Jesus « Wondering Fair

Delicate Delegation

1 06 2012

It seems to me that the delegation of tasks (better known as the delegation of control) is a bit like asking a friend to cut your hair. You’re probably better off doing the job yourself, you sense things are not going to turn out perfect, but at least you can say you gave them a chance before taking back the scissors (and editing their handiwork later).

Delegation of anything can be a delicate issue. Some of us can’t handle the weight of responsibility, and so delegate in order to shirk decision-making at the earliest opportunity. Others of us simply don’t trust anyone other than ourselves to do the job well or to meet our expectations, countenancing delegation solely as a means of assigning unwanted and unimportant work to someone else.

So how does God square up as a delegator? How does someone with a world of power, and vision to match, decide who to share it with? How does God get the work done? Looking at the life of Jesus, we find some interesting lessons. Here are a few:

Firstly, God invests in people quickly. Within moments, it seems, of Jesus’ taking up public ministry, he calls alongside Simon Peter and his brother Andrew, then James and his brother John (Matt. 4). From the outset, God does not intend to do his work alone.

Secondly, God takes the flack for his people’s mistakes. Nobody concerned to save face would choose disciples like Jesus’ twelve. Time and again they misunderstand him, they misinterpret him and disobey him, with the consequence that others misunderstand and misinterpret him. So no, God would not get a gold star for his choice of employees, but he manages the ones he has with exceptional skill. Jesus is patient with his disciples, he takes his time with them, he journeys with them, he repeats and explains things for them, he invests time and prayer in them, and ultimately he stands by them. Nobody gets dropped but everybody is given freedom to leave, however painful to himself and his mission (Matt. 26:31).

Thirdly, God’s ‘whys’ are more important than his ‘whos.’ When it comes to choosing who to pass the baton to, Jesus chooses prayerfully (Luke 6) and then merely adequately. I don’t think Jesus chose disciples from among fishermen, zealots and tax collectors because they shone out as skilled learners and leaders. I think he chose them for a different reason entirely: to show that it is only by God’s own qualities, his love, grace and power shared, that anyone can fulfil God’s intentions. God’s associates are not the world’s boldest and best, but ordinary people like you and me, people who may not have it all at the outset but who can learn as they follow, developing skills and traits which mirror God’s own, with everlasting impact.

Having been a manager myself in days gone by, I appreciate that these things may not translate easily to the world of business (or hairdressing!), geared as we are to hold on to control more easily than we relinquish it. But I do wonder what life would look like if we had a go at doing things Jesus’ way. We might end up looking like Ziggy Stardust, but perhaps we wouldn’t need the scissors back.

Madi Simpson

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Tags: delegation, disciples, faith, God, Jesus, mission, vocation, work
Categories : Bar Conversations and Cheap Advice

What Makes a Speaker Persuasive?

18 05 2012

In his treatise on rhetoric, when Aristotle set out to express the factor that makes a public speaker most persuasive, he elected an element not many of us would choose. To Aristotle, a speaker’s most powerful weapon is not logos: it is not his unanswerable logic, argumentation, insightful content. It was not the eloquence and rhythm of his words. Nor was it pathos: someone’s passion, emotion, intensity of expression, full range of body moves.

Instead of logos and pathos, Aristotle chose instead ethos: the speaker’s character. For him, more important than what was said, or how intensely it was said, was who said it. A speaker’s character is his or her most persuasive trait. His ethos, comprised for Aristotle of wisdom, virtue, and goodness toward the audience, is what speaks loudest to the people who hear his words.[1]

I confess that I felt surprised, even disappointed, when I came upon Aristotle’s choice some years ago. True, if a speaker’s life does not match his words, the most eloquent of speeches won’t get a listening. But provided he is a decent person, I thought, and nothing could be held against him, clearly logos and pathos were much sharper arrows. Aristotle should just listen to Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream, and notice his choice of metaphors, the rhythm of language and repetition, his use of songs and scriptures to ground his argument, and the bursting, passionate delivery of his rising words – until he reaches a stirring climax with “Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, we are free at last” – to realize that ethos is no match for logos and pathos.

But as Aristotle’s observation remained in the back of my mind, and I came to listen to numerous speakers over the years, I grudgingly and slowly gave in to Aristotle. The master philosopher was right also on this one. And what convinced me of Aristotle’s choice for ethos was this: think of a good speaker you heard a while ago. You may remember a couple good insights; maybe a carefully constructed sentence, if he was really able and repeated the sentence at key points. You may remember a moving story or a passionate delivery.

But what stuck? What addresses you still? It is not words or emotions: it is the speaker’s soul. The questions that remain over time are: how good was that person? Did her humility lower my barriers, and did her benevolence attract my heart, so our personalities could meet? How much did she penetrate into me? Was there a communication of spirit? More than the delivery of a message, was there an encounter? Like Aristotle pointed out, it is the speaker’s spirit that communicates the most. Words may inform our minds, emotions may move our hearts, but we are permanently
transformed only if a speaker’s character is compelling, and a piece of his soul penetrates into ours.

I’m an avid speech listener. I will pay almost whatever cost to go hear the best speakers, and to savour that multiplicity of words, emotions and spirit packed beautifully into a few moments. I search across history to find and read the most compelling rhetoric ever articulated, trying to imagine what it was like to be there and listen, feeling the speaker’s soul project forward and move through the audience. I confess I have even prayed a couple times for God to let me experience in a dream what it was like was to sit under George Whitefield, as he swept whole cities and countries with his eloquence in the eighteenth century. But nothing makes my heart beats faster than to imagine myself among the crowds that once filled the beaches and hills of Galilee, as word got around that a prophet was in town, next to people who walked for weeks to hear him speak, and to relish Jesus’ words, and feel the gravity of his personality, and be infused by his spirit, and press through the crowd, until I could get a glimpse of his eyes, and go home with a piece of that soul in mine.

René Breuel

[1] Aristotle, The Art of Rhetoric (New York: Penguin, 2005), book 2.1.5-9

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Tags: Aristotle, character, ethos, George Whitefield, I Have a Dream, Jesus, Martin Luther King, preaching, public speaking, rhetoric
Categories : Spirituality for the Rest of Us, The Heart of Faith

Distance, Repentance and Embrace

4 05 2012

Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations details the maturation of Pip, a young man specially selected by an unknown benefactor to become a “gentleman.” It is easy to read the tale as a rags-to-riches story, with Pip moving from his apprenticeship to his brother-in-law, Joe the blacksmith, to the high-life of London, complete with expensive dinners, private clubs, and days filled with nothing but leisure. Pip’s assumes that Miss Havisham—the crazy, rich, old woman in his town—has chosen to patronize him with the plan that he marry the beautiful, distant Estella, her ward and Pip’s childhood companion. However, Pip’s expectations are dashed when he discovers that his benefactor is really a convict and that Miss Havisham’s plans for Pip or anyone else were never kind. Despite the disappointment and a number of narrative complications, in the end Pip eventually develops a life in London and far away from the blacksmith’s forge, placing him solidly among the middle or even upper-middle class.

However, there is another, more troubling narrative at work that invites a different reading. Joe, Pip’s brother-in-law, is really a surrogate father to Pip and the deep love between them is quite clear… except that Pip seems to always intended to be good to Joe, to visit Joe, to thank Joe, to tell Joe that he loves him but Pip never actually gets around to doing these things. Pip is actually quite embarrassed by Joe’s lack of formal education and poor, country manners. In this, it is a modern prodigal son story—the son just wants to get away from home and, when he is given a chance, he goes without looking back, rejecting the man who had cared for him through his childhood, who has been his friend, his confidant, and his comforter. In fact, when Pip is back in his home village, he stays in a hotel without going to visit Joe.

Granted, Dickens’ tale is toned-down version of the the parble of Prodigal Son. However, in some ways, Pip is more insidiously unkind to Joe than the traditional Prodigal Son. Rather than the son eventually returning home repentant, Pip never returns to humbly confess his arrogance to Joe. In fact, rather than Pip seeking Joe out, Joe leaves the forge for London to nurse Pip through the sickness and through his recovery—even though Pip secretly feels that he is too good for Joe and his unrefined ways.

Eventually, Pip does confess his shabby treatment of Joe and Joe says all is forgiven but the relationship is never as intimate as it once was. The narrative’s closing note of displacement reflects the particularly modern outlook of the novel, suggesting that after the relational breech of Pip’s embarrassment regarding Joe, after the high-living in London, after Pip’s shame regarding his benefactor, there is no going back. One might learn, grow, and regret the past, but we all move on and there is no restoration or renewal, only the sham of a family or the sham of a romance.

Amid our modern expectations of a great fall into knowledge, shame, regret, and ultimately personal growth, Jesus parable of the Prodigal Son offers a frightening hope. Like Pip, the original Prodigal Son’s maturation and resulting repentance lead him to return to his father. However, unlike Pip, the Prodigal is not permitted to repent in the context of a dispassionate conversation. Nor is the Prodigal allowed to move-on relationally, remembering his old father with a distanced, fond affection and a bit of lingering sadness for the irreparable breach.

The Prodigal is not permitted these emotional escapes because the Father in Jesus’ parable is very different from the good, kind Joe. The Father rushes out to his son on the road, stops the son’s confession before it really begins, hugs him close and declares cause for a celebration. The breech is repaired by the Father’s overwhelming love for the Prodigal. But the Prodigal is also exposed, his failing known by all, even though the Father chooses to forgive them.

Pip, on the other hand, is able to hide his repeated betrayals of Joe: confessing privately and receiving Joe’s forgiveness privately, Pip’s identity as a private, self-sufficient individual is left intact. Yet, unlike the Prodigal, there is still no place for Pip, no home or family to claim and to be claimed by.

The frightening thing about the Prodigal Son is that it depicts the hope of restoration and renewal that God offers each of us. There is no escape after a measured confession into a polite, albeit distant, relationship. God welcomes each of us to himself with an exuberant love that will not permit us to hide. Instead, God sees our deepest betrayals and suffocates them in an embrace.

Jessica Hughes

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Tags: Charles Dickens, embrace, faith, fiction, forgiveness, Great Expectations, Jesus, literature, novel, Prodigal Son, reconciliation, repentance
Categories : Bar Conversations and Cheap Advice

A Tale of Two Politicians, and of Redemption

30 04 2012

Injustice smells. There is a nauseating odor to it: toxic, enraging, sad. And when we see someone who cheated and betrayed, someone who let us down, it is hard to find satisfaction more pleasing to our guts than to beat him up, to make him pay for his sins.

Two politicians made me think of this last week. The first was John Edwards, an once-promising American presidential candidate, charming in his looks and in his words, but who betrayed his terminally ill wife and lied about. Caught right in the middle of his presidential campaign, Edwards faced last week his trial. But as Washington Post contributor Christ Cillizza pointed out, it was a trial more about feelings than legal procedures: “This trial — regardless of the outcome — amounts to one last chance for the public to express its disdain for a man who cheated on his terminally ill wife, lied about it, fathered a child out of wedlock, lied about it and is now left searching for some strands of redemption or, at least, forgiveness.” It is another chance to look at a man who fell, fell from really high up, and make him pay.

The second politician, Charles Colson, had an even more spectacular fall: the Watergate disgrace, maybe the most famous corruption scandal of modern politics, when Colson helped a team of then-president Richard Nixon’s reelection committee to break into and tap the offices of his political opponents. Colson and others were sent to prison for this, but then he underwent a conversion, narrated in his bestseller Born Again, and became a devout Christian. Colson then dedicated the second part of his life to start a ministry that reaches out to prisoners, and become a major evangelical leader.

The thing is: Colson died last week, and, curiously, his obituaries at major newspapers have varied in tone. Some narrated the whole of his life, and praised his conversion and the good he made after it. Others, however, were cynical, and implied that his life change was just smokescreen, that Colson remained the Watergate dirty trickster for all his life, that the redemption of such a treacherous man could not possibly be true. How could it?

Redemption is hard to believe in. It really is. Especially because it is such a personal matter: I am treacherous too, I’m the one deserving condemnation, and I can’t possibly believe that I could find redemption. An observer of the reactions to Colson’s death put it well: “When you read those who smirk and dismiss the Chuck Colson conversion, … [r]ead a subtext that belongs to all of us: the fear that the criminal conspiracy we’ve all been a part of will be exposed, and just can’t be forgiven. Read the undercurrent of those who find it hard to believe that one can be not just pardoned, but “born again… That’s indeed hard to believe.”

But what if redemption is possible? What if people like Edwards or Colson can really be forgiven and start anew? What if I can be forgiven? What if I can end this life with my head raised high, with no finger pointing at me, redeemed by the grace of Christ, and have something like the following scenario for Colson’s death be true also for me?

I have to believe that when Chuck Colson opened his eyes in the moments after death that he didn’t hear anything about break-ins or dirty tricks or guilty consciences. I have to believe Mr. Colson heard a Galilean voice saying, “I was in prison and you visited me” (Matt. 25:36). I have to believe that he stood before his Creator with a new record, a new life transcript, one that belonged not to himself but to a Judean day-laborer who is now the ruler of the cosmos… That’s good news for guilty consciences, good news for recovering hatchet men and women like us.

Indeed it is good news, almost too good to be true. But true it is, and deliciously, liberatingly, scintillatingly good too. Redemption is possible, not despite the greatness of our sins, but because of the greatness of Jesus’ grace for us.

René Breuel

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Tags: Charles Colson, faith, forgiveness, Jesus, John Edwards, justice, politics, redemption, sin, Watergate
Categories : The Heart of Faith

Why Church Control must be Crucified

25 04 2012

The Church is about controlling people. The overbearing Pastor dominates the congregation, playing lead role and telling the others what to do. Some people avoid the Church like the plague, hoping they’ll be safer outside. Yet even there the Church interferes. One blogger commented on the decline of the Church in Australia. His solution was that the Church “stop sticking their noses into everyone else’s business: politics, child raising, court systems, sexual preference etc. etc.” With all our lobbying for political control, we’re known more for what we stand against than what we stand for. Our grab for authority and casting of judgment has obscured God’s grace and the call to life. … At least that’s how it’s perceived.[1]

Okay, is this what it should be? The Church isn’t an organisation; it’s an organism. It’s a bunch of people who when put together should look like Jesus. So how did Jesus wear his authority? Was he about control?

Well, first things first, there’s a big difference between legitimate, and illegitimate authority. I can’t walk into your workplace and start telling people what to do. Why? Well, I’m not the boss. But let’s say I was ….. So let’s try a thought experiment. If Jesus really is the Son of God, as he claimed to be, that changes everything. If it’s true, doesn’t he have legitimate authority? And can’t he extend this authority to whoever he wishes? Then the real question is, How did Jesus choose to use this authority? The bottom line is this: Jesus was no authoritarian dictator; he wielded his ultimate authority with absolute humility.

Have you ever seen that TV show “Undercover Boss”? The idea’s simple: the boss of a massive company dons the worker’s uniform and enters into their company as one of the team … scrubbing dishes, delivering mail, answering phones. The boss gets to know their staff on the ground, as an equal; and at the end of the week, everyone’s shocked as his or her true identity is revealed. Same with Jesus, the ultimate undercover boss. Take two incidents.

First, Easter. Everyone has abandoned Jesus. Peter backstabbed him three times. They feel like dirt, guilty as hell, as now that Jesus has been crucified, they’ve run in fear back to their old lives. Peter and the crew are out in the boat. But while they’re out fishing and serving themselves, who should be on the beach cooking them an awesome meal of fish over the fire, but the leader himself, Jesus. He beat death. He is the boss. Peter’s probably thinking, “I’m in deep trouble.” Now, there is stuff to talk through, and a relationship to mend. But there’s no lecture and no punishment. Just forgiveness and love. “For God didn’t send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but to savethe world through Him” (John 3:17).

Second incident, John 8.[2] Know the story? A woman is caught in the act of having sex with someone else’s husband. Under the religious laws, she should be killed, stoned to death. They throw her in the dirt in front of Jesus. “Your call, Jesus.” But he turns the tables: “Whoever is without sin, you cast the first stone.” One by one they drop the rocks, and leave. But notice what Jesus says. “Woman, where are your accusers? Now, go and sin no more.” … “Sin no more.” He’s not there to judge. But nor is he saying to this lady and her male friend (who has conveniently escaped, “Guys, do what you want: keep wrecking families and doing damage.”

The Church is meant to look like Jesus. Our role is not to judge, or grasp for control. But nor is it to ignore when stuff’s not right. If we truly love someone, we won’t watch silently on while they hurt themselves, or others. As a parent, if your four-year-old went to stick a fork into a live power socket, would you say something? To not is negligent. Worse, it’s unloving.

Jesus did call out sin, but it was out of love. And Jesus gave the Church, as his body, that same authority. It’s not to condemn. It’s so people will turn from death, from sin, and choose what leads to life and freedom.

Jesus was no control freak. When the disciples fought over who would be first, he donned a slave’s towel and washed their feet. “Whoever wants to be first must be last. Are you greater than your master? I came not to be served, but to serve, and to give my life as a ransom.” Jesus wore his authority with humility. He leveraged his power on behalf of the least. And as his body, the Church should too.

Jesus wasn’t about being the star of the show—he’s the undercover boss. And he gives equal authority to every Christian, not to one mega-leader to manipulate the rest. It’s only when we’re all together, serving each other, that the Church looks like Jesus. The authority we have isn’t to control. Instead, our authority is to serve each other, and give up our life to help a hurting world. That’s why Church control must be crucified.

Harsh judgmentalism and control issues are often identified with the culture wars, especially in America. So before you go back to your everyday existence, to a society that prizes power, take a look at the cruciform Church’s authority expressed in an edgy city like San Francisco. Every week, dozens of followers of Jesus from different denominations gather together as one body, the Church, to serve the least of these under the Golden Gate Bridge.[3]

Dave Benson

[1] See, for instance, www.unchristian.com, the Australian Communities Report, Dan Kimball’s book They Like Jesus but Not the Church.

[2] Whilst this story’s location (John 7:53-8:11) jumps around John’s Gospel in the earliest manuscripts—it was clearly a later interpolation, though perhaps by John or another early editor—there are still solid arguments for its authenticity, and it resonates with both Jesus’ teaching and example. See here.

[3] From Dan Merchant’s DVD, “Lord, Save Us From Your Followers,” lordsaveusthemovie.com. Also, to further explore the question “Is the Church relevant,” see www.kbc.org.au/media/message-logos-is-the-church-relevant/ for a response to the perceived control, exclusivity and hypocrisy of the contemporary church.

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Tags: authority, church, control, dominate, humility, Jesus, power, serve, undercover boss
Categories : The Heart of Faith, Tough Questions

Housekeeping and Its Glories

20 04 2012

For me there is something satisfying about giving your house a good scrub and then sitting down in the midst of organization and cleanliness to enjoy a good book and a cup of tea on a Sunday afternoon. More than an abstract satisfaction associated with cleaning, I feel it like a satisfaction of putting your own space in order. There is something unique about home, a kind of familiarity that develops into a special sort of appreciation. In my case, I can tell where the cat is walking by the creak of particular floorboards, I know exactly which spaces get the right sort of light for reading a book, and each corner of home has potent memories associated with it. Housekeeping offers a way of defending the importance of the bundle of memories and reflexes which we associate with our home.

This can extend beyond the walls of your apartment and function on a city-level too. I’m always excited to run into someone from my hometown of Seattle as no one else understands the many things (refined appreciation of well-roasted coffee or a love of the mixed smells of rain and cedar trees) which are unique to my geographical home. There is an unavoidably intimate bond you share with a person who has drunk in the same smells and sights over a lifetime. New places that we experience get absorbed into our place-memory, but we nevertheless tend to experience an anchoring in time and place.

Contrary to what some might think, this familiarity is actually an experience that we share with God. The writer of the gospel of John surely had this in mind when he recounts, “So the Word became flesh; he made his home among us” (Jn 1:14 REB). In John’s original Greek, the word translated as “made his home” (literally “tabernacled”) refers back to the Tabernacle in Exodus, where we are also reminded that God asked the people to make space for him to be with them in a way that resonates with our own unique anchoring in place and time. But the suggestion here isn’t that God becomes a permanent guest staying in our space, but rather than he takes up residence in our home along with us, sharing our intimate emplaced experience with us.

While other religious traditions emphasise the distance of God from men and our dusty spaces, Jesus uniquely emphasised his sharing in our embeddedness. And contrary to what we might expect, this intimacy does not diminish the power of God. Instead, the familiarity that brings satisfaction to housekeeping is another form of the intimacy known by the maker of all time and space.

Jeremy Kidwell

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Tags: homeliness, housekeeping, incarnation, intimacy, Jesus, Seattle, time
Categories : The Heart of Faith

The Texture of Reality

9 04 2012

A touch. A fingertip feeling pulsing muscles and skin – the same fingertip that had felt the temperature of a glass of milk, that had flowed through curtains and childrens’ hair – is the fingertip Caravaggio uses for the climax of the Christian epic: Thomas finally settles his doubts and touches Jesus’ crucifixion marks. When the women and the other ten apostles told Thomas Jesus had appeared to them after his death, he could not believe it. But this touch…

The apostles did not believe it either when they first heard from the women – but then they saw him, and the unexpected became true. Still, Thomas could not believe it. And who can judge him? Even if his closest companions attested that they had seen Jesus alive after his death, Thomas could still hear the nails being driven into his hands, smell the blood flowing from his wounds, see the dust floating across the light beams as they placed Jesus’ body in a tomb. He had seen a dead body, lifeless, cold, still. And only undeniable proof could change Thomas’ mind: “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.” [1]

For Thomas, the days between the news of the resurrection and his own encounter with Jesus must have been anguished. He wanted to believe, of course; he wanted to see his old friend back to life, to see death defeated before his eyes. But the texture of reality around him breathed a different spirit: cold, earthly, indifferent, often cruel. Thomas saw the world turning gray on that Friday afternoon, his friend crucified on a cross and his hope crucified within. The touch of Jesus’ cold body must have lingered on his fingers, the touch of incarnated goodness now reduced to a static corpse, violated and beaten.

But then Jesus appears to him, seemingly beyond logic, and Thomas’ finger is warmed by life and blood. Hard bone, pulsing flesh, the sound of heartbeat; a live breathing body, not the lifeless corpse he had touched before. Caravaggio amplifies the drama of this encounter with a technique called chiaroscuro, which he had learned from Leonardo da Vinci: the background is dark, and light is poured on Jesus’ body. To Thomas this scene is more concrete and physical than anything around them. In fact, this moment will illuminate his life from now on: it will be the clarity which makes sense of this dark world, the understanding that will reshape his fears and hopes and loves and desires.

Thomas’ reality is changed. The light of this moment, the warmth of this touch will stay on with him. His finger will carry this warmth as he touches faces or mud or spears, as he grabs a hard stone or as he touches his brides’ arm. He won’t even be able to eat the essential elements of the Mediterranean cuisine – bread, wine, water, oil – without remembering the resurrected Christ. Thomas’ senses are impregnated; his sight and smell and touch and taste and ears carry the ring of the resurrection. The texture of reality now breathes and pulses with life, even as he ventures later into the dark cold background.

René Breuel

[1] John 24:25

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Tags: art, Caravaggio, doubt, Doubting Thomas, Easter, faith, hope, Jesus, resurrection, senses
Categories : Spirituality for the Rest of Us, The Heart of Faith

Deeper Magic

6 04 2012

The dripping blood our only drink,
The bloody flesh our only food:
In spite of which we like to think
That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood—
Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.

In 1922 T.S. Eliot published The Waste Land, a lengthy, complex poem that solidified his position at the pinnacle of the Modernist movement—a movement characterized by its sense that the traditional structures of art, culture, and religion were “like an old bitch gone in the teeth,” discredited, impotent. For Modernism, all that remained of western culture was a heap of broken images for the artist to sift through, reassembling the few usable shards into something new, something that might speak to a new generation.

Naturally, Modernists thought the Christian faith might provide some useful images but Christianity—along with the notion of an all-powerful, benevolent God—were most certainly passé. As the title suggests, The Waste Land reflects on the bleak, meaningless nature of modern life as the chorus of voices that weave in and out of the poem search for some sort of meaning, something to redeem the destructive impulses of passionless and sterile sex, rape, addiction, and suicide.

Needless to say, the literary world was somewhat puzzled when Eliot—this Modernist visionary—went on to publish The Journey of the Magi in 1927 and then Ash Wednesday in 1930. These poems—particularly Ash Wednesday— mark, in no uncertain terms, his conversion to a very traditional and highly orthodox version of the Christian faith. Eliot’s poetic and religious journey from the waste land of modern life to a redemptive vision for the individual and society culminated in The Four Quartets. Rather than filling the Modernist call to build something new out of the discredited rubble of the past, The Four Quartets are a re-presentation of the Christian narrative in the language of Modernism.

The quartets grapple with the great mysteries of the Christian faith celebrated in the Christian year: Holy Week, the Incarnation, Pentecost. Underlying these mysteries—and Eliot’s exploration of them—is the question, how can one man’s death in the first century in Palestine bring about the salvation of the world? How can his death bring about forgiveness for other people’s sins?

Like the writer of the biblical letter of Hebrews, Eliot knows this great mystery can only begin to be apprehended through rethinking linear time. Thus, he begins with cosmic history and the “intersection of the timeless with time,” which he calls the “still-point of the turning world.” The moments of the Incarnation (which Christians celebrate at Christmas) and Holy Week (in which Christians celebrate the death and resurrection of Jesus) are not discrete, disconnected events but the epicenter of the great cosmic quake that occurs when God enters human history. The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus are the center, the axis around which the rest of history revolves, with the ripples from this “timeless moment” stretching before and after. Each previous foreshadowing act of redemption in the Christian narrative—the ram God provides in lieu of Isaac, the exodus of Israel from slavery in Egypt—and each act of redemption—individual or corporate—to come are ripples from the epicenter marked by the cross.

As this image of salvation rippling out suggests, each moment and each individual agent in history is not a discreet unit operating under its own direction. To say that people and events are influenced by what comes before is too weak and linear a way of understanding the actuality of the apparently impossible union of the timeless God with human history. It is as if the eternal, infinite energy of God piercing into the finite universe in the person of Jesus is what gives narrative motion to all of history and, as such, that divine disturbance claims for itself all those who are willing to be claimed in its temporal ripples.

How can that be? As with the Medieval champion or the ancient King, Jesus’ fate is the fate of his followers, just as each ripple in a pond is really just the visual impact of the stone that breaks the water’s surface. Jesus’ death is able to effect this ultimate resurrection and redemption because, while all that is mortal can only die, death—in claiming the immortal for itself—begins working backward, as C. S. Lewis put it. Destruction and brokenness, in overstepping their bounds by breaking and destroying the holy perfection of God-made-Man, are defeated and the holy God who formed heaven and earth shows himself victorious on behalf of all who will be claimed by his kingship.

Jessica Hughes

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Tags: Easter, incarnation, Jesus, literature, resurrection, T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land
Categories : The Heart of Faith

The Upper Hand of Evil

4 04 2012

Is goodness feasible in an evil world? Can we maintain innocence as we seek to enter and influence the tough dynamics of the marketplace, politics and society? Can we sustain love and generosity for people who disdain and even abuse us? Or, to put it in biblical language, is it possible to follow Christ through a path that does not lead to a cross? For anyone who has really attempted it, the practicalities of goodness are no small challenge.

A painting got me thinking about these things – actually, a painting based on a novel. Erich Heckel’s Two Men at the Table uses spectral colors and pointed lines to convey a tortured scene of anguish and tension. We see two men around a table in a claustrophobic little room, a piece of paper and a knife between them, a portrait which seems to haunt the encounter and a crude picture of Jesus on the cross, surrounded by a bloodied atmosphere. The older man leans forward, apparently challenging or menacing the younger man, who does not know what to do, oppressed by faces and colors alike.

Heckel drew inspiration for this scene from Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, and subtitled the painting, “To Dostoyevsky.” In this novel, the masterful Russian writer crafts the story of Prince Myshkin, a “completely beautiful human being,” as Dostoyevsky described in a letter: a generous, kind, loving, forgiving, innocent young man, who enters St. Petersburg’s corrupt society and seeks to love people, only to be dismissed and manipulated in return. Myshkin is like a figure of Christ in an un-Christian world, and he disputes the love of a stunning femme fatale with brutal Rogozhin, who attempts to kill Myshkin and who has at home a portrait of Christ taken down from the cross as a dead body without life, without hint of a possible resurrection. Beautiful Nastassya oscilates between the innocent goodness of Myshkin and the harsh character of Rogozhin, until she decides for the worse man, who kills her in the end. Heckel’s painting seems to portray this last encounter between the two men at Rogozhin’s house, where they spent a tense night veiling over Nastassya’s dead body.

Dostoyevsky’s experiment to place a good man in an evil world highlights Myshkin’s tragic fate. People don’t know what to do with him, and his purity is misunderstood and abused. A scholar described that Myshkin is a “more riddling and more tragic figure of lost absolutes. In a world where God is simply dead flesh, a good man becomes simply an idiot.”[1] We may question at several points how much Myshkin resembles Jesus’ actual example, and notice that he lacks the fiber and force of the Jesus he represents, for instance. But Myshkin reminds us still of the upper hand of evil which seemed to hover over Jesus’ last hours: Jesus facing false accusations silently, beaten and spit at, at the hands of traitors and hypocrites who take his life at the end, and who mock his final prayer, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”[2]

Yet, even as we sense the upper hand of evil seemingly everywhere, and wonder if we can emulate Jesus’ graceful endurance of mistreatment, we can also remember that the painting hanging on Rogozhin’s wall is not the end of the story. Jesus was lowered from the cross crumbled and broken, and the friends who had not fled could only weep that Friday afternoon. But Sunday was still to come, with news that would change everything; that broken body, and all the tragic human fate it sums up and represents, was gone. We may believe it or be wondering about it still, but the news of resurrection carried by the beams and airs of dawn electrified people with a cosmic kind of possibility: if that body was really gone, if Jesus had come back to life, then the matrix of reality is altered; tragedy is not the final result of goodness, nor is realism synonymous with pessimism. Evil may appear to have the upper hand, and goodness may lead to a painful cross, but there is life beyond pain, and hope beyond tragedy, and the model of one whose victory over evil changes the outcomes for us all.

René Breuel

[1] A. S. Byatt, Prince of Fools, at http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2004/jun/26/highereducation.classics.

[2] Luke 23:34

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Tags: art, crucifixion, Dostoevsky, Easter, Erich Heckel, ethics, evil, German expressionism, Good Friday, goodness, grace, Jesus, literature, resurrection, The Idiot
Categories : The Heart of Faith

An Evening of Questions

30 03 2012

Questions were coming from the right and left, thoughtful, poignant questions. What about suffering? The infinitude of religions? The dates established by Josephus? I and the atheist next to me were getting grilled, now by the audience. We had just debated about the existence of God, at a mix of café and literary meeting hub here in Rome, next to the university. I could see in people’s faces that they wanted to engage, that they welcomed a friendly forum where they could express their honest doubts, and honest they were.

I tried my best to answer their questions. One gal wanted to hear how can we believe in the Jesus story when we see similar stories of the sacrifice and resurrection of different gods in so many of the world’s myths, and I was glad that I had just written a Wondering Fair article just on that (thank you Lord!), and could share my thoughts with her. A guy wanted to me to name one example of a powerful person of faith which did not abuse his power for his own selfish gain. I tried going for the easy answer, Jesus, and he laughed with me, but then tried telling him a bit of William Wilbeforce, who used his wealth and influence as a member of the British Parliament to help abolish the slave trade. A student asked why would the Vatican have a subterraneous hidden library if it had nothing to hide – and this one I was glad I could by-pass, and said it would be best left for a Vatican official to respond. (Though he got me thinking, what lurks down there?)

But my favorite question came after the debate, while I was packing my things. A guy approached me with his girlfriend, both in their twenties. He was articulate but seemed afraid to voice his doubts, a bit ashamed even.

“I have a question, kind of. I know it is dumb, but still…”

“No please, go ahead,” I said, looking him in the eye, and his girlfriend nudged him too.

“I’m not into all this philosophy, I like being practical, and just wanted to know: why did Jesus turn water into wine?” I could not help but smile, and his girlfriend went on. “You know, people would get drunk with all that wine, and isn’t Jesus supposed to discourage that?” I kept on smiling, and he concluded. “Not just that, I just thought that, you know, he should be supposed to do important miracles, and this wine think is just, I don’t know, unimportant.”

I told them, “what a great question!”, and I could the see their faces relax, as if thinking, “Oh I’m glad, I thought it was going to sound stupid…” But I really meant it. It is a great question. I liked it not just because I could see the emotions bubbling in their eyes – a bit of fear, shame for asking a stupid-sounding question, courage to come forward and go talk with a stranger – but mostly because the issue behind their question is the most crucial existential question we have, more pressing that “is there life after death?” or “what is the meaning of life?”, and the question is: Who is Jesus? Who is this man who still haunts us, thousands of years later, who still attracts us like he did back then, who still gets us thinking about wine and water and the large and small stuff of life?

Many people see Jesus as the answer, but I like it even more when they see him as the question. And what a question he is. Scholar John Meier writes, “What is beyond dispute … is that Jesus of Nazareth is one of those perennial question marks in history with which mankind is never quite done. With a ministry of two or three years he attracted and infuriated his contemporaries, mesmerized and alienated the ancient world, unleashed a movement that has done the same ever since, and thus changed the course of history forever.” Answering who that man was is not small challenge.

I loved when people came to ask about hope and suffering and ethics and the origins of the universe. But those two were on to something. Who is this Jesus? The way we answer this question will change the way we answer every other existential question. Until we come to grips with it, a large piece of the puzzle of life and history will be unresolved, and of our lives too.