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 Pillar of Salt (1953)

  There were not many of us at these secret meetings, and we felt strongly even if we had no very definite ideas. But I always left this Arab house filled with warmth and a feeling of generosity. The communion which ten of us could achieve was of good augury for the rest of the city. I smiled at the little street vendors and was amiable to the ticket collector in the streetcar; when two women began to argue, I sided with the Moslem one. But the vendors did not understand my smiles, the ticket collector hardly returned my politeness, and the Moslem women formed such a solid bloc in their opposition to the Jewess that I ended up by feeling sorry for her as the victim. Perhaps, I thought, if they only knew that I had just left an Arab home in the middle of the Halfaouine section, with a fig tree growing in the middle of the patio, and that I had just drunk tea there with Ben Smaan and the others, if only they knew that I was working for them, who I was and what I thought... But I had to overcome the hostility of the ticket collector and teach the shopkeepers not to insult Jewish housewives by calling them bitches, and I had to send Jewish and Moslem girls to the same schools. Our success depended on our work and patience and on time. Naturally, I had my ups and my downs. When I was discouraged, I thought of the sufferings of the Jews, of their despair in the ghetto: “They will never never like us!” I thought also of the utter misery which so blinded the Moslems. How could one cut a path through such tangled darkness? Then again, when I was strong enough to view it all with the calm of a Spinoza and to recover from my own nervousness, I seemed to see the solution clearly, and this vision gave me a certain serenity and a philosopher’s joy. In action, I felt happy and optimistic. For a while, I thought I could discover salvation through trying to save others.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  We were already going ahead with the application of our plans and biting into the future. I assumed an attentive and preoccupied look, ready to rush wherever he would send me. Monsieur Bismuth, the well-known druggist, was going to be, it seemed, my paying sponsor. Yes, I knew his drugstore well, though I had never met Monsieur Bismuth: a modern storefront, spacious display windows, with neon lighting at night. A stout thread of gold now bound me to the city. The principal began to speak to me in detail about my sponsor; a son of poor parents, who had been a courageous and hard worker, with the community scholarship coming to bring recognition to his merits, and here he was a wealthy man, an honored member of the community, the owner of the finest drugstore in our part of the country. “Let him be your inspiration,” concluded Monsieur Louzel. “Your destinies have much in common, and I hope, for you, that they’ll continue to have as much in common.” Abandoning his histrionic manner to become almost paternal, the principal then asked me: “What do you want to be?” “A physician,” I answered, without any hesitation. “Well, if you continue to study as hard as you have been, we’ll make a physician of you.” He then dismissed me, and I went again across the three stages, opened the glass-paneled door, closed it carefully. To me, it seemed as if I were awakening from a dream. But unlike those awakenings when one is seized with the irresistible desire to check on the real existence of one’s treasure, my own gold was here with me: magically, my dream had acquired a body. The school principal, Monsieur Bismuth, the influential druggist, the Alliance Israélite Universelle, the whole of the Jewish community of Tunis had decided that it must come true. This was no time for self-satisfied jubilation. My destiny pushed me ahead: I was expected. So I hurried across the yard, without paying any attention to the benevolent eucalyptus trees, to the big bronze bell that waited there, patient and almost motherly, to the sidelong glances of all my classmates indoors. I climbed the old wooden staircase four steps at a time. As I feverishly gathered my things together, I felt on me the gaze of all my classmates. They were perhaps astonished to see me summoned like this by the principal; perhaps Monsieur Marzouk had announced to them my new and sudden glory. But I was sure that they all stared at me. So as not to have to compete against this general lack of concentration in the class, Monsieur Marzouk interrupted his teaching. In the silence that ensued, my heart beat cheerfully, with big, heavy beats, as if it were dancing.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  First, Jews of the first century, like a great many Jews in the twenty-first century, organized their lives around the major festivals and holy days. Among the festivals, incomparably the greatest was Passover, which commemorated the time when, in the book of Exodus, Israel’s God had acted dramatically to break the power of Pharaoh of Egypt and to set free his previously enslaved people. The whole story is important and was and is rehearsed in detail every Passover: the slavery, the hardship, the plagues on Pharaoh and his nation, the judgment on the firstborn of Egypt (and the protection of the Israelites through the blood of the Passover lambs), the crossing of the Red Sea, the journey in the wilderness, the giving of the law (the Torah) on Mt. Sinai, and the construction of the tabernacle. We have every reason to suppose that when the Jewish people celebrated Passover year after year they thought of it as the freedom festival that not only looked back to the original act of liberation, but ahead to another great act of liberation, especially when the people once more felt themselves enslaved or oppressed. And the point for our purposes is this: Jesus himself chose Passover as the moment to do what he had to do, and the first Christians looked back to Passover as one of the main interpretative lenses for understanding his death. Second, however, a great many Jews of the first century sharpened their hope for a fresh act of divine liberation in the light of the book of Daniel and similar writings. Here (in Dan. 9) they found assurance that the “exile” had not consisted merely of the seventy years in Babylon, but was continuing to their day in a different form, that of continuing pagan oppression. All the great prophets of the exile had insisted that Israel’s disaster (including the destruction of the Temple and the consequent sense of being excluded from the divine Presence) was the result of Israel’s own idolatry and sin. If and when, therefore, a fresh act of deliverance were to undo this long exile, it would be a divine act of “forgiveness of sins.” The great annual holy day at which confession of sin was made and forgiveness was available was the Day of Atonement. This had little in common with Passover, except that both took place in the Jerusalem Temple (after which the Passover meal was then eaten in private homes). But since, in the time of Jesus, many Jews were looking for a great event that would be both a “new Passover” and the “forgiveness of sins,” it is possible to see that the two might somehow be combined. Jeremiah had spoken of a “new covenant” in which sins would be forgiven (Jer. 31:31–34). All this generates a framework of potential meaning within which the actions of Jesus himself and the perceptions of his first followers could find fertile soil.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  Israel had been enslaved in Egypt; God’s great act of liberation, overcoming Pharaoh and the Egyptian gods and rescuing his people, was the apolytrōsis, the great “redemption” at the heart of Israel’s covenant story. Like so many other early Christians and in line with Jesus himself, Paul interprets the cross in relation to Passover: a new Passover, a new Exodus. As anyone who has attended a Passover celebration will recall—and as Jews both ancient and modern know in their bones—Passover is a complex event. Its narrative positively bristles with different elements: bricks without straw, the call of Moses, the revelation of the divine name, the plagues in Egypt, the Passover meal itself, the slaughter of the firstborn, the crossing of the Red Sea, the pillar of cloud and fire, the grumbling of the people, the arrival at Mt. Sinai, the construction of the tabernacle. Each one subdivides, so that, for the uninitiated, the writings of Jews of Paul’s day appear to be peppered with disjointed references to plagues, unleavened bread, angels giving the Torah, or items of tabernacle furniture. These, however, are not in fact disjointed. The links are there in the great narrative so widely known, so easily summoned to mind, in that world if not in ours. And we do not have to go very far in the story to see that when Paul says apolytrōsis, he has this entire picture very much in mind. The original Exodus was the moment when God fulfilled his promises to the patriarchs (Exod. 2:24) and established his covenant with the whole people (19:5; 24:3–8). When Jeremiah spoke of a “new covenant” (31:31–34), he was looking back to this original moment in order to look ahead to the even greater deliverance that God would one day accomplish, and this was central to the early Christian perception of what had been accomplished in Jesus. The new Passover was modeled on the old one. This time, however, it would not mean simply liberation from an enslaving human power. It would mean liberation from sin, the sin that had caused the enslavement of exile. That is why, as we have seen, the reimagining of Passover in the Second Temple period needed to include the idea of atonement or forgiveness. But liberation from slavery, of whatever sort, was only the negative side of Passover. The positive purpose of the Exodus was to set Israel free to worship the covenant God (Exod. 3:12, 18; 4:23; 5:1; 8:1, 20, 27; 9:1, 13; 10:3, 7–11, 24–26). Why this was impossible in Egypt is not made clear, but there may have been a sense that, with the local Egyptian gods holding sway, worshipping YHWH, at least in the way intended, would have been impossible.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  The notion of priesthood, admittedly now often exposed as a cloak for selfish wrongdoing, is another vital part of being human. We humans are called to stand at the intersection of heaven and earth, holding together in our hearts, our praises, and our urgent intercessions the loving wisdom of the creator God and the terrible torments of his battered world. The Bible knows perfectly well that this priestly vocation can be corrupted and often has been. But once more it proposes not abolition, but full and complete cleansing. The Coming One “will purify the descendants of Levi and refine them like gold and silver, until they present offerings to YHWH in righteousness” (Mal. 3:3). This ancient Jewish promise points ahead to the ultimate “priesthood” of Jesus himself. We should not be surprised, then, that horrible abuses have spoiled our sense of both the royal and the priestly vocations. That is what we should expect. The remarkable thing is that the Creator, having made the world to work in this way—with humans functioning like the “image” in a temple, standing between heaven and earth and acting on behalf of each in relation to the other—has not abandoned the project. Yes, it gets distorted again and again. But it remains the way the world was supposed to work—and the way in which, through the gospel, it will work once more. The powers that have stolen the worshipping hearts of the world and that have in consequence usurped the human rule over the world would like nothing better than for humans to think only of escaping the world rather than taking back their priestly and royal vocations. Communities of Reconciled Worshippers Those passages from the book of Revelation are not the only places in the New Testament where the result of Jesus’s death is described as a renewal of vocation. Two famous Pauline passages point the same way. In the first, 2 Corinthians 5:21, the natural reading has been obscured and overlaid by generations who have seen in it the regular “works contract” idea. But the wider context of 2 Corinthians 5–6, in which Paul is explaining the nature of apostolic ministry and locating it within his fresh reading of Isaiah 49 (one of his favorite passages), indicates that his train of thought is the same as that of Revelation: the death of Jesus, reconciling people to God, generates the renewal of their human vocation. In this carefully constructed passage, Paul says the same thing three times, developing it to a climax. In each case he first says something about Jesus’s death and then something about the “ministry of reconciliation” to which people are called as a result: God reconciled us to himself through the Messiah, and he gave us the ministry of reconciliation. (5:18) God was reconciling the world to himself in the Messiah, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting us with the message of reconciliation.

• From Laid and Confused: Why We Tolerate Bad Sex and How to Stop (2023)

  “I think having more sex would be nice. If time permitted, I’d definitely try to make it happen on Grindr or Tinder,” a thirty-year-old cis gay man told me. “But as I’m getting older, I feel like I’ve been hedging a lot more. Like, is it worth risking having sex with someone who ends up being terrible? Maybe I should just jack off on my own and call it a night.” Hey, that sounds like a nice night. The dip in sexual activity is not all bleak, even if some of the factors causing it are. Many theorize that declining birth rates in many countries reflect a broader uptick in freedom available to childbearing people. So fewer people are getting married? Fantastic. Studies have shown that married straight women, for one, often report feeling coercion from their husbands to have sex. Women are raising their relationship standards so significantly “that dating opportunities for heterosexual men are diminishing,” claimed a recent Psychology Today article that urges men to address their skills deficits. Let’s fucking goooo. New research6 even indicates that people who have no desire to marry report better sex lives than single people who want to eventually marry, proving, at least a little, the toxicity of the heteronormative nuclear family—even the idea of it—as it relates to sex. The broadening of choices chronicled by social scientists benefits everyone, but particularly women and the LGBTQIA+ community. Crucially, increased freedom to opt out of marriage and monogamous, cis-heteronormative sexual arrangements improves the quality of life for asexual people, who represent around 1 percent of the American population (many experts agree that this estimate is conservative). Asexual people do not experience sexual attraction, but can be romantically attracted to all genders—sub-categories include biromantic, heteromantic, and aromantic. Julie Kliegman, a nonbinary writer who came out as asexual, or ace, in 2016, spent a giant chunk of her life having sex she didn’t like. It wasn’t until she saw an episode of BoJack Horseman, where a primary character reveals he is asexual, that she reconsidered her sexual history and put the pieces together: sex was not for her, at all. “I knew I didn’t care for it exactly, but I didn’t know that it was an option to opt out of it altogether,” she said. To the extent she dates at all (“It’s rough out there”), Kliegman seeks intimate, romantic relationships with people of all genders that don’t include sex. As asexual representation increases, she suspects more people will come out and stop having sex. This is a fantastic thing, even though it would technically fall under the umbrella of the sex recession. “A lot of people are puzzling through how they feel about sex,” she said, “and I think the asexuality label might apply to some of them.”

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  All the signs are that he did—and that he connected this too to Passover. The other key action of that week was Jesus’s organizing and celebrating a strange meal with his followers, and this seems to be central to his own interpretation of the events that were rapidly unfolding. I have made the point elsewhere, but it bears repeating: when Jesus wanted to explain to his followers what his forthcoming death was all about, he did not give them a theory, a model, a metaphor, or any other such thing; he gave them a meal, a Passover meal—or at least what they seem to have thought was a Passover-meal, though it turned out to be significantly different. Instead of looking back fifteen hundred years or so to the great event of the Exodus from Egypt—though that inevitably remained in the forefront of everyone’s minds on that day —he turned the meal around so that its primary significance looked forward to what was going to happen the next day. And already, before we try to understand any of the words that Jesus is reported to have said on that occasion, we know beyond any reasonable historical doubt that Jesus saw his approaching death in connection with the coming of the kingdom. He seems to have believed, somehow, that what was going to happen would confront and defeat the dark powers with which he had been waging a running battle for the last few years. Just as Israel’s God overcame the power of Egypt and even the myth-laden power of the Red Sea, so, Jesus believed, God would use the upcoming event to overthrow all the dark powers that had kept not only Israel but also the whole human race in captivity. This would be the ultimate freedom moment. “Let me tell you,” he said to his friends as they shared the cup at the meal, “from now on I won’t drink from the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes” (Luke 22:18; Matt. 26:29 has a slightly longer version of the same saying). The evangelists, writing much later, clearly believed that this prediction had come true. The victory had been won. Something was about to happen through which, as was fitting for an ultimate Passover, God would overthrow all the powers of the world and liberate his people from them once and for all.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  That is why, second, the result is not that sinners are free to “go to heaven,” but that they are free for the true human vocation, the royal priesthood in all its variations. It is when humans take up their proper vocation, redeemed by the Messiah and indwelt by the Spirit, that the “powers” find they are starved of their oxygen. That is what much of the rest of Romans 8 is about, starting with the end of v. 4: “as we live not according to the flesh but according to the spirit.” This points ahead to the resurrection itself (8:9–11), to the life of taking responsibility for one’s own body and its actions (8:12–16), and to the vocation to suffer and so to share the “glory” of the Messiah (8:17–25), that is, his strange, suffering, but powerful rule over the world. This leads to the ultimate new creation, when the present creation, groaning in travail, will be set free from its slavery to corruption and decay, “to enjoy the freedom that comes when God’s children are glorified” (8:23). That is the ultimate “glory,” the “royal” role for which humans were made and for which, as in 5:17, they are redeemed. They are “justified” in order to be “justice bringers.” This is the result of the revolution accomplished on the cross. The work of the cross is not designed to rescue humans from creation, but to rescue them for creation. If we told the story that way, all kinds of problems would either be solved or at least appear in a new light. The point then extends also to the “priestly” work of intercession. Humans who are redeemed through the Messiah and indwelt by the Spirit discover that, in the pain of ignorance about what to pray for, “that same spirit pleads on our behalf, with groanings too deep for words” (8:26). But God, the “Searcher of Hearts,” knows what the Spirit is thinking, because the Spirit is pleading for God’s people according to God’s will (8:27). And so it goes on, to the final statement of assurance: nothing can separate us from the love of God revealed in the death of the Messiah. I have stressed that here as elsewhere the picture only makes sense if we take the view that all the early Christians shared, that the living God of Israel was personally present in and as Jesus himself. This poses for later thinkers an obvious problem: How could God, as it were, be split into two? The first Christians do not seem to have seen it like that. Nor did they worry particularly about how to say what had to be said. They drew on various Jewish models already in use to talk about how the one God, utterly beyond and above the world he had made, was nevertheless present and active within it. This, after all, is how Israel’s scriptures speak of Israel’s God.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Was it a mirage? A dirty yellow jalopy, crudely painted with a red cross, rattled around an elbow in the road; it was the community ambulance! The men yelled, threw themselves forward in an effort to run, and waved their thin arms. In my tired head, another useless question had formed: how had Picchonero arrived so soon? How much time had gone by? I found it unpleasant to feel that I had lost all conception of time. The men surrounded the prehistoric vehicle deliriously; with their stiff hands they touched it and groped for the door handle, found it, and dived inside. They climbed into it with their knees and chests and elbows and heads banging against each other, pushing, squeezing, piling up, disappearing in the dark as fast as possible. This took as long as was necessary for the driver and the guide, who was not Picchonero, to set the brakes, open the doors, leave their seats, and appear smiling and shy. They gazed at the overflowing truck with its wide-open doors, covered with men hanging onto the windows and standing on the step. Unfortunately, they explained, they had precise orders, and first they must... The others, their arms hanging and silent, stared vacantly at their lost hope. “Who is the group leader?” the driver asked timidly. Nobody answered. The redhead was certainly buried in the dark belly of the ambulance. “We’ll come back and fetch you,” he shamefully went on. “The community could find no other transport. We’ll be back as fast as we can.” The driver and his guide hesitated, waited in vain for a reply, and got back into their seats. With great difficulty, the truck turned round, jumped, and slowly started on its way. With its doors open on both sides, it looked like a great beetle, too heavy for its wings, with masses of little fleas on its back. We were once more alone with the war, which was steadily catching up with our torn feet. Now that the bombers had made sure of the silence of their former objectives, they were aiming closer to us on the left. Clouds of thick gray smoke slowly rose and hung in the air, and the whims of the wind brought us the acid smell of bomb explosions.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  Jesus’s particular redefinition (and Luke’s showcasing of that redefinition) belongs on that map, even though it transforms it beyond anything previously imagined. The hope of Israel, expressed variously in the Torah, Prophets, and Psalms, was not for a rescue operation that would snatch Israel (or humans or the faithful) from the world, but for a rescue operation that would be for the world, an operation through which redeemed humans would play once more the role for which they were designed. It was the hope for a renewed world in which justice and mercy would reign forever. Jesus was explaining not that this hope had been abandoned in favor of “saved souls going to heaven,” but that this hope for new creation had been fulfilled in a shockingly unexpected way. The revolution had already taken place. By the evening of that Friday, had they but known it, the world had changed. From our point of view, as we read this story, it all involves a double redefinition. First, there is indeed a radical redefinition of the Jewish hope of rescue from pagan oppression, of a new justice and peace for the world, of the ultimate return of YHWH to his Temple. Once you put the crucifixion and resurrection of Israel’s Messiah in the middle of that story and make it the new focus, everything looks different. Second, the Christian world has for so long clung to and taught a meaning of “redemption” that involves “saved souls going to heaven” that it takes quite an effort of the imagination to come to terms with the New Testament’s message, that what we are promised in the gospel is the kingdom of God coming “on earth as in heaven”; or, to put it another way, for all things in heaven and on earth to be summed up in the Messiah; or, to put it yet another way, “new heavens and a new earth, in which justice will be at home” (2 Pet. 3:13). Once we learn, with the puzzled disciples on that extraordinary evening, to grasp the way the ancient biblical hope was redefined around Jesus himself, then we are bound to embrace the far more radical revision of our own “Christian” cultural expectations concerning “heaven.” And once we do that, we are forced into two more major questions that hover over the present part of the book. The two questions are as follows. First, what is the calling of humans in this promised new world? Second, granted human failure (“sin”), how are humans to be rescued so that they can fulfill that calling?

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  In this book I want to show what that means and how a fuller vision of what happened when Jesus died, rooted in the New Testament itself, can enable us to be part of that revolution. According to the book of Revelation, Jesus died in order to make us not rescued nonentities, but restored human beings with a vocation to play a vital part in God’s purposes for the world. Understanding what exactly happened on that horrible Friday afternoon is a big step toward making that vocation a reality. But whether we understand it or not, there is no denying that the sheer fact of Jesus’s crucifixion and the symbol of the cross itself still carry enormous power in our world. We need to think about this for a moment before going any farther. It forces us to ask, again, the key question: Why? Captivated by the Cross Someone recently drew my attention to an energetic, youthful organization calling itself the “Jesus Army.” It has, of course, a website, and I confess that when I first looked at it, I was expecting trite clichés and tired slogans. Not at all. It had the feel of fresh discovery and embraced a wider variety of spiritual traditions and practical programs than I had anticipated. But at its heart it remained deeply traditional, as you can see in the posting that caught my eye. This short piece places the spotlight on the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth, the event that forms the subject of this book. It draws our attention to the strange, perhaps even revolutionary power that this event still appears to possess, despite all the skepticism and sneering of today’s world: YOU can’t get away from it. It’s everywhere. The cross. In homes, in films, in paintings, in pop videos. Worn as an earring, on a necklace. Stitched or studded onto leather or denim. Tattooed onto skin . . . What would Coca-Cola or McDonald’s give to own a symbol that millions wear around their necks every day? The cross is the universal Christian symbol, acknowledged by millions of Christians everywhere as the single visual sign of their faith. Which is weird, isn’t it? Because the cross was originally a symbol of suffering and defeat. The Roman Empire killed thousands of its enemies by nailing them to wooden crosses. It’s like wearing a gibbet around your neck. Or hanging a little golden lethal injection from your necklace. Jesus Christ was executed 2,000 years ago by the Romans. But Christians believe Jesus didn’t stay dead—that Jesus beat death and rose again, beyond death’s reach. That makes the cross not a sign of death, but a sign of the end of death. A sign of hope, a sign of possibility—for every human being. That’s why Christians wear crosses. The Jesus Army wear and give away bright red crosses.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  In any case, with hope secured because of the Messiah’s death, Paul can stand back and survey the entire biblical narrative from Adam to the Messiah (5:12–21). If God’s call to Abraham and the covenant that he made with him were designed to rescue the world from its plight, this purpose has now been accomplished in the Messiah, only more so: the Messiah has inaugurated the new creation, not simply a return to the original one. Hence the “how much more” of vv. 15 and 17. Hence too the promise that those who receive the abundance of divine grace will “reign in life” (v. 17). Here again is the goal of salvation, the restoration of the truly human destiny, of the covenant of vocation in which humans are called as the royal priesthood. The passage is dense, but when we take it slowly it all makes sense—within this framework. The Adam project, for humans to share in God’s rule over creation, is back on track. In and through it all, Jesus’s death is referred to in several overlapping ways. It is “the gift in grace through the one person Jesus the Messiah” (v. 15), “the free gift” (v. 16), “the abundance of grace” (v. 17), the “upright act” (v. 18), and the “obedience” (v. 19)—the last of these echoing “obedient even to death” in Philippians 2:8. All this is seen as the work of “God’s faithful covenant justice,” an English phrase that is struggling to translate and unpack the dense language Paul uses in v. 21. And all, in particular, is about the inauguration of the reign of God or of “grace” (5:21). The idea of the “reign of grace” is a shorthand for God’s reign, that is, God’s kingdom, seen as the reign of divine grace. This is all, in other words, kingdom-of-God language. This is how God has inaugurated his sovereign rule on earth as in heaven. That is how he has rescued human beings to be part of that new reality, to be active participants, not merely beneficiaries. Once liberated from sin, they can play their proper part again—a point of considerable significance when we consider how this “revolution” works out in and through Jesus’s followers in our own day. All this, however, declares that God has rescued humanity through the death of Jesus, seen from several different but complementary angles. It does not yet explain how that is done. We glimpse the goal but not the means. That is still to come.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  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. Notice what then happens. When we see the victory of Jesus in relation to the biblical Passover tradition, reshaped through the Jewish longing for the “forgiveness of sins” as a liberating event within history , we see the early Christian movement not as a “religion” in the modern sense at all, but as a complete new way of being human in the world and for the world.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  Second, however, a great many Jews of the first century sharpened their hope for a fresh act of divine liberation in the light of the book of Daniel and similar writings. Here (in Dan. 9) they found assurance that the “exile” had not consisted merely of the seventy years in Babylon, but was continuing to their day in a different form, that of continuing pagan oppression. All the great prophets of the exile had insisted that Israel’s disaster (including the destruction of the Temple and the consequent sense of being excluded from the divine Presence) was the result of Israel’s own idolatry and sin. If and when, therefore, a fresh act of deliverance were to undo this long exile, it would be a divine act of “forgiveness of sins.” The great annual holy day at which confession of sin was made and forgiveness was available was the Day of Atonement. This had little in common with Passover, except that both took place in the Jerusalem Temple (after which the Passover meal was then eaten in private homes). But since, in the time of Jesus, many Jews were looking for a great event that would be both a “new Passover” and the “forgiveness of sins,” it is possible to see that the two might somehow be combined. Jeremiah had spoken of a “new covenant” in which sins would be forgiven (Jer. 31:31–34). All this generates a framework of potential meaning within which the actions of Jesus himself and the perceptions of his first followers could find fertile soil. Third, we should not imagine that any first-century Jews outside the Christian movement were carrying in their heads anything like the complex constructions that Jesus’s first followers quickly developed to talk about his death. Some were hoping for a Messiah or at least a prophetic leader who would point the way out of Israel’s present troubles, but nobody, as far as we can tell, thought that such a figure would suffer. Equally, some thought that a time of terrible suffering was to come, a time through which Israel would be delivered, but nobody connected this with a potential Messiah. Likewise, some picked up the texts that spoke of Israel’s God himself coming back in a whole new way, as promised in Isaiah 52, to judge the world and deliver his people. But nobody connected that with either the possibility of a Messiah or the likelihood of intense suffering.

• From White Oleander (1999)

  I liked how they seemed to know what to do. They seemed like a dock, firmly attached to the world, you could be safe then, not always drifting like us. I prayed Barry Kolker would be that man. Their murmured words of love were my lullabies, my hope chest. I was stacking in linens, summer camp, new shoes, Christmas. I was laying up sit-down dinners, a room of my own, a bicycle, parent-teacher nights. A year like the one before it, and the next like that, one after another, a bridge, and a thousand things more subtle and nameless that girls without fathers know. Barry took us to the Fourth of July game at Dodger Stadium and bought us Dodger caps. We ate hot dogs and they drank beer from paper cups and he explained baseball to her like it was philosophy, the key to the American character. Barry threw money to the peanut vendor and caught the bag the man threw back. We littered the ground with peanut shells. I hardly recognized us in our peaked blue caps. We were like a family. I pretended we were just Mom, Dad, and the kid. We did the wave, and they kissed through the whole seventh inning, while I drew faces on the peanuts. The fireworks set off every car alarm in the parking lot. Another weekend, he took us to Catalina. I was violently seasick on the ferry, and Barry held a cold handkerchief to my forehead and got me some mints to suck. I loved his brown eyes, the way he looked so worried, as if he’d never seen a kid throw up before. I tried not to hang around with them too much once we got there, hoping he would ask her while they strolled among the sailboats, eating shrimp from a paper cone. SOMETHING HAPPENED . All I remember is that the winds had started. The skeleton rattlings of wind in the palms. It was a night Barry said he would come at nine, but then it was eleven and he hadn’t arrived. My mother played her Peruvian flute tape to soothe her nerves, Irish harp music, Bulgarian singers, but nothing worked. The calming, chiming tones ill suited her temper. Her gestures were anxious and unfinished. “Let’s go for a swim,” I said. “I can’t,” she said. “He might call.” Finally, she flipped out the tape and replaced it with one of Barry’s, a jazz tape by Chet Baker, romantic, the kind of music she always hated before. “Cocktail lounge music. For people to cry into their beer with,” she said. “But I don’t have any beer.” He went out of town on assignments for different magazines. He canceled their dates. My mother couldn’t sleep, she jumped whenever the phone rang. I hated to see the look on her face when it wasn’t Barry. A tone I’d never heard crept into her voice, serrated, like the edge of a saw.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  Further, the Apostle says (Phil. 1:23): “I desire [Vulg.: ‘Having a desire’] to be dissolved and to be with Christ.” From these words Gregory argues as follows (Dial. iv, 25): “If there is no doubt that Christ is in heaven, it cannot be denied that Paul’s soul is in heaven likewise.” Now it cannot be gainsaid that Christ is in heaven, since this is an article of faith. Therefore neither is it to be denied that the souls of the saints are borne to heaven. That also some souls go down to hell immediately after death is evident from Lk. 16:22, “And the rich man died, and he was buried in hell.” I answer that, Even as in bodies there is gravity or levity whereby they are borne to their own place which is the end of their movement, so in souls there is merit or demerit whereby they reach their reward or punishment, which are the ends of their deeds. Wherefore just as a body is conveyed at once to its place, by its gravity or levity, unless there be an obstacle, so too the soul, the bonds of the flesh being broken, whereby it was detained in the state of the way, receives at once its reward or punishment, unless there be an obstacle. Thus sometimes venial sin, though needing first of all to be cleansed, is an obstacle to the receiving of the reward; the result being that the reward is delayed. And since a place is assigned to souls in keeping with their reward or punishment, as soon as the soul is set free from the body it is either plunged into hell or soars to heaven, unless it be held back by some debt, for which its flight must needs be delayed until the soul is first of all cleansed. This truth is attested by the manifest authority of the canonical Scriptures and the doctrine of the holy Fathers; wherefore the contrary must be judged heretical as stated in Dial. iv, 25, and in De Eccl. Dogm. xlvi. Reply to Objection 1: The gloss explains itself: for it expounds the words, “They will not yet be where the saints will be,” etc., by saying immediately afterwards: “That is to say, they will not have the double stole which the saints will have at the resurrection.” Reply to Objection 2: Among the secret abodes of which Augustine speaks, we must also reckon hell and heaven, where some souls are detained before the resurrection. The reason why a distinction is drawn between the time before and the time after the resurrection is because before the resurrection they are there without the body whereas afterwards they are with the body, and because in certain places there are souls now which will not be there after the resurrection.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  As many biblical writers insisted (one thinks, for a start, of Deuteronomy, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel, and the Psalms), if exile was to be undone, sin would have to be forgiven. This can be seen in many places, but one striking example is found in Lamentations, the poetic quintessence of the theme of exile as a result of sin. Line after line indicates the direct connection: Israel’s sin is the cause of exile. Then at last, after the brief note of consolation in chapter 3, we find the sudden promise toward the end of chapter 4: The punishment of your iniquity, O daughter Zion, is accomplished, he will keep you in exile no longer. (4:22) This is exactly in line with the promise of Isaiah 40:1–2: 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. Israel’s God comes as a warrior king who will defeat the idols of Babylon and set his people free and also as the gentle shepherd who will lead his flock and give special care to the mother sheep with their lambs (40:3–11). All these promises are finally made good in the Servant Songs, particularly the fourth and final one (52:13–53:12). This is where Israel’s sins are finally dealt with. The same is true of Jeremiah 31, a collection of oracles predicting the joyful return of the exiles. Wave upon wave of poetry declares and celebrates the powerful love of YHWH, as a result of which sins will be forgiven, exile will be undone, Jerusalem will be rebuilt, and so on. At the heart of this there will be a “new covenant”: The days are surely coming, says YHWH, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt—a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says YHWH. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says YHWH: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, “Know YHWH,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says YHWH; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more. (31:31–34) The “forgiveness of sins” was a huge, life-changing, world-changing reality, long promised and long awaited.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  They are, quite literally, “martyrs”; the word means “witnesses.” Some of those who were beheaded on that beach shouted out “Jesus!” in their last moments. They knew him, loved him, and were ready to die for him, as he had died for them. We cannot tell what effect their witness will have in the days to come, but history suggests it will be powerful. For every story that makes the news headlines, there are a million others. Again and again Jesus’s followers find that when they are weak, then they are strong; that the monsters that loom so large and that can indeed do serious damage from time to time are hollow inside. The idolatry and sin that gave them their energy and puffed them up with pride has been cut off at the root with the forgiveness of sins. As became apparent with the fall of Eastern European Communism, many societies had been in the grip of what had seemed massive, powerful, invincible forces. But once their bluff was called, they collapsed like a bunch of pricked balloons. There is, no doubt, a certain pragmatic wisdom in the advice that one should not “poke the dragon.” But in the Bible the dragons have already been conquered, and even though they may lash their tails angrily, they are in fact a defeated, mangy old bunch. Believing this and living on this basis can be exhilarating as well as dangerous. Part of the skill lies in discernment, in knowing which dragons to challenge, when, and on what grounds. But when there are forces at work in our world dealing in death and destruction, propagating dangerous ideologies without regard for those in the way, or forces that squash the poor to the ground and allow a tiny number to heap up wealth and power, we know we are dealing with Pharaoh once more. Idols are being worshipped, and they are demanding human sacrifices. But we know that on the cross the ultimate Pharaoh was defeated. And so we go to our work, not indeed with some kind of slogan-driven social agenda to keep the chattering classes happy, nor with the arrogance that expects to “build the kingdom” by our own efforts, but in prayer and faith, with the sacramental ministry and prayer of the church around and behind us and with the knowledge that the victory won on the cross will one day have its full effect. We expect to suffer, but we know already that we are victorious. The sacramental life, in particular, can have a power that is sometimes overlooked by those who, afraid of the wrong use of baptism or the Eucharist, have downplayed them within their central teaching. That wasn’t Paul’s line.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  Faced with the tragedy and terror of exile, the great prophets struggled for meaning. The pagan hordes had triumphed over Israel, trampled upon the holy places, and taken the chosen people off to Babylon (the “Babel” where, in Genesis 11, human arrogance had reached its full height). What sense could be made of that? The prophets’ central insight, exactly in line with Deuteronomy, was to see the exile as a kind of living death. But this could not be the end of the story, or chaos would indeed have come again. Somehow —and the greatest of the prophets struggled in prayer and poetry to bring this insight to birth—just as the Creator chose the covenant people to be the means of rescuing the human race, so now, with the chosen people themselves in need of rescue, God might do the same thing again. He might act in a new way to call from within exilic Israel a remnant, perhaps even a remnant of one, through whom he would deliver Israel. How that deliverance would be accomplished remained obscure. That it would have to happen was the conviction born of the prophetic belief. If Israel’s God was indeed the world’s creator, he was under a solemn obligation to bring it to pass. He would, despite all, be faithful to his covenant, to his purposes for creation itself. The early Christians believed that this was what had just happened in and through Israel’s Messiah, Jesus. So why would this whole story lead to the idea of a coming climactic moment of “forgiveness of sins”? Why would Paul or anyone else suggest that when God dealt with sins this would be “in accordance with the Bible”? To answer those questions we need to retrieve and develop our earlier discussion of “sin” and show what it meant within this larger story. “Sin” and “Exile” in a Biblical Framework The word “sin” is not only sad and ugly as it stands; it is much misunderstood. In Western culture it has come to be associated, rightly or wrongly, with a killjoy, finger-wagging, holier-than-thou moralism, with a fussy, nit-picking concentration on small personal misdemeanors that ignore major injustice and oppression. Talk about “sin” is regularly associated with a dualistic rejection of the “world,” with a smug “otherworldly” pietism, and with a severe story line that cheerfully sends most of the human race into everlasting fire. There are of course many preachers and teachers who have spoken wisely and biblically about “sin.” It remains an enormously important topic. But what I have just described is how a great many people, both inside and outside the church, perceive the language of “sin.” One of the reasons some former “insiders” are now “outsiders” is because they have reacted against such perceived teaching. There was a time when the people who worried about “sin” were impenitent wrongdoers. Today, the wrongdoers aren’t worried any more. The people banging on about “sin” are those who think it’s someone else’s problem.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  Once we say that the aim of God’s saving plan is the new heaven and new earth, with resurrection bodies for his redeemed people, then the means by which we are brought to that goal, leaving sin and death behind, must be rethought as well. Atonement (how humans are rescued from their plight and restored to their intended place within the loving and creative purposes of God) must dovetail with eschatology (what God ultimately intends for the world and for humans). And if we rethink our eschatology, as I have been trying to do over the last decade or two, we must rethink our view of atonement as well. In fact, the two go together very closely in the New Testament: the cross was the moment when something happened as a result of which the world became a different place, inaugurating God’s future plan. The revolution began then and there; Jesus’s resurrection was the first sign that it was indeed under way. That is what the present book is about. The unresolved theological problems of the sixteenth century were made worse, in my view, by the collusion of the Western churches with the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Many Christians in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries still held to a robust resurrection hope. That, indeed, formed part of the postmillennial “Puritan hope,” reflecting a mood of cultural optimism as well as spiritual hope. But by the nineteenth century the notion of “going home to heaven” had all but taken over. The essential Epicureanism of the Enlightenment insisted on a great gulf between earth and heaven. Many devout Christians accepted that unbiblical cosmology, opting for a detached spirituality (a heavenly-mindedness with a questionable earthly use) and an escapist eschatology (leaving the world and going to heaven). Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, on both sides of the Atlantic, this has taken us back once more to the medieval heaven-and-hell eschatology, which has radically conditioned both soteriology (“How are we saved for that goal?”) and missiology (“How should the church set forward God’s work of salvation?”). True, the doctrine of purgatory was not so popular outside Roman circles in the nineteenth century. But “penal substitution,” which had been emphasized partly in order to ward off that idea, then found a new home in the Western piety that focused not on God’s kingdom coming on earth as in heaven, but on my sin, my heavenly (that is, nonworldly) salvation, and of course my Savior. This, indeed, presses a particular question upon us: if many of our contemporary ideas about what was achieved on the cross belong with a nineteenth-century view of “sinners” being “saved” and “going to heaven,” what might the cross mean for the earlier view in which the gospel is transforming the whole world?