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 Boys & Sex (2020)

  The latest debates over sexual consent have been raging on college campuses since 2011. That’s when the Obama administration issued a “Dear Colleague” letter to university officials reminding them they were responsible for upholding all aspects of Title IX, including those that involved sexual misconduct: at the time, three quarters of schools were reporting their assault rate at an improbable zero. In reality, according to the AAU Campus Climate Survey, which consisted of one hundred fifty thousand students at twenty-seven public and private universities, 23.1 percent of female students had been sexually assaulted through physical force, violence, or incapacitation since entering college, including 10.8 percent who experienced penetration. By 2014, the state of California had mandated that all universities receiving public funds use the “affirmative consent” standard in sexual misconduct hearings (in a separate legislation, public school district health curricula were required to include consent education, although there are no guidelines as to what that might entail). Sometimes called “yes means yes,” the law requires a sexual partner to obtain “affirmative, conscious, and voluntary” agreement at each stage of an intimate encounter. New York passed similar legislation a year later, by which time eight hundred campuses nationwide were using that standard in adjudicating complaints. That’s a dramatic break from the past, when, until and unless a person said no (and sometimes not even then), anything was fair game. When I first began interviewing high school and college students about sex in 2010—before the “Dear Colleague” letter, before Donald Trump’s “locker room banter,” before the fall of Harvey Weinstein, the rise of the #MeToo movement, the conviction of Bill Cosby, the accusations against Brett Kavanaugh—most, whether male or female, believed rape was something perpetrated by strangers in dark alleys. So the fact that it even occurred to Liam to be concerned over his actions is strangely heartening: a sign that young men are grappling (if some more sincerely than others) to integrate ideas about gender, sex, and power that may contradict previous, deeply held expectations. That’s major progress in a very short time, and a long way from 1993, when the New York Times scoffed at Antioch College’s pioneering affirmative consent policy as “legislating kisses.” Some of the guys I talked to had found the erotic spark in “yes means yes.” Recall Wyatt, the “feminist fuckboy” who said, “I’ll just put it out there—affirmative consent is really hot. It’s exciting to have a girl saying, ‘Yes! I want you to do this.’ ‘Yes! I want you to do that.’ To feel she’s really into it. It’s a pretty awesome thing for both of you to have that sort of connection.”

• From Dante's Divine Comedy (2001)

  ©2001 The Teaching Company. 72 E. In describing the origins of the quarrel, the canto singles out Buondelmonte—in effect the “founder” of Dante’s own White Guelf faction—as the one chiefly to blame for the precipitating incident. IV. In Canto 17, Cacciaguida continues the discourse into the future and gives a remarkable, sustained account of Dante’s upcoming exile. A. Dante tells Cacciaguida that he is ready for a fuller account of what earlier predictions have suggested will happen to him. Dante does not give in to fatalism—he knows his own moral responsibility. B. Cacciaguida tells him of exile by specifically describing the hardships that it will entail (“the arrows in the bow your exile will shoot”). 1. Dante will know the salty taste of others’ bread. (Florentine bread is made without salt.) 2. He will climb stairs that are not his own. 3. Most of all, he will be in the company of rascals and knaves. 4. He will spend his early exile trying to get back. C. He must learn to rise above partisanship and become a “party of your own.” V. Most important as a way of dealing with exile, Dante must write the poem that will tell his readers what he has seen. A. Thus, the Commedia itself is commissioned in this canto. B. It is the poem itself, this poem, the Commedia, that will allow Dante to transmute his exile into a pilgrimage. C. Dante must use the poem to prophetically denounce all the evils he has learned about on his journey to the afterlife. His pilgrimage has given him a higher and wiser perspective. 1. Dante shares with Cacciaguida his realization that he must not be timid when he writes about what he has seen. 2. Like a biblical prophet, he understands that he must direct his words against those in the highest places, even though there is always a temptation to hold back. D. Dante realizes that he is writing for those who will “look back at these” as the old days. ©2001 The Teaching Company. 73 1. Fame is no longer the reason for writing; uttering truths is the real reason. 2. Some will find these truths bitter to the taste (not unlike the bread of exile), but it will be good for them, as bad-tasting things sometimes are. 3. This realization perfectly illustrates the way in which Dante the poet must capture and communicate what Dante the pilgrim is learning. 4. Dante has won fame, but only as a byproduct, not because it was his main goal. 5. Prophets tear down (criticize) in order to build up (edify). E. Like his great-great-grandfather, Dante will be a martyr (through his exile) and a crusader, though with his pen rather than with a sword. Readings: Dante, Paradiso, Cantos 14–18. John Freccero, Dante: The Poetics of Conversion, Chapter 14. Virgil, The Aeneid of Virgil, Book 6.

• From Deceptions and Myths of the Bible (1975)

  It means, as we said, the end of superstition and the beginning of enlightenment. The aforesaid archives all confirm it and later we will present them in proof thereof. Creation is a process, not an act. It is cosmic “big business” and like its human similitude its purpose is to supply a lack, in this case qualitation. If this be not so, what is Creation for? What is Evolution for? So vast and painful a process cannot be just for the pleasure of something that needs nothing. And we might well add, What is man for? Is he just a lost soul living by grace, or is he a partner in the business? This cosmo-conception gives to man a majestic raison d’être, not just that of saving his soul but of creating soul—qualitation. Sometimes we say God is a spirit, but never do we say he is a soul, and rightly so, for soul is man’s creation. Man is the moral and spiritual qualifier, and this qualifying of the purely quantitative is the purpose of Creation. This the scriptural authors did not know, and so they perverted the mind of man and the purpose of God. Their personal and fiatic Creator is but their alibi for ignorance of Causation and the creative process. The world exists and knowing not how or why, they said a God created it. If our more natural theory is correct, it completely refutes this priestly concept, and everything based upon this concept. To the religionist it will seem horrendous, opposed to the “revealed truth” of the scriptures. To this we reply, it is their concealed truth finally revealed. What does “the seed of Abraham” mean? Abraham, formerly Abram, is but the Hindu Creator Brahma, formerly Brama, with the a as prefix instead of suffix. Therefore Abraham’s seed is the Creator’s seed. And what is Genesis but gene with another suffix? Testament itself is derived from testes , and the Bible is but the testimony of a cosmic teste’s work—Creation. Such is. the Old Testament and such is the New. Originally the latter’s Creator was called monogene—one gene, wrongly and maliciously translated as “only begotten son,” so even here we see the monstrous hoax in the making. The Bible is, we repeat, but priest-perverted cosmology, its God, but the creativity in nature. With its Causation concept, nothing can be explained; with ours everything can be, including the second mystery—life from so-called “dead matter.” In world creation, called in metaphysics Involution, the creative intelligence became involved in that substance that became matter; it ensouled and intelligized it creatively. Together they constitute that aforesaid Life Principle. Because of this, matter is not “dead”; it is instinct with creativity. But matter is the polar opposite of space in which this genetic intelligence lay inactive and asleep; so in matter it is again inactive and asleep. To become active it must free itself from matter, and here the process is radiation, the opposite of congelation.

• From The Erotic Engine (2011)

  These may seem mundane aspects of communications, but without them, nothing else can develop. People tend to be nervous about giving out their credit card information online—doubly so when the product is taboo. One of the biggest challenges of e-commerce is making customers comfortable with a new way of paying. “The adult side of the business has actually done a really good job of generating trust from the general consumer,” Abrams said. Other people in the industry remain more optimistic about the adult world’s capacity to continuing innovating on a technological front as well as a business front. Among those with a cheerier outlook is Jenna Jameson herself. She has heard the pessimistic chatter, but does not buy into it. “We always hear that the adult technology lead is slowing down,” she told me. “Not in my opinion, though, as every time I turn around, this industry is still at the forefront of the next new thing. I think we will continue to see the adult industry spearhead the development and use of technology.” Jameson may have more reason to be optimistic than most. Not only is she one of the most successful, famous and rich X-rated stars of all time but she has also become an iconic entrepreneur whose brand has crossed over into mainstream culture. Her autobiography spent six weeks on The New York Times bestseller list, and she has appeared on billboards in New York’s Times Square promoting her website. Her brand includes a line of sex toys produced by Doc Johnson (a company founded by Reuben Sturman of peep-show notoriety) as well as ringtones (“moantones,” actually), purses, guitars, perfume and more. She has done commercials for Adidas and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. She has attained such celebrity that I was not allowed to contact her directly: my questions and her answers filtered through her handlers. Long before Jameson secured her place as a bona fide mainstream celebrity, the former stripper who graduated from soft-core to hard-core, and from stills to film, was already pulling the technological levers that would catapult her to stardom. In those days, though, it was more about survival than getting ahead. “Being in the adult industry means always having to fight: fight with government, media, ISPs or other regulators in both public and private sectors,” she said. “In order to survive and deliver what our customers wanted, while working with these restrictions, we had to be better, cleaner and smarter in being able to adapt and constantly look for new and intelligent ways to deliver new media.” Two-thirds of the way through her autobiography, Jameson has a single line about the porn world generally being ahead of the pack technologically. I wanted to know whether she was just repeating a truism, or whether this was something she had actually experienced working in the industry.

• From Dante's Divine Comedy (2001)

  ©2001 The Teaching Company 2 gives way to Bernard of Clairvaux, a Christian mystic who is Dante’s guide for the final cantos of the Paradiso. To explore this poem in a way that does justice to its coherence and artistic complexity, as well as to Dante’s vision of the universe, we begin with a brief overview of the poem itself, then move to some of the biographical and political facts—“Dante’s life and times,” if you will—that you need to know to understand the poem. From there, in Lectures Three and Four, we discuss the literary texts from the biblical and classical traditions that Dante drew on in forming the Commedia, as well as his own early works, which were also important in shaping the poem. We devote approximately the same number of lectures to each of the three parts of the poem, seven lectures to Inferno, six to Purgatorio, and seven to Paradiso. Because much of the poem consists of direct dramatic encounters between the pilgrim and inhabitants of the afterlife, our discussion centers primarily on these encounters. In the Inferno, these encounters are concerned with deepening Dante’s (and the reader’s) intellectual understanding of the nature of sin. Sin is divided into three broad categories in the Commedia—incontinence (subjecting reason to desire), violence, and fraud—and Lectures Six through Eleven show Dante meeting sinners drawn from each of these categories, ending with the vision of Satan frozen at the bottom of hell in Inferno 34. In Purgatory, we see the nature and purpose of moral improvement as repentant sinners prepare themselves for the vision of God in heaven, strengthening their wills against the seven deadly sins. After spending time in antepurgatory in Lectures Twelve and Thirteen, where we learn the rules of purgatory and the nature of salvation along with the pilgrim, we move on to the terraces of purgatory proper for Lectures Fourteen through Sixteen, where we encounter the process of improvement for both Dante and those he meets there. At the end of Purgatory, in Lecture Seventeen, we are with Dante in the earthly paradise, a kind of reconstructed Garden of Eden. In Paradiso, we journey through the created universe as seen and understood in the Middle Ages, traveling through the seven planets (as they were then understood): the moon, Mercury, Venus, the sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Lectures Eighteen through Twenty-One deal with this journey and include memorable encounters in the Circle of the Sun with great Christian thinkers and in the Circle of Mars with Dante’s own great-great- grandfather.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  The longer I studied our washing machine with the lid open, the more I realized that “for best results” I would have to be directly linked to the unnatural forces that my clothes were experiencing. But I hesitated to climb into the clothes basket. I had heard stories of broken fingers and dislocated shoulders. I thought, however, that if I had a way of plucking something of my own abruptly from a state of extreme spin and putting it on while it was still damp, time would be shocked to a stop until my garment dried. It was worth a try, anyway. Just at the close of a rinse cycle, I tied a length of brown twine around a dripping dark-red T-shirt as tightly as I could and tossed it back in the machine. When the spinning began I stood on a chair and held the end of the twine above the basket so that it could bobbin freely. At the right moment I jerked hard on the twine, shouting, “Now!” My red T-shirt flew twirling into the room like a flushed duck. I put it on and ran outside, full of hope. But the two-tone leaves were aflutter on the lindens and I could hear the usual traffic, so I knew that I had failed. I liked letting the shirt dry and its color lighten on me, though. A few days later, when there were enough dirty clothes to make another load, I hammered a finishing nail into the table next to the washing machine and mounted a spool of heavy-duty thread onto it. I wound the end of the thread clockwise around the spindle of the washing machine at the commencement of spin. Thread transfer proceeded with increasing speed. The little spool wobbled wildly as it was stripped of its cotton integument. I grabbed the spool and held it tightly, so that the thread being drawn into the machine had to snap—at that instant of rupture I expected time to be all mine. But time wasn’t mine even then; I still, it seemed, wasn’t connected intimately enough to the pure state of spin.

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

  Yet despite my depression and my fear for the future, I could not quite succumb to the prevailing despair. The worst had happened, but that meant that I no longer had anything much to lose, and increasingly I found that quite liberating. I had recently moved from my Highgate flat into the house of a college acquaintance in West Finchley. Her husband, Barrie, had died, almost overnight, of viral pneumonia, at the age of twenty-six. Susan had been six weeks pregnant at the time of his death and decided that she did not want to live alone. Her tragedy put my own woes into perspective, and Susan was also a marvelous support to me. Together we looked forward to the baby, and when her daughter was born later that summer, I helped to look after her, changing nappies and even getting up to do the night feed. Susan’s Jewish family generously welcomed me into their midst. Neither Susan nor her parents were believers, but they did have family dinners on Fridays, and I was introduced to chopped liver and challah. On the baby’s naming day, I attended my first synagogue service. Sitting in the women’s gallery, watching the men below transformed by their white prayer shawls, and listening to the strange chant, I was aware that this was quite different from any religion that I had experienced. People talked throughout the service, taking apparently little heed of the long Hebrew readings and prayers. But there was a warmth in the room that was moving and intriguing: the men embraced one another and came over specially to talk to us women, admiring the baby and congratulating Susan’s and Barrie’s parents with tears in their eyes. I did not think about it much at the time, but that service planted a seed: there were other ways of being religious than I had been accustomed to. Not everybody felt that it was unworthy to feel emotional and to show your feelings.

• From Deceptions and Myths of the Bible (1975)

  Without some consciousness of the whole vast, cosmic process, it is difficult for us to understand our present status, social and personal. We think of ourselves as the ultimate of life and that life will never be any different. We just can’t realize that we are not at all what nature intends life to be someday, and that we are but preparation for it. The fact is we are but tentative humanity, the real thing lies ahead. The next verses suggest its nature. 4. Thou hast a few names even in Sardis which have not defiled their garments; and they shall walk with me in white: for they are worthy. 5. He that overcometh, the same shall be clothed in white raiment; and I will not blot out his name out of the book of life, but I will confess his name before my Father, and before his angels. 6. He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches (Chap. 3). The white raiment is merely symbolic of perfection. In our previous treatment of Revelation we said this raiment was the auric elements, and on these high planes the one and only Holy Ghost, morally. Here the garments are no longer material but finer even than mental matter, therefore scripturally pure. So is consciousness; it is becoming divine, and so life then will be different. Confessing its name before the Father is all very well figuratively and Hebraically, but not otherwise. The implication that the Creative principle was morally perfect, a priori, is the great delusion of the Hebrew people. Here the reader should recall our distinction—quantitative and qualitative. Only evolutionary life is morally qualified and man makes it so. This is the great truth the Hebrew priesthood robbed us of, and considering the results of their false God-concept in toto , it is time we ourselves did a little blotting out. Instead of their God blotting us out of his book of life, we should blot him out of ours. Philadelphia7. And to the angel of the church in Philadelphia write; These things saith he that is holy, he that is true, he that hath the key of David, he that openeth, and no man shutteth; and shutteth, and no man openeth (Chap. 3). Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love. Not without reason did John choose this name for the last church, or plane, for only on this last and highest one is that divine quality, love, complete. In this lies the meaning of that statement, “Love is the fulfilling of the law.” This law is the law of life, of Evolution, and love, spiritual, is its end, not its beginning. Here we see the magnitude of the aforesaid Hebrew error—attributing to the involutionary Creator this strictly evolutionary and human quality. In this difference lies the whole span of invoevolutionary being and the purpose of Creation itself. Can anything then be further from the truth than Hebrew theology?

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  This is how we should understand both the big announcements and the intimate words of consolation. The most formal of the announcements comes, in Luke’s gospel (4:16–30), at the start of Jesus’s public career. Jesus goes back to his hometown of Nazareth and on the sabbath day goes to the synagogue—a place of worship, but also the communal “gathering place” (that’s what the word means), the place where people come together to discuss, to think things through, to study the law and to reflect on what it means. Jesus stands up to read from the prophet Isaiah and chooses another of the great passages about the coming new age, the release from slavery, the new Exodus, and restoration after the exile, which formed the hope that sustained so much Jewish life of his day. This is the passage often referred to as Jesus’s “Nazareth Manifesto”: He came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up. On the sabbath, as was his regular practice, he went into the synagogue and stood up to read. They gave him the scroll of the prophet Isaiah. 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:

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  But he will do this through his “anointed,” through the one he calls “my son.” I have deliberately set out these passages at some length to show just how strong, just how deep-rooted in scripture, is the idea of YHWH himself coming to rule and reign as Israel’s king. Several of the themes one can observe in the sorry sequence of would-be kings from the Maccabees to bar-Kochba (see Chapter 9) emerge in a clear light: victory over the nations, the rescue of Israel from oppression, Jerusalem and the Temple as the proper dwelling place for God’s glory, and so on. But it is YHWH himself who will bring this about—or, in that final twist in Ezekiel 34, echoed in Psalm 2, YHWH himself acting in and through the Davidic king. The idea of YHWH alone as king, as expressed by the extreme revolutionaries in the first century, thus raises a big question. What will this mean in practice, in reality? What will it look like? How does all this line up, if it does, with the national expectation and hope? Will it underwrite it, will it overthrow it, or will it perhaps do both of those at the same time? Paying attention to the prophets would indicate that something like this third possibility was likely; but what would it actually mean? In particular, the question was raised: would YHWH actually appear, visibly and in person, to take charge? If so, what could people expect to see? How would it happen? Or, if not, would he act through chosen representatives—perhaps specially inspired prophets? (There was no shortage of people in the first century claiming prophetic inspiration, speaking urgent words from YHWH to his suffering and anxious people, sometimes promising them immediate and spectacular supernatural deliverance.) And if YHWH did choose to act in that way—acting in one sense all by himself, but in another through particular representatives—how would those people be equipped for the task? This, again, is where the ancient idea of “anointing” comes into play. An individual is solemnly smeared with holy oil as a sign, and perhaps a means, of a special “equipping,” or “enabling,” from YHWH himself to perform the necessary tasks. Such persons are no longer acting on their own authority or initiative, but on God’s. A dangerous claim, and one can imagine people being instantly cynical: “Claiming to speak for YHWH ? What, another one? We’ve heard that before. You’re probably just a fraud like all the others.” There was, after all, no obvious model for what it might look like, how it might happen, that YHWH would do what all those psalms and prophets said and come in person to take charge, ruling the world, rescuing Israel, establishing his presence in the Temple, judging the nations, and causing the trees and the animals to shout for joy. The ancient scriptures are quite unhelpful on the matter.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  If we want to understand what he thought he was up to, we have to take them seriously and see the role they play in the whole picture. But if there had been an earlier “victory,” when did it take place? Matthew, Mark, and Luke all supply the answer: at the beginning of Jesus’s public career, during his forty-day fast in the desert, when the satan tried to distract him, to persuade him to grasp the right goal by the wrong means, and so to bring him over to his side (Matt. 4:1–11; Mark 1:12–13; Luke 4:1–13). Jesus won that battle, which was why he could then announce that God’s kingdom was now beginning to happen. But the battle clearly isn’t over yet. The great initial victory, won in Jesus’s own intense private struggle, has created a space in which God’s kingdom can now make inroads, much as the early victory of Judah the Hammer created space for the Temple to be cleansed, the early victory of the rebels in AD 66 for a short-lived sense of triumph, and the initial victories of Simon the Star for a few brief moments of freedom and Jewish self-rule. But this same kingdom, God’s kingdom, can only be finally established through the final battle. The enemy troops will mass again, close in, and do their worst to repair the earlier damage. What is the final battle that Jesus envisages? It is no longer, clearly, a military battle against Rome or even a revolt against Herod and the chief priests, an attempt (perhaps) to take over the Temple or Jerusalem itself. It is no longer the traditional freedom fight of pious Jews fed up with pagan rule—and with corrupt local rulers colluding with that rule, and so becoming no better than pagans themselves. It goes much deeper. It is the battle against the satan himself. And, though the satan no doubt uses Rome, uses Herod, uses even the chief priests themselves, Jesus keeps his eye on the fact that the satan is not identified with any of these, and that to make such an identification is already to give up, and so to lose the real battle. “Your moment has come,” he said to the chief priests, the officers of the Temple police, and the elders who had come out to arrest him. “Your moment has come at last, and so has the power of darkness!” (Luke 22:53). The darkness, it seems, had to be allowed to do its worst in order to be defeated. And the dark powers that put Jesus on the cross continued to the last with their mocking questions: “Save yourself, if you’re God’s son! Come down from the cross!” (Matt.

• From The Erotic Engine (2011)

  From an economic perspective, virtual worlds seem almost as marginal as some of the sexual activities found therein. But that is the precise reason why it is so interesting. Currently, the interface for a world such as Second Life is difficult to negotiate. There’s lots of waiting for images and information to download, navigation makes no initial sense, it’s nearly impossible to find anything without the help of an experienced friend, the means of interaction seem strange and off-putting to the uninitiated, and the primary activities all seem to centre around sex. Yet that is how, with minor modifications, we would have described the World Wide Web a decade or so ago. Or the Internet itself not long before that. Many experts concur that virtual worlds are where email was ten or fifteen years ago: they have become part of the general discourse and expanded beyond the core geek community, but they have yet to go mainstream. A number of things still need to happen in order for virtual worlds to hit the big time the way other Internet applications have. Mainstream users will require a vastly simpler and more intuitive interface. We’ll need another leap forward in bandwidth and processor power—current lag issues might be bearable for diehards, but not for the rest of the world. The percentage of non-sexual activity will need to grow. That doesn’t mean that erotica will go away, but as happened with the VCR and many other Internet applications, other content will expand more quickly. In all likelihood, virtual worlds will require an analogue to the back room of a video rental shop—the adult content will have to be sequestered for those who choose to see it. All these things, in fact, are already happening in Second Life and elsewhere. Any particular world might wither and fall victim to the vagaries of technological and social change, but virtual worlds themselves are clearly on the ascendant. Already, university courses are being taught in virtual worlds. Real countries set up virtual embassies to take questions about visas. Therapists in virtual environments treat people with phobias. Hollywood blockbusters have been screened in Second Life. And business people and academics are finding ways to turn virtual worlds into collaborative laboratories and meeting places. A concept that began with some sentences strung together in a database more than thirty years ago is poised now to shake up the fundamentals of how we communicate with one another.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  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. 3:10)—renewed, that is, by worship of God and the Lamb, so that we are able to serve as “kings and priests,” putting Jesus’s rule into effect in the world and summing up creation’s praise before him. This is what it looks like, today, when Jesus is running the world. This is, after all, what he told us to expect. The poor in spirit will be making the kingdom of heaven happen. The meek will be taking over the earth, so gently that the powerful won’t notice until it’s too late. The peacemakers will be putting the arms manufacturers out of business. Those who are hungry and thirsty for God’s justice will be analyzing government policy and legal rulings and speaking up on behalf of those at the bottom of the pile. The merciful will be surprising everybody by showing that there is a different way to do human relations other than being judgmental, eager to put everyone else down. “You are the light of the world,” said Jesus. “You are the salt of the earth.” He was announcing a program yet to be completed. He was inviting his hearers, then and now, to join him in making it happen. This is, quite simply, what it looks like when Jesus is enthroned. 11 Simply Christian (London: SPCK; San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2006).12Surprised by Hope (London: SPCK; San Francisco: HarperOne, 2008).13 Terry Eagleton, “Who Needs Darwin?,” New Statesman, 13 June 2011, p. 58.Further Reading

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  What’s more, it doesn’t just declare it as something to be believed, like the fact that the sun is hot or the sea wet. It commits the worshipper to allegiance, to following this Jesus, to being shaped and directed by him. Worshipping the God we see in Jesus orients our whole being, our imagination, our will, our hopes, and our fears away from the world where Mars, Mammon, and Aphrodite (violence, money, and sex) make absolute demands and punish anyone who resists. It orients us instead to a world in which love is stronger than death, the poor are promised the kingdom, and chastity (whether married or single) reflects the holiness and faithfulness of God himself. Acclaiming Jesus as Lord plants a flag that supersedes the flags of the nations, however “free” or “democratic” they may be. It challenges both the tyrants who think they are, in effect, divine and the “secular democracies” that have effectively become, if not divine, at least ecclesial, that is, communities that are trying to do and be what the church was supposed to do and be, but without recourse to the one who sustains the church’s life. Worship creates—or should create, if it is allowed to be truly itself—a community that marches to a different beat, that keeps in step with a different Lord. Ideally, then—I shall come to the problems with this in a moment—the church, the community that hails Jesus as Lord and king, and feasts at his table celebrating his victorious death and resurrection, is constituted as the “body of the Messiah.” This famous Pauline image is not a random “illustration.” It expresses Paul’s conviction that this is the way in which Jesus now exercises his rule in the world—through the church, which is his Body. Paul, rooted as he was in the ancient scriptures, knew well that the creator’s plan was to look after his creation through obedient humankind. For Paul, Jesus himself is the Obedient Man who is now therefore in charge of the world; and the church is “his body, the fullness of the one who fills all in all” (Eph. 1:23). It is this vocation that gives the church courage to stand up in the face of the bullying self-appointed masters of the world, to resist them when they are forcing their communities to go in the wrong way, while at the same time demonstrating, in its own life, that there is a different way of being human, a way pioneered and now made possible by Jesus himself. “God’s wisdom, in all its rich variety,” is to be “made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places —through the church!” (Eph. 3:10).

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  Many other passages point in the same direction. In particular, some of the discourses in John’s gospel, climaxing in the so-called high-priestly prayer of John 17, explore at much greater depth the many-sided transformation Jesus seems to have believed would happen when people followed him and discovered what it meant for God to become king. This was, it seems, a major part of Jesus’s whole program. Just as a politician today needs to have a coherent set of policies about apparently quite different issues (immigration, foreign policy, the economy, education, and so on), so Jesus’s campaign for the kingdom seems to have included all the elements we have so far described—healings, celebrations, forgiveness, the renewed heart—and much more besides. But what then must we say about Jesus’s vision of the kingdom itself? Did he think it was already here, or was it still in the future? Or was it in some sense both, and if so how? Chapter 7 The Campaign Starts Here K EEP THESE SPECTACLES ON, then, as we come back to Jesus and to what he was saying about God—about Israel’s God. Jesus was going about declaring, after the manner of someone issuing a public proclamation, that Israel’s God was at last becoming king. “The time is fulfilled!” he said. “God’s kingdom is arriving! Turn back, and believe the good news!” (Mark 1:15). “If it’s by God’s finger that I cast out demons,” he declared, “then God’s kingdom has come upon you” (Luke 11:20). Think for a moment of how a “proclamation” like this works. Those of us who live in modern democracies are used to the idea of a new government taking office, with a new president or prime minister. We are used to hearing about this on the radio or TV. When this happens, almost all of us simply accept that this is how things now are. We believe in democracy. Even if we didn’t vote for the eventual winner, we shrug our shoulders and recognize that the majority disagreed with us this time around. Whatever happens, it’s unlikely to mean that all the old laws and all the old customs will be swept away, or that the new leader will invent a whole lot of new ones and expect us all to come into line. Some policies will shift this way or that, to be sure. But a new leader, a new government, won’t transform our lives from top to bottom. But imagine what it would be like if you’d lived for years and years under the vicious and repressive rule of a foreign tyrant. You have no system in place to change things. No elections are held, or if they are, they’re rigged from start to finish. And imagine that this takes place in a world without radio, TV, or printed media.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  The people grumbled and sometimes clamored to go back to Egypt. When the holy law arrived from Mount Sinai, its first task was to condemn the people—including Aaron!—for making an idol, a golden calf, instead of worshipping the one God, whose only appropriate “image” is a living, breathing human being. The covenant was broken before it had even really begun, and God very nearly withdrew his promise to travel in person with the Israelites. Whatever the ancient promises meant, and whatever this new fulfillment might involve, it certainly didn’t make the people pure, holy, and faithful overnight. But this was the story that sustained the Israelites for the next thousand years and more, up to the time of Jesus—and, of course, sustains the Jewish people to this day. This was the story Jesus knew from boyhood. This was the story—the tyrant, the leader, the victory, the sacrifice, the vocation, the presence of God, the promised inheritance—within which it made sense to talk about God taking charge. This was the story about God becoming king. This was the story Jesus’s hearers would have remembered when they heard him talking about God taking charge at last. Since we have reason to believe that Jesus was one of the greatest communicators of all time, we must assume that this was the story he wanted them to think of. He must have known what he was doing, what pictures he was awakening in people’s minds. When he was talking about God taking charge, he was talking about a new Exodus. Chapter 9 The Kingdom Present and Future W HEN JESUS HEALED PEOPLE, when he celebrated parties with all and sundry, when he offered forgiveness freely to people as if he were replacing the Temple itself with his own work—in all these ways it was clear, and he intended it to be clear, that this wasn’t just a foretaste of a future reality. This was reality itself. This was what it looked like when God was in charge. God’s kingdom was coming, as he taught his followers to pray, “on earth as in heaven.” On one occasion, indeed, Jesus said sharply to those who were accusing him of being in league with the devil that, if it was indeed by God’s own Spirit that he was casting out demons, “then God’s kingdom has come upon [them]” (Luke 11:20). A great deal of what Jesus was doing and saying only makes sense on the assumption that he really did believe that God was already becoming king in the new way he had promised. It was happening, and this is what it would look like. But there are constant hints, throughout Jesus’s public career, that the coming of the kingdom would depend on future events yet to be realized.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

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

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

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

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

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

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

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