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 alone already tells us that he had in mind a highly dramatic and story-laden climax to his public career: this, it seems, was how he believed Israel’s God would become king. With Passover as the context and his repeated clashes with hostile forces both human and nonhuman during his public career, there is every reason to suppose that he saw the task as paralleling the liberation of Israel from Egypt, an event preceded by clashes with Pharaoh and his entourage and by the “plagues” visited on Egypt. We do not need to propose exact typological matches for elements in the Exodus narrative and elements in Jesus’s work and teaching. Indeed, to do so might be to miss the point. What matters is that the entire Passover context made sense of the entire event that Jesus envisaged as he went up to Jerusalem for that final visit. Passover said, “Freedom—now!” and “Kingdom—now!” This seems to be exactly what Jesus wanted to convey or, better, what Jesus believed would happen . He was not, after all, offering a new theory for people to get their minds around. He was announcing that something was happening and that it would happen immediately, an event through which freedom and kingdom would become realities in a whole new way. He was launching a revolution. What he did in Jerusalem brings all this into sharp focus. By itself, his dramatic action in the Temple might have various interpretations, as it has had in much subsequent discussion. Where people have tried to turn Jesus’s one-off kingdom movement into a “religion,” it has been seen as an attempt to clean up the “religious” establishment, to oppose commercialism, and so forth. This is all very worthy and no doubt necessary from time to time; but it has almost nothing to do with a one-off new Passover, a unique Exodus moment. When we put Jesus’s Temple action (Mark 11:12–18) into a Passover context, however, it suddenly carries the memory of Moses’s confrontation with Pharaoh. This echo is heightened when we add in material (Mark 13:1–31 and elsewhere) in which language about the imminent fall of the Temple awakens biblical echoes of the fall of Babylon. More particularly, what Jesus did in the Temple, interpreted (as seems most likely) as a Jeremiah-like symbolic prediction of its forthcoming destruction, must have had to do in some way with his aim of declaring that Israel’s God, returning to his people at last, had found the Temple sadly wanting and was establishing something different instead. This in turn points back once more to the Exodus. Moses had told Pharaoh all along that the point of the Israelites leaving Egypt was ultimately in order to worship their God (Exod. 3:12, 18; 4:23; 5:1–3; 7:16; 8:1, 20;9:1, 13; 10:3, 24–26).

• From The Prophetic Imagination (1978)

  of chaos, to barren Sarah, and to oppressed Egyptian slaves. The speech of God is first about an alternative future. In offering symbols the prophet has two tasks. One is to mine the memory of this people and educate them to use the tools of hope. The other is to recognize how singularly words, speech, language, and phrase shape consciousness and define reality. The prophet is the one who, by use of these tools of hope, contradicts the presumed world of the kings, showing both that that presumed world does not square with the facts and that we have been taught a lie and have believed it because the people with the hardware and the printing press told us it was that way. And so the offering of symbols is a job not for a timid clerk who simply shares the inventory but for people who know something different and are prepared, out of their own anguish and amazement, to know that the closed world of managed reality is false. The prophetic imagination knows that the real world is the one that has its beginning and dynamic in the promising speech of God and that this is true even in a world where kings have tried to banish all speech but their own. Hope and Yearning The task of prophetic imagination and ministry is to bring to public expression those very hopes and yearnings that have been denied so long and suppressed so deeply that we no longer know they are there. [6] Hope, on the one hand, is an absurdity too embarrassing to speak about, for it flies in the face of all those claims we have been told are facts. Hope is the refusal to accept the reading of reality which is the majority opinion; and one does that only at great political and existential risk. On the other hand, hope is subversive, for it limits the grandiose pretension of the present, [7] daring to announce that the present to which we have all made commitments is now called into question. Thus the exilic community lacked the tools of hope. The language of hope and the ethos of amazement have been partly forfeited because they are an embarrassment. The language of hope and the ethos of amazement have been partly squelched because they are a threat.

• From The Prophetic Imagination (1978)

  But that genuinely historical event has important political dimensions, as is recognized especially in Matthew. On the one hand, it is seen as a threat to the regime (Matt 28:11-15), whereas, on the other hand, the risen Jesus announces his new royal authority. He is now the king who displaces the king. His resurrection is the end of the nonhistory taught in the royal school and a new history begins for those who stood outside of history. This new history gives persons new identities (Matt 28:19) and a new ethic (28:20), even as it begins on the seashore among the dead enslavers (Exod 14:30). 1 . On the distinction between hope and process or optimism, see Douglas John Hall, Lighten Our Darkness: Toward an Indigenous Theology of the Cross (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1976), chaps. 1 and 3; also Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope: On the Ground and the Implications of a Christian Eschatology, trans. J. W. Leitch (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), chap. 2. ↵ 2 . The census stands in Israel for the ability of the royal apparatus to regiment people against freedom and justice; thus it evokes curse (2 Samuel 24). Perhaps with intuitive correctness, the Chronicler has credited the policy to Satan (1 Chronicles 21). There is indeed something satanic about such an exercise of control. Frank Moore Cross links the census to the entire development of royal ideology ( Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic: Essays on the History of the Religion of Israel [Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1973], 227–40). It is not difficult to see why it was later discerned as satanic. Thus the discernment of Satan as having socioeconomic dimensions. Walter Brueggemann, “2 Samuel 21–24: An Appendix of Deconstruction?” CBQ 50 (1988): 383–97; idem, First and Second Samuel , Interpretation (Atlanta: John Knox, 1990), 350–57; K. C. Hanson, “When the King Crosses the Line: Royal Deviance and Restitution in Levantine Ideologies,” BTB 26 (1996): 11–25. ↵ 3 . On the restoration of language as the first act of hope, see Dorothee Soelle, Suffering, trans. E. R. Kalin (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975). ↵ 4 . John J. Pilch, “Selecting an Appropriate Model: Leprosy—A Test Case,” in Healing in the New Testament: Insights from Medical and Mediterranean Anthropology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000), 39–54; Jerome H. Neyrey, “Clean/Unclean, Pure/Polluted, and Holy/Profane: The Idea and the System of Purity,” in The Social Sciences and New Testament Interpretation, ed. R. L. Rohrbaugh (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1996), 80–104. ↵ 5 . In commenting on the Beatitudes, José Porfirio Miranda observes the socioeconomic dimension to the blessing: “I wonder where there is more faith and hope: in believing ‘in the God who raises the dead’ (Rom 4:17) or in believing like Luke in the God who ‘filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty’ (Luke 1:53)?” ( Marx and the Bible: A Critique of the Philosophy of Oppression, trans. J. Eagleson [Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1974], 217). ↵ 6 . On the claims of the Beatitudes, see Jürgen Moltmann, The Church in the Power of the Spirit: A Contribution of Messianic Ecclesiology, trans. M. Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 80– 81. He concludes that the “people of the Beatitudes” must be converted to the future. On the

• From White Oleander (1999)

  You’ve got to believe me.” Nobody said anything. We left Starr crying in monotonous sobs, took Davey to the emergency hospital, where they popped his shoulder back in, taped it down. We concocted a story about how we were playing on the river. He jumped off a rock and fell. It sounded stupid even to me, but Davey made us promise not to say it was Starr. He still loved her, after everything. EASTER . A pure crystalline morning where you could see every bush and boulder on the mountain. The air was so clean it hurt. Starr was in the kitchen fixing a ham, pushing little points of cloves into the squares she’d scored into the top. She’d been sober for two weeks, taking a meeting a day. We were all making an effort. Davey’s sling was a constant reminder of how bad it could get. Starr put the ham in the oven, and we all went to church, even Uncle Ray, though he stayed behind in the car for a minute to get stoned before he came in, I could smell it as he passed by me to take the seat between Owen and Starr. Her eyes begged Reverend Thomas for a dose of the Blood. I tried to pray, to feel once again that there was something bigger than just me, someone who cared what I did, but it was gone, I could no longer detect the presence of God in that cinder-block church or in what was left of my soul. Starr yearned toward the sagging Jesus on the pearwood cross, while Uncle Ray cleaned his fingernails with his Swiss Army knife and I waited for the singing to start. Afterward we stopped at a gas station and Uncle Ray bought her an Easter lily, the promise of a new life. At home, the trailer smelled of ham. Starr served up lunch, creamed corn, canned pineapple rings, brown-and-serve rolls. Ray and I couldn’t look at each other, or it would all start again. We looked at the little kids, we played with our food, congratulated Starr on her cooking. Ray said Reverend Thomas wasn’t half bad. We had to put our eyes anywhere but on the other one’s face. I studied the little bowl of pink peppermint ice cream with jelly beans sprinkled over, and the Easter lily in the middle of the table in its foil-wrapped pot. We hadn’t been together since we took Davey to the emergency room. We hadn’t talked about it, how it had all gone too far. All afternoon, we watched Easter shows on TV. Pink-skinned evangelists and choirs in matching sateen gowns. Congregations the size of rock ’n’ roll concerts. Hands waved in the air like sunflowers. He is risen, Christ the Lord. I wished I believed in Him again. “We should be there,” Starr said. “Next year, we’ll do the Crystal Cathedral, Ray, let’s.” “Sure,” Ray said.

• From The Prophetic Imagination (1978)

  newness in it. Doxology is the ultimate challenge to the language of managed reality, and it alone is the universe of discourse in which energy is possible. [19] It is worth asking how the language of doxology can be practiced in the empire. Only where there is doxology is there any emergence of compassion, for doxology cuts through the ideology that pretends to be a given. Only where there is doxology can there be justice, for such songs transfigure fear into energy. I shall not now explore further the second and third Mosaic memories of sojourn and Sinai, although that is worth doing. The wilderness theme asks about immobilizing satiation; the Sinai theme speaks of God’s freedom for the neighbor. Taken altogether, the Mosaic tradition affirms three things: 1 . The alternative life is lived in this very particular historical and historicizing community. 2 . This community criticizes and energizes by its special memories that embrace discontinuity and genuine breaks from imperial reality. 3 . This community, gathered around the memories, knows it is defined by and is at the disposal of a God who as yet is unco-opted and uncontained by the empire. 1 . To be sure, the prophet lives in tension with the tradition. While the prophet is indeed shaped by the tradition, breaking free from the tradition to assert the new freedom of God is also characteristic of the prophet. Compare Walther Zimmerli, “Prophetic Proclamation and Reinterpretation,” in Tradition and Theology in the Old Testament , ed. Douglas A. Knight (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1977), 69–100. More broadly, Joseph Blenkinsopp, Prophecy and Canon: A Contribution to the Study of Jewish Origins, Studies of Judaism and Christianity in Antiquity 3 (Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame Univ. Press, 1977), has explored the authority found in the ongoing tension between prophet and tradition. ↵ 2 . Formally this argument is informed by the sociology of Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966); Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1967); Thomas Luckmann, The Invisible Religion: The Problem of Religion in Modern Society (New York: Macmillan, 1967). But our concern is with the substance of prophetic ministry and not simply with formal understandings. In terms of substance, the issue has been well put by Douglas John Hall, Lighten Our Darkness: Toward an Indigenous Theology of the Cross (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1976). ↵ 3 . The data on prophetic ecstasy has been summarized by Johannes Lindblom, Prophecy in Ancient

• From The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)

  People who feel safe and meaningfully connected with others have little reason to squander their lives doing drugs or staring numbly at television; they don’t feel compelled to stuff themselves with carbohydrates or assault their fellow human beings. However, if nothing they do seems to make a difference, they feel trapped and become susceptible to the lure of pills, gang leaders, extremist religions, or violent political movements—anybody and anything that promises relief. As the ACE study has shown, child abuse and neglect is the single most preventable cause of mental illness, the single most common cause of drug and alcohol abuse, and a significant contributor to leading causes of death such as diabetes, heart disease, cancer, stroke, and suicide. My colleagues and I focus much of our work where trauma has its greatest impact: on children and adolescents. Since we came together to establish the National Child Traumatic Stress Network in 2001, it has grown into a collaborative network of more than 150 centers nationwide, each of which has created programs in schools, juvenile justice systems, child welfare agencies, homeless shelters, military facilities, and residential group homes. The Trauma Center is one of NCTSN’s Treatment Development and Evaluation sites. My colleagues Joe Spinazzola, Margaret Blaustein, and I have developed comprehensive programs for children and adolescents that we, with the help of trauma-savvy colleagues in Hartford, Chicago, Houston, San Francisco, Anchorage, Los Angeles, and New York, are now implementing. Our team selects a particular area of the country to work in every two years, relying on local contacts to identify organizations that are energetic, open, and well respected; these will eventually serve as new nodes for treatment dissemination. For example, I collaborated for one two-year period with colleagues in Missoula, Montana, to help develop a culturally sensitive trauma program on Blackfoot Indian reservations. The greatest hope for traumatized, abused, and neglected children is to receive a good education in schools where they are seen and known, where they learn to regulate themselves, and where they can develop a sense of agency. At their best, schools can function as islands of safety in a chaotic world. They can teach children how their bodies and brains work and how they can understand and deal with their emotions. Schools can play a significant role in instilling the resilience necessary to deal with the traumas of neighborhoods or families. If parents are forced to work two jobs to eke out a living, or if they are too impaired, overwhelmed, or depressed to be attuned to the needs of their kids, schools by default have to be the places where children are taught self-leadership and an internal locus of control.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  Even at the time—especially at the time!—this must have sounded completely crazy. (Well, Paul did say that the “word of the cross” looked like madness.) One of the Caesars was still on the throne. His local officials around the world were still running the show with brutal efficiency. The chief priests were still in charge of the Temple in Jerusalem. Paul himself was in prison! So is this statement about God’s overthrowing the rulers and authorities in the cross of Jesus simply a bit of over-the-top bravado, whistling in the wind, shaking an apostolic fist at the cosmos? No doubt the rhetoric is deliberately designed to sound a bit like that, but underneath there is a logic that is crystal in its clarity and compelling in its conviction. The power of the rulers has been broken—the new Passover, to use our earlier language, has now taken place for certain—because in the messianic events “God made us alive together with Jesus, forgiving us all our offenses.” Victory over the powers, once more, is accomplished through the forgiveness of sins. Paul adds a note about God “blotting out the handwriting that was against us,” referring obliquely to the Jewish law, which had kept non-Jews out of the reckoning and had pronounced condemnation for disobedience on the Jews themselves. That has been done away with. It has been nailed to the cross. (Remember Gal. 2:19: “Through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to God”? This is a very similar point.) Once again, it is because of this victory that the Gentile mission was even thinkable. The “powers” that had held the nations captive had been defeated. The slaves could now walk free. So how does “forgiveness” result in “victory over the powers”? Here we go back to our earlier analysis of sin and idolatry. The idols—and that includes human rulers when they are idolized, whether formally (as in the Roman Empire) or informally—gain their power because humans give it to them. Humans are designed to worship God and exercise responsibility in his world. But when humans worship idols instead, so that their image-bearing humanness corrupts itself into sin, missing the mark of the human vocation, they hand over their power to those same idols. The idols then use this power to tyrannize and ultimately to destroy their devotees and the wider world. But when sins are forgiven, the idols lose their power. The reason Paul can be so triumphantly certain that by six o’clock on Good Friday the “rulers and authorities” had lost their power was that he knew, because of the resurrection of Jesus, that sin itself had been defeated. And one of the ways in which he knew in practice that this had happened was because, when he announced Jesus as Lord around the non-Jewish world, people believed it and gladly gave their allegiance to this new Master. The liberating power of the gospel was itself a demonstration of the truth it proclaimed.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  The old apartheid system was broken not simply through protests and boycotts from secular moralists in the rest of the world, but through the tireless and costly work and prayer of Desmond Tutu and many other Christians, some working in public view and many under the radar. Those of us who remember the 1970s will recall that commentators predicted, as a matter of certainty, a major civil war in South Africa. That this did not happen was largely due to that patient, prayerful struggle. Similar things might be said about the work of Martin Luther King, Jr., and many others in America, speaking with a powerful Christian voice that refused to be drowned out by the Ku Klux Klan, on the one hand, or the militant Black Power activists, on the other. These things have happened in my lifetime, and they are neither to be discounted nor explained away as the inevitable progress of enlightened liberal values in the modern world. As we should know, there is nothing inevitable about such things. What we witnessed was the power of the cross to snatch power from the enslaving idols. It is comparatively easy to name yesterday’s idolatrous systems. It is much harder to point to the equivalents in today’s and tomorrow’s world. Here the church needs the wisdom of the serpent as well as the innocence of the dove, and both often seem to be in short supply. But when Christians in non-Western countries look at Europe and America, they see, behind our own much-vaunted “freedoms,” another set of idolatries and enslavements. The familiar trio of money, sex, and power are enthroned as securely as ever. A sign in my local charity shop tells me that a quarter of the world’s wealth is owned by so few people that they could all fit on an ordinary bus, while millions of desperately poor people save up what little they have to pay people smugglers to ferry them dangerously across the Mediterranean, where, if they make it across the sea, barbed wire and refugee camps await them and local politicians agonize over how to cope. You don’t have to hold a doctorate in global economics to know that something is radically wrong with whatever “systems” we have, or don’t have, in place. Western politicians clearly have no ready answers, bent as they are on solving yesterday’s problems with pragmatic short-term solutions. We don’t have a narrative that could make sense of the problem, let alone one that might solve it.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  What God said of Jesus in his resurrection God says of all who are “in him.” People sometimes play the language of “justification” off against the language of “incorporation,” but this is clearly a mistake. We see the same point (being justified in the Messiah) in Galatians 2:17, or for that matter Philippians 3:9. This is why, summing up the argument in 4:24–25, he says that Jesus was “handed over because of our trespasses and raised because of our justification.” It isn’t that the resurrection of Jesus causes that “justification.” Rather, it is the sign that this justification has in principle taken place on the cross . As Paul says in Romans 5:9, we are justified “by his blood”; and, as he declares in 1 Corinthians 15:17, “If the Messiah wasn’t raised, . . . you are still in your sins”—a throwaway remark, and all the more important because of it. Here we are near the heart of Paul’s theology, and indeed of this present book: on the cross the real revolution took place , and the resurrection is the first sign that it has happened. Among many results of this revolution, justification takes its vital place, partly because of the assurance of sins forgiven, but also because of the assurance of membership in Abraham’s family (again, as in Gal. 3). Behind both of these, there is for Paul the sense that with the victory of the cross the powers that have ruled the world, the idols that have kept the human race in their grip, have been overthrown. As in John 12:30–32, this is the necessary step before the peoples of the world can be set free from their present “rulers” and drawn to Israel’s Messiah. In any case, the point of justification “in the present time” is that it anticipates the verdict that will be announced on the final day. This final verdict, whether of “condemnation” or of “justification,” was described in 2:1–16, and Paul looks ahead to that moment in 8:31–39—but with the knowledge that “there is no condemnation for those in the Messiah, Jesus” (8:1), because God has already condemned sin itself (8:3). The point Paul is making in Romans 3 is that this verdict is already known when someone “believes in the one who raised from the dead Jesus our Lord” (4:24). One of the themes of Romans 5–8 is the explanation of how the verdict issued in the present corresponds to the verdict that will be issued in the future (in the form, as with Jesus himself, of people being raised from the dead).

• From The Prophetic Imagination (1978)

  will be prophetic voices crying out in the wilderness of the dominant culture of our day. [4] Aside from the particular enquiry that concerns Smith, his study is a rich and suggestive way in which the themes exposited in my book may engage with actual ecclesial practice. While the environment of technological consumerism in the United States is not a welcoming habitat for prophetic ministry, these several instances of prophetic ministry that I have cited are grounds for taking heart. Obviously every reader can add to that list of local efforts at resistance and alternatives. The interplay between prophetic texts heard imaginatively and concrete practice is a defining one for the church that will become more crucial and more difficult, and perhaps more joyous, in time to come. 1 . Andrew McAuley Smith, “Prophets in the Pews: Testing Walter Brueggemann’s Thesis in The Prophetic Imagination in the Practice of Ministry” (D.Min. thesis, Princeton Seminary, 1999). ↵ 2 . Ibid., 49–86. ↵ 3 . Ibid., 92. ↵ 4 . Ibid., 120. ↵

• From The Prophetic Imagination (1978)

  community to be shaped from the poor, hungry, and grieving is called to disengage from the woe pattern of life to end its fascination with that other ordering, and to embrace the blessing pattern. The hope Jesus announces here is heavy and hard. It contrasts sharply with the cheap and cross-free hope of the royal consciousness. Hope is easy and flimsy for those who already have richness, fullness, and laughter now; but hope is hard for those who are denied the riches, prevented from fullness, and have no reason to laugh. The strangeness of this prophetic energizing is that it is addressed precisely to the nonpersons consigned to nonhistory. What is offered here is not a general moral reflection but a concrete offer to a specific constituency with a direct sanctioning of an alternative way. So the Lucan teaching is with “his eyes on his disciples” (Luke 6:20). His disciples constitute precisely the ones disengaged from the old ordering that is under criticism and lacks energy. His disciples are those who have been denied riches, prevented from fullness, and have no reason to laugh, those who are able to disengage from the woe pattern of life that can only lead to death, who have ended their fascination with that other ordering, and who can believe that these new words open up futures that the royal consciousness cannot offer. These three blessing statements, surely a Lucan sample expressed as a longer list in Matthew, clearly express the issues of criticism and energy. Criticism to death is for those who have riches, for riches reflect the world of Pharaoh and Solomon and always concern the use of the goods of the brothers and sisters. The way of exploitation and confiscation leads to death. This is an old prophetic critique, but it is matched by this remarkable futuring. The new futuring of God is for those who have not only resisted these exploitative practices but have been victimized by them. The future will be given not to people in their fullness but to those who have been forcibly denied enough. The future is given to those who are experienced in groaning. The future is denied to those who have been cynical and calloused and self-deceiving enough to rejoice in the present ordering and are unable to grieve about the ruin toward which the royal community is headed. Jesus’ teaching in these hard sayings reflects two central issues of the prophetic tradition. First, the word is addressed to and received by a minority

• From The Prophetic Imagination (1978)

  Third, the ultimate criticism ends in submission (Luke 23:46), the last thing possible in a world of competence and control. Thus in that very world of control Jesus presents a new way of faithfulness that completely subverts the dominant way. And finally, his assertion of paradise is a speech about the delegitimization of the world that killed him (Luke 23:43). Now he speaks from a very different value system . The very one called criminal is now welcomed to paradise; the outcast is the welcomed one. Jesus’ new way of acting and speaking announces that another way is now operating. It is the final assertion that the old way is null and void. Too much should not be made of these isolated statements of the cross, for each has its own complex development in the history of the tradition, which is undoubtedly in part a history of the liturgy. Nonetheless, together they form a statement that completely refutes the claims of those who seem to be in charge. These statements (a plea of insanity, a cry of abandonment, a groan of submission, and an assertion of a new way of graciousness) are a refutation of the world now brought to an end. The old order may be characterized as madness masquerading as control; phony assurance of sustained well-being; a desperate attempt to control and not submit; and a grim system of retribution. Thus each statement of Jesus is a counter-possibility that places all the old ways in question. The passion narrative of Jesus provides ground for prophetic criticism. It hints at a fresh way for the repentance of Lent. Christological Hymn. This theological tradition of life in the shape of death and of power in the form of suffering is more than the dominant culture can receive or accept. That alternative discernment is evident in the theology of the cross both as narrated by Mark and as articulated by Paul. While many texts might be cited, here I mention the ancient hymn utilized by Paul: Christ Jesus, who though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord,

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  In Luke’s gospel this is expressed in several sharply personal scenes that likewise explain the means through which the goal of the kingdom is realized. Jesus is accused of crimes that Luke’s readers know he has not committed, but that are characteristic of the many revolutionary groups around at the time (23:2). He is thus to die the death of the brigand, the revolutionary, in place of rebel Israel as a whole . This is captured in the way Luke somewhat belabors his explanation of the “exchange” of Barabbas for Jesus: “Take him away!” they shouted out all together. “Release Barabbas for us!” (Barabbas had been thrown into prison because of an uprising that had taken place in the city, and for murder.) . . . Pilate gave his verdict that their request should be granted. He released the man they asked for, the one who’d been thrown into prison because of rebellion and murder, and gave Jesus over to their demands. (23:18–19, 24–25) In case we missed the point, Luke says it again, this time through the strange conversation between the two brigands crucified alongside Jesus: One of the bad characters who was hanging there began to insult him. “Aren’t you the Messiah?” he said. “Rescue yourself—and us, too!” But the other one told him off. “Don’t you fear God?” he said. “You’re sharing the same fate that he is! In our case it’s fair enough; we’re getting exactly what we asked for. But this fellow hasn’t done anything out of order.” (23:39–41) This time Luke takes the whole question a giant step forward. Jesus is dying the death that others deserved and he did not. The man who has seen that strange but powerful truth then turns to Jesus himself: “Jesus,” he went on, “remember me when you finally become king.” (23:42) This in turn elicits the famous response from Jesus, promising him, as he had promised the disciples at the Last Supper, that the kingdom would be arriving sooner than anyone had expected, because Jesus’s death would bring it about. “Paradise” here is not, of course, the final resting place of either Jesus or the man asking the question. Nor does Jesus’s “kingdom” consist in people “going to heaven after they die,” though this passage has often been mistakenly read that way.

• From The Prophetic Imagination (1978)

  prophets did indeed advocate systemic justice. The reason for hostility, rather, is because the enunciation of the God of the covenant (who is the creator God) renders the claims of the totalism penultimate, while every totalizing regime (as in “Make America Great Again”) presents itself as ultimate. Prophetic deconstruction dismisses the ultimacy of allegiance and submission expected by the totalism. The enunciation of this God undermines all such pretensions. In both judgment and hope, prophetic articulation—in elusive poetic form— voices the interruption of the known controlled world of the totalism and the emergence of an alternative world that is dramatically other than the world managed by the totalism. The prophets voice a world other than the visible, palpable world that is in front of their hearers. For that reason, prophetic utterance must perforce be “imaginative,” an act of imagination by word and image that evokes and hosts a world other than the one readily available. Thus the prophets, with their passionate rootage in tradition, their passionate grasp of social reality, and their passionate force of language, imagine the present world under threat and judgment, even while the regime continues to imagine itself as absolute and abiding. The prophets can even imagine the termination of the Holy City over which the regime presides. Thus the prophets, conversely, imagine a new world coming outside the totalism that the totalism thinks is impossible. They imagine a new sociopolitical, this-world emergence beyond the capacity of the regime. The totalism imagines itself absolute to perpetuity, while the prophetic imagination—in contradiction—imagines an old world ending and a new world emerging. It is a contest of imaginations that admits no easy resolution but that puts the hearer in crisis between a failed imagination and a new inexplicable imagination . [3] In the formation of Scripture’s canon, that contest between imaginations is resolved on behalf of prophetic imagination while dismissing the imagination of the totalism. Prophetic imagination is judged in the canon to be adequately truthful, even when on occasion historical events say otherwise. It has become clear to me, albeit belatedly, that the paradigm I have offered in this book has functioned as leitmotif for much of my subsequent work. Thus, I have further explicitly exposited such thought in Hopeful Imagination , in

• From The Prophetic Imagination (1978)

  It is mind-boggling to think of the public expression of hope as a way of subverting the dominant royal embrace of despair. I am not talking about optimism or development or evolutionary advances but rather about promises made by one who stands distant from us and over against us but remarkably for us . Speech about hope cannot be explanatory and scientifically argumentative; rather, it must be lyrical in the sense that it touches the hopeless person at many different points. More than that, however, speech about hope must be primally theological, which is to say that it must be in the language of covenant between a personal God and a community. Promise belongs to the world of trusting speech and faithful listening. It will not be reduced to the “cool” language of philosophy or the private discourse of psychology. It will finally be about God and us, about his faithfulness that vetoes our faithlessness. Those who would be prophetic will need to embrace that absurd practice and that subversive activity. The urging to bring hope to public expression is based on a conviction about believing folks. It is premised on the capacity to evoke and bring to expression the hope that is within us (see 1 Pet 3:15). It is there within and among us, for we are ordained of God to be people of hope. It is there by virtue of our being in the image of the promissory God. It is sealed there in the sacrament of baptism. It is dramatized in the Eucharist—“until he come.” It is the structure of every creed that ends by trusting in God’s promises. Hope is the decision to which God invites Israel, a decision against despair, against permanent consignment to chaos (Isa 45:18), oppression, barrenness, and exile. Hope is the primary prophetic idiom not because of the general dynamic of history or because of the signs of the times but because the prophet speaks to a people who, willy-nilly, are God’s people. Hope is what this community must do because it is God’s community invited to be in God’s pilgrimage. And as Israel is invited to grieve God’s grief over the ending, so Israel is now invited to hope in God’s promises. That very act of hope is the confession that we are not children of the royal consciousness. Of course prophetic hope easily lends itself to distortion. It can be made so grandiose that it does not touch reality; it can be trivialized so that it does not impact reality; it can be “bread and circuses” so that it only supports and abets

• From The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)

  As of 2014 our EMDR study had the most positive outcome of any published study of people who developed their PTSD in reaction to a traumatic event as an adult. But despite these results, and those of dozens of other studies, many of my colleagues continue to be skeptical about EMDR— perhaps because it seems too good to be true, too simple to be so powerful. I surely can understand that sort of skepticism—EMDR is an unusual procedure. Interestingly, in the first solid scientific study using EMDR in combat veterans with PTSD, EMDR was expected to do so poorly that it was included as the control condition for comparison with biofeedback-assisted relaxation therapy. To the researchers’ surprise, twelve sessions of EMDR turned out to be the more effective treatment.[3] EMDR has since become one of the treatments for PTSD sanctioned by the Department of Veterans Affairs. Is EMDR a Form of Exposure Therapy?Some psychologists have hypothesized that EMDR actually desensitizes people to the traumatic material and thus is related to exposure therapy. A more accurate description would be that it integrates the traumatic material. As our research showed, after EMDR people thought of the trauma as a coherent event in the past, instead of experiencing sensations and images divorced from any context. Memories evolve and change. Immediately after a memory is laid down, it undergoes a lengthy process of integration and reinterpretation—a process that automatically happens in the mind/brain without any input from the conscious self. When the process is complete, the experience is integrated with other life events and stops having a life of its own.[4] As we have seen, in PTSD this process fails and the memory remains stuck—undigested and raw. Unfortunately, few psychologists are taught during their training how the memory-processing system in the brain works. This omission can lead to misguided approaches to treatment. In contrast to phobias (such as a spider phobia, which is based on a specific irrational fear), posttraumatic stress is the result of a fundamental reorganization of the central nervous system based on having experienced an actual threat of annihilation, (or seeing someone else being annihilated), which reorganizes self experience (as helpless) and the interpretation of reality (the entire world is a dangerous place). During exposure patients initially become extremely upset. As they revisit the traumatic experience, they show sharp increases in their heart rate, blood pressure, and stress hormones. But if they manage to stay with the treatment and keep reliving their trauma, they slowly become less reactive and less prone to disintegrate when they recall the event. As a result, they get lower scores on their PTSD ratings. However, as far as we know, simply exposing someone to the old trauma does not integrate the memory into the overall context of their lives, and it rarely restores them to the level of joyful engagement with people and pursuits they had prior to the trauma.

• From The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)

  Theater of War performances are followed by a town hall–style discussion. I attended a reading of Ajax in Cambridge, Massachusetts, shortly after the news media had publicized a 27 percent increase in suicides among combat veterans over the previous three years. Some forty people—Vietnam veterans, military wives, recently discharged men and women who had served in Iraq and Afghanistan—lined up behind the microphone. Many of them quoted lines from the play as they spoke about their sleepless nights, drug addiction, and alienation from their families. The atmosphere was electric, and afterward the audience huddled in the foyer, some holding each other and crying, others in deep conversation. As Doerries later said: “Anyone who has come into contact with extreme pain, suffering or death has no trouble understanding Greek drama. It’s all about bearing witness to the stories of veterans.”[3] Keeping Together in TimeCollective movement and music create a larger context for our lives, a meaning beyond our individual fate. Religious rituals universally involve rhythmic movements, from davening at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem to the sung liturgy and gestures of the Catholic Mass to moving meditation in Buddhist ceremonies and the rhythmic prayer rituals performed five times a day by devout Muslims. Music was a backbone of the civil rights movement in the United States. Anyone alive at that time will not forget the lines of marchers, arms linked, singing “We Shall Overcome” as they walked steadily toward the police who were massed to stop them. Music binds together people who might individually be terrified but who collectively become powerful advocates for themselves and others. Along with language, dancing, marching, and singing are uniquely human ways to install a sense of hope and courage. I observed the force of communal rhythms in action when I watched Archbishop Desmond Tutu conduct public hearings for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa in 1996. These events were framed by collective singing and dancing. Witnesses recounted the unspeakable atrocities that had been inflicted on them and their families. When they became overwhelmed, Tutu would interrupt their testimony and lead the entire audience in prayer, song, and dance until the witnesses could contain their sobbing and halt their physical collapse. This enabled participants to pendulate in and out of reliving their horror and eventually to find words to describe what had happened to them. I fully credit Tutu and the other member of the commission with averting what might have been an orgy of revenge, as is so common when victims are finally set free.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  This is where the promise of “resurrection,” the promised restoration after the “death” of exile, fits in. And that leads us back once more to Isaiah 40–55, where the prophet declares that the Glory of YHWH will be revealed once more and all flesh shall see it, because sins have been forgiven, the people have been pardoned; the exile will be over, Babylon will be destroyed, the ancient covenant will be renewed, and creation itself will flourish as always intended. Once again we note that this is the passage in which we find, in chapters 52 and 53, the most striking of all biblical images about one person suffering and dying on behalf of the many. All this—the rich combination of story and promise, of Glory and Temple, of exile and restoration—would be in the front of people’s minds during the Second Temple period, that is, between the late fifth century BC and the late first century AD. Throughout that period, though the Temple was rebuilt and the sacrifices regularly offered until AD 70, when the Romans destroyed it once and for all, nobody ever suggested that the divine Presence had actually returned in power and glory. Like all holy places, the Temple undoubtedly retained a strong sense of memory, of “presence” in that sense. It does to this day, which is why devout Jews pray fervently at the Western Wall, often scribbling prayers, folding them up, and pushing them into the cracks between the massive, ancient stones. But they do not suppose that the divine Glory, which the later rabbis referred to as the Shekinah, the “tabernacling Presence” of God, is there in the same way as in Exodus 40, 1 Kings 8, Isaiah’s vision, or the promises of Ezekiel 43 or Isaiah 40 and 52. Isaiah spoke, after all, of the sentinels on Jerusalem’s walls lifting up their voices and singing for joy, because “in plain sight they see the return of YHWH to Zion” (52:8). That never happened. The postexilic prophets—Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi—insisted that it would happen, but it hadn’t yet. Centuries later, the rabbis looked back on this period and produced a list, with a sense of gloomy resignation, of all the ways in which the Second Temple was deficient in comparison with the First Temple. Notable on the list of what was missing in the Second Temple was the Shekinah itself, the glorious divine Presence. In Jesus’s day, the hope was alive that the Glory would return at last. But nobody knew exactly what that would mean, how it would happen, or what it would look like. To these questions the New Testament writers offer an answer that is so explosive, so unexpected, so revolutionary, that it has remained entirely off the radar for most modern readers, including modern Christian readers.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  This means that in order to appropriate this for ourselves, to benefit from this story, it is not simply a matter of believing a particular abstract doctrine, this or that theory of how “atonement” might be thought to “work.” No doubt that can help, though with the abstractions can come distortions, as we have seen. No, the gospels invite us to make this story our own , to live within the narrative in all its twists and turns, to see ourselves among the crowds following Jesus and witnessing his kingdom-bringing work, to see ourselves also in the long-range continuation of that narrative that we call, in fear and trembling (because we know its deep ambiguities), the life of the church. In particular, as followers of Jesus from the very beginning have known, we are to make the story our own by the repeated meals in which the Last Supper is brought to life once more. If that was how Jesus wanted his followers not only to understand, but also to appropriate for themselves the meaning of the death he was to die, there is every reason to take it seriously as the sign and foretaste of the eventual kingdom, carrying within it the assurance that we too are those who share in the “forgiveness of sins.” And, with that, the gospels give to those who read them the energy and the sense of direction to be Beatitude people for the world, knowing that the victory was indeed won on the cross, that Jesus is indeed already installed as the world’s rightful ruler, and that his way of peace and reconciliation has been shown to be more powerful than all the powers of the world. There is one particular moment in the gospel stories as told by Matthew and Mark to which we must return, because only in the light of the fuller picture can we begin to address it in all its complexity. This is the so-called cry of dereliction in Matthew 27:46 and Mark 15:34: “My God, my God, why did you abandon me?” I have stressed that all four evangelists saw Jesus as the living embodiment of YHWH himself, Israel’s God, and that they saw his kingdom-bringing achievement, up to and climactically including his death on the cross, as the achievement of the one God himself. This was not about a human being trying to twist God’s arm, as in the famous illustration (used by Albert Schweitzer) of Jesus throwing himself on the wheel of history and making it turn in the opposite direction. It was about the Lord of history coming in person, in the person who represented the promise-bearing people, to do what had to be done. How then can this embodied God cry out to “my God” that he has been abandoned?

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  It was far more revolutionary. It was about the kingdom of God coming “on earth as in heaven.” Within that new reality, the “forgiveness of sins” was neither simply a personal experience nor a moral command, though it was of course to be felt as the former and obeyed as the latter. It was the name for a new state of being, a new world, the world of resurrection, resurrection itself being the archetypal forgiveness of-sins moment, the moment when the prison door is flung open, indicating that the jailor has already been overpowered. As Paul said, if the Messiah is not raised, “your faith is pointless, and you are still in your sins” (1 Cor. 15:17). “Forgiveness of sins,” for the first disciples, was now to be seen as a fact about the way the world was , a fact rooted in the one-off accomplishment of Jesus’s death, then revealed in his resurrection, and then put to work through the Spirit in the transformed lives of his followers. Forgiveness of sins became another way of saying “Passover” or “new Exodus.” Or, as in Isaiah 54–55, following hard on the heels of the kingdom announcement of chapter 52 and the “servant’s” work in chapter 53, it would come to mean “new covenant” and “new creation.” The gospel was the announcement of this new reality. This new reality—hard to perceive except by faith in Jesus’s death-defeating resurrection, as all the early Christians knew well—was designed to come to ultimate fruition in the eventual new creation, the “new heavens and new earth.” I have written about this at length elsewhere (notably in Surprised by Hope) , and we do not need to repeat or labor the point. Ephesians 1:10 says it all: God’s plan was to unite all things in the Messiah, things in heaven and on earth. The final scene in Revelation (chaps. 21–22) spells it out: the new heavens and new earth function as the ultimate Temple, the new world in which God will wipe away all tears from all eyes. First Corinthians 15 describes the accomplishment of this final reality under the image of the messianic battle: Jesus, having already conquered sin and death, will reign until these and all other enemies are totally destroyed. Romans 8 describes it as the birth of the new creation from the womb of the old, weaving into that great metaphor a powerful allusion to the events of the Exodus, so that creation itself will have its own “Exodus” at last, being set free from its slavery to corruption and sharing the freedom that comes when God’s children are glorified. That is the ultimate hope. All of this is the “goal” of God’s rescue operation accomplished through Jesus. All of this is in direct fulfillment of the ancient hopes of Israel: it is all “according to the Bible”—though it was quite unexpected. Nobody had read Israel’s scriptures like this before, but the events concerning Jesus left his followers with no choice.