A “new song” celebrates God’s deliverance from exile. Sometimes the song is the deliverance. Singing transforms experiences and changes perspectives.

Such is the case with Dante Alighieri’s (1265-1321) Divine Comedy.

Many of us came across at least part of the Comedy somewhere in school. Perhaps we’ve read the Inferno, where, in the chilling words of C. S. Lewis, God says to the sinner, “Thy will be done.” Perhaps we took a course that included the Purgatorio, where those whose sins have been covered and who are guaranteed a place in heaven experience cleansing from the pollution of their sins. Fewer of us, probably, have tasted of the Paradiso, where dance and song become more and more prominent as the soul rises to God.

The Origin

Less known is the fact that the Divine Comedy is itself a product of exile. For Dante, homelessness became a permanent feature “in the middle of his life.” At about age 35 and at the height of a promising calling as poet and politician, Dante experienced a dramatic and devastating reversal of fortune at the hands of political enemies. He then spent the last 20 or so years of his life — when he did most of the writing for the Divine Comedy — away from home, “knowing the salty taste of others’ bread” (bread in his native Florence was made without salt) and “going up and down stairs” as a guest in homes not his own.

Separated from his family, and with his career in ruins, Dante awakes “alone” (literally) “in a dark wood” (metaphorically). From this vantage point, he looks anew at himself, at the human condition, and at the Christian story.

He writes about an imagined meeting with two people. In the Inferno he comes across a fellow poet-statesman, Pier delle Vigne, who found himself — like Dante — betrayed and suddenly out of favor (Inf. XIII). This soul’s response was suicide. Delle Vigne gave up on living and sought grim satisfaction through his suicide against those who had wronged him.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
In the Paradiso, on the other hand, Dante meets his own great-great-grandfather, Cacciaguida (Par. XV-XVIII). Cacciaguida recounts pilgrimage to the Holy Land and his battles for truth as a Crusader. Then he forecasts in some detail his great-great-grandson’s exile, but promises that Dante’s fame will shine all the brighter “for having become a party of your own.” Cacciaguida challenges Dante to take advantage of his poetic gifts to become a pilgrim and crusader in his own right: to journey deeper into the Christian story and tell the truth about what’s wrong with us and with the church.

Chosen Journey

It was writing this extraordinary song of 14,000 lines that turned Dante’s exile into a pilgrimage. Dante sang his lament, and his forced exit from home became a chosen journey into the heart of God’s redeeming story. Not only that, but his personal loneliness drove him to realize that his true community was vast and personal, comprised of every soul for whom Christ died and who will attain resurrection life. And by writing his “new song” in the people’s Italian rather than the church’s Latin, Dante invites every one of us into his party.

Many of us have experienced exiles not unlike Dante’s. Not everybody who shows up on a Sunday morning has had a great week. Many are in marriages than make them feel they’d be less lonely single. Some will have heard from a boss that week, “We’re moving in a different direction…” Nearly all are acutely aware they are not the person they wish they were.

What can we offer? Well, we can make sure not to skirt the painful and difficult parts of the Bible’s story in worship. We can make sure the psalms of lament are read and sung. We can use art that tells the truth about the Christian life as journey. We can offer generous opportunity for the most basic of Christian prayers: “Lord, have mercy.”

Perhaps the most important thing we as worship leaders can offer is ourselves as “living epistles” of what it is to live in pilgrimage rather than exile. Perhaps there are artists or poets who draw profound emotions or deep thoughts from you, who point you to Christ’s suffering and glory and your place in them. “Alone and in a dark wood” not long ago myself, I found in Dante a soul-mate and a guide through the dark wood. Maybe he could be the same for you, or — perhaps you have your own song to write.

Occasionally, an ancient writer hits you with a jaw-droppingly fresh insight. The first theologian to discover the power of the idea of Jesus as God’s “New Song” was Clement of Alexandria in the early 200’s: “I have called Him a New Song.”

This is the promise He (Jesus) made to the Father: “I will declare your name to My brethren: in the midst of the congregation will I sing praises to You” (Heb 2:12).

Clement then asks Christ:

… to sing praises, and declare to me God Your Father. Your story will save, Your song will instruct me.

Clement ministered in a city that had been founded 500 years earlier by Alexander the Great as the portal for bringing Greek “reason” and “culture” to the “unenlightened” and “uncultured” East. In addition, Alexandria had long been home to a large number of Jews in permanent exile. Alexandria was the place where the Old Testament was translated into Greek. Alexandria was also the center of an intellectual approach to Judaism that had come close to reducing Israel’s story of redemption to a mere philosophy of moral improvement.

The genius of Clement lies in his ability to take an Old Testament motif of a New Song (see Isa 42:10; Ps 33:3) that is fulfilled in the New Testament (Rev 5:9; 14:3) and apply it creatively and redemptively in a non-Christian world that already had its own thoughts about music.

Magic of Music

Ancient Greece was fascinated with music, imagining the cosmos itself to reverberate to various musical modes. Personifying the magic of music was the Greek hero Orpheus. His music was supposed to have tamed beasts and moved inanimate objects. In classical Greece, great contests of song — of Olympian proportion — honored Orpheus’s memory. By the time of the emergence of Christianity, however, buffoons like Nero (who rigged musical contests to make himself the winner) made a mockery of this memory. Still, the games went on — an unending run of American Idol, despite a talent drain.

Everlasting New Song

There is a “harmony” to the universe, grants Clement in his extended tract Exhortation to the Greeks. But that “harmony” has nothing to do with speculation about musical modes, and everything to do with the “symphony” of being that has constituted the Trinity from eternity.

With the fatherly purpose of God … and by the power of the Holy Spirit, the Word of God arranged in harmonious order this great world, yes, and the little world of man too, body and soul together; and on this many-voiced instrument of the universe He (the Word of God) makes music to God.

This eternal “harmony” and “symphony” between Father, Word, and Spirit became concrete when the Word became a human being. Christ came to make us like himself and to draw us into the eternal relationship — the eternal “harmony” and “symphony” — that has always existed within the godhead.

Jesus the New Song

Thus, Clement proclaims: “Because the Word lately took a name — the name consecrated of old and worthy of power, the Christ, I have called him a New Song.” And while ancient Greeks mythologize and fantasize about a revered hero of the past taming beasts through song, Christians know a more powerful Singer:

He is the only one who ever tamed the most intractable of all wild beasts — human beings. For he tamed birds, that is, people who are flighty; reptiles, that is, those who are crafty; lions, that is, the passionate; swine, that is, those who are pleasure-loving; wolves, that is, the rapacious. … All these most savage beasts, … the heavenly song of itself transformed into gentle people. …

See how mighty is the New Song! It has made … humans out of wild beasts. They who were otherwise dead, who had no share in the real and true life, revived when they heard the song.

Those who awake to God’s song of redemption

will dance with angels around the unbegotten and only imperishable and only true God, the Word of God joining us in our hymn of praise.

What an amazing thought! Clement compellingly contextualized biblical imagery to speak to a culture of disbelief at the beginning of the 3rd century. May we at the beginning of the 3rd millennium be as faithfully creative. Because the story Jesus tells still saves, and the song He sings still instructs.

As the credits roll in the movie I Am Legend, Bob Marley sings:

Won’t you help to sing
These songs of freedom?
‘Cause all I ever have:
Redemption songs,
Redemption songs,
Redemption songs.

An artful choice. Marley’s reggae music provides the movie’s central character, Robert Neville (played by Will Smith) a slender line of hope. He’s reluctant to believe that in his post-apocalyptic world there’s a God with a plan, reluctant to believe even that any other non-zombie humans exist. Marley’s voice from a healthier world helps him fend off despair.

Many of us know what it is to feel cut off — to have no sense that there’s a master plan. The driver from hell nearly runs you off the road. Cash flow is negative. A relationship unravels. Evil reigns in the world, good is thwarted at every turn. And you go: “Am I left alone?”

Will Smith had Bob Marley’s reggae. I have the book of Psalms — and I have them in the ancient church’s plainsong.

Echoed Cries

The Psalms invite me to tell God’s people’s story as my own:

• The betrayals of David, then of my Redeemer, and now, to my astonishment, of me — I find I share — I mean really share — by virtue of taking David’s and Jesus’ words as my very own: “Even my best friend, the one I trusted, … has turned against me” (Ps 41:9 NLT).

• Warnings made to others become warnings I send to my own unbelieving heart: “… they did not wait for His counsel” (Ps 106:13).

• Promises made to others, I take for myself — “Taste and see that the Lord is good” (Ps 34:8).

• Wisdom aimed at people three millennia ago I sing as though I had discovered it myself: “… I almost lost my footing … For I envied the proud” (Ps 73:2a,3a).

The power lies not just in the Psalms’ words, though. It lies also in their music. “He who reads the Torah without chant, of him can it be said as it is written, ‘the laws that I gave you were not good,’” says the Mishnah’s Rabbi Johanan. How much more true of the psalms. Ancient Israel chanted the psalms. The ancient church chanted them as well. “A soul rightly ordered by chanting the sacred words forgets its own afflictions and contemplates with joy the things of Christ alone,” maintained Athanasius of Alexandria in the 4th century.

Fact is, when truth becomes song, you know it at a deeper level.

Spanning Time

This past Advent, I began chanting psalms in my daily devotions. I’m doing so using the eight ancient plainsong chant tones that have their origins in the Gregorian musical revolution of the middle of the 1st millennium, as recovered and restored in the late 19th century. James Litton has adapted them for church and individual singing in his handsome volume, The Plainsong Psalter (Church Publishing Inc., 1988; ISBN: 978-0809691627 — hardback, quarto-sized, $40).

A couple of friends on the other side of the country have bonded with me in an arrangement of spirit. We’re simply following the course laid out in the Daily Office in the Book of Common Prayer (which serves as the text base for The Plainsong Psalter). It takes seven weeks to chant through the psalms, a pace of about three psalms per day. It’s a tempo that works for me.

The great thing about chant is that you don’t have to force the text into an artificial meter. Chanting allows the text to take its own meter and rhythm. In a given line, singers stay on a chanting tone all the way up to the last note (or two or three) of a phrase.

Indigenously Christian

The plainsong music is lovely. Tone 1 is the basis for the tune most of us know as “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross.” And if you’ve admired Allegri’s Miserere, you’ll recognize Tone 2 to be the cantor’s melody.

In the early hours of the morning I enjoy the fellowship across 1500 years or so with folks who have shared these psalms in similar fashion. I love the bold aspiration of the original Gregorians: to create a music that all believers could sing and that was trying to be indigenously Christian, but that was in positive dialogue with the best music theory of its day.

In this world that is beyond crazy I enjoy having my “soul rightly ordered” as I sing redemption songs, plainsong-style.

With the 1st of May, comes  a new issue of Worship Leader Magazine, for whom I’ve been a columnist since the first of the year. The lead article this issue happens to be mine, a meditation on the Holy Spirit’s role in worship. To read the whole article, of course, you have to subscribe. But here’s the Introduction, Headings (with summaries), and the Conclusion:

One minute the puppy was playing on the side of the street. The next, he darted into traffic. That was it. I saw him spin off a passing car’s wheel and collapse in a lump at the side of the road. A police officer happened by and stopped to see if he could help. I expected him to feel for a heartbeat. Instead, he took off his sunglasses and held them to the puppy’s nose.

“No breath,” he said to me, “he’s gone. Poor guy.”

Worship Leaders and the Spirit — Leading worship is the privilege it is because it amounts to cooperating with the life-giving Holy Spirit.

The One Worship Leader and the Spirit — Jesus cleanses the Temple as a sign that his sacrifice will end sacrifices, and as a sign that He is going to build a new building, one made of us.

The Spirit in John’s Gospel — Jesus’ sayings and conversations in John’s gospel give us a glimpse into the vision that animated Jesus that day he cleansed the Temple.

The Holy Spirit and Worship — What characterizes Spirit-led worship? Are there marks of the breath of the Spirit?

The Spirit Creates Life — G. K. Chesterton suggests that the only way to explain the fact that the church hasn’t died over time as one cultural, political, or philosophical support after another has fallen away, is that there is a Presence in the church that won’t go away. If Arianism, Gnosticism, Pelagianism, imperial patronage, humanism, scientism, modernism, and postmodernism can’t make the Holy Spirit go away, I probably can’t either.

The Spirit Makes One out of Many — Unity is not difficult to sustain when everyone shares the same preferences – musical tastes, “age and stage” affinity, theological nuance, Myers-Briggs profiles. When there’s unity despite differing penchants, a unity that is born out of heroic forbearance and costly deference, it seems more likely that it is the Spirit who is at work.

The Spirit Exalts Others — A fundamental characteristic of the Holy Spirit is that he does not call attention to himself: “He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you,” said Jesus (John 14:16).

Breathe in. Breathe out.

Of course, there’s so much more to say about the Spirit and worship — about the mission, about the gifts, about uniting old and new. But for now, this will have to suffice: not unlike that lifeless puppy I saw on the side of the road, we were dead to intimacy with our Maker, and dead to the way our relationships with one another were to mirror the eternal communion within the Trinity — until the Son came, died, rose, and breathed the breath of God into us.

As a worship leader there’s probably nothing greater that I can contribute to worship than making sure that I keep breathing God’s breath myself. In the Word daily — breathe in. In prayer daily — breathe out. Confess “my stuff” — breathe in. Lift his name in praise and adoration — breathe out. Come to the Table — breathe in. Wish my neighbor Christ’s peace — breathe out. Ponder the wonder of his grace to me — breathe in. Find the lost, tell the story, feed the hungry — breathe out.

He who hung the earth is hanging.
He who fixed the heavens in place has been fixed in place.
He who laid the foundations of the universe has been laid on a tree.
The master has been profaned.
God has been murdered…

But He rose up from the dead
and mounted up to the heights of heaven.
When the Lord hath clothed Himself with humanity,
and had suffered for the sake of the sufferer,
and had been bound for the sake of the imprisoned,
and had been judged for the sake of the condemned,
and had been buried for the sake of the one who had been buried,
He rose up from the dead,
and cried with a loud voice,
“Who is it that contends with me?
Let him stand in opposition to me.
I set the condemned man free;
I gave the dead man life;
I raised up one who had been entombed.
Who is my opponent?
I am the Christ
I am the one who destroyed death,
and triumphed over the enemy,
and trampled Hades underfoot,
and bound the strong one,
and carried off humanity
to the heights of heaven.”
“It is I,” says the Christ.

This Easter finds me at the happy convergence of three memorable texts (my life’s story could pretty much be told in terms of what I read). The first is this one, Melito of Sardis’ (ca. A.D. 195) remarkable Easter sermon (I’ve extracted lines from near the end of the sermon) — a text that Bob Webber often extolled for its so-called “Christus Victor” theme.

God is crucified so that humanity can rise, Melito practically sings. This death of God and resurrection of man is the means by which “the One who sits on the throne’ says, ‘I make all things new’” (Revelation 21:5). This “all things” is, well, “all things.” Praise be. Art is new. Science is new. As are gardening, cooking, playing, singing.

It was with Melito’s sermon dancing around in my brain that I serendipitously came upon this thought from sociologist Werner Stark:

The truths of religion can be much more easily and much less inadequately expressed in artistic than in linguistic terms — or better, in the language of art than in the language of science. St. Thomas Aquinas’s hymns are much more convincing, so far as live faith is concerned, than even his best arguments. … Max Weber coined a more remarkable phrase than he knew when he called himself on one occasion “religiously deaf.” But those who can hear will find, for instance, in Anton Bruckner’s Te Deum a statement of faith, which is not only supremely moving but also experientially satisfying and convincing. The rationalistic demotion of art to something ‘merely sentimental’ is not the least disservice which the discursive intellect has done to religion, and, indeed, to all humanity. The fact is and remains that the rationalist as such has no ear for the divine call (Werner Stark, Sociology of Religion, Vol IV [ Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969], p. 72).

The third text is complement to the second: R.R. Reno’s commendation in First Things (Mar. 27, 2009) of David Hart’s new book Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (Yale, 2009) — a book that is an attempt to get the “religiously deaf” to listen to their own folly. From Reno’s remarks I extract but this thought:

“The revolutions that genuinely alter human reality at the deepest levels,” Hart writes, “are those that first convert the minds and wills, that reshape the imagination and reorient desire, that overthrow tyrannies within the soul.” Christianity caused such a revolution, and it did so, Hart claims, with its fundamental claim about Christ: In him each one of us can join our humble humanity to the glory and holiness of God.

Honor, laud, and glory to our crucified and risen Christus Victor.

And fivefold thanks.

Thanks, first, for the utter graciousness by which Jesus came.

Thanks, second, for the loving faithfulness that brought Jesus back from death to life.

Thanks, third, for the Spirit’s kiss by which I find myself astonishingly not “religiously deaf.”

Thanks, fourth, for the host of gifted saints and fellow-travelers (from all times and all places) who have given us such stunning musical and artistic expressions of the glory of Holy Week’s story.

Thanks, fifth, for the fact that ours is a faith that satisfies the itch to compose hymns and that prompts us to make our best arguments as well.

TV doctor Gregory House is one of the most cleverly written characters going. You want to crown the boor with his own cane, then you see a flash of humanity and illumination. There’s more than meets the eye. The tiny hand of an unborn child grasps his finger during neonatal surgery (Season 3, “Fetal Position”). House’s eyes unmask him: his own aspirations for relationship mock his pretense at believing we are nothing more than parts that have somehow been randomly, if complicatedly, assembled. House will never admit it, but he doesn’t have to. You know he now knows what Dylan (and then Hendrix) knows:

There are many here among us
Who feel that life is but a joke
But you and I we’ve been through that
And this is not our fate

In John’s gospel Nicodemus also takes up a Dylanesque watchtower song. Liberal commentators treat Nicodemus, “a man of the Pharisees … a ruler of the Jews” (John 3:1) as a figment of the gospel writer’s imagination. Conservatives dismiss him as a dull blade (as if any of us would have been a fig more astute ourselves in theological dialogue with Jesus).

As to the former commentators: If the sun is still shining 2,000 years from now and my life receives brief mention in but one source, I hope, first, that the mention is true, second, that the mention likewise presents me as a platform for my Master Teacher’s voice, and third, that the mention is allowed its say. As to the latter commentators: true, Nicodemus slinks in at night; true, he shows himself no match for theological repartee with Jesus. But his glory lies in these facts: one, he shows up, and two, he knows enough to shut up. I hope I’m that wise.

My Alter Ego

Of all the characters Jesus comes across in John’s gospel, it’s Nicodemus with whom I think I most identify. He is the sum of some of my deepest fears: an Ausländer educated beyond his capacity to understand, and promoted to a prominence where his ignorance becomes painfully evident.

A Pharisee on the Sadducee-dominated Sanhedrin, Nicodemus is a minoritarian. His name is Greek, not Jewish (“Nicodemus” means “Victory of the People”), though we’re never told whether he was of pagan origin himself or simply bore the Seleucid oppressors’ version of the Hebrew name Naqdimon. Perhaps his name “Victory of the People” has a special bite. Not only does his party oppose its adveraries theologically (Pharisees affirm resurrection, Sadducces deny it), but Pharisees are non-aristocratic teachers “of the people,” while Sadducees are the aristocratic power-elite. If you will, his is a lonely Democratic voice in an assembly run by Republicans.

Nonetheless, Nicodemus has become, by means not disclosed to us, an “insider.” Jesus refers to him, in fact, as The preeminent Teacher of Israel (despite the translations, in the Greek there’s an emphatic definite article in front of the title “Teacher” in v. 10). One wonders if it is because of his undeniable strength as “The Teacher” that Sadducees have grudgingly made room for him on the Council. The fact that he comes to Jesus at night suggests he does not feel his “insider” status is secure.

Why do I relate to Nicodemus? Easy. As far as I have been able to ascertain, my mother and my father were the first in their respective families to go to college. My mother is from the Mississippi delta and her parents were sharecroppers. My dad’s parents were small farmers in East Tennessee. I sit around a faculty table at a theological seminary and go: “Who let me in? And when will they figure out what a hick I am?”

Nicodemus Shows Up

Something has happened in Jesus’s early “signs” to trigger Nicodemus’s sense that he doesn’t have everything figured out. What I love is that Nicodemus knows to whom to bring his ignorance. John surely expects us to assume that the “signs” that Nicodemus has come to ask about include the Turning of Water into Wine (John 2:1-11 = “the first sign”) and the Temple Cleansing (John 2:13-25 … “What sign do you show?”, Jesus is asked). Nicodemus isn’t a clever enough reader of Scripture to see in the Cana miracle the promise of God’s having saved his best wine for the age of the Spirit that is about to dawn (see Ezk 36:25-27). That is, until Jesus starts talking about being “born again/from above” (the Greek word anothen at John 3:3,7 is a double entendre). I’m not smart enough to figure that out either. Which, of course, is the point — otherwise we wouldn’t need the rebirth.

Nor does it look like Nicodemus is astute enough to see the hidden lesson in the Temple Cleansing. Jesus’s temporary interruption of daily sacrifice promises the coming “end of sin” (not to mention of Sadducean hegemony), when He offers the Temple’s Final Sacrifice (see Dan 9:25-27). Nicodemus, it follows, could hardly understand that Jesus’s act also signals his intent to inaugurate a building project: the raising up of a new Temple based on his own Body, once he’s given it for the sin of the world. Thus, Jesus’s discourse on the lifted serpent — another figure for his own Body. Not that any of us could have seen the pattern of prediction until the Fulfiller himself showed up. Which, of course, is again the point: he did show up. The little hand reached out from Mary’s womb, and the renewal of all things began.

But from the “signs” Nicodemus does know enough to know that something is afoot.  Jesus’s mystifying rejoinders to Nicodemus’s questions reveal to him that he does not understand a whit about things that (at least in Jesus’s estimation) should be obvious from the theology of the Hebrew Scriptures: there’s a death about us that requires a rebirth from above (3:3-8), a sickness about us that calls for the lifting up of a curse-bearer (3:10-14).

Nicodemus Shuts Up

But I love something even more than the fact that Nicodemus knows to whom to come. After his initial “but, … but’s …,” he shuts up and listens. Apparently, he realizes he is in the presence of the True Teacher of Israel.

It’s interesting the way the narrative in John 3 subtly shifts in verse 16. Either John reassumes his own explanatory voice, or he continues Jesus’s answer to Nicodemus in a way that leaves the confines of the conversation behind. Either way, John’s or Jesus’s “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son” thrusts Nicodemus’s nighttime foray into the bright daylight of God’s mission to reclaim his lost world.

Nicodemus has to go back into the dark place of his Sanhedrin colleagues’ murderous machinations against the Lord of light. In the face of their ultimately devilish scheme we hear him offer — and get shouted down for — a plea for simple procedural justice (John 7:50-51). What his posture is during the final trial we are not told. Mark puts “the whole council” of the leadership in cahoots (Mark 15:1) — perhaps Mark is being hyperbolic; perhaps known friends of Jesus were excluded from the proceedings. Regardless, I can only imagine how crushingly frustrating it must have been for Nicodemus to watch it unfold.

When last we see him, Nicodemus “the Teacher” offers his most elegant discourse, wordlessly carrying 100 pounds of spices for his Teacher’s burial.

Nicodemus also, who had at first come to him by night, came bringing a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about a hundred pound’s weight (John 19:39).

Mute as his tongue is, here Nicodemus is his most eloquent: however rebirth comes to us it must pass through this tomb; the path to Jesus’s being lifted up as a sign of God’s love for the world and as the One in whom Israel’s (and the world’s) core sickness can be healed must call for this entombment; if an end is ever to come to unjust accusations and hearings, they must all be absorbed in this most heinous of injustices, the death of the one truly innocent human being who ever lived.

That grave could not hold Jesus. Praise be, the spices were not necessary.

I’ve been trying to understand why I found the baby’s hand grasping House’s finger to be such a compelling picture of the Incarnation (see my post of 12/22/08). A little person reaches out, and a “what” that had seemed a safe abstraction to the cynical surgeon (a “fetus,” a “thing”) becomes a “who” with relational demands.

God himself came as just such a “who.”

A “what” is something I can control.

A “who” — I can’t.

And so I think it’s more comfortable, sometimes, to relate to a concept (“redemption”) or a thing (“the cross”) than to the person who reaches out from Mary’s womb. I can mine the doctrine of redemption for what it is I think I need from it: freedom from guilt, purchase from evil, hope for resurrection. Same for the cross. But the Person who redeemed, freed, purchased, and promises resurrection will not be reduced to those benefits.

I’m realizing I need to spend more time with Jesus, not just with truths (true as they are) about him. This Advent/Christmas season, I have been contemplating the Jesus whom John’s gospel portrays for us. Here is the Bible’s most exalted Christology: “… and the word was God.” Here is also the Bible’s earthiest: “… the word became flesh and dwelt among us.”

In this and a few posts to follow, I want to ponder the ways Jesus — God’s hand from Mary’s womb — takes hold of ours.

The word becomes flesh and grabs a seeker. When Jesus senses that Andrew and a friend are following him, he turns, and asks point-blank:

“What are you looking for?” (John 1:38).

What a profound question. What a probing question. Jesus wants to know our agenda, what aspirations we’re projecting onto him. Surely John the Baptist’s teaching about Jesus being “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” had prompted a myriad of questions for Andrew. So Jesus puts the question to the seeker, and the seeker has to decide whether it’s a “what” or a “who” that he is after.

Instead of pulling out a list, though, Andrew simply asks in return, “Rabbi, where are you staying?” In other words, “Well, I know I don’t know the answers to my questions. I know I need to know the One who does. So, I’m pretty much more interested in a relationship with you than in getting all the right answers.”

Time and again, I sense Jesus putting the same question to me: “Just what is it you are looking for in me?”, all the while waiting for me to set aside my “next topic for discussion.”

The word becomes flesh and grabs a non-seeker. Some of us are seekers. Some are not. Andrew is. Nathaniel is not — at least he’s not looking for anything from Jesus. “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” is his retort to claims that Jesus might be the Messiah. (Jesus and Nathaniel were from different towns in Galilee — who knows, maybe they went to rival yeshivot?) Reluctantly, though, Nathaniel agrees to go with his brother Philip to check things out.

Jesus seizes the initiative. And what an initiative it is: “Behold, an Israelite indeed, in whom there is no guile” (John 1:47). Nathaniel is surprised: “How do you know me?” Surely with the most generous laugh, Jesus responds: “Before Philip called you, when you were under the fig tree, I saw you” (John 1:48). OK, that’s pretty enigmatic. It has to mean something like: “Look, I know you’ve simply been trying to be a faithful Israelite — learning your Torah, saying your prayers, going to synagogue, giving alms. All that time, I’ve had my eye on you. Truth be known, from eternity I’ve been shaping you for me. I’ve been anticipating the day we’d meet and become friends.”

It’s enough for Nathaniel. Whether it’s what Jesus says or how he says it — regardless, the lights come on. Here’s God’s Son, he realizes, Israel’s King. Quite a leap, but just because Nathaniel has been living in as much of the light as has been available to him, he “gets it.” And Jesus promises (I paraphrase): “You figured all that out on the basis of how little I showed I already know about you? Just wait” (see John 1:50-51).

I’m struck, first, by how “from out of nowhere” it is that Jesus shows up in Nathaniel’s life, second, by how affirming Jesus’ expressed purposes are, and third by how much Nathaniel’s future has been prepared for simply by his staying “under the fig tree.”

One of the most unexpectedly encouraging conversations I ever had was with the pastor of the not-especially-evangelical church of my upbringing. When I returned home from college for Christmas after trusting Christ my freshman fall, my parents were stunned and disturbed by my “born again” experience, and they wanted their minister to straighten me out. The minister wisely said: “As you start this new life, make sure to take along with you everything good from the old. The God who created you is the same God who is recreating you — he doesn’t waste anything.”

I could recall hearing nothing about the need for personal faith from this church. Still, I had to admit to myself, much of the basic biblical portrait of God had been instilled there. The Bible stories I had learned in Sunday school had given me an essential trust in the Bible and an inchoate sense of the biblical storyline.

When Jesus showed up to make me new, he had already, so it appeared, put in place at least some of the building material. I learned to be grateful for the “fig tree” under which I had lived … and, of course, even more grateful for the One who already knew me there.

Seeking … or not seeking … it doesn’t seem to matter much to Jesus. Life in him, after all is “not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of a man, but of God” (John 1:13).

He just comes, grabs, and won’t let go.

Before I became a Christian, I believed that religion was a socially functional good whether it was true or not. I believed, with Eric Fromm, that religious myth takes the best of us and transfers it to “God.” We become better people, or at least aspire to be better people. But what we’re believing “in” is not necessarily true.

When I became a Christian, God crashed through all that. He is. Truth matters. We’re broken, and he had to fix us. As John’s gospel maintains:

There was the true Light which, coming into the world, enlightens every man. … And the word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we saw his glory (John 1:9,14).

Each Advent/Christmas season seems to bring its own “zinger,” a fresh reminder that the gospels tell more than a good story. They tell the One True Story.

My first Christmas as a Christian, the zinger was Handel’s Messiah. The music wasn’t unfamiliar, but the notion that the Bible was a coherent whole was new. And to hear this One True Story sung — well, it resonated with something deep in my soul. I wept through the performance.

This year’s zinger was the rebroadcast of an episode of House, titled “Fetal Position” (from Season 3). For the TV-averse, Gregory House (played by Hugh Laurey) is an über-competent, but über-über-narcissistic surgeon. House is as always right about medicine as he is unfailingly wrong about, well, everything else, from relationships to ethics.

In this episode, House has to weigh the health of a pregnant woman against that of the baby in her womb. It’s not a huge conflict for House, actually, because what’s in her is just a “thing” as far as he is concerned. Studiously and forcefully, he denies the humanity of the unborn, and airily prescribes abortion when the “fetus’s” illness threatens the pregnant woman’s life.

The aspiring mother, Emma, however, would rather die than lose her baby. Against his better judgment, House winds up in the operating room, performing prenatal surgery.

No sooner does he open an incision in Emma’s uterus than the baby reaches out an arm and grabs House’s index finger with a tiny hand. House’s quip, “I just remembered I forgot to TiVo Alien,” fails to mask the revelation that’s just taken place. His eyes tell the tale, as does his thumb as it caresses the tiny hand.

After the (successful) surgery, House visits Emma. She’s amazed, she remarks, that she’s going to be OK.

“What’s amazing is how blonde your baby’s hair is.”

“My baby?”

“Yeah, that thing in your belly that tried to kill you.”

“You’ve never called him a baby before.”

The banter goes on, but House’s eyes betray him again.

Before a final lovely scene of Emma hugging her newborn months later, the penultimate scene has House at home sitting in front of the TV, popping pain-killers. In the background Lucinda Williams’ haunting voice sings “Are You Alright”:

Are you sleeping through the night?
Do you have someone to hold you tight?
Do you have someone to hang out with?
Do you have someone to hug and kiss you,
Hug and kiss you, hug and kiss you?
Are you alright?

As the lyrics unfold, House’s eyes transition from retro-TV images of dinosaurs to his own fingers. He watches his thumb caressing the place where Emma’s boy had reached out of her womb to take hold of his finger.

Out of the womb of Mary, I am reminded, God’s tiny little hand grabs mine.

I can’t not respond. I can’t not return the caress. I can’t call God a myth, a nice idea or a projection of our best hopes for ourselves. I can’t not be grateful that Someone is there, holding tight, hanging out, hugging and kissing.

More to follow …

I grow more and more convinced that Paul’s letters to Timothy and Titus have been wrongly written off as flat and unimaginative. In fact, they offer some of the apostle’s most creative theologizing.

One of Paul’s finest moments is his finding in an unnamed pagan prophet from Crete’s past a diagnosis for which his own gospel is the antidote (compare Titus 1:12 with 2:12).

“We Cretans are (religious) liars,” confesses the prophet. “God’s grace became incarnate to teach us godliness,” counters Paul.

“We Cretans are vicious beasts” admits the prophet. “God’s grace came to teach us justice,” urges Paul.

“We Cretans are lazy gluttons,” bemoans the prophet. “God’s grace came to teach us self-control,” offers Paul.

I wrote all that up in more scholarly form some time ago in “Titus as Apologia: Grace for Liars, Beasts, and Gluttons” (for a copy, click the link), insights from which my friend Phil Towner adroitly worked into his truly outstanding NICNT commentary, The Letters to Timothy and Titus (Eerdmans, 2006).

My main summer project has been completing a short writing project for Baker Book House: essentially fifty-plus words per verse of commentary on these three letters to Paul’s two most trusted lieutenants.

The writing comes on the heels of three lectures and some valuable interchange with University of Florida students at the Christian Study Center (headed up by Richard Horner, himself an exceedingly astute scholar of Western intellectual history) in Gainesville during this past spring semester. My lectures, How Pauline are the Pastorals … and why does it matter?, are available in mp3 format from the CSC website).
That lecture series and this summer’s writing have provided the first chance I’ve had in a while to work carefully through these last of Paul’s letters. It’s been both bracing and convicting.

This summer happens to find us in the midst of a political season. For that reason, when the writing brought me at long last to the beginning of Titus 3 and to Paul’s instructions on civic virtue there, I found myself having to linger a while.

In a word, Paul says that Christians should not only be passively obedient, say, in praying for government (1Tm 2) and in paying taxes (Rom 13), but beyond those duties we should be ready “for every good work” (Titus 3:1). He’s talking about works done in the public square, not in the Christian ghetto.

Moreover, as if to anticipate those who assume he means we should lead with indignant anger and strident denunciations of all that is wrong with the world, Paul urges us: “to slander no one, to be peaceable and considerate, and always to be gentle toward everyone” (Titus 3:2 TNIV).

I thought those words were worth calling attention to during the summer of a presidential race, so a few days ago I posted some reflections at Glenn Lucke’s Common Grounds Online community, “Paul to Titus: On Christians in the Public Square.” I’d be pleased to have friends drop in there to continue the conversation about what Paul would have us do.

But before I stop keyboarding, I also have to recommend a sobering article by David Brooks of the New York Times, “The Great Seduction: America’s Next Moral Threat Isn’t Sexual — It’s Financial” (NYT, June 10, 2008). Brooks, in turn, refers to Barbara Dafoe Whitehead’s “A Nation in Debt: How We Killed Thrift, Enthroned Loan Sharks and Undermined American Prosperity”).

Its Puritan theology and Franklinesque ethic of prudence, opines Brooks, originally enabled the U.S. to be wealthy without being corrupted by wealth. But that legacy has given way to a culture of financial decadence, an explosion of debt, and the division of our citizenry into an “investor class” and a “lottery class.” At our peril, may I suggest, we neglect the prospect of resentment-fueled class war.

Between them, Brooks and Whitehead offer various suggestions for turning things around, e.g., tightened usury laws, raised awareness about debt, access for the poor and middle class to financial planning, re-purposed lotteries, foundation- and church-based short-term loans.

What they leave for somebody else to say is this: What’s going on around us in the collapse of the housing market and in the skyrocketing of personal debt has everything to do with what happens when we do not pay attention in the marketplace and in the public square to the basic values the gospel teaches: truth will eventually out us, and we can only deny the claims of justice and self-control so long (Titus 1:12). If we’re a city on a hill, as it was put by the One who came to teach us to deny ungodliness and worldly passions and to live soberly, justly, and piously, now is a time for shining (see Titus 2:11-12; Mt 5:14-16).

In sum of this post and of my explorations in the Pastorals over the last few months: we dare not keep our faith in the prayer-closet — and we could do worse than to heed the apostle’s considered judgment as to how he wanted his theology to be applied in the next generation.

Random thoughts on a Monday morning …

I’m grateful to Thomas Howard for Dove Descending, his commentary on T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets.” But why must Eliot be so pointedly obtuse as to need line-by-line decoding? (Though I suspect some of my students would think I find in Eliot a kindred spirit.) Having forced my way through “Prufrock” and “Hollow Men” and “Wasteland” last week, I’m ready for some words of redemption. I’m just getting started on “Four Quartets” — I love the notion of there being “a way up that is at one and the same time a way down,” but this poetry is tough going. (I hope I can get some help from Charlie Kidd when he returns from abroad.)

Last week while grading exams (almost done), I listened several times (and am doing so even now) to Richard Strauss’s Alpine Symphony. The Alpine Symphony, a tribute to the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, makes Nietzsche’s atheism (or at least his quest for a “nobler god”) feel so, I dunno, so what? Brave?

Then again, if your best hope is to have your ashes parked on the top of the Himalayas in a Chock Full o’Nuts can (per The Bucket List, which movie Shari sat me down to watch this weekend, and which movie felt to me like an extended commentary on how to make Nietzsche work for you — even if the main characters do make non-Nietzschean moves toward relationships), you move past bravery into, well, again, what?

OK, I guess it makes a pretty big difference whether there’s a Redeemer or not. If not, The Bucket List is about as close to redemption as you’re going to get, I suppose. That said, I’m not sure a bucket list isn’t a bad idea even if (or since) there is a Redeemer.

What could be on mine? I’ve already killed a gator, hit a home run, played Bach & B.B. King, swung a samurai sword, driven (even briefly owned) a muscled up Mustang, kissed the most beautiful girl in the world, raised with her the three most vibrantly alive sons ever, written more than I have the right to expect anybody to read, spoken truth into the lives of half a generation of seminarians, seen tons of the majestic …

Before we leave Strauss, his Also Sprach Zarathustra (the whole tone poem) has inspired me to try to get the “Prelude” into my fingers on my Lucille and out through my Fender tube amps.

My head still hurts (that good hurt when your head feels like it’s taken in more than it’s able) from how rich the Institute for Worship Studies experience was this session. I’m grateful especially for bold prayers and wise counsel I received, and for the self-giving love I witnessed among strong-willed and talented worship leaders. It’s curious that my teaching partner and I are going through such parallel dysfunctions in church life. I love the church so — may all of us who love the Groom and his Bride help each other help Her not dress so ugly. I hold much promise of Her better adornment through my IWS friends.

Like I said, random thoughts … but, hey, it’s my blog.

Note to both devoted readers: I won’t forget about the other seven reasons for samurai sword training in Japan.

Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality. • T. S. Eliot