Not wishing to submit this re-write of a re-write to publishers, I submit it to you, dear readers, this first novel of all my coming novels. It's a good entrance to a robust series set in a universe you didn't know you lived in. It's also not very long, and I'll be giving it to you in serial form, covering generally one chapter over the next twelve weeks. I submit it here because the religious themes are overt, and not separable from my own seminary experience.
Enjoy,
the Curious Monk
Saturday, June 5, 2010
Thursday, June 3, 2010
Christology: On Athanasius's On the Incarnation
For me, the essential part of this was Athanasius’s describing the original imageo dei as a sharing in Christ’s own being, and the way this hangs together with Christ’s restoring/decorrupting the fallen image through the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection.
With Athanasius, because a fundamental part of our identity is sharing in Christ, and because we all share that, and because it is exactly what Jesus Christ carried through death into new life, there is actually a ‘mechanism’ for how the atonement might have worked. This makes the most sense of atonement out of anything I’ve read so far, which admittedly isn’t much. It’s also very Pauline, and I wonder where and how exactly that got dropped out of our modern understandings of incarnation and creation.
It also speaks of a fundamental connection and intimacy between creation and Creator that I feel is sorely missed or misunderstood. We are capable, after all, of putting God into the ‘dilemma’ that provokes the incarnation in the first place. That “man...was disappearing, and the work of God was being undone” is a profound and radical statement about God, creation, and our place and power within it. So that while Athanasius does clearly think far more thoroughly of divinity within Christology, the humanity of Christ, and of us all, is of utmost importance to the divine.
I do think it might be good to remember that this is not primarily, I think, an evangelic or even apologetic tract so much as it is a delineation of one side of an inner-Christian dialogue and a defense of the oncoming orthodox Christological positions; that is, I think Athanasius’s probably assumed that his readers would be Christians in some sense, and that he could write about the incarnation to them assuming more common ground than he might have otherwise. That might account for some of the zealous tone.
My own question for Athanasius is this: the good news presented here is primarily from John and Paul; I would be very interested to know how the message of the Kingdom, that which the Word came to say, which so dominates the other gospels,would work in an Anselmian understanding of incarnation.
With Athanasius, because a fundamental part of our identity is sharing in Christ, and because we all share that, and because it is exactly what Jesus Christ carried through death into new life, there is actually a ‘mechanism’ for how the atonement might have worked. This makes the most sense of atonement out of anything I’ve read so far, which admittedly isn’t much. It’s also very Pauline, and I wonder where and how exactly that got dropped out of our modern understandings of incarnation and creation.
It also speaks of a fundamental connection and intimacy between creation and Creator that I feel is sorely missed or misunderstood. We are capable, after all, of putting God into the ‘dilemma’ that provokes the incarnation in the first place. That “man...was disappearing, and the work of God was being undone” is a profound and radical statement about God, creation, and our place and power within it. So that while Athanasius does clearly think far more thoroughly of divinity within Christology, the humanity of Christ, and of us all, is of utmost importance to the divine.
I do think it might be good to remember that this is not primarily, I think, an evangelic or even apologetic tract so much as it is a delineation of one side of an inner-Christian dialogue and a defense of the oncoming orthodox Christological positions; that is, I think Athanasius’s probably assumed that his readers would be Christians in some sense, and that he could write about the incarnation to them assuming more common ground than he might have otherwise. That might account for some of the zealous tone.
My own question for Athanasius is this: the good news presented here is primarily from John and Paul; I would be very interested to know how the message of the Kingdom, that which the Word came to say, which so dominates the other gospels,would work in an Anselmian understanding of incarnation.
Monday, May 31, 2010
Matthew: On History and Faith
To the charge that the truth of the gospels seems in some way diminished because of historical ‘problems’ with the gospels, I would first say that one doesn’t go to the gospels for history anymore than one goes to the gospels for science, because the gospels antedate both history and science. Which is not to say that the gospels don’t deal with the historical world or the natural world – but is to say that they do not do so in the ways that we modern readers might expect.
There must be more work to ascertain how ancient people generally thought about history in general and scripture in particular. What kind of truth were first-century Jews looking for, say, when Jesus read Isaiah in the synagogue? It certainly wasn’t journalism, nor a double-blind study. While we can’t go to the gospels for history, I do think we might be able to go to history for gospel. Because it might be that for these people the historical world was the world of faith. Our dualisms may not apply.
This is perhaps the largest problem with historical criticism, in that it carries too many of our own polar assumptions, and not enough of ancient peoples’, into the study of historical texts. Literary criticism, something of a corrective to this, puts together what form critics rend asunder because many have found it easy, even in the history of historical criticism, to lose sight of the forest for the trees.
When one spends too much time debating where exactly Jesus was born, it’s easy to lose sight of what the sheer weight of Christ’s advent has meant to the world for believers and non-believers, and for the story of Jesus Christ itself. One recalls here the old analogy of the scientist dissecting a dead butterfly and the poet describing a living one in flight. They both tell us key things about the species, though we must admit that the scientist-poet is a rare bird indeed.
Yet this is, of course, what Christians are compelled to be. It is the vey spirit of Christ which inspires us to seek his flesh. Thomas might have needed to put his hands in Christ’s side in order to believe the resurrection, but it was Christ’s own person that made him seek belief to start with. We are historical creatures with particular questions, and that inquiry is anything but dispassionate. It is profoundly faithful, and must be fair.
Christianity’s own core is that flesh is spiritual and that temporal, historical events have eternal significance. Our God is only ever revealed in the historical, the limited, the concrete...the human. How then could we dismiss the particulars of Christ’s life or fail to ponder their everlasting import? It’s not that history or scripture can never be wrong about details of Christ’s life, but rather, our journey of life in Christ is the walk into Jesus of Nazareth – and back out into faith again, enriched and reborn.
There must be more work to ascertain how ancient people generally thought about history in general and scripture in particular. What kind of truth were first-century Jews looking for, say, when Jesus read Isaiah in the synagogue? It certainly wasn’t journalism, nor a double-blind study. While we can’t go to the gospels for history, I do think we might be able to go to history for gospel. Because it might be that for these people the historical world was the world of faith. Our dualisms may not apply.
This is perhaps the largest problem with historical criticism, in that it carries too many of our own polar assumptions, and not enough of ancient peoples’, into the study of historical texts. Literary criticism, something of a corrective to this, puts together what form critics rend asunder because many have found it easy, even in the history of historical criticism, to lose sight of the forest for the trees.
When one spends too much time debating where exactly Jesus was born, it’s easy to lose sight of what the sheer weight of Christ’s advent has meant to the world for believers and non-believers, and for the story of Jesus Christ itself. One recalls here the old analogy of the scientist dissecting a dead butterfly and the poet describing a living one in flight. They both tell us key things about the species, though we must admit that the scientist-poet is a rare bird indeed.
Yet this is, of course, what Christians are compelled to be. It is the vey spirit of Christ which inspires us to seek his flesh. Thomas might have needed to put his hands in Christ’s side in order to believe the resurrection, but it was Christ’s own person that made him seek belief to start with. We are historical creatures with particular questions, and that inquiry is anything but dispassionate. It is profoundly faithful, and must be fair.
Christianity’s own core is that flesh is spiritual and that temporal, historical events have eternal significance. Our God is only ever revealed in the historical, the limited, the concrete...the human. How then could we dismiss the particulars of Christ’s life or fail to ponder their everlasting import? It’s not that history or scripture can never be wrong about details of Christ’s life, but rather, our journey of life in Christ is the walk into Jesus of Nazareth – and back out into faith again, enriched and reborn.
Thursday, May 27, 2010
Christology: The Historical Jesus
Whenever I read any of this historical-critical stuff, I feel like something of an archeologist myself – much of it is tedium, confirming or solidifying what we already know. Some of it is troubling or shocking or difficult to fathom; a few things are real, wonderful, and substantial finds.
And I found all three here, in James Charlesworth's 'The Historical Jesus': the basic thrust of Jesus’s biography must certainly be familiar to many Christians, at least one would hope so. And I’m not as troubled with all of the conflations at the author tended to be – I think it’s probably okay, for example, to assume that the garden John mentions before Jesus’s arrest is indeed Gethsemane, though that name isn’t specifically there; I don’t see what harm that could really do. So most of the book was a recast for me, and that’s fine.
And there were certainly some points that were profoundly troubling; the suggestion, seriously entertained, that the wedding in Cana was Jesus Christ’s own wedding. Now I don’t, myself, have much of a stake in the answer to this question, it wouldn’t change my faith overmuch if Jesus had married – but to argue that there was a strong possibility of this specifically from the absence of evidence in the Gospels as to what the wedding was actually about assumes an almost maniacal editing of the Jesus traditions before we get them in Johannine form.
Because so many of the historical-critical findings have been eventually overturned or revealed as exaggerations or distorted understandings of Christ, I wonder how easily, and at just how many points, contemporary historical-critical scholarship makes the same over-reaching mistakes. We say we’re getting better, but are we really?
But of course I did find several gems, the most recent of which in Charlesworth was the argument that because Jesus most likely did not know Greek, he would have lacked that language’s (and our New Testament’s) more sophisticated understanding of past, present and future, and would have dealt instead in the simpler Semitic paradigm of fulfilled or un-fulfilled time.
That is a profound realization, it’s both based on historical data and consonant with the Hebrew Bible, and it helps us understand what the man was actually trying to say. That’s premium work; I wish all historical scholarship went down a similar vein and perhaps spent less time battling through the authority of sources.
Which brings me to the actual question: it’s not that I side with the Christ of faith or the Christ of history so much as that I choose the Christ of history because of the Christ of faith. Because and only because I believe that Jesus was the Son of God who was crucified for our sins and resurrected for our salvation, it matters what he taught and where he lived and how he understood God.
That’s why the historical details matter to me, albeit in varying degrees. And that’s probably true for most Christians – I think the discussion of the historical Jesus alone is perhaps best for an outward-facing conversation, because the degree of certainty that we can have about Jesus’s human life is significant and telling in an apologetic sense, as a defense of the reasonableness of our faith .
And I found all three here, in James Charlesworth's 'The Historical Jesus': the basic thrust of Jesus’s biography must certainly be familiar to many Christians, at least one would hope so. And I’m not as troubled with all of the conflations at the author tended to be – I think it’s probably okay, for example, to assume that the garden John mentions before Jesus’s arrest is indeed Gethsemane, though that name isn’t specifically there; I don’t see what harm that could really do. So most of the book was a recast for me, and that’s fine.
And there were certainly some points that were profoundly troubling; the suggestion, seriously entertained, that the wedding in Cana was Jesus Christ’s own wedding. Now I don’t, myself, have much of a stake in the answer to this question, it wouldn’t change my faith overmuch if Jesus had married – but to argue that there was a strong possibility of this specifically from the absence of evidence in the Gospels as to what the wedding was actually about assumes an almost maniacal editing of the Jesus traditions before we get them in Johannine form.
Because so many of the historical-critical findings have been eventually overturned or revealed as exaggerations or distorted understandings of Christ, I wonder how easily, and at just how many points, contemporary historical-critical scholarship makes the same over-reaching mistakes. We say we’re getting better, but are we really?
But of course I did find several gems, the most recent of which in Charlesworth was the argument that because Jesus most likely did not know Greek, he would have lacked that language’s (and our New Testament’s) more sophisticated understanding of past, present and future, and would have dealt instead in the simpler Semitic paradigm of fulfilled or un-fulfilled time.
That is a profound realization, it’s both based on historical data and consonant with the Hebrew Bible, and it helps us understand what the man was actually trying to say. That’s premium work; I wish all historical scholarship went down a similar vein and perhaps spent less time battling through the authority of sources.
Which brings me to the actual question: it’s not that I side with the Christ of faith or the Christ of history so much as that I choose the Christ of history because of the Christ of faith. Because and only because I believe that Jesus was the Son of God who was crucified for our sins and resurrected for our salvation, it matters what he taught and where he lived and how he understood God.
That’s why the historical details matter to me, albeit in varying degrees. And that’s probably true for most Christians – I think the discussion of the historical Jesus alone is perhaps best for an outward-facing conversation, because the degree of certainty that we can have about Jesus’s human life is significant and telling in an apologetic sense, as a defense of the reasonableness of our faith .
Monday, May 24, 2010
Matthew: On the Gospels as Portraits of Christ
The image of the portrait of Christ denotes an intimacy between artist and subject - the artist is sitting with the subject for some hours, the artist knows the subject on some personal level, and the subject, let's be honest, is usually giving the artist money – which skews the 'objectivity' of the portrait.
But all of this connotes relationship. And, I would add, all of this connotes some degree of spirit (we've all heard of the beliefs about photographs stealing one's soul - there's nothing stealthy about a portrait, no paparazzi with a paintbrush and a canvas. does anyone even do portraits anymore?)
It makes sense of course that this idea of portrait would describe the gospels more than a snapshot. The writers of the gospels had some relationship with Jesus Christ. And their affection for the personality and work of Jesus Christ ‘colored’ what they wrote about him.
But because the Jesus Christ of faith is worthy of praise and honor in the first place, it matters less that the Beloved Disciple didn’t catch Jesus making a fool of himself at a party, or drinking milk straight from the carton at 3AM. The whole person of Christ matters more than individual moments about him, right? This would include details about his birth and diet and stray comments – the whole matters more than the sum of its parts, and that comes in a portrait.
On the other hand, the image of the portrait implies only one artist, and we now know this simply could not have been the case for the gospels. I suggest the image of the mural would be more apt – that beautiful art form that is often whole communities of people building on each other’s work, sometimes over days and weeks, each adding their piece to a greater, messy harmony.
This brings up the subject of canonization, of course, because there were and are other murals. And we are hard pressed, frankly, to say with any degree of certainty as to who was and wasn’t truly inspired by God when they wrote accounts of Jesus – in large part because so many people seem to have been involved in all the oral traditions, and in all the communities of people of the early Jesus Movement that kept traditions about Jesus going.
What does that sort of inspiration even look like, what would the criteria be? Would the person have to glow to be inspired? Would they have to hear the voice of God audibly, or would a prompting of one’s consciousness suffice? If the latter, how do we know that the fourth person remembering a parable of Jesus to add to the book of Mark is inspired, but a second person remembering one of Jesus’s stray sayings for the Gospel of Thomas is not?
What we can say with greater certainty is that we choose these gospels, these four that we have today. We chose them in antiquity and we choose them again in our own time. We choose them all over the world just as we have chosen them for 2000 years because they describe the Jesus Christ we ourselves have relationship with better than the alternative murals of the Gnostic or other apocryphal gospels – these are the gospels which build faith.
Yes, we choose them because they have better historical bona fides than the gospels we have not chosen, but at this point the sheer weight of our collective choice must matter more than any one reason for it. It’s like ‘dating’ manuscripts in the other sense of the word. It matters less that he has blue eyes and quite a bit more that he’s your boyfriend.
But all of this connotes relationship. And, I would add, all of this connotes some degree of spirit (we've all heard of the beliefs about photographs stealing one's soul - there's nothing stealthy about a portrait, no paparazzi with a paintbrush and a canvas. does anyone even do portraits anymore?)
It makes sense of course that this idea of portrait would describe the gospels more than a snapshot. The writers of the gospels had some relationship with Jesus Christ. And their affection for the personality and work of Jesus Christ ‘colored’ what they wrote about him.
But because the Jesus Christ of faith is worthy of praise and honor in the first place, it matters less that the Beloved Disciple didn’t catch Jesus making a fool of himself at a party, or drinking milk straight from the carton at 3AM. The whole person of Christ matters more than individual moments about him, right? This would include details about his birth and diet and stray comments – the whole matters more than the sum of its parts, and that comes in a portrait.
On the other hand, the image of the portrait implies only one artist, and we now know this simply could not have been the case for the gospels. I suggest the image of the mural would be more apt – that beautiful art form that is often whole communities of people building on each other’s work, sometimes over days and weeks, each adding their piece to a greater, messy harmony.
This brings up the subject of canonization, of course, because there were and are other murals. And we are hard pressed, frankly, to say with any degree of certainty as to who was and wasn’t truly inspired by God when they wrote accounts of Jesus – in large part because so many people seem to have been involved in all the oral traditions, and in all the communities of people of the early Jesus Movement that kept traditions about Jesus going.
What does that sort of inspiration even look like, what would the criteria be? Would the person have to glow to be inspired? Would they have to hear the voice of God audibly, or would a prompting of one’s consciousness suffice? If the latter, how do we know that the fourth person remembering a parable of Jesus to add to the book of Mark is inspired, but a second person remembering one of Jesus’s stray sayings for the Gospel of Thomas is not?
What we can say with greater certainty is that we choose these gospels, these four that we have today. We chose them in antiquity and we choose them again in our own time. We choose them all over the world just as we have chosen them for 2000 years because they describe the Jesus Christ we ourselves have relationship with better than the alternative murals of the Gnostic or other apocryphal gospels – these are the gospels which build faith.
Yes, we choose them because they have better historical bona fides than the gospels we have not chosen, but at this point the sheer weight of our collective choice must matter more than any one reason for it. It’s like ‘dating’ manuscripts in the other sense of the word. It matters less that he has blue eyes and quite a bit more that he’s your boyfriend.
Notice: Semester Rewind
All (two of you):
Since I didn't have the chance to post throughout the semester, you'll be seeing my relatively few posts on Matthew, Christology, Hermeneutics, and Ethics all summer long, a post or two at a time. I'll start you off with Matthew.
Thanks,
the Curious Monk
Since I didn't have the chance to post throughout the semester, you'll be seeing my relatively few posts on Matthew, Christology, Hermeneutics, and Ethics all summer long, a post or two at a time. I'll start you off with Matthew.
Thanks,
the Curious Monk
Sunday, April 18, 2010
Editorial: Meanwhile, Saul
Meanwhile, Saul
“Meanwhile Saul,” says the book of Acts. And that’s the point. The rest of the sentence is more exciting, to be sure. ‘Breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord’ has understandably gotten more attention – especially from disciples. But ‘meanwhile, Saul’ means that Saul is not the beginning. In the beginning was not Saul. In the beginning was the Lord, who has been converting what seems to be the entire Greco-Roman world in Acts. Saul isn’t even the only traveler. Philip has just been converting an Ethiopian eunuch on the way south from Jerusalem whereupon he is whisked away to Caesarea, west of Jerusalem. Transported in an instant! ‘Meanwhile, Saul,’ indeed. What can possibly compare with instantaneous teleportation?
“Meanwhile, Saul,” is very good news. It means that we ourselves are meanwhile. We are interrupting, erupting into God’s plan for the salvation of the world. We are not that plan itself. But we can be included in it. Meanwhile Ben, meanwhile, Noel, meanwhile Aron. One of my professors said this week that the thing about these readings is that they’re hard to believe, that it seems difficult for us to accept that nothing is too good for God. And when I heard that I laughed, because that’s the point – they’re impossible! They are too much to believe! And so we can’t believe them. But of course, says Acts, they happen anyway. We are not the whole picture. Our individual faiths and doubts, our own threats and murders are not the whole great stage.
Meanwhile, Saul. Meanwhile, God. The story of Saul on the road to Damascus is not about a great villain coming to great faith anymore than the story from John is about a breakfast by the sea. These all are stories about the goodness of God, which is too good to be believed. You’ve heard about the gospel of prosperity, and I’ve thought sometimes about something that might be called the gospel of poverty. But I’m here to tell you about the gospel of surprise. And I like to be surprised. Some people, who are surprised badly, think it is not very good to be surprised. And I understand that. But we have to be surprised. Without surprise, we can never step outside ourselves. Without surprise, we never get anything better than the good we do believe – which is nothing particularly much. Without surprise, we don’t get a God worth having. We don’t even really get a God at all.
“Saul went to the high priest and asked him for letters to the synagogues at Damascus, so that if he found any who belonged to the Way, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem.” Now this was actually a strange thing for him to do. Neither the Temple nor Rome was actively persecuting Christians at this time. But Saul asked to go just in case there were Christians there, he didn’t even know that there were. So it’s like, “Ummm, okay, Saul, sure.” He’s just looking for a fight. So I think we can understand Flannery O’Connor, who writes, “God knew that the only way to make a Christian out of that man was to knock him off his ass.”
Which is of course exactly what occurs. “Now as he was going along and approaching Damascus, suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. He fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him ‘Saul, Saul,’ why do you persecute me?” Please understand, Saul the Pharisee knows about appearances of God. Saul even knows what to do: you see God, you fall to the ground, like Ezekiel. That is part of the surprise, because Saul probably expects the Lord to tell him where the Lord’s enemies are, because they must be dealt with. So it’s not that he has the vision. It’s what the vision is. It’s the Lord naming himself as Jesus and equating himself with the very people Saul was looking to kill. No wonder the man went blind.
And that is something we have to think about. We Protestants talk about ‘road to Damascus moments.’ We look for God, we seek God, we want to experience God and all of that is good. But there is no good moment on the way to Damascus. Saul’s moment with Jesus leaves him blinded and silent and doubtlessly bewildered, and at any rate still travelling with the same men he’d set out to persecute the Christians with. I mean, do we know anyone else in the New Testament who’s in the dark and doesn’t eat or drink for three whole days? Saul is dead, symbolically. Saul met Jesus and it outright killed him – died of surprise. God is so good we don’t even want to believe it. Not much of a conversion, really.
But of course, this is why we have stories, instead of moments. Meanwhile Saul, meanwhile God, meanwhile Ananias. To follow the Lord is to live a life perpetually interrupted. ‘Here I am, Lord!’ It’s always the middle of the night, isn’t it? We’re always doing something we expect to keep right on doing. God always drags us right on out of bed, because the good that we expect is so dull it puts us right to sleep. But the God who finds us is the God worth getting up for, now. ‘Let me tell you about Saul,’ says Jesus. ‘I know!’ says Ananias. ‘He’s come to arrest us all, probably trial in Jerusalem or led away to Rome.’ ‘No, really,’ says Jesus, ‘I want you to help him out. The man might be a tool, but he’s my tool now.”
Nobody saw that one coming! The great mission of Ananias is to go across town. The future of Christianity depends on a simple baptismal service and a laying on of hands. ‘Meanwhile, Ananias’. What we get to do, is participate. This is it, right? Straight street, prepare ye the way of the Lord. The road to Damascus was Saul’s road to Jesus. He finally gets the God of loving kindness that he’s read so much about. But the street across Damascus was Jesus’ road to Saul. ‘Here comes my body, whom you were persecuting,’ says Jesus to Saul. ‘Let me touch you. Let the scales fall right off your eyes. Let me pour out my water over you. Take, and eat and be filled with my Spirit. Then I will show you.’
And this time, we’d all best be prepared to be surprised.
“You don’t run down the present,” writes Annie Dillard. “You wait for it, empty-handed, and you are filled. You’ll have fish left over.” The story of the astounding goodness of God is the story of Saul is the story of the disciples fishing by the sea. It is the greatest story ever told only if you’re telling it later. To actually live through it is another thing altogether. The disciples weren’t fishing in celebration. They were fishing in confusion. They were fishing because they had given up their livelihoods for this charismatic guy and done all these great things and gone up to Jerusalem in triumph and apprehension and seen the whole thing fall apart and their leader killed and then later the women said they had seen something but no one knows what’s really going on and – “I’m going fishing,” says Peter. I’m going fishing. Back to the drawing board. And back out into the boat where they caught nothing, and it was night.
Surprises can be terrible, and they can be astounding. What they never are is particularly comforting. To encounter God is to meet the death of our own expectations. That is the gospel of surprise. And it is the only way we can meet something incredibly new. But we meet it nonetheless, and get what we could not possibly imagine. We fill our nets just by trying out the other side of the boat. As if that would ever work. It is indeed too much to believe. One hundred and fifty three is the number of astonishment. It is the number of God’s grace because it is a number none of us could possibly expect.
Fortunately, we are none of us alone. Saul’s conversion does not rely on Saul alone. Peter’s restoration does not rely on Peter alone. “That disciple whom Jesus loved said to Peter, ‘It is the Lord!’” In other words, ‘meanwhile, John,’. That’s what gets Peter jumping out the boat, which is another thing to do whenever you see God. You get out and try to walk on water. What else would you do? What else is even worth trying? But the disciple who first recognizes Jesus doesn’t do anything. No one person gets it right. One doesn’t see but jumps, the other sees but doesn’t leap. It’s together that they get breakfast by the sea. Meanwhile Saul, meanwhile Peter, meanwhile John. Meanwhile you, meanwhile me, meanwhile Gethsemane.
Now I don’t think there is a particular imperative here. I don’t read a specific command of God in any of these passages. How could there be? How could we be surprised if we were told ahead of time exactly what we were going to have to do? How could we receive the incomprehensible goodness of God if we were told in simple human terms what that good would be? We couldn’t.
But I will say this: God is an earthquake. God is goodness shaking the earth. God is the interruption too enormous and too kind to be believed. “You can't conceive, nor can I, the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God," writes Graham Greene. So if you want to find God, you want to seek God, you can’t just look within yourself. You can’t look for a moment in your life. The difficulty with discerning the work of God isn’t that it is so small. It is that the work of God is so incomprehensibly big. You want to find the focus of an earthquake, you need three points. You need Saul, you need the Lord, you need Ananias. To find the center from which goodness overflows, you need Jesus, you need John, you need your Simon Peter. You want to find out what God’s doing, you need to actually ask each other. We need to ask each other. To be people of the earthquake, to be the people of the Lord, we need to have that conversation, and to live lives centered in Jesus Christ we cannot stop – not until the ground stops shaking.
And yes, be prepared to be surprised. If we ask, if we look for the goodness of God, I can guarantee we will be.
“Meanwhile Saul,” says the book of Acts. And that’s the point. The rest of the sentence is more exciting, to be sure. ‘Breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord’ has understandably gotten more attention – especially from disciples. But ‘meanwhile, Saul’ means that Saul is not the beginning. In the beginning was not Saul. In the beginning was the Lord, who has been converting what seems to be the entire Greco-Roman world in Acts. Saul isn’t even the only traveler. Philip has just been converting an Ethiopian eunuch on the way south from Jerusalem whereupon he is whisked away to Caesarea, west of Jerusalem. Transported in an instant! ‘Meanwhile, Saul,’ indeed. What can possibly compare with instantaneous teleportation?
“Meanwhile, Saul,” is very good news. It means that we ourselves are meanwhile. We are interrupting, erupting into God’s plan for the salvation of the world. We are not that plan itself. But we can be included in it. Meanwhile Ben, meanwhile, Noel, meanwhile Aron. One of my professors said this week that the thing about these readings is that they’re hard to believe, that it seems difficult for us to accept that nothing is too good for God. And when I heard that I laughed, because that’s the point – they’re impossible! They are too much to believe! And so we can’t believe them. But of course, says Acts, they happen anyway. We are not the whole picture. Our individual faiths and doubts, our own threats and murders are not the whole great stage.
Meanwhile, Saul. Meanwhile, God. The story of Saul on the road to Damascus is not about a great villain coming to great faith anymore than the story from John is about a breakfast by the sea. These all are stories about the goodness of God, which is too good to be believed. You’ve heard about the gospel of prosperity, and I’ve thought sometimes about something that might be called the gospel of poverty. But I’m here to tell you about the gospel of surprise. And I like to be surprised. Some people, who are surprised badly, think it is not very good to be surprised. And I understand that. But we have to be surprised. Without surprise, we can never step outside ourselves. Without surprise, we never get anything better than the good we do believe – which is nothing particularly much. Without surprise, we don’t get a God worth having. We don’t even really get a God at all.
“Saul went to the high priest and asked him for letters to the synagogues at Damascus, so that if he found any who belonged to the Way, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem.” Now this was actually a strange thing for him to do. Neither the Temple nor Rome was actively persecuting Christians at this time. But Saul asked to go just in case there were Christians there, he didn’t even know that there were. So it’s like, “Ummm, okay, Saul, sure.” He’s just looking for a fight. So I think we can understand Flannery O’Connor, who writes, “God knew that the only way to make a Christian out of that man was to knock him off his ass.”
Which is of course exactly what occurs. “Now as he was going along and approaching Damascus, suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. He fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him ‘Saul, Saul,’ why do you persecute me?” Please understand, Saul the Pharisee knows about appearances of God. Saul even knows what to do: you see God, you fall to the ground, like Ezekiel. That is part of the surprise, because Saul probably expects the Lord to tell him where the Lord’s enemies are, because they must be dealt with. So it’s not that he has the vision. It’s what the vision is. It’s the Lord naming himself as Jesus and equating himself with the very people Saul was looking to kill. No wonder the man went blind.
And that is something we have to think about. We Protestants talk about ‘road to Damascus moments.’ We look for God, we seek God, we want to experience God and all of that is good. But there is no good moment on the way to Damascus. Saul’s moment with Jesus leaves him blinded and silent and doubtlessly bewildered, and at any rate still travelling with the same men he’d set out to persecute the Christians with. I mean, do we know anyone else in the New Testament who’s in the dark and doesn’t eat or drink for three whole days? Saul is dead, symbolically. Saul met Jesus and it outright killed him – died of surprise. God is so good we don’t even want to believe it. Not much of a conversion, really.
But of course, this is why we have stories, instead of moments. Meanwhile Saul, meanwhile God, meanwhile Ananias. To follow the Lord is to live a life perpetually interrupted. ‘Here I am, Lord!’ It’s always the middle of the night, isn’t it? We’re always doing something we expect to keep right on doing. God always drags us right on out of bed, because the good that we expect is so dull it puts us right to sleep. But the God who finds us is the God worth getting up for, now. ‘Let me tell you about Saul,’ says Jesus. ‘I know!’ says Ananias. ‘He’s come to arrest us all, probably trial in Jerusalem or led away to Rome.’ ‘No, really,’ says Jesus, ‘I want you to help him out. The man might be a tool, but he’s my tool now.”
Nobody saw that one coming! The great mission of Ananias is to go across town. The future of Christianity depends on a simple baptismal service and a laying on of hands. ‘Meanwhile, Ananias’. What we get to do, is participate. This is it, right? Straight street, prepare ye the way of the Lord. The road to Damascus was Saul’s road to Jesus. He finally gets the God of loving kindness that he’s read so much about. But the street across Damascus was Jesus’ road to Saul. ‘Here comes my body, whom you were persecuting,’ says Jesus to Saul. ‘Let me touch you. Let the scales fall right off your eyes. Let me pour out my water over you. Take, and eat and be filled with my Spirit. Then I will show you.’
And this time, we’d all best be prepared to be surprised.
“You don’t run down the present,” writes Annie Dillard. “You wait for it, empty-handed, and you are filled. You’ll have fish left over.” The story of the astounding goodness of God is the story of Saul is the story of the disciples fishing by the sea. It is the greatest story ever told only if you’re telling it later. To actually live through it is another thing altogether. The disciples weren’t fishing in celebration. They were fishing in confusion. They were fishing because they had given up their livelihoods for this charismatic guy and done all these great things and gone up to Jerusalem in triumph and apprehension and seen the whole thing fall apart and their leader killed and then later the women said they had seen something but no one knows what’s really going on and – “I’m going fishing,” says Peter. I’m going fishing. Back to the drawing board. And back out into the boat where they caught nothing, and it was night.
Surprises can be terrible, and they can be astounding. What they never are is particularly comforting. To encounter God is to meet the death of our own expectations. That is the gospel of surprise. And it is the only way we can meet something incredibly new. But we meet it nonetheless, and get what we could not possibly imagine. We fill our nets just by trying out the other side of the boat. As if that would ever work. It is indeed too much to believe. One hundred and fifty three is the number of astonishment. It is the number of God’s grace because it is a number none of us could possibly expect.
Fortunately, we are none of us alone. Saul’s conversion does not rely on Saul alone. Peter’s restoration does not rely on Peter alone. “That disciple whom Jesus loved said to Peter, ‘It is the Lord!’” In other words, ‘meanwhile, John,’. That’s what gets Peter jumping out the boat, which is another thing to do whenever you see God. You get out and try to walk on water. What else would you do? What else is even worth trying? But the disciple who first recognizes Jesus doesn’t do anything. No one person gets it right. One doesn’t see but jumps, the other sees but doesn’t leap. It’s together that they get breakfast by the sea. Meanwhile Saul, meanwhile Peter, meanwhile John. Meanwhile you, meanwhile me, meanwhile Gethsemane.
Now I don’t think there is a particular imperative here. I don’t read a specific command of God in any of these passages. How could there be? How could we be surprised if we were told ahead of time exactly what we were going to have to do? How could we receive the incomprehensible goodness of God if we were told in simple human terms what that good would be? We couldn’t.
But I will say this: God is an earthquake. God is goodness shaking the earth. God is the interruption too enormous and too kind to be believed. “You can't conceive, nor can I, the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God," writes Graham Greene. So if you want to find God, you want to seek God, you can’t just look within yourself. You can’t look for a moment in your life. The difficulty with discerning the work of God isn’t that it is so small. It is that the work of God is so incomprehensibly big. You want to find the focus of an earthquake, you need three points. You need Saul, you need the Lord, you need Ananias. To find the center from which goodness overflows, you need Jesus, you need John, you need your Simon Peter. You want to find out what God’s doing, you need to actually ask each other. We need to ask each other. To be people of the earthquake, to be the people of the Lord, we need to have that conversation, and to live lives centered in Jesus Christ we cannot stop – not until the ground stops shaking.
And yes, be prepared to be surprised. If we ask, if we look for the goodness of God, I can guarantee we will be.
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