Surprise

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 Cleanness (2020)

  We were trailing behind the others, we could hear them ahead of us in the dark, their occasional bursts of laughter. We were walking up Apolonia, the main thoroughfare, though it wasn’t until we reached the center of town that there were any real signs of life, some open shops, a restaurant, a man at a table outside, hunched over a slice of pizza. We caught up with the others in front of a convenience store, and waited until N. and the priest emerged with new bottles of wine and a stack of plastic cups. N. handed these out as the priest busied himself with one of the bottles, cutting the foil at the neck with a pocketknife attached to his keys, working at it slowly, with the deliberateness of drunkenness. He had arrived after the rest of us, driving in from Veliko Turnovo. We had all been curious to meet him, but there was nothing especially priestly about the man who appeared dressed all in black, not in a cassock but in jeans and a T-shirt he wore tucked in, tight on his thin frame. He had a young man’s beard, scraggly and unkempt, a sign of laziness more than devotion, I might have thought. Only his hands marked him out, the fingers long and thin, a scholar’s hands, with the weird sliding grace of someone accustomed to ritual. Or maybe I had this impression because of the way I had seen him raise his hand to a man’s lips earlier in the evening, when the distinguished Bulgarian writer, elderly and reclusive, asked for a blessing before he read. He had become priestly in that moment, he had stood solemnly while the writer pressed his lips to the third joint of the second finger of his right hand, and then he made the sign of the cross over the writer’s bowed head. It had surprised me, it was a gesture I hadn’t seen in years, not made in earnest, not since the year I had played at conversion in graduate school, when I had made it myself or had it made over me at the rail of a church in Boston, where I stood with my arms crossed over my chest, my mouth sealed by my disordered life, as I thought of it then.

• From Story of O (1954)

  “Why, gladly,” Sir Stephen had said, but he had remarked that, in spite of everything, there was a risk he might rend O. “O is yours,” René had replied, “O will be pleased to be rent.” And he had leaned down over her and kissed her hands. The very idea that René could imagine giving up any part of her left O stunned. She had taken it as the sign that her lover cared more about Sir Stephen than he did about her. And too, although he had so often told her that what he loved in her was the object he had made of her, her absolute availability to him, his freedom with respect to her, as one is free to dispose of a piece of furniture, which one enjoys giving as much as, and sometimes even more than, one may enjoy keeping it for oneself, she realized that she had not believed him completely. She saw another sign of what could scarcely be termed anything but a certain deference or respect toward Sir Stephen, in the fact that René, who so passionately loved to see her beneath the bodies or the blows of others besides himself, whose look was one of constant tenderness, of unflagging gratitude whenever he saw her mouth open to moan or scream, her eyes closed over tears, had left her after having made certain, by exposing her to him, by opening her as one opens a horse’s mouth to prove that it is young enough, that Sir Stephen found her beautiful enough or, strictly speaking, suitable enough for him, and vouchsafed to accept her. However offensive and insulting his conduct may have been, O’s love for René remained unchanged. She considered herself fortunate to count enough in his eyes for him to derive pleasure from offending her, as believers give thanks to God for humbling them.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  Maybe there is no wizard. Perhaps,” she went on, more to herself than to me, “I should simply accept your idea that you and I are just fellow travelers through this life, both of us listening to the bell tolling.” And I had no doubt that a new phase of therapy was beginning when she came into my office one afternoon in our fourth year looking straight at me, sat down, looked at me again, and said, “It’s strange, Irv, but you seem to have gotten a lot smaller.” Lesson 7: Letting Go Our final session was unremarkable except for two events. First, Irene had to phone to inquire about its time. Though our meeting time had often changed because of her surgical schedule, she had not once, in five years, forgotten it. Second, I developed a splitting headache just before the session. Since I rarely get headaches, I suspect that this one was in some way related to Jack’s brain tumor, which had first made its presence known via a severe headache. “I’ve been wondering about something all week,” Irene began. “Do you plan to write about any aspect of our work together?” I had not thought of writing about her, and at that time was immersed in planning a novel. I told her so, adding, “And anyway, I’ve never written about therapy as current as ours. In Love’s Executioner, I had usually waited years, sometimes a decade or more, after a particular patient’s therapy ended before writing about it. And let me reassure you, if I ever did consider writing about you, I’d seek your permission before beginning—” “No, no, Irv,” she broke in, “I’m not worried about your writing. I’m worried about your not writing. I want my story to be told. There’s too much that therapists don’t know about treating the bereaved. I want you to tell other therapists not only what I’ve learned but what you’ve learned.” In the weeks following termination, I not only missed Irene but, again and again, found myself musing about writing her story. Soon my interest in other writing projects waned and I began to sketch an outline, at first in a desultory manner, then with increasing commitment. Several weeks later, Irene and I met for a final check-in session. She had mourned the loss of our relationship. For example, she dreamed we were still meeting; she imagined conversations with me and mistakenly thought she saw my face in a crowd or heard my voice addressing her. But by the time we met, the grief about ending therapy had passed, and she was enjoying life and relating well to herself and to others. She was especially struck by her change in visual perception: everything had become fleshed out again, where for years her surroundings had appeared as a two-dimensional stage set. Moreover, a relationship with a man, Kevin, whom she had met in our last few months of therapy, had not only endured but was flourishing.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  You’re accumulating information from me, but you’re not giving anything back! I believe you’re trying to relate to me differently now but I’m not experiencing it as engagement. I don’t feel yet that you’re relating to me as a person—it’s more like you regard me as a data bank from which you make withdrawals.” Making withdrawals from a “data bank.” She nodded. Maybe he’s right. She started her car, eased back onto the 101 south freeway. * ​ * ​ * ​ Myrna sat in silence at the beginning of the next session. Impatient as always, Ernest tried to prod her: “Where have your thoughts been these last few minutes?” “I think I’ve been wondering how you’ll begin the session.” “What would be your preference, Myrna? If a genie granted your wish, how would you like me to start? What’s the perfect statement or question?” “You might say, ‘Hello, Myrna; I’m really glad to see you.’” “Hello, Myrna; I’m really glad to see you today,” Ernest immediately repeated, concealing his astonishment at Myrna’s response. In past meetings with her, such clever opening gambits had invariably flopped, and he had thrown out his question now with little hope of success. What a marvel that she had become so audacious! And that he was really glad to see her—that was even more of a marvel. “Thank you. That was nice of you, even though you didn’t do it perfectly.” “Huh?” “You stuck in an extra word,” Myrna said. “The word today .” “The implications being . . . ?” “Remember Dr. Lash, how you always used to say to me, ‘A question ain’t a question if you know the answer.’” “You’re right, but humor me. Remember, Myrna, sometimes a therapist has special conversational privileges.” “Well, it seems clear to me that ‘today’ implies you often haven’t been glad to see me.” Is it only recently, Ernest thought, that I considered Myrna an interpersonal retard? “Go on,” he said, smiling. “Why would I not want to see you?” She hesitated. This was not the direction she wanted the hour to take. “Try. Try to speak to that question, Myrna. Why do you think I’m not always glad to see you? Just free-associate; say anything that comes to your mind. ” Silence. She felt words stirring, welling up. She tried to pick and choose, to contain them, but there were too many words, all pouring quickly into her mind. “Why are you not glad to see me?” she erupted. “Why?

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  Again and again I have found that “statistically significant” truth (often with the exceptions—the “outliers”—excluded from the calculation for statistical reasons) had little relevance to the truth of my unique encounter with the person of flesh and blood before me. In a session during our third year, I asked, “What feelings did you take home from our last session? Any thoughts about me during the week?” I pose this type of question often as part of my campaign to focus therapeutic attention on the here-and-now—on the encounter between me and the patient. She sat in silence for a while, then asked, “Do you think about me between sessions?” Although this question from a patient, which most therapists dread, is not uncommon, I somehow hadn’t expected it from Irene. Perhaps I hadn’t expected her to care, or at least to acknowledge she cared. “I—I—I often think about your situation,” I stuttered. Wrong answer! She sat for a moment, then stood. “I’m leaving,” she said and stomped out, not failing to slam the door behind her. I saw her through the window, pacing in the garden and smoking a cigarette. I sat and waited. How easy it is for noninteractive therapists, I thought, to deflect that question of hers by such ploys as: “Why do you ask?” or “Why now?” or “What are your fantasies or your wishes about that?” For therapists who are, like me, committed to a more egalitarian, mutually transparent relationship, it’s not so easy. Perhaps because the question reveals the limits of therapeutic authenticity: no matter how genuine therapists try to be, how intimate, how honest, there remains an unbridgeable gap, a fundamental inequality between therapist and patient. I knew that Irene hated my thinking of her as a “situation”—and hated too that she’d allowed me to mean so much to her. I might, of course, have been more sensitive and used a warmer and more personal word than situation. But I believe that no appropriate response of mine would have given her what she wanted. She wanted me to be thinking other thoughts—loving, admiring, sensual ones or, perhaps, doting. Yes, doting —that’s the word. When she had finished her cigarette, she walked back in with great aplomb and took her seat as though nothing unusual had happened. I continued by appealing to her sense of reality. “ Of course, ” I pointed out matter-of-factly, “patients think more often about their therapists than therapists think about them. After all, the therapist has many patients, whereas a patient has only one therapist. The same thing was true for me when I was in therapy, and isn’t it true for your own surgery patients, and for your students? Don’t you loom larger in their minds than they in yours?”

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  Why plant a tree if the garden is going to be dug up tomorrow? I have argued against this view elsewhere, particularly in Surprised by Hope and Surprised by Scripture . Indeed, the reason for that double “surprise” is partly that the New Testament view of God’s new creation still comes as a shock to many in our world, both Christian and non-Christian. But in the present book I want to go deeper than before into the difference between the “usual” view of “mission” I have mentioned—the idea of “mission” as “saving souls for heaven”—and the “mission” that I believe flows from the extraordinary, indeed revolutionary, vision of the achievement of Jesus in his death. Christian mission means implementing the victory that Jesus won on the cross . Everything else follows from this. The point is that this victory—the victory over all the powers, ultimately over death itself—was won through the representative and substitutionary death of Jesus, as Israel’s Messiah, who died so that sins could be forgiven. To suggest, as many have done, that we have to choose between “victory” and “substitution” is to miss the point, whichever we then choose. The New Testament affirms both and indicates, as we have tried to map out, the relationship between them . The “powers” gained their power because idolatrous humans sinned; when God deals with sins on the cross, he takes back from the powers their usurped authority. The question now is: What does it look like when this integrated vision of the death of Jesus is turned into mission? Answering that question—or at least beginning to answer it—is the purpose of this final part of the book. * * * For the sake of clarity, I have spoken here of two versions of “mission,” though I am naturally aware that things are more complicated than that, in both church history and current practice. It may help, though, to explain very briefly, at the risk of considerable oversimplification, how we got to our present position. The recent “backstory” of these two versions looks like this. For many protestant Christians in Europe and America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the mood was one of optimism. New things were happening, and the gospel was going forward, changing lives and communities. As Europeans traveled the globe, they had a sense of spreading what they saw as Christian civilization in areas previously unknown. This, they believed, was how the kingdom of God would indeed come on earth as in heaven. This was one outflowing of the solidly this-worldly focus of some Reformation theology. It led to what has been called the “Puritan hope”: the vision that the kingdoms of the world would become the kingdom of God, as it says in Revelation 11:15.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  It is this larger reality that really matters. The smaller reality—that I, as a sinner, need to know the forgiving love of God in my own life—is vital for each person, one by one. But, as history shows, that reality can all too easily be understood within the Platonized version of the gospel in which the whole emphasis falls on a detached spirituality in the present and a detached future salvation in which the created order is abandoned altogether. Once again, that is how to domesticate the revolution. The larger reality is that something has happened within the actual world of space, time, and matter, as a result of which everything is different. By six o’clock on the Friday evening Jesus died, something had changed, and changed radically. Heaven and earth were brought together, creating the cosmic “new temple”: “God was reconciling the world to himself in the Messiah” (2 Cor. 5:19). This was totally unexpected. No Jews prior to Jesus were walking around with this kind of messianic narrative in their heads. But when the resurrection compelled the disciples to rethink their original and natural reaction to the death of Jesus—a reaction we see graphically portrayed in Luke’s picture of the two on the road to Emmaus—we find them grappling with the fresh belief that these events were seen as the dramatic, unexpected, but nevertheless appropriate fulfillment of the ancient prophecies and therefore as the events through which the long-awaited new age was being ushered in at last. This was not about inventing a new kind of religion. It had nothing to do with getting rid of the earthbound hopes of the ancient Jews and embracing a “spiritual” reality instead. 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.”

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  The only way we can make sense of that belief is to say that they were not deluded or deceived, but were telling the truth, even though it was a truth for which the world was unready: that Jesus really was fully and bodily alive again, indeed more fully and more bodily alive than before. He had gone through death and out the other side, and his body itself was the start of the new creation. This wasn’t a matter of “resuscitation,” but of a new, transformed kind of body. And—though this takes more explanation, to which I alluded in the previous chapter—this new body seemed to be equally at home in the two interlocking dimensions of created reality, what the Bible calls “heaven” and “earth,” that is, God’s space and our space. All of this and much more is given with the extraordinary and totally unexpected event of Jesus’s resurrection. And with the resurrection we find the beginnings of the interpretation of the crucifixion . The cross meant what it meant in the light of what happened next. Everybody in that world, just like everybody in our world, knew that dead people don’t just come back to life, let alone reappear in a new, transformed body. Something must have happened to make that possible. If the prison door is standing open, someone must have unlocked it, perhaps overpowering the guards in the process. Something about Jesus’s death seems to have had that effect. According to Luke, Jesus himself began this process of interpretation when he explained to the puzzled disciples on the road to Emmaus that his death had not been simply a horrible accident, a tragic mistake, but had been the strange fulfillment of the long narrative of Israel’s scriptures . And within that narrative we find, as we shall discover step by step, the deep meaning of the claim that his death was “for our sins.” The formula in which the early Christians summarized their basic belief (“The Messiah died for our sins in accordance with the Bible”) is rooted in the story of what actually happened. The resurrection of Jesus did not immediately generate anything like an “atonement theology.” The resurrection stories in all four gospels and the similar passage at the start of Acts are full of dense and fascinating interpretation of what has just happened, but none of them even begins to offer any interpretation of Jesus’s death itself—with the important exception, as we saw in the previous part, that Luke’s Jesus explains that it was necessary for the Messiah to suffer as part of the divine plan (24:26).

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  Believing in Jesus’s resurrection is hard not merely because it’s difficult to get our minds around the idea of a person going through death and out into a new sort of bodily existence the other side, though that does indeed challenge our imaginations at the deepest level. It’s hard because we are asked to grasp or be grasped by the fact that a new reality, a new mode of existence, has been introduced to the world. This is at the heart of the ongoing revolution: that a new way of being human has been launched, a way that starts with forgiveness (God’s forgiveness of those who turn from their now defeated idols) and continues with forgiveness (the forgiveness offered by Jesus’s followers in his name and by his Spirit to all who have wronged them). This is why forgiveness, in both senses, looms large in the prayer Jesus taught his followers. This is what it looks like, sounds like, and feels like when heaven comes to earth, when God’s kingdom comes and his will is done in the world of humans as it is in the world of the angels. Forgiveness is the new reality. It is the power of the revolution. Praying the Lord’s prayer and believing in Jesus’s resurrection turn out ultimately to be all about the same thing. We can see this in some graphic recent examples. In many cultures and countries in the world “forgiveness” is seen as a sign of weakness. If someone has wronged you, you should get even! Justice has not been done! You have been robbed of your rights! I have seen people eaten up by that philosophy. It pervades every aspect of their lives. Every thought turns into a grudge, and every grudge clamors for revenge. And I have seen people who have given up that philosophy and discovered the healing power of forgiveness. It can and does happen. This always catches us by surprise, perhaps because it is the true and sure sign of the world still waiting to be fully birthed. When, in June 2015, relatives of the murder victims in Charleston, South Carolina, came face-to-face with the killer, several of them told him at once that they forgave him. Something similar happened after the Amish school shooting in October 2006. These incidents, widely reported, strike secular journalists and their readers as strange to the point of being almost incredible. Do these people really mean it? It is clear that they do. The forgiveness was unforced. It wasn’t said through clenched teeth, in outward conformity to a moral standard, while the heart remained bitter. Forgiveness was already a way of life in these communities. They were merely exemplifying and extending, in horrific circumstances, the character they had already learned and practiced.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  It was a horribly familiar event. Nobody—neither Jesus’s followers, nor his mother, nor Pontius Pilate, nor the mocking crowds—were saying to themselves, as evening drew on and Jesus’s body was taken down from the cross for burial, “So he died for our sins!” Nobody was saying “All this has happened in accordance with the Bible!” Nobody, as far as our evidence goes, had been expecting Israel’s Messiah to die for the sins of the world. Nobody, on the evening of Jesus’s crucifixion, had any idea that a revolutionary event had just taken place. True, Matthew and Mark both record that the centurion in charge of the execution muttered something about Jesus really being “son of God.” (In Luke, he declares that Jesus was “in the right,” innocent, thus agreeing with what one of the brigands alongside Jesus had said moments before; 23:47, 41.) In the centurion’s world, the phrase “son of God” referred of course to Tiberius Caesar. The levels of irony detected by the gospel writers, and perhaps intended by the centurion himself, are profound, but they do not approach anything like the early Christian confession of faith. No. Despite Jesus’s repeated attempts to warn his followers of what was going to happen and even to explain to them something of what it would mean, his sudden arrest, trial, and execution came as a horrible shock that by itself carried no explanation, no hidden and perhaps consoling meaning. As we have seen, some people in the ancient Jewish world were hoping and praying for a Messiah. Jesus’s followers had even concluded that he was the one, despite the fact that he hadn’t been doing what many had expected a Messiah would do (leading the fight against the occupying pagan forces, for a start). But nobody thought a Messiah, even if one should appear, would die a horrible death at the hands of those same pagan forces. In the same way, as we noted in the previous part of the book, some people in the ancient Jewish world had pondered the fate of the martyrs of former generations. Perhaps, some had dared to suggest, their sufferings, torture, and horrible deaths would function within a strange, dark divine plan according to which the sufferings of the few would be the means of rescue for the many. But there is no evidence that anybody supposed such a suffering figure could be the Messiah.

• From Story of O (1954)

  In any event, the story of O has deep roots. It has, in my opinion, that feeling of repose, of spaciousness as it were, which one finds only in a tale which the author has nurtured within her for a long time: a tale with which she is wholly familiar. Who is Pauline Réage? Is she—for there are such people—a mere dreamer? (It is enough, they say, to listen to the dictates of your heart. It is a heart that nothing can dissuade.) Is she a woman of the world, who knows whereof she speaks? Who knows whereof she speaks and is astonished that an adventure that began with such promise—or at least with such sobriety, in a climate of asceticism and chastisement—should turn out so badly and end on a note of dubious smugness, for, it seems generally to be agreed, O remains in that kind of brothel to which she was led by love; and not only does she remain there, she rather likes it. And yet, in this connection: [image file=image_rsrc109.jpg] II.—A ruthless decencyI too was surprised by the end. And nothing you can say will convince me it is the real end. That in reality (so to speak) your heroine convinces Sir Stephen to consent to her death. He will remove her irons only after she is dead. But, obviously, there are things that have been left unsaid, and that busy little bee—I am referring to Pauline Réage—has kept part of the honey for herself. Who knows, perhaps this once she let herself be seduced by a writer’s concern: that she might one day want to write a sequel to O’s adventures. Besides, that ending is so obvious it was hardly worth stating. We discover it without any trouble. We discover it, and somehow it obsesses us. But you, the author, how did you think it up—and what is the open sesame which explains it? I keep harping on this because I feel certain that once it has been found, then the ottomans and the four-posters, and even the chains will be explained and will allow this tall, dim figure, this scheming phantom, these curious breaths of air, to move freely to and fro among them.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  When Jesus of Nazareth died the horrible death of crucifixion at the hands of the Roman army, nobody thought him a hero. Nobody was saying, as they hurriedly laid his body in a tomb, that his death had been a splendid victory, a heroic martyrdom. His movement, which had in any case been something of a ragtag group of followers, was over. Nothing had changed. Another young leader had been brutally liquidated. This was the sort of thing that Rome did best. Caesar was on his throne. Death, as usual, had the last word. Except that in this case it didn’t. As Jesus’s followers looked back on that day in the light of what happened soon afterward, they came up with the shocking, scandalous, nonsensical claim that his death had launched a revolution. That something had happened that afternoon that had changed the world. That by six o’clock on that dark Friday evening the world was a different place. Nonsensical or not, they were proven right. Whether we believe in Jesus, whether we approve of his teaching, let alone whether we like the look of the movement that still claims to follow him, we are bound to see his crucifixion as one of the pivotal moments in human history. Like the assassination of Julius Caesar around seventy years earlier, it marks the end of one era and the start of another. And Jesus’s first followers saw it as something more. They saw it as the vital moment not just in human history, but in the entire story of God and the world. Indeed, they believed it had opened a new and shocking window onto the meaning of the word “God” itself. They believed that with this event the one true God had suddenly and dramatically put into operation his plan for the rescue of the world. They saw it as the day the revolution began. It wasn’t just that they believed Jesus had been raised from the dead. They did believe that, of course, and that too was scandalous nonsense in their day as it is in ours. But they quickly came to see his resurrection not simply as an astonishing new beginning in itself, but as the result of what had happened three days earlier . The resurrection was the first visible sign that the revolution was already under way. More signs would follow. Most Christians today don’t see it like this—and, in consequence, most people outside the church don’t see it like that either. I understand why. Like most Christians today, I started my thinking about Jesus’s death with the assumption, from what I had been taught, that the death of Jesus was all about God saving me from my “sin,” so that I could “go to heaven.”

• From Story of O (1954)

  “Don’t go,” O said. “Stay a while longer and tell me …” But she did not have time to finish her sentence. The door opened: it was her lover, and he was not alone. It was her lover, dressed the way he used to when he had just gotten out of bed and lighted the first cigarette of the day: in striped pajamas and a blue dressing gown, the wool robe with the padded silk lapels which they had picked out together a year before. And his slippers were worn, she would have to buy him another pair. The two women disappeared, with no other sound except the rustling of silk as they lifted their skirts (all the skirts were a trifle long and trailed on the ground)—on the carpet the mules could not be heard. O, who was holding a cup of coffee in her left hand and a croissant in the other, was seated cross-legged, or rather half-cross-legged, on the edge of the bed, one of her legs dangling and the other tucked up under her. She did not move, but her cup suddenly began to shake in her hand, and she dropped the croissant. “Pick it up,” René said. They were his first words. She put the cup down on the table, picked up the partly eaten croissant, and put it beside the cup. A fat croissant crumb still lay on the rug, beside her bare foot. This time René bent down and picked it up. Then he sat down near O, pulled her back down onto the bed, and kissed her. She asked him if he loved her. He answered: “Yes, I love you!” then got to his feet and made her stand up too, softly running the cool palms of his hands, then his lips, over the welts. Since he had come in with her lover, O did not know whether or not she could look at the man who had entered with him and who, for the moment, had his back to them and was smoking a cigarette near the door. What followed was not of a nature to reassure her. “Come over here so we can see you,” her lover said, and having guided her to the foot of the bed, he pointed out to his companion that he had been right, and he thanked him, adding that it would only be fair for him to take O first if he so desired. The unknown man, whom she still did not dare to look at, then asked her, after having run his hand over her breasts and down her buttocks, to spread her legs.

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  Near its beginning, Paul writes: “I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received” (15.3). The language most plausibly suggests that what follows is a very early Christian tradition that Paul had “received,” most likely soon after his Damascus experience. Perhaps even the pre-Damascus Paul had heard this, for he knew enough about the Jesus movement to persecute it. Then, following brief references to Jesus dying for our sins and being buried and raised, he provides a list of those to whom the risen Christ appeared: He appeared to Cephas [Peter], then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. (15:5–8) There are at least three surprises. First, Paul’s Damascus experience happened at least a few years after the forty days of appearances reported in Acts. Clearly, Paul regarded experiences of the risen Christ as continuing rather than being confined to that brief period of time. Moreover, his phrase “Last of all…he appeared also to me” need not be understood to mean that such experiences stopped with him. Rather, it probably means that the last experience he cited in the list was his own. The second surprise is that Paul uses language associated with visions to describe the appearances of the risen Christ. He repeatedly uses the verb “appeared” not only for the experiences of Peter and the rest, but also for his experience, suggesting that they were in this sense similar. To call them visions suggests that they were not the kinds of experiences that could have been photographed, as a literal-factual reading of the gospel stories would suggest. To call them visions is also not to demean them, as if they were “only” visions. Nobody who has had a vision would ever say it was “only a vision.” Rather, Paul’s experience of the risen Christ carried the conviction that he was real and could be known —but real need not mean a transformed corpse whom others would have seen if they had been there. The third surprise comes later in the chapter as Paul writes about what kind of body the resurrection body is: “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?” (15:35). Here he counters a belief of at least some in Corinth that resurrection means the same thing as the immortality of the soul. He answers his own question in stages, insisting throughout that resurrection is about bodies, not about disembodied immortal souls. At the same time, he also insists that the resurrected body is not simply the predeath body brought back to life. First, he says that there are many kinds of bodies (15:38–41). Then, in a series of contrasts, he writes about the differences between physical bodies and resurrected bodies.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  A Bedouin pushed the sliding door open and hesitated as he entered. The stink of a stable and of stale cooking fats spread throughout the car, as well as of something else that I was unable to identify. Through the still open door an unpleasant draft reached us. “Close the door!” the Sicilian masons shouted, though apparently without any hostility or clannish animosity. The Mohammedans in the car all pricked their ears up. For a while, the little game stopped. But the Sicilians had really intended no harm and we were quite clearly, one and all, a big family of Mediterraneans. One of the Mohammedans, to show that he appreciated it, even decided to join in the fun: “Close that door! Don’t they have doors, back home on your mountainside?” The Bedouin smiled foolishly and, without giving an answer, finally closed the door before sitting down heavily beside the French lady who, without making any display of it, grew tense and pulled herself together. She didn’t actually move, but my own antennae had already detected a violent disturbance in her magnetic equilibrium. The third odor of the Bedouin now became more recognizable in the closed car: the bitter and penetrating smell of burned charcoal. “Come on! Sell me your little tail,” the Djerban began again. The child’s attention had wandered, and he now started. “No! No!” “I’ll give you fifty francs for it.” “No!” “One hundred francs!” “No!” “Ah, you’re a tough number! Two hundred!” “No!” “Well, I’ll go all the way: a thousand francs!” “No!” The eyes of the Djerban tried to express greed. “And I’ll throw in a bag of candy too!” “No! No!” “So it’s no deal? Is that your last word?” shouted the Djerban, pretending now to be angry. “Repeat it once more: is it still no?” “No!” Then, suddenly, the Djerban threw himself on the child, pulling a terrifying face, and grabbed roughly at the boy’s fly. The child defended himself with his fists, shrieking in terror that was no longer a pretense, tore the fez off his aggressor’s head and began to pull at his hair. In the end, the Djerban, almost blinded and his face already bruised by the tiny hands, let go of the tiny little animal. The boy’s father was laughing out loud, the Djerban was doubled up with nervous laughter, and all our neighbors were smiling broadly. Even the lady who sat beside the Bedouin must have found it, deep inside her, quite funny. At last the child, still pale and distrustful, decided to smile at his partner in the game.

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  The second surprise is that Paul uses language associated with visions to describe the appearances of the risen Christ. He repeatedly uses the verb “appeared” not only for the experiences of Peter and the rest, but also for his experience, suggesting that they were in this sense similar. To call them visions suggests that they were not the kinds of experiences that could have been photographed, as a literal-factual reading of the gospel stories would suggest. To call them visions is also not to demean them, as if they were “only” visions. Nobody who has had a vision would ever say it was “only a vision.” Rather, Paul’s experience of the risen Christ carried the conviction that he was real and could be known—but real need not mean a transformed corpse whom others would have seen if they had been there. The third surprise comes later in the chapter as Paul writes about what kind of body the resurrection body is: “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?” (15:35). Here he counters a belief of at least some in Corinth that resurrection means the same thing as the immortality of the soul. He answers his own question in stages, insisting throughout that resurrection is about bodies, not about disembodied immortal souls. At the same time, he also insists that the resurrected body is not simply the predeath body brought back to life. First, he says that there are many kinds of bodies (15:38–41). Then, in a series of contrasts, he writes about the differences between physical bodies and resurrected bodies. His central metaphor compares the physical body to a seed that is sown: What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body. (15:42–44) The resurrected body—including the body of Jesus—is a spiritual body: raised imperishable, raised in glory, raised in power. Clearly the resurrected body is not simply a physical body restored to life. Then Paul adds: “It is written, ‘The first man, Adam, became a living being’; the last Adam [Jesus] became a life-giving spirit” (15:45). The risen Christ is a life-giving spirit. We note that all of this is in a chapter that also includes a verse often cited by some Christians to defend a physical bodily resurrection: “If Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain” (15:14). But the verse has a very different meaning when set in the context of the chapter as a whole. Resurrection is not about coming back to life in a form similar to one’s form before death. Rather, the difference is as great as the difference between a seed that is sown and the full-grown plant that emerges.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Hoping to catch a breath of air, I had opened the door and all the windows of the study hall. The deserted high school was suffocating, paralyzed by the motionless June heat. Blinding white light gushed in from everywhere like a motionless whirlwind, poured through the torn canvas shades with every thread now stiff and dry. Yellow, red, and green flashed from the pages of my book and tortured my tired eyes. I was waiting for the results of the written examinations and every hour was an agonizing battle against the heat and the heaviness of my head. Since the candidates had now been granted the exceptional privilege of using the study hall, I had fled from the gossip of my family at home to spend all my spare time in the school building. From the other end of the long corridor, I heard the approach of soldierly footsteps resounding in the hot air and easily identified as those of Monsieur Creschi, the Corsican janitor who had once been a top sergeant in the colonial infantry. His approach seemed interminable, till suddenly he appeared in the doorway, a silhouette haloed by a blaze of light. A little boy was waiting for me in the lobby, he said. A little boy? I was in too deep a torpor to feel any curiosity. To hell with all little boys! I could hardly hear Monsieur Creschi, who panted, groaned, and patted his damp forehead. Regretfully, I stood up and pulled the back of my wet and sticky shirt, soaking with sweat, away from my skin. I found my youngest brother, Birou, in the lobby. He was upset and full of the importance of his errand: Uncle Joseph was dead, my mother wanted me home at once, my father was waiting for me. Birou’s excitement amused me. “Do you know Uncle Joseph?” I asked invidiously. “Oh, yes!” he said. “I saw him at cousin Louisa’s wedding.” “What was he like?” “He’s big and strong. He’s nice and has a mustache.” “You’re mixing him up with Uncle Binhas. Uncle Joseph is the oldest, the one who sells shoes. Besides, he’s not big, he’s small.” “Oh, I thought the big one was the oldest. So he’s not dead.” Although we lived in the same city, we seldom had any contact with my father’s family. I saw Uncle Joseph no more than once or twice a year. To assert a difference from the rest of the tribe in the Passage, my father was always proclaiming the dignity of the Benillouche family and the reserved but real tenderness they felt for each other. This was partly true; but he had actually cut himself off from his own family when he had married my mother, a pretty girl from a humble background. Still, catastrophes and rare occasions of great joy brought the Benillouche clan together again and made them aware of their unity.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  We may suspect that this was (among other things) something of a power play. Peter, presented in all the gospels as Jesus’s closest associate, had a brother, Andrew, and they might be supposed to be the natural people to occupy the positions of greatest responsibility in any coming kingdom. James and John are getting in first. But all this jockeying for position misses the point entirely. First, the kingdom is not going to come the way they expect. Jesus has a baptism with which to be baptized (10:38), an allusion it seems to the suffering he will experience for which his baptism at the start of the gospel story was an advance signpost. He also has a “cup” to drink, an allusion to the vocation, which comes into sharp focus in the later scene in the Garden of Gethsemane (14:36); he must drain to the dregs the “cup of the wrath of God” so that his people won’t have to drink it (see particularly Jer. 25:15–17; 49:12; 5:7; Lam. 4:21). It is striking that though “baptism” is associated with Jesus’s death in one or two passages in the New Testament (Romans 8 and Colossians 2 come to mind), the idea of the “cup” seems to belong only to the traditions about Jesus we find in the gospels. In any case, James and John appear to interpret these cryptic warnings as applying to a great coming battle or struggle, and they assure him that they can share that too. Jesus admits that they may indeed face great suffering themselves (10:39). But, as the irony in the passage mounts higher and higher, Jesus warns them that sitting at his right and his left “in his glory” is not his to grant. Those positions have already been assigned (10:40). Only as Mark’s story reaches its grisly end do readers realize what is meant. James and John have been asking for the places at Jesus’s right and left so as to accompany him as he completes the glorious work of bringing in God’s kingdom, defeating all the powers that have held the human race captive. But those places are reserved for the two who are crucified alongside him as he hangs there with “King of the Jews” above his head. Can this really be Mark’s meaning? Emphatically, yes. Here is how it works out. Jesus’s death accomplishes God’s kingdom, because he is giving his life in the place of sinners, as “a ransom for many.” Jesus explains this by describing two radically different sorts of power:

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

  something, but I had a pretty good idea that even if I did there still wasn’t going to be any hamburger. When we came back to the living room, my mother was looking out the window through the binoculars. The sunburned man stood beside her, his head bent close to hers, one hand resting on her shoulder as he gestured with his beer bottle at some point of interest. He turned as we came in and grinned at us. “There’s our guy,” he said. “How’s it going? You get some lunch? Judd, did you get this man some lunch?” “Yes sir.” “Great! That’s the ticket! Have a seat, Rosemary. Right over here. Sit down, Jack, that’s the boy. You like peanuts? Great! Judd, bring him some peanuts. And for Christ’s sake get these bottles out of here.” He sat next to my mother on the couch and smiled steadily at me while Judd stuck his fingers into the bottles and carried them clinking away. Judd returned with a dish of nuts and left with the rest of the bottles. “There you go, Jack. Dig in! Dig in!” He watched me eat a few handfuls, nodding to himself as if I were acting in accordance with some prediction he had made. “You’re an athlete,” he said. “It’s written all over you. The eyes, the build. What do you play, Jack, what’s your game?” “Baseball,” I said. This was somewhere in the neighborhood of truth. In Florida I’d played nearly every day, and gotten good at it. But I hadn’t played much since. I wasn’t an athlete and I didn’t look like one, but I was glad he thought so. “Baseball!” he cried. “Judd, what did I tell you?” Judd had taken a chair on the other side of the room, apart from the rest of us. He raised his eyebrows and shook his head at the other man’s perspicacity. My mother laughed and said something teasing. She called the man Gil. “Wait a minute!” he said. “You think I’m just shooting the bull? Judd, what did I say about Jack here? What did I say he played?” Judd crossed his dark legs. “Baseball,” he said. “All right,” Gil said. “All right, I hope we’ve got that straightened out. Jack. Back to you. What other activities do you enjoy?” “I like to ride bikes,” I said, “but I don’t have one.”

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  DEDICATION For Leo Look! The Lion has won the victory! (Revelation 5.5) CONTENTS Dedication PART ONE: INTRODUCTION 1. A Vitally Important Scandal Why the Cross? 2. Wrestling with the Cross, Then and Now 3. The Cross in Its First-Century Setting PART TWO: “IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE BIBLE”: THE STORIES OF ISRAEL 4. The Covenant of Vocation 5. “In All the Scriptures” 6. The Divine Presence and the Forgiveness of Sins 7. Suffering, Redemption, and Love PART THREE: THE REVOLUTIONARY RESCUE 8. New Goal, New Humanity 9. Jesus’s Special Passover 10. The Story of the Rescue 11. Paul and the Cross Apart from Romans 12. The Death of Jesus in Paul’s Letter to the Romans The New Exodus 13. The Death of Jesus in Paul’s Letter to the Romans Passover and Atonement PART FOUR: THE REVOLUTION CONTINUES 14. Passover People 15. The Powers and the Power of Love Acknowledgments Scripture Index Subject Index About the Author Also by N. T. Wright Credits Copyright About the Publisher PART ONE Introduction PART TWO “In Accordance with the Bible” The Stories of Israel PART THREE The Revolutionary Rescue PART FOUR The Revolution Continues ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I have been writing about the cross on and off and in various places for many years. That is inevitable, granted that the focus of my academic work has been the New Testament and that the focus of my work as priest, preacher, and bishop has been the biblical, sacramental, and liturgical life of the church, which brings one back to the cross every day, or at least every week. But this is the first time I have tried to stand back and set out the whole picture of what the early Christians said about the death of Jesus. As I have done so, I have been surprised to see quite new elements emerging and new connections between them. The overall argument presented here is quite fresh; I have surprised myself with the lines of thought and interpretation I have found myself pursuing, including in some places saying significantly different things from what I have said in my earlier published work. I hope this book will encourage followers of Jesus to think afresh about the central events of their faith. But I also hope it will explain to puzzled onlookers something of why we Christians regard the brutal liquidation of a young Jew two thousand years ago in the way we do. I also hope that, even though it lacks the bits and pieces of an “academic” study, it will encourage theologians, preachers, and teachers in the churches to return to their foundational texts and to see if there is perhaps more to be said about what we have called the “atonement” than we had previously realized. The early Christians believed that Jesus’s death had launched the revolution.