Canter Bridge

Jesus must have known his words would be overlaid upon the landscape of life like a template, checked for accuracy, doubted in anguished fashion, and celebrated when they seemed to describe the ironic intricacies of life more exactly than any others:

Peter began to say to him, ‘Look, we have left everything and followed you.’ Jesus said, ‘Truly I tell you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields, for my sake and for the sake of the good news, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this age—houses, brothers and sisters, mothers and children, and fields with persecutions—and in the age to come eternal life. But many who are first will be last, and the last will be first.’

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The gospel writers occasionally seem to have lost the thread of communication theory.

What end is served, for example, by quoting one of your story’s main figures in a language that your readers do not understand? Such an obfuscating move might be put down to the desire to impress, the practice of linguistic elitism. There, the ability to toss off a foreign phrase rather than a desire to communicate weighs heaviest in the writer’s mind. (more…)

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In a short career studded with the jaw-dropping actions we call miracles, Jesus’ most spectacular confrontation with the crowded spaces of the gospels’ spiritual geography goes under the title ‘the Gadarene demoniac’.

This was the fellow who wandered among the tombs, the ineffective chains of citizens’ arrest hanging from his body, cutting himself and crying out in a madman’s chaotic and irresolvable delirium. Every detail underscores that his life—if it can be described as such—takes place at the margins, in the netherworld of those who have been ejected from human society and will never return. To call this man a castoff is to underestimate the spiritual slavery that led to his ‘cutting off’—as the Pentateuch unceremoniously calls such a thing—from his people. (more…)

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In the gospel accounts of his life, Jesus’ authority over all things—an advised rather than careless description—becomes increasingly evident as his little cohort follows him around the land. The confidence that emerges in fits and starts runs a course that is at cross purposes with fear, its primary alternative. (more…)

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It might have been the sheer numbers of people who followed Jesus into the region of the Sea of Galilee that spooked the custodians of religious stability. On the one hand, it is not easy to fault them. Religious madmen and the gullibility of the throngs had caused considerable harm to the Jewish people’s destiny, encased as they were in Imperium’s airless wax. (more…)

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