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.

Page 29 of 216 · 20 per page

• From How God Became King (2012)

  The four gospels together demand a complete reappraisal of the various avoidance tactics Western Christianity has employed rather than face this challenge head-on. It simply won’t do to line up the options, as has normally been done, into either a form of “Christendom,” by which people normally mean the capitulation of the gospel to the world’s way of power, or a form of sectarian withdrawal. Life is more complex, more interesting, and more challenging than that. The gospels are there, waiting to inform a new generation for holistic mission, to embody, explain, and advocate new ways of ordering communities, nations, and the world. The church belongs at the very heart of the world, to be the place of prayer and holiness at the point where the world is in pain—not to be a somewhat “religious” version of the world, on the one hand, or a detached, heavenly minded enclave, on the other. It is a measure of our contemporary muddles that we find it very difficult to articulate, let alone to live out, a vision of church, kingdom, and world that is neither of these. What happens if we ask the question the other way around? What, in other words, do we learn about the cross when we discover that the gospels present it as the means by which God (in Jesus) becomes king of the world? Again, I see three immediate answers to this challenging question. First, the way we have normally listed options in atonement theology simply won’t do. Our questions have been wrongly put, because they haven’t been about the kingdom. They haven’t been about God’s sovereign, saving rule coming on earth as in heaven. Instead, our questions have been about a “salvation” that rescues people from the world, instead of for the world. “Going to heaven” has been the object (ever since the Middle Ages at least, in the Western church); “sin” is what stops us from getting there; so the cross must deal with sin, so that we can leave this world and go to the much better one in the sky, or in “eternity,” or wherever. But this is simply untrue to the story the gospels are telling—which, again, explains why we’ve all misread these wonderful texts. Whatever the cross achieves must be articulated, if we are to take the four gospels seriously, within the context of the kingdom-bringing victory. This is the ultimate redefinition-in-action of the messianic task, the kingdom-bringing messianic vocation.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  Within this context, the “forgiveness of sins” gains an entirely new dimension. It includes, of course, just what it says to most of us: we are all overdrawn at the moral bank, and need to know again and again that God wipes out the debt and fills the account with his own freely given treasure. But when we step back from our own personal anxieties and awareness of guilt, we recognize that the world as a whole needs, longs for, aches and yearns and cries out for forgiveness—for that collective, global sigh of relief that means that nobody need seek vengeance ever again; that nobody will bear a grudge ever again; that the million wrongs with which the world has been so horribly defaced will be put right at last; that in God’s ultimate new world there will be no moral shadow, no lingering resentment, no character warped by another’s wrong. “Forgiveness of sins” is not a purely negative term, getting rid of the moral stain and guilt that we all incur, though it is that too. It is the positive presence of God and the Lamb, the Lamb whose shed blood has wiped the record clean. …the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting. And so, finally, we come to the “resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.” Here we must “festoon” around the well-known words the great New Testament hope: “the life of the age to come,” the “coming age” in which the whole creation will be transformed to share the liberty of the glory of the children of God. And, within that new creation, the coming together of heaven and earth of which Paul spoke (Eph. 1:10), God’s people are promised new bodies. I have written about this elsewhere, but it is perhaps worth reiterating it. If you belong to Jesus the Messiah, if his Spirit dwells in you, if you are a worshipper of the one true God, maker of heaven and earth—then however you may feel at the moment, whether you are sick or healthy, handsome or jaded, you are simply a shadow of your future self. God intends to transform the “you” you are at the moment into a being—a full, glorious, physical being—who will be much more truly “you” than you’ve ever been before. Sin, by distorting and downgrading our specific God-given capacities and vocations, makes us more and more alike in our degradation. Jesus makes us more and more alive in our uniqueness, and the resurrection will complete that in a great act of new creation. Thomas à Kempis put it like this in his great hymn “Light’s Abode, Celestial Salem” (translated here by J. M. Neale): O how glorious and resplendent, Fragile body, shalt thou be; When endued with so much beauty, Full of health, and strong, and free; Full of vigor, full of pleasure That shall last eternally.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  The problem of forgetting what the gospels are about is not confined to one segment of the church. Different branches—Catholic, Protestant, Reformed, charismatic, evangelical, liberal, social-gospel, and the many segments of church life that bear two or more of these rather misleading labels at the same time—come at things from different angles. Naturally. But it is my belief that all of them, over many centuries now, have backed off from facing the full challenge of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. It would be fascinating to chart the ways in which different parts of the church have read (and, in my view, misread) the gospels. But that would require a different sort of book and is in any case way beyond my competence. Instead, I want to come at the question from the angle of the parts of the church I know best. After nearly twenty years in senior ministerial roles in the Church of England, seven of them as Bishop of Durham, and with fairly wide experience of traditions very different from my own, I think what I have to say reflects not a narrow or idiosyncratic viewpoint, but one at which many Christians from many traditions will nod with recognition. The question, then, is not only: Can we learn to read the gospels better, more in tune with what their original writers intended? It is also: Can we discover, by doing this, a new vision for God’s mission in the world, in and through Jesus, and then—now!—in and through his followers? And, in doing so, can we grow closer together in mission and life, in faith and hope, and even in love? Might a fresh reading of the gospels, in other words, clear the way for renewed efforts in mission and unity? Is that what it would look like if we really believed that the living God was king on earth as in heaven? That, after all, is the story all four gospels tell. I am aware, of course, that there are other documents that have been called “gospels,” and I shall say something about them in passing. But I am here dealing with the four that were recognized, from very early on, as part of the church’s “rule of life,” that is, part of the “canon”: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. And the story that the four evangelists tell is the story, as in my title, of “how God became king.”

• From How God Became King (2012)

  That may get you a little way down the road, though if all you do is affirm traditional orthodoxy in the face of the proper historical questions that must still arise, you may find the journey increasingly uncomfortable . But there is a long way to go, and, to be frank, the only way to travel the distance is to go back to the gospels themselves and to the integrated message they contain of the kingdom and the cross, or rather the incarnation, kingdom, cross, resurrection, and ascension—with all of those understood in carefully worked out relation to all of the others. And yes, that may mean that the car needs to be taken to the mechanic, and the mechanic may have to take it apart and clean or even replace its various parts. This time, however, the point will be to put it back together again and to drive away in proper style. I understand the frustration of those who are now saying we should, as it were, start with the creeds, so that we shall at least read the Bible in a “believing” way. But if we start with the creeds, granted the way our Western Christianity is now more or less bound to read them, we will never understand the gospels, and hence the whole canon itself. If, however, we start with the gospels, which form the heart and balance point of the whole Christian canon, and if we understand them to be telling the story of how God, the creator God, Israel’s God, became in and through Jesus the king of all the world, then we can return to the creeds and say them in a very different spirit. Put tradition first, and scripture will be muzzled and faded. Put scripture first, and tradition will come to new life. Better still, as Jesus himself said, put God’s kingdom first—put first the revelation that, as the gospels have been eager to tell us, this is the story of how God became king!—and all these things will be added to you. The question of how we might then read the gospels, publicly and privately, is a challenging one. I have enjoyed exploring, over many years now, different ways of undertaking this central task. Most congregations, I think, have never heard a gospel read, or “performed,” all the way through. There are plenty of people in our churches who have the dramatic talent to undertake that. Many clergy have never thought of allowing large sections of scripture to frame their liturgy, rather than the other way around; that was done as an experiment in one of the Durham churches in Lent 2010, and it worked wonderfully well. Equally—and this is really astonishing when you stop to think about it—most practicing Christians, including most clergy, have never sat down privately and read right through one or more of the gospels in a single sitting.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  This was when slaves were freed, when land sold off by the family was restored to its original owner, when things got put back as they should be. The jubilee is a fascinating social innovation within the legislation of ancient Israel, a sign that relentless buying and selling of land, goods, and even people won’t be the last word. But seventy times seven? That sounds like a jubilee of jubilees! So, though four hundred and ninety years—nearly half a millennium—is indeed a long time, the point is this: when the time finally arrives, it will be the greatest “redemption” of all. This will be the time of real, utter, and lasting freedom. That is the hope that sustained the Israelites in the long years of the centuries before the time of Jesus. It is normally assumed that the book of Daniel reached its final form during the first half of the second century BC , around the time of the Maccabean crisis, when Judas Maccabeus and his family led a successful resistance against the Syrian invasion. And so, with Daniel 9 in mind, learned scribes were calculating and recalculating, asking when the seventy sevens would be fulfilled. When will the real return from exile happen? And Matthew makes it clear beyond cavil, to anyone thinking Jewishly in that period, that the moment had come with Jesus. Instead of years, he does it with generations, the generations of Israel’s entire history from Abraham to the present. All the generations to that point were fourteen times three, that is, six sevens—with Jesus we get the seventh seven. He is the jubilee in person. He is the one who will rescue Israel from its long-continued nightmare. “He,” says the angel to Joseph, “is the one who will save his people from their sins” (1:21). That, to any first-century Jew, didn’t just mean that individuals could turn to him and find personal forgiveness, though that would obviously be true as well. Read Isaiah 40 and Lamentations 4 again and see. Exile is the payment for sin, so forgiveness of sin means the end of exile. If you have received a royal pardon, you get out of jail free. The time has come. Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid, that she has received from YHWH ’s hand double for all her sins. (Isa. 40:1–2) The punishment of your iniquity, O daughter Zion, is accomplished, he will keep you in exile no longer; but your iniquity, O daughter Edom, he will punish, he will uncover your sins.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  To be “in communion” with them is far more than simply hoping that our departed loved ones will actually still, in some sense, be in touch with us, that there will be some kind of mystical contact beyond the grave. It is to share in fellowship and solidarity with all those who have been the “kingdom people” of their day and to gain strength and courage from them for our own witness. It was highly significant, in view of the vocation he already sensed, that Dietrich Bonhoeffer chose to write his doctoral dissertation, “Communion Sanctorum,” on this clause. Within this context, the “forgiveness of sins” gains an entirely new dimension. It includes, of course, just what it says to most of us: we are all overdrawn at the moral bank, and need to know again and again that God wipes out the debt and fills the account with his own freely given treasure. But when we step back from our own personal anxieties and awareness of guilt, we recognize that the world as a whole needs, longs for, aches and yearns and cries out for forgiveness—for that collective, global sigh of relief that means that nobody need seek vengeance ever again; that nobody will bear a grudge ever again; that the million wrongs with which the world has been so horribly defaced will be put right at last; that in God’s ultimate new world there will be no moral shadow, no lingering resentment, no character warped by another’s wrong. “Forgiveness of sins” is not a purely negative term, getting rid of the moral stain and guilt that we all incur, though it is that too. It is the positive presence of God and the Lamb, the Lamb whose shed blood has wiped the record clean. ...the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting. And so, finally, we come to the “resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.” Here we must “festoon” around the well-known words the great New Testament hope: “the life of the age to come,” the “coming age” in which the whole creation will be transformed to share the liberty of the glory of the children of God. And, within that new creation, the coming together of heaven and earth of which Paul spoke (Eph. 1:10), God’s people are promised new bodies. I have written about this elsewhere, but it is perhaps worth reiterating it.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  But then, growing within that soil, we find all kinds of fresh plants: a continual stream of people, movements and, writings in the postbiblical period, up to and including the revolt of bar-Kochba in the 130s, that draw on and develop the same beliefs and hopes. It’s not difficult to imagine the Judaean people, all the way through this period, singing psalms like Psalm 2, where the nations rage but God installs his king on Mount Zion and summons the nations to bow down before him: 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, saying, “Let us burst their bonds asunder, and cast their cords from us.” 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. ” Now therefore, O kings, be wise; be warned, O rulers of the earth. Serve YHWH with fear, with trembling kiss his feet, or he will be angry, and you will perish in the way; for his wrath is quickly kindled. Happy are all who take refuge in him. It doesn’t take a higher degree in ancient Jewish history to guess, accurately, what they would be thinking as they read Psalm 89, with its glorious vision of God’s whole world ruled over by the Davidic king and its mystified sorrow at the way in which that hope seems to have been dashed yet again: I will sing of your steadfast love, O YHWH , forever; with my mouth I will proclaim your faithfulness to all generations. I declare that your steadfast love is established forever; your faithfulness is as firm as the heavens. You said, “I have made a covenant with my chosen one, I have sworn to my servant David: ‘I will establish your descendants forever, and build your throne for all generations.’” Then you spoke in a vision to your faithful one, and said: “I have set the crown on one who is mighty, I have exalted one chosen from the people. I have found my servant David; with my holy oil I have anointed him; my hand shall always remain with him; my arm also shall strengthen him. The enemy shall not outwit him, the wicked shall not humble him . I will crush his foes before him and strike down those who hate him.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  The jubilee is a fascinating social innovation within the legislation of ancient Israel, a sign that relentless buying and selling of land, goods, and even people won’t be the last word. But seventy times seven? That sounds like a jubilee of jubilees! So, though four hundred and ninety years—nearly half a millennium—is indeed a long time, the point is this: when the time finally arrives, it will be the greatest “redemption” of all. This will be the time of real, utter, and lasting freedom. That is the hope that sustained the Israelites in the long years of the centuries before the time of Jesus. It is normally assumed that the book of Daniel reached its final form during the first half of the second century BC, around the time of the Maccabean crisis, when Judas Maccabeus and his family led a successful resistance against the Syrian invasion. And so, with Daniel 9 in mind, learned scribes were calculating and recalculating, asking when the seventy sevens would be fulfilled. When will the real return from exile happen? And Matthew makes it clear beyond cavil, to anyone thinking Jewishly in that period, that the moment had come with Jesus. Instead of years, he does it with generations, the generations of Israel’s entire history from Abraham to the present. All the generations to that point were fourteen times three, that is, six sevens—with Jesus we get the seventh seven. He is the jubilee in person. He is the one who will rescue Israel from its long-continued nightmare. “He,” says the angel to Joseph, “is the one who will save his people from their sins” (1:21). That, to any first-century Jew, didn’t just mean that individuals could turn to him and find personal forgiveness, though that would obviously be true as well. Read Isaiah 40 and Lamentations 4 again and see. Exile is the payment for sin, so forgiveness of sin means the end of exile. If you have received a royal pardon, you get out of jail free. The time has come. Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid, that she has received from YHWH’s hand double for all her sins. (Isa. 40:1–2) The punishment of your iniquity, O daughter Zion, is accomplished, he will keep you in exile no longer; but your iniquity, O daughter Edom, he will punish, he will uncover your sins. (Lam. 4:22) This is perhaps the most important point to make, because it’s one of the hardest for people today to grasp. We can just about take on board the idea, which Matthew also emphasizes, that the life of Jesus recapitulates key elements in the earlier story of Israel. For a moment, as Jesus stands on the mountain giving the famous sermon, he is Moses. For a moment, answering his critics about his actions on the sabbath, he is David.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  It’s the same story all the way through. And there is no doubt that this is the story the gospel writers intend, in their different ways, to retell in the basic story of Jesus himself. Isaiah and Daniel do indeed provide something of a climax to this much larger narrative. But then, growing within that soil, we find all kinds of fresh plants: a continual stream of people, movements and, writings in the postbiblical period, up to and including the revolt of bar-Kochba in the 130s, that draw on and develop the same beliefs and hopes. It’s not difficult to imagine the Judaean people, all the way through this period, singing psalms like Psalm 2, where the nations rage but God installs his king on Mount Zion and summons the nations to bow down before him: 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, saying, “Let us burst their bonds asunder, and cast their cords from us.” 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.” Now therefore, O kings, be wise; be warned, O rulers of the earth. Serve YHWH with fear, with trembling kiss his feet, or he will be angry, and you will perish in the way; for his wrath is quickly kindled. Happy are all who take refuge in him. It doesn’t take a higher degree in ancient Jewish history to guess, accurately, what they would be thinking as they read Psalm 89, with its glorious vision of God’s whole world ruled over by the Davidic king and its mystified sorrow at the way in which that hope seems to have been dashed yet again: I will sing of your steadfast love, O YHWH, forever; with my mouth I will proclaim your faithfulness to all generations. I declare that your steadfast love is established forever; your faithfulness is as firm as the heavens.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  To put it simply, most Jews of Jesus’s day did not believe that the exile was really, properly over. Yes, they’d come back from Babylon—well, some of them, anyway. Yes, they’d rebuilt the Temple in Jerusalem. But pagan foreigners were still ruling over them. They were still slaves even in their own land, as Ezra and Nehemiah complain: “Here we are, slaves to this day—slaves in the land that you gave to our ancestors to enjoy its fruit and its good gifts” (Neh. 9:36). The great promises of Isaiah and Ezekiel hadn’t yet come true. All this is summed up graphically in a vital passage in Daniel 9, normally assumed to have been written in the early second century BC , in which Daniel in exile in Babylon asks God whether it isn’t time now for Jeremiah’s prophecy to be fulfilled, the prophecy that the Babylonian exile would last for seventy years. Back comes the answer: not seventy years, but seventy weeks of years, in other words, seventy times seven years: In the first year of Darius son of Ahasuerus, by birth a Mede, who became king over the realm of the Chaldeans—in the first year of his reign, I, Daniel, perceived in the books the number of years that, according to the word of YHWH to the prophet Jeremiah, must be fulfilled for the devastation of Jerusalem, namely, seventy years. Then I turned to the Lord God, to seek an answer by prayer and supplication with fasting and sackcloth and ashes…. While I was speaking, and was praying and confessing my sin and the sin of my people Israel, and presenting my supplication before YHWH my God on behalf of the holy mountain of my God—while I was speaking in prayer, the man Gabriel, whom I had seen before in a vision, came to me in swift flight at the time of the evening sacrifice. He came and said to me, “Daniel, I have now come out to give you wisdom and understanding. At the beginning of your supplications a word went out, and I have come to declare it, for you are greatly beloved. So consider the word and understand the vision: Seventy weeks are decreed for your people and your holy city: to finish the transgression, to put an end to sin, and to atone for iniquity, to bring in everlasting righteousness, to seal both vision and prophet, and to anoint a most holy place.” (9:1–3, 20–24) That sounds like a devastatingly depressing answer, and in a way it is. That’s a long time to wait. But the idea of “seventy times seven” has a particular ring to it, more obvious to an ancient Jew than to us today. Every seven days, they had a sabbath. Every seven years, they had a sabbatical year. And every seven-times-seven years, they had—or at least they were supposed to have had, according to Leviticus—a jubilee.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  I’d owned enough New Age tchotchkes in my lifetime to know that within a few days of purchase they just seemed like more crap. But as you were shopping, sifting through the stones and their meanings, there was hope that this was a turning point. It was the velocity of buying something that was the high, the potentiality of it. I could capitalist-believe in magic. In the store was hope, and hope was what separated me from the flat expanse of the rest of my life. It was like a line, a gateway that stopped me from being swallowed. I looked at the fliers for all of the different healers. Some did numerology, others Tarot, others Reiki and chakra cleansing. I could have sat there all day and had my fortune told until someone predicted what I wanted to hear—that I was getting back together with Jamie, that he was coming back to me—so I quickly pulled away. I looked at the crystals. I would have loved to buy rose quartz, giant hunks of it, hundreds and hundreds of dollars’ worth. I wanted to make a circle around me; do some ritual shit with rose petals; burn vanilla, gardenia, and strawberry incense to attract love. Instead I bought a sparkly raw chunk of amethyst in the palest purple, which was said to bring peace and stability. There was also a table where magic candles were sold: red for love and passion, green for money. I bypassed the love candle and selected an egg-colored one for clearing and needed change. Maybe I could just burn the past year away. —At home I ate pad thai and drank white wine, fed Dominic, and gave him his medicine. I’d known nothing about dogs before him—how or where to pet them—but he was patient with me, and I’d soon discovered his favorite places to be touched. His entire head was brown with the exception of two white patches: one a white stripe down the center of his forehead, which I stroked gently with one finger and called his angel mark, and the other a diamond shape on the back of his neck, an arrow pointing as if to say, Scratch me here. This was the area that he could not reach with his paws, and, when scratched, would lull him right to sleep. We would play a game where he gazed at me lovingly, trying to keep his brown eyes open, his lids growing heavy, then popping open, then heavier and heavier until they were sealed shut: just two stitches lined with little lashes. When he rolled over onto his back and showed me his white underside, it meant that it was time for a belly rub. Sometimes I would get crazy like I was waxing a car, Dominic pawing joyfully at the air, fur flying, tongue out, and panting. Other times I would gently stroke and kiss the softness there, relishing his scent, which was somehow reminiscent of a warm roast chicken.

• From Available: The unfiltered and empowering new memoir for women about sex, dating and divorce after 40 (2021)

  I look tanned, happy, relaxed, like I’m always up for a big laugh and a good time. My curly hair, a bit wild, indicates that I’m not buttoned-up or afraid to look like the most natural version of myself. My strapless clothing shows that I’m comfortable with my body. Those things are true about me, I’m not purporting to be someone I’m not. This may be a superficial and one-sided presentation of myself, but it’s not false advertising. I’m showing my teeth – white enough and straight enough; I’m showing my body – petite, strong and healthy; I’m showing my nails – manicured and brightly colored. In other words, there shouldn’t be any surprises when a man meets me in person, nothing that I’m squirreling away and hoping he won’t notice when I’m alive in front of him. And if Michael does see my profile then it means he’s on Tinder too. I do the thing that I’ve been doing over and over again for the past few months: I take a leap of faith. I click the button to make my profile public for anyone on Tinder to see. A few hours later, lying in bed with Georgia pressing her warm feet against me as she sleeps, I stare at my phone and wonder how I survived the monotony of my life pre-Tinder. Tinder contains a vast sea of men, so many of them with such odd profile pictures that when I find the occasional one that doesn’t reek of inappropriateness, I click the heart button just to show solidarity, like hey, my normal sees your normal and thinks we might be able to make some normal magic together. It doesn’t matter if I find the person attractive, I just care that he seems like a person I could know in my current life. If it looks like a mug shot, swipe left – if you can’t smile for this one picture, I worry. Sitting in your car with your seatbelt on, swipe left – come on, live a little! There have to be more creative backdrops for a selfie. Lying in bed shirtless, swipe left, don’t be so obvious. Oh, even better, take a pic of yourself in front of a mirror with nothing but briefs on, swipe, swipe, swipe! All of your photos are ones in which you’re posing with other women, swipe left – that raises suspicion, are you hinting at an open marriage? You’re posing with your kids, swipe left – don’t drag your kids into this sordid place. You’re posing with your dog in every photo, swipe left – I’ve been down this road, I see your dog for the jealous lover she really is. You never part your lips when you smile, swipe left, what are you hiding?

• From How God Became King (2012)

  Third, the kingdom that Jesus inaugurated, that is implemented through his cross, is emphatically for this world. The four gospels together demand a complete reappraisal of the various avoidance tactics Western Christianity has employed rather than face this challenge head-on. It simply won’t do to line up the options, as has normally been done, into either a form of “Christendom,” by which people normally mean the capitulation of the gospel to the world’s way of power, or a form of sectarian withdrawal. Life is more complex, more interesting, and more challenging than that. The gospels are there, waiting to inform a new generation for holistic mission, to embody, explain, and advocate new ways of ordering communities, nations, and the world. The church belongs at the very heart of the world, to be the place of prayer and holiness at the point where the world is in pain—not to be a somewhat “religious” version of the world, on the one hand, or a detached, heavenly minded enclave, on the other. It is a measure of our contemporary muddles that we find it very difficult to articulate, let alone to live out, a vision of church, kingdom, and world that is neither of these. What happens if we ask the question the other way around? What, in other words, do we learn about the cross when we discover that the gospels present it as the means by which God (in Jesus) becomes king of the world? Again, I see three immediate answers to this challenging question. First, the way we have normally listed options in atonement theology simply won’t do. Our questions have been wrongly put, because they haven’t been about the kingdom. They haven’t been about God’s sovereign, saving rule coming on earth as in heaven. Instead, our questions have been about a “salvation” that rescues people from the world, instead of for the world. “Going to heaven” has been the object (ever since the Middle Ages at least, in the Western church); “sin” is what stops us from getting there; so the cross must deal with sin, so that we can leave this world and go to the much better one in the sky, or in “eternity,” or wherever. But this is simply untrue to the story the gospels are telling—which, again, explains why we’ve all misread these wonderful texts. Whatever the cross achieves must be articulated, if we are to take the four gospels seriously, within the context of the kingdom-bringing victory. This is the ultimate redefinition-in-action of the messianic task, the kingdom-bringing messianic vocation. In all four gospels, not only in John, the cross is the victory that overcomes the world. I am wary of describing this simply as a “Christus Victor” interpretation, because historically that has been associated with other kinds of development and has often been set over against other atonement theologies. But the idea of messianic victory as a fresh interpretation of an ancient Jewish theme is precisely what the four gospels have in mind.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  First, it is obvious that without the resurrection of Jesus the evangelists would never have had a story to tell. Thousands of young Jews were crucified by the Romans. Very few of them are even mentioned in our historical sources, except as a grisly footnote. Even those who think the evangelists were in fact very clever inventors of large-scale fictions designed to revive a Jesus movement that might not otherwise have survived the death (and continuing deadness, so to speak) of its founder are bound to admit that even within these cleverly designed myths the resurrection plays the vital role in opening the question up again, so that what looked like defeat, like yet another failure of a kingdom dream, was in fact a victory. The resurrection, in short, is presented by the evangelists not as a “happy ending” after an increasingly sad and gloomy tale, but as the event that demonstrated that Jesus’s execution really had dealt the deathblow to the dark forces that had stood in the way of God’s new world, God’s “kingdom” of powerful creative and restorative love, arriving “on earth as in heaven.” That is why the bodily resurrection matters in a way that it never quite does, even to the devout who insist that they believe it, if all one is interested in is a kingdom “not of this world.” The resurrection is, from Mark’s point of view, the moment when God’s kingdom “comes in power.” From John’s point of view, it is the launching of the new creation, the new Genesis. From Matthew’s point of view, it brings Jesus into the position for which he was always destined, that of the world’s rightful Lord, sending out his followers (as a new Roman emperor might send out his emissaries, but with methods that match the message) to call the world to follow him and learn his way of being human. From Luke’s point of view, the resurrection is the moment when Israel’s Messiah “comes into his glory,” so that “repentance for the forgiveness of sins” can now be announced to all the world as the way of life, indeed, as they say in Acts, as The Way. Once we put kingdom and cross together in the manner we have, it is not difficult to see how the resurrection fits closely with that great combined reality. It is the resurrection that declares that the cross was a victory, not a defeat. It therefore announces that God has indeed become king on earth as in heaven.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  Having said all that, it is vital that we do not therefore miss the point that, in addition to referring back to Jesus himself, the gospels were telling his story in such a way as to say that this was indeed the moment when “our movement,” the early Christian “Way,” as it was sometimes called, was launched. Like Americans retelling the story of the brave pioneers who crossed the ocean and settled in a difficult and dangerous land, and doing so not merely for the sake of a good tale but in order to reinforce the sense of modern America as a country with a particular kind of risky, can-do attitude toward life, so the gospel writers told the story of Jesus in order to undergird and reinforce the Christian determination to follow him, to go on following him, to live as he lived and, if necessary, to die as he died, believing that God’s kingdom, established through his work, was becoming a reality in more and more of the world through their own lives, work, and costly witness. Once we adjust the volume on this speaker so that we can lose the distortion introduced by radical skepticism, on the one hand, and radical Lutheranism, on the other, we should be able to hear the more nuanced and distinctive notes of the early Christians celebrating the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus as the moment when, and the means by which, their own work took its flying instructions and got off the ground. The gospel writers were not, then, simply telling the story of Jesus in some “neutral,” “objective,” fly-on-the-wall kind of reportage. Actually, as I and others have often pointed out, there is no such thing as “neutral” reportage. All stories are told from a point of view; without that, you have no principle of selection and are left with an unsorted ragbag of information. No, the gospel writers were telling the story of Jesus, quite deliberately, in such a way as to put down markers for the life and witness of their own communities. The thing to bear in mind, though, as we adjust the volume on this third speaker, is this: just because the gospel writers were consciously telling the story of Jesus as the foundation story of the church, that doesn’t mean they weren’t telling the story of Jesus himself. Just because the sports reporter is a thoroughly biased supporter of one team rather than the other, that doesn’t mean he is allowed to get the score wrong.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  See, feminists have made it okay for girls to explore what used to be an exclusively boy world. But true equality won’t come until boys learn to embrace girl stuff as well. So here’s the deal: If you want your boyfriend to treat you with respect, then tell him that you won’t sleep with him until he starts putting barrettes in his hair. And I’m not talking about secret bedroom kinky shit. Make him wear them to work! The next time he buys a pair of shoes, make sure they’re Mary Janes (and don’t forget the white lacy anklets to go with them). Because as soon as he realizes the pure bliss of wearing a frilly, pink, poofy party dress, maybe he’ll finally relax a bit and loosen up that uptight male swagger. And maybe once he lets his guard down, he’ll look around and realize that the world doesn’t revolve around him. You may think this is funny, but it’s no joke. “Girl stuff” is dangerous, so let’s use it to our advantage. We truly can change the world! Because if construction workers were man enough to wear skirts and heels, they wouldn’t whistle at women who walk by. And if misogynistic rockers and rappers were man enough to cry while watching tearjerkers, they wouldn’t need to masturbate all over the mic. And if presidents and generals were man enough to wear lip gloss and mascara, they wouldn’t have to prove their penis size by going to war all the time. Because male pride is not really about pride. It’s about fear—the fear of being seen as feminine. And that’s why “girl stuff” is so dangerous. And as long as most men remain deathly afraid of it, they’ll continue to take it out on the rest of us. 19 Putting the Feminine Back into Feminism I REMEMBER BACK IN COLLEGE—when I was admittedly rather naive with regard to gender politics—someone asked a friend of mine whether she considered herself a feminist. I was surprised to hear her answer “No.” After all, she certainly seemed like a feminist to me. She was independent, intelligent, career-minded, pro-women’s reproductive rights. She regularly stood up for herself and was keenly aware of the disparity between how certain professors treated her and how they treated her male counterparts. When she was asked why she didn’t identify as a feminist, her reply was, “I like being a girl.” She went on to explain that she enjoyed, and even felt empowered by, being feminine.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  If you belong to Jesus the Messiah, if his Spirit dwells in you, if you are a worshipper of the one true God, maker of heaven and earth—then however you may feel at the moment, whether you are sick or healthy, handsome or jaded, you are simply a shadow of your future self. God intends to transform the “you” you are at the moment into a being—a full, glorious, physical being —who will be much more truly “you” than you’ve ever been before. Sin, by distorting and downgrading our specific God-given capacities and vocations, makes us more and more alike in our degradation. Jesus makes us more and more alive in our uniqueness, and the resurrection will complete that in a great act of new creation. Thomas à Kempis put it like this in his great hymn “Light’s Abode, Celestial Salem” (translated here by J. M. Neale): O how glorious and resplendent, Fragile body, shalt thou be; When endued with so much beauty, Full of health, and strong, and free; Full of vigor, full of pleasure That shall last eternally. And Jesus will do this, declares Paul (Phil. 3:20–21), by the power that enables him to submit everything to himself. Our resurrection, in other words, like the whole new creation, will come about because Jesus is king and Lord. Once you get the kingdom back in its place, everything else—Trinity, incarnation, atonement, resurrection itself—all gain in meaning. They stop trying to do jobs they were not supposed to do and can play the parts they were originally given. Conclusion: How to Read the Gospels My case throughout this book, then, is that we have all misunderstood the gospels. We have either followed the apparent implication of the great creeds and allowed ourselves to tell a pseudo-Christian story from which the story of Israel, on the one hand, and the story of God’s kingdom, on the other, have been quietly removed. Or we have formulated a concept of the kingdom that did in fact grasp God’s passion to put the world to rights, but we were then unable to integrate that with the incarnation and death of God’s own son. And to correct this misunderstanding it is not enough, not nearly enough, to affirm airily that we believe in the “canon” (many say that who, alas, continue to assume that the canon merely supports the “orthodoxy” they already know), still less that we are supporting something called “Nicene Christianity” and determining to read the Bible in that light.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Yet now even really nice women with hairpins often found their less orthodox sisters quite useful. It would be: ‘Miss Smith, do just start up my motor—the engine’s so cold I can’t get the thing going;’ or: ‘Miss Oliphant, do glance through these accounts, I’ve got such a rotten bad head for figures;’ or: ‘Miss Tring, may I borrow your British Warm? The office is simply arctic this morning!’ Not that those purely feminine women were less worthy of praise, perhaps they were more so, giving as they did of their best without stint—for they had no stigma to live down in the war, no need to defend their right to respect. They rallied to the call of their country superbly, and may it not be forgotten by England. But the others—since they too gave of their best, may they also not be forgotten. They might look a bit odd, indeed some of them did, and yet in the streets they were seldom stared at, though they strode a little, perhaps from shyness, or perhaps from a slightly self-conscious desire to show off, which is often the same thing as shyness. They were part of the universal convulsion and were being accepted as such, on their merits. And although their Sam Browne belts remained swordless, their hats and their caps without regimental badges, a battalion was formed in those terrible years that would never again be completely disbanded. War and death had given them a right to life, and life tasted sweet, very sweet to their palates. Later on would come bitterness, disillusion, but never again would such women submit to being driven back to their holes and corners. They had found themselves—thus the whirligig of war brings in its abrupt revenges. 5Time passed; the first year of hostilities became the second while Stephen still hoped, though no nearer to her ambition. Try as she might she could not get to the front; no work at the actual front seemed to be forthcoming for women. Brockett wrote wonderfully cheerful letters. In every letter was a neat little list telling Stephen what he wished her to send him; but the sweets he loved were getting quite scarce, they were no longer always so easy to come by. And now he was asking for Houbigant soap to be included in his tuck-box. ‘Don’t let it get near the coffee fondants or it may make them taste like it smells,’ he cautioned, ‘and do try to send me two bottles of hair-wash, “Eau Athénienne,” I used to buy it at Truefitt’s.’ He was on a perfectly damnable front, they had sent him to Mesopotamia.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  All these flashbacks are important. They would have been much more readily apparent to Jesus’s first followers and to Matthew’s first readers than they are to us in the de-Judaized state of our secularized imagination. But far more important than flashbacks, than the picking up of detached themes and hints from long ago, is the towering sense of a single story now at last reaching its conclusion. For much of that time, as we said a moment ago, the story looked as if it was lost, many a mile from its destination, with night falling and enemies closing in. Suddenly, out of the blue, we discover that something is happening that will turn all that around. It isn’t (we need to be very clear at this point) that things have not been as bad as we’d thought. In fact, they’ve been worse. But the new event that is now happening is precisely an event we might call rescue. A fresh initiative. It hasn’t come from within the story as it was—though, strangely, those with eyes to see will recognize that it is where the story ought to have gone all along. That’s part of the complex task the gospel writers are accomplishing: describing something as both the fulfillment of the vocation of Israel and divine judgment on the mess and the muddle that Israel’s story had become. Matthew, then, is telling his story in such a way as to say: “This is it! This is what we’ve been waiting for—even though we would never have thought it would be like this! This is where the single story of Abraham’s family, of David’s offspring, of the restoration from exile was going all along. We didn’t think it would look like this. But now that it’s happened, we can see that this is where it was supposed to be heading all along.” It didn’t just emerge from the story the way it was. The story was indeed stalled, stagnant, running out of hope. It required a fresh act of divine mercy to do what was needed. As later preachers would say about individual sinners, the only thing that Israel contributed to the story of Jesus that Matthew is telling was the particular set of muddle and rebellion from which God was now coming to free it.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  As later preachers would say about individual sinners, the only thing that Israel contributed to the story of Jesus that Matthew is telling was the particular set of muddle and rebellion from which God was now coming to free it. I hope it is clear from this that, when we turn up this first speaker, the music is telling us much more than simply that all four gospels refer to the Old Testament and present Jesus as the fulfillment of prophecy. To say that sort of thing is to have the speaker turned up just far enough so that you can tell something is going on, but not far enough to be able to understand what it is. This is a point of fundamental importance for the whole New Testament and indeed the whole early Christian movement. The gospel writers saw the events concerning Jesus, particularly his kingdom-inaugurating life, death, and resurrection, not just as isolated events to which remote prophets might have distantly pointed. They saw those events as bringing the long story of Israel to its proper goal, even though that long story had apparently become lost, stuck, and all but forgotten. But, you may say, what’s the point of telling the story of Jesus as the climax of the story of Israel? What relevance has that got to the rest of the human race and to the wider world? Here we touch on another point of foundational importance for the whole of early Christian thought and life. Understand this point, and you will understand almost everything. In Israel’s scriptures, the reason Israel’s story matters is that the creator of the world has chosen and called Israel to be the people through whom he will redeem the world. The call of Abraham is the answer to the sin of Adam. * Israel’s story is thus the microcosm and beating heart of the world’s story, but also its ultimate saving energy. What God does for Israel is what God is doing in relation to the whole world. That is what it meant to be Israel, to be the people who, for better and worse, carried the destiny of the world on their shoulders. Grasp that, and you have a pathway into the heart of the New Testament. Mark: Jesus and the Breaking In of God’s New World The evangelists, each in his own way, tell the story of Jesus as the proper climax to Israel’s story. This is clear right from the start. We have already glanced at Matthew. Mark indicates that the arrival and baptism of Jesus are the moments at which the prophecies of Isaiah and Malachi of the ultimate redemption, of God’s returning to rescue his people, were at last coming true: Isaiah the prophet put it like this (“Look! I am sending my messenger ahead of me; he will clear the way for you!”): “A shout goes up in the desert: Make way for the Lord!