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 Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  This is where the vocation of prophecy comes in alongside that of the royal priesthood. Another word about this may help. Power, after all, is frequently held and wielded not by elected officials and politicians, but by well-positioned lobbying groups, on the one hand, and the media, on the other. They will say in their defense that their mandate—sometimes given theoretical justification, more often just quietly assumed—is to hold the elected officials to account (the media) and to remind them of the real needs and interests of their constituents (the lobbyists). There is no doubt a grain of truth in that, but it is almost completely hidden under a ton of unscrutinized agendas. Official oppositions sometimes provide genuine critique, but often they don’t. Journalists sometimes do, but often simply reflect their own equally distorted agendas. We should not assume that our systems are automatically the best we could possibly have. This is where those who believe in the victory of the cross have something to say—quite literally. As Christians, our role in society is not to wring our hands at the corruption of power or simply to pick a candidate that supports one or another supposedly Christian policy. The Christian role, as part of naming the name of the crucified and risen Jesus on territory presently occupied by idols, is to speak the truth to power and especially to speak up for those with no power at all. I have seen this again and again, mostly in cases that never made the newspapers but significantly transformed actual communities. I saw it when friends working in the prison system, some of them as chaplains, were able to go to the prison governors and point out ways in which the system was failing to protect many highly vulnerable young people in their care. I saw it when a small group managed to protest successfully on behalf of a man who had fled for his life from another country at a time when the government was keen to boost its statistics for keeping such people out. I saw it when young people from a church went to a back street in a poor neighborhood where drug dealers and others had been openly plying their trade. The young people swept the street, repainted the backs of the houses, and planted flowers all the way along, which encouraged the residents to take control of their own environment instead of handing it over to bullies.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  Not surprisingly, these are the very qualities Peter Levine considers essential in those called to do therapeutic work with traumatized human beings. As he says, the therapist must “help to create an environment of relative safety, an atmosphere that conveys refuge, hope and possibility.” But pure empathy and a warm therapeutic relationship are not enough, for traumatized people are often unable to read or fully receive compassion. They are too suppressed, too stuck in primal defenses more appropriate to our amphibian or reptilian evolutionary predecessors. So what is the therapist to do with human beings hurt and beaten down by past trauma? It is to help people listen to the unspoken voice of their own bodies and to enable them to feel their “survival emotions” of rage and terror without being overwhelmed by these powerful states. Trauma, as Peter brilliantly recognized decades ago, does not reside in the external event that induces physical or emotional pain—nor even in the pain itself—but in our becoming stuck in our primitive responses to painful events. Trauma is caused when we are unable to release blocked energies, to fully move through the physical/emotional reactions to hurtful experience. Trauma is not what happens to us, but what we hold inside in the absence of an empathetic witness. The salvation, then, is to be found in the body. “Most people,” Levine notes, “think of trauma as a ‘mental’ problem, even as a ‘brain disorder.’ However, trauma is something that also happens in the body.” In fact, he shows, it happens first and foremost in the body. The mental states associated with trauma are important, but they are secondary. The body initiates, he says, and the mind follows. Hence, “talking cures” that engage the intellect or even the emotions do not reach deep enough. The therapist/healer needs to be able to recognize the psychoemotional and physical signs of “frozen” trauma in the client. He or she must learn to hear the “unspoken voice” of the body so that clients can safely learn to hear and see themselves. This book is a master class in how to listen to the unspoken voice of the body. “In the particular methodology I describe,” Levine writes, “the client is helped to develop an awareness and mastery of his or her physical sensations and feelings.” The key to healing, he argues, is to be found in the “deciphering of this nonverbal realm.” He finds the code in his synthesis of the seemingly—but only seemingly—disparate sciences that study evolution, animal instinct, mammalian physiology and the human brain, and in his hard-won experience as a therapist.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  I therefore regard it as a fixed point in understanding Jesus’s death that Jesus himself understood what was about to happen to him in connection with Israel’s ancient Passover tradition and that this was linked directly to his beliefs about the launch of God’s kingdom. The royal power of God had already been displayed, close up and dramatically, in his public career. But Jesus believed that through his death this royal power would win the decisive victory through which not just Israel but also the whole world would be liberated: ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven. The Passover and Exodus themes cluster together in an almost bewildering and overdetermined fashion: the fulfillment of ancient promises, the liberation from slavery, the crossing of the Red Sea, the coming of God himself in the pillar of cloud and fire, the promise of inheritance. All these, in parables, healings, promises, and warnings, formed part of Jesus’s public proclamation and private teaching. Now they gathered to a greatness. Up to this point, it might appear that the theological significance with which Jesus was investing his death was simply about a great, freedom- bringing victory. That, indeed, is the overarching significance of the evidence, all the way from his initial kingdom announcement after his baptism through to his dark words about the imminent kingdom at the final meal. But how would this victory be won? What had to happen for the dark powers to be defeated? Here we come a step closer to the heart not only of Jesus’s own vocational vision, but of the whole New Testament picture of what actually happened, theologically speaking, on the first Good Friday. I have stressed that Jesus chose Passover as the moment for his final dramatic symbolic actions —including the death he believed he would suffer. He did not choose one of the other festivals. In particular, he did not choose the great and somber Day of Atonement. However, as we saw in Part Two, by the time of Jesus the long story of Israel had reached a point where two things ran together, at least potentially. The victory over the powers would be won by Jesus dealing with the people’s sins. Recall how the narrative now worked. Israel had been in “continuing exile,” according to Daniel 9 and many later texts, ever since the Babylonian destruction. Renewal, reform, and even revolution had taken place, but the plight was still a reality, visibly underlined at Passover time in Jerusalem by the presence of Roman soldiers and the Roman governor himself, up from his normal residence in the port city of Caesarea to keep a personal eye on things during the notoriously dangerous freedom festival. But the analysis of that extended plight was that Israel was still “in its sins.”

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  Let me explain. We know that the entire creation is groaning together, and going through labor pains together, up until the present time. Not only so: we too, we who have the first fruits of the spirit’s life within us, are groaning within ourselves, as we eagerly await our adoption, the redemption of our body. We were saved, you see, in hope. But hope isn’t hope if you can see it! Who hopes for what they can see? But if we hope for what we don’t see, we wait for it eagerly—but also patiently. (8:17–25) This rich, vivid portrayal of the present time—with creation groaning in expectation like a pregnant woman about to give birth, and with the Messiah’s people groaning within themselves as they long for their new resurrection bodies—is perhaps the finest description in the New Testament not only of what it means to share the Messiah’s sufferings, but also of why that is necessary. When Paul speaks of the Messiah being glorified and of his rule over the whole creation, he has several psalms in mind, notably Psalm 2, which speaks of the Messiah’s worldwide rule, and Psalm 8, which speaks of the “glory and honor” proper to human beings who are called to exercise delegated authority over God’s world. What we have here, as a result, is a dynamic fusion of messianic hope and human vocation, reshaped around the suffering of Jesus and refocused on the suffering of his followers. Paul has thus filled out the “inner dynamic” described in chapter 5 with a vision of the wider purpose of this suffering. This is how it works. The Messiah suffered and won the victory over the powers of evil. The church, the Messiah’s people, must suffer in the present, because they share the Messiah’s life, his raised-from-the-dead life, and this is the way to implement the Messiah’s victory. This is part of what it means to share in his “glory,” his splendid rule over the world, which at present is exercised through the Spirit-led work and suffering of his people. And through their prayer. Paul joins all these themes together in a unique passage, Romans 8:26–27, that brings the inner personal dynamic of suffering together with the larger world-redeeming purpose. This time he is alluding to Psalm 44, which speaks of God searching the hearts of his people (v. 21) and whose next verse, which Paul quotes a little later, refers to God’s people “being like sheep destined for slaughter.” The world-changing task of God’s people in the present, rooted in the Messiah’s victorious suffering, has its ultimate depth in prayer, particularly the prayer that comes from the indescribable depths of a sorrow-laden heart:

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  Luke is most emphatic, in his gospel and then over and over again in Acts, that the ultimate destination of God’s people is the resurrection. But “paradise,” the interim state, the blissful garden of refreshment prior to that final destination, will be won that very day for all who trust in Jesus, because through his death, the innocent dying the death of the guilty, the sovereign rule of God will come to birth in a whole new way, with results as personal and intimate as they are cosmic and global: “I’m telling you the truth,” replied Jesus, “you’ll be with me in paradise, this very day.” (23:42–43) This sequence of thought comes to its conclusion when the centurion at the foot of the cross, watching Jesus die, insists like the others that Jesus was innocent, was “in the right” (23:47). Against those who have insisted that Luke has no theological interpretation of the cross—because he does not include a “formulaic” or “dogmatic” statement like Mark 10:45!—we must insist that for Luke the cross does two things in particular. First, it is the means by which the powers of darkness (note again 22:53) are defeated, so that God’s kingdom, his newly minted sovereign rule over the world, can at last begin. Second, this is accomplished because the innocent Jesus is dying the death of the guilty. In fact, though Luke does not have the “ransom” saying, he does include, on the lips of Jesus, a clear reference to Isaiah 53: Let me tell you this: when the Bible says, “He was reckoned with the lawless,” it must find its fulfillment in me. Yes: everything about me must reach its goal. (22:37, quoting Isa. 53:12) In the light of this, one can only wonder at the real agendas behind the attempts to deny Luke a theological understanding of the crucifixion. The idea that Jesus was identifying with his fellow Jews as they faced imminent judgment is in fact inscribed into the larger narrative of Luke’s gospel as a whole. Particularly from chapter 9 on, Jesus is constantly warning his people of the great disaster that is hanging over their heads. His message about God’s kingdom is offering a different way, but their determination to resist the way of peace that he is advocating will lead to nothing but ruin. Yes, he says, Pilate had instigated a massacre of Galilean pilgrims in the Temple, but that event was not unique: “Unless you repent, you will all be destroyed in the same way.” Eighteen people had indeed been killed when the tower in Siloam collapsed: “Unless you repent, you will all be destroyed in the same way” (13:1–5). In the same way.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  Or, to put it in the language of the biblical narrative to which Paul will appeal frequently in Galatians, the new Passover (liberation from the enslaving powers) is accomplished through the rescue from exile (“for our sins”), and all has taken place in fulfillment of the age-old divine purpose (“according to the will of God”). We will return to Galatians presently. Before we do so, it is worth noting in the same connection the repeated references to the death of Jesus in the opening passages of 1 Corinthians. Nowhere here does Paul explain why or how the cross of the Messiah has the power it does, but he seems able to assume that and to incorporate this assumption into a rhetorically powerful appeal: The word of the cross, you see, is madness to people who are being destroyed. But to us—those who are being saved—it is God’s power. . . . Jews look for signs, you see, and Greeks search for wisdom; but we announce the crucified Messiah, a scandal to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, Jews and Greeks alike, the Messiah—God’s power and God’s wisdom. God’s folly is wiser than humans, you see, and God’s weakness is stronger than humans. (1:18, 22–25) This then undergirds the otherwise curious and almost inexplicable reference, in the next chapter, to the assumed victory of the cross over the powers of the world: We do, however, speak wisdom among the mature. But this isn’t a wisdom of this present world, or of the rulers of this present world— those same rulers who are being done away with. No: we speak God’s hidden wisdom in a mystery. This is the wisdom God prepared ahead of time, before the world began, for our glory. None of the rulers of this present age knew about this wisdom. If they had, you see, they wouldn’t have crucified the Lord of glory. (2:6–8) Paul’s implication here, though he does not explain it, is that the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth somehow overthrew the power of the “rulers,” echoing perhaps the second stage of Galatians 1:4 (“to rescue us from the present evil age”) and certainly anticipating the dense statement of Colossians 2:15 (“God . . . stripped the rulers and authorities of their armor, and displayed them contemptuously to public view, celebrating his triumph over them in [Jesus]”). The main point to note from these brief references is that Paul can assume that all those to whom he writes are familiar with the very early traditions in which such ideas have crystallized and that presumably he or his colleagues have explained to the early converts, at least to some extent. In particular, we must assume that for Paul it was certainly not a matter of ransacking his biblically stocked memory or his culturally aware mind for miscellaneous images, metaphors, and models to which he could refer more or less at random.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  I didn’t come to Utah to be the same boy I’d been before. I had my own dreams of transformation, Western dreams, dreams of freedom and dominion and taciturn self-sufficiency. The first thing I wanted to do was change my name. A girl named Toby had joined my class before I left Florida, and this had caused both of us scalding humiliation. I wanted to call myself Jack, after Jack London. I believed that having his name would charge me with some of the strength and competence inherent in my idea of him. The odds were good that I’d never have to share a classroom with a girl named Jack. And I liked the sound. Jack. Jack Wolff. My mother didn’t like it at all, neither the idea of changing my name nor the name itself. I did not drop the subject. She finally agreed, but only on condition that I attend catechism classes. Once I was ready to be received into the Church she would allow me to take Jonathan as my baptismal name and shorten it to Jack. In the meantime I could introduce myself as Jack when I started school that fall. My father got wind of this and called from Connecticut to demand that I stick to the name he had given me. It was, he said, an old family name. This turned out to be untrue. It just sounded like an old family name, as the furniture he bought at antique stores looked like old family furniture, and as the coat of arms he’d designed for himself looked like the shield of some fierce baron who’d spent his life wallowing in Saracen gore, charging from battle to battle down muddy roads lined with groveling peasants and churls. He was also unhappy about my becoming a Catholic. “My family,” he told me, “has always been Protestant. Episcopalian, actually.” Actually, his family had always been Jews, but I had to wait another ten years before learning this. In the extremity of his displeasure my father even put my older brother on the phone. I was surly, and Geoffrey didn’t really care what I called myself, and there it ended. My mother was pleased by my father’s show of irritation and stuck up for me. A new name began to seem like a good idea to her. After all, he was in Connecticut and we were in Utah. Though my father was rolling in money at the

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  It is of course difficult to get inside anybody’s sense of vocation. Human hearts and their imaginative capacities are deep and mysterious. But when a person makes a habit of saying certain things and then at an ideal and opportune moment takes decisive action that, though dangerous, makes exactly the point to which he or she had been referring, we are on reasonably safe ground. And at the heart of what we securely know about Jesus’s death is the time of year at which it took place. It happened at Passover time, and it seems clear that this was deliberate on Jesus’s part. He chose, for his final and fateful symbolic confrontation with Jerusalem and its authorities, the moment when all his fellow Jews were busy celebrating the Exodus from Egypt and praying that God would do again, only on a grander scale, what he had done all those years ago. It makes sense. To announce God’s kingdom is to announce that God is at last overthrowing the dark powers that enslave his people. To announce God’s kingdom is to say that this is the time for God to reconstitute his people, rescuing them and regrouping them for new life and new tasks. To announce God’s kingdom is to say that, as in Isaiah 52:7–12, God himself is coming back to display his Glory in person and in power. Each of these three themes can be shown to be characteristic of Jesus’s public teaching and activity, his healings (particularly the exorcisms), his celebrations with outcasts and “sinners,” his call of the Twelve (as an obvious sign of reconstituting the people Israel around himself), and his telling of stories that seemed to have an obvious reference to what God was doing as a way of explaining what he himself was doing. To be sure, a lot of this was oblique, and necessarily so. We must not try to shortcircuit the historical investigation, pass by the Jewish context and the messianic overtones, and jump straight into a picture of Jesus “claiming to be God.” Many theologians and preachers have tried that; it leaves vital questions unasked, let alone unanswered, and it all too easily collapses into a different narrative altogether. When, however, we put the bits of the puzzle back together, the overtones of Isaiah 52 are clear at numerous points, especially when Jesus himself is making his final journey to Jerusalem and telling stories about the master who comes back—an obvious allusion to the much-anticipated return of Israel’s God after the long years of exile. In any case, what matters for our purposes is that Jesus chose Passover to do what had to be done and indeed to suffer what had to be suffered.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  Second, then, there is the hope for the worldwide rule of this God. Out of worship and prayer there grows witness; and the “witness” is not simply about people saying, “I’ve had this experience; perhaps you might like it too,” but about people announcing that a new state of affairs has come into being. This too begins from the day of Pentecost, as we have seen, when the disciples announced to the startled crowds that the ancient prophecies had been fulfilled, that “forgiveness of sins” had happened as an event in real space and time, and that the whole world was now called to order in the name of its creator and restorer. To announce Jesus as Israel’s Messiah is to say that this is now happening and “forgiveness of sins” is the key to it all. This witness continues through the many different scenes of gospel announcement: Philip to the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8, Peter to Cornelius in Acts 10, and so on. It reaches a first decisive climax in chapter 12, when Herod Agrippa I begins a serious attack on the church but is forestalled, first by Peter’s angelic release from prison and then by his own sudden death. Luke’s comment makes the position clear: Herod died, “but God’s word grew and multiplied” (Acts 12:24). Here is the vital note of kingdom: the kingdoms of the world turn out to be, in ultimate terms, powerless against the kingdom of God. They can persecute and kill Jesus’s followers, but this—as other New Testament writers were quick to emphasize, following Jesus himself—only strengthened the kingdom of God, since that kingdom was accomplished precisely through Jesus’s death and then implemented through the suffering of his followers. Thus, throughout Paul’s career, we find him living boldly in the faith that Jesus is Lord and that the local and international rulers and magistrates are ultimately under his command. This, indeed, is part of the foundation of Paul’s mission to the Gentiles: the “powers” that had ruled the pagan world had been overthrown, defeated on the cross, as he hints in 1 Corinthians 2:8 and states clearly in Colossians 2:13–15, so now people who had formerly been enslaved could be summoned to allegiance to the new, liberating rule of Israel’s Messiah. That did not prevent Paul from being beaten, driven out of town, imprisoned, or even stoned. That isn’t how the kingdom works, as Jesus himself repeatedly warned (or promised!). The last great narrative sequence in Acts, Paul’s trials, his journey to Rome and the shipwreck, and his final arrival, is told in such a way as to highlight the paradoxical nature of the kingdom: the powers of the world, whether they are corrupt magistrates, casually brutal soldiers, incompetent sailors, storms at sea, or even deadly serpents, cannot prevent Paul from arriving in Rome and, though under house arrest, announcing the kingdom of God and teaching about Jesus as Lord “with all boldness, and with no one stopping him” (28:31).

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  Readers in the second century BC would have had no difficulty identifying the latter events with the time when the Syrians had desecrated the Temple in 167 BC. Readers in the first century AD, including the early Christians, would naturally see Rome rather than Syria as the invading empire. And all this has to do with the coming multifaceted reality of the end of exile, the forgiveness of sins, the renewal of the covenant, the victory over the pagan power, the unveiling of the divine Glory, and now especially the putting into effect of the divine kingship. The kingship or “kingdom” of God was, of course, a major theme of Jesus’s own public proclamation. He related it directly to his own work. Both he and those who later told his story linked it directly and dynamically to his own death. This alone would justify paying close attention to the theme of God’s kingdom in a book on the meaning of the cross, and we shall return to this in the next part of the book. But it is also important to notice that the idea of God being king played a large part in the revolutionary movements of the first century, movements already active around the time of Jesus’s birth and even more so in the years leading up to the Roman-Jewish war of the late 60s. The idea of Jesus himself as the king, the king who attained his ultimate royal status through being killed, belongs exactly on the map of first-century resistance movements, drawing as they did on scriptural themes, and particularly on Daniel, for a revolutionary theology in which Israel’s God was to “finish transgression, put an end to sin, atone for iniquity,” and thereby to win the ultimate victory over the powers of evil. If we are searching for the historical context in which the early Christians were to say that the Messiah “died for our sins in accordance with the Bible,” this would be no bad place to start. To develop this further would demand that we examine the two other themes mentioned a moment ago: the relation of Israel’s suffering to the coming kingdom and the revelation of divine love, covenant faithfulness, underneath the entire picture. For this we need a new chapter. 7 Suffering, Redemption, and Love

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  This is etched into the New Testament at point after point. We return once again to Acts, this time to chapter 12. The fact that the victory had already been won when Jesus died did not mean that Herod wouldn’t kill James, but it did mean that Peter was then wonderfully rescued from jail. Acts offers no explicit interpretation of this strange combination of events. Had I been James’s mother or wife, I think I would have chafed at the strange providence that worked its victories in such apparently random fashion, and I would only partly have been comforted by reflecting how Jesus’s own mother had felt at the foot of the cross. Or take Acts 16. The fact that the victory had already been won didn’t mean that Paul and Silas wouldn’t be beaten (illegally, as it happens) by the authorities in Philippi, but it did mean that when they then sang hymns at midnight, the prison doors were shaken open by an earthquake and they found themselves converting the jailer and demanding—and receiving—a public apology from the magistrates. Or go to Acts 27–28. The victory achieved by Jesus didn’t stop Paul from being shipwrecked, but it did mean that when he got to Rome to announce God as king and Jesus as Lord, he would know that he came with the scent of victory already in his nostrils. The God who defeated death through Jesus and rescued Paul from the depths of the sea would enable him to look worldly emperors in the face without flinching. At each point we have the sense that these things are not coincidental. Those who follow Jesus are precisely not to suppose that there will be no suffering along the way or that, if there is, it means they must have sinned or rebelled to have deserved such a thing. (They may, of course, but that isn’t the point, as Paul emphasizes in 2 Corinthians.) On the contrary. The suffering of Jesus’s followers—of the whole Body of Christ, now in one member, now in another—brings the victory of the cross into fresh reality, so that fresh outflowings of that victory may emerge.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  You are expected to tough it out and grow up. As the conversation unfolds, the two camps eye each other with a complex alloy of pity, tenderness, envy, exasperation, and outright scorn. But while they position themselves at opposite ends of the spectrum, both agree with the fundamental premise that passion cools over time. “Some of you resist the loss of intensity, some of you accept it, but all of you seem to believe that desire fades. What you disagree on is just how important the loss really is,” I comment. Romantics value intensity over stability. Realists value security over passion. But both are often disappointed, for few people can live happily at either extreme. Invariably, I’m asked if my book offers a solution. What can people do? Hidden behind this question looms a secret longing for the élan vital, the surge of erotic energy that marks our aliveness. Whatever safety and security people have persuaded themselves to settle for, they still very much want this force in their lives. So I’ve become acutely attuned to the moment when all these ruminations about the inevitable loss of passion turn into expressions of hope. The real questions are these: Can we have both love and desire in the same relationship over time? How? What exactly would that kind of relationship be? The Anchor and the Wave Call me an idealist, but I believe that love and desire are not mutually exclusive, they just don’t always take place at the same time. In fact, security and passion are two separate, fundamental human needs that spring from different motives and tend to pull us in different directions. In his book Can Love Last? the infinitely thoughtful psychoanalyst Stephen Mitchell offers a framework for thinking about this conundrum. As he explains it, we all need security: permanence, reliability, stability, and continuity. These rooting, nesting instincts ground us in our human experience. But we also have a need for novelty and change, generative forces that give life fullness and vibrancy. Here risk and adventure loom large. We’re walking contradictions, seeking safety and predictability on one hand and thriving on diversity on the other. Ever watch a child run away to explore and then run right back to make sure that Mom and Dad are still there? Little Sammy needs to feel secure in order to go into the world and discover; and once he has satisfied his need for exploration, he wants to go back to his safe base to reconnect. It’s a sport he’ll come back to as an adult, culminating in the games of eros. Periods of being bold and taking risks will alternate with periods of seeking grounding and safety. He may fluctuate, though he’ll generally settle on one preference over another.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  They know that erotic intensity waxes and wanes, that desire suffers periodic eclipses and intermittent disappearances. But given sufficient attention, they can bring the frisson back. For them, love is a vessel that contains both security and adventure, and commitment offers one of the great luxuries of life: time. Marriage is not the end of their romance, it’s the beginning. They know that they have years in which to deepen their connection, to experiment, to regress, and even to fail. They see their relationship as something alive and ongoing, not a fait accompli. It’s a story that they are writing together, one with many chapters, and neither partner knows how it will end. There’s always a place they haven’t gone yet, always something about the other still to be discovered. Modern relationships are cauldrons of contradictory longings: safety and excitement, grounding and transcendence, the comfort of love and the heat of passion. We want it all, and we want it with one person. Reconciling the domestic and the erotic is a delicate balancing act that we achieve intermittently at best. It requires knowing your partner while recognizing his persistent mystery; creating security while remaining open to the unknown; cultivating intimacy that respects privacy. Separateness and togetherness alternate, or proceed in counterpoint. Desire resists confinement, and commitment mustn’t swallow freedom whole. At the same time, eroticism in the home requires active engage ment and willful intent. It is an ongoing resistance to the message that marriage is serious, more work than play; and that passion is for teenagers and the immature. We must unpack our ambivalence about pleasure, and challenge our pervasive discomfort with sexuality, particularly in the context of family. Complaining of sexual boredom is easy and conventional. Nurturing eroticism in the home is an act of open defiance. 10 The Shadow of the Third Rethinking Fidelity Q: Are there any secrets to long-lasting relationships? A: Infidelity. Not the act itself, but the threat of it. For Proust, an injection of jealousy is the only thing capable of rescuing a relationship ruined by habit. —Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life The bonds of wedlock are so heavy that it takes two to carry them, sometimes three. —Alexandre Dumas T HE T ALMUD , THE GREAT COMPILATION of rabbinic tradition, tells the following parable. Every night, Rabbi Bar Ashi would prostrate himself before the merciful God and beg to be saved from the evil urge. His wife, overhearing him, would think, “It’s been a number of years since he has withdrawn from me. What makes him say that?” So one day, as he is studying in the garden, she dresses herself up as Haruta and meets him there. (Haruta was the name of the quintessential prostitute in ancient Babylon.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  Dividing history into “periods” or “movements” is always tricky, but these two stand out. In part, the second was a reaction against the overoptimism of the first. It too bred a reaction, as new “social gospel” movements arose in the early twentieth century, insisting that the emphasis on “going to heaven” wasn’t the point and that following the Jesus of the gospels meant working to help the poor and the sick here and now. Many churches today are shaped through traditions that go back to one or another of these movements, and many debates in church councils, synods, and the like reflect the unresolved issues in question. Many Christians grew up reading the Bible in the light of this or that version, often without realizing that these traditions of reading scripture were themselves shaped by cultural forces that distorted some elements of biblical teaching and screened out others altogether. None of us can escape that problem. But what I have tried to do in this book is to outline a way of understanding the New Testament’s vision of Jesus’s death, particularly that in the gospels and Paul, a vision that, by giving attention to various strands often ignored and by sketching a way of combining things that have often been played off against one another, will relaunch something more like the first movement than the second. Such a missional vision will need serious reshaping. There were problems (to put it mildly) with that earlier optimism. But I believe we can and must make the attempt. This is already happening, in fact. Many contemporary mission organizations are well aware of the need to advance a holistic mission without losing the cutting edge of personal evangelism. My hope is that a fresh appraisal of what the cross achieved will undergird this new vision and give it biblical and theological depth and stability. Rethinking Mission The case I have been putting forward in this book is not just a thinker’s puzzle for theologians to argue over in dusty seminar rooms. It is immediately and urgently practical. The “victory” is achieved because Jesus “gave himself for our sins,” rescuing and forgiving humans and so breaking the deadly grip of the powers they had been worshipping. A mission based on a supposed “victory” that does not have “forgiveness of sins” at its heart will go seriously wrong in one direction. That was the danger of the first view I outlined: triumphalism without forgiveness at its core. A mission based on “forgiveness of sins” where we see things only in terms of “saving souls for heaven” will go wrong in the other direction. That was the danger of the second view: a message of forgiveness that left the powers to rule the world unchallenged. The New Testament insists on both and in their proper relation. That has been my case. When we get this right, the church’s true vocation emerges once more.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  But that’s not a good place to be. The practice is far more likely to be sustained over time if those engaged in it and the leaders and teachers in their churches understand the biblical and theological basis for what they are doing. Many other Christians, convinced of the “going to heaven” theory, have come to regard any talk of working for God’s kingdom in the present world as a dangerous distraction. We ought (so they think) to see ourselves as “citizens of heaven” and therefore have nothing much to do with “earth.” Sometimes this view is backed up by the belief that God will actually destroy the present world. Why, then, would we bother with it? Why plant a tree if the garden is going to be dug up tomorrow? I have argued against this view elsewhere, particularly in Surprised by Hope and Surprised by Scripture. Indeed, the reason for that double “surprise” is partly that the New Testament view of God’s new creation still comes as a shock to many in our world, both Christian and non-Christian. But in the present book I want to go deeper than before into the difference between the “usual” view of “mission” I have mentioned—the idea of “mission” as “saving souls for heaven”—and the “mission” that I believe flows from the extraordinary, indeed revolutionary, vision of the achievement of Jesus in his death. Christian mission means implementing the victory that Jesus won on the cross. Everything else follows from this. The point is that this victory—the victory over all the powers, ultimately over death itself—was won through the representative and substitutionary death of Jesus, as Israel’s Messiah, who died so that sins could be forgiven. To suggest, as many have done, that we have to choose between “victory” and “substitution” is to miss the point, whichever we then choose. The New Testament affirms both and indicates, as we have tried to map out, the relationship between them. The “powers” gained their power because idolatrous humans sinned; when God deals with sins on the cross, he takes back from the powers their usurped authority. The question now is: What does it look like when this integrated vision of the death of Jesus is turned into mission? Answering that question—or at least beginning to answer it—is the purpose of this final part of the book. * * * For the sake of clarity, I have spoken here of two versions of “mission,” though I am naturally aware that things are more complicated than that, in both church history and current practice. It may help, though, to explain very briefly, at the risk of considerable oversimplification, how we got to our present position. The recent “backstory” of these two versions looks like this.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  Softer phrases now came to my lips: “Who can tell?” “Maybe!” “Life is complex and unknowable.” After Paula and I had met for many weeks, we began to make concrete plans to form a group for dying patients. Nowadays, such groups are commonplace and much discussed in magazines and television, but in 1973 there was no precedent: dying was as heavily censored as pornography. Hence, we had to improvise every step of the way. The beginning posed a major hurdle. How to start such a group? How to recruit group members? With a classified ad: “Wanted! Dying people”? But Paula’s network of her church, hospital clinics, and home-care organizations began to yield potential group members. The Stanford renal dialysis unit referred the first, Jim, a nineteen-year-old with severe kidney disease. Though he must have known that his life span was short, he had little interest in deepening his acquaintance with death. Jim avoided eye contact with Paula and me and, for that matter, any form of engagement—with anyone. “I’m a man without a future,” he said. “Who would want me as a husband or a friend? Why keep facing the pain of rejection? I’ve talked enough. Been rejected enough. I’m doing okay without anyone.” Paula and I saw him only twice; he did not return for a third session. Jim, we concluded, was too healthy. Renal dialysis offers too much hope, postponing death so long that denial takes root. No, we needed the doomed, the short-timers on death row, those without hope. Then Rob and Sal came through our door. Neither of them met our qualifications precisely: Rob often denied that he was dying, and Sal claimed that he had already come to terms with his illness and needed no help from us. Rob, only twenty-seven, had lived for six months with a highly malignant brain tumor. Lurching in and out of denial, he would insist, at one moment, “You’ll see, I’ll be backpacking in the Alps in six weeks” (I don’t believe poor Rob had ever been east of Nevada), and, a few moments later, curse his paralyzed legs for preventing him from searching for his life insurance policy: “I’ve got to find out whether the benefits to my wife and kids will be canceled if I commit suicide.” Although we knew the group was not large enough, we started with four members—Paula, Sal, Rob, and I. Since Sal and Paula needed no help and I was the therapist, Rob became the group’s raison d’être. But Rob obstinately refused to give us much satisfaction. We tried to offer him comfort and guidance while respecting his choice to deny. Supporting denial, however, is an unsatisfying, duplicitous endeavor, especially when what we wanted was to help Rob accept his dying and get the most out of what life he had left. None of us looked forward to our meetings. After two months Rob’s headaches grew more severe, and one night he died quietly in his sleep.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  Jacob’s family goes into Egypt to escape a famine, and the Israelites remain there for four centuries, ending up as slaves, before the dramatic events of Passover and Exodus through which they are set free and led at last to their promised land. Once there, they struggle for survival and independence. Even when that is briefly attained under the kingship of David, an internal rebellion forces David himself to flee into exile before returning to resume his throne. Then, after the kingdom is divided into “north” (with its own non-Davidic kings) and “south” (still under Davidic rule), the northern tribes are captured by the Assyrians and taken away, never to return. The southern tribes—Benjamin, Judah, and those Levites who live among them—are left. But they too eventually succumb to the might of Babylon, and most of them are taken there as captives. The Temple is destroyed. According to Ezekiel, this is made possible because YHWH himself has abandoned it to its fate, following the shocking behavior of priests and people alike. The Babylonian captivity is what is normally referred to as “the exile.” What follows is in a way the most puzzling moment of all. After two generations, some of the exiles in Babylon return to their land. They rebuild the Temple. But they do not regain their independence, except for a few brief periods. They continue to tell and retell their own story as one of continuing “slavery.” There is a strong, widespread sense that the great prophecies about a glorious return (Isaiah and Ezekiel in particular) have not been fulfilled. The prophets of what we think of as the postexilic period (Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi) warn that all is not well. In particular, they suggest that, though the exiles themselves (or some of them) had returned, YHWH himself had not, despite the promises of Isaiah 52, Ezekiel 43, and elsewhere. Malachi promises that he will return, but he seems not to have done so yet. Fresh divine action would be needed to undo the present slavery, to complete the story, to put all things right at last. Into this puzzling situation, the book of Daniel (now generally reckoned to have reached final form in the second century BC) introduces a new note. Jeremiah had said that the exile would last for seventy years; but now it seems that the real, deeper “exile” of continuing slavery to foreign powers would last for a much longer period: seventy weeks of years, that is, seventy times seven (9:24). Nearly five hundred years of exile! Well, the slavery in Egypt had been nearly that long; perhaps this too would be within the great divine plan . . . But the story was still unfinished.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  This is why, by the way, “believing in Jesus’s resurrection” isn’t simply a matter of giving acknowledgment to the fact that on the third day he rose again from the dead, though of course it includes that. To say yes to Jesus’s resurrection is, by that very thought and deed, to say yes to the new world of forgiveness that was won on the cross, the world that was then launched into heaven-and-earth reality on Easter morning. It is not a matter first of convincing oneself that perhaps “miracles” may happen after all, then that Jesus’s resurrection might be one of them, and then that the evidence really does seem to point this way. Resurrection and forgiveness are not strange things that might perhaps happen in the old creation. They are the hallmarks, the telltale signs, the characteristic marks of the new creation. Believing in them is a matter of glimpsing and clinging to the reality of that new creation itself. Believing in Jesus’s resurrection is hard not merely because it’s difficult to get our minds around the idea of a person going through death and out into a new sort of bodily existence the other side, though that does indeed challenge our imaginations at the deepest level. It’s hard because we are asked to grasp or be grasped by the fact that a new reality, a new mode of existence, has been introduced to the world. This is at the heart of the ongoing revolution: that a new way of being human has been launched, a way that starts with forgiveness (God’s forgiveness of those who turn from their now defeated idols) and continues with forgiveness (the forgiveness offered by Jesus’s followers in his name and by his Spirit to all who have wronged them). This is why forgiveness, in both senses, looms large in the prayer Jesus taught his followers. This is what it looks like, sounds like, and feels like when heaven comes to earth, when God’s kingdom comes and his will is done in the world of humans as it is in the world of the angels. Forgiveness is the new reality. It is the power of the revolution. Praying the Lord’s prayer and believing in Jesus’s resurrection turn out ultimately to be all about the same thing.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  Here we see, in particular, how for Paul the Messiah’s death was intimately linked to the main thrust of the letter, namely, the inclusion of non-Jews in the family promised to Abraham without their needing to get circumcised. We can note the three main points once more. First, the event has occurred by which God has declared the “present evil age” null and void and has launched the “age to come,” so that the powers of the “present evil age,” which are the powers that had previously held people captive, have no longer any right to keep them prisoner. The new Passover means that all slaves are now offered freedom. Second, the means by which this goal is attained is precisely the “forgiveness of sins.” If, as Paul implies in 2:15, the objection of Jews (or Jewish Messiah believers) to the inclusion of Gentiles is that they are “Gentile sinners,” then this objection is overturned precisely because the Messiah “gave himself for our sins.” Anyone, Jew or non-Jew, who is “in the Messiah” cannot therefore any longer be categorized as a “sinner,” and objections to their inclusion in the family on such grounds must be overruled. Third, for a Jew (and Paul himself is the archetypal devout and zealous Jew, as he says in 1:13–14) to recognize Jesus as Israel’s Messiah and come into the Messiah’s family is to declare that “the son of God loved me and gave himself for me”: and with that the Jew too is given a radically new identity, the ultimate Israel identity, the messianic identity: “It isn’t me any longer; it’s the Messiah who lives in me.” Thus at every point the Messiah’s crucifixion, interpreted through the Messiah’s representative position vis-à-vis Israel and the divine purposes for Abraham’s family, means the creation and maintenance of a single covenantal family, the one sin-forgiven people of God, the people already celebrating the life of the “age to come.” That is the main argument of Galatians. But there is more. The older readings, in which Paul is opposing something called “legalism” or the human attempt to earn “righteousness” by “good works,” always had trouble with Galatians 5, in which Paul suddenly turns around and tells his audience to stop fighting and squabbling and to behave themselves. Are they then to do “good works” after all? But every move that this reading makes reveals just how much it has missed the point Paul is making. Once we recall the two main steps in his view of the cross, it all comes clear.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  “Of course you are! Where was your father born? And your grandfather? Have you ever had any other nationality in the last few centuries? No! There you are!” “It’s true,” I said, “that I was born here, like my father and all my ancestors, and I’ve never been out of this country since my birth. You consider that we belong to the same nation, but what about the others, Ben Smaan, what about the others? I’m afraid that, to them, we may still be foreigners.” “Maybe the times have changed. But there’s a job for those of us who know how to speak and explain and convince. We must promote unity among all the native sons of the country and make them act according to their own conscience. Why should we do without the help of the Jews who are an important part of the population and a particularly active, clever, and powerful one?” The last part of this sentence did not please me. What could he mean by “clever and powerful”? I preferred to think that his words had been tactlessly chosen. “I can only agree, but I must admit that I am a pessimist. One cannot force oneself to be accepted as a relative or even a neighbor. That is the opinion of many Jews for whom the only solution is Zionism.” He stopped me with both hands and a scornful expression on his mouth that was as small as his eyes; he curled his lips to express his indignation and disagreement. “Zionism! Leave that alone! It’s a Utopia and one that will arouse the whole Arab world. What could a handful of madmen do against the whole Arab world? No, let us put aside what would split us apart and look only to what can bring us together.”