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 Simply Jesus (2011)

  Re-Living the Exodus Answer: you tell the story, you sing the songs, and you keep celebrating God’s victory, even though it keeps on not happening. As we have seen, the story —the Story above all stories for the Jewish people—was the story of the Exodus, the time when God heard the cries of his people in their slavery in Egypt and came to rescue them, bringing them through the Red Sea at Passover-time, leading them through the desert and home to their promised land. Since Jesus himself seems to have deliberately chosen the Exodus story, the Passover story, as the setting for the carefully staged climax to his own public career, it’s important that we think for a moment about the seven great features of this story, which all first-century Jews would have known in their bones. All this —we are still learning to take off our modern Western spectacles and put on first-century Jewish ones!—is essential if we are to understand what Jesus thought he was doing. If we don’t get this straight, we shall simply squash Jesus into the little boxes of our own imaginations rather than seeing him as he was. Here are the seven themes of the Exodus: • Wicked tyrant • Chosen leader • Victory of God • Rescue by sacrifice • New vocation and way of life • Presence of God • Promised/inherited land First, the Exodus story was all about a wicked tyrant—Pharaoh, the king of Egypt—who had enslaved God’s people. Pharaoh is, as it were, the most visible symptom of the problem the people were facing. Second, God chose a leader. Moses was called, along with his brother Aaron and sister Miriam, to tell the people that God was now at last coming to their rescue. Moses then, at God’s behest, led the people out of slavery to freedom. Third, God won a great victory over Pharaoh and his people. This took the form of divine judgment, beginning with a sequence of plagues and reaching its decisive climax when the Red Sea, which had parted to let the Israelites through, rushed back and drowned the Egyptian army. This divine victory was celebrated in a great song whose closing line gives us the direct link to what Jesus was saying: “YHWH will reign forever and ever” (Exod. 15:18). This is what it means to say that Israel’s God has taken charge. He is reigning.

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

  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. They would just film me for fifteen to twenty minutes.

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

  To Turn Again The decision to write A History of God seemed to come out of the blue, and it changed my life so radically that, if I were a traditional believer, I might be tempted to call it an inspiration. In Coleridge’s poem the ancient mariner, adrift on a desolate ocean and apparently eaten up with bitterness and despair, found himself watching the water snakes coiling, writhing, and gleaming around his becalmed ship. O happy living things! no tongue Their beauty might declare: A spring of love gusht from my heart, And I bless’d them unaware! Sure my kind Saint took pity on me, And I bless’d them unaware. Redeemed by a spontaneous ecstasy that took him out of himself and toward his fellow creatures, the mariner discovered that he could actually pray again. And immediately the albatross hanging around his neck like a millstone, the cause of all his misery, “fell off, and sank / Like lead into the sea.” The mariner attributes this impulse of love to the prompting of his patron saint, but Coleridge, who was, I believe, the first person to use the word “unconscious” in its modern, psychological sense, stresses that it came upon him “unaware.” The mariner did not know what he was doing but was saved by the hidden workings of his psyche, which knew instinctively what was best for him. My own experience was similar, but while the mariner was redeemed in an instant, as tends to happen in myths and fairy tales, it took me much longer to go through the process. I too was “unaware” of what was happening to me. There was no sudden road-to-Damascus illumination, and it was only in retrospect that I realized that the decision to write about God had been a defining moment. With no clear understanding of what I was about, I had taken the first step down a path that would lead me in a wholly unexpected direction. At the time, however, I simply grabbed at the idea as a pragmatic expedient. I was desperate to get to work on something— anything—to convince myself that I still had a future. I expected this new book to follow the somewhat skeptical line of its predecessors. God, of course, did not exist, but I would show that each generation of believers was driven to invent him anew. God was thus simply a projection of human need; “he” mirrored the fears and yearnings of society at each stage of its development. Jews, Christians, and Muslims had all produced the same kind of God because they had similar desires and insecurities, but increasingly, in the clear light of rational modernity, people were learning how to do without this divine prop. That was my idea at the outset, but even then I expected some surprises. By this time I had enough experience to know that the finished work was always different from my original proposal.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  In my room, I would throw myself on the bed and sigh with relief—nothing bad had happened! I would think that I should ask her out for a bite to eat, since it was dinner time. I better ask her out right now, I would say to myself, before she gets undressed or has a shower, while we are both still in the ceremonially friendly mood-envelope. I would hop up—and then I would think better of it. The problem would be that I was right on the brink of being perceived as a threat by her, and I wouldn’t be able to risk seeming sinister or sleazy by making any advances now. And I wouldn’t have to. The fact that we were in side-by-side rooms would feel increasingly relevant as the evening progressed: time would be on my side. I would lie back on the bed with my hands on my forehead, listening to the sounds from her room. Despite the doors connecting us, her room would turn out to be surprisingly uneavesdroppable-on. I would hear her water run for a while—perhaps a very quick shower, more likely a face-wash and a toothbrushing. Fifteen minutes would pass. I would hear her unlock several locks and go outside. She would be on her way to dinner. I would wait and then Drop and hide behind a corner and watch her. She would decide to dine at the lugubrious woodgrain-Formica-and-waitresses-with-Early-American-bonnets restaurant that was linked to the motel, just because she was tired and it was close by. I would buy a local paper from a machine and go inside and take a menu and sit down somewhere, ignoring the PLEASE WAIT FOR HOSTESS TO SEAT YOU sign, and then I would stop meddling with time. I would be deep into menu-parsing when Adele walked in. There would be very few folks in the restaurant. The hostess would seat Adele at a nearby table. When Adele said, “Thanks,” I would look up with pleased surprise. I would say hello. She would be carrying a copy of Mirabella, still wearing the pink sweater. When she sat down, I would lean over and ask her, “After you’ve read your magazine and I’ve read my newspaper, will you join me for dessert?” And of course she would say yes. The two of us would pretend that we didn’t exist for half an hour. While I ate my pot roast, I would rattle the newspaper with a serious air and read it more thoroughly than I’ve read a newspaper in years. Finally there would come an indecisive moment after our dinner plates were removed. I would look up again and say, “Dessert time?”

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  Jews in Jesus’s day and Jews in our own day have a very special sense of time. Time is moving forward in a linear fashion, with a beginning, a middle, and an end—unlike some other visions of time, in which everything is cyclical, going around and around and constantly returning to the same point. The Jewish view of time is part of the Jewish view of God and creation: God has a purpose for his good creation, a purpose to be worked out in time. Indeed, the Jewish people think of themselves as living within the long story of how that purpose is to be worked out. But already, in the opening of the Bible, there is another feature. When God made the world, he “rested” on the seventh day. This doesn’t just mean that God took a day off. It means that in the previous six days God was making a world—heaven and earth together—for his own use. Like someone building a home, God finished the job and then went in to take up residence, to enjoy what he had built. Creation was itself a temple, the Temple, the heaven-and-earth structure built for God to live in. And the seventh-day “rest” was therefore a sign pointing forward into successive ages of time, a forward-looking signpost that said that one day, when God’s purposes for creation were accomplished, there would be a moment of ultimate completion, a moment when the work would finally be done, and God, with his people, would take his rest, would enjoy what he had accomplished. One of the few things that ancient pagans knew about the Jewish people was that, from the pagans’ point of view, they had a lazy day once a week. From the Jewish point of view, it wasn’t laziness; it was the chance to celebrate time in a different mode. The sabbath was the day when human time and God’s time met, when the day-to-day succession of tasks and sorrows was set aside and one entered a different sort of time, celebrating the original sabbath and looking forward to the ultimate one. This was the natural moment to celebrate, to worship, to pray, to study God’s law. The sabbath was the moment during which one sensed the onward movement of history from its first foundations to its ultimate resolution. If the Temple was the space in which God’s sphere and the human sphere met, the sabbath was the time when God’s time and human time coincided. Sabbath was to time what Temple was to space . This sense of looking forward was heightened by the larger sabbatical scheme in which the seventh year was a year of agricultural rest and the seven-times-seventh year the year of jubilee, the time for slaves to be freed, for debts to be cancelled, for life to get back on track. As we have already seen in this book, the theme of jubilee ties in closely and naturally with the great all-encompassing theme of the Exodus.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  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. As with the ascension, there are several things we need to say right away about this extraordinary claim. (By now we ought to be getting used to extraordinary claims, not because we are dealing with fantasy or “supernatural” speculation, but because Jesus himself opens the window on a world that, though real and solid, is very different from the world as most people see it.) And the first thing is: don’t believe everything you read about the Rapture.

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

  I had spent twenty years trying to fit into one environment, one career after another, to no avail. Perhaps I should simply stop trying to enter the mainstream. Instead of fighting against the bias in my life that pushed me outside the group and beyond the norm, maybe I should just go with it and see what happened. The great myths show that when you follow somebody else’s path, you go astray. The hero has to set off by himself, leaving the old world and the old ways behind. He must venture into the darkness of the unknown, where there is no map and no clear route. He must fight his own monsters, not somebody else’s, explore his own labyrinth, and endure his own ordeal before he can find what is missing in his life. Thus transfigured, he (or she) can bring something of value to the world that has been left behind. But if the knight finds himself riding along an already established track, he is simply following in somebody else’s footsteps and will not have an adventure. In the words of the Old French text of The Quest of the Holy Grail, if he wants to succeed, he must enter the forest “at a point that he, himself, had chosen, where it was darkest and there was no path.” The wasteland in the Grail legend is a place where people live inauthentic lives, blindly following the norms of their society and doing only what other people expect. The myth of the Holy Grail was a watershed in the spiritual development of the West. It turned the crusading ethos on its head. Instead of marching to their adventure in the huge, massed armies of the Crusades, the Grail knights embarked on a solitary quest, riding into the forest alone. The destination of the Grail knights is not the earthly city of Jerusalem but the heavenly city of Saras, which has no place in this world. The forest represents the interior realm of the psyche, and the Grail itself becomes a symbol of a mystical encounter with God. By the thirteenth century, when the Grail legend began to take root in Europe, the people of the West were finally ready to develop a more spiritualized form of Christianity. And when I started to work on A History of God, I too began to focus on my inner life. This was not initially a conscious choice, but whether I liked it or not, I was now much more alone than before. Henceforth I would often be very busy indeed—researching, writing, lecturing, traveling, having fun, seeing friends—but increasingly that was no longer where the action was.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  He is reigning. He has won the victory over the wicked tyrant. He is the king. Fourth, the rescue of God’s people was achieved in such a way as to make it clear to them that this was an act of special favor and mercy. “Passover” is called that because, on the last night in Egypt, the angel of death, bringing judgment on all the firstborn of Egypt, “passed over” the Israelite houses where a lamb had been sacrificed and its blood daubed on the doorposts. The shared family meal of that night has been repeated ever since, constituting the people as the rescued, freed family of God. And it was during the preparations for Passover when Jesus rode into Jerusalem on the donkey. Fifth, the Israelites arrived at Mount Sinai, where the “marriage covenant” between them and their God was sealed. God, for his part, gave them his law, the way of life through which they were to show the world what its maker had had in mind. Sixth, God himself went with the Israelites on their journey, in a pillar of cloud by day and fire by night. The book of Exodus closes with the making of the tabernacle, where God would come to live in the midst of his people. Half a millennium after Moses’s day, David and Solomon would plan and build a permanent version of this tabernacle, the Temple in Jerusalem. It was to the Temple that Jesus of Nazareth came that day, to perform a strange, dramatic symbolic gesture and to debate with the teachers of the law, as the winds began to blow more fiercely and the perfect storm of history reached its height. Seventh, all this happened in fulfillment of ancient promises. God had promised to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob that their family would have the land of Palestine as their inheritance. Now at last those promises were coming true. Hope had been deferred for a long time. Now it was being realized. All this is what I meant when I said earlier that the festival Jesus chose as his moment to act was “dense with detail and heavy with hope.” For us, the picture has to be assembled step by step; for them it was like a living room in their own home, full of pictures and ornaments they knew extremely well, and none of them without significance. And the significance, for everyone who shared in the festival, was hope. What God had done before God would do again. Of course, as the biblical story itself abundantly shows, things were never that simple. The people at the time of the Exodus were fearful. Moses himself tried to get out of his dangerous new role.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  What Paul is doing, not for the first time, is mixing his metaphors. The basis of it all, offered here as comfort and hope for the grieving, is that the Lord “will come down from heaven.” Paul describes this in language that would remind biblically minded hearers of the scene in which Moses comes down the mountain. That’s the significance of the archangel’s voice and the trumpet. 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 The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  But by unwittingly putting into practice two of the essential principles of religion, I had already, without realizing it, embarked on a spiritual quest. First, I had set off by myself on my own path. Second, I had at last been able to acknowledge my own pain and feel it fully. I was gradually, imperceptibly being transformed. All the world faiths put suffering at the top of their agenda, because it is an inescapable fact of human life, and unless you see things as they really are, you cannot live correctly. But even more important, if we deny our own pain, it is all too easy to dismiss the suffering of others. Every single one of the major traditions—Confucianism, Buddhism, and Hinduism, as well as the monotheisms—teaches a spirituality of empathy, by means of which you relate your own suffering to that of others. Hyam had quoted Hillel’s Golden Rule, which tells you to look into your own heart, find out what distresses you, and then refrain from inflicting similar pain on other people. That, Hillel had insisted, was the Torah, and everything else was commentary. This, I was to discover, was the essence of the religious life. In 1989, my heart newly sensitized to pain, I found that I was constantly jolted out of my bitter, frustrated introspection by the spectacles of suffering that assailed me every time I turned on my television or opened a newspaper. I knew what it was like when people ignored your needs, but my little woes paled into insignificance when compared with the suffering of the Lebanese, the people of El Salvador or South Africa. I was beginning to act according to the Golden Rule, even though my new awareness of the world’s pain did not seem religious to me, because I didn’t associate religion with this type of sympathy. But it was not sufficient simply to emote in front of the television screen. This habit of empathy had to become a regular part of my life, and it had to find practical expression. It could easily degenerate into self-indulgence, and would not have changed me had I not acted upon it. These were momentous months. During the autumn and winter of 1989 one Communist government in the former Soviet Union fell after another. Crowds smashed the Berlin Wall and danced upon this hated symbol of a divided Europe. On December 22 the Brandenburg Gate was ceremonially opened, uniting East and West. The world that had come into being after the Second World War seemed to be undergoing radical change. I was still feeling frightened and depressed about my own circumstances, but it was impossible not to feel stirrings of hope. The Berlin Wall had seemed an unshakable reality; it had been an image of nearly everything that had gone wrong in Europe, but now it was no more. If unthinkable change could take place on this scale, could not something—anything—move for me?

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

  This must be the way that human life worked. He who loves his life shall lose it; he who loses his life shall save it. This was not an arbitrary command of God, but simply a law of the human condition. If you cast your bread upon the waters and were prepared to give it up for good, it would somehow come back to you—albeit in another form. I experienced that poem as a gift. In the convent I might have said that it was a moment of grace. But I did not believe that it was the work of a God. I noticed that Eliot had not abandoned the deity, and that he still prayed. But that was his privilege; it was not for me. This moment of grace was precious for its own sake, because it was an earnest of recovery. Of course, I realized that there was still a long way to go, but I now knew that I could feel things, that I was not emotionally dead, as I had feared, and that my mind was beginning to come to life again.

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

  In some of the poems of Ash-Wednesday, the Dame pointed out that February morning, the experience of spiritual progress and illumination was represented by the symbol of a spiral staircase. This was, perhaps, reminiscent of Dante’s Purgatorio, where the souls who are climbing to the beatific vision of God toil around the twisting cornices of Mount Purgatory, each of which constitutes a further stage in their purification. In the very first poem of the sequence, which is printed at the beginning of this book, the verse constantly turns upon itself in repetitions of word, image, and sound. Repeatedly the poet tells us, “I do not hope to turn again,” and yet throughout the poem, he is doing just that, slowly ascending to one new insight after another. And even though he insists that he has abandoned hope, I felt paradoxically encouraged. In my own minor way, I had also given up hope—and yet, Eliot seemed to be saying, that could be the way forward. I too had understood that I could not hope to go back and undo the past. Ever since I had left the convent I had tried to be normal, to be just like everybody else. But I could not be the same as my fellow students. It was now time to give up “desiring this man’s gift” or “that man’s scope” and to refuse any longer to submit to the “usual reign.” At seventeen years old, when I had decided to become a nun, I had opted to be different, and now, whether I liked it or not, I was different. This was not because I was anything special, not because I was uniquely talented or sensitive, but simply because I had voluntarily and wholeheartedly submitted to a regime that had been carefully designed to put me fundamentally at variance with the rest of the world. The system had worked. It may in some ways have been destructive, but like any initiation, it could not be undone. I could not hope “to turn again,” and I must “no longer strive to strive towards” what was normal for other people, whose experience had been dissimilar from my own.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  Fourth, the rescue of God’s people was achieved in such a way as to make it clear to them that this was an act of special favor and mercy. “Passover” is called that because, on the last night in Egypt, the angel of death, bringing judgment on all the firstborn of Egypt, “passed over” the Israelite houses where a lamb had been sacrificed and its blood daubed on the doorposts. The shared family meal of that night has been repeated ever since, constituting the people as the rescued, freed family of God. And it was during the preparations for Passover when Jesus rode into Jerusalem on the donkey. Fifth, the Israelites arrived at Mount Sinai, where the “marriage covenant” between them and their God was sealed. God, for his part, gave them his law, the way of life through which they were to show the world what its maker had had in mind. Sixth, God himself went with the Israelites on their journey, in a pillar of cloud by day and fire by night. The book of Exodus closes with the making of the tabernacle, where God would come to live in the midst of his people. Half a millennium after Moses’s day, David and Solomon would plan and build a permanent version of this tabernacle, the Temple in Jerusalem. It was to the Temple that Jesus of Nazareth came that day, to perform a strange, dramatic symbolic gesture and to debate with the teachers of the law, as the winds began to blow more fiercely and the perfect storm of history reached its height. Seventh, all this happened in fulfillment of ancient promises. God had promised to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob that their family would have the land of Palestine as their inheritance. Now at last those promises were coming true. Hope had been deferred for a long time. Now it was being realized. All this is what I meant when I said earlier that the festival Jesus chose as his moment to act was “dense with detail and heavy with hope.” For us, the picture has to be assembled step by step; for them it was like a living room in their own home, full of pictures and ornaments they knew extremely well, and none of them without significance. And the significance, for everyone who shared in the festival, was hope. What God had done before God would do again.

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

  It was starting to be impossible now to assume that men were superior to women, that homosexuality was a crime, that whites should rule blacks. Women were taking command of their own lives, were campaigning for equal rights—and beginning to get them. In November 1970, the Gay Liberation Front had held its first public demonstration in Britain. In the United States, South Africa, and Europe, an unprecedented racial equality was beginning—slowly and painfully—to overturn centuries of enslavement and oppression. Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King were heroes to students all over the world. People were beginning to think in new ways, to cast aside a discredited past, and were gradually transforming the world. In my own small way, when I left the religious life, I too had faced the unthinkable, broken a taboo, and crossed a frontier that had once seemed impassable. I too was beginning to think differently, and to realize that assumptions that had hitherto held me in thrall were by no means cast in stone. It was even possible that one day I would be able to sing “We Shall Overcome” with the rest of my generation. My new confidence showed in the fact that I was not particularly worried about the future. In the summer of 1973 I would come to the end of my government grant, but I had a new supervisor now, my thesis was going well, and we thought that it would be finished and ready for submission in about a year. This in itself was quite an achievement. Some people took at least seven years over their thesis, while others found it psychologically impossible to bring it to a conclusion. There was no point in even looking for a job without a doctorate, but thanks to my parsimonious regime, I had a considerable amount of money saved, and living rent-free at the Harts’, I could easily support myself during the intervening year. It was probably because I had relaxed in this way that, in the Hilary term of 1973, I felt the first flicker of true recovery. I had gone to hear Dame Helen Gardner, the Merton Professor of English Literature, lecture on T. S. Eliot. She was known in the faculty as “the Dame.” It suited her grand manner and her way of waving students into an auditorium as if she were welcoming them to a garden party. That day she was lecturing on the sequence of poems which Eliot had called Ash-Wednesday. The first of these, she explained, was Eliot’s version of Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality.” I became immediately alert, because it was from this poem that I had taken my mantra, with its serene determination to let go of the past and cultivate new strength and joy. As I listened to the Dame reciting Eliot’s lines, I felt for the first time in years profoundly and spontaneously moved by the poetry.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  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. 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.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  He and he alone would give the people what they needed and wanted. He would take control and sort everything out. The singing of these songs week in and week out, while watching the dreary procession of corrupt officials and regimes come and go, would provide a natural seedbed for the hope for Israel’s God to be king—and nobody else. This longing would only be increased by the prophetic passages that spoke in the same way: 6 How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of the messenger who announces peace, who brings good news, who announces salvation, who says to Zion, “Your God reigns” [i.e., “Your God is king”]. Listen! Your sentinels lift up their voices, together they sing for joy; for in plain sight they see the return of YHWH to Zion. Break forth together into singing, you ruins of Jerusalem; for YHWH has comforted his people, he has redeemed Jerusalem. YHWH has bared his holy arm before the eyes of all the nations; and all the ends of the earth shall see the salvation of our God. (Isa. 52:7–10) Sometimes, of course, this theme resulted in a note of severe warning: Cursed be the cheat who has a male in the flock and vows to give it, and yet sacrifices to the Lord what is blemished; for I am a great King, says YHWH of hosts, and my name is reverenced among the nations. (Mal. 1:14) 7 So far I have only quoted passages in which the word “king” or “kingdom” or a near equivalent actually occurs. But it isn’t hard to extend the range. Consider, for example, passages in which Israel’s God is spoken of as the true “shepherd” of his people—remembering that, in a rural economy where looking after livestock was one of the most common occupations, “shepherd” was a frequent image for “king.” We think again of the Psalms: YHWH is my shepherd; I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures; he leads me beside still waters; he restores my soul. (23:1–3) Give ear, O Shepherd of Israel, you who lead Joseph like a flock! You who are enthroned upon the cherubim, shine forth. . . . Stir up your might, and come to save us! (80:1–2) And also of the prophets: See, the Lord YHWH comes with might, and his arm rules for him; his reward is with him, and his recompense before him. He will feed his flock like a shepherd; he will gather the lambs in his arms, and carry them in his bosom, and gently lead the mother sheep. (Isa. 40:10–11) Hear the word of YHWH , O nations, and declare it in the coastlands far away; say, “He who scattered Israel will gather him, and will keep him as a shepherd a flock.” For YHWH has ransomed Jacob, and has redeemed him from hands too strong for him.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  For he is our God, and we are the people of his pasture, and the sheep of his hand. (Ps. 95:3–7) Say among the nations, “YHWH is king! The world is firmly established; it shall never be moved. He will judge the peoples with equity.” Let the heavens be glad, and let the earth rejoice; let the sea roar, and all that fills it; let the field exult, and everything in it. Then shall all the trees of the forest sing for joy before YHWH; for he is coming, for he is coming to judge the earth. He will judge the world with righteousness, and the peoples with his truth. (Ps. 96:10–13) I will extol you, my God and King, and bless your name forever and ever. . . . All your works shall give thanks to you, O YHWH, and all your faithful shall bless you. They shall speak of the glory of your kingdom, and tell of your power, to make known to all people your mighty deeds, and the glorious splendor of your kingdom. Your kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and your dominion endures throughout all generations. (Ps. 145:1, 10–13) We notice a constant triple theme in these songs. First, Israel’s God is celebrated as king especially in Jerusalem, in his home in the Temple. Second, when Israel’s God is enthroned as “king,” the nations are brought under his rule. Israel rejoices, but all the other nations will be included as well—sometimes, it seems, so that they may be punished for all their wickedness, particularly their oppression of Israel, but sometimes too so that they may be brought in to share the life of God’s people and join in with Israel’s praise of the one God. Indeed, the whole of creation will join in the celebration. Third, when God is king, the result is proper justice, real equity, the removal of all corruption and oppression. One can see all too easily how these songs would give rise, among a people weary of corrupt and self-serving rulers, to the longing for YHWH himself to come and take charge. He and he alone would give the people what they needed and wanted. He would take control and sort everything out. The singing of these songs week in and week out, while watching the dreary procession of corrupt officials and regimes come and go, would provide a natural seedbed for the hope for Israel’s God to be king—and nobody else. This longing would only be increased by the prophetic passages that spoke in the same way:6 How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of the messenger who announces peace, who brings good news, who announces salvation, who says to Zion, “Your God reigns” [i.e., “Your God is king”]. Listen! Your sentinels lift up their voices, together they sing for joy; for in plain sight they see the return of YHWH to Zion. Break forth together into singing, you ruins of Jerusalem; for YHWH has comforted his people,

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  Luke’s story isn’t an exact copy of this tradition. Luke, after all, like all the early Christians, is a monotheist. There is no sense in which he supposes he is describing the adding of another god to the collection of them already “in heaven.” And Jesus himself is “son of God” in a sense that would take several generations of prayerful thinkers to explore fully. Nevertheless, the parallel is sufficiently close to make any readers in the Roman world realize what is going on. Jesus is radically upstaging Caesar. Actually, if we think of the story as the opening frame of the book of Acts, we get the point, because the closing frame is Paul in Rome, under Caesar’s nose, announcing God as king and Jesus as Lord “with all boldness, and with no one stopping him.” The whole book is the story of how Jesus, exercising his power as the CEO of earth as of heaven, sends out his followers as ambassadors to make his kingdom a reality, climaxing with the strange paradox of Paul in chains announcing that the Roman world has a new emperor. It is that paradox, indeed, that sets the tone for all kingdom work in the present time, as we shall see again presently. But even ascension is not the last moment in the story. Something stranger still is to happen in the future. The Jesus of “yesterday” is to become the Jesus of “tomorrow.” The story is incomplete without its final scene. The Return of Jesus “Look out of the window,” say the skeptics. “If you think Jesus is already installed as king of the world, why is the world still such a mess?” Fair question. But actually the story so far—even the story of the ascension itself—is not designed to make the sort of claim to which that sort of objection would pose an ultimate problem. Even the story of Jesus’s resurrection and his going into “heaven” are only the beginning of something new, something that will be completed one day, but that none of the early Christians supposed had been fully accomplished yet.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written: “The spirit of the Lord is upon me Because he has anointed me To tell the poor the good news. He has sent me to announce release to the prisoners And sight to the blind, To set the wounded victims free, To announce the year of God’s special favor.” He rolled up the scroll, gave it to the attendant, and sat down. All eyes in the synagogue were fixed on him. “Today,” he began, “this scripture is fulfilled in your own hearing.” (Luke 4:16–21) This is the message of forgiveness, all right, but it’s not just forgiveness for individuals who are physically or emotionally crippled as a result of their guilt, real or imagined. It’s a kind of corporate forgiveness, tapping into the ancient Jewish hope of the “jubilee,” the year when all debts would be forgiven, when slaves would be set free (Lev. 25). The jubilee is the sabbath of sabbaths. If, every seven years, there is to be a sabbatical year, in which the land lies fallow and people rest, the jubilee is the sabbatical of sabbaticals, seven times seven years, producing a great celebration of release, forgiveness, and rescue from all that has crippled human life. That’s what Jesus was announcing. American readers in particular ought to know this theme well, because part of Leviticus 25 (v. 10, in italics below) is inscribed on the famous Liberty Bell in Philadelphia: You shall count off seven weeks of years, seven times seven years, so that the period of seven weeks of years gives forty-nine years. Then you shall have the trumpet sounded loud; on the tenth day of the seventh month—on the day of atonement—you shall have the trumpet sounded throughout all your land. And you shall hallow the fiftieth year and you shall proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you: you shall return, every one of you, to your property and every one of you to your family. That fiftieth year shall be a jubilee for you: you shall not sow, or reap the aftergrowth, or harvest the unpruned vines. For it is a jubilee; it shall be holy to you: you shall eat only what the field itself produces. (Lev. 25:8–12) Jesus’s hearers would have understood the Isaiah passage in this sense. They would have been eager to know how exactly he supposed these great prophecies would be fulfilled. As so often, however, Jesus’s message seems to be that they are being fulfilled—but not in the way people had imagined. Yes, God is taking charge. Yes, the great jubilee year is dawning, the time of release, of forgiveness. But it won’t work out the way they had expected.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  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. He is, no doubt, doing this in a million ways of which we see little. He is, for sure, at work far outside the confines of the church. The cosmic vision of Colossians is true and should give us hope, not least when we have to stand before local government officials and explain what we were doing praying for people on the street, or why we need to rent a public hall for a series of meetings, or why we remain implacably opposed to a new business that is seeking shamelessly to exploit young people or low-income families, for instance by encouraging them to gamble with their limited resources. When we explain ourselves, we do so before people who, whether or not they know it, have been appointed to their jobs by God himself. Jesus has defeated on the cross the power that would make them malevolent. And, as we pray and celebrate his death in the sacraments, we claim that victory and go to our work calmly and without fear. But Jesus is also at work in all sorts of ways in and through the church itself. We are to be, as Paul says, “renewed in the image of the creator” (Col.