If, then, the act of substitution is a primordial human reality, the seriousness of sin is the essential human dilemma, the divine initiative in salvation is the basis for human hope, the narrative movement of grace is the primary shape for human knowledge, and the complex nature of reality is the inescapable challenge for human understanding — then the human study of the world should reflect these realities.

Mark Noll, Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind, pp. 70-71, emphasis added.

By “complex nature of reality,” Noll refers to the multiplicity of the atonement. Who put Jesus on the cross? Judas? Pilate? The priests? God? Jesus himself? Yes — they all did. Does God love sinners or punish them? He does both. Was the cross the worst moment in human history or the best? It was both at the same time.

Ehrman told Gross that he no longer considers the Bible to be the Word of God, but that he considers several of its authors to be “religious geniuses” — he explicitly included Paul and the writers of the four Gospels in this group of “geniuses.”

That’s interesting, isn’t it? Here you have 4 Jews and a Gentile, living and writing on the marginal fringes of the greatest empire in the world. Only in retrospective do we consider Israel and Jerusalem to have been an important part of the world. At the time, it was a minor province that, while occasionally troublesome, could be routinely put down by Roman force. Two of them (Paul and Luke) were well-educated by the standards of their day, but consider the others: John, a village fisherman; Matthew, a minor government official; Mark, whose “education” consisted of a series of missionary trips with Peter, Barnabas, and Paul.

According to Ehrman’s view of the Bible, there was nothing inherently special about the Jewish traditions they received. According to Ehrman, Jesus never rose from the dead, so Matthew and John might have known him and his teachings, but Mark, Paul, and Luke were all working from hearsay and secondhand stories. Not that his teaching counted for much: Ehrman’s new book makes the argument that Jesus was deluded. Would you trust your children’s education to the deluded followers of a deluded teacher?

And yet…

How do we account for this sudden explosion of religious genius? It’s as if Gandhi, MLK, Billy Graham, and the Dalai Lama all went to the same kindergarten.

Wouldn’t you want to know who they had as their teacher?

for a virgin to give birth for an angel to announce tidings of any kind for an infant to be Israel’s God incarnate

I can only agree and marvel at this improbable day.

Here is what Leon Morris has to say about Luke 12:24:

Jesus reinforces this [teaching] with an appeal to the ravens (or ‘crows’, Goodspeed, GNB), mentioned here only in the New Testament (they are the objects of God’s care in Ps. 147:9). Birds do not engage in agricultural activities, but they do not lack for all that. God feeds them. There is possibly significance in the fact that ravens were unclean (Lev. 11:15). God makes provision even for these unclean birds. And Jesus goes on to remind his hearers that they are of more value than birds (cf. v. 7)

Here is a poem I wrote about a parallel passage, Matthew 6:34:

Matthew 6:34

It’d be too easy to assume
You were talking to me, so
Who? Your disciples? They
Seemed to worry more about
Fish than God (then anyway).
The crowds, hungry and poor
And the soldiers stealing their cloaks?
Maybe. And maybe yourself,
Reminding yourself of what
You already knew: the times
Were short, the work was long
From Capernaum down to Judah, and
The coming trial must not
Darken the day too soon.


Each day has trouble enough.

Photo credit: Raven and the First Men at UBC’s Museum of Anthropology, by bRONTE dIGITAL

The first, Psalm 125, which begins:

Those who trust in the Lord are like Mount Zion,

which cannot be shaken but endures forever.

The second, is from Luke 5.  After beginning his public ministry, Jesus calls Simon Peter, James, and John to follow him. After addressing a crowd from Simon’s fishing boat, Jesus commands Simon to put out his net.  Simon responds:

Master, we’ve worked hard all night and haven’t caught anything.  But because you say so, I will let down the nets.

The nets are lowered, an enormous number of fish are caught, and Simon falls at Jesus’ feet, leading to this exchange:

“Go away from me, Lord; I am a sinful man!.”  For he and all his companions were astonished at the catch of fish they had taken, and so were James and John, the sons of Zebedee, Simon’s partners. Then Jesus said to Simon, “Don’t be afraid; from now on you will fish for people.” So they pulled their boats up on shore, left everything and followed him.

Psalm 125 promises that those who trust in the Lord (lit. YHWH) will be like Mount Zion, and Luke 5 depicts Simon – who would be called The Rock – trusting in Jesus.

A couple of side notes.  I appreciate the egalitarian spirit of the TNIV, which I am currently using in my personal reading, but “you will fish for people” simply doesn’t have the rhetorical strength of “thou shalt catch men” from the King James. Also, did Simon’s entire fishing company disband and follow Jesus?  The text has an interesting change of person: Jesus calls Simon to follow him, then concludes “So they pulled their boats up on shore, left everything, and followed him.” The change of person is also their in both the King James and NIV.

How does it change our perspective of this scene to think of any entire company of men – a small business, really – following Jesus together?  Were they following Jesus, or were they following Simon Peter, their boss, who was following Jesus?

Rather than being employed for its own sake, the poetry is always in the service of ideas and moral commitments, and it is always demanding that its readers measure themselves against the judgments it repeatedly makes – judgments about the nature of virtue, about the proper mode of civil and domestic behavior, about the true shape of heroism, about the self-parodying bluster of military action, about the criteria of aesthetic excellence, about the uses of leisure, about one’s duties to man and God, about the scope and limitations of reason, about the primacy of faith, about everything.

Apparently, the ghost of Shakespeare hangs over Milton studies constantly.  Another good quote, about the difference between Milton and Shakespeare, referring to the debates over who wrote Shakespeare’s plays:

Jonathan Rosen was getting at something like this when he said in a recent New Yorker piece, “No one would ever wonder whether Milton was really the author of his own work.”

Milton went blind in his mid-forties, prior to writing Paradise Lost: the magnificent epic that Milton is best known for was composed mentally and dictated to a series of secretaries, including one of his daughters and the poet Andrew Marvell, who wrote the poem “To His Coy Mistress,” a standard of English textbooks.

His blindness led him to compose one of the greatest poems in the English language, “On His Blindness,” which I memorized while I was unemployed following graduate school, wondering whether my long education would ever result in productive employment:

When I consider how my light is spent, Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide, And that one Talent which is death to hide, Lodg’d with me useless, though my Soul more bent To serve therewith my Maker, and present My true account, least he returning chide, Doth God exact day-labour, light deny’d, I fondly ask; But patience to prevent That murmur, soon replies, God doth not need Either man’s work or his own gifts, who best Bear his milde yoak, they serve him best, his State Is Kingly.  Thousands at his bidding speed And post o’re Land and Ocean without rest: They also serve who only stand and waite.

A quick explication: Milton despairs at going blind, feeling that his one “Talent” (his ability as a writer) is now wasted, and, referring to the parable of the talents, fears that Jesus will return and question him as to why he has not put his talent to work.  (The work “fondly” here means “foolishly” – Milton’s retort that he can’t work because he’s blind, in other words, is a pretty stupid thing to say to the Lord of Heaven and Earth.)  The poem turns as Milton comes to realize that God does not “need” his work or “his own gifts” (i.e. Milton’s talent was a gift from God to begin with).  Instead, what God demands is his readiness to serve.  The image changes to a royal court: thousands of courtiers speed to and fro in their service to God, but “They also serve who only stand and waite.” Milton’s readiness would soon be repaid; a few years after this poem, Milton began work on Paradise Lost.

Two passages that I’ve recently read reminded me of this.  The first is from Life Together: 

“Whosoever will be great among you, shall be your minister” (Mark 10:43). Jesus made authority in the fellowship dependent upon brotherly service.  Genuine spiritual authority is to be found only where the ministry of hearing, helping, bearing and proclaiming is carried out.  Every cult of personality that emphasizes the distinguished qualities, virtues, and talents of another person, even though these be of an altogether spiritual nature, is worldly and has no place in the Christian community; indeed, it poisons the Christian community. The desire we so often hear expressed today for “episcopal figures,” “priestly men,” “authoritative personalities” springs frequently enough from a spiritually sick need for the admiration of men, for the establishment of visible human authority, because the genuine authority of service appears to be so unimpressive.  There is nothing that so sharply contradicts such a desire as the New Testament itself in its description of a bishop (I Tim. 3:1 ff).  One finds there nothing whatsoever with respect to worldly charm and the brilliant attributes of a spiritual personality.  The bishop is the simple, faithful man, sound in faith and life, who rightly discharges his duties to the Church. His authority lies in the exercise of his ministry.  In the man himself there is nothing to admire.  (Bonhoeffer, 108)

Perhaps this is a better description of “redemptive influence: the simple, faithful man (or woman), sound in faith and life. 

The second passage comes from Jonathan Wilson’s Why Church Matters: Worship, Ministry, and Mission in Practice. The people that we minister to in ESN and FM are, let’s face it, powerful people, even if they don’t realize it themselves. They are among the world’s intellectual elites: the most educated members of the wealthiest society on the planet.  This position carries with it a whole set of temptations to the Christian, not the least of which is the confusion of worldly success with spiritual faithfulness.  Too often we think that suffering or failure is the result of personal weakness, when it may be exactly the reverse. 

After considering the mysterious phrase from Acts 5:41 – “the apostles left the Sanhedrin, rejoicing, because they had been counted worthy of suffering disgrace for the Name” – Wilson writes of the connection between power and suffering in the Gospel:

This is the lesson of the early community of disciples: the power of the Spirit is the power to suffer as witnesses to the good news of the kingdom of life in Jesus Christ.  This insight is key to the church’s practice of power.  Power is not the means to avoid suffering or protect oneself or one’s community from suffering.  Nor is the suffering of the church a sign of our powerlessness.  Nor is suffering in itself a good.  Rather, when the church is empowered to live by the kingdom of God in a world that is in rebellion against that kingdom, suffering is the consequence of faithful witness. (Wilson, 137)

May I too be considered worthy to suffer disgrace because of the Name.