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

  This is her conclusion on those stories: The religious leader is implicitly the representative of the supreme values of the society and a questioning of his personal qualities or his right to leadership detracts from the validity of those values. For this reason there is not a single story in the whole Jewish Near Eastern material at our disposal which portrays the rabbi in a negative light or ridicules him as, on the contrary, the priest is frequently ridiculed in the Christian European tradition, or as, occasionally, is the rabbi in Jewish European society.* In other words, Jesus’s challenge parables seduced his audience by the expectedness of their format, while they subverted them with the unexpectedness of their content. Do not, then, ever hear any of the specific names or classes or acts or episodes in the parables of Jesus with modern Christian ears; try to use ancient Jewish ears. And imagine the reactions among those first hearers in his original oral audiences. The probably unthought and possibly unseen foundations of their traditional world were being projected, probed, and pondered by those parables. IN THIS PRESENT CHAPTER , I looked in some depth at four more challenge parables apart from that paradigmatic story of the Good Samaritan, and here are some conclusions from those cases. Challenge parables submit their destiny to their audiences. Jesus can hope and intend, to be sure, but ultimately he cedes control to his hearers. He can only trust that the provocation of the challenge’s content will raise consciousness about some aspect of the normalcy his people take for granted. And so it was, of course, with Ruth, Jonah, and Job before him. Challenge parables mean —that is, intend—to make us probe and question, ponder and wonder, discuss and debate, and, above all else, practice that gift of the human spirit known as thinking. About what? About the absolutes of our religious faith, the certainties of our theological vision, the presuppositions, presumptions, and prejudices of our social, political, and economic traditions. Challenge parables are not about replacing certitude with doubt, because certitude and doubt are but opposite ends of the same spectrum. Challenge parables foster not periodic doubting, but permanent questioning. Their hope is—from the poet Rainer Maria Rilke—to help us “love the questions” and “live the questions.” Their purpose is—from the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins—to “Jolt / Shake and unset your morticed metaphors.” Their intention is—from the prophet Micah—to make us “walk humbly with our God.” Jesus was, of course, an oral teacher with an interactive audience. Parables that we can read in a minute or two would have taken an hour or two to tell, would have been regularly interrupted by agreement and disagreement, and would have been intended to provoke—yes, provoke—discussion, debate, and thought. But always understand that such challenges intend to shake the foundations of one’s world. Socrates did it with challenge questions, and Jesus with challenge parables .

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

  The power of Jesus’s parables challenged and enabled his followers to co-create with God a world of justice and love, peace and nonviolence. The power of Jesus’s historical life challenged his followers by proving at least one human being could cooperate fully with God. And if one, why not others? If some, why not all? “Ashes denote,” wrote Emily Dickinson, “that fire was.” And if fire ever was, fire can be again. SCRIPTURE INDEXNote: The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was created. To locate a specific passage, please use the search feature of your e-book reader. Scripture references are in bold.

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

  Here is that magnificent in-between section: The creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. (8:19–21) Christians are called to be heirs not only of God the Liberator, but of God the Creator. We take on God’s responsibility for creation itself. If all of that is packed into the very opening “Abba, Father!” of the Lord’s Prayer, no wonder we cannot pray it of ourselves, but only as empowered by the creative and liberating Spirit of God. We have now moved beyond any simple ascendancy of prophets over psalms or justice over prayer as some preferential divine option. We have also moved beyond thinking about prayer to God as empowerment by God. Paul has challenged us with the idea that God empowers the very prayer itself. The Abba Prayer as Jesus’s great hymn of hope can only be prayed, says Paul, by the Holy Spirit already within us and already having made us heirs of God and joint heirs (not subheirs, by the way) with and in Christ. That is how we become responsible for healing not only ourselves, but all of creation. But that raises another, even more pressing question. How, then, do we obtain that divine Spirit in the first place? Do we pray for it? Or what do we do? Actually Paul has been answering that question through all of the preceding chapters of Romans (1–8). Coming from deep within the very core of Jewish tradition, Paul understands God as the God of distributive justice. But, for Paul, that does not primarily mean that God demands us to distribute God’s world fairly, justly, and equitably among all God’s creatures. It does mean that—but secondarily. Primarily it means that God offers, grants, and distributes God’s own identity, character, or Spirit (to use Paul’s word) freely, equitably, and justly to all of us. At this point two physical analogies may be helpful. Think, first, of a heart transplant. After the operation is over, your old, unhealthy heart is completely gone and replaced by a new and healthy one. God, says Paul, offers everyone a graciously free Spirit transplant . Our old spirit of bondage to violent injustice is removed and replaced by the Holy Spirit of God’s distributive justice and restorative righteousness. But, of course, although a human heart transplant is neither free nor possible for everyone, the divine Spirit transplant is both free and possible for everyone. Think, next, of a technical rather than a medical analogy. The message on your screen offers you a free—yes, totally free—new operating system (O/S) for your computer.

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  And Dr. Date said, “I don’t know if I’d use those precise numbers, but that’s the right idea. For different reasons, being just slightly underweight carries greater risk than being obese.” The date wasn’t very successful, and two years later I married a cartoonist and his two cats, but Dr. Date and I had a nice dinner and he verified that weight is not what matters, healthy behaviors are what matter. My friend Kelly Coffey weighed more than three hundred pounds when she graduated from Smith College. She was completely miserable and thought her weight was to blame. So she had bariatric surgery and lost half her body weight. And she says, “I felt happy for a few weeks, and then the depression, the self-hate, all of it came flooding back.” So when did things change for her? “When I realized it wasn’t about weight,” she says. “It was about learning to respect myself and my body and treat it with love.” It’s not about weight or size or fat—weight is a measure of gravity and nothing else—it’s about living joyfully inside your body, as it is, today. Which brings me to Health at Every Size. HAES is, as the name implies, an approach to living inside your body based on health rather than weight. Lindo Bacon literally wrote the book on HAES—Health at Every Size: The Surprising Truth about Your Weight—based on their decades of research on nutrition, exercise, and health. There are four major tenets, according to “The HAES Manifesto”: (1) accept your size, (2) trust yourself, (3) adopt healthy lifestyle habits including joyful physical activity and nutritious foods, and (4) embrace size diversity.15 It’s almost too simple: Welcome your body just as it is, listen to your own internal needs, and make healthful choices around food and physical activity. You might lose weight (you probably won’t), but you’ll definitely be healthier and happier. Can it be true? Happy and healthy without losing weight? It can. Do you want it to be true? That’s another story. What it comes down to is whether you’re willing to try on the possibility that you are already beautiful and whether you’re ready to prioritize real health over conforming to some cultural standard of how your body is “supposed” to look. I know that intellectual awareness of the negative impact of self-criticism and about the lack of relationship between health and weight can’t instantly undo the decades of shaming that so many women have absorbed. In my experience, women are reluctant to let go of their self-critical thoughts and the cultural thin ideal even when they believe that it’s all nonsense—which it is—and they’re even more hesitant to believe that they are already beautiful—which they are.

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  Jaw drop. What the drugmaker was saying—explicitly! Right to the FDA’s face!—is that they were attempting to “treat” healthy women. Because if you experience pleasure in the context of a mutually consenting “sexual event,” that is a normal, healthy sex life. Period. No wonder the drugs are ineffective. They’re trying to fix something that isn’t broken. The only thing that’s broken is the culture that tells women they have an illness. Let me say this categorically: Drug companies would very much like you to believe that responsive desire is a disease. It is not. When they want to medicate someone who says, “Once we get started, everything is great; it’s just getting started that’s a lot of work,” they are trying to medicate someone who is normal and healthy. Unfortunately only three of the twenty-four FDA panelists were sex researchers, therapists, or educators, so the panel believed the same old myth most of us were raised with—that desire must be “spontaneous.” They are wrong. I am working to help therapists, educators, and medical providers of all kinds to stop believing desire must be spontaneous. If your medical provider or therapist thinks desire should be spontaneous, feel free to suggest they read this book; a lot of clinicians actually refer their patients and clients to the book once they, too, learn that desire needn’t be spontaneous. Some medical schools even assign Come As You Are as a text, and I hope you get one of those doctors. But in the meantime, you are likely to encounter helping professionals who have not integrated responsive desire into their understanding of normal, healthy desire.21 (Drug companies have a much bigger PR budget than sex researchers, therapists, and educators do.) Please tell everyone you know: If you have responsive desire, you are already normal. No one needs to “crave” sex out of the blue to be a fully healthy person. If you want to experience more spontaneous desire, just for the fun of it, you don’t need to change you, you can just change your context, which you learned how to do way back in chapter 3. But you don’t need to experience spontaneous desire in order to be healthy and normal. it might be the chasing dynamicRemember the tomatoes and the aloes: Our expectation that people are supposed to be all one way will only make some people “right” and other people “wrong,” when there’s nothing wrong that a different context wouldn’t fix—and nothing right that the wrong context couldn’t break. That brings us to the most common issue for which couples seek sex therapy: low desire. Low desire is, by definition, a relationship issue. The partner with “low” desire is the one who wants sex too infrequently for the other partner’s satisfaction. It’s not that one person’s desire for sex is somehow inherently “too low” or the other’s is “too high.” They’re just different—at least in the current context.

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

  Recall also the challenge parables about the loving Moabite, the repentant Ninevites, and the holiest Edomite from the books of Ruth, Jonah, and Job addressed to the absolutes of postexilic Israel. The first two types—riddle and example —all have a somewhat adversarial edge, but the third type—challenge —is extremely gentle in its provocative content. Those three challenge books are pedagogical, or instructive, rather than polemical, or aggressive. They want to seduce you into thought rather than beat you into silence and batter you into subjection. That is also the mode used by the challenge parables of Jesus just seen in those same preceding chapters. Even if ironic, they are always irenic. We will have to watch that spectrum from the pedagogical to the polemical in Part II, because if the parables by Jesus were primarily pedagogical challenges, those about Jesus will usually move beyond pedagogy to polemic and beyond challenge to attack. Throughout Part II the fundamental question is whether Jesus is—for Christians—the incarnate challenge parable of God to the world or rather the incarnate attack parable of God against the world. Before moving directly to Part II, however, I insert a short Interlude. My purpose is to prepare for the transition from Part I to Part II, which is a transition from total fiction to a mixture of fact and fiction. The parables told by Jesus were fictional stories about fictional characters. The parables told about Jesus show a fascinating spectrum from fictional to factual stories about historical characters. If, by the way, we dislike fiction in our gospels, we should take the matter up not just with the gospel writers, but with Jesus. They picked up that rhetorical strategy from his own lips. The only difference is that his parables were about fictional characters and their parables are about historical characters. The following Interlude leaves all of that aside for a moment and looks at a Roman case study in which you can see a historical fact and a historical figure being morphed into parable or, better, into diverse and even contradictory parables. You can call it a case of historical parable or parabolic history or history fictionalized as parable. By whatever name, it should prepare us for Part II, where we move finally from challenge parables by to challenge parables about Jesus and, indeed, to Jesus as the Christian God’s great challenge parable to the world. InterludeThe Lure of Parabolic History CAESAR AT THE RUBICON WE NO LONGER KNOW THE exact course of the ancient Rubicon, let alone the exact spot where Julius Caesar crossed it. Yet, from then to now, “crossing the Rubicon” has been a cliché for passing the point of no return in an endeavor. In Caesar’s time, that river of destiny, flowing from the Apennines to the Adriatic, marked the physical boundary between Cisalpine Gaul, to its north, and Italy proper, to its south.

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

  11:12–13) If it is by the finger of God that I cast out the demons, then the kingdom of God has come to you. (Luke 11:20; Matt. 12:28) Blessed are the eyes that see what you see! For I tell you that many prophets and kings desired to see what you see, but did not see it, and to hear what you hear, but did not hear it. (Luke 10:23b–24; Matt. 13:16–17) The wedding guests cannot fast while the bridegroom is with them, can they? As long as they have the bridegroom with them, they cannot fast. The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast on that day. (Mark 2:19–20; Matt. 9:15–16; Luke 5:34–35) Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.” (Mark 1:14b–15; Matt. 4:17) Notice that final example. Every part of it points not to the future soon, but the present now of the kingdom of God. Furthermore, recall, from the start of this chapter, that the “one like a human being” (literally, “one like a son of man”) was assigned in the book of Daniel to bring God’s kingdom down to earth for the “people of the holy ones of the Most High” (7:27). But Mark insists repeatedly that Jesus is that “Son of Man,” that he is already present on earth (2:10, 28), that he will die and rise from the dead (8:31; 9:9, 12, 31; 10:33, 45; 14:21, 41), and that he will finally return in glory (8:38; 13:26; 14:26). But, of course, if Jesus the Son of Man, that is to say, Jesus as the truly Human One, is already on earth, then the kingdom of God is already in the world. The second major difference between Jesus and John concerns collaboration rather than intervention. Imagine, for a moment, a first-century audience’s reaction to the—well, yes, absurdity—of Jesus’s proclamation about the presence of God’s kingdom here below. Look around you, hearers would have told Jesus, nothing has changed—the tetrarch Antipas is still there, the governor Pilate is still there, and, above all else, the emperor Tiberius is still there. Where, they would have asked, is God’s Great Cleanup actively operational? You have simply replaced, they would have told Jesus, a “when” we cannot know with a “where” we cannot see. What would, what could, Jesus have answered to those powerful objections to his vision of the kingdom of God? In answer Jesus proclaimed another—and, indeed, necessarily concomitant—aspect of his paradigm shift within contemporary eschatological expectation. You have been waiting for God, he said, while God has been waiting for you. No wonder nothing is happening. You want God’s intervention, he said, while God wants your collaboration. God’s kingdom is here, but only insofar as you accept it, enter it, live it, and thereby establish it.

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

  It is prayed by Christians who focus on Christ’s substitutionary sacrificial atonement for human sin, but it never mentions Christ, substitution, sacrifice, atonement, or sin. It is prayed by Christians who focus on the next life in heaven or in hell, but it never mentions the next life, heaven, or hell. It is prayed by Christians who emphasize what it never mentions and also prayed by Christians who ignore what it does. You could respond, of course, that there is nothing strange there at all. It is, you might say, a Jewish prayer from the Jewish Jesus; hence nothing Christian or even Jewish Christian is present. But that only invites us to start the question of strangeness all over again. It does not mention covenant or law, Temple or Torah, circumcision or purity, and so on. What if the Lord’s Prayer is neither a Jewish prayer for Jews nor yet a Christian prayer for Christians? What if it is—as this book suggests—a prayer from the heart of Judaism on the lips of Christianity for the conscience of the world? What if it is—as this book suggests—a radical manifesto and a hymn of hope for all humanity in language addressed to all the earth? The Lord’s Prayer is, for me, both a revolutionary manifesto and a hymn of hope. It is revolutionary, because it presumes and proclaims the radical vision of justice that is the core of Israel’s biblical tradition. It is a hymn, because it presumes and produces poetic techniques that are the core of Israel’s biblical poetry. In ordinary everyday language the word “justice” has come primarily, if not exclusively, to mean retributive justice, that is, punishment. For example, I was working on this Prologue while in Denver on September 27, 2009. The Denver Post ’s Sunday headline was about “DUI Justice,” and it discussed whether punishments were fairly and equally imposed on all accused persons. That headline took for granted that most readers would see the word “justice” and correctly understand that it meant punishment—judicial punishment, but punishment nonetheless. But the primary meaning of “justice” is not retributive, but distributive . To be just means to distribute everything fairly. The primary meaning of “justice” is equitable distribution of whatever you have in mind—even if that is retribution or punishment. Do not think this is some game with words. Here is what is at stake. The biblical tradition speaks of God as a God of “justice and righteousness” (Ps. 99:4; Isa. 33:5; Jer. 9:24). Those two words express the same content. A God of “justice and righteous ness” is a God who does what is just by doing what is right and does what is right by doing what is just. The redundant phrase proclaims that God’s world must be distributed fairly and equitably among all God’s people. Whenever, then, I use the term “justice” with respect to the biblical tradition, Jesus, or the Lord’s Prayer, it will be distributive justice I have almost exclusively in mind.

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

  That, by the way, would be rather naïve—if taken as literal approval of defensive violence in the situation of the arrest. But those “swords” before Gethsemane in 22:35–38 must be read along with the “swords” that follow almost immediately at Gethsemane in 22:49–51. In that overall context, what does Luke intend by this conversation at the end of the Supper? Jesus refers back to an earlier incident with that opening comparison of “when” and “now” in 22:35. I begin by looking at that earlier event, but first in Mark before returning to it in Luke. In Chapter 4 I mentioned briefly how Jesus told his companions to go out and do exactly what he himself was doing. They were to heal the sick, eat with those they healed, and announce the presence of God’s kingdom in that reciprocity of spiritual and physical power, building peasant community from the bottom upward. There is massive scholarly consensus that we have two independent versions of that crucial eschatological collaboration. One dates to the 50s CE and was used as a source by both Matthew and Luke. Since German scholarship discovered it and called it die Quelle, “the Source,” we usually refer to it as Q for short. The other major source used by both Matthew and Luke is Mark itself, and that dates from the 70s CE. I focus on just one element—the traveler’s staff—which changed significantly from Q in the 50s to Mark in the 70s. In the Q version of their mission instructions, Jesus’s companions are told: “Take no gold, or silver, or copper in your belts, no bag for your journey, or two tunics, or sandals, or a staff ” (Matt. 10:9). But no staff means that they travel without that minimum defensive weapon against small-time thieves or even village dogs. They might as well have had a sign on their backs: “Available for mugging.” Offensive violence might be wrong, but surely at least the minimal defensive counterviolence implicit in carrying a staff should be permitted. In the Markan version from one to two decades later, we find Jesus changing his mind about that no-staff rule or, more accurately, having it changed for him. “He ordered them to take nothing for their journey except a staff; no bread, no bag, no money in their belts; but to wear sandals and not to put on two tunics” (6:8–9). The staff, you will notice, is not only permitted; it is moved from last place in the Q version to first place in the Markan one. Sandals are also permitted now, but my present focus is on that transition from “no staff” to “staff.” I interpret that change from Q to Mark as a concession to the reality of small-time violence. We are still in the villages of Galilee, and those who proclaim the kingdom’s presence can carry at least a poor person’s minimal defensive weapon. The no-staff command is changed to permission for a staff—both on the lips of Jesus.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  So it is not any particular wonder, given the atmosphere that had been maintained for centuries, and given the high cost of books of such length, that there were very few Bibles to be had. Still, as it happened, by the time Luther entered the monastic life, the one book that novices were allowed to read was in fact the Bible. We know that immediately upon entering the monastery, Luther was lent one that was bound in red leather, for he recollected this often in his later years. It seems that Luther did not receive the book lightly, for he not only read it but almost devoured it. He read it over and over until he was inordinately and perhaps even peculiarly familiar with it. This would of course have everything to do with the events of his future and the future itself. What propelled him in this intensive reading, we cannot know for sure, but it seems undeniable that his personal struggles—his Anfechtungen—formed the lion’s share of his obsession. In a word—and of course in the Word—Luther was desperately searching for the answer to his bitter difficulties, to the problems that surely had sent him to the monastery in the first place. Because he had been so powerfully influenced by Humanist thinking at the university as a student of philosophy, he had a strong idea that if he went to the source itself, he might at last find the unobscured answers to his questions, if such answers existed. So he was desperate, a man on a mission to locate the things that might be there, or perhaps that must be there, somewhere. So he now at last had in his hands the urtext itself, and like a scientist at a microscope looking for a cure to a fatal epidemic—one with which he is himself afflicted—Luther hardly took his eyes from the eyepiece. What lay there was more important to him than anything that lay outside it. In contrast with his frenetic and passionate Bible reading, Luther said that the other monks did not read their Bibles very much or at all, and it is extremely likely that Luther’s obsession with and mastery of the book attracted the attention of Staupitz during this time.2 This is because as odd as Luther was among the monks of his monastery in wanting to read and understand the Bible, Staupitz was nearly equally odd among the theologians of that era.

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  When there’s no pressure to perform, Patrick is creative, curious, playful, and unabashedly experimental. He knows what a gift Olivia’s sensitive accelerator can be, and he’s aware of the challenges it presents. So. When Olivia finished her master’s degree, he set up a kind of sensual treasure hunt for her, involving most of her collection of toys, two kinds of lube, at least one instance of being carried, naked, handcuffed, and blindfolded, down the hallway to another apartment in their building, and several of their very good friends. (Which may be the best “science made my sex life better” story I’ve ever heard.) At the end of it, over a giant meal, Olivia, swimming in endorphins and oxytocin, asked Patrick to marry her—mostly kidding. Mostly. Some people don’t believe me when I tell this story, which I share with permission. Oddly, it’s the only story they don’t believe, as if an unconventional, wide-open celebration of pleasure is the only real cause for skepticism around women’s sexuality. But it’s out there, pleasure and unruly exploration and partners who adore a woman’s whole sexual being, from the wounds of her past to the wilds of her imagination. Stories like this give me hope that more and more women will heal from shame and find love that embraces their whole selves, eroticism and all. Olivia is One Big Yes. It’s a gift. It’s a challenge. She maximizes her sexual potential when she allows her sexual response to grow to capacity, without pushing in any specific direction. Slow down. Stay still. Don’t push or pull. Allow sensation to take over. Your best source of knowledge about your sexuality is your own internal experience. When you notice disagreement between your experience and your expectations about what you “should” be experiencing—and everyone does, at some point—always assume your experience is right. You can also assume everyone’s experience is different from yours—as are everyone’s ideas about what their experiences “should” be. Every one’s terrain and everyone’s map are different from everyone else’s. When the map doesn’t fit the terrain, the map is wrong, not the terrain. I’ve used hypothetical twins a few times throughout the book, but this time I can use real-life twins to illustrate my point. My sister Amelia and I are identical twins. We have the same DNA, were born within minutes of each other, grew up in the same house, went to the same schools, watched the same TV shows, and read many of the same books. And yet by the time we started our sexual lives, we had very different maps in our heads. I had my own unique version of the Media Message in my head. I believed that the Ideal Sexual Woman was an adventurous, noisy female whom men lusted after for her skill and her enthusiasm. She was—of course!—easily orgasmic from penetration, she experienced spontaneous desire, and her vagina got so wet. Any woman who didn’t want to try new things was a prude, hopelessly hung up and neurotic.

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  You’re not broken. You are whole. And there is hope. You might feel stuck. You might be exhausted. You feel depressed, anxious, worn out by the demands of taking care of everyone else, and in desperate, dire need of renewal. You might be tired of feeling like you need to defend yourself and tired of wishing your body would do something different. You might wish that for a little while, someone else would defend you so you could lower your guard and just be. Just for a while. Those are circumstances; they’re not you. You are okay. You are whole. There exists inside you a sexuality that protects you by withdrawing until times are propitious. I completely get how terribly frustrating it can be that your partner’s body feels like times are propitious right now, while your body is still wary. And it’s even worse because the more ready your partner’s body seems, the more wary your body becomes. It sucks, for both of you. But it’s in there, your sexuality. It’s part of you, as much as your skin and your heartbeat and your vocabulary. It’s there. It’s waiting. Just because you’ve had no call to use the words “calefacient” or “perfervid” lately doesn’t mean they’re no longer available to you. If the opportunity arises, there they will be, ready, waiting. Like your best friend, your sexual desire is waiting for your life to allow it to come out and play. Let it, whenever it feels safe enough. And a brief message to Partner A—the one who wants sex and keeps asking for it: I know that it can feel like Partner B is withholding and I know that that can feel deeply awful. Your role in untangling your relationship knots is very difficult because it requires you to put down your hurts and be loving to the person who, it sometimes seems, is the source of those hurts. Boy, is that hard. I know, too, that sometimes you might worry that you want sex too often, that you’re making unreasonable demands, or that you’re sick to want sex as much as you do. No, you just have a higher level of sexual interest than your partner does—your parts are organized in a different way. It’s normal. Neither of you is broken, you just need to collaborate to find a context that works for both of you. Give Partner B space and time away from sex. Let sex drop away from your relationship—for a little while—and be there, fully present, emotionally and physically. Lavish your partner with affection, on the understanding that affection is not a preamble to sex. Be warm and generous with your love. You won’t run out. Put simply, the best way to deal with differential desire is: Be kind to each other. Remember the sleepy hedgehog. Untangling the knots of sexual dynamics in a relationship takes time, patience, and practice.

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

  Finally, the Assyrian and Babylonian Empires were gone, and the Persian Empire had arrived; the northern Kingdom of Israel was gone forever, and the southern Kingdom of Judah had been restored after the Babylonian exile. It was the end of the 500s, but the unknown prophet we now call Third Isaiah had exactly that same ancient message about prayer and worship versus justice and righteousness. But now at least the positive predominates over the negative: Negative: Is such the fast that I choose, a day to humble oneself? Is it to bow down the head like a bulrush, and to lie in sack-cloth and ashes? Will you call this a fast, a day acceptable to the Lord? Positive: Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin? (58:5–7) Throughout almost three centuries the God of the prophets demands distributive justice on this earth. That we have always known. But this is my seminal question: Why does the prophetic God insist on that negative and positive dynamic? Why insist—and insist so strongly—that God does not want prayer, ritual, worship, and sacrifice, but rather wants distributive justice, so that all God’s people—and especially its most vulnerable members—get enough, get a fair share of God’s world? Here are some different ways of explaining why the prophets put it that way. One interpretation takes it to mean that we should stop wasting our time with prayer or worship and concentrate instead on justice and equality. Another understanding takes it as simply extremist language emphasizing that God wants both prayer and justice, not one or the other but both together. A final reading takes it as asserting that God prefers justice over prayer. The prophets were simply using shock tactics to emphasize God’s preferential option for justice over prayer. After all, although God often speaks of rejecting prayer in the absence of justice, God never speaks of rejecting justice in the absence of prayer. I wonder, however, if any of those is an adequate explanation for the interaction of prayer and justice in the biblical tradition. Is there a better way of holding together the biblical prophets on justice and the biblical psalms on prayer? After all, one of those very psalms also hails God as “Mighty King, lover of justice,” saying, “You have established equity; you have executed justice and righteousness in Jacob” (99:4). My own interpretation places those prophetic assertions of justice against prayer back into a dynamic and organic unity of justice-and-prayer or prayer-and-justice. In my understanding, meditation and action or ritual prayer and distributive justice can be distinguished, but not separated.

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

  No wonder nothing is happening. You want God’s intervention, he said, while God wants your collaboration. God’s kingdom is here, but only insofar as you accept it, enter it, live it, and thereby establish it. That is why Jesus did not settle down in Nazareth or Capernaum and have his companions bring others to him. Instead, he sent them out to do exactly what he himself was doing: heal the sick, eat with the healed, and demonstrate the kingdom’s presence in that reciprocity and mutuality. It is not, he said, about intervention by God, but about participation with God. God’s Great Cleanup of the World does not begin, cannot continue, and will not conclude without our divinely empowered participation and transcendentally driven collaboration. Violence or Nonviolence? As noted above, Jesus did not fit the ordinary paradigm of a new David as warrior deliverer of his people. In other words, the paradigm shift he announced did not imagine himself or others in violent collaboration with a violent God. Neither, of course, did John advocate violent resistance, but his image of a violent God left certain options open. Jesus, however, gave the nonviolence of God as the reason for his own refusal to resort to violence. The kingdom’s presence demanded nonviolent collaboration between the divine and the human—even or especially against violence itself. Recall the reason Jesus gave for nonviolent resistance to evil: “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matt. 5:44); “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you” (Luke 6:28). But why? “So that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous…. Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (5:45, 48). Like God, like Jesus, we are called to nonviolent resistance to the violent normalcy of civilization. The strongest witness to that nonviolent eschatology of Jesus is actually Pilate, the Roman governor who executed him in Jerusalem. On the one hand, that official publicly, legally, and officially crucified him for resistance to Roman law and order. On the other hand, he made no attempt to round up the disciples of Jesus. He understood—correctly—that the kingdom movement was one of nonviolent resistance. Compare, for example, that story about Barabbas, who “was in prison with the rebels who had committed murder during the insurrection” (Mark 15:7). Jesus met the precise fate of public but nonviolent resistance to Roman law and order. According to the terms of his imperial mandate, Pilate was precisely correct: public execution for Jesus, but no communal arrest for his companions. This was also illustrated powerfully in that parabolic interaction between Pilate and Jesus in John’s gospel. “My kingdom,” says Jesus in 18:36a, “is not of this world” (KJV) or “is not from this world” (NRSV) .

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

  Hence the New Revised Standard Version correctly translates Matthew’s Greek as “the end of the age.” The eschaton is not about the destruction of the world, but about its transformation into a place of justice and nonviolence. It is not about the annihilation of the earth, but about its transformation into a location of freedom and peace. Daniel’s vision of the kingdom of God coming down from heaven to earth was an eschatological vision, and my own term for that is the Great Divine Cleanup of the World . Here is how that future is imagined in four texts, three from the Bible and a final one from outside it. First, God’s Great Cleanup establishes worldwide peace . Recall those famous lines found verbatim in two separate biblical books: “They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more; but they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees, and no one shall make them afraid” (Mic. 4:3–4; Isa. 2:4). Next, God’s Great Cleanup establishes a worldwide banquet . There will be “for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear…. Then the Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces, and the disgrace of his people he will take away from all the earth” (Isa. 25:6, 8). Finally, God’s Great Cleanup establishes worldwide equality . I cite here a text from outside the Bible because, unlike those preceding prophetic texts, this one comes from the same time as Jesus. “The earth will belong equally to all, undivided by walls or fences…. Lives will be in common and wealth will have no division. For there will be no poor man there, no rich, and no tyrant, no slave. Further, no one will be either great or small anymore. No kings, no leaders. All will be equal together” (Sibylline Oracles 2.319–24). Two other terms often associated with God’s eschatological transfiguration of the world will be important for understanding exactly what the Abba Prayer of Jesus means by “Your kingdom come” as we continue through this chapter. They are apocalypse and messiah. The word apocalypse comes from Greek and means a revelation about the eschaton. In Daniel 7, for example, the seer has an apocalyptic revelation. It begins by saying that “Daniel had a dream and visions of his head as he lay in bed” (7:1). Later his dream vision is explained by an angelic interpreter: “As for me, Daniel, my spirit was troubled within me, and the visions of my head terrified me. I approached one of the attendants to ask him the truth concerning all this. So he said that he would disclose to me the interpretation of the matter” (7:15–16). Notice one special aspect of the term apocalypse (or apocalyptic ).

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

  If you grant, then, that the kingdom proclaimed by Jesus was a paradigm shift within the popular expectation of his people, what was its precise content? What was different about it? What hope did it leave behind, and what new hope did it shift to? When, for example, Jesus prayed “Your kingdom come,” what exactly was the precise meaning of that kingdom of God for his tradition swerve or paradigm shift within eschatological, apocalyptic, and messianic Judaism? What is the best way to sharpen the contrast between the popular contemporary expectation of God’s Great Cleanup, or the coming of the kingdom, and that proclaimed by Jesus? I think it is by focusing on the difference between John the Baptist and Jesus the Christ. This is not a cheap exaltation of Jesus over John. Indeed, I am convinced that Jesus learned powerfully from John—learned what to believe, but also what not to believe—especially about God. Furthermore, the execution of one popular prophet, John, may have protected the other one, Jesus, for a given amount of time under Herod Antipas’s prudent rule in Galilee. On the one hand, it is historically certain that Jesus had earlier accepted John’s hope for the imminent eschatological intervention of God. How is that certain? Because John had baptized Jesus into that vision at the Jordan. And how is that certain? Because of the acute embarrassment in the New Testament gospels about Jesus’s baptism by John: Mark accepts it (1:9–10), Matthew protests it (3:13–16), Luke hurries it (3:21), and John omits it (1:29–34). On the other hand, when we hear Jesus’s own voice, we detect both strong respect for John and equally clear separation from him. “Truly I tell you,” says Jesus, “among those born of women no one has arisen greater than John the Baptist; yet the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he” (Matt. 11:11; Luke 7:28). The baptism movement of John was changed into or replaced by the kingdom movement of Jesus. Furthermore, even those opponents who disliked both John and Jesus equally described them with very different dismissals. They said that John was a mad ascetic and that Jesus was a drunken profligate: “John the Baptist has come eating no bread and drinking no wine, and you say, ‘He has a demon’ the Son of Man has come eating and drinking, and you say, ‘Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners’” (Luke 7:33–34). In other words, and leaving aside the nasty name-calling, John and Jesus had—eventually—very divergent programs. I turn therefore to the contrast between John and Jesus to understand the paradigm shift in the latter’s understanding of the kingdom of God and, thence, of what he meant by “Your kingdom come” in his Abba Prayer. John the Baptist was an “apocalyptic” eschatologist. His “revelation” was about the imminent advent of God’s kingdom and was not about—as it later became in our gospels—the imminent advent of Jesus as God’s messiah.

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

  Think about that parable of the Unjust Steward, who, under threat of dismissal by his master, reduces the debts of his tenants (Luke 16:1–7). It should have raised the audience’s consciousness about the relationship between a “rich man,” his “manager” (a slave?), and his debtors (tenant farmers?). How would they have responded? Would the audience have only focused on the individual actions of the “manager,” or would they have been forced to discuss the structural constraints of the system? Or, again, think about that parable of the Wicked Tenants, who murder the son of their absentee master to acquire the vineyard for themselves (Mark 12:1–8). Leave aside its present riddle aspect as an allegory of Jesus in 12:9–12, and imagine a first-century Galilean audience hearing that story. Would some find that murder acceptable—even by divine law? Would they agree the tenants were, as we say, “wicked”? Would others find it understandable, but not prudent—the authorities would surely exact vengeance? Would some, many, or even most find it unacceptable on moral grounds? Jesus could not have known their reactions beforehand and neither can we afterward. Why, then, did Jesus trust so much in his audience and grant so much to their reaction? Why not just tell them what he wanted to say openly and literally—like a modern church sermon? Because a challenge-parable medium is perfect for a paradigm-shift message . Because a collaborative eschaton requires a participatory pedagogy . Jesus is not just announcing to his audience that God’s kingdom is now present. He is announcing that is only present if and when it is accepted, entered into, and taken upon oneself. If discussion and debate, agreement and disagreement, argument and contradiction do not arise from and because of his challenges, then no change in consciousness can take place, no paradigm shift can occur, and no kingdom of God can be present. Because, first, challenge parables are paradigm shifters, and because, second, the kingdom of God is itself a transcendental challenge parable sent, as Daniel 7 said, from heaven to earth. You can even think of certain parables from Jesus as precisely and exactly parables of that paradigm shift itself. Think, for example, of the parables of the Treasure and of the Pearl: The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which someone found and hid; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field. (Matt. 13:44) Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls; on finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it. (Matt. 13:45) Even completely apart from Jesus’s usage of them, those are perfect metaphors for a paradigm shift, for a tradition swerve, for a fundamental disruptive innovation. But, of course, Jesus correlates them with the kingdom of heaven—that is, with God’s kingdom “as in heaven, so on earth” (Matt. 6:10 in the Greek word order).

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

  Jesus says in Mark, “There are some standing here who will not taste death until they see that the kingdom of God has come with power” (9:1). And Jesus says in Matthew, “You will not have gone through all the towns of Israel before the Son of Man comes” (10:23). But the counterchallenge of John to the synoptics is that the return of Jesus has already happened. Jesus is already back—in the Holy Spirit. When Jesus appeared to all the disciples from heaven in John 20:19–23, he “breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit’” (20:22). That mention of their receiving the Hoy Spirit directs our minds back to the great final discourse of Jesus in John 13–17. In that long section, the Holy Spirit—well-known from the synoptic tradition—is uniquely renamed as the Advocate, the Defender, the Comforter (Greek parakl [image "image" file=Image00047.jpg] tos ): I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you. (14:16–17) The Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you. (14:26) When the Advocate comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who comes from the Father, he will testify on my behalf. (15:26) First, the Holy Spirit or Spirit of Truth is renamed as the divine Advocate in the legal and forensic sense of an attorney who defends Christians against “the ruler of this world” (16:11). Furthermore, it is “another Advocate,” so that Jesus himself was also an earlier Advocate. Finally, sent by the Father in the name of Jesus (14:26) is the same as sent by Jesus from the Father (15:26). Immediately after that first citation above, Jesus continues with this promise: “I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you. In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live” (14:18–19). That phrase “a little while” is later repeated like a dramatic refrain. Indeed, it is not just repeated, but pounded on: “A little while, and you will no longer see me, and again a little while, and you will see me.” Then some of his disciples said to one another, “What does he mean by saying to us, ‘A little while, and you will no longer see me, and again a little while, and you will see me’; and ‘Because I am going to the Father’?” They said, “What does he mean by this ‘a little while ’?

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Luther Becomes a Priest, Aetatis 23At last, the day came when Luther had passed the period of suppliance and could become a full-fledged monk. At this time, early in 1506, there were fifty-eight monks in the monastery. Eleven of them were lay monks, while the rest were priests. Luther’s superiors rightly saw in him someone with special gifts, and early on determined that he should be ordained as a priest, and soon. For this, however, the vicar-general of the order must also approve. The vicar-general of the Augustinians at that time was an especially gifted man named Johannes von Staupitz. He had accepted that post three years earlier, and the year before that—in 1502—had become dean of the theology department at the brand-new university at Wittenberg. This Staupitz would become extremely important in Luther’s life in the years following, and although he would never leave the church as Luther did, his relationship with Luther would have much to do with Luther’s own path. On April 3, 1506, Staupitz—then forty-six years old—spent the night in the Erfurt monastery, so it is presumed that it was during this time that he spoke with Luther and agreed that Brother Martinus should be ordained a priest. Thus it was precisely one year to the day after this that was fixed for Luther’s ordination: April 4, 1507. After that looming milestone, Luther would be able to celebrate Mass. The first Mass for a priest was a festive occasion. In its way, it was as important as a baptism or a marriage or a funeral. It was an epochal moment that, like these other events, was a door through which one passed irrevocably. Therefore, much was made of the first Mass. Relatives and friends would be invited to attend, probably to spend a night or two in the monastery, and immediately following the Mass a celebratory dinner would be held. By this time, relations with Luther’s father had improved enough that Luther invited him. It seems that for the previous two years they had not communicated, and there could be no question Hans Luther felt betrayed and furious over his son’s dramatic change in plans, which Luther had surely known were against his father’s wishes. Doing something against one’s father’s wishes was at that time almost unthinkable. But as it happened, Hans Luther’s feelings had by this time changed enough that he was invited and would come. He was unable to come to Erfurt until May 2, however, but it was so important to Luther that he insisted on planning things around his father’s schedule. We can imagine that it would have meant a great deal to see his father and after nearly two years it would present the opportunity for a reconciliation between them—or so Luther hoped—and so May 2 was settled as the date.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  28 Halfway Home ...Everyone I met Wore part of my destiny like a carnival mask. “I’m Bartleby the Scrivener,” I told the Italian waiter. “Me, too,” he replied. —Charles Simic, “St. Thomas Aquinas” Rather than rejoice about the grant, I start to steel myself against the ceremony now rushing toward me like a jail on wheels. David and Jack convince me to join their Sunday study group at a shambling halfway house. The place sits on hospital grounds across from a methadone dispensary. A favorite joke of the residents is to use magic markers to manufacture a closed sign on the clinic, so eventually the panicked methadone addicts holler and pound the door. Walking into the house, I expect to find tattooed thugs and strippers and former felons, which I do. But most are working stiffs, plus a professor. There’s even a disbarred lawyer who’d once passed out in a snow bank and woke in a hospital with neither hand nor foot—the blackened appendages having been amputated—a fairly common injury among the homeless, it turns out. On my first afternoon there, David bends over a former hooker’s study guide for her high school equivalency exam, and I see the hooker later help a Boston banker handle his own toddler during a visit—the same unlikely, democratic exchange of skills as my Cambridge meeting. The house director is a woman I hate on sight: a stork-thin blonde with manners that strike me as prissy, like she’s instituting a no-cussing rule for the house, for one: say a bad word, you chip in a buck to the party fund. Save for a slightly spastic right hand, she looks like a runway model, being nearly six feet tall with long hair the color of sunflowers. In the recovery community, she’s legendary. Mother Teresa with altitude, I overhear one resident say. She did biochemical research for NASA before her career in chemical dependency. The white Mustang convertible she drives has a high-test engine, and I once heard a felon remark she looks like a dentist’s wife, i.e., never done a day’s work in her life and somebody always taking care of her teeth. Her name is Deb, and when I whine about how hard it is not to drink on afternoons alone with Dev, she invites the two of us to stop by the house for a snack. I can bring a video for him. She’ll even personally counsel me if she has time. Fat chance, I think at first, but the lure of a sober hangout proves too great to stay away. The writers I once passed flasks of vodka back and forth with have been scarce since I pledged off. On Dev’s first visit to the house, he passes two residents exhaling plumes of cigarette smoke, transfixed by a Thai kickboxing movie. I tuck Dev’s head under my coat, and he says, What’re they watching? Grown-up show, I say.