodus, in turn, looked back farther, to the divine call to the original patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Their story in turn looked back farther still, to the mysterious but powerful story of creation itself, when Israel’s God had brought his beautiful, ordered, and living creation out of the primal waters of chaos. The God who brought order out of chaos and who brought his enslaved people out of Egypt would do it again. Creation and covenant: God made the world, God called Israel to be his people, and God would remake his world in order to rescue his people Israel. Every time the Jewish people told the story (and they told it often), that was what they were thinking and hoping and praying for. It was this hope, this story that generated the second great storm wind, the powerful high-pressure system, into whose path Jesus of Nazareth decided to walk. And, eventually, to ride a donkey.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  In particular, Jesus came to Nazareth and announced the jubilee. This was the time—the time!—when all the sevens, all the sabbaths, would rush together. This was the moment Israel and the world had been waiting for. When you reach your destination, you don’t expect to see signposts anymore. Nobody puts up a sign on Capitol Hill pointing to “Washington.” Nobody needs a signpost saying “London” in Piccadilly Circus. You don’t need the sabbath when the time is fulfilled. It was completely consistent with Jesus’s vision of his own vocation that he would do things that said, again and again from one angle after another, that the time had arrived, that the future, the new creation, was already here, and that one no longer needed the sabbath. The sabbath law was not, then, a stupid rule that could now be abolished (though some of the detailed sabbath regulations, as Jesus pointed out, had led to absurd extremes, so that you were allowed to pull a donkey out of a well on the sabbath, but not to heal the sick). It was a signpost whose purpose had now been accomplished. It was a marker of time pointing forward to the time when time would be fulfilled; and that was now happening. Notice how this theme then ties in with others we have already observed. If the sabbath now has a purpose, it won’t be for rest from the work of creation, but rather for celebrating God’s victory over the satan: “And isn’t it right,” asks Jesus, “that this daughter of Abraham, tied up by the satan for these eighteen years, should be untied from her chains on the sabbath day?” (Luke 13:16). Victory in the real battle is closely connected with the healings that reveal that God is in charge. “My father is going on working,” declares Jesus, “and so am I” (John 5:17). And these things happen, of course, in the moment when the time is fulfilled. If Jesus is a walking, living, breathing Temple, he is also the walking, celebrating, victorious sabbath. But this means that the time of Jesus’s public career, taken as a whole, also acquires a special significance. He spoke about this special significance when he insisted that the wedding guests can’t fast while the bridegroom is still at the party. Something new is happening; a new time has been launched; different things are now appropriate. Jesus has a sense of a rhythm to his work, a short rhythm in which he will launch God’s kingdom, the God’s-in-charge project, and complete it in the most shocking and dramatic symbolic act of all. “Look here,” he says to those who have warned him that Herod wants to kill him, “I’m casting out demons today and tomorrow, and completing my healings. I’ll be finished by the third day. But I have to continue my travels today, tomorrow, and the day after that! It couldn’t happen that a prophet would perish except in Jerusalem” (Luke 13:32–33).

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  But then God’s people will be exalted, like the “one like a son of man” in Daniel 7:13, so that after their own suffering and death they will be with their Lord forever. And the result is that Jesus will have his “royal appearing,” like Caesar coming back to Rome after a visit to the colonies. His glad, loyal citizens will “go out to meet him,” not in order to stay with him out in the countryside, away from the city, but to escort him in triumph and splendor back into his capital. Of course these metaphors, when pressed, don’t all fit together. You’re not supposed to be able to draw the scene in a sketch-pad. Think of the book of Revelation, where in 5:6 we find the lion who is also a lamb “standing there as though it had been slaughtered” (slaughtered lambs don’t normally stand up), with seven horns (we can just about imagine that) and seven eyes (that’s a bit harder). The point is that this language is not meant to be taken literally. It’s a mixture of code, metaphor, and political cartoon. But the fact that this particular picture is a rich mixture of such styles of writing doesn’t mean that nothing is going to happen. Some think that once you’ve said something is “metaphorical,” you mean it’s “all in the mind,” with no corresponding events in the real world. On the contrary. Paul is giving his readers a set of lenses through which to look, but the event itself at which they are to look is definite, clear, and vital. Lose this and you lose everything. Without the “second coming,” seen in proper biblical terms, following Jesus is reduced to a “way of being religious,” a private spirituality with a vague and uncertain personal hope, but with no prospect at all of a world radically transformed by Jesus as its rightful Lord. Some, indeed, are content to make that reduction, leaving Christian faith as a “spirituality” that one might find helpful, but without any thought of the ancient vision of the Psalms and Isaiah, of the whole world healed, judged, put right, transformed under the sovereign rule of Israel’s Messiah. That fits quite nicely within the postmodern reaction against an older and arrogant Christian “triumphalism,” but it is a lot less Jewish and a lot less Christian, and it has little to do with the actual Jesus himself.

• From Another Country (1962)

  I thought they were very logical.” “French logic is very simple. Whatever the French do is logical because the French are doing it. That’s the really unbeatable advantage French logic has over all others. ” “I see,” she said, and laughed again. “I hope you read the play before your friend consulted the stars. Is it a good part?” “It’s the best part,” he said, after a moment, “that I’ve ever had.” Again, briefly, he heard the typewriter bell. Cass lit a cigarette, offered one to Eric, and lit it for him. “Are you going to settle here now, or are you planning to go back, or what?” “I don’t,” he said, quickly, “have any plans for going back, a lot—maybe everything—depends on what happens with this play.” She sensed his retreat, and took her tone from him. “Oh. I’d love to come and watch rehearsals. I’d run out and get coffee for you, and things like that. It would make me feel that I’d contributed to your triumph.” “Because you’re sure it’s going to be a triumph,” he said, smiling. “Wonderful Cass. I guess it’s a habit great men’s wives get into.” Weeping and crying, tears falling on the ground . The atmosphere between them stiffened a little, nevertheless, with their knowledge of why he had allowed his career in New York to lapse for so long. Then he allowed himself to think of opening night, and he thought, Yves will be here. This thought exalted him and made him feel safe. He did not feel safe now, sitting here alone with Cass; he had not felt safe since stepping off the boat. His ears ached for the sound of Yves’ footfalls beside him: until he heard this rhythm, all other sounds were meaningless. Weeping and crying, tears falling on the ground . All other faces were obliterated for him by the blinding glare of Yves’ absence. He looked over at Cass, longing to tell her about Yves, but not daring, not knowing how to begin. “Great men’s wives, indeed!” said Cass. “How I’d love to explode that literary myth.” She looked at him, gravely sipping her whiskey, without seeming to taste it. When I got to the end, I was so worried down . “You seem very sure of yourself,” she said. “I do?” He was profoundly astonished and pleased. “I don’t feel very sure of myself.” “I remember you before you went away. You were miserable then. We all wondered— I wondered—what would become of you. But you aren’t miserable now.” “No,” he said, and, under her scrutiny, blushed. “I’m not miserable any more. But I still don’t know what’s going to become of me.” “Growth,” she said, “is what will become of you. It’s what has become of you.”

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  All I wanted to do was crawl under the bedclothes and shut out the world. I even dialed the office of the production company, but of course there was no reply. They would all be waiting for me at the studio, setting up, as they called it. A car was coming to collect me in forty-five minutes. I often wonder how my life would have turned out if I had managed to get through to the producer, offered my excuses, and pulled out. Strangely enough, once I was in the cab, I found that I was feeling better. It was a beautiful day, and London was looking its very best in the June sunlight. Outside I passed women wearing brightly colored clothes, looking like exotic birds and preening themselves on the gray pavements. Men walked with their shirtsleeves rolled up, their jackets slung over their shoulders. There was that air of excitement, that pulse of life, which becomes almost comically evident in England whenever the sun makes a brief appearance. I found myself picking up the mood. I remembered the strange lightness that had come upon me in the hospital the morning after I had swallowed those sleeping tablets, the feeling that I had nothing to lose. I felt a similar freedom that morning and realized that I too looked a part of this cheerful summer scene. I had washed my hair, slathered on some makeup to hide the ravages left by my tears, and put on a bright pink dress. I could almost feel my mood shifting in my mind. This tentative optimism got a further boost when I arrived at the grimy studio. The team seemed friendly and genuinely pleased to see me, and explained again what they wanted me to do. They were hoping to make a series for Channel 4 called Opinions. Every week, somebody with a strong or interesting viewpoint would discuss an idea in front of the cameras for thirty minutes. There would be no visuals, no interviewer, and no TelePrompTer. The idea was that the speaker would simply explore his opinion with the viewers, and carry through an argument by him- or herself from start to finish. “I mean, how often do you see this on TV?” Nick, the producer, demanded rhetorically. “All we are given these days are bite-sized ideas, everything cut down to size. Channel Four wants to make different kinds of programs, and this will be new! This will be the ultimate talking head! A lot of people think it can’t work, but we’re convinced that it can.” Sometimes, he explained, the person would be a celebrity, sometimes somebody like myself, who was not famous but might have something interesting to say. The thing to do was to go in front of the cameras and enjoy myself. This morning, as this was just a pilot, they weren’t expecting a thirty-minute talk.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  Believing in the second coming itself is anything but arrogant. The whole point of it is to insist, over against not only the wider pagan world, but against all self-delusion or pretension within the church, that Jesus remains sovereign and will return at last to put everything right. This putting right (the biblical word for it is “justice”) is the sort of sigh-of-relief event that the whole world, at its best and at many other times too, longs for most deeply. All sorts of things are out of joint, both on a large and a small scale, in the world; and God the creator will put them straight. All sorts of things are still going wrong, corrupting the lives of human beings and the larger life of the environment, the planet itself; God the creator will put them right. All sorts of things are still wrong with us, Jesus’s followers; Jesus, when he comes, will put us right as well. That may not be comfortable, but it’s what we need. Believing he will do it is part of Christian humility. Waiting for it is part of Christian patience: When the king is revealed (and he is your life, remember), then you too will be revealed with him in glory. (Col. 3:4) Beloved ones, we are now, already, God’s children; it hasn’t yet been revealed what we are going to be. We know that when he is revealed we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is. (1 John 3:2) But how will it happen? Thinking of the second coming or of Jesus “returning” often raises the same kind of problems that we saw with the ascension. People who still think that “heaven” is a long way away, up in the sky, and that that’s where Jesus has gone, imagine that the second coming will be an event somewhat like the return of a space shuttle from its far-off orbit. Not so. Heaven is God’s space, God’s dimension of present reality, so that to think of Jesus “returning” is actually, as both Paul and John say in the passages just quoted, to think of him presently invisible, but one day reappearing. It won’t be the case that Jesus will simply reappear within the world the way it presently is. His return—his reappearing—will be the central feature of the much greater event that the New Testament writers promise, based on Jesus’s resurrection itself: heaven and earth will one day come together and be present and transparent to each other. That’s what they were made for, and that’s what God will accomplish one day.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  Where does Jesus come into all this? From his own perspective, he was himself both upstaging the power structures of his day and also calling them to account, then and there. That’s what his action in the Temple was all about. But his death, resurrection, and ascension were the demonstration that he was Lord and they were not. The calling to account has, in other words, already begun—and will be completed at the second coming. And the church’s work of speaking the truth to power means what it means because it is based on the first of these and anticipates the second. What the church does, in the power of the Spirit, is rooted in the achievement of Jesus and looks ahead to the final completion of his work. This is how Jesus is running the world in the present. But, happily, it doesn’t stop there, with the constant critique, both positive and negative, of what the world’s rulers are up to. There are millions of things that the church should be getting into that the rulers of the world either don’t bother about or don’t have the resources to support. Jesus has all kinds of projects up his sleeve and is simply waiting for faithful people to say their prayers, to read the signs of the times, and to get busy. Nobody would have dreamed of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission if Desmond Tutu hadn’t prayed, and pushed, and made it happen. Nobody would have worked out the Jubilee movement, to campaign for international debt relief, if people in the churches had not become serious about the ridiculous plight of the poor. Closer to home, nobody else is likely to organize a car shuttle to get old people to and from stores. Nobody else is likely to volunteer to play the piano for the service at the local prison. Few other people will start a play group for the children of single mothers who are still at work when school finishes. Nobody else, in my experience, will listen very hard to the plight of isolated rural communities or equally isolated inner-city enclaves. Nobody else thought of organizing the “Street Pastors” scheme, which, in my country at least, has had a remarkable success in reducing crime. And so on. And so on. And if the response is that these things are all very small and in themselves insignificant, I reply in two ways. First, didn’t Jesus explain his own actions by talking about the smallest of the seeds that then grows into the largest kind of shrub? And second, it is remarkable how one small action can start a trend. One theologian has called it “cascading grace.” Word gets around that a church in the next town has begun a particular project, and the good news story invites people to try something similar for themselves. That’s how the Hospice movement spread, transforming within a generation the care of terminally ill patients. Jesus is at work, taking forward his kingdom project.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  This is the sharp edge of what God is doing. Look at the texts and you’ll see. When God does the big things, the little people get drawn in too. Human systems often forget that, but God doesn’t. Read on in Isaiah 40: the God who comes in power and glory, who stretches out the heavens like a curtain, who glances down and sees the princes of the earth as so many grains of sand, is also the God who feeds his flock like a shepherd, gathers the lambs in his arms, and gently leads the mother sheep. Blessed are those who can see this, who can spot what’s going on, who are prepared to go with Jesus rather than with the princelings of the earth, even though what Jesus was doing wasn’t what they had expected. Tellingly, Jesus himself then goes on to compare John the Baptist and Herod Antipas. Jesus is too canny to do this directly; he refers to Antipas by means of the symbol Antipas himself had chosen for his coins. Jews weren’t supposed to make pictures of human faces, so they chose symbols instead. Antipas’s symbol was a particular kind of reed that grows beside the Sea of Galilee. So, asks Jesus, “What were you expecting to see when you went out into the desert? A reed wobbling in the wind?” In other words, “When you went off after John, were you looking for another ruler like the ones you’ve got already?” Surely not, he implies. He then repeats the question, coming a shade more into the open. “Well, then, what were you expecting to see? Someone dressed in silks and satins? If you want to see people like that you’d have to go to somebody’s royal palace.” Again, the expected answer is, “No, we’ve got people like that already, and we’re fed up with them. We want something else. We want God himself to be king.” “So,” Jesus presses the question, “what were you expecting to see? A prophet?” Someone announcing God’s rule? “Yes, and much more than a prophet.” He then quotes Malachi 3:1, where God promises to send his messenger ahead of him, to prepare the way. “All right,” he seems to say, “you were wanting God to be king—so you went looking for a prophet, hoping that he would be the one to tell you that it was happening at last. And you were right— he was. Since the time of John’s brief work, God’s kingdom has indeed been breaking in, even though the men of violence are trying to hijack it.” “So,” he concludes, “if you’ll believe it, he is Elijah, the one who was to come”—another reference to Malachi, this time to 4:5, where the messenger-in-advance is said to be Elijah himself. And then he adds, characteristically, “If you’ve got ears, then listen!” What’s going on? Why does he say it like that?

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  The early Christians were, after all, a small minority, staking their daring and apparently crazy claim about Jesus from a position of great weakness and vulnerability. They were perceived, with some justification, as a threat to the established order, and so they attracted criticism, threats, punishment, and even death. But their threat to the present world was not of the usual kind. They were not ordinary revolutionaries, ready to take up arms to overthrow an existing regime and establish their own instead. Celebrating Jesus as the world’s rightful king—as we see them doing in our earliest documents, the letters of Paul—was indeed a way of posing a challenge to Caesar and all other earthly “lords.” But it was a different sort of challenge. It was not only the announcement of Jesus as the true king, albeit still the king-in-waiting, but the announcement of him as the true sort of king. Addressing the ambitious pair James and John, he put it like this: “Pagan rulers . . . lord it over their subjects. . . . But that’s not how it’s to be with you” (Matt. 20:25–26). And, as he said to Pilate, the kingdoms that are characteristic of “this world” make their way by violence, but his sort of kingdom doesn’t do that (John 18:36). We all know the irony of empires that offer people peace, prosperity, freedom, and justice—and kill tens of thousands of people to make the point. Jesus’s kingdom isn’t like that. With him, the irony works the other way around. Jesus’s death and his followers’ suffering are the means by which his peace, freedom, and justice come to birth on earth as in heaven. Jesus’s kingdom must come, then, by the means that correspond to the message. It’s no good announcing love and peace if you make angry, violent war to achieve it! That, as we shall see, is the watchword for the “today” bit of the story of Jesus. But what about the “tomorrow” or “forever” bit? What is the ultimate future? Jesus’s first followers were unequivocal: Jesus will return. He will come again. He will reappear in power and glory, triumphing over all the forces of death, decay, and destruction, including the structures that have used those horrible forces to enslave and devastate human lives. The present mode of the story is not the end. Pundits debate the origin of the phrase, “It ain’t over till the fat lady sings” (the best guess is that it’s a metaphor from opera, though it is applied to sport and even to church services). But in the Christian story it ain’t over till the Master returns.