Its interesting how paradigm shifting works can quickly begin to reframe everything around it. This is what happens when you exchange one lens for another.

In this case I’m thinking about Jason Staple’s monumental work Paul and the Resurrection of Israel: Jews, Former Gentiles, Israelites. In it he proposes a blind spot in common theological and academic discussions, specifically relating to how we understand the use of these three terms- Jew, Gentile, Israel- in the scriptures. As he posits, even the most ardent scholar looking to reform a history of problematic viewpoints regarding the relationship between Jew and Gentile, long pitted against one another as opposing factions, doesn’t go far enough, and the key to addressing the problem is found in understanding the distinctive uses of these terms rather than, as is common practice, conflating them or collapsing them into a uniform and generalizing descriptives.

To summarize his most important point:

• The term Jew refers to Judean, the surviving faction of an exiled Israel
• The term Israel refers to an idea, not a people. God creates this idea when he calls a people to be His image bearers to the world. It is this idea, when considered against the reality of exile, that is considered “dead”.
• The term Gentile refers to the surrounding nations in which the scattered tribes that embody this idea called Israel have found themselves subsumed into- the Gentile world. Hence why Israel is seen to be a “dead” idea, and why the reformed movement being led by the Pharisees of the suriving Judean people was seen to be integral to the covenant promise being realized.

Why does this matter? Because in common efforts to tackle the Jew-Gentile problem, there has long been a resistance to letting go of the assumed distinctions Jew-Gentile contain. When we come to the scriptures, the tendency is to read them as one long treaties regarding the resistance of the “Jews” and the eventual inclusion of the “Gentiles”. Its this paradigm that is the root of the problem. Instead, what scripture details is an internal discussion and an internal critique in which the promise for Israel is ultimately fulfilled. Rather than co-opting passages and turning them into how-to statements regarding individual salvation, the proper vantage point for seeing and hearing these texts in their world would be to see the context of Israel’s promised renewal- what this and how that happens in the face of exile and in a second temple period that saw Judea grappling with this preoblem and the questions it evokes.

An example of how this works in real time from Luke 14:1-24, a passage I was reading through this weekend.

The context of the passage:

• It’s the sabbath
• Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem (hence the death and resurrection are in Luke’s focus)
• Jesus has been invited to eat at the house of a prominent “Pharisee” (read: Judean)

As the text states, in front of them sits a sick man. As “they” (the Pharisee and his honored guests, the experts in the law) are watching Jesus closely, Jesus tests them on their understanding of the Law. In their undestanding of the Law, Jesus asks, is it appropriate to heal this sick man on the sabbath.

Silence from the table, as a yes or no would both equally leave them condemned.

In the silence, Jesus gets up and heals the man.

And then follows up with a story, fittingly, about a feast. As they are watching Jesus, Jesus has astutely picked up on how the guests have seated themselves at the table. As Mcknight puts it in his commentary

“In the first century one’s status was embodied by where one sat at a banquet, and this meal has the appearnace of an evening symposium with Jesus as the guest speaker. The higher one’s honor the closer one sat to the host; the lower one’s honor the farther one sat away from the host. A meal put people in their place by a recognized pecking order.”

So Jesus, understanding that the Law is best understood not as a set of rules that define God’s promised kingdom, but as the story that proclaims and invites participation in God’s promised kingdom, tells a story. A story about a wedding feast.

A first story in which he flips their pecking order upside down and inside out.

And a second story about a great banquet that flips the grand story of God’s making right what is wrong in the world upside down and inside out.

The first story is an invitation to those at the table with Jesus to reorient how they understand their participation in the expected arrival of God’s kingdom.

The second story is a condemnation or warning regarding their preseent positioning in light of God’s kingdom having arrived in their midst.

Now, back to the above point regarding seeing this through the lens of Staple’s suggested premise. A common reading of this passage is to read these stories as commenting on gentile inclusion in the kingdom of God over and against Jewish resistance to this inclusion. But step back and ask this question. Who is being invited? The poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind.

Now ask another question. If we assume this is about Gentile inclusion, how quickly would this lead to equating Jew with the oppressor and Gentile with the victim or the marginalized? Is this accurate? Is this helpful?

Now back up and look at the context once again. Sabbath. Jerusalem. Feasts. Banquets. Healing. All of these facets share one thing in common- they are marks of Jewish expectation, a Judean being faithful to the Law. They are marks of a Judean holding to the expectations of God’s promise to make right inthe world what is wrong.

So what were these expectations?

• A coming Messiah
• The arrival of God’s kingdom on earth marked by the renewal of Israel and the resurrection of all
• The ushering in of the new creation reality, or the new age

Expectations that had been recontextualized around Judea as a response to the problem of exile. A faithful Judean would have understood that “Israel”, as an idea, was dead. Exile meant death. Thus they saw their survival as the means by which God’s promises would be fulfilled through a resurrected idea. They were now the harbingers of this idea called Israel, hence the call to strident reform.

Another important point: this renewal of Israel was always seen to be the point in which salvation arrived for the sake of the world. It was always understood to be the point in which Gods kingdom would then spill out into all the nations.

Hence why reading this through that common Jew-Gentile paradigm does not make sense to the story itself. It fails to account for how the text would have been recieved and understood in its world by a Judean living in the second temple period.

Now, if instead we apply the lens of these distinctive terms acting in relationship to each other, what we find instead is a powerful portrait of God’s kingdom arriving in their midst and proclaiming the promised fulfillment. Only it arrives in an unexpected way.

As is typical to the parable, we expect to find the participants being represented in the story. The two stories are presented as contrasts, the first talking about a feast that they are throwing, the second applying the conceptual lens of the great banquet God is throwing, a motif that would have conjured up thoughts of the great promise. The one throwing the feast is Yahweh, the servant is Jesus, the ones who have been invited are the ones to whom Jesus has been sent (Judeans, or the representation of Israel). From which we get the invitation: “Come, for everything is now ready.” (14:17)

The response, the story imagines, is a series of excuses. The repeated refrain, “I have just…” therefore I cannot come. Leading the master to send the servant instead to the sick, the poor, the needy, the blind. This ultimatley culminating in the statement “not one of those who were invited will get a taste of my banquet.” (14:24)

When I set this all in proper context, within the world of second temple Judaism, how do I imagine these stories speaking to the prominant Pharisee and the experts in the Law which surround him? Do they imagine the story to be about the exclusion of Jews? Do they imagine the story to be about Jews being replaced by Gentiles? The only way such a conclusion could be upheld is if we misrepresent and misconstrue the terms, reading them out of context. This is not about individual salvation. It is not about persons getting in or getting out. It is not about God rejecting a Jewish world and embracing a Gentile one. It is about HOW the promise gets fulfilled.

As I understand it, the emphasis here is on how this promise gets fulfilled. Further, its about the shape of this kingdom. It is about the way it transforms or reorients the world.

For a faithful Judean, there was an intimate connection between Torah faithfulness and God’s promise coming to fruition. This was front and center because of the problem of exile. Thus the question becomes two-fold. How can we know God is true to His name? Through God’s promise being fulfilled. But as the prophetic ministry has underscored, being a part of this coming in to fruition hinges on the question of Israel’s particiipation. The long story of Israel is one of a people missing out as God contintues to move forward, with the tension of the story being, how can God fulfill the promise if Israel is left dead in exile. At the time of the second temple period, Judeans see their call to reform to  be integril to both.

This passage, then, does not mean the promise will go unfilled. Indeed, it is being fulfilled in their midst, that is the key proclamation. And it wasn’t about it happening at their expense. If the expectation was a true return from exile, the way this was going to happen was through the flow of the kingdom out to the nations. That’s the thing that is being flipped upside down. It is in this kingdom movement that an assimilated Israel gets resurrected, thus bringing about the new creation.

For the pharisee watching Jesus, the kingdom would come through their commitment to purity and faithfulness. In this the kingdom would flow out into the world making right what is wrong. Instead, Jesus begins with the Judeans they have marginalized in this process. This is in fact good news for the Pharisees. In fact, it is good news for the world.

“It is clear to what a degree the discovery- that is, the revelation- of a sacred space possesses existential value for religious man; for nothing can begin, nothing can be done, without a previous orientation- and any orientation implies aquiring a fixed point. It is for this reason that religious man has always sought to fix his abode at the “center of the world.” If the world is to be lived in, it must be founded- and no world can come to birth in the chaos of the homogenuity and relativity of profane space.”

“To whatever degree he may have desacralized the world, the man who has made his choice in favor of a profane life never succeeds in completely doing away with religious behavior… even the most desacralized existence still preserves traces of a religious valorization of the world.”

– The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion by Mircea Eliade

Eliade’s clasic and profound history of the nature of religion doesn’t claim to do this, but I think my most honest assessment would say that he has afforded me one of the most powerful arguments for not just the truth of religion, but of Christianity.

Eliade’s aim is essentially explore the premise that one cannot understand modern man without understanding those parts of him that are and remain deeply religious, even in a secularized, or what he terms “profane” world. This is as much a part of us as our material bodies- we are a religious species indebted to the history of our development.

There are two elements of this historical movement, the first being the modern West and its adherence to the Judeo-Christian Tradition. The second would be the backdrop from which the Judeo-Christian Tradition emerges (the broader primitive mythic state of the world), including the later developing Eastern religions. What’s fascinating about this is that every chapter ultimately ends up in the same place- at  the Judeo-Christian Tradition marking a specific kind of revelatory turn in the historical landscape. This becomes a common refrain throughout the book- the mythic world once had this shape, and then it was recontextuzlied through the Judeo-Christian Tradition. So much so that this becomes the measure for the shape of religious and world history.

Which is simply to say, What Eliade is picking up on is that the shared stories of our mythic history find their unifying shape in the specificity of a revelatory moment. One that has the power to make sense of all the world’s stories (to borrow from Tolkien).

What differentiates the Sacred from the Profane is that the Sacred is noted for its differentiation, whereas the Profane is noted for its homogenuity. Meaning, the sacred is built on the notion that reality is more than simply our observations of the profane. By its nature it finds something in the world, it speaks of spaces that are set apart from the profane, it pulls us towards mystery rather than mere explanation. The profane on the other hand, or the secularized world, is by its nature singular. Reality cannot be more than the same, material properties manifesting itself in different ways and capacities. Whatever it is that we find, it can be reduced to this singular plain.

There is another element at play here though, and that is the role of the Sacred in sanctifying the profane. This is why the mythic language begins, as Eliade points out, with a cosmological story before fleshing out its origins stories. The sacred assumes an orientation, a center from which all else flows. If this is, in the mythic world, things like ladders and trees and mountains, it eventually gets reconstituted in temples. The temples act as the space where the sacred and profane meet and communicte and interact. It is also what we do when we participate in these sacred spaces- we are reactualizing this center, this act of creation, in the profane. This is how the sacred flows out into the world.

“Every world is the work of the gods, for it was either created directly by the gods or was consecrated, hence cosmicized, by men ritually reactualizing the paradigmatic act of Creation.”

We know the true shape of the world by conforming it to its sacred shape. Or as Eliade writes, “The world becomes apprehensible as world, as cosmos, in the measure in which it reveals itself as a sacred world… Where the sacred manifests itself in space, the real unveils itself.”

The subsequent chapters of the book narrow in on the sacreds relationship to time, nature, and humanity. As Eliade suggests, Sacred time is “a primordial  mythical time made present”… and “by its very nature is reversible.” The past made present. On the other hand, for those who adhere to the profane, time is part of the material fabric of reality. It occupies the same thing as all matter and reality, and thus is devoid of mystery or break.

More profound is looking at the distinct way the Judeo-Christian narrative breathes into the story of sacred time this notion of historical time (profane time) being sanctified, or made sacred through the person and work of Jesus Christ. Here the whole of history becomes a theophany, to borrow from Hegel. And the implications of this is that time, in the Jewish sense, frames the familiar cyclical perspective within that which affords it a beginning and an end. It is in this way, that one succeeds in “living in the universal”, and in this way that experiencing the sacred becomes an experience of a continuous moments of eternity.

For me, this makes so much sense of the world I know, the world I experience and inhabit. This notion that we cannot create the sacred, we can only find it and discover it, was especially monumnental to me. We cannot fomulate these spaces, we can only happend upon them as we understand the profane to open the world up to its necessary mystery. As Eliade writes,

“Religious man’s profound nostalgia is to inhabit a divine world, is his desire that his house shall be like the house of the gods.

By which he means, this isn’t just part of a primitive and archaic past. Its a part of the true shape of reality, of this world. It is what shapes our desire, our longings, our restlessness. Even in a secularized, desacralized world, we intuitively know this to be true. The world is not singular, it is wanting. It is not without a center, it is shaped by a center that continues to flow outwards, informing the whole of history. to be without mystery is to be less than true, less than human- it is to be subsumed by the homogenous, the lifeless material shape of reality. To be informed by mystery is to have life, to be sacred and to live in the sacred spaces that define this worlds true nature.

In his book Light of the mind, Light of the World: illuminating Science Through Faith, Spencer Klaven examines the history of the modern scientfic enterprise through the lens of the mind-matter divide. He notes that science, used in this modernist sense, can only hand us a representation of reality, not Reality itself, and shows how the historical narrative betrays a long and winding road through the trappings of materialism back to where it ultimately must land- the relationship of the material (science) to the mind (knoweldge). To know the world, as he puts it, is to properly attend for the mind that observes it, the question of truth, or the nature of Reality, boiling down to that which the mind observes. To do away with the mind as matter, which is one of the sole aims of the modernist enterprise, leaves us marooned in time and space.

Perhaps most interesting to me, particularly because of the ways it overlaps with the history of film, another subject I’ve been immersed in as a I work through James Monaco’s monumental work How To Read a Film, is the ways in which Klaven sees light as the means of knowing. Light is what allows us to observe the world. Light illuminates Reality. And as Monaco has spent pages exploring, the most fundamental role of the filmmaker is to work with light. The fundamental question of the filmmaker is how much light do I let in so as to clarify the images that I want to show.

For Klaven, apart from the minds ability to observe an illuminated world, Reality cannot be fundamentally true and alive, let alone known. The mind gives shape to what is behind the material world, and it is precisely, then, in the mind that we can know the full shape of this Reality, not as benign mechanistic systems but as something geniunely true. Klaven brings in the essential function of this interpretive process- language. To name something is to validate its truthfulness. It is to name that which we observe and thus recognize the life behind the system. Similarly, Monaco’s own thesis has been underscoring film as language. As language it bears both form and interpretation, function and observation.

There’s a fascinating element of this discussion that he touches on in chapter four, which breaks the history of film down into three central parts: film, cinema, and movies.

• The “filmic” is the aspect of art that concerns its relationship with the world around it
• The cinematic (cinema) deals with the esthetics and internal structure of the art
• The movie deals with its function as an economic commodity

Or more succinctly: Movies as economics, film as politics, and cinema as esthetics

Here it is telling that cinema, or esthetics gets, by a large margin, the greatest attention and most amount of pages. Why? Because ultimately film is asking similar questions when it comes to how we perceive the and concieve the truth about Reality. In the inital pages concerning esthetics, Monaco compares the Lumiere Brothers with Geoge Melies, both standing at the precipice of the birth of cinema. For the Lumiere’s, their accomplishement was the simple creation of a immitated reality- bringing space and time to life on screen through a singular image (the train pulling into the station). Melies on the other hand, sought after the ability of film to “change” reality by way of utilizing its illusion.

And yet Monaco makes the point that what Melies does reflects the natural progression that would have necessarily come about, no matter who was behind the camera. This is because it is rooted in technology. Just as science is rooted in reducing reality to its material property, the function of film is the natural outflow of its constructed codes.

This matters to a discussion about eshtetics because the question of films truthfulness, or its ability to say and reveal something about Reality beyond the mechanics of its form, its technology, reaches beyond the the functional properties. It reaches beyond the utility of the technological tools. One can call what we get an illusion (Melies was, quite literally, a magician by trade), but the illusion remains the product of its mechanisitc properites. It is not trully alive. Equally so, one can call our experience of Reality an illusion in the same sense of its mechanistic functions, and yet the question still remains- how do we attend for the observer. To what end is the observent mind experiencing and thus knowing a truth which lies behind the technology, the utility? To what end is the the observant mind seeing and knowing that truth which lies behind material reality?

This gets even more fascinating to me as I consider Monaco’s observations regarding the parallels between the rise of a global culture and the development of film. Modern society is mirrored, and in many ways driven, by the presence of film, practically and symbolically. Just as we find the age of science attempting to deconstruct reality, or as Kraven suggests turn God into small gods (atoms) which we can then control and thus circumvent and supersede on the basis of our own human inventions (for example, Love gets reframed from a Deity into a matter of function, the product of atoms and chemicals we can reduce and master), we also find the age of the movie attempting to be deconstructed into its economics.

And yet, our experience of Love stays stubbornly resistant to such attempts.

Film, as cinema, or as esthetic- as  art, stays stubbornly resistant to such attempts to reduce it to its technological functions or the systems it produces. It is the art that continues to drive filmmakers, precisely because the primary role of film is to make sense of our experience of this world, not to keep us marooned on the level of its function and form. To mean something, we must observe it, and thus experience it.

In no small way then, to go back to that movie, film, cinema dichotomy, even in a world that Monaco describes as experiencing the death of cinema and film in favor of economics, even in an increasingly globalized world that is still wrestling with the reality of the dominating mechanics of the American industry that was so pervasive in the early oughts (the relationship between global industries and the Hollywood machine is a worthwhile discussion in its own right), the echos of film continue to reverberate with its cinematic presence. An artform that is tied to technology will have its inevitable and necessary advancements, but such innovations will remain empty apart from its relationship to light, to the observer. We got to the movies precisely because it is cinema.

As Klaven writes,

At this stage in our history, science and theology desperately need each other’ 

By this stage he means a modern landscape which has elevated the sceince of atoms to the level of a wholly explanatory system, leaving the world lifeless and void in its wake. The world, however, is not a machine. It is not the cruel and uncaring reality that the mind’s observation desires to contradict. Reality is that which we observe and experience. Similarly, the modern landscape has developed film into a mechanistic structure dependent on the machine that produces it. In Hollywood, even the greatest auteurs get subsumed by the system. And yet underneath this lies something more true. When film attends for the observer it becomes cinema- that which attends for the reality behind the structure.

I’m presently working through a book by Sarah Irving-Stonebraker called Priests of History: Stewarding the Past in an Ahistoric Age.

In it Irving-Stonebraker makes the case that that we (the modern West) are living in an “ahistorical age.” By ahistorical she means a time that is without a history and a time that is against history. As agents and holders of the myth of progress, history stands as the enemy which we, the very product of the enlightenment, have managed to unshackle ourselves from.

In a sense, history itself has been rewritten with the modern West as its necessary starting point, origins story and all. This is the world of our own creation, our own making, thus “history” as a concept becomes a redundancy. We no longer have need of it. We have arrived in the new world.

As I’ve been reading, my mind keeps wandering back to a book I read last year called The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins by Stefanos Geroulanos.

In it Geroulanos argues that our obsession with prehistory has led to much of the problems we find in the modern age. Just as Irving-Stonebaker suggests history has become the necessary scapegoat and villain for the modern age, Geroulanos suggests that an invented prehistory has been used to create villains and scapegoats in the modern age. In the first case, it our sense of superiority that has led to the neglect and demonizing of history, effectively finding ourselves standing above it. In the second case, the way we create these demons is by inventing a prehistory that allows us to justify the demonization. This prehistory gives us the necessary language to say that we, the modern West, have been the point all along. We evoke language like primitive and savage and lizard brain, none of which are rooted in actual truth but instead allow us to conceive of these lesser-greater/us versus them categories.

I find this juxtaposition fascinating. As I’ve been mulling over this basic idea, I revisited a previous post of mine in this space about the Jewish concept of the behind days. Ancient Israel, second temple Judaism, and Jewish practice, are anchored in this practice of looking or facing backwards. The future, in this posture, will be what it will be. Their task is to remember history. Thus, it is not as though they are not moving forward, rather its that memory of the past, of history, is always being recontextualized, precisely because this is what they are looking at as one lives in the present.

As an atheist academic, historian and teacher turned Christian, Irving-Stonebraker appeals to the Judeo-Christian narrative for her employment of this notion of priesthood. Just as we are preists of creation, we are equally called to be preists of history. This is the very defintion of ones belief in the priesthood of all believers. This means we tend to history. We keep it alive. We preserve it. We exist in relationship with and to it. We allow it to shape the perspective of our present context, not to keep us bound to history, but accountable to it,

Full disclosure- I don’t share complete theological persuasion with Irving-Stonebraker. There is a certain segment of Christianity, one that seems to be experiencing a kind of revival of sorts as a sort of neo-reformed conservative movement with a modern twist led by atheist conversions. It’s usually easy to pick up on some of the cues, be it words, langauge or ideas. There’s a bit of that on display here, although I will say she also veers more distinctly classical in this regard.

However, I don’t think that’s license to write her off, and I think much of what she has to say is very worthwhile and necessary to people across those dividing lines. I only say that because there is a tendency for the circles who will lay claim to this work, such as the main gatekeepers over at the gospel coalition, to use a very narrow view of history to justify their appeal to orthodoxy as classical, reformed theology. Which is precisely how they are using this book when I glanced at the review. It’s unfortunate, and I do think the foundation of her thesis can and should actually protect against this, but nevertheless it comes with the territory.

That said, my own journey through faith, from and away and back again, has been interesting for me to think about as well, given that I grew up in a demonination (pentecostal) that is often seen to be a very modern movement and expression that is all about newness and bucking tradition. Yet it is only now that I’ve become aware of its rich historical roots (along with my families historical roots) that reach much further back into a very real historical reality. Understanding that has helped me to understand where i was and what it was. It also gave me a much deeper appreciation for it, especially as it challenged some of my ignorance. I’ll save that for a future post

Likewise, a later part of my journey also found me shifting from a non-denominational setting without a history to a Tradition (Lutheran) I knew nothing about and had zero history with. Which was hugely formative for the years I spent as a pastor there. That taught me how a people might see their faith as necessarily rooted in history.

Even further, the denomination I presently reside in, and have now for the past 11 years (Evangelical Covenant Church), is one in which I also had no history with. Rather than learning from the outside looking in though, as I did necessarily with the Lutheran Church, this has been a practice of entering into that history and allowing it to become my own.

All of this has born fruit in its own ways, challenging some of that ahistorical mindset

With each new church season we (my church) work our way through one of the Gospels. We are presently in the Gospel of Luke. This morning we looked at the story of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37)

The great thing about this practice is that each new season brings with it a fresh context, thus a fresh set of eyes. One point in particular stood out for me this time around, as I had never looked at it this way before.

A common observation is to rightly point out that the initial question posed by the Jewish “laywer” (who is my neighbor) is thrown back at the lawyer in the end using a different framework and emphasis (which of these was a neighbor).

This shift in focus reflects two important aspects of the text that I think are relevant to its context. The first point, one brought up and underscored by my pastor, is this;

Compassion and mercy must be taken together

The lawyer, or technically “the expert in the Law”, answers Jesus’ question by stating that it is “the one who had mercy.” The root of the word mercy in the Greek (eleos), outlined in this article, shares a meaning with the word olive oil. Why does this matter? Because often mercy is used in a modernist sense in place of “justice” or “forgiveness”, two other words equally misconstrued through a strict application to modern court room or legal/penal concerns. Mercy, like forgiveness, is often understood to be the withholding of a consequence or penalty. But that’s not how the word is used in the Greco-Roman world. The cultural and customary use of olive oil can help us understand this. As the above article points out,

Olive oil was used to treat wounds. It was soothing, comforting, and healing. It speaks then to a merciful God who is all those things

Just as the word justice, which shares a root with the word righteousness, denotes the idea of something “being made right” or whole, the word mercy denotes the act of helping, healing, restoring towards this just or right end.

Further though, mercy contains the word compassion (Strongs defines it as to show mercy” or “to have compassion”), which is defined according to the image of “the stirring of the inward parts, literally the twisting of the intestines.”

A feeling or a conviction and an act. A posture and a movement anchored in making right what is wrong in the world.

Which brings me to the second thing that stood out for me;

The direction the Priest, Levite, and the Samaritan are traveling indicate what is being made right and how it is being made right

Scot McKnight states in his recent commentary on Luke that the initial question posed by the expert in the Law, noted by my pastor as an attempt to find a loophole in which to “justify” (make right) himself, doesn’t just indicate that he is looking for “who to help”, as though having this information signed on the dotted line would ensure him eternal life, it actually had more to do with justifying those whom he was excluding for the purpose of obtaining eternal life, properly understood as the fulfillment of the covenant promise, not being saved and going to heaven. The promise was for the restoration of Israel, through which the fullness of time (creations renewal) would be found.

To unpack this idea further:

Every parable Jesus tells puts his audience in the story, in this case a religious teacher of the Law. What’s interesting to note about the context of this parable is the first half of chapter 10, which is all about the appointing and sending out (the second of two sending chapters, following the sending of the 12 in chapter 9) to the surrounding area to “harvest the fields”. Here Jesus calls out Chorazin, Bethsaida, and Capernaum, God’s representative people (10:13-15).

So what does this have to do with the story of the good Samaritan? The hint is found in the direction of their travels. The man is “going down from Jerusalem”. The Priest is following “the same road.” The Levite “came to the same place”, indicating that each of these characters are facing the same direction- away from Jerusalem.

Now, here’s a point McKnight raises, citing scholar Ben Witherington. The text tells us that the man was not dead (vs 30). This is an important point because of how the purity laws worked. If they had been going to the temple (moving in the direction of Jerusalem), purity laws would have been a part of the discussion. Heading away from the temple meant that “defilement was not so serious.” Thus, as McKnight points out, the condemnation was not on the Law, as some often state, it was placed elsewhere- namely on the nature of the movement itself and what this movement was accomplishing.

What I mean by this basic point is this. The Gospels state that Jesus came to Judea first. As chapter 10 describes, the point of coming to Judea is so that this might flow out from Jerusalem into the world. But there is a further point about the nature of this movement that remains relevant to the discussion of this parable. As my pastor pointed out, the equation Jesus presents would have been anticipated to end with the following- a priest, a levite and Israel (Ezra 10:5; Nehemiah 11:3). This would have been the equation applied to the Jewish expectation, being held now by the only surviving tribe (Judah) from the period of exile. In a very real sense the idea of Israel was seen to be pronounced dead with the Diaspora. Thus what we find in Judah in the time of Jesus is a push for reform by the Pharisees. This reform includes the strict resistance to that which they see lying at the root of the exile (idolatry), and a further return to faithfulness regarding the Torah.

To summarize:

1. The priest and the levite formulate an expectation regarding the third – the restoration of the idea of Israel, which would mark a full return from exile.

2. Jesus throws it for a loop, replacing this oft cited equation with the Samaritan

3. These are the same Samaritans that had just rejected the proclamation of the kingdom and healing of the sick in Luke 9:1-2;53.

Now notice the parallel with 9:53 and the direction of the movement in chapter 10. “The (Samaritans) did not welcome him (Jesus) because he was heading for Jerusalem.” Contrasted with heading “down” from Jerusalem.

Notice a second parallel in 9:54- “When the disciples James and John saw this (the Samaritans rejection of Jesus), they asked, “Lord, do you want us to call fire down from heaven to destroy them.” Contrasted with chapter 10 where the judgment of fire is placed on Capernaum and mercy is being enacted by the Samaritan.

The movement to Jerusalem contrasted with the movement away, indicating that what the priest and levite, or the expert in the Law, have missed is the point of this movement- Jesus’ kingdom work, which is built on this call to mercy and justice.

As Jesus states in 10:13, “if the miracles that were performed in you had been performed in Tyre and Sidom (pagan cities), they would have repented long ago.” But you who have been given this knowledge of the kingdom, you still fail to see what it is all for- a kingdom for the world. A kingdom moving out into the world.

This is how the idea of Israel, the harbinger of God’s promise to restore creation, left dead in the Diaspora, gets restored. The expert in the Law asumed that the point was the necessary rejection and judgment of the world, not mercy. After all, idolatry led to exile, thus Judahs return hinged on its repentance (a return to Torah faithfulness). The question who is my neighbor is looking to justify the expert in the laws commitment to this present day reform- resist idolatry by condemning the world. Have I resisted the right thing, is the question. In doing so he misses the actual work of God- mercy for the world. This is, after all, where the story of Israel, their story, has been scattered and dissolved. The call to go and do likewise then is both the answer to the initial question and to the second. How will the promised restoration come about? Through participating in the Kingdom work that is moving out into the world, thus restoring the idea of Israel in the process,

I was genuinely taken captive by Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book Between The World and Me, read from the vantage point of being a white male living in Canada. Yes, I am certain Coates has his detractors and his disagreements- comes with the politicized territory. But I found him to be a poignant window into a world not my own, breathing a kind of poeticism into the conversation befitting one who understands the power of langauge and words. Written from a father to a son, the non-fiction narrative approach helps enliven ideas that might otherwise get lost in the ambiguity of theory.

I recently finished his follow up called The Message, which if it lacks the pointed bite of his prior commentary, also reaches and applies more broadly as the story of the son growing into a writer. It follows his travels through three distinct places- Africa, South Carolina, Palestine- showing us how he became aware of the power of language and the word. Of story.

I’ve been mulling over some of my highlights this week, beginning with this quote,

“When I think of my earliest days as a writer, what I recall is a kind of longing- I felt everything I wished to say, even if I didn’t exactly know it.” (P 129)

I’m not so presumptuous as to call myself a “writer”, but what stood out for me hearing these words is how much resonance it holds for any act of communication. The deep felt need to communicate what is in one’s head and ones heart and the frustration that comes from either not knowing how to or of such efforts failing to be heard and understood.

One of the biggest struggles in my life is the struggle with feeling misunderstood and without the ability to bridge that understanding with others. Coates writes of story and words playing the role of “haunting”, by which he means bringing to the surface a shared understanding of what is right and wrong about a given thing or moment or state or idea. When I think back on my earliest years, pen and paper was my way of having this same dialogue with myself, both about the world I was grappling with out there and my place in it.

Coates writes,

“There are dimensions in your words- rhythm, content, shape, feeling. And so too with the world outside.” (P 44)

The relationship between word and reality helps us shape the feelings that often are caught inbetween. We do not understand the world, or for that matter ourselves (or more so yet, our place in it), and yet words speak where we cannot. As Coates describes it,

“The accretion of imperfect, discomfiting life must be seen and felt so that the space in your mind, gray, automatic, and square, fills with angle, color, and curve… But the color is not just in the physical world you observe but in the unique interaction between that world and your consciousness- in your interpretation, your subjectivity, the things you notice in yourself.” (P 44)

What we experience as one who has been set in relationship to the world around us is the product of the complexities this very relationship creates. This is what we feel, the feelings themsleves birthed from what we experience and what we observe, and these feelings, these intuitions, are brought to life through the power of langauge, of the word. To speak a word, to write a word, is to release these feelings into the spaces and places they are attempting to wrestle with and define and make sense of. This becomes, then, the necessary act of interpretation, which always needs an interpreter.

Which is perhaps the reason why being misunderstood, or the failure to communicate be it through ones own inability or a failed process, is such a pervasive and oppressive truth shared by more people than I realized for most of my waking years.  As one Psychology Today article puts it, “One of the hardest burdens to bear is being misunderstood by other people.” It’s also one of the most common experiences we humans share. When we cannot communicate what’s on the inside, especially where it relates to others perceptions of us and what is necessary and important to us, and worse yet when these become perceptions that have the power to dictate and shape us in ways that run counter to what we feel, we (or I) no longer feel like I have any control or agency in these matters at all. I am what the world tells me I am and the world remains haunted by the things that haunt it, even as the words I put out into the world say otherwise and long for the opposite.

And yet, to believe in the power of the word is to believe that there is some external truth that is drawing them forwards and out of us, however it is that we communicate it. There is a reason they are being spoken and written, which is precisely why they are worth being pursued. And sometimes, as Coates puts it, the best reminder that this is true is immersing yourself in the stories, in the words, of others. We are all stories being told, after all. We all belong to a story.

“As a reader, I changed. I was no longer merely turning words over in my head or on my tongue- I was now turning over entire stories… as I turned the stories over in my mind, I could feel the revelations spinning out of them.” P (10)

It’s a reminder that we are all speaking words precisely because we feel, and the best revelations occur when we realize that we feel the same world, even if we see and experience it from different vantage points. Even more powerful when the words of another somehow become our own. This is what Coates offered to the many persons of color encountering his work, evidence in the many reviews and responses stating that he put into words a feeling that otherwise could not be spoken, and gave a new license and ability to speak this same word, and even a new word themselves.

Which means there’s something even more powerful at play in this picture- you never know when merely speaking your word might free someone else to feel understood and thus freed to speak.

One last note, perhaps needing to be relegated its own separate thought and thread- this is also why, I think, I have found such solace and healing in the Christian narrative. The notion of the Word being spoken into our midst as God’s act of solidarity or understanding with the human experience remains one of the most haunting and powerful revelations for my own journey. It shapes the God-human relationship into a narrative, into a story, through which we can both understand and be understood, and it breathes into us the invitation to speak our own word in response.

James Monaco, in his book How To Read A Film, connects the development of film to the science of brain function. On a technical level, to tell a story on film requires understanding how it is that we process images, and the art of film, of creating on-screen storytelling methods which imitate movement in time and space, utilizes technological tools to help shape this as a coherent experience. Much in the same way that our brains process information and formulate memory.

Consider how filmmakers decipher the relationship between scenes (continuous) and sequences (a broken up series of scenes). It is the relationship between these two essential  components of narrative form that allows a film to make sense of otherwise disparate moments, activities, ideas, encounters, ect.. This is in fact how we navigate each and every day of our lives. Our brains need to take the scenes that frame our experiences in time and space and arrange them together to formulate a coherent point of view or experience. Without this we could not function

Sequences themsleves, broken down into two categories, episodic and ordinary, also allow us to distinguish between function and interpretation. When a sequential narrative is formed and coherent, it frees us, again in the same way as processing memory, to distinguish between the scenes, and to narrow in on the specifics of each scene. Without that broad, narrative view as an interpretive lens the scenes would cease to be coherent.

Even the way film is designed, establishing the necessary frames per second to accord with how long an image stays in our memory, is working in tandem with the science of brain function. This is how and why a strip of film or the movement of digital images creates the illusion of seeing an unbroken image that contains movement in space and time.

Or consider the way film takes the rules of prose, dictated by punctuation, and plays that into a visual language. We may not always realize it, but our brains are constantly moving between flashback and the processing of fresh images. In a sense this is what film language would describe as the momtage- the act of mixing images and conjoining them at the same time. All of which requires an active use of punctuation in our day to day processing. Our brains break things down, compartmentalize, and form a narrative based on the metaphorical sentences that our experiences represent.

I also found this to be a really interesting insight to go along with that. Monaco notes that while it may seem counterintuitive, something like the hard cut (shifting from one image to another) correlates more with the way our brains actually function than the panning shot. The pan, in which the camera moves from one thing to another, is effectively dictating the narrative the Director wants to tell. It is guiding us to details we would normally just pass over in day to day function. We experience the hard cut, not the pan. This is equally true with things like the jump cut, where time has the appearance of being condensed by jumping us from one moment to another, eliminating the process of getting from point a to point b. This is an obvious editing tool designed to hold our attention and engage effective storytelling, but it’s the art of manipulating actual brain function that allows it to work.

Here’s another interesting point. Monaco notes a difference in langauge between America and Europe. In Europe montage, a key element of narrative filmmaking, means editing. In America editing is its own term. What’s the significance? Editing denotes the idea of cutting down, while montages “build up from the raw materials.” If the montage creates continuity by blending unrelated things into a shared narrative, building up then is the act of forming a narrative out of the foundation that is already there, a way of seeking to understand this foundation as the natural and necessary framework for the narrative itself. On the other hand, cutting down is the act of fitting reality into an external set of rules and perceptions that we coerce and manage and formulate apart from that foundation. It’s worth stating the model the montage is following is built on the more integrated understanding of the European approach. In terms of brain function, it is a ground up approach.

On codes- this is shared langauge that filmmakers can evoke, utilize, and manipulate. These codes apply to the rules of filmmaking, defining the technical asoects of visual storytelling in film. They also apply to what these aspects are utilizing in terms of that preexisting foundation. Syntagmas (narrative elements, chronological or not), are evoking images that have a shared language. Filmmakers understand that when viewers see a particular image they are also seeing particular ideas, sharing necessary reactions, making automatic connections. Because these codes don’t need to be established or explained, they can be manipulated in service of the narrative a filmmaker wants to establish and explore. These are the natural associations that form from our shared cultural context, which is also how our brains form our sense of identity and character.

Of course there is a relationship between the art on screen and the camera movement/placement a filmmaker is employing. It’s here where the complexities of our own pov and the artists pov come into relationship with the perspective of the camera. Much in the same way, we build relationships between our selves and the world around us, only here the camera becomes that additional element which can enable us to interpret reality through the art of imitation. This is what allows film to both direct our focus and exist in relationship to it, ultimately with an awareness of how the brain sees and interprets the world around us. It can follow (stay focused on a moving subject) or utilize Rack focus (shift our focus). It can match cut (link two disparate scenes by the repetition of an action or a form), it can edit (joining two shots and determining the length of each), it can engage deep focus or narrow focus, it can jump or pan. What is perhaps most powerful about this art form though is that it informs how we see and understand the world while simultaneously enabling us to see and understand the world

Some final thoughts on why I’ve been thinking about all of this over the past week:

1. Over the years I have become more and more indebted to narrative philosophy/theology (see Walter Fisher’s book Human Communication As Narration: Toward a Philosophy of Reason, Value and Action). Narrative philosophy is defined as “a theory that suggests that human beings are natural storytellers and that a good story is more convincing than a good argument.” (Wikipedia) Another definition states it as “a theory that suggests that human beings are natural storytellers and that a good story is more convincing than a good argument.” Narrative Theology is built on the same notion, using narrative approaches to bridge ancient and modern contexts by way of scripture and Tradition as story rather than doctrine. I have found this study of film as an artform to align with this philosophical approach to understanding reality, especially where it connects to how we know and how we experience it. Story is not only integral to how we interpret this reality, it’s integral to the way our brains process  reality as narrative.
2. Reality is more than what we observe and experience on a functional level. It has a foundation and an ontological shape, it requires the art of interpretation. It needs language. It’s experienced through the construction of codes. All of this invites another central conviction of mine: participationist philosophy/ theology, defined as a theory of knowledge that holds that meaning is enacted through the participation of the human mind with the world. All things known in and through relationship. The art of film is  expressly about the different components functioning in relationship. These different components are active. They participate in the establishing of the narrative, and through this the narrative can become known. Similarly we participate as viewers, engaging in the reading of a film so as to be informed and transformed by it. Taken together with narrative philosophy, these two things have a lot to say about what it means to be human.

“Film is difficult to explain because it is easy to understand… somewhere between lies the genius of film.” (P191

If film is distinguishable by its adherence to technology and technicalities, it is equally distinguishable by its esthetics. Understanding the technical dimensions (the science of film) can make us better readers of the films esthetics, or symbols (interpretation of meaning). In his book, How To Read A Film, James Monaco spends the first nearly 200 pages on the science before moving into the necessary function of interpretation.

As Monaco suggests, “much of films meaning comes not from what we see (or hear) but from what we don’t see.”  He goes on to describe this as the ongoing act of comparing what we see with what we don’t see. Here the practice of studying function and form become a foundation for asking what these signs are pointing towards. And for this we need symbol, or language. As Walter Percy so wonderfully expresses in his book The Message in the Bottle, signs and symbol are both integral to our ability to speak about this world, the world we observe and experience, with any sense of coherency. Science is but one way of knowing and gets us to a singular point- the basic constrcution of a film. For us to know what a film means we must ask what a film is saying.

Which of course means understanding the artists role and the role of the viewer. As Monaco noted earlier on, one of the outcomes of modernism and its indebtedness to a singular way of knowing (science) is the collapse of the art itself into the product of the viewers own making. There’s an irony to this, as the reason for this is the gradual deconstruction of arts sacredness along with the sacredness of the artist. Art becomes a mirror of societies true form of worship- progress, and thus it no longer mirrors the world it is imitating but remakes the world in its own image.

And yet, at its heart, beholden as it is to technology and as captive as it becomes to the modern project, film, has the power to bind us to something more eternal, and what sits behind this is the simple reality of how it is that we know anything at all

Signs will always need symbols.

“Very few films are strictly denotative; they can’t help but be connotative, for to speak film is partly to invent it.”  p 190

To speak is to invent. Invent what? Language.

Monaco bridges the line between the peculiar nature of film as a form without a language, and the fact that it functions LIKE a langauge. It simply cannot be broken down into parts that are able to speak on their own. The parts will always be compared with the whole, the same way language, or symbol, is appealing to something external to itself. The part stands for the whole or the whole for a part (p188), and in both cases remain interconnected in an appeal to knowledge, or to the act of knowing.

We learn to read the image to understand the image, as Monaco puts it.

Language analyzes. Or as Monaco insists, the real value of language, or symbol, is the wealth of meaning we can attach to it. Further, what’s unique about film is that it is a continuum of meaning. Which cannot be broken down and explained by the science of its construction. It is moving us towards something transcendent, something true about the sign, which includes a signifier and the signified, which the symbol is seeking to interpret.

There is yet another important facet of this, which connects to the difference between the page and the screen. Monaco notes that “The reader of a page invents the image, the reader of a film does not.” Yet he insists,  both… must work to interpret (sign and symbol). What does this mean? The langauge that we find in the written or spoken word is itself evoking the need to imagine the image the word is signifying. Words give meaning to that image we sense but cannot otherwise explain. Film by contrast is both word and invention. And yet the power is found in the simple fact that this becomes, in a sense, it’s own language, it’s own word that must be interpreted all the same. It would be a fallacy to state that the technology erases this need for interpretation, even if modernism has spent so long convincing us that this must be the case.

The same is true for our observation and experience of this world. If technological advancement mirrors scientific advancement, the temptation of modernism is to be convinced that we have arrived at the ultimate meaning and truth, when in fact we have simply arrived at an understanding of its function and form. We haven’t collapsed a once robust interest in knowledge of the whole into its parts, nor have we filled in what is often stated by some superficial readings to be the god of the gaps. Our world is much the same as it has always been- function and form that require language and interpretation to say something about it. To know something about it. Rather than having done away with the need for such an appeal to transcendence and meaning and truth, the real illusion is this idea that these things can either be reduced to function and form or created in its own image. Art, and film, remind us that such truth must exist in order to be appealed to. Signs and symbols must have that external force of presence for art to matter, and perhaps the most compelling evidence that it does is the simple fact that art, even when presently being consumed by the narrow confines of the modernist enterprise, still seems to matter.

Even further, it still seems necessary and essential to knowing anything about this world that it is analyzing at all.

In a recent episode of the Bema Podcast, host Marty Solomon references Brad Gray, discussing one of the distinguishing factors of the Judeo-Christian narrative. I mentioned in a previous post on this site that memory is a concept indebted to the Judeo-Christian Tradition, at least in the way it utilizes it as redemptive act and concept. Solomon notes how the Judeo-Christian tradition referred to the future as “the behind days”. Unlike pagan cultures (pagan being defined appropriately rather than polemic) which were obsessed with future and a forward facing posture, the Judeo-Christian Tradition taught and practiced a backwards facing posture. The future is unknown, the practice of faithful living is rooted in memory, or remembering. Therefore they “backed into the future”, precisely because they were always facing backwards.

I loved this concept. It’s written into the whole of the scriptures. It feels right to the posture of my own life living in a western society obsessed with the myth of progress.

It gained some weight reading through Lous Daniel’s How To Write Your Life Story.

The entire premise of this how to manual (more of a course than a book, as Daniel’s describes) is built on the notion that the author/professor firmly believes everyone should engage in this process, and second that it is built on the practice of building a memory bank. Memory is at the core of this process. More striking is the fact that Daniel’s has seen this process bear fruit in both young and old. It’s not something we do necessarily after we arrive in the future, it’s something we do as a valuable part of living our pasts into the future.

I’ve started this process. Thus far its been illuminating and fascinating- and I’m only at the part where I’m logging memory. The more I log, the more memory starts to take central focus in how I am seeing the present. In fact, this is one of the tips of formulating this into a story, is always connecting the past to the present. This allows us to see how we are formed by this practice of remembering, and likewise how it can be a part of our daily living in the now. 

He (Jesus) was teaching in their synagogues, and everyone praised him (Luke 4:15)

All the people in the synagogue were furious when they heard this (Luke 4:28)

Separated by a meager 13 verses, the fourth chapter of Luke’s Gospel details these polarized responses by the “people in the synagogue” in Galilee, Jesus’ hometown.

Which begs the question, what leads to the shift in posture? Why the change?

Picking up on some of the patterns embedded in this small section of text can help in parsing this out, beginning with 4:22:

All spoke well of him and were amazed

Directly preceding this we find Jesus stating “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” (4:21) What scripture? Jesus cites, in the traditional posture of a rabbi, Isaiah 61:1-2. What is this passage about?  It is about proclaiming the long awaited and long expected “year of the Lord’s favor.” The fullness of time. For any faithful Judean, the people occupying the synagogues, this would have been marked by the return from exile. Hence why stating that the time had come led to amazement.

But here’s the key to understand the shift: note what precedes the proclamation of the Lord’s favor

• Proclaim good news to the poor
• Proclaim freedom for the prisoners
• Proclaim recovery of sight for the blind
• Proclam liberation of the oppressed

Now look at how Jesus responds to the amazement. Sure, you’re amazed now, but I know how this story goes- the prophet is always rejected in their hometown. Remember Elijah (vs 25)? Instead of going to the widows in Israel he went to a widow in Zarapath. Remember Elisha? Instead of attending to leprosy in Israel he cleansed the Syrian.

Hence, your amazement is because you will want me to do here what I did in Capernaum, missing who I am and what it is I came to do- the scripture is fulfilled (Israel’s renewal) in the outflow of the spirit, not in its containment. This is the great paradox Jesus represents. It’s like Paul states in Romans 9-12. The outflow to the Gentiles is good news for Israel, and the salvation of Israel (the outcome of this outflow) is good news for the Gentiles. It is in the outflow that “all Israel shall be saved”, and it is in the salvation of Israel that we find this salvation (good news) flowing out into the whole of the world.

There’s a familiarity to the response we get from the people in the synagogue. They are furious. So angry in fact they want to throw him off a cliff. Any amazement they had is now gone. And where does Jesus go? To capernaum. Luke underscores the irony by contrasting the people of the synagogue (who is this, isn’t this the son of Joseph) with the demons (I know who you are). The synagogue- are you going to leave us languishing? The demons- have you come to destroy us? 

Welcome to the life of the prophet.

Only here we come to perhaps the most important part. Jesus concludes this passage by stating,

I must proclaim the good news of the kingdom of God to the other towns also, because that is why I was sent

The good news

The fulfillment of the promise made with Israel for the sake of the world.

Here’s the thing about the Gospels being situated within the prophetic Tradition. Prophecies were always about immennce. It was about the thing sitting directly upon the horizon (the judgment of the surrounding nations bearing down on faithless Israel) and always set in contrast with God’s continued faithfulness. In Jesus, the imminence shifts to fulfillment. It is about “today.” It is about the person standing in their midst.

This is the good news, even if it doesn’t sound like good news to the Galileans watching this person heading in the direction of Capernaum to bring good news to the poor, freedom to the prisoners, sight to the blind, liberation to the oppressed. For any Judean seeing themselves as the sole survivors of exile and sole representative of this idea called Israel, this was deemed a condemnation of their faithfulness to the Torah. Jesus looking outwards was, in their minds, like speaking to a dead idea. The hope of the world started with them. In a sense this is true. Jesus’ resurrection would begin in Jerusalem with the arrival of the kingdom of God. But it is in the outflow that this dead idea called Israel would turn into good news for Judea.

In his commentary on Luke Scot McKnight calls this an act of holistic redemption. Everything being turned inside out.

This is our faith, that God has interrupted history from its middle in Jesus Christ, and we know the end from the middle because God has known the end from the beginning

This is the persistent witness of God’s faithfulness. This is the good news. What was imminent has become today. Which is precisely why we continue to look to the outflow. If we want to know who Jesus is and what Jesus did we look to what He continues to do all around us in the world. Good news for the world becomes good news for our own lives. This was always the point, that God’s glory (presence) would fill the earth and that in so doing Sin and Death itself, that enslaving agent that has creation in its grip, would be defeated.