And when he had said these things, he went on ahead, going up to Jerusalem. When he drew near to Bethphage and Bethany, at the mount that is called Olivet, he sent two of the disciples, saying, “Go into the village in front of you, where on entering you will find a colt tied, on which no one has ever yet sat. Untie it and bring it here. If anyone asks you, ‘Why are you untying it?’ you shall say this: ‘The Lord has need of it.’” So those who were sent went away and found it just as he had told them. And as they were untying the colt, its owners said to them, “Why are you untying the colt?” And they said, “The Lord has need of it.” And they brought it to Jesus, and throwing their cloaks on the colt, they set Jesus on it. And as he rode along, they spread their cloaks on the road. As he was drawing near—already on the way down the Mount of Olives—the whole multitude of his disciples began to rejoice and praise God with a loud voice for all the mighty works that they had seen, saying, “Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!” And some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, rebuke your disciples.” He answered, “I tell you, if these were silent, the very stones would cry out.”

And when he drew near and saw the city, he wept over it, saying, “Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes. For the days will come upon you, when your enemies will set up a barricade around you and surround you and hem you in on every side and tear you down to the ground, you and your children within you. And they will not leave one stone upon another in you, because you did not know the time of your visitation.”
Luke 19:28-44

I am reminded from my Lenten devotional this morning that while we often tend to rush past Palm Sunday on our way to the Cross and the Resurrection, this passage is crucial for understanding what it is that the Cross and the Resurrection proclaims. It is a picture of celebrating that in which we place our hope before drawing back to allow the passion narrative to reshape this hope in the direction of Jesus’ death and Resurrection. The anticipation of that which we see only partly being made clear. As Jesus declares looking over Jerusalem, “would that you, even you, had known on this day the thing that make for peace!” It’s a question that rings through our own present state of affairs as one can imagine Christ looking over our lives, our cities, our Countries. Here the hopeful proclamation “Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!” becomes dangerous words when reframed through the shadow of what is to come. Hope comes in the form of a sacrificial servant who likewise requires us to give up our rights and our life for the sake of this peace as we follow in the way and and on this journey. Jesus knows this struggle intimately. It is why He weeps over the city.

And yet, is here, when we arrive at the Resurrection we will ultimately arrive back at this picture of the triumphal entry, not in the way of empire or the way of conquest or power, but in the way of this servant who brings the hope of new life itself. Thus, we can then repeat the words of this proclamation, “Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!” in the light of a new Kingdom vision, one that finds peace in our division through the reign of Christ and thus offers us hope for true life and true healing as image bearers of that which is good, which is perhaps the mightiest work of all.

It is often said that in our rush to get to the goodness of Resurrection Sunday we have a tendency to want to move quickly past Good Friday, forgetting that we cannot arrive fully at the Resurrection without first understanding the nature of this Friday that we call good.

In reading through the story of the Triumphant Entry into Jerusalem in Mark 11, I am struck by the fact that perhaps the reason many of us struggle with Good Friday is because we have also rushed past Palm Sunday, missing the Temple context for both Jesus’ Death and Resurrection. There is a reason why Holy Week begins with Jesus’ entrance to the Holy City, as the Death of Jesus is indeed the Defeat of the Powers of Sin and Death that rule this world and hold it in its grip, and the Resurrection is Christ’s full ascent to the throne in declaring the Kingdom of God on earth as it is in Heaven, with the resurrection hope being the truth that the ruler of the New Creation has taken His rightful place and is restoring a world once held in the grip of Sin and Death.

Further yet, what we miss when we rush past the Triumphal Entry is that Jesus comes as the fulfillment of Israel’s story. To understand how it is that Jesus’ house (the Temple) “shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations”, we must first understand how it is that the story of Israel finds its beginning in Creation and its culmination in the Resurrection. The context of Israel’s story is written all over Mark 11 and Jesus’ entry into Jersualem, beginning with the grand proclamation of Zechariah Chapter 14 that “on that day” his feet shall stand on the Mount of Olives and “living waters shall flow out from Jerusalem” declaring the truth that “the Lord will be King over all the earth” and that “on that day the Lord will be one and his name one.” (14:9) The choosing of the tethered colt flows from the story of Genesis 49:10-11 and Zechariah 9:9, with the nature of the colt falling in line with the symbolism of Numbers 19:2, Deuteronomy 21:3  and 1 Samuel 6:7. The royal procession occurs in line with the great Maccabean procession following their successful revolt, and the chants of Hosanna flow straight from Psalm 118:25-26, a word that brings together the cry of “save us” and the declaration of praise that acclaims our savior has come. The very declaraion “the coming kingdom of our father David” in Mark 11:10 tells us that to understand what is coming in the death and resurrection is happening in line with the story of Israel.

The structure of Mark 11, framing the triumphal entry against the “Markean sandwich” of the story of the fig tree is purposely rendered to capture precisely what is happening with Jesus’ rising to the throne. As author and scholar Mary Healy puts it in her commentary on the Gospel of Mark, “He comes as the Lord of the temple, who looks around the holy dwelling with his searching gaze to see whether its true purposes are being fulfilled” in line with Malachi’s great and powerful picture of a purifying judgment.

And suddenly there will come to the temple the Lord whom you seek… But who will endure the day of his coming? And who can stand when appears? For he is like the refiner’s fire.”

Malachi 3:1-2

For he is “like” the refiner’s fire. The problem is that they, the image bearers, the lights to the world, God’s people, have made it, the temple, God’s throne room, God’s dwelling place into a “den of robbers” (Mark 11:17; Jeremiah 7:9-11). The promise to Israel, the grand picture of the covenant through which God declares His faithfulness to “restore” with fire, is that God’s house will be called a house of prayer for all nations. This is the point of the fig tree passage which both precedes and then is properly contextualized and proceeds the cleansing of the temple. The symbolism of the fig tree, one of the most prominant symbols in the scriptures for Israel and God’s working within the life and renewal of Israel is most often used to describe the failure of Israel to be a light to the world, the failure to delcare to God’s good creation the truth of our (creation’s) identity as image bearers over and against the lie of the Powers that has actively worked to hide this truth from us. In the hopeful picture of Jesus’ cursing of the fig tree in Mark 11:12-14, Jesus passes by a tree that is not bearing fruit because “it was not the season for figs”. Don’t miss the fact that the cursing follows this picture of the “season”, lest we read this entirely as God’s judgment for Israel’s failure. In the context of the temple cleansing there is something more going on here than simple judgment. As the Markean Sandwich will highlight, the point is not just the cleansing, but what the cleansing is for. The curse “may no one ever eat fruit from you again” is leading somewhere good.

This simple line in 11:14, “and his disciples heard it” indicates that we will return to this story, but not before we are given the context for this parable like story. Just as Jesus arrives at this fig tree, Jesus arrives in the temple. This is not a passive and linear progression of events, but rather an interpretative device meant to reveal what is going on as Jesus enters the temple and begins to overturn the tables. If the triumphal entry is the grand proclamation of the precise accomplishment and victory that the death and resurrection will soon proclaim, then what Jesus is doing in overturning the tables is preparing to take throne. And what is being proclaimed here? They are robbing people of the goodness of God’s great creation being declared in their lives. As Jesus takes the throne, the cleansed and eventually raised temple, which the Gospel writers understand is the precise image of the death and the resurrection properly understood, will be so that it can function as a prayer “for all.”

And so we return to the story at hand, the story of this fig tree that the disciples “overheard”. As they once again pass by this fig tree the disciples notice that it has “withered away to its roots”. Don’t miss the corelation here with the cleansing of the temple. The temple has been emptied and exposed just as the tree has been withered and the roots exposed. It is Peter who points out the simple truth that this tree has withered, which we are to understand is presented as a question that as of yet stands without an answer, something they had overheard and were trying to figure out. To which Jesus now explains in a parable type explanation:

And Jesus answered them, “Have faith in God. Truly I say to you whoever says to this mountain, be taken up and thrown into the sea, and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says will coe to pass, it will be done for hi. Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask in prayer, believ that you have recieved it, and it will be yours. And whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone so that your Father also who is in heavn may forgive you your trespasses.”

Mark 11:22-25

“Have faith in God.” What a powerful phrase to attach to the picture of this withering fig tree and the parallel picture of the cleansing of the temple. And how often has this passage about faith been so abused when removed from the context of the triumphal entry and its preperatory work for Jesus to eventually take the throne in the death and resurrection.

Have faith in God. Faith for what? That God who is faithful will restore Israel to its true purpose, to be a light to the world. And how is God doing this? Through the cursing, through the cleansing, through the restorative work that declares in the Death and Resurrection, Christ being the faithful one in light of Israel’s failure to be faithful, and from God’s great throne room (the temple that sits at the center of Jerusalem sybmolizing Jesus occupying the throne at the center of the cosmos, the whole created order) that through God’s reign this temple will be called “a house of prayer for all nations”. Therefore, “whatever you ask in prayer” flows from the truth of what this reign wants to instill, from the truth that the victory of the death and resurrection will proclaim in its restorative purposes the true heart of God for His Creation. The beginning of the new creation built around a new order that reflects all the way back to the beginning of the story and the order given to God’s good creation in the grand story of the Genesis narrative to be fruitful, to multiply and fill God’s good earth as God’s image bearers. As theologian Mary Healy wonders, and similar to the picture of the streams flowing outwards that we find in Zechariah noted above,

The tree is not only fruitless, but completely dead. Another, more fruitful tree must take its place. Perhaps in the background is Ezekiel’s vision of the new temple, from which flowed a river with trees along its banks, bearing fruit all year round (Ezek 47:1-12; see Mark 11:13).

Mary Healy (The Gospel of Mark)

It’s no mistake that Jesus’ words here in Mark about having faith in this truth, in God’s ascent to the throne declaring a new reality, ultimately lands on this notion of “forgiveness” in 11:29. “Whenever” is an all encompassing word that carries the same inference of the word “all”. If prayers are to reach to “all” the nations, then “whenever” we pray we must be engaging in this exercise of forgivness. For, if you have “ANYTHING” against “ANYONE”, that is keeping the prayers from reaching out to “ALL”, and how can we trust that this “forgiveness” flows back to us (Israel) in this cleansing process. If the cleansing is to do its work, it must come through our participation in this Kingdom work that the Cross and Resurrection will call us towards, and we partcipate in this work through faith in what Christ has accomplished on the Cross and in the Resurrection by rising to the throne. Just as we see in Mark the disciples being sent out repeatedly two by two, an echo of the flood passage in Genesis, so will we arrive at the call of the Great Commission to participate in this prayer for all nations as the hoped for restoration of God’s good creation in Mark 16:14-20. Or to take the original ending of Mark which stops at 16:8, this is precisely what is anticipated when they are called to follow the path to Galilee where Christ “is going before” them. “There you will see him” the angel proclaims, ascending to the throne as the raised temple and declaring that the Kingdom and the hoped for rule of God has arrived in their midst.

Don’t miss the greater context of Malachi’s prophetic imagery here from the aforementioned chapter 3:1-5. If the one who takes the throne “will sit as a refiner and purifier” (vs 3), the one who purifies Israel is doing so for a purpose- to declare as a “judgement” that God is “drawing near” (vs 5). God in Jesus, or Jesus as the full revelation of God with us, will be a “swift witness” against, which means that God will subsequently be a swift witness for. And as chapter 3:1-5 draw out, where Christ has gone before them to Galilee at the end of the Gospel of Mark, both the messanger (figured in John the Baptist) and the Christ in line with the picture of this messanger fully emobided, has been determined to “prepare the way before me” (vs 1) so that they can follow and seek after and thus participate in the new ruler’s Kingdom building process. And in chapter 5 what this looks like is the judgment of the oppressors, those who are “robbing God” (vs 8) by oppressing the poor, the widow, the fatherless, so that the prayers can then freely flow out to the poor, the widow, the fatherless without inhibition. A prayer for “all” is the promise. The oppression is keeping these prayers from flowing out to all. The cleansing of Israel that Malachi imagines is so that through the story of Israel, which in Malachi 1-3 is centered on God’s faithfulness to his covenant even when Israel proves unfaithul, the covenant promise can then and now be fulfilled, giving the Gospel of Mark license to show Jesus’ charge to “have faith” in this great restorative exercise of the new rule, a statement that is ironically followed up by the closing section of Mark 11 seeing those same religious leaders Jesus’ is looking to cleanse and restore challenging Jesus’ authority to do just this.

If we come to the death and resurrection of Christ without first beginning with the triumphal entry, the danger is that we will arrive at the Resurrection and resist its grand call to “have faith” in the truth that Christ has ascended to the throne and that the new Kingdom has arrived in its fullness. We will make the Gospel about us and our salvation rather than about our participation in making “his house” a prayer for all nations. And the grand symbolism of Christ’s arrival and Christ’s ascension to the throne is that we are, as God’s created humanity, image bearers of this truth to the whole of creation. This is why we are sent out two by two and called to participate in this act of prayer being sent out to all the nations. In Christ, if this is true for Israel than it is likewise true for all the world. That we have resisted God’s rule and failed to image this truth to the world is the reason Sin and Death is allowed to hold its grip, the grip Jesus as the faithful one has defeated.

If we come to the death and resurrection without first beginning with the triumphal entry, we will miss the fact that Christ’s restorative ministry begins with our own cleansing, which is precisely the point of moving from the humbling posture of Ash Wednesday through to the Friday we call good before we arrive at the Resurrection. Don’t miss the fact that the den of robbers is aimed at those in the Jerusalem temple. The Church is the very thing being cleansed and restored for the purpose of being a “prayer to all nations” because we, collectively and consistently, have failed in being that light to the world. You, me, we that stand within the walls of the Church and call ourselves “Christians” are the ones that need to heed Malachi’s words when he asks, “who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears” in 3:2. The inference is that God is going to restore the Church by freeing the Church to step into its true vocation through faith in what Christ has done on the Cross and in the Resurrection, which flows out into this grand picture we find in scripture of Christ’s dwelling within us and thus by nature of this dwelling cleansing and restoring our lives “like” a refiner’s fire for the purpose of that great message of inclusion that flows from this exercise of “forgiveness”. In truth, none of us can stand when he appears precisely because we are all, collectively, being withered and cleansed so that Christ can ascend and declare the promise of the new creation from His throne, out of which then we are called to get up and to follow Him in this Christ centred, Christ driven, Christ proclaimed ministry of bringing the light of the Easter message to all people and to all the world in faith. In faith that God is indeed making all things new, and God is making all things new through us.

Remembering is an act of storytelling, 

Robert Nash

Back at the turn of the calendar year I started to give some intentional focus to a research project on the topic of memory that I had been sitting on for quite some time. The research project was inspired by a particular experience I had years ago when I found myself really struggling with life and contemplating suicide. I had recently abandoned the faith that I had once held, and consumed by research into life and its inner workings had come to the conclusion, based on the facts, that if I could not come up with a truly rational reason “not” to commit suicide, then based on my life and who I am it felt like it just might be the most compelling answer to life’s questions that I could find. If meaning in life is constructed, people with my story were simply taking up space, and there were many, many reasons to suggest that meaning is not only constructed but temporary and highly selective. If one of the greatest challenges to prolongued human existence and survival is over population, and my life exists near the most insignificant rung at the bottom of that ladder, then it not only made significant sense not to add to the problem through procreation, but some of the most signficant voices and theories looking to the future were correct in that at some point in time this selective nature would have to take precedence over any created meaning. That was or is simply the hard truth that we chose to ignore in order to create meaning on a daily basis.

This rationalized thought process hinged on the understanding that what science tells us is that any and all human activity that is involved in meaning making of any form is at its heart irrational. This is what compelled me all those years ago, is that while I had abandoned my faith as something inherently irrational at its core, wish fullfilment and a self indulging process of meaning making, what was equally true is that in this supposedly rational world I was now occupying, the only way I could actually live in it was to actually tell myself the lie every morning that this life actually holds meaning, and to do so knowing that this meaning is illusionary at best, destructive and harmful at its worst. I was in effect having to be even more irrational in my thought process than I was before, because at least my prior faith delusions could offer me a sense of conviction that I truly believed was true. From where I now sat I had to be intentional about lying to myself knowing that I was doing precisely this very thing on a rational basis. The problem was, the more I came to know, the more knowledge became my new god, my driving force, the point of my existence. And when this knowledge, untainted by those irrtational thoughts, consistently told me that I was meaningless and irrational at my core, it became harder and harder to reconcile this in the day to day workings of propping up these irrational choices and decisions and experiences. When you know how the sausage is made (and what it is made from and the death necessary to make it) the sausage is no longer appetizing. I have to willingly ignore these facts in order to eat it and enjoy it (and even then it can leave me feeling gross more often that not in my human tendency to over indulge).

The evidence to me seemed to be undeniable. If I cannot fully justify my life without abandoning my sense of reason, then there was no good reason for me not to commit suicide, especially when it seemed I actually wanted to die in this moment. This is when I had an experience that I could not explain away. I had come to this conclusion, and I felt my last ditch effort to convince myself that faith was not actually true was a prayer to God. I felt if the notion of God was true then God would interject and intercede. And so I prayed the most honest prayer of my life with little to no expectation anything would come of it, alone with my experiences and my thoughts in the darkness of the night. I did not expect God to answer. And yet the result of that prayer was God speaking to someone who I did not know in an effort to save and repurpose my physical existence. That person was given words to write down that were meant specifically from God for me, not knowing my situation nor why they needed to share them. It recounted my prayer word for word, and called me to this one task- to remember.

And so I gave myself to this task of remembering. Remembering my memories.

So why I am bringing all of this up? I recently finished two books that brought me back to this space and that drummed up all of these thoughts once again. The first is the book Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, in which author Dan Ariely walks through all of the ways in which who we are is shaped by external forces.

The stuff that we believe, the stuff that we argue, the stuff that we think, whether conscious or unconsciously flows from these external forces. There is small evidence that from time to time we can circumvent these influences and forces and redirect them, but by and large that is the exception to the rule, and even when we do there is no guarantee that this circumventing will lead to something positive or negative. That appears to be not a matter of logic or rational direction, but rather more a measure of luck and naturally derived determination.

The second book was called Irrationality: A History of the Dark Side of Reason.

Author Justin Smith does a masterful job at demonstrating how all of this effort by the enlightenment thinkers and subsequent inventors of modernity to replace the old gods with the gods of knowledge and reason have actually led to a more irrational society based purely on the fact that we have been trained to think we are inherently rational beings. This has led to some of the most violent and destructive tendencies and actions in human history, and, if the West can be taken as evidence of this inevitable trajectory, some of the most irrational societies in natural history. It’s basic premise suggests that at our core we are necessarily irrational beings. We have to be in order to make sense of life in the face of death. By ignoring this fact we actually end up becomming more irrational, and worse yet this irrationality becomes a weapon that creates destruction. And one of the biggest challenges facing the often presumed superiority of the West and Western thought, lined with its addiction to knowledge, reason and progress as the highest virtues, is coming to terms with the limiting nature of reason and rationality itself.

Both of these books should have come with trigger warnings. They brought me back to that space and uncovered that part of my journey once again. They reminded me of a revelatory moment I had when reading through a recommended book a friend bought for me called How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie years ago. I remember when I finished that book being struck by the fact that we are all inherently predicatable and thus inherently manipulatable. So much so that the science of this fact can be replicated over and over again without fail even when we are aware that we are being manipulated. In truth, as Justin Smith points out, we are all far more aware of this fact than we care to admit. We just choose to ignore it so that we can actually live.

More so, they got me thinking more about this particular research project. One of the reasons I decided to research memory is precisely because, when measured against reason and rationalism, memory is known to be an unreliable source of information. They are the way we tell and retell our stories, but more so they are the way we reconstruct the narratives that give our life meaning. As Psychologist David Clear writes regarding the science of memory,

Each time you remember something, you’re not retrieving some immutable image of what happened. You’re actually reconstructing it. In other words, you’re repainting the retrieved image when you’re remembering it. 

David B. Clear

In other words, on the surface it would appear that memories are in effect lies. Falsehoods. Untruths that we tell ourselves on a daily basis in order to give our life some sense of context and identity. They are the shaping of our own personal myths in the enlightnment sense of the word, which is to say a story that is untrue but that attempts to breathe meaningful ideas into our existence as small letter truth. The fact that in the highly rational and reasoned Western world this is what gives myth its power is of course an obviously contradictory exercise, and yet as Justin Smith so aptly outlines, we continue to do it because we can’t live without it.

I am currently neck deep in my research on memory with a lot of scattered information that desperately needs organization, but at a fundamental level the two books I mentioned above sparked a resurgence and reawareness of why this subject matters to me and of the material that has been emerging through my research with consistent measure. In James Gleick’s wonderful book Time Travel: A History, he proposes that we break down into two highly generalized and very basic camps as a human species- those who would choose, if time travel existed, to travel to the future, and those who would choose to travel to the past. There is a bit of irony to the fact that the Western world as a whole is obsessed with the future while I am someone who is obsessed with the past. This explains my affection for these Old world-New World dichotomies. I am someone given to the art of nostalgia, and I value the memory making process above all else. Because I know that without memories our life and our sense of meaning fades. We are shaped either by our own memories, or in the case of our inability to remember, the memories others are able to carry on our behalf.

If memories are so integral to our sense of being, to our ability to exist and to live and to have meaning, then somehow and in someway these memories must be more than lies and untruths. They literally hold the power to shape our stories and to define who it is that we are and how we make sense of the world. And their most powerful iteration is in fact as story. Memory making is at its heart a storytelling exercise, which is why we find this notion of memory driving the very heart and substance of those old world mythologies. It’s why we see it at the heart of all cultural development. It’s why, as a Christian, memory lies is at the center of all Christian practice. The Western world and civilization, in its striving to locate and retrieve some form of individuality out of the collectivism it has long tended to demonize, has forgotten what memory is, ironically speaking, precisely because of its necessary infatuation with the future. And this is not surprising, because when rationalism and reason uncover the true meaninglessness of the human story, what remains is this constant push then to reinvent, to progress, to move forward. Because if we aren’t we are either regressing into the past or getting lost in the senselessness of the present. The end result though is that we tend to move forward without context, without that necessary story that grounds us in that necessary sense of meaning that flows from memory and the memory making process. This defines one of the greatest challenges facing Western society, which is our disconnect from history as truth and from histories ability to tell a truthful story of our world, our societies and our sense of identity. To remember the past and for the past to hold meaning, we must be able to see it and recognize it as trustworthy, as being able to say something true about who we are. This demands that we be able to let go of these Old World-New World conflicts between rationalism/reason and supposed superstion and faslehoods, and recover some sense of truth about who we are, what humanity is, and, in a necessary sense for me personally, who and what God is. This is why God remains important for me, and this task to remember remains vital to my understanding of God. If truth is merely created and manifested by way of lies and falsehoods we intentionally ignore in order to find meaning in our lives, then truth is not only subjective and relative, it is the ultimate unreliable narrator. If Truth is something that is given, revealed and discovered, something that sits above us and informs our existence whether we are aware of it or not, then that gives us something to trust in, something to believe in. Something to place our faith in. This doesn’t necessarily demand a god in the deified sense, but to me it does demand us to turn something into a god. For the Western world that god is rationalism, reason, knowledge and progress. To me those gods have been left wanting, or at least unable to afford us meaning in its truest sense. It is simply playing the role of a necessary, functional god that we have concocted in order to keep moving forward. It is completely future oriented, and it is dependent entirely on where we are headed and what we accomplish. It is the deification of truth made in our (or natures) own image.

Which, as I was taught early on in my journey beyond the fringes of faith, is a necessarily self focused endeavor that elevates humanity itself or the natural world as that which holds true authority. It is bent on future survival, not present existence. And for as much as the human experience intuitively needs to reconcile this gap, and for as much as we do so unconsciously on a daily basis, for me personally the only way this meaning becomes Truth that I can personally rest in and put my faith in is if something transcendent, something beyond ourselves and the seeming insignificance of this present world when seen within the bigger evolutionary picture, is imbuing it with meaning.

And yes, I also know that I was taught that science gives us this meaning simply by showing us how special the anomaly of life actually is when seen from the vantage point of the universe and our unlikely and up until now wholly unique existence, but that doesn’t hold water in a purely future oriented perspective. It’s a part of the lie we tell ourelves in order to survive in the present. It’s the predictably irrational behavior that human activity constantly manipulates and exploits. It’s the dark side of reason that proves us to be the most irrational creatures on the planet. It is precisely why we cannot trust our memories. And if we can’t trust our memories, then in our rush to get to the future, our meaning can only come from where we stand in the social constructs of our societies. It comes from our own happiness. And although altruism can scientifically and naturally imbue us with this meaning in an evolutionary sense, alturism itself quickly becomes a part of the same competitive field that renders this whole thing meaninglness, a way of distinguishing who and what is valuable, a self serving exercise molded into the larger narrative of survival that guides it. That doesn’t make it Truth, it makes it truth, and truth that is at its heart irrational.

The real question then for me is, to what end does the irrational hold meaning. To what end do my memories hold meaning if they are not trustworthy in and of themselves. To what end can I trust, for example, that my experience in prayer and answer to prayer represents some kind of Truth with a capital letter T? If I have to accept a lie in order for it to become truth, then to me the human endeavor starts to cave in on itself. It is limited and unreliable by nature of what it is. If it stands above me as something ready to be revealed and discovered, then it gives me reason to step out in faith and to allow it to inform my present and give this world, this life meaning. Which is what this new research project is really about- a stepping out in faith in order to recover the story of God, this world and my place in it. I totally understand that people can arrive at a similar place, and do all the time, without needing this notion of God to do so. But to me I just came to the place where I concluded that I can’t do it honestly. I don’t think any of us truly can. Without some notion of God I could only do this by simply accepting that this is the way things are, this is the reality we have been given, and thus this is how we allow ourselves to make sense of it and to live. We can only do it by submitting ourselves to something irrational, and that was something my rational mind couldn’t reconcile, especially because that appeared to have little to no answers for the present state of my life and the problem of social measure, inequality and oppression. It wasn’t a true motivating factor because it depended on my ability to invest in social currency or my ability to accept the social currency others were gaining by investing me, neither of which I could trust, neither of which were guaranteed, and neither of which were present at that time in my life. And both of which necessarily depended on perpetuating a lie as small letter truth, be it alone or together. It was, in other words, a kind of self help, a self improvement message wrapped up in social concern, the same kind of messages that drove me nuts and reeked of superficiality in the Church world. I needed something more. That moment in my life awakened me to something more, and this current research project hopefully will help grow my awarness of it. At least that continues to be my prayer.

SOURCES

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/memories-unreliable-science-brain-false-memory-remembering-a8687296.html

https://medium.com/swlh/warning-you-cant-trust-your-memory-here-s-the-science-that-proves-it-91e0601bb2fe

https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=T-db9SRf0XsC&gl=ca&hl=en-CA&source=productsearch&utm_source=HA_Desktop_US&utm_medium=SEM&utm_campaign=PLA&pcampaignid=MKT-FDR-na-us-1000189-Med-pla-bk-Evergreen-Jul1520-PLA-eBooks_Business_Economics&gclid=CjwKCAiA4rGCBhAQEiwAelVti_KfmHIiHEGf9M-0hLt3OTQfWmT0IuDxKXkgPn-pmO5U961iJrHUchoCfQQQAvD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds

https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B089PW87PL/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

https://books.google.ca/books/about/Time_Travel.html?id=jC0yDwAAQBAJ&source=kp_book_description&redir_esc=y

   

Maybe you have to know the darkness before you can appreciate the light.”
—Madeleine L’Engle

When I first started writing in this space it was an attempt to try and deal with some of the great anxiety I was feeling and experiencing over turning 40. Anxiety is something I have wrestled with my whole life. When I was in counseling around that same time 5 or so years ago it became apparent that in most cases this anxiety arises from places of fear, fear that reaches all the way back to the chronic nightmares that plagued me as a child. Even as a young mind I was struck by a mutli-faceted and confusing world that seemed to be equal parts aware and invisible, clear and hidden. At times the fear seemed to flow from the hidden spaces, that which I could not control, with that which I could see helping to shed light on those fears. At other times fear arose from that which I could see, requiring me to imagine the unseen and the unknown in order to make sense of my fears.

This is where I first fell in love with the art of story. It is only in storytelling that we can make sense of a world that is equal parts seen and unseen, and story does this by evoking the power of the imagination. Delve into modern research and you will find a renewed interest in the imagination emerging within the sciences, psychology and the field of education. This is becuase imagination is not only helpful, it is necessary for understanding the world and our place in it. For far too long modern Western society has been built on a philosophy, and therefore a psychology of rationalism and reason as the highest virtues. This is not dissimilar to the idea that growing up means to set aside our childish ways. There is something counterintuitive to this way of thinking though when it comes to our understanding of the human experience. To think this way actually increases anxiety and distances us from our ability to understand the world as it truly is.

I’m currently reading a book called Atlantic by by Simon Winchester. He tells the story of the Atlantic ocean by imagining it as a living entity and shaping it through Shakespeares famous monologue that evokes the 7 ages or stages of man. Here he depends on the art of storytelling and the act of the imagination to help us understand the Atlantic as more than simply a body of water, but as a body of water with a very real context. He takes what we see and what we know, this picture of standing on the shoreline looking out over this vast and mysterious expanse, and helps us to imagine the unseen- the people, places, history, questions, changes that inform this body of water in terms of this movement from life to death. And it is in understanding this movement that we can then shift our perspective to questions of the eternal, as in why does this body of water, which will one day represent an anomaly as being the longest surviving body of water in earth’s history, matter in the bigger picture?

I’m also reading a book right now called Irrationality: A History of the Dark Side of Reason by Justin Smith. It’s a hard hitting and incredibly compelling, perspective changing examination of reason’s limitations and the West’s problematic dependency on it. Much in the same way, Smith is arguing for a return to the imagination, a renewed ability to imagine truth and reality as something that must be revealed not obtained. True rationality then comes from a position of humility, a willingness to engage both what we see and that which we cannot see and to allow this to inform our sense of reason and rationality. Rationalism, or truth in the Western sense of the term, tends to be about three things- progress, control and reason. What the West has long neglected in the process is storytelling, imagination, and myth. And if Smith is right, this has actually led to a a more irrational society.

So why do I bring this up? Becuase I have found myself once again caught in a place of crippling anxiety. A year long journey with some health struggles that reaches back to February, 2020 and which carried through the stresses of the pandemic without much in the way of answers. In the past month things got worse, allowing my anxiety to have an even greater hold on my life. As my wife lamented at one point in recent days, “I want my husband back.” I can see that person, but in this space of fear laden anxiety over the unseen, the unknown, that person feels inevitably lost in the fog and enslaved to the very real darkness of my imagination.

For those who don’t know what an anxiety disorder is and what it can do to someone like me who suffers from it, it is an all consuming struggle. It means running through a thousand different narratives in your mind every minute of the day. It means being unable to function and be present in every day, ordinary activities. Rationality becomes the enemy because, in most cases we feel and know we cannot truly trust it. It feels better to remain imbalanced and given to irrationality than to risk the truth catching us off guard. Anxiety is an obsession that is forever caught somewhere between what we see and what we cannot see, with both of these realities equally clouded and uncertain. It robs us of our ability to live, and yet at the same time demands that in order for us to live we must learn to accept that our struggle with anxiety does not make us less than another. At the same time, more often than not social situations tend to make this anxiety that much worse, which only compounds this problem as a viscious cycle.

So what does one do with anxiety when it wreaks havoc on our lives and our ability to live? There’s no easy answer to this question, and it likely looks different for everyone. For me, one thing that has helped is prayer. There is a reason I think why a fascinaton with prayer has followed my struggle with anxiety very, very closely. I am not good at prayer. For someone with social anxiety prayer in public, or praying together is even worse. And yet typically once a year I found myself coming across a book, sometimes by searching for it and sometimes by it simply falling across my path and reminding me its time to reengage the topic, that teaches me and reteaches me about the art of prayer. Recently it was lyrics of this song that awakened this within me. It’s by Hulvey and it’s called “Reasons”:

You can’t keep going at a rate like this, running for your life when you’re meant to live. Gotta keep on breathing. There’s too many reasons. I spent late nights, I was scared to die, I ain’t wanna see the grave. I was playing games with my heartbeat instead of slowing down just to pray. You’ve been reachin’ for the hand you thought you’d never grab, but Jesus brings the hope you thought you’d never have (have, have). Tired of livin’ in a nightmare, Lord, I just wanna hear you, runnin’ ’round the same circle don’t make me feel brand new. You gotta know it ain’t over ’cause you got a hand to hold. Let His peace come rushin’ through your soul. Too many reasons for you just to let go. There’s hope

Hulvey (Reasons)

In light of these lyrics, I’m beginning a book by Sarah Bessey called “A Rhythm of Prayer”, a book that was born out of a time of great struggle in her own life and the feeling the she couldn’t pray becuase she didn’t know how.

In knowing that she was not good at prayer, it opened her up to knowing all of the ways in which prayer can happen and all of the ways prayer breaks into our lives, our questions and our struggles in unexpected ways. Perhaps most imporantly, prayer is a way of reigniting our imagination for what we can see and what we cannot see, and not surprisingly invites us into a larger story. It gives us the words, images and pictures we need to make sense of our experiences.

Last Friday morning in a moment of great anxiety over an upcoming appointment that day, I found myself in a place of prayer as I was out in the open space of the rural Manitoba countryside waiting for my first pick up (I am a school bus driver). One thing that I love about my job is that it puts me in tune with the changing seasons. It makes me aware of the timing of the sunrise and the length of the days. The other day I found myself driving in the pitch dark in one direction, only to come around the next mile in the opposite direction to encounter the sunrise bursting on the scene, a sunrise that was not there the previous week at that same time.

One of the things that I also become aware of driving a school bus is the forever changing position and size of the moon in the sky. Sitting in that same position, facing the same direction at the same time every morning as I wait for that first pick up, sometimes the moon is directly in front of me. At other times its to my left, my right or even behind me. And somtimes it looms massive in the sky long into the morning, while at other times appearing like a small orb and disappearing quickly with the earliest notes of the sunrise. Why is this? The answer to that question is the movement of the earth and the moon. While the movement of the earth, which spins giving us that 24 hour cycle of night and day, makes it appear like the sun and the moon are moving in the sky from one side to the other (rising and setting), the moon is actually moving in orbit around the earth at the same time. This illusion and this reality combined gives us a sense of night and day while also making tracking down the moon on any given morning or evening something of an adventure, a dance of the imagination. For the ancients, this would even tell a story.

On this particular morning as I was struggling with my anxiety the moon, which the previous day had been right in front me, was gone. I could not see it until I turned my head to the left and noted this perfectly halved slice hanging high in the sky which, had I not looked upwards I would never have noticed.

What struck me in this moment was this notion of seeing half the moon while the other half was hidden from my sight. To know that the moon was whole in this moment required me to use my imagination, to image what I could now only see in part. This brought to mind the famous verse by Paul in 1 Corinthians 13:12 where he writes, “For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.” (NIV).

What Paul has in mind here is an important part of a larger train of thought that runs through his letters, that being the nature of revelation or knowledge of God, ourselves and this world (or Creation). “Then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known” evokes a sense of revelation, that art of revealing truth that the West has lost in its love affair with the enlightenment. Here we come as well to that grand theology that sees humanity as image bearers, in that what Christianity imagines in Christ is the truth of God fully revealed “in the flesh”, and thus, as God’s image bearers, the truth of our identity as sons and daughters of God is likewase made known as we imitate Christ and become a light to the world. As theologian N.T. Wright often suggests, to participate in the Kingdom of God is to then image or imagine Christ to the world and to invite all the people’s of the earth to consider and see their true identity. This working metaphor of “reflection” invokes this idea then of Truth reflecting itself into our reality in a revelatory and revealing sense, but in a way that can get clouded and abstracted by our experience in this world. This is the journey of faith then, is to be constantly growing in our persepctive of God, ourselves and this world so that the full revelation of Christ, often seen dimly and often clouded by our better judgements, can be made known.

What’s intersting is to consider the history of mirrors as a context through which to Paul’s understands words, especially as they flow through his constantly developing train of thought. Consider this from the following article on the history of mirrors https://www.furniturelibrary.com/mirror-glass-darkly/

Early glass mirrors were made of glass tiles cut from blown glass forms—thus always slightly curved, and always slightly colored, as the chemistry of clear glass manufacture remained unknown. These glass tiles were then affixed over still-hot, carefully sized, cast lead forms, with a thin layer of polished metal sheeting between the two. It was a belabored and imprecise process, resulting in mirrors of dim reflection.
As attributed to Paul the apostle, “For now we see through a glass, darkly.”
Around 500 AD, man began to create somewhat clearer and more reflective glass mirrors using silver-mercury amalgams. Examples of such have been found in China dated as early as c.500AD. But another thousand years would pass before silvery-mercury amalgam processes became more efficient—and less deadly, mercury being one of the most toxic elements on planet Earth.
Enlightment in the Age of Reason, science, culture, philosophy—and mirror-making, did not arrive in an instant. But sometime around the 12th century, mirror-makers began to measurably improve their craft. A guild of mirror makers—the first recorded, was formed in the city of Nuremberg in 1373, soon followed by a guild in the city of Venice.

Historians and theologians have long equated these words from Paul with these famous bronze mirrors in Corinth, in which this notion of imaging was a developing idea in a rationalistic sense. Fast foward in time and we find the foundation for the enlightenment intertwined with this notion of a mirror which can accurately reflect the truth in a fully reasoned way. We move from revelation to self revelation, the notion of recieved knowledge to precieved and earned knowledge. And yet in truth, mirrors remain deceptive entitities which can easily manipulate our perspective based on light and angle. Just like the perfectly split moon that hung in the sky that Friday morning, our experience shapes our understanding of reality in particular ways. Which is precisely why imagination and story remains so integral to revelation.

As I sat there considering the moon and imagining its wholeness, I said a prayer. I then turned to my devotion for the morning in N.T. Wright’s Lent For Everyone: The Gospel of Mark. The morning’s reflection was on Mark 6:45-56, with the focus of thte relfection on 6:45-42. This is the passage following the feeding of the masses with the loaves and fishes where the disciples find themelves in a boat in the middle of the sea while Jesus remained alone on the shore praying. The disciples were having to “work hard at rowing” just to stay moving and afloat in the midst of this great wind that came “against them”, and it says that in seeing this, Jesus “came to them… walking on the sea”. We gain a description of the disciples struggling with their experience of this great wind which had left them incapacitated and unable to move foward, and when Jesus arrives they “were scared stiff” becuase they thought he was a ghost, an allusion, an appartion. Jesus’ words to them arrive as a simple yet powerful admonition- “It’s me. Don’t be afraid.”

There’s a final note ascribed to this passage that suggests that the correlation to this moment, or the revelatory potential of this moment is the preceding passage with the story of the loaves and the fishes. They “were overwhelmed” because “they hadn’t understood about the loaves.” Their hearts were “hardened”- clouded, obscured, hidden, abstracted, because of their perspective, their experience.

To which we come to these words, “It’s me. Don’t be afraid.” It’s not some fractured moon somehow cut off from the sky, it’s the moon in its fullness. It’s not an apparition, it’s Jesus. God fully revealed in human form. The Word made flesh. It’s no mistake that Paul’s words to Corinth are framed against a lengthy discourse on love as the highest ideal, the greatest truth. However complicated our experiences are, however much they osbscure the truth of our reality, however much they leave us stuck with a clouded view of the fuller picture, we can know the truth of love stands taller. This is the tension we carry in faith.

In reflecting on this passage, Wright offers the following words of insight on this tension by imagining this story from the perspective of Thomas in the boat:

Perhaps this is how it’s always going to be, for anyone who wants to follow Jesus, now or at any time. Perhaps what he wants from us is not that we should be able to explain it all but that we should just be clear we’re going to go on following him. I may not be the sharpest tool in the box (my father always used to say that, because he was a carpenter too, like Jesus’ father), but I reckon I’m in this for the long haul. I may not always understand it first time off, but I’ll still show up. Or my name’s not Thomas Didymus …

N.T. Wright

Wright finishes this reflection with a prayer for the day, a prayer that immediately washed over me in this moment as I sat in my anxious state underneath this half moon at once hidden and at once revealed. My appointment, ironically enough, would come with more unanswered questions and uncertainty. But it also arrived with something tangible, a revelation of Truth emerging from notes in my bloodwork that invited my participation in the here and now, even if a waiting game continues in terms of understanding the bigger picture, the full story. These are things that I can, and am even charged to tackle over the coming six months, the alloted time between now and my next appointment, things which can continue this journey of exploration and the search for Truth. The anxiety remains, but the opportunity to refame my perspective emerges, and an opportunty to hear the simple words “it’s me, don’t be afriad” over and over again as I continue to trust that this is true even when I can’t quite see it. I simply need to turn my head to the left, look up and allow myself to imagine, to reengage my story. This is what it means to image God in our lives. And as I do, I trust that what I only see dimly now will be revealed as whole, and I trust in this knowing that the fullness of God revealed has in fact already arrived in our midst in the person and minsitry of Jesus, the Word made flesh, love embodied.

Film

A one man show written together along with his audience. An emotional and conceptual magic trick that proves all too real. A love letter to all those who struggle with knowing who they are, their value and their worth. And a gift to those struggling with mental illness, depression or just general feelings of lostness, sadness and hopelessness.

Who am I? Know you are more than labels and perceptions.

“It all made sense then. Who’s an enemy and who’s one of ours.
She’s one of ours.”

A stunning and powerful recreation of the 1962 massacre in Novocherkassk of unarmed protesters by the Soviet army and KGB leaders. One of these leaders is a young mother who’s unflinching and often unquestioned commitment to the Soviet Union and the KGB is thrown into contest when she has to contend with the reality that her daughter is amongst these protestors. 

The films isn’t trying to make a political point as much as it wants to explore a complex conversation regarding the intricate marriage of politics, people, ideologies and struggle. There’s as much in subtext as there is in the surface script, bringint to light the common humanity that drives and challenges convictions on either side of this conversation. It is within the (necessary) tension that this attention and awareness of our shared humanity creates where we can begin to enter these kinds of conversations together, which I think is what Dear Comrades ultimately desires to invoke.

The dry wit in this film is delicious, mouth-watering, appetizing, flavoursome, flavourful, toothsome, inviting, very enjoyable, very palatable. succulent, luscious, rich, sweet.
tasty, savoury, piquant, scrumptious, delish, scrummy, yummy, yum-yum. 

I totally get the elevated emotions over a game of scrabble. And the off beat reality that these character’s exist in also feels relatable in that unfamiliar way that seems to suggest in some way or form this could very well be my reality. Life as it is when we take off the filters. Kind of melancholy, kind of sad, kind of eclectic, kind of fun, and more often than not irreverent about the stuff we take seriously while being aware of the stuff we should take more seriously. All wrapped up in a mystery solving drama revolving around a missing son and a game of scrabble.

Delightful British film that offers a nice twist on the prodigal son narrative, including a meaningful and insightful angle on the son who stayed.

This is the international film Directed by Jayro Bustamante, not the American version released in the same year.

The film uses the ancient context of the familiar lore that informs its story to comment on what is a very modern political challenge facing Guatemala. It’s the way it does this, layering the different facets of its story into the different elements and characters that populate this modern stage, that is so effective. What one might assume would be traditional horror translates into something much more subtle. This is a drama with horror notes, and rather than use jump scares it uses visuals and tone to bring about this working commentary on the class divide. And given how this focuses in on a singular family responding to the political crisis, each family member is given a unique position to play into the story from their own contrasting perspectives. 

An exceptional film with a perhaps an even more important voice.

This was one of two outstanding foriegn animated films I saw in Feburary (the other being 2018’s The Tower, a starling Palestinian film that explores the nature of hope in seemingly hopeless situations, rooting its story in a real world tragedy and the power of a child to find freedom in light of the past). This is the second film in a proposed new universe of films that began with the equally wonder Ne Zha from last year.

What was so impressive about Ne Zha is how it brings together cultural notes from Chinese Tradition and belief with the myths and stories that guide their history. It is a wonderful expression of what makes their culture and heritage so rich, weaving in a real sense of spirit and religious conviction that is often absent in Western stories. This second film leans darker and more serious, trading in the world building of Ne Zha for a more streamlined, quest like narrative. Both are equally impressive, and taken together prove complimentary in terms of the way they center on the Fengshen Yanyi” (Investiture of the Gods and the important intersection in their history that shapes this book, the shifting from the falling Shang Dynasty to the rise of the Zhou dynasty.

The animation is beautiful, and the storytelling feels exciting and fresh from my Western perspective, especially in its ability to imagine a real world context that is much bigger than what we can see simply on the surface.

Books

An books formed from Bruder’s own journey into a sub-culture of America. It follows what is an organized community of people who live without a home and who survive “nomadically” by taking seasonal jobs in places like Amazon and State parks. There is a central figure who gives this documentation of this vast and diverse community of people a narrative shape, but every single person we encounter has arrived at this lifestyle for a different reason and with their own unique story in tow.

At the same time, there are shared concerns they all face, many of which shed light on the larger systemic problems that feed into their individual and shared challenges. Bruder helps to give this context while bringing these stories to light not as an anomaly, but as a beautiful and even necessary part of the fabric of our societies. These are not homeless, but people without homes, some by choice, some by necessity, and all with a story that is worth being told. Given how this is told as a kind of travelogue, the further Bruder finds herself on this journey of discovering this community of people, the more she finds hersself gaining empathy for and even capturing the spirit for this kind of lifestyle.

A new find for me in terms of author, and after encountering her brand of introspective horror on full display in this fairly easy read I am hooked. In truth though, I was hooked after one of the best prologues I can remember reading in a long time:

“My beloved aunt, Sara Harrison Shea, was brutally murdered in the winter of 1908. She was thirty-one years old.

Shortly after her death, I gathered all of the diary pages and journals I was able to locate, pulling them out of dozens of clever hiding places throughout her house. She understood the danger these pages put her in.

It then became my task, over the next year, to organize the entries and shape them into a book. I embraced the opportunity, as I soon realized that the story these pages tell could change everything we think we understand about life and death.

I also contend that the most important entries, the ones with the most shocking secrets and revelations, were contained in the final pages of her diary, written only hours before her death.

Those pages have not yet been found.

I have taken no liberties when transcribing these entries; they are not embellished or changed in any way. I believe that, as fantastical as the story my aunt tells may be, it is indeed fact, not fiction. My aunt, contrary to popular belief, was of sound mind.”

Phenomenal book that functions as a blend of travelogue, scholarship and devotional. Father James Martin, whom anchors himself in the Ignatious Tradtion of the Christian faith, structures each chapter according to an on the ground, practical pilgrimage through the Holy Land, and pairs it with thoughts on the scholarship and ultimately reflections on his own spiritual journey and awareness of encountering the text while walking in the footsteps of Jesus.

It’s incredibly accessible, highly engaging, and quite often revealing and profound as an honest depiction of this journey. It takes us into the nooks and crannies and dirty corners of the life behind the text, and brings us up close and personal to the one who claimed to be God and yet walked this earth as a man amongst humans.

I could just as easily include the film in my above list as I rewatched it following this read, for the first time in over 30 years I might add. But this read was special in that it not only brough up all those childhood memories of images still anchored in my mind, but gave me a fresh perspective through which to understand this story about fear and hope. From my adult eyes, it was a process of reaching back into my childhood perspective to uncover what it could teach me about about overcoming fear and recovering hope, pushing back against the cynicism that so easily comes with those adult eyes. I wrote in this space already about my experience with this book, so I won’t rehash that. Just simply to say that I never realized how much depth there really was tothis story. Or at least it seems I had forgotten.

This is one of two books I read in February on the similar subject of anger and empathy and its roots in human development and history as a working tension (the other being the book, The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World In Crisis, itself a natural follow up to a book I readin January called Survival of the Friendliest: Why We Love Insiders and Hate Outsiders and How We Can Rediscover Our Common Humanity). I picked this one up in preperation to read Irrationality: A History of the Dark Side of Reason over the month of March.

There’s not a table left unturned in this hardhitting, empathetic but intelligent discourse on where we are as a world, how we got here, and perhaps, if our imaginations might allow, where we could go should we confront some of the biggest problems of our modern modes of thinking. At the heart of the author’s intent, someone who lives as an adopted Westerner while also understanding this narrative from an Eastern perspective, is exploring the nature of story. The stories we tell ourselves are the stories that define us on a cultural and socio-political lives. Further, its how we understand these stories that turn something from benign history to dangerous rhetoric. And this is as true for what it means to understand the modern stories that tend to guide us in our present age, particularly in the neglect of history and this increasing allegiance to rationalism.

Much of the books premise navigates this notable shift from cultures that once built their lives around stories to a modern and largely godless culture that exists without stories, without myths, at least in the sense in which they are tied to our history. It’s shocking how much of this problematic story emerges from that modern, godless, mythless worldview. It’s also shocking how this shift from religious (given) mythtelling to created mythtelling continues to see itself as the championing of truth, when in fact it is truth built on a modern story, a story that itself hands us the same rheoric that sets one against the other. If anything, it has just revealed the consistent inconsistency and polarization that exists within the human will, along with a will that is intrinsicly tied to the stories that inform us and inform our lives. This isn’t a condemnation of religion as much as it is the will’s continued resistance to truth in a larger, universal sense. In truth, religious mythtelling, or storytelling actually allows us a greater chance to attend to the will. We might think we are more free in a rationalist driven Western society, but we are in fact not. And this will only become more and more pertinant as society progresses towards a future where we are controlled more and more by change and technology, the very things that are stealing away human vocation and guiding progress. We celebrate the success of something going viral, giving way to some of the greatest disparities the world has ever known.

Honorable Mention: Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely (A super easy read, and even a fun read given how it exploits our predictably irrational behavior as humans. There is a bit of irreverance to the way the author sheds light on the hows, whys and what’s of our decisions and choices and actions, revealing how much all of us, whether we want to admit it or recognize it or not, are very much controlled by these recognizable external forces and factors. We actually know this more often than not, which adds in the added factor that typically we don’t actually care more often than not. Or we simply choose to ignore it. And yet taking the time to reflect on some o this stuff can actually help us in those small and few moments where we can effectively circumvent the predictably irrational)

Music

As a huge fan of Switchfoot, I was keenly interested when frontman Jon Foreman first entered into the realm of solo work. His albums are much more scaled back than Switchfoot, which gives them a meditative quality (which colors his previously released Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter series). Departures is his most complex work yet, and also one of his best. Here he brings in a variety of instrumentation that lends layers to that stripped down nature, and lyrically we find him exploring even deeper realms of introspection and faith. It’s both his most overt album on a religous level, and its also his most compelling.

At first glance this might seem like a bit of a deviation from the material Foo Fighter’s are usually known for. Dig a little deeper though and there’s some compelling song structure and lyrics to be mined from their latest full release. It comes out firing right of the gate before settling into this grove that seems to take this ablum where it will. For my money that is to some interesting places, and thematically speaking this fits with its overt call to revolution colored by the album’s call to try and throw off that which oppresses us and both enter into the rallying cry of No Son of Mine, and also strip off the burden of Shame Shame, the deep depression apparent in the film’s title track, while getting up to dance. There’s a dark side to this album, but it’s also it’s most upbeat, lending itself to the experience of going from being on the ground to participating in the experience.

This is a song that ws featured on We The Kingdom’s 2020 release, Holy Water. This new version brings in Rinhart to add his vocal powers to an already great song, and it gives this single an undeniable new force and purpose.

This is a cover of Joy Division’s haunting and powerful song from the 80’s, which lyrically continues to capture the leads dark days leading up to his eventual suicide. You can feel the Vocal Few, a solo project by the front man for The Classic Crime, re-contextualizing the song for our present times. And the results are pretty effective.

If you are looking for something to accompany a journey through the dark places but with a view for optisim and hope, this deeply reflective but intentional record by someone who knows his way around the dark times is a breath of fresh air. It’s meditative of course, fitting with the artist’s overall vibe and tendencies, but it is also in a way uplifting and informing in a road trip kind of way. From the opening track, Hand of God, there is an undeniable spiritual longing that runs through the songs, looking and longing for spiritual renewal and the promise of a new reality, and perhaps even finding it.

Podcasts

Given that there are a couple of new Pinocchio adaptations releasing this year, this was a great way to get familiar with the roots of the actual story.

I picked up Sarah Bessey’s new book called The Rhythms of Prayer, and this was a really great interview with the author that dives into why she wrote it, what’s challenging and liberating about recovering an active prayer life, and some of the honet questions that flow from that. You can also find an interview with her on the Relevant Podcast.

I love the way the way this podcast sheds light on the stories we have lost and the history we have disconnected from in terms of the modern language we use and the oppenness we have to the lanuage of metaphor as opening us up to truth and a broader view of the world’s spiritual reality.

I could just as easily recommend Episode 158, which features an interview with Ben Witherington 111 and Jason Myers on their new book that helps readers to navigate the broad and diverse world of the New Perspective on Paul (called Voices and Viewon Paul). But I went with this interview with Thiessen because of the light it sheds on the difficult language of the purity system. The way he was able to shed light on the differentialation between ritual, personal, demonic, and cultural impurity is really compelling, and I’m very much looking forward to picking up the book.

Don’t miss the excellent episode on The Vast of Night, but I wanted to highlight this film becuase it is a bit underseen in 2020, and the conversation the hosts have around this film brings so much light to both the production of the film and some of those intricate and intimate details that mark the film’s story. Excellent companion piece to help you dialogue with the film after you see it, and please, do see the film.

It has been over 30 years since I saw the film the Neverending Story, and, full confession, I was not aware that it was based on a book. Stumbling across the novel brought back fond memories of the story, and ignited my desire to get aquainted with the source material (followed up by a rewatch of the classic film).

In comparison the book is much longer and more invested in the intracies of the journey that we find in the story on a philsophical level than the film. The film fast tracks some of the narrative portions and streamlines the story arc to read much more succinctly as an adventure film. In contrast, the book is much more epic in scope, drawing out the themes that are touched on in the film regarding the journey itself.

Which is not to say the film is bad adaptation. I appreciated both forms of the story, and the film stays mainly faithful to the heart of the book and the main story beats that we find within its pages. It’s simply to say they both offer and evoke slightly different experiences.

One thing that I really appreciated about the book is how poetic the prose is. It’s easy to sense the religious undertones, a bit more complex to tease them out. And yet that is precisely the job of the reader in engaging the depth of the narrative concern, and is, I would argue, what the author intended us to do in terms of engaging this conversation with the bigger ideas of its philosophical thought and the intracicies of its literary form.

Consider this excerpt from the article Religion and Romanticism in Michael Ende’s The Neverending Story by Kach Filmer:

“The Neverending Story is, above all, a profoundly
religious text, although there is not a word in it that is
specifically religious, and in it there are unmistakable
elements of skepticism. But through this text, the author’s
priestly role can be seen quite clearly, and the problematics of fantasy are dealt with in a context which includes spiritual, as well as psychological, growth. This is no mere fairy tale, though it invokes the whole fairy story tradition. It is a work of the Romantic Imagination, and its purpose is, as Stephen Prickett has noted in the epigraph to this paper, “to change the way the reader experiences life” (15).

In other words, it offers a lived Dialectic of Desire as
Bastian Balthazar Bux pursues his ambitions and
daydreams through the wonders of Fantastica, the world
of fantasy and imagination. And as C.S. Lewis has written
in another context, “The dialectic of Desire, faithfully fol-
lowed, would retrieve all mistakes, head you off from all
false paths, and force you not to propound, but to live
through, a sort of ontological proof.” Lewis was writing of
his own experiences of the strongly nostalgic emotion of
Sehnsucht, die desire for something which can hardly be
identified, but which pierces us like a rapier at the small of a bonfire, the sound of wild ducks flying overhead, the title of The Well at the World’s End, the opening lines of Kubla Khan, the morning cobwebs in late summer, or the noise of falling waves…” (10).

The author goes on to say,

“This same longing is generated for Michael Ende’s charac-
ter Bastian by the experience of reading, indeed by the
physical object of a book itself:
“I wonder,” he said to himself, “what’s in a book while
it’s closed. Oh, I know it’s full of letters printed on paper,
but all the same, something must be happening, because
as soon as I open it, there’s a whole story with people I
don’t know yet and all kinds of adventures and deeds a nd
battles. And sometimes there are storms at sea, or it takes
you to strange cities and countries. All those things are
somehow shut up in a book. Of course, you have to read
it to find out. But it’s already there, that’s the funny thing.
I just wish I knew how it could be.” (11)

There is in this passage an undoubted ontological im-
petus : a world has been created and is waiting for the reader
to enter it. As Tolkien has written in his essay “O n Fairy
Stories,” the reader must enter and engage with this secon-
dary world and with its special laws (Tolkien 48). But
Ende’s text is polysemous; there is a fantasy within a fan-
tasy. There is the primary tale of the small boy Bastian with
which the reader engages, and there is the story of Fantas-
tica into which Bastian himself is drawn. The self-reflexivity of the tale makes it highly meta-narratological. The alternation of red and green typeface (in the original versions, both German and English) also emphasizes the metanarrative technique. This might be seen as an attempt to undermine
the operation of the imaginative process, since there is a
deliberate return to the fictional version of the real world
and the notion of readerly engagement with a text.
But this, of course, is not the whole story. The role of
Bastian in the metafictional world parallels the role of the
reader in the act of reading any text. Readers m ust con-
struct the text, as m odem theorists would have it; the
author is “dead” and meaning resides only in the subjec-
tive engagement of the reader with the signifying con-
structs which comprise the text. Certainly Bastian con-
structs the text; but the text in this novel is much more than merely words on paper, as Bastian is well aware. The text is a world, and the act of constructing the text is the act of creating a world, which is precisely the role Bastian is given in the world of Fantastica. Moreover, he is constantly referred to as a Savior by the inhabitants of Fantasica, which emphasizes his creative and godlike function, although this deus ex rnachim from the mundane world is a flawed saviour whose endeavors are not always either well-intentioned or beneficent in their effects.”

Regarding this notion of good and evil, dark and light,

“The human im agination has access to both dark and light;
in the worlds of fantasy there are good and evil characters
who are equally important to the story. Quests would not
appeal were there not monsters to be overcome and evil
creatures to outwit; they are all part of the story . In
Fantastica, then, the evil characters are as valuable as the
good ones, since they arise out of the same creative human
faculty. The human Imagination is a dualistic faculty, and
human creators are dualistic gods since they are, as
Tolkien suggests in his poem, lords in rags — fallen crea-
tures. Although Ende does not articulate this point ex-
plicitly, it is implicit in the value he places upon the evil
characters in his fantastic world — a world which clearly
comprises all the realms of human im agination: myth,
fantasy, legend, story, parable, allegory and marcher. The
real evil in Fantastica, die terrifying threat to the world of
the imagination, is the Nothing, the sense of absence and
loss which pervades the story until Bastian can enter the
fictional realm. And it is the idea of the Nothing which
comes closest in this novel to commentary upon recent
theoretical trends in literature.”

Here is the link to the full article:

https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol18/iss1/11/?utm_source=dc.swosu.edu%2Fmythlore%2Fvol18%2Fiss1%2F11&utm_medium=PDF&utm_campaign=PDFCoverPages

I had never really considered this film to be a horror fantasy film until I read the book and revisited the film from my now adult perspective. As it conjured up all these images from my own childhood, I could see the hidden fears that this story was evoking and coaxing to the surface. The image of the Nothing stands seared in my brain as it helps us to imagine those childhood struggles that had held me bound to fear, and in some ways continue to bear themselves out tangible ways. There is something deeply human about what Bastian faces in his own life, the things that hold this notion of fantasy and reality in tension. Childhood innocence and adult responsibility battle for his allegiance, which we hear in the film as the father chides the son to get his head out of the clouds and to take responsibility for facing life’s problems following the mother’s death.

It is here the power of the book, the power of story to transform us rises to the surface, teasing out the importance of the imagination in helping to form our perspective of this world and our experiences in necessary and spirit driven ways. This is, in fact, the role of faith, guided as it is by those old mythologies that once formed the foundation of our worldview before the West in all of its rationalistic glory replaced it with the gods of human reason and progress. This is a German based stories, and as such is entrenched in the familiar language of those old fairy tales. And yet it also translates much broader than this into the larger world of myth. Endes book is a call back to the truth of a world that once was and still is soaked in mystery and revelation.

Here in lies the value of literature forms and trends. It allows Bastian to make sense of that feeling of inevitable lostness and the nihilism that his struggling experiences threaten to impose onto his once imaginative and sacredly held worldview. And it does so by attaching this to images and ideas that are bigger than himself. The Nothing becomes the very personification of his very real fears, and the adventure he gets sucked into holds real world stakes. And behind this lies the truths that only our myths can truly capture in their essence, truths that get bound up in sacrificial, Christ type figures, realities of good and evil, vitues and failures, all of which play themselves out in real and tangible ways in the world we occupy in the here and now. Here in this story, then, we can also gain a glimpse of the character of God as something fully real, fully imagined, and fully alive in our struggle.

All of this was not something I would have understood as a child in philosophical terms. And yet my dhildhood mind would have understood this in many ways far more accutely and resolutely and unquestioningly than my adult one, which has been taught to be prone to resististing this imaginative way of seeing the world in the face of life’s perpetual struggle. This book reignitted that childhood fervor, that childhood innocence framed by what were very real and very true experiences of life’s struggles. The real difference lies in the ability of my young mind to frame this in a particular kind of story, the kind of story this book represents and that Bastian uncovers. For me, I considered my chronic nightmares, the bullying of my own childhood experience, the moments of uncertainty and questions, and perhaps more the way my growing love of stories gave my young mind a way to be formed by a reality vision of the world much larger than myself and my experiences. It created in me a love for the imagination, but even more so the ability to imagine the ebb and flow of my experience in those larger truths.

20He went into the house. A crowd gathered again, so that they couldn’t even have a meal. 21When his family heard it, they came to restrain him. ‘He’s out of his mind,’ they said. 22Experts who had come from Jerusalem were saying, ‘He is possessed by Beelzebul! He casts out demons by the prince of demons!’ 23Jesus summoned them and spoke to them in pictures. ‘How can the Accuser cast out the Accuser? 24If a kingdom splits into two factions, it can’t last; 25if a household splits into two factions, it can’t last. 26So if the Accuser revolts against himself and splits into two, he can’t last – his time is up! 27But remember: no one can get into a strong man’s house and steal his property unless first they tie up the strong man; then they can plunder his house. 28‘I’m telling you the truth: people will be forgiven all sins, and all blasphemies of whatever sort. 29But people who blaspheme the holy spirit will never find forgiveness. They will be guilty of an eternal sin.’ 30That was his response to their claim that he had an unclean spirit.

Mark 3.20–35

I have long wrestled with this passage from Mark, especially growing up in a particular Tradtion that would have emphasized the blasphemy in this verse in measurable ways. When the word blasphemy is used as a means to control the truth of the Gospel, it can very quickly turn into abuse. When we read this verse and use it to distinguish between the other as the heretic and to establish ourselves as the true believer, it can very quickly become oppressive and miss the person who lies at the center of the question fueling this accusation. Which in Mark’s Gospel is the question ‘who is this man’? Is he the Christ or something other?

Not unlike verses dealing with false prophets and sheep in wolves clothing, there is a fine line that exists between distinguishing between truth and falsehood and getting wrapped up in this accusing game. In my younger years this verse arrived in the form of heavy anxiety over whether I had committed the unpardonable sin. In my later years this matured into accusations of being called that false prophet my younger self feared. I can remember literally being called “the devil” for endorsing something that Andy Stanley, of all people, once said in one of his sermons. That’s how thin and blurred this line can get. I learned very quickly that no matter how hard one tries, there will always be a reason someone can call you the devil, and the truth of this passage is that if you call someone the devil you are evoking the nature of that unpardonable sin.

The thing that struck me about encountering this passage once again, which came up in my daily reading through N.T. Wright’s Lenton for Everyone series on the Gospel of Mark, is is that the danger of presenting ourselves as the accuser is that we ultimately end up accusing ourselves in the process. We all become the devil we see in the other. And what happens when we play the role of the accuser is that we actually begin to take up “the satan’s” work, which is to divide and foster division between the family of God. Christ on the other hand cannot stand divided. Christ came to heal a divided people and to bring unity where there is division. The truth of Christ is that this unifying work can only be found in Him, lest we end up all accusing one another to death. And if the unifying work of Christ is not true in our lives, in our communities, in our Churches, then what hope do we have in this ministry of reconciliation? This is a life, a community, a Church, a home that cannot last. Thus, especially those who call themselves Christ followers, this is serious business indeed.

Something about N.T Wright’s reflection in his Lenton for Everyone series, which I am reading his Mark version of for this present season, landed for me in a new and fresh way towards this end. I’m not sure I had ever read this passage from the lens of that division/unity theme. But I thought a portion of what he wrote was worth sharing. It helped to free some of that baggage for me personally, and perhaps it could reform your own understanding of this tricky passage as well.

Week 1: Wednesday (Mark 3:20-35; focused on 3:20-30); from Lent For Everyone: Mark, Year B by N.T. Wright

For generations people reading the gospels have wondered, quite naturally, just how much they can trust the gospels. Sceptics have suggested that it was all made up later to boost the church’s picture of the Jesus it worshipped. The bridges to historical certainty have been broken and not rebuilt. Fundamentalists have said that it was all dictated by God, so the question doesn’t arise. But most ordinary Christians are somewhere in between. Where are there solid footholds on which we know we can stand, even if it feels a bit of a splash, sometimes, to get to them?

This passage is one of those solid rocks. Nobody in the early church, however inventive they were feeling, would ever have made up a story about Jesus being accused of being in league with the devil. That would simply give too much ammunition to the new movement’s opponents, of whom there were plenty. So we can be absolutely sure this story is historically solid. You can rest your whole weight on it.

But if this story is solid, it means that we are forced, whether we want to or not, to believe that Jesus really was doing and saying things that were so remarkable that the only possible explanation – unless Jesus really was acting with a new, God-given power – was that he was in league with the devil. His opponents must have been desperate; this was all they could come up with. They couldn’t deny that Jesus had been doing extraordinary things. They could only try to hit back with smear and innuendo. The solid rock at one point enables us, then, to walk through some other bits of the fast-moving historical stream with equal confidence.

So what do we find as we do so? We find a new level of a theme we already observed: that when Jesus was behaving as if he was in charge, it wasn’t just the human ‘authorities’ that were being upstaged, and likely to strike back. It was the dark powers that hovered behind them.

There is an irony here. The legal experts from Jerusalem say that Jesus is in league with ‘the Accuser’, in other words, ‘the satan’. The word ‘satan’ actually means ‘accuser’; this reflects the ancient belief that the dark force in question was God’s ‘director of public prosecutions’, whose job it was to point the finger at evildoers, and who enjoyed the role so much that he began to incite people to commit offences for which he could then charge them. But it is they, themselves, who are ‘accusing’ – accusing Jesus! This is part of a much larger theme which continues throughout Mark’s gospel, as various dif ferent people ‘accuse’ Jesus of all sorts of things until they end up crucifying him.

But Jesus, in response, makes his strongest claim yet about what is going on through his work. What he is doing indicates clearly that the ‘Accuser’s’ kingdom – the usurped rule, in the whole world, of the power of evil – is being broken. Jesus has already made a decisive impact on it, ‘binding the strong man’ so that he can now ‘plunder his house’ (verse 27). This is the only explanation, Jesus is suggesting, that fits the facts. If Jesus had been in league with the satan, things would have got worse, not better.

The sharp, and worrying, warnings of verses 28–30 have often been taken out of context, as though there was a special ‘unforgiveable sin’ but Jesus wasn’t telling us what it was. Within the passage, though, the meaning is clear. Jesus is doing what he is doing by the power of the holy spirit. But if people look at the spirit’s work and declare that it’s the work of the devil, they are erecting a high steel wall between them and the powerful, rescuing love of God. That is a warning to all of us, whenever we are tempted to sneer at some new or different ‘Christian’ movement.

The main lesson for us, though, as we continue our journey through Lent, may well be this. If we are serious about following Jesus, people will misunderstand us, too, and may accuse us of bad motives, or prejudice, or ‘extremism’. The answer is simply to look back to Jesus, and to his victory over all the powers of evil. They can still make a lot of noise, and cause a lot of nuisance, but the ‘strong man’ has been tied up, and those who work for God’s kingdom can indeed, in the power of the spirit, set about plundering his house.

A brief word on the history of the Hebrew word translated “the satan”, or “the accuser” from an article for Biblical Archaeology authored by John Gregory Drummond

The Hebrew word śāṭān, meaning “accuser” or “adversary,” occurs several times throughout the Hebrew Bible and refers to enemies both human and celestial alike. When referring to the celestial adversary, the word is typically accompanied by the definite article. He is ha-satan—the Accuser—and it is a job description rather than a proper name. From the Accuser’s appearances in the Books of Job and Zechariah, it seems that the job entails calling attention to the unworthiness of mankind. The Accuser is essentially the prosecuting attorney of the divine court of YHWH, and part of his job includes collecting evidence to prove his cases. With this bit of knowledge in mind, it isn’t difficult to envision the various “outcries against sin,” such as that against Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 18:20–21), as the voice of the Accuser.

It is difficult to determine at which point in Israel’s history the Accuser began to take on a much more sinister role in the Israelite/Jewish belief structure, or how heaven’s great prosecutor became the prince of darkness (Ephesians 6:12). It is certainly easy to make the connection between Israel’s time in exile and the likely influence of the cosmic dualism of Persian religion.1 However, even within books written well after the return from foreign lands, the Accuser is still a self-righteous lawyer. Though if 1 Chronicles 21:1 is any indication,2 they began to believe the Accuser wasn’t above getting his hands dirty.

It is perfectly clear, however, that by the first century C.E., Judaism developed a belief in the divine forces of darkness doing battle against the forces of light. This can be seen within the New Testament and other extra-Biblical writings such as those found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. There are likely several factors that inspired these developments, including the influence of Persian, as well as Hellenistic, religions.
If there was an army of evil spiritual forces making war on the righteous, they had to have a commander. It is at this time that the impersonal and lofty Accuser began to acquire the various names and titles that have filled the writings of western civilization for 2,000 years. The Greek word diabolos (from which “devil” is derived), meaning “slanderer,” comes from a verb that means “to hurl” (i.e., accusations).
Diabolos was typically used as the Greek equivalent for the Hebrew śāṭān (in the Septuagint version of Job, for example), though it was not uncommon to simply transliterate the word into the Greek satanas (1 Kings 11:14). Other names used for the leader of the forces of evil at this time include Maśṭēmāh, which means “hatred” (1QM 13:4, 11; Jubilees 10:8), and Belial, a popular name among the writers of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which means “worthless” or “corrupt.” “Children of Belial” (Hebrew: bene-belial) was a typical phrase used to describe evil people in the Hebrew Bible (e.g., Deuteronomy 13:13; 1 Samuel 1:16; 2 Chronicles 13:7, etc.). If someone were searching for a name that personified evil in the Hebrew Bible, it would be Belial, not Satan. Interesting enough, the name only occurs once in the New Testament (2 Corinthians 6:15), as Paul’s stark contrast to Christ.
It is also in this period that we begin to see the development of the tradition of equating the talking serpent in the Garden of Eden with Satan (Life of Adam and Eve xi–xvii).

Satan’s role in the New Testament, though highly expanded, has much more in common with the Accuser of the Hebrew Bible than the commander of the armies of darkness that is typically portrayed in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Even though he is given such lofty titles as “the ruler of this world” (John 12:31), “father of lies” (John 8:44), “god of this world” (2 Corinthians 4:4), “ruler of the power of the air” (Ephesians 2:2), and Beelzebul, “ruler of the demons” (Matthew 10:25; Mark 3:22; Luke 11:15), Satan is essentially treated as nothing more than a glorified prison warden who has been corrupted by his own power. Throughout the Gospels, Satan’s “kingdom” is never considered to be a burning underworld full of the tormented dead, but, rather, is equated with the bondage of sin and the curses brought upon humanity for acts of unrighteousness. According to Jesus (Matthew 12:29; Mark 3:27; Luke 11:21–22), a “strong man” (Satan) must be bound in order to plunder his house for treasures (humans), and it is clear he viewed his ministry and that of his disciples within this context. All other references to Satan in the New Testament, including those in Revelation, reflect this struggle for spiritual freedom.
Over the course of several centuries of influence from many different cultures, the defeated Accuser of the Christians would go on to appropriate aspects of various divine enemies (Typhon, Hades, Ahriman, Hela, to name but a few) to become the complex mythological monster that was thrown out of heaven at the beginning of time to rule the fiery underworld and torment the souls of the damned. Such a character makes for great movies and Halloween costumes, but would have been virtually unknown to anyone in Biblical times.

Happy Sunday everyone.

I had a real epiphany this morning reading through a portion of Mark’s Gospel. It comes from Mark Chapter 4 and the Parable of the Sower.

Again he began to teach beside the sea. Such a very large crowd gathered around him that he got into a boat on the sea and sat there, while the whole crowd was beside the sea on the land. He began to teach them many things in parables, and in his teaching he said to them: “Listen! A sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seed fell on the path, and the birds came and ate it up. Other seed fell on rocky ground, where it did not have much soil, and it sprang up quickly, since it had no depth of soil. And when the sun rose, it was scorched; and since it had no root, it withered away. Other seed fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked it, and it yielded no grain. Other seed fell into good soil and brought forth grain, growing up and increasing and yielding thirty and sixty and a hundredfold.” And he said, “Let anyone with ears to hear listen!”

When he was alone, those who were around him along with the twelve asked him about the parables. And he said to them, “To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside, everything comes in parables; in order that

‘they may indeed look, but not precieve, and may indeed listen and not understand; so that they may not turn again and be forgiven’

And he said to them, “Do you not understand this parable? Then how will you understand all the parables? The sower sows the word. These are the ones on the path where the word is sown: when they hear, Satan immediately comes and takes away the word that is sown in them. And these are the ones sown on rocky ground: when they hear the word, they immediately receive it with joy. But they have no root, and endure only for a while; then, when trouble or persecution arises on account of the word, immediately they fall away. And others are those sown among the thorns: these are the ones who hear the word, but the cares of the world, and the lure of wealth, and the desire for other things come in and choke the word, and it yields nothing. And these are the ones sown on the good soil: they hear the word and accept it and bear fruit, thirty and sixty and a hundredfold.”

He said to them, “Is a lamp brought in to be put under the bushel basket, or under the bed, and not on the lampstand? For there is nothing hidden, except to be disclosed; nor is anything secret, except to come to light. Let anyone with ears to hear listen!” And he said to them, “Pay attention to what you hear; the measure you give will be the measure you get, and still more will be given you. For to those who have, more will be given; and from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.”

He also said, “The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how. The earth produces of itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head. But when the grain is ripe, at once he goes in with his sickle, because the harvest has come.”

He also said, “With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable will we use for it? It is like a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.”

With many such parables he spoke the word to them, as they were able to hear it; he did not speak to them except in parables, but he explained everything in private to his disciples.

Mark 4:1-34

All my life I have been conditioned to read this passage unconcsiously from a deterministic point of view. If God is the sower this means that God is deliberately sowing these seeds in places that bring about specific outcomes of faith (or lack of it) according to His elective purposes. After all, the above passage seems to indicate that those on the inside are given the knowledge of their salvation while those on the outside are deliberately kept from knowing this salvation. Which for me always seemed to shift the emphasis of this parable towards the fact that there is only one good option on this “lottery” list, should I be lucky enough to be one of the seeds sown on the rich soil. That doesn’t seem like great odds.

I don’t think I had ever realized I was reading it from a deterministic direction until I realized how it is that I interepret this whole section as a proclamation of my salvation in one direction or another. How I read it in line with the phrase “nothing that is hidden except to be revealed”, inferring this to mean that in Jesus the good seed and the bad seed will be made known according to the will of the Father, which istelf occurs according to God’s deliberate opening or hardening of hearts, a phrase that surfaces in Mark 6:52 as a proclamation (Jesus Walking on the Water) and in Mark 8:17 as a question referencing their failure to understand the purpose of the feeding of the 5,000 and the 4,000. Your hearts are hardened followed by, “are your hearts hardened”, or better put, “are your hearts still hardened”.

The irony of this being that while deterministic views tend to emerge from a Tradition that desires to deemphasize a works based righteousness, to be the good seed in the Parable of the Sower remains a works based prospect in this deterministic mindset- “hear” the word, “accept” the word, and bear fruit thiry and sixty and hundredfold. A good Calvinist reading, for example, would say that this fruit is the sign of the spirit’s work within you which lets you know that you have been elected to faith. You are the seed God determined to be planted on good soil, therefore trust in the truth, this given knowledge, that you will hear the word, accept it and bear fruit thirty and sixty and hundredfold. How many times have I been told by this perspective that “one just knows” if they are saved or not, or that the simple “desire” to know indicates our election, our being the good seed. And if you don’t, well, that then is God’s will for you. God is the one who sowed the seed where it couldn’t grow after all.

And then I encountered this in Mary Healy’s pastoral commentary on Mark. She writes from a Catholic perspective.

“The explanation of the parable of the sower would have resonated with Mark’s audience as a powerful word of encouragment… It can lead the participants, and indeed all of us, to reflect on the dangers in our lives that threaten the fruitfulness of the word. What kind of soil am I? (And) What obstances are there, and how will I overcome them?”

Mary Healy (The Gospel of Mark)

I read this and I thought, why have I never read this passage as an encouragement before? Why have I never considered this parable as an actual invitation to participation in God’s Kingdom work, as seems to be pertinant for Mark’s Gospel? It’s becuase I have been taught to read it from a deterministic lens. Caught between that feeling of chosenness and not being chosen, and thus forced to interpret the work of Christ as necessarily distinguishing between insiders and outsiders as a matter of God’s choosing one over the life of another in whatever that great mystery becomes. Recognizing this allowed the whole section of Mark 1-6 to open up for me in a whole new way.

All 6 chapters are designed according to this shared trajectory that is made clear in the paired stories of the feeding of the 5,000 and the 4,000. The raising of the 12 (divided tribes) in line with the 7 loaves/fish (new creation) as the revealing of the Kingdom of God being established here on earth for the sake of the whole world, not just this the good seed. This culiminates in chapter 8 with this pattern that emerges from the story of John the Baptist, where John’s ministry foreshadows Jesus’ ministry and where John’s death foreshadows Jesus death. As the call arrives, “if anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospels will save it” (8:34-35), what we find is a call towards reponse and repentance, a change in direction, a decision to follow in the way Jesus is heading and actually participate in this Kingdom work. What emerges from this is that the seed being sown is not different seed, rather is it is the nature of the soil that is different.

What is being revealed in this is not an arbitrary affirmation of my peronal salvation, but rather the proclamation that the Kingdom of God has been made manifest through the death and resurrection of Jesus, who arrived in line with the prophetic ministry and in light of this new creation story that is now unfolding. The good soil is the truth of who Jesus is and the Kingdom He proclaims, and the call to be aware of the soil we are tilling is wrapped up in te call to “follow” Jesus in the way He is headed. This brings to light the phrase in 4:24 where it says, “with the measure you use, it will be measured to you, and still more will be added to you.” How clear is this call towards willfull and open participation in this Kingdom building. This is a new beginning, not some arbitrary proclamation of a pre-determined end. This is about something bigger than simply resting in the security of our personal salvation. It is about what the death and resurrection of Jesus accomplishes and what this new reality is now. What it brings forth in our present reality. This is the hidden mystery being made known through this “Kingdom” based parable.

We are not determined by where God has sown us, but rather the sowing unfolds as a call to participate in the unfolding of this Kingdom according to the kind of soil that will bear the fruit of this Kingdom imagination, this new reality. And we participate in this as Kingdom builders by responding to the challenges that keep this seed from growing in Christ. If we are not rooted in the soil of Jesus’ ministry, this love bearing, sacrifical ministry, victory claiming ministry, the fruit of this participation cannot grow. What bears fruit is the ministry of Christ, and thus we are called to imitate this ministry in our lives by participating in this ministry and allowing it to be made known in our lives. The only thing determined in this equation is the truth that Jesus has arrived and that Jesus has established this new creation in our midst. The truth that Jesus embodies, the knowledge of this mystery being unveiled through the Cross and Resurrection.

Consider this from Mary Healy’s commentary regarding this idea of insiders and outsiders found in 4: 12

Unsure of the meaning of the parable, they ask Jesus to explain. In reply, he draws a contrast between his disciples, to whom the mystery of the kingdom has been granted, and those outside, to whom everything comes in parables. This pronouncement is one of the most difficult in the Gospel. Taken at face value it sounds as if Jesus has deliberately excluded some people from the kingdom by cloaking his words in mystery to avoid being understood. How are we to interpret this cryptic statement? The key lies in understanding “mystery,” a word that is used only here in the Gospels (see Matt 13:11; Luke 8:10), but often in the teaching of St. Paul.

Mary Healy (The Gospel of Mark)

Healy goes on to describe this mystery as God’s plans which are rooted in the story of the Hebrew scriptures. God’s plan for creation, and God’s bringing about something new in the new creation, out of the muck and mire of a Sin soaked world. She goes on to say,

They are a mystery not because God wants them unknown, but because they become known only by revelation… God’s hidden purposes are not a puzzle to be figured out, nor can they be grasped by any human intellectual methods. Like the secrets of any person’s heart, they can be known only if one freely chooses to disclose them. That is why Jesus says elsewhere that his gospel is “hidden from the wise and the learned” but “revealed to little children” (Matt 11:25; Luke 10:21). Jesus is calling his disciples to recognize that they have been granted an immense privilege (see Matt 13:17): to them the mystery of the kingdom, present in the person and teaching of Jesus, has been unveiled. The parable of the sower has prepared them to understand the mystery that he will later teach explicitly: his kingdom will be established in a hidden and unexpected way—not through a triumphant conquest, but by way of suffering, setbacks, and seeming failure. It is a mystery that will culminate in the cross.

Mary Healy (The Gospel of Mark)

Constrasting this with this notion of “outsiders”, she goes on to say,

But what about those outside? Jesus describes their predicament with a quotation from Isaiah (Isa 6:9-10).32 In the context of the passage, God forewarns Isaiah that he would be called to preach judgment to Israel at a time when the people were mired in sin and injustice, and so his message would meet with stubborn resistance. The forceful language does not mean that God himself will block the people’s ears and eyes. Rather, the prophet’s message will cause the people to blind and deafen themselves to avoid hearing it, in order to persist in their rebellion. Jesus, likewise, is addressing a wayward generation, many of whom will harden themselves to avoid grasping the implications of his words. His parables, by their hidden depths veiled in simplicity, will cause a separation by the response they evoke in listeners’ hearts. For those who ponder the parables with sincere openness, the mystery of the kingdom will be gradually unveiled. But for those who prefer to persist in their own rebellious ways, the parables will remain opaque: so that they may look and see but not perceive, and hear and listen but not understand. Their obstinacy hinders them from attaining the goal of all Jesus’ teaching: that they be converted and be forgiven. The tone of Jesus’ words expresses a longing in the heart of God, as if God were saying: “If only you would listen, my people!” (see Deut 30:10; Ps 81:13-14; Luke 19:42). Yet his pronouncement hints at a theme that Paul will later develop in great detail (Rom 9-11): even the hardening of part of Israel—the refusal of many Jews to accept the gospel—is within God’s plan and will in the end contribute to the full and glorious accomplishment of his mysterious purposes.”

Mary Healy

What’s signficant about the way she unfolds this notion of the hardening of hearts is that this bears itself out as a persistant opportunity to make good out of the messiness of our reality. This is what follows in the Genesis nature when we are said to till the ground against all manners of things that can keep fruit from growing. Thus when Jesus follows up the parable of the sower with the parable of the “growing seed”, the inference is placed on the establishing and growing of this Kingdom, not simply my personal salvation. As we participate in this kingdom work, the promise is that the spirit meets us and works within us bringing about the fruitfulness of this marriage, this relationship between God, Humanity and the new creation. As the dominant theme of the Genesis narrative reemerges, we are reminded that we, all of us, not simply some chosen remnant or elect, were created in the image of God to be image bearers. The picture is one that sees the whole cosmos as God’s temple, and us as the idols placed at its center, the last thing normally placed in ancient temples to literally imagine, in a very real sense, God’s dwelling within that temple. When Jesus is said to be the new temple, what this is saying that we are all now placed in Jesus who occupies the entire cosmos, and we are placed as His image bearers. That is how it is when we wake up and look at the seed sprouting and growing and say “we know not how”. We only know that Jesus has been revealed, and that in Him, God’s very dwelling place, the new creation is being brought to fruition. And in some mysterious way our participation in this new creation work bears fruit. This is the context for the raising of the 12, the symbolic bringing together of the divided tribes for the sake of the whole world, God’s Kingdom domain. God could have done this without our help, without our participation. The great truth found in the mystery of the Cross is that God invites our participation. He is using us to bring about the Kingdom in the truth of a crucified and raised Christ.

How much richer is this vision than the deterministic view which has hampered my reading of this passage for so many years. A vision for this passage that has whittled it down to my election, my personal salvation instead of this picture of the Kingdom come in the whole of the cosmos, God actually taking residence in our midst and amongst the created order by way of this relationally driven and relationally concerned spirit driven call to participation. A participation that has a cosmological perspective. A participation that has the whole world in mind. The chosen few called to be a light to the whole world, not the world being remade for a chosen few. That’s why the parable of the sower can be read as an encouragement. How exciting this becomes when these options aren’t simply the luck of a lottery draw, but an actual picture of this move towards participation in the hope of the spirits involvement in our lives and in all of creation, looking to bring about something new in our willing participation for the sake of the whole world.

As a side note, this also makes so much sense read in line with Mark 1, where Jesus implores the leper of 1:40-45 not to tell anyone of his healing, only to have him go and tell everyone and literally redirect Jesus’ projected path. Literally interrupting Jesus’ ministry and forcing Jesus to have to readjust that path, to take another road. Read this through a deterministic lens and you come to “the hardened hearts” inference twice mentioned and once again bearing out the same problem. God is directing all of this, pulling the strings all so that a select elect few will be saved. That to me feels like such a narrow and sad view of this Kingdom work. Once we see these passages not in line with some future sanctification but rather in line with what is being accomplished in the death and Resurrection of Christ and this New Creation reality, it unfolds as a clear call towards allegiance to this new reality. Get in on the work God is doing in and through His created order and then trust that it will bear fruit. This is what faith is all about. This notion of a determined and progressive sanctification is built around a works based theology that sees salvation as a matter of achieving some kind of moral perfection. The declaration becomes salvation through faith with sanctification bearing this out to completion with God’s judgment of a world full of bad seed. This is a wrong view of sanctification. Rather, sanctification in the OT, according to the book Already Sanctified, is the active preparation for entering into God’s work. It is tied to the act of repentance, this turning and looking and moving in a different direction than we once were. This exchanges a focus on morality for the work of Christ, the belief that in Christ something has happened in the here and now to change and transform our reality. The Powers have been defeated, the new creation has begun. As John’s Gospel projects, to borrow from the words of theologican N.T. Wright, this is a new “Genesis”. “In the beginning was the Word” John says, with his entire Gospel pulling from this imagery to imagine this text in the light of Christ’s ministry. This is the truth that Christ proclaims and that his ministry both anticipates and brings about. Thus, just as the call in the garden was to “create”, to “make”, the call in the new creation, full of all of this same garden imagery, is to create, to make. To willfully participate in what God is doing. And we do so in the image of the Creator.

It is no misstep that the first thing Jesus does is hand this Kingdom work over to us, which is risky business indeed. This is an outflow of God’s love for His Creation. Seems to me like there could have been a more direct way towards this end if not for the desire to be in relationship with His Creation. This is the way in which God desires to bring about this new reality, a working partnership between us and the spirit that dwells within us transforming this reality in the truth of this new creation vision, and in this we come to know the truth of who Jesus is and what Jesus is doing, which as we read in Mark’s Gospel is really the whole point of this insider/outsider language. It’s written into the pattern of the text, the Markean “sandwich” if you will, with these stories packaged together in parallel fashion, each section commenting on the other. The wondering of Herod in knowing who this Jesus is in chapter 6 paralleled with the declaration of Peter of Jesus as the Christ in chapter 8. The death of John paralleled with the death of Jesus, just as John’s ministry of repentance leads to the call to follow in the way of Jesus’ ministry by bearing one’s own cross. Ths new creation, this new Kingdom reality will come about, even if this partnership with us means a few detours along the way. And we can know this precisely because in Jesus, who arrives according to the scriptures and in the ministry of the prophets, has indeed brought it about despite the exile that has scattered them and us as a divided people. As all four Gospels imagine, the New Exodus has happened and as we make our way through the desert we can trust that this is bringing about a new reality, raising up a people to unify the world. Through the 12 the nations will be united for the sake of God’s love reaching out through all the world, through the whole cosmos. Out of His great love for the world God has given a way for the spirit to be present in relationship to the whole of this creation, and that way is Jesus. And when this truth comes to us as revealed knowledge? When this truth arrives at our feet as an eye opening revelation? It arrives as an invitation to participate in the mystery of this Kingdom work, to be God’s image bearers with the spirit made alive in each of us, the planted seed able to grow in abundance and love and fruitfulness as we watch this participation grow into something special, something that has in mind the whole world. So heed the words of Jesus as he brings this question to all of us,

And becoming aware of it, Jesus said to them, “Why are you talking about having no bread? Do you still not perceive or understand? Are your hearts hardened? Do you have eyes, and fail to see? Do you have ears, and fail to hear? And do you not remember? When I broke the five loaves for the five thousand, how many baskets full of broken pieces did you collect?” They said to him, “Twelve.” “And the seven for the four thousand, how many baskets full of broken pieces did you collect?” And they said to him, “Seven.” Then he said to them, “Do you not yet understand?”

Mark 8:17-21

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I decided to pen this blog post not necessarily to expand on the tough subject of God’s “Impassibility”, but to document some of what I have been encountering lately and offer some of my own reflections on why I find discussions like this to be more frustrating than helpful.

Why am I specifically concerned with impassibility right now? This is a term that I spent so little time on in Seminary, and yet over and over it seems to come up in public discourse, especially when it comes to (often heated, sometimes hostile) disagreement between different factions of Christianity. For an idea I spent so little time on in my personal theological education, it certainly bears much weight for many when understanding and approaching the idea of the Gospel.

The term came to light for me recently when I noticed some on the heavily Reformed side of the equation reading books on the impassibility of God. It seems to be reemerging as a hot topic of the day seemingly for those on both sides of the fence.

Some books that I have seen people reading: God is Impassible Impassioned: Toward a Theology of Divine Emotion by Rob Lister; God Without Passions by Sam Renihan; Confessing the Impassible God: The Biblical, Classical, & Confessional Doctrine of Divine Impassibility. impassibility; Divine Impassibility: Four Views of God’s Emotions and Suffering; Confessing the Impassible God: The Biblical, Classical, and Confessional Doctrine of Divine Impassibility by Ronald Baines.

I also found this list of resources: https://headhearthand.org/blog/2016/02/10/the-impassibility-of-god/

Another reason why impassibility has been on my mind lately is because of the crap storm (to put it mildly) theologian N.T. Wright has recieved over an article he wrote for Time magazine back in March regarding a Christian response to the pandemic. I was unware of the controversy until I came across someone citing it on a random post. If you just google the words Wright, Time Magazine, and Impassibility you will encounter an endless list of articles taking the article to task and offering up a defence of God’s impassibility

You can find Wright’s article here: https://time.com/5808495/coronavirus-christianity/

And some notable responses here: https://www.reformandamin.org/articles1/2020/4/1/nt-wright-is-wrong-christianity-offers-answers-and-hope-amidst-the-coronavirus-pandemic https://theconfessingmillennial.com/2020/04/04/is-wright-right-in-what-he-writes-the-undying-love-of-an-impassible-god/ https://ca.thegospelcoalition.org/columns/detrinitate/only-the-impassible-god-can-help-us-now/

While the above articles will give you a fair overview of the arguments for God’s impassibility along with their concerns for Wright’s article which they believe challenges or ignores God’s impassibility, it’s worth noting that much of the debate (not on Wright’s side, but on the side of those dialoging about the article) essentially boils down to two sides claiming the other is misunderstanding their central position. In case one might be tempted to pull for an amicable and balanced middle ground, it is worth noting that the issues push much further than this. For many this is about faithfulness to scripture, history, and the Gospel, with both sides of the discussion claiming that their view more faithfully represents all three. Trust me when I say to even attempt to reconcile this disparity will frustrate and evade even the smartest among us, because utlimately this isn’t about rationalist dialogue but conviction. And what underlies that conviction is much subtext and predetermined assumptions.

Let’s use the debate over Wright’s article as an example. For most of the detractors, the issues boil down to three statements:

“Supposing real human wisdom doesn’t mean being able to string together some dodgy speculations and say, “So that’s all right then?” What if, after all, there are moments such as T. S. Eliot recognized in the early 1940s, when the only advice is to wait without hope, because we’d be hoping for the wrong thing?”

Wright

“Rationalists (including Christian rationalists) want explanations; Romantics (including Christian romantics) want to be given a sigh of relief. But perhaps what we need more than either is to recover the biblical tradition of lament. Lament is what happens when people ask, “Why?” and don’t get an answer. It’s where we get to when we move beyond our self-centered worry about our sins and failings and look more broadly at the suffering of the world.”

Wright

“The point of lament, woven thus into the fabric of the biblical tradition, is not just that it’s an outlet for our frustration, sorrow, loneliness and sheer inability to understand what is happening or why. The mystery of the biblical story is that God also laments. Some Christians like to think of God as above all that, knowing everything, in charge of everything, calm and unaffected by the troubles in his world. That’s not the picture we get in the Bible.”

Wright

As Strachan says in his article: https://www.reformandamin.org/articles1/2020/4/1/nt-wright-is-wrong-christianity-offers-answers-and-hope-amidst-the-coronavirus-pandemic

How striking that Wright speaks against both hope and rationality (in a biblical sense) in his essay. Truly, he ends up with neither; that is, we come away from his article neither gripped with the force of resurrection hope nor struck by the beauty of the true and defensible gospel of grace. Instead, we are left pondering that God laments evil and suffering, yet does so without fullness of knowledge or power.

Strachan

Or as the Confessing Millennial says in his article: https://theconfessingmillennial.com/2020/04/04/is-wright-right-in-what-he-writes-the-undying-love-of-an-impassible-god/

Impassibility” does not mean that God has no emotional life whatsoever, but that his emotions (or “affections”) are not like ours… The doctrine of impassibility has fallen on hard times in recent years, mostly because grassroots, pop-Christianity has a caricaturized understanding of it as making God to be a cold, distant, aloof Being, indifferent to the affairs of the world, like a robot or an automoton. But correctly understood, the doctrine of impassibility is one of the central foundations for our hope in Christ. As postmoderns, this goes against our instincts because we often want to “anthropomorphize” God. As philosophers since Voltaire (at least) have suggested tongue-in-cheek: if God has made us in his image, then human beings have been trying to return the favor ever since. But God chides through the psalmist, “You thought I was just like you…” (Psalms 50:21). God is not like us. We are like God, albeit imperfectly and in a broken manner. We were created in God’s image, not the other way around. Any anthropomorphism is always, by definition, analogical. God’s “emotions” are not like our emotions. His affections and inner life comports with his perfections. The doctrine of impassibility tells us that God is dependable, that he is a constant, and that his affections are not those that ebb and flow like the fickle emotions of humanity. Impassibility forms the basis and foundation for God’s dependable.

The Confesswing Millenial

And Wyatt Graham’s repsonse from the article: https://ca.thegospelcoalition.org/columns/detrinitate/only-the-impassible-god-can-help-us-now/

Bonhoeffer’s essential insight is that God suffers alongside us and so is passible. Yet historically Christians rarely taught such a view. Instead, they affirmed that God in Christ experienced suffering. He could do so not because he was divine but because he was human. The single person of Christ remained what he was (divine) and added to himself what he was not (human). Only in this specific sense, God in Christ suffered death, even death on a cross. Yet the incarnation of Jesus Christ does not change the nature of God! He does not become passible, or able to suffer in his divine nature. That would mean God entered into change and become something he was not. But God does not change. So the Logos became human (John 1:1, 14). He took on the form of a slave (Phil 2:7). And he did so while remaining fully and truly God….So it is natural to assume God experiences emotions like us, suffers like us… And during this age of pandemic that we live in, how comforting would it be to know that God knows how we feel? He is just like us, we sometimes assume. And yet almost no Christians before this century and the last would have spoken of God like this. Most would have felt it entirely improper and uncomforting to know that God suffers. Why might that be?

Wyatt Graham

Graham is responding to Wright’s statement that “God was grieved to his heart, Genesis declares, over the violent wickedness of his human creatures. He was devastated when his own bride, the people of Israel, turned away from him. And when God came back to his people in person—the story of Jesus is meaningless unless that’s what it’s about—he wept at the tomb of his friend. St. Paul speaks of the Holy Spirit “groaning” within us, as we ourselves groan within the pain of the whole creation. The ancient doctrine of the Trinity teaches us to recognize the One God in the tears of Jesus and the anguish of the Spirit.”

So to summarize, where Wright is saying we need a fresh sense of the mystery of God, a fresh understanding of our Christian hope, and a fresh reading of God’s relationship to suffering that resists the trappings of rationalist and enlightenment tendencies, opponents are pushing back saying we need a reclaiming and doubling down on the traditional sense of the mystery of God, the traditional proclomation of the Christian hope, and a response to suffering that rests on a rationalist defence of the true Gospel. And for these opponents the key seems to lie in reclaiming and upholding God’s impassibility. This mirrors the larger conversation that seems to be evident in this new found and re-invigored interest in this theological idea that some feel is under attack and others feel needs reform. While one side is saying that impassibility borrows from Greek ideas rather than scripture, the other side is saying that it uses Greek language to describe a specifically and uniquely Christian ideas. Both sides are accusing the other of ignoring scripture, history and Tradition, and both sides are accusing the other of working from wrong headed and sweeping generalizations along with invoking imporoper definitions of either impassibility or passibility. Does your head hurt yet?

One article that has been championed as a fair and concise representation for strident and strong proponants of a necessary theology of impassibility is this one from the The Gospel Coalition, which should be noted is a site that deals exclusively with Reformed Theology, often from the Calvinist perspective. https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/themelios/article/the-impassible-god-who-cried/

Impassibility is the idea that “God does not experience emotional changes either from within or effected by his relationship to creation”. While on the surface this working definition might seem to lead to a picture of God who is cold, calculated, emotionally distant and removed from creation, propronents of impassibiity as a necessary theology will maintain that this is a misunderstanding of the term. To think in such terms is to apply human definitions and human emotions to what are divinely given and demonstrated attributes, and God is by nature wholly (and Holy) other. What is most important in this theological stream of thought is for the Creator-Created distinction to be upheld, especially when it comes to speaking about the incarnation. If we lose sight of this we lose our Christian hope, for it is precisely because of God’s unchanging nature that we can hope in the first place. Therefore for God to become human is not for God to suffer and thus change in nature, but for God to take human suffering, which is caused by human sinfulness and/or God’s necessary judgment of human sinfulness, and give it a redemptive purpose. As Wesley Hill puts it in his article, https://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2015/01/the-impassible-god-of-the-bible,
this is the very point of what it means for God to enter into human suffering as one who cannot suffer and who does not change:

The reason the pagans could not conceive of anything like the incarnation is that their gods are part of the world, and the union of any two natures in the world is bound to be, in some way, unnatural, because of the otherness that lets one thing be itself only by not being the other. But the Christian God is not a part of the world and is not a ‘kind’ of being at all. Therefore the incarnation is not meaningless or impossible or destructive.

Put positively, because the Christian God is radically transcendent (which “impassibility” gestures toward), therefore God can take human nature to himself without displacing it or destroying it. And because the transcendent God has taken human nature to himself, the suffering which God undergoes in that nature is redemptive, rather than simply passive victimhood and solidarity with us. Because it is God who suffers in Christ, that suffering is not simply the suffering a fellow-sufferer who understands but is instead the suffering of One who is able to end all suffering by overcoming it in resurrection and ascension and immortality. Paradoxically, perhaps, it is only by affirming impassibility that we can maintain the deepest soteriological import of the suffering God takes on himself in and through the Incarnation.

Wesley Hill

In short, if God was not unchangeable, God could not be in full control, thus stripping Christianity of its hopeful proclamation. For God to be in control it requires God to be above Creation and wholly (and Holy) other. God is not simply loving, God is love. Thus this requires that God cannot be moved or swayed by human limitation and human experiences of suffering, the mark of created and fallen order. Thus when we approach the problem if suffering we must see it in terms of God’s accomodation of this distinct human fallenness and human depravity. We must see the revelation of God making itself known through the limited nature and language of the human experience as an unchanging reality freely given. As Wyatt Graham writes,

If God could suffer pains of the body, he would be no God; he would be a human. If God could get angry due to hunger, then he is a creature. If God’s mood changes on the basis of weather, hormones, or heat, then his love does not outpour upon us with constancy. If God could suffer the pains of loss, his love could be an act of protection to avoid loss. But God loves freely without any need to protect himself. He is open and never-closing. If God could lose what he has, what hope do you have that he could lose you? If God’s love changes, then can something come between you and God’s love for you in Christ Jesus? God did become human in Christ Jesus, and so he experienced everything that by nature divinity could not. But through this mysterious union of divinity and humanity, Christ’s divinity and humanity did not mix together to create a third thing. Christ’s two natures kept their integrity: he was fully God and fully man, not a mixture of the two. And so even in the incarnation, God considered in himself remains impassible. And what a glory that is because apart from the impassible God there is no ever-beneficent flow of Goodness. And when we enter into suffering, we need a God whose affections for us does not rely on his self-preservation or our response but solely on his good and loving nature. In difficult days like today, only the impassible God can help us

A couple thoughts from my own world of experience and struggle. And I note, these are not acadmically driven thoughts. They are personally driven. While I did not study the doctrine of impassibility in seminary, what is clear is that so much of my experience of Christianity and my own journey of faith interesects with it in very specific and important ways. I grew up unconsciously adopting a theology of impassibility even if I could not give it a name, while much of my subsequent and later struggle with Christianity stemmed from an unconscious rejection of it. While I love Jesus, theology and scripture, these discussions of God’s impassiblity strike me as less important than they are muddled, frustrated and divisive. They are an example of how theology itself can become an idol, a demonstration of our devotion to rationalist depictions, knowledge driven approaches and control. It becomes less a discussion of those existential wonderings regarding this working tension that exists between the human experience and the mystery of God, and fare more a demonstration of these knowledge based systems that lead to and inform our salvation. Maybe this sounds trite, but it seems to me the last thing someone needs in the midst of suffering and questions are complicated theological systems of thoughts that pretend to offer us the right answers to the tension. Which is why I for one apprciate Wright’s call to uphold the mystery of faith rather than rushing towards these kinds of theological systems, especially when these theological systems arrive with so much baggage in tow. Love and humility seem to be in right order when approaching the subject of suffering. Further, if both sides agree that we can appropriately speak of God as being present in our suffering, why do we need to color this language with our “yes buts” rather than simply being free to say that God is with us in our suffering. Or better yet, demonstrating that God is with us in our suffering by being there in the suffering of others.

As an avid reader of Wright and as someone who has been deeply affected by his work, I can bring my personal biases to the table here. When Wright speaks of the necessary mystery, the need to temper our devotion to ideologies and theological systems with the simple practice of sitting with things that don’t quite make sense, I am inclined to hear in that the wisdom of the Biblical writers and the great mystics of our Tradition. This has been a fruitful exercise that I have come to hold near and dear through the years as I have become free to wrestle with my own faith. And as I have given myself the freedom to actually wrestle with my own faith, I have come to fall more and more in love with Jesus. It’s strange how that works. When theology is no longer an idol I must worship but rather an invitation to enter into the mysteries of God and Creation something beautiful emerges in its place- Christ-likeness.

Towards this end, one of the most important ideas that I have been freed to explore through Wright’s work is a theology of Creation and the New Creation. Whenever I encounter staunch protectors of God’s impassibility I typically find that the story of creation takes a back seat to the story of the fall. We move quickly past the idea of humankind made in God’s image towards a declaration of humanities depravity, using this as the necessary differentiating between Creator and Creation. Wright has done a lot of work towards this end, speaking to what we lose when we move so quickly from creation to fallenness without the necessary picture of creation and new creation that Christ embodies and the Gospels proclaim. We lose the necessary context of humanity as God’s image bearers within creation and the imagery of creation as God’s temple. We end up with theologies that then demand these complicated solutions to the problem in order to deal with the gaps that end up existing within a good God and a fallen creation, often turning these theologies into heavy laden doctrines that read this Creator-Created distinctions primarily through the idea of total depravity and all that flows from this in terms of how this retains this distinction. And lest our systems of faith collapse in on themselves, we must uphold all of these theologies at all cost. We lose the ability to actually appreciate the imagery and the metaphors and the pictures that emerge within the larger story of God and His people as we find them in their mystery, their nuance, their tension, and their simplicity.

If one thing has become clear from reading all of this exhaustive debate surrounding the notion of God’s impassibility, it is that even those who hold up God’s impassibility as the “answer” to the problem of suffering and salvation aren’t actually offering anything different in terms of the solution. For both sides the answer is ultimately Jesus. The question is, where do our theologies begin to hide Jesus from our view and where do they raise Jesus more firmly into view. And as Wright puts it in his article for Time, this might be precisely where we need to give lament its due, so that we ensure our hope is not being placed in something other than Jesus and the story in which Jesus belongs. Because to rush towards the answers of our theological systems is to replace Jesus with our built theologies.

Another thing that has become clear to me is that while both sides of the impassibility question tend to blame the other for misappropriating the terms and missing the necessary nuance in favor of generalizations, in truth, any soft or nuanced forms of these ideas would be better off discarding the term altogether. There is no true middle ground available when it comes to subscribing to something like impassibility, only distinctions between those open to embracing the mystery of the faith and those who are not. For those who are not, theological systems lead to more theological systems until the whole thing becomes a systematic theology full of ideas that are inherantly dependent on the other. It no longer becomes about Jesus, but rather about any number of the theological ideas which, if removed from the equation will cause the whole system to come crashing down. And sadly, often this kind of theology has little to say to our real world context or to someone who actually needs to hear the message of the Gospel.

To come back to the conversation of God’s impassibility, one of my struggles is with the sheer brevity of theological ideas it requies in order to stay upright, many of which exist to answer that question, how does a good God allow or cause suffering, by upholding God’s divine obligation or right to operate according to a different kind of love as that to which we are called as God’s image bearers to emulate. And this usually is described in accordance with some form of divine justice. Maybe I’m just naïve, but it seems to me that I am to make sense of God in my life and at work in this world, the love which I am called to embody as an image bearer should be the same love embodied in the Creator. Many of the theological treaties that I encounter speaking about God’s freedom to embody a different kind of love sound smart and feel well argued and are largely colorful in appearance, but in truth, far more often than not I come away from these theological proclamations feeling anything but hope and freedom, typically because of the ways in which it removes this simple truth from the equation. It leaves me needing to answer the problem of suffering in the world, for example, with answers that say that somehow God is the author of our suffering. And this is precisely the kind of thing Wright is taking to task in his article for Time magazine. Rather than pertain to offer such answers to what is a deeply human struggle, better to point to Christ as the one who entered into our suffering with us, and to allow Christ to free us to enter into the suffering of others. This seems so clear to me when I read the Gospels, unmuddied by the brain fog of God’s impassability. This simple truth evades our needs to contextualize it into our theological systems. It just rings with a senes of fidelity to the Christian story and feels like it fits with the challenge and need of the human experience rather than lofty theological statements.

Here’s the truth. Those who hold to God’s impassibility largely do not believe that God is distant from Creation or devoid of emotion. Those who hold to God’s passibility largely do not believe that we cannot trust in the promise of God’s New Creation and that God’s charachter changes. Both are reductionist views of the opposing positions. At the same time, both sides do come to some necessary points regarding who God is and who God must be in order for their position to be distinguished. It’s important to recognize both of these aspects of the larger discussion. I have heard hard nosed Calvinists say that if Calvinism was not true they could not believe in God. Somehow they find comfort in the idea that God determines all things, good or evil. For me, I walked away from that kind of determinism because if that was true I could not believe in God. For me it did not bring hope, it brought the opposite. So how do we reconcile these two experiences? This is why I appreciate Wright’s article and his larger body of work. Wright would say we need to return to Jesus who came, died and rose again “according to the scriptures”. And what are the scriptures? It is the story of God and God’s people. A part of engaging the mystery of God then is thinking of these things in line with this story, a story that culminates in and is fully expressed in the Word made flesh. And what’s fascinating to me is how little these responses to Wright’s article take heed of the words he actually penned regarding this shift in focus from our own suffering to the suffering of the world. Where do we find this modeled for us? Precisely in the pereson and ministry of Christ Himself.

FILM

1. Two of my hands down favorite watches- Italy’s Martin Eden (2019), part love story between cynic and idealist, and part love letter to Italy, the film is an exploration of the relationship between art and meaning with an emphasis on given meaning from which we are then able to create the story of our lives and this world. Secondly, The White Ribbon (2009), a tough watch but also a powerful parable about the origins and roots of evil, with the story taking the time to onder about how it is that we arrive at a world where something like the Nazis and the Holocaust could arise.

2. 1974s quiet psychological horror The Conversation, featuring a young Gene Hackman in full form, tells the story of a surveillance detective, looking thematically at the ways in which we perceive things and the people around us, including ourslelves. Blurred lines between what is real and what is not function as a working tension throughout the story, digging deep into the nature of what our character does and what this says about who we are.

3. Finding Vivian Maier (2013)– A wonderful documentary about this woman photographer who’s life and work gets uncovered yeas after her death by an unsuspecting young man, who then decides to make a film about figuring out who she was and why she hid herself and her work from the world. This takes him on a journey to France, in which the story turns into something of a travelogue as well with a wonderful backdrop through which to discover Vivian Maier.

3. Journey Into Light (1951) is a film all about the deconstruction and reconstruction process of belief and faith in God. It’s an older film, but it’s still quite poignant and packs an emotional punch.

4. Blacanieves (2012) If you ever watched or read the story of Snow White and thought to yourself, I know what this can use. Matadors and bullfighting!!, then this is the film for you. It’s made in an esquisite black and white format which accents the richness of the fairy tale like story.

5. Please Stand By (2016)- I had been waiting FOREVER to see this film, and it finally became available and I fell for it big time. Tells the story of a young woman with autism who finds purpose in her writing and in the mythology of Star Trek. Part road trip film, part existential drama, and plenty of plain old human spirit.

Also caught up with the amazing One Night in Miami, Amazon’s Oscar hopeful, and I’ve been exploring Mubi for the first time this month from which I’ve watched some great titles. One that stands out is the deeply spiritual Beginning (2020), a foreign film that’s a mix of Malick and Italian neo-realism, and is a deeply contemplative exercise on the nature of forgiveness and redemption set amidst some startling images of tragedy, joy, sadness and life.

SERIES/TV

I’m not a big series guy, but I started the new season of Zoeys Extraordinary Playlist (so much fun), and I have been following along with HBOs 30 Coins, which has been a really great horror piece.Also happy to finally be getting back to the new MacGyver season. I know, a weird one to watch, but the payoff of a super niche storyline for those of us who stuck with it has been one of the few things my son and I have been able to watch and enjoy together. So it’s a cherished tradition and imo a lot of fun.

BOOKS

I’ve been immersed lately in reading about early Jewish life, tradition, and history, particularly the important points of transition from Israel to Second Temple Judaism to Rabbinic Judaism. Two books on the history of the Samaritans I found super enlightening, Samaritans: A Profile by Reinhard Pummer and The Samaritans: The Question of Jewish Identity by Juan Guiterrez. Learning about the Samaritans, a particular and diverse Jewish sect, offered a window not only to the story of Israel, but into Christianity. Both books challenged some of my perspective of what it means for Christianity to emerge as a sect of Second Temple Judaism.

I caught up with last year’s The Hidden Life of Addie La Rue, and it sparked some personal reflection. Has a lot to do with matters of life and death and what it means to live. Brings in themes of immortality and mortality, exploring some of the questions that emerge from these ideas in relationship to one another.

Finally got back into the Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children series with the fourth book, Map of Days. It’s different from the other 3, but it does a good job at taking what has so far been a more contained story and blowing it wide open. Sets the stage for the mythology to expand and grow.

I also read two unexpected finds. One satisfied a secret and unfilled passion for horses (my city bred blood ensured I never got to realize that in my life). It’s called Horse Crazy: The Story of a Woman and a World in Love with an Animal by Sarah Maslin Nir. I loved how it structured the story of her life by using the different horses she had encountered along her journey. And secondly, I read this book called The Survival of the Friendliest: Why We Love Insiders and Hate Outsiders, and How We Can Rediscover Our Common Humanity by Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods. It was an interesting process to read this in line with my Christian faith as so much of this book about reimagining the science and theories of humanities explosive emergence late on the scene reads like a Biblical type narrative. There is a point where the authors wonder about an answer to the problem of things like violence and racism and genocide, where humanities greatest strength (our unique ability to communicate and respond in cooperative relationship with one another) is also our greatest weakness (causes us to exclude outsiders at any cost). And I found myself shouting JESUS! Not in an evangelistic kind of sense, but in a revelatory sense. In the way of something clicking for me and challenging me personally.

MUSIC

Ani DiFrancos Revolutionary Love , Charlie Peacocks new release Skin and Wind, Josh Garrels new release Early Works Part 2, and new singles by Crowder, Foo Fighters and We The Kingdom have been occupying my playlistAnd why not throw in

PODCASTS

I’ve been eating up the recent series by The Bible Project called The Family of God. Reshaping my understanding of the Biblical narrative in some wonderful ways. In a Certain Kingdom is a podcast by a Russian, Eastern Orthodox guy who tells the story of a particular Russian fairytale and then offers insight on the fairy tales from the perspective of faith and philosophy. The episode called Sister Alionushka and Brother Ivanushka was a particularly profound episode about a couple of orphans who wander the wide world and encounter danger and evil.

Deep Talks: Exploring Theology and Meaning Making did an episode on Open Theism with a couple key figures from that movement or tradition (Greg Boyd being one of them) that I found super interesting. Always good to hear the range of approaches and perspectives when it comes to the field of theology, and it’s interesting to hear consider what key questions and challenges anc convictions are driving that movement, especially in how they read scripture and the Biblical story.

Two memorable episodes from On Script– the one on John Behr dialoging with Origen, and the one on Wil Gafney about Womanist Midrash. The Great Books did a rerelease of their AMAZING set of three episodes on the Lord of the Rings with professor and author Bradley Birzer. Incredible. And Travel With Rick Steves did an excellent episode on spiritual travel and on visiting Greek Mythology this month that I found very meaningful.