Canter Bridge

It is easy for the man or woman who is easily impressed by the majesty of deity or nature to conclude that humankind is a footnote. Man seems a mere scratch on a mountainside, woman a murmured vowel in an epic cantata that celebrates greatness as largeness.

It is true that biblical poetry is capable of celebrating Leviathan’s immensity at humanity’s cost. Yet only mankind is glorious in a way that imitates its Maker. Only man and woman stride like gods—admittedly small ones—across the landscape. Only human beings are easily mistaken for their Creator in a manner that honors rather than belittles the Designer of this oddly self-reflective species.

The eighth psalm is an ode to the Ruler’s majesty. ‘How majestic is your name in all the earth!’, the speaker exudes God-ward in the opening and closing lines of the hymn. There is no mistaking who occupies center stage in this singing out of creation’s architecture. Continue Reading »

Those biblical psalms that begin plaintively nearly always end in confidence and intelligent resignation. A subtle but sure movement carries such prayers towards the closure of response.

‘To you I call, O Lord my Rock’, the writer of the twenty-eighth psalm tells his Creator, ‘Do not turn a deaf ear to me. For if you remain silent, I will be like those who have gone down to the pit.’

No theatrical poser, the pray-er spells out a life or death situation and the impotence that defines his inability to do anything but address Heaven. Yet, irresistibly, he is drawn towards what seems an antithetical or dubiously pious security.

The Lord is my strength and my shield; my heart trusts in him and I am helped. My heart leaps for joy and I will give thanks to him in song. Continue Reading »

‘He rushes at me like a warrior’, Job says of God.

In working up to this declaration of divine warfare against his broken life, Job is relentless regarding the plight of a man who once walked in friendship with God but has seen that amity turned inexplicably into violence:

He shattered me / He seized me by the neck and crushed me / He has made me his target / His archers surround me / Without pity he pierces my kidneys / And spills my gall on the ground / Again and again he bursts upon me. Continue Reading »

Who would have thought we’d end up just here, not six full years after September 11, 2001?

A flurry of recent conversations with individuals connected to the United States military have clarified for me just how deep is the divide between two nearly incompatible views. Faced with what our country’s forces are attempting to accomplish in the current crisis, we at home seem drawn irresistibly towards disengagement. Those in the line of fire quite often find this unthinkable and wonder how we got there while they were away fighting.

Network television routinely portrays as victims military families who feel that-far from victimhood-they have made noble choices and willingly bear the attendant sacrifices. Our media’s focus on casualty levels that—each number telling the terrible story of some family’s loss—bear no resemblance to the vastly higher toll of deep conflicts that have consumed our national efforts in the past. This disconnect is perceived by military men and women as missing the obvious point that military conflict kills human beings. Great efforts require such sacrifice, I hear military people saying, and not just the generals and colonels whose age and seniority might be suspected of distancing them from the emotional and physical disfigurement of those who do the bloody work. Continue Reading »

Job’s relentless honesty is all that he has.

All other assets have been lost to the crescendo of calamities that have come upon him as part of a cosmic drama that he will never understand. Job responds by cursing the days of his conception and birth, flinging at the unanswering skies his resentment of all powers that could have swallowed up that day and saved him the unceasing trouble into which he has fallen. Nothing he says is false. It is merely daring, as the speaking of truth so often is. Continue Reading »

It is possible for an ancient text to narrate community well-being and miraculous healing in one breath.

It is not so easy for us. Whether we are liberated or hamstrung by our naturalistic convictions is an open question.

The remarkable fact of today’s text is not so much that a profound sharing of life and resources coexists with the healing of a temple mendicant. It is rather that these events are presented as matters of the public record.

Peter and John, with nothing else to give to the man who lies at the gates of the temple in his daily quest for alms, heal the man and make alms unnecessary. The incident is not so much unique as representative. By the time we reach that public spectacle, the text has already alerted us to the face that ‘fear’ was in each one of the Jerusalemite followers of Jesus because ‘many signs and wonders were happening through the apostles’. Continue Reading »

Nehemiah’s memoir shows signs of paranoia. This is not unusual in women and men who undertake great tasks at formidable cost. It does not take preternatural focus and a grand project’s fatigue to create enemies, only to render them the principle fact on the ground.

Sanballat, Tobiah, and Geshem could no doubt speak as reasonable men. Their request, in fact, was to counsel together with Nehemiah. They were not strangers to the Jewish community. Indeed, they had their advocates on the inside.

Yet Nehemiah, probably correctly, perceived that they were at the core opponents of the restoration project to which he had bent his energies, to say nothing of the wellbeing of those enthusiasts, true believers, and fence-sitters who had climbed down to throw in their lot with him. The prospects that would follow upon failure were unattractive. Continue Reading »

It is perhaps not for us to judge Ezra’s decisions when his people’s survival was at stake.

To say this is immediately to risk the kind of biblicism that fails to reckon with narrative that is not fit for morality lessons or reduction to principles. A story like this exists because the events it describes actually happened in a people to whose clothing the smoke of extinction still clung. Such a people finds it impossible to regroup gently.

Their hope is that there is mercy in severity. If that mercy does not appear, they are worthy of disdain. Yet this does relieve us of the readerly duty to read sympathetically, even when this requires a hermeneutical discipline that is not native to us. Continue Reading »