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 Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  It was partly due to all those years in the classroom. Day after day, hour after hour, I had been compelled to talk to a captive and often reluctant audience of adolescent girls. To hold their attention and convey the ideas and information that they needed, I had learned to think on my feet and make my material lively and interesting. And as a result, what had once seemed an impossible feat had become second nature. Not only that, I realized: I had positively enjoyed talking, seemingly to myself, in that dark studio, cut off from the rest of the world by the blinding lights, but conveying my message all the same. I had thought that the school had arrested my progress. I had feared that I was slipping backward into old habits of timidity, but all the time I had been developing a new skill. And if I could do that, I might be capable of other things. Maybe my future was not as hopeless as I had feared. And so, a few weeks later, on the last day of term, I found that I was neither distressed nor frightened to be leaving the school, even though I had no definite plans and no prospect of another job. I had imagined that I would be distraught. But instead I felt a great calm and an occasional flicker of excitement. It was time to go, I acknowledged as I stood with the other members of staff at the back of the hall for the final assembly. I recalled my first morning at the school, when I had stood up in the gallery with the sixth form, looking down at the hundreds of girls in the hall below, and felt suffocated by the all-too-familiar rhythms of institutional life. Against the odds, I had gained something from these years, but now it was time to move on. I listened to the very generous words of the headmistress as she thanked me for my contribution to the school in her detached way, almost as though she were speaking of somebody else. It felt as if I had already gone. Later that morning I was able to joke in my farewell speech to the staff and admire my present: a set of elegant cocktail glasses with dark red stems. I smiled to myself. Not an obvious present for an ex-nun.

• From Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex (1994)

  Much of the noise and fury about sex, almost all of it, has been on the side of humiliation. A lot of dirt has been flung about to make the case that people should not be proud, should not show off, brag about, exhibit, demonstrate, or share their sexual selves except in a few restricted ways not to be discussed. What if the fury about sex became a celebration, a joy, a shout? What exactly are we afraid of, besides change? Every revolutionary figures out how important it is to break rules—to be bad, bad as defined by the prevailing culture. To be a sexual revolutionary these days requires little more than public discourse, because even discourse is discouraged, and creates change. “It helps me forget,” someone tells me about their uncommon sexual predilection. “It helps me get over it,” says a prostitute. “It helps me cure it,” says a masochist. Whatever it is. God knows, sex has helped me forget and get over and cure a lot of things. It? Maybe. Maybe just talking about sex this way, this much, is half a cure. A cure for what? For It, the loss, the longing, the hole inside, the little deaths of passivity and despair, the loneliness, the fear of growing older, of dying, being left behind—It, the hunger, the urge to love, to give, to live independently of how others think I should live, the persistent urge to and fear of truly letting myself go in front of another. Richard Nixon said in 1970 that freedom of expression could be protected only by suppressing pornography. Any permissiveness toward pornography, he felt, “would contribute to an atmosphere condoning anarchy in every other field.” Nixon was really talking about permissiveness toward sex itself; pornography was just an easy target. Sex is threatening. Sex undermines the conventions of our mental life; we go back to them in time, but first they disappear for a while. What works to fix “it,” in the words of all these seekers, is that which contraverts the given, creates psychic anarchy. In the sexual moments of greatest intensity there are no rules, no givens, no paradigms but the immediate—the one right in front of your eyes and hands. Practice anarchy long enough and it becomes a way of life. The most personal and the most political moments in our lives always strike us like blows, knock us to our knees with their sweet truth.

• From Get Out of Your Head: Stopping the Cycle of Anxious Thoughts (2020)

  Attached to her text is a picture of her dad. He is a godly man, a great dad, a faithful husband. He also is a man with a substance abuse problem. He finished a season in rehab a few months ago, and boy, did he return to his church and community on a mission. After his program finished, he went back and began leading Bible studies at the rehab facility he’d just left. The picture Jess texted me was of six men, all of different ages, ethnicities, and interests. They were all smiles, seated around a dinner table. Jess wrote, “My dad woke up Saturday morning with the idea to invite his rehab buddies over for dinner, so he and my mom made the invite, and a few hours later they all showed up. My family is still fragile, but these are the things that help me see that God really does bring beauty from ashes.” Only God can take our most broken parts and turn them into thumbs-up moments of hope around grilled hamburgers and potato salad. Only God can take the thing we want to hide and build the greatest story we will ever tell. Only God can turn people we might have looked down on into friends and colaborers and brothers in Him. Only God. Our Singular Focus Aside from the apostle Paul and Jesus, Peter might just be my favorite person in the Bible. My love for him runs deep for two simple reasons: first, he was a radical, a renegade, a guy living hair-on-fire for the Lord, and I like to think that I have a little of that Jesus-freak passion running through my veins. Second, Peter is perhaps best known for the unbelievable mistakes he made—a reality to which I can relate. He was a little…overconfident. A certain incident comes to mind when he told Jesus in Matthew 26, in essence, “What do You mean I’ll deny You? That’s preposterous.” This was, of course, right before Peter denied Jesus, not once or twice but three times. So, there’s that. But in other places in Scripture, Peter was this passionate, devoted, faithful disciple, one in whom Jesus could place His trust. Acts 2 reminds us that it was Peter on the Day of Pentecost who stood before the masses and shared the truth, prompting thousands to follow Christ, which is when the church was birthed. But the scene that knits my heart closest to Peter’s heart is recorded in Matthew 14.

• 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 Simply Jesus (2011)

  So far as we know, this story was unique in the ancient world. Even the Romans had not thought of themselves in this way, with the sense of a great story now at last reaching its climax, until Augustus and his court poets used the idea in their propaganda. (This is interesting in itself. It’s clear from earlier Jewish texts that the Jews didn’t get the idea from Livy or Virgil. But it’s equally obvious that the Roman poets didn’t borrow it from the Jews either. Faced with these two parallel movements, we can see already why they crashed into each other, as you would expect in a perfect storm.) As far back as we can trace their ancient scriptures—what Christians call the Old Testament—the Jewish people and their ancestors had believed, or had been told by their prophets to believe, that their story was going somewhere, that it had a goal in mind. Despite many setbacks and disappointments, their God would make sure they reached the goal at last. After all, they were taught that their God was the one true God of all the world. He wasn’t simply one more god among many. It was therefore impossible that his will for the world would ultimately be thwarted. And, since the present state of affairs was clearly less than ideal, he would do whatever it took to sort things out. His people would, in the meantime, find themselves caught up in the story of how that would happen. Thus, whereas the Romans had what we might call a retrospective eschatology, in which people looked back from a “golden age” that had already arrived and saw the whole story of how they had arrived at that point, the Jews cherished and celebrated a prospective eschatology, looking forward from within a decidedly ungolden age and longing and praying fervently for the freedom, justice, and peace that, they were convinced, were theirs by right. God would do it! It was going to happen at last!

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

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

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

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

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

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

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

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