Welcome to Holy Week everyone,

Below you’ll find the Scripture readings for the month of April. If you’re new here, I’d like to invite you join us in committing to five simple practices for re-embodying your faith. Here’s a quick synopsis of the five practices with some links to get you started:

1. SCRIPTURE: We share a common reading schedule, usually one passage from the Old Testament, one from the New Testament, and a Psalm each day. Learn more: How To Read The Bible

2. PRAYER: We pray on our knees the first minute we get out of bed and the last minute before our head hits the pillow. Learn more: How To Pray

3. FASTING: Fasting makes space for God. We do it in different ways in different seasons (e.g. internet fast on Sundays; no meat or dairy on Fridays; special alms-giving in summer). Learn more: Why We Fast

4. CHURCH: Make a commitment to physically go and worship with other Christians at a local church every Sunday. Learn more: Losing Our Religion

5. AUTHORITY: Begin to ask God for a trustworthy pastor, priest, or spiritual leader. Then approach that person and give them authority in your life. Learn more: What Is A Priest?

For more on the integration of Christian faith and practice, read this post:

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The April Plan

The readings for this month are as follows. If you’re the analog type, you can access the reading plan here and print it out or bookmark it on your phone or computer. We also have a personalized plan on the Dwell app (FREE for you!), which automatically loads each new day’s Bible passages. You can read or listen right on the app. It’s pretty awesome. You have to create an account to get started, but once you’re in, it’s free thanks to VB Fellows footing the bill (we welcome your donations to help keep it going).

In the past, the plan has consisted of three regular readings per day: a Psalm, an Old Testament passage, and a New Testament passage each day. Lately, we have simplified to a two-reading plan, just to help folks really form a consistent pattern. Baby steps, as they say. This month we’ll be reading the Book of Acts with a couple of special readings added in for Good Friday and Easter Sunday. As usual, I recommend watching the excellent Bible Project video introductions linked below before you begin. Happy reading!

— Ross

P.S. Here’s a special meditation for Good Friday and the meaning of the cross.

And here’s the three-part essay series on moving mountains, if you haven’t caught up yet. (Part 4 coming soon, Lord willing.)

Blessings to all and a happy Holy Week. Praise the Lord.

— Ross

Hi Everyone,

Below you’ll find the Scripture readings for the month of March. If you’re new here, I’d like to invite you join us in committing to five simple practices for re-embodying your faith. Here’s a quick synopsis of the five practices with some links to get you started:

1. SCRIPTURE: We share a common reading schedule, usually one passage from the Old Testament, one from the New Testament, and a Psalm each day. Learn more: How To Read The Bible

2. PRAYER: We pray on our knees the first minute we get out of bed and the last minute before our head hits the pillow. Learn more: How To Pray

3. FASTING: Fasting makes space for God. We do it in different ways in different seasons (e.g. internet fast on Sundays; no meat or dairy on Fridays; special alms-giving in summer). Learn more: Why We Fast

4. CHURCH: Make a commitment to physically go and worship with other Christians at a local church every Sunday. Learn more: Losing Our Religion

5. AUTHORITY: Begin to ask God for a trustworthy pastor, priest, or spiritual leader. Then approach that person and give them authority in your life. Learn more: What Is A Priest?

For more on the integration of Christian faith and practice, read this post:

Give a gift subscription

The March Plan

The readings for this month are as follows. If you’re the analog type, you can access the reading plan here and print it out or bookmark it on your phone or computer. We also have a personalized plan on the Dwell app (FREE for you!), which automatically loads each new day’s Bible passages. You can read or listen right on the app. It’s pretty awesome. You have to create an account to get started, but once you’re in, it’s free thanks to VB Fellows footing the bill (we welcome your donations to help keep it going).

In the past, the plan has consisted of three regular readings per day: a Psalm, an Old Testament passage, and a New Testament passage each day. Lately, we have simplified to a two-reading plan, just to help folks really form a consistent pattern. Baby steps, as they say. This month we’ll be reading the story of David at the end of 1 Samuel and all the way through 2 Samuel. We will end with the first four chapters of 1 Kings, which will give us a glimpse of the beginning of Solomon’s reign. As usual, I recommend watching the excellent Bible Project video introductions linked below before you begin. Happy reading!

— Ross

P.S. If you missed it, check out my recent essay series on the meaning of miracles and the difference between power and authority:

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I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth.    
 
-- from “East Coker” by T. S. Eliot

I don’t know about you, but it’s been a long, cold winter here in Virginia. And let’s just say, not all my family members are happy about it. Which has prompted me to inquire with them: What exactly is winter for?

Every year, about this time of year, I lead our Virginia Beach Fellows class (and my own family) through a prolonged season of fasting and prayer. These are believers in their early twenties, usually fresh out of college. Most are unfamiliar with fasting. We don’t go without food altogether. The assignment is to fast from certain foods and all liquids besides water (coffee is the toughest for most folks to do without), as well as from one or two forms of daily technology use (social media, entertainment, music, podcasts, etc). The purpose, I tell them, is to make space for God. In this light, I tell a riddle:

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What is an English word that literally means “to lack an empty space,” not merely a word that means “full,” but one that specifically means “to lack a lack?”

It’s not an easy riddle—usually no one gets it without a couple of hints—but the word is: incapacity. This, I tell my students, is our problem: we lack a lack. We are becoming incapacitated at the level of our souls. Souls can atrophy, not because they have too little nourishment, but because they have too much and the wrong kind. Like the Rich Young Ruler, we may be sincere in our desire to inherit eternal life, but when it is offered we find we have no room for it. We are already full. The gift is free, but we still can’t afford it.

Part of the purpose of fasting, then, is to make ourselves poor in some small way so that we have capacity to receive the kinds of gifts that only God can give.

At the beginning of the fast, I have my students read “East Coker” from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. Eliot is not exactly known for his perspicuity, but even at first glance you can probably sense the relevance of this section:

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I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:

Why wait without hope or faith or love? Because our hope and faith and love are not as purely directed as we’d like to think. We’ve put our hope in many things. We’ve believed many things, loved many things. Despite being warned that we cannot serve more than one master, we have done it anyway. Now we must put aside even the good things that have too quickly become ultimate, so that the ultimate thing can become ultimate again.

So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

If the problem of the atrophied soul is that it cannot afford a free gift because it is too full, then the answer is that the soul must be emptied in order to be full. Poverty becomes the new currency. Silence becomes the soil for a new song.

This is what the Sermon on the Mount says over and over again: Why not pray or fast to be seen by others? Because then you will have “received your reward in full” and will not have room for God, who rewards you in secret. Why give more than you’re asked? Why not let your left hand see what your right hand is doing? Why forgive and bless your enemies even as they curse you? Not because you earn blessings like merit badges by doing so, but because you make space to receive what cannot be received any other way. And yes, that space, that void, may remain a void for some time, as you wait for God to fill it with Himself. But, as Eliot says, “the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.”

How long can the modern person wait for God? How long before we fill the void of anxiety, disappointment, injustice or even boredom with one of a thousand ready-made solutions? If Jesus taught his disciples anything, it was this: Let the void come. Don’t avoid it. Don’t fill it too quickly with your own cheap remedies. Blessed are the poor in spirit. The void is where God meets you and fills you.

But Jesus went further still: Despite his disciples best wishes, he made the void. He became the void.

I doubt the Twelve were surprised when Jesus told them that his second coming would be like a thief. As far as they were concerned, he had already come like a thief. He had taken their lives, he had stolen their loves, he had robbed them of their best hopes and expectations of who the Messiah would be. And why? So that they would have the capacity to receive something far better. He was the thief who loved them.

“For judgment I came into this world, that those who do not see may see, and those who see may become blind.” (John 9:39)

Though it may have confused them at first, eventually the Twelve would understand this saying better than anyone, because they had lived it. Where they could see, Jesus had struck them blind; where they had been blind, they were finally beginning to see.

“Those who see” and “those who do not see,” as it turned out, were not two distinct types of people, but two possibilities within every human heart. And Jesus was the Robin Hood figure who not only robbed the rich to give to the poor, but took it a step further, making those from whom he had stolen rich again in the end. This is the merciful cycle of God: He opposes the exalted and exalts the humbled. But once the exalted are humbled, they are finally fertile soil for exaltation…that is, if they stay, if they wait in that place of humility. The waiting is key. And, unfortunately, the waiting is often less like a moment and more like a season.

Which brings us to perhaps the most confusing part of this section of Eliot’s poem:

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Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth. 

What do these images have in common? They are all images of winter, painfully hinting at spring. Lightning in a winter sky, wild thyme and strawberry buried somewhere beneath the snow, perhaps even beneath the ground itself. And why does the laughter in the garden echo? Because the garden is bleak. Very little grows there in the winter months. And therefore, winter has an amplifying effect on our senses. We hear more and see further when the landscape of our lives isn’t padded with the fruitful vegetation of life.

As I write this, I am peering out the window of my house at a winter sunrise over the distant bay, a sight I can see only this time of year, when all the trees that lie between have lost their leaves and appear to be dead. The trees are only pretending, of course. But in their pretense of death, I see what I could not see any other way.

This is what winter affords. This is also what fasting affords. There was a time, not long ago, when most of the world lived according to distinct seasons. Their spaces were not temperature controlled. Their attention was not screen-controlled. Their day-to-day lives were not homogenized by the powerful blessings and curses that these and other technologies have afforded us. Their work took on different patterns in winter than in spring or summer or fall. They prepared for winter before it arrived, and when it arrived, they prayed that they would make it through.

Their children grew up with these seasonal rhythms. They understood intuitively that winter was the time when the ground did not produce, when stores would become thinner by the day, when keeping warm was itself a daily chore. They understood that winter could be especially hard for the elderly and for pregnant mothers, that some would possibly die. Winter, after all, was the season of death. But it was also the season of new birth, the womb out of which spring is born.

Most ancient people already lived by some sort of rhythm of feasting and fasting. But winter was its own kind of “forced fast.” It was nature’s way of making space, of making capacity, both in the ground and in the ground of the human heart.

Needless to say, our cultural moment is particularly allergic to this kind of seasonality. Just as our jobs tend to demand the same thing from us in January as they do in June—when our kids are babies as when they are full grown—we, as consumers, tend to demand the same comforts, amusements, and pleasures all throughout the year. We eat ripe strawberries all winter long. No wonder our jobs expect what they expect: production must keep up with consumption. We feast daily without fasting ever. But feasting without fasting is not feasting at all; it is addiction.

Without the forced rest of seasons, without the yearly liturgy of fasting and feasting, the ground of our souls becomes a Dust Bowl, over-stimulated and under-nourished, dry and sparse, blown this way and that by the faintest breeze.

We have done our very best to erase winter. But, in the end, we have not so much erased it as merely held it at bay. The cold stillness of winter still looms on the not-so-distant horizon of our bustling civilization and our own busy hearts. We have delayed its coming, but it comes nonetheless. And when it comes, it may be all the worse for us because we’ve held it back, because we’ve become unfamiliar with its ways. It comes to individuals, to communities, to nations. COVID was one such mega-winter. There will certainly be others. And if we are not prepared—if we are not “seasoned” by the seasons we welcome—we may be broken by the crises we can’t avoid.

Fasting is not fundamental to the Christian life. You can be a Christian without fasting. But you cannot be a Christian without suffering. Fasting is the embodied practice of welcoming, voluntarily, that poverty of spirit which will nevertheless come, whether we welcome it or not. God’s ways are severely merciful. Fasting makes space for death to do its work in little ways, so that when death comes in bigger ways, we can recognize its redemptive pattern. Fasting is practice; grief is the game. Likewise, winter is nature’s fast. When we welcome winter rather than erasing it—when we welcome its stillness, its thin-ness, its non-productiveness—we become fertile soil for the Sower’s springtime seed. This is how winter can be the most fruitful season of all.

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P.S. Lent begins this coming Wednesday, February 18. This is traditionally a time when Christians fast and pray in preparation for Easter, confessing their sins, remembering their mortality, and awaiting the resurrection of the dead. If you’d like to know more about why Christians fast or how you can begin, see the essay/podcast below:

Needless to say, Jordan has a beautiful mind. After a successful career as a Silicon Valley entrepreneur (retiring in his mid-thirties), he has since become a philosopher and polymath focusing on the relationship between technology and culture and the nature and future of civilization. About two and half years ago, he and his wife Venessa were baptized into the Christian faith (praise God). We met not long after that, through a mutual friend, and have kept in touch ever since.

For more on this topic, see my essay, “A Parish Manifesto” over at or my abridged Substack version, “The Future of Our Churches” (with audio) below.

If you prefer to watch on YouTube, here it is:

Hi Everyone,

Below you’ll find the Scripture readings for the month of February. If you’re new here, I’d like to invite you join us in committing to five simple practices for re-embodying your faith. Here’s a quick synopsis of the five practices with some links to get you started:

1. SCRIPTURE: We share a common reading schedule, usually one passage from the Old Testament, one from the New Testament, and a Psalm each day. Learn more: How To Read The Bible

2. PRAYER: We pray on our knees the first minute we get out of bed and the last minute before our head hits the pillow. Learn more: How To Pray

3. FASTING: Fasting makes space for God. We do it in different ways in different seasons (e.g. internet fast on Sundays; no meat or dairy on Fridays; special alms-giving in summer). Learn more: Why We Fast

4. CHURCH: Make a commitment to physically go and worship with other Christians at a local church every Sunday. Learn more: Losing Our Religion

5. AUTHORITY: Begin to ask God for a trustworthy pastor, priest, or spiritual leader. Then approach that person and give them authority in your life. Learn more: What Is A Priest?

For more on the integration of Christian faith and practice, read this post:

Give a gift subscription

The February Plan

The readings for this month are as follows. If you’re the analog type, you can access the reading plan here and print it out or bookmark it on your phone or computer. We also have a personalized plan on the Dwell app (FREE for you!), which automatically loads each new day’s Bible passages. You can read or listen right on the app. It’s pretty awesome. You have to create an account to get started, but once you’re in, it’s free thanks to VB Fellows footing the bill (we welcome your donations to help keep it going).

In the past, the plan has consisted of three regular readings per day: a Psalm, an Old Testament passage, and a New Testament passage each day. Lately, we have simplified to a two-reading plan, just to help folks really form a consistent pattern. Baby steps, as they say. 1 Samuel is the story of Samuel, Saul, and David—of Israel’s transition to a united monarchy. It’s one of my favorite books of the Bible. As usual, I recommend watching the excellent Bible Project video introductions linked below before you begin. Happy reading!

— Ross

P.S. If you missed it, check out my recent essay series on the meaning of miracles and the difference between power and authority:

To those of you patiently awaiting Part 4 of “On Moving Mountains,” this is…not that. It’s more like a related intermission (Part 3.5?). I’m still plugging away at the conclusion of the series. But, dare I say, this essay might be even better. It’s the product of about twenty years of my theological thinking; sort of my own personal “theory of everything.” I originally wrote it as a follow-up to my Mere Orthodoxy essay, “Why God Hides.” Some of you may have seen an earlier draft at some point (it’s seen a few iterations). But I thought now was the perfect time to clean it up and share the final version here. There’s also an audio version for those who prefer to listen. Cheers.

Intro: Born To Die?

“Jesus was born to die,” is an expression you sometimes hear in Evangelical Christian circles. Of course, people don’t mean it quite the way it sounds—that he was literally only born to die for our sins—but we’re sometimes tempted toward a theology that takes this shape, where the cross becomes not just the climax of the story, but the summation of it. No further context is needed. Sure, the Gospel accounts give a lot of interesting information about the kind of person Jesus was, but this mostly serves to prove that he was the right person to die for our sins. In this view, being a Christian comes to mean little more than understanding “what the cross does for you,” as though the death of the Messiah were a mere mechanism for the removal of guilt, an event which might have been just as effective if it had taken place on the moon.

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I may be overstating the problem. But the fact remains that many Christians today struggle to see the connection between the events of Holy Week and the rest of the life and ministry of Christ, which precedes and sets the stage for his death and resurrection.

On the other hand, there are those on the Christian Left who see the early chapters of the Gospels as absolutely central, even climactic. In Christ’s earthly ministry and teaching, as they see it, Jesus proves himself to be the social-justice revolutionary they always knew he was. “Blessed are the poor,” etc. And at times, this seems true enough. At other times, not.

As any honest reader of the Gospels discovers before long, Jesus is not easily pinned down. Picking and choosing the parts of him that fit well into your own system of thought is a pastime as old as Christianity itself. But the truth is most often found in the patient (painful) integration of the parts that don’t fit—the parts we don’t even like. It’s in that place of tension that we begin to discover, bit by bit, who he is and who we are.

Imagine Jesus giving a sermon series at almost any modern church—progressive, traditional, or otherwise. Imagine an anonymous Jesus standing at the pulpit for three or four Sundays in a row, delivering, for the first time, the parable of the Unjust Steward or the Ten Virgins or even the Sermon on the Mount and then simply sitting back down. If Jesus were your preacher, how long would he have a job?

What are we to make of Jesus’s earthly ministry? How do his words and actions in the early chapters of the Gospels integrate with the events of his death and resurrection to form a unified whole? What is the through-line? If he had one mission, what was the nature of that mission?

Let me be more specific: Why heal a blind man without even telling the man who he is? Why raise Lazarus if he’s only going to die again? Why feed the five thousand, knowing that tomorrow they’ll have to find their own food once more? Why touch lepers or heal the sick? Why speak in riddles and parables about “the kingdom of God,” when he could have used those same precious opportunities to speak straightforwardly about who he was and what his followers needed to believe in order to be saved?

Why does he constantly refuse to give straight answers to straight questions? Is there some special logic that gives unity to all the interruptions and seemingly random interactions that make up the Gospel accounts? Was there a plan? Or was Jesus merely “on his way” to the cross, which alone would save us from our sins?

My answer: there was a plan.

In a sense, that plan was very simple: obey the Father. But because Jesus did obey his Father, his ministry became a kind of unveiling of a much more complex and far-reaching plan: the Father’s patient campaign to reconcile the world to himself through his Son.

Of course, I don’t claim the ability to see or articulate the whole plan in its perfect sublimity. But I think I can see a particularly central through-line: a certain divine strategy or philosophy of communication, which at first glance, might appear to us a losing strategy. And yet with it, Jesus transformed the world. And with it, we can join him in reconciling the world to God. I call this strategy…soil-tilling.

The Problem of “Getting Through”

Almost all intimate relationships suffer from a kind of “elephant-in-the-room” problem at one time or another, to one degree or another. Think of that close friend, family member, or coworker, with whom everything is fine except for one thing. And that one thing is the thing that could change everything…if only the person could hear it. But they can’t. You know this, because you’ve tried a hundred times. No matter what you say or do, there is no getting through. The message you would preach is probably simple enough. You might even be able to boil it down to a single sentence: “I love you.” “You are beautiful.” “You have to trust me.” “You have to stop this.” “You’re an alcoholic.” Whatever that one statement might be, they will never hear it. So eventually you give up. You leave. Or else, more likely, you stay and resolve simply to coexist with the person and their blindspot. Perhaps you’re thinking of that someone right now.

But now, let me ask a slightly different question: Have you ever wondered if you might be that person for someone else? What if the people who love you most—and who know you best—wish that you could just hear one thing? They’ve been trying to tell you. Maybe they’ve been trying for years. Or maybe they gave up long ago, because there was no getting through…to you.

“Getting through” is the central problem of communication, which, in a sense, is the central problem of human relationships. But this is counterintuitive. When we think of communication, we tend to think of the message. The speaker says something, and then it has been communicated.

But that’s not exactly true.

The telling is only half the story. And, as we’ll see, it is by far the less interesting half. In order for something to be communicated, it must be sent and received. You can go tell it on the mountain all you like, but without ears to hear, nothing has been communicated. To “communicate” literally means “to make something common,” that is, to make it known. Jesus understood this, I think, in a deeper way than anyone ever has. This is why he said so often, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.” Because, if you want to communicate anything successfully, the hearing is just as important as the message.

Most of us, I think it’s safe to say, don’t really believe this. We say things like, “All you can do is tell the truth. It’s up to the other person to receive it.” “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.” Or, in Evangelical terms: “You can bring the message, but it’s up to the Holy Spirit to do the rest.”

These statements rightly acknowledge that getting through is very hard work. But they also assume that this hard work is someone else’s to do. It couldn’t possibly be my responsibility to get through. Whether a person hears and receives the truth is a problem of some other realm, for “them” to figure out, or God. It’s certainly not my problem.

But such assumptions ignore the part of communication with which Jesus was most interested. In John 3, speaking to Nicodemus, Jesus sums up the central problem of his ministry in one sentence,

This is the judgement: the light has come into the world, but the people love the darkness rather than the light, because their deeds were evil. (John 3:19)

In other words, it’s not just that the world is full of darkness and needs his light to drown out the darkness. If that were the case, the problem of sin and its corresponding solution would be relatively simple: “Hooray! The light has come! Problem solved.” But no, it’s much more complicated than that. The light has come into the world, but the people don’t care. There’s no room in the inn. Even worse, they don’t want the light; they want the darkness. They love the darkness. In fact, it’s understandable that they do, since the source of the light is the fire of God. The same light which might have given them sight now also threatens to expose them, even to burn and blind them.

Just because the light has come does not mean it can get through to their hearts, to the level of their loves. And as long as they do not love the light, the light itself will condemn them. In a kind of terrifying reversal of Psalm 139, even the light will be darkness to them.

The Parable of the Soil-Tiller

Jesus’s Parable of the Sower in Mark 4 speaks directly to this problem of reception. “Listen,” Jesus says, not inconsequentially, since the whole parable is about our ability, or inability, to hear. A farmer sows seeds on four different types of ground—path, rocks, thorns, and fertile soil—and the seed fails to bear fruit in every location except the fertile soil.

Afterward, in a kind of perfect irony, the disciples don’t understand the parable. In fact, they seem to question the whole technique of parable-telling (v. 10). Why does he even speak in parables in the first place? Wouldn’t it be much more efficient if he would just come out and say what he means? Jesus responds, “Do you not understand this parable? How then will you understand all the parables?” (v. 13). That is to say, the Parable of the Sower is the meta-parable, the parable about parables, the seminal revelation of Jesus’s whole communicative strategy, at least, for those with ears to hear (vv. 3, 9, 23).

What, then, is this strategy?

Well, first you have to understand the context of this discussion between Jesus and the disciples. The Gospel of Mark is famous for its special emphasis on what some scholars have called “The Messianic Secret.” Throughout the first half of Mark’s account, not only does Jesus continually refuse to reveal his identity, at times he actively hides it. To add to this, Mark’s Gospel is particularly action-packed. Jesus doesn’t say much. He does things: fasts in the desert, gathers his disciples, casts out demons, heals the sick, touches lepers, feeds five thousand, and walks on water. But right in the middle of the first half of Mark, in chapter 4, we get a break from the action. Everything slows down, Jesus opens his mouth, and out comes…the Parable of the Sower.

Perhaps, the reader thinks, we’re going to get an explanation for all this mysterious activity. And indeed, that’s exactly what we get. Except that Jesus’s explanation, at first glance, seems even more mysterious than his actions.

After sharing the parable, Jesus explains to his confused disciples that the seed is “the word” and the various types of ground represent the receptivity of the human heart. On the path, Satan, like the birds, steals it away immediately. On rocky ground, it grows up quickly, but trouble and persecution scorch it before long. Among the thorns, the word grows deeper roots, but the weeds of worldly cares and distractions eventually choke it out. Only in the fertile soil does it bear fruit, thirty, sixty, and one hundred times what was sown.

The parable and its explanation raise some uncomfortable questions. Here are two that come to my mind: 1) Is God a bad farmer? 2) Am I the good soil?

Is God A Bad Farmer?

At first glance, the Parable of the Sower might tempt us to think of God as someone who just throws his seeds casually to the wind, letting them fall where they may. But, of course, God is not a haphazard farmer any more than he is an unjust judge. Rather, Jesus is painting for us a picture of the problem of communication (made all the more relevant in the age of the internet, by the way): distribution is easy; reception is complicated. The seed—in this case, the truth of the gospel—is simple and plentiful, but the ground—the human heart—is a complicated mess. Thus, the problem is not in God, but in us. Which leads us to the second question:

Am I the Good Soil?

“Well,” you might say, “the problem is in some of us. Some, after all, are fertile soil!” And yes, there is a certain, let us say, hyper-Calvinist way of reading this parable, which carries the blessing and the curse of rendering Jesus’s words immediately unmysterious. In this understanding, the path, the rocks, and the thorns represent three types of reprobate individuals, those who are not chosen. Likewise, the fertile soil represents the hearts of the elect. Everyone has known someone with a heart like the path, who simply cannot (or will not) entertain the truth of the gospel. Likewise, we have seen people receive the word with joy, only to give it up again the next month or year when times get tough. We have also known some who have bought in completely, who grew deep roots in the church for a long season, and yet, whose devotion to the gospel was eventually choked out by other concerns and allegiances. Finally, we have seen a simple seed of truth find such fertile soil in a person that it bears a hundred times what was sown. Thus, Jesus could be talking about four different types of people.

But there’s reason to believe this is an oversimplification. It’s good to remember, especially in our non-agrarian age, that almost every farmer would have been faced with all four types of ground on his one piece of land. Paths, rocks, thorns, and fertile soil are not so much four completely different types of ground as four common elements of any one plot. So, too, the human heart. If we consider the seed more broadly as “truth” of any kind, you might consider how this is true of yourself, how you are, simultaneously, the sort of person who has been fertile soil to certain truths, while other truths which you received at first with joy have since been quickly scorched by trials or else slowly choked out by other cares and distractions. You might even be able to imagine—though of course you would be blind to the details—that you are also the sort of person for whom certain truths simply cannot go in, no matter how hard others might have tried to get them through. Your heart, in fact, is every type of ground at once. And so is mine.

This, again, is the problem of communication, as Jesus presents it. The seed is simple and plentiful, but the soil is complicated and problematic. The Word became flesh in the world, yes. But what if the word will not easily be received by those who hear him? How do you make the horse drink, if it won’t?

Why Parables? So That They May Not Understand.

This brings us to the central most part of Mark 4, which also happens to be the most confusing part, in which Jesus explains to the disciples why he speaks in parables. Recall that the disciples’ main confusion at this point is not so much, “What does this parable mean?” but, “Why parables? Why is Jesus acting and speaking in such a mysterious fashion? Why not be clear?” The disciples don’t ask these specific questions in the text, but I think this pretty well sums up the sentiment of the disciples, as well as the reader of Mark’s Gospel at this juncture.

In response, Jesus gives one of the more mysterious answers that exists in the Gospel accounts. To this day, it goes right over our heads. If you asked a random Christian today, “Why did Jesus speak in parables?” they would likely reply, “He used images and stories to better relate with his audience, to make his teachings easier to understand.” This is a fine answer. The trouble is that Jesus says something like the opposite:

To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside everything is in parables, so that

‘they may indeed see but not perceive,
and may indeed hear but not understand,
lest they should turn and be forgiven.’ (Mark 4:11-12)

So according to Jesus, he tells parables so that people will not understand. And, as though to make the whole thing even more offensive, he adds, “lest they should turn and be forgiven.” So, seemingly, Jesus doesn’t want them to understand and doesn’t want them to be forgiven.

Here again, there’s a certain kind of Calvinism which claims to resolve this tension in short order: “What exactly is confusing?” they might reply. “The whole passage has been about God’s eternal election from the beginning. Some are the path, some the rocks, some the thorns. But only in those who are divinely chosen to be fertile soil does the seed of the word take root and bear fruit. Jesus makes clear in this very passage that the parables are a dividing mechanism, marking in-group from out-group. To the chosen, the secret of the kingdom is being divulged. To those outside, it is not. They will hear but not understand, because they were not meant to understand. They are objects of wrath. Why? Because God deemed them as such by his own eternal decree.”

Let’s give this view its due. It does fit well in the context. It does seem to solve most of our problems. The parables do serve as a dividing line between in-group and out-group. Jesus basically says that. So yes, this is a parable about election. The trouble is that election in the Bible is not as straightforward as this logic might suggest.

How God Elects

In Scripture, when God chooses someone to be “in” and others to be “out,” he is not usually drawing an eternal line in the sand, but rather playing a longer game by which those inside the line become a blessing even to those beyond it. To be clear, election does involve exclusion and curse for those outside, but if and when the elect are faithful, even the excluded and the cursed may find themselves to be the inheritors of the blessing of God. God chooses some now in order to bless many later. His is an incremental salvation. The mustard seed eventually becomes the largest tree in the garden. The quintessential case is, of course, Abraham. Why did God choose Abraham and his offspring? So that the nations—that is, the now-un-chosen—would be blessed through them. This is what God literally says to Abraham and to his offspring on multiple occasions. He narrows in order to broaden, chooses some and excludes others in order that many might be included in the end.

And lest we be tempted to think this is only an Old Testament theme, the same pattern is clearly revealed in Jesus’s own words and actions in the New Testament. This is, for instance, the structure of his entire High Priestly Prayer in John 17. (Note especially the contrast between the emphasized verses below.)

“Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son that the Son may glorify you, since you have given him authority over all flesh, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him. […]

“I have manifested your name to the people whom you gave me out of the world. Yours they were, and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word. Now they know that everything that you have given me is from you. For I have given them the words that you gave me, and they have received them and have come to know in truth that I came from you; and they have believed that you sent me. I am praying for them. I am not praying for the world but for those whom you have given me, for they are yours. All mine are yours, and yours are mine, and I am glorified in them. […]

“I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me.” (John 17, selections)

Jesus’s prayer is a peek behind the curtain at God’s master strategy for “reconciling the world to himself.” And how does it work? Does God bring the megaphone straight to the world? No. Does he send his Son to bring the megaphone straight to the world? Still no. The Father chooses to send his own Son. The Son chooses “his own” from among the world. He does not pray for the world, because they are not his immediate chosen ones. Rather he prays for his own, because through them (who represent him as he represents the Father) the world might come to believe and know the love of God. From Father to Son, from Son to disciples, from disciples to the world. This is how election works.

When the Father sends Jesus to be “Abraham’s seed” (singular, as Paul points out), does this mean he has rejected Israel? No. Jesus becomes Israel so that Israel (and the world) might be saved. When Jesus reveals himself to his disciples and does not reveal himself to those outside—when he does not even “pray” for the world—does this mean he has eternally rejected the world? Definitely not. Rather, his disciples become the means by which the world comes to believe.

Let’s take another example: Jesus with the Canaanite woman. The whole meaning of election can be glimpsed in this one beautiful, mysterious interaction:

Canaanite Woman: “Have mercy on me, O Lord, Son of David; my daughter is severely oppressed by a demon.”

Jesus: “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”

Woman: [Comes and kneels before him.] “Lord, help me!”

Jesus: “It is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.”

Woman: “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.”

Jesus: “O woman, great is your faith! Be it done for you as you desire.” (Matthew 15:21-28, selections)

Here is a microcosm of the way Gentile inclusion always works. Jesus does not simply come shouting, “All are welcome!” No, his strategy is much the same as the election of Abraham—specificity for the sake of generality—but, in Christ, it’s taken to the next level. It is: “No. No. Yes.” Rejection for the sake of acceptance. Holiness for the sake of inclusion. Concealment for the sake of revelation. And we should not be surprised by this. Jesus is not the new-and-improved, modern enlightened liberal version of the harsh, archaic Father of the Old Testament, as we might sometimes be tempted to assume. Rather, as he himself says,

…the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing. For whatever the Father does, that the Son does likewise. (John 5:19)

But again, why? If God so loved the world that he sent his only Son, why didn’t he choose the megaphone method? Why this painfully long incremental process of veiling and unveiling from Abraham to Christ and, even still, from Christ to the present?

The Making of New Wineskins

He must make new wineskins. Most likely, the first game you ever played was peekaboo. Someone, for some mysterious reason, decided to hide their face from you with their hands. Somehow, this simple act of hiding arrested your attention. It made your little eyes focus on something rather than on everything. (For, of course, to look at everything is the same as to see nothing at all.) And then, revelation. The hands part. Not despite the hiding but because of it, a face is revealed, a familiar face, but one which you now see and enjoy as if for the very first time. Through the simple act of hiding, you were given a new way to see.

Why, then, does Jesus speak in parables? He says himself that the purpose of the parables is that “they may indeed see but not perceive, and may indeed hear but not understand, lest they should turn and be forgiven.” This is actually a quote from Isaiah 6, in which Isaiah is called to preach to Israel, not as an act of mercy, but as an act of judgment—to preach so that the people will not repent. Isaiah is evidently a bit disturbed by this idea, so he pleads, “How long, O Lord?” And the Lord responds:

“Until the cities lie ruined
and without inhabitant,
until the houses are left deserted
and the fields ruined and ravaged,
until the Lord has sent everyone far away
and the land is utterly forsaken.
And though a tenth remains in the land,
it will again be laid waste.
But as the terebinth and oak
leave stumps when they are cut down,
so the holy seed will be the stump in the land.” (Isaiah 6:11-13)

The Lord’s answer is harsh, but we can see in the language of the “seed” that his judgement is not eternally fixed, but rather serves a deeper purpose of renewal. Why does the Lord harden hearts? So that they can once again be broken into fertile soil. Furthermore, the purpose of the faithful remnant is not merely to “be saved” from among the damned, but rather to play a central role in the long-game salvation of all Israel and the world. The remnant will be “the stump” and “the holy seed” out of which a new shoot (see Isaiah 11) will grow.

Of course, we know that Christ is that seed. But, as the seed, he too must be hidden in the ground if he is going to bear fruit. The purpose of this judgement of concealment is not “eternal damnation,” but rather to be the means of a deeper, truer, wider repentance.

Wait, but the passage explicitly says that the Lord does not want them to repent. Right. He does not want them to repent immediately. After all, that kind of repentance would only reflect the wish to be delivered from destruction, rather than a true love for God. Sometimes, of course, the former can lead to the latter. But in this case, God says, “No. I don’t want any half-hearted repentance. I’m playing a longer game.”

In the beginning of his ministry, Jesus faces a similar predicament. If he simply comes out and announces that he is the Messiah, surely plenty of people would “believe” and “follow.” But they wouldn’t necessarily understand who he really was or what he was really doing. So again, Jesus plays the long game, as with the rich young ruler. He lets people be disappointed. He lets them reject him in the short term. Think of his conversation with Peter in Mark 8 (after eight straight chapters of mysteriously veiling his identity).

Jesus: “Who do you say that I am?”

Peter: “You are the Christ, the son of the living God!”

Jesus: “Don’t tell anyone this. Also…I’m going to be killed.”

Peter: “No Lord, this shall never happen to you.”

Jesus: “Get behind me Satan. You are a stumbling block to me. You do not have in mind the things of God but the things of men.”

Why does he allow this confusion to happen, especially amongst his own disciples? In short, Jesus’s most mysterious words and actions bless his disciples by pruning them of the kinds of false beliefs and expectations, which, if he spoke more straightforwardly, they’d be tempted to pin to him. He is breaking the ground so the seed can go in. The path is the hardest ground, the least likely place for the seed to take root, precisely because it is the most familiar and trodden ground of all. “Oh, you’re the Messiah! Great, I know exactly what you mean by that.” But no, you don’t, because your idea of the Messiah is a damnable misunderstanding, which needs to be un-understood before it can be received aright. As Mark Twain put it, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

Jesus will not let old wineskins carry new wine. Thus he spends his whole ministry not so much pouring out new wine as forming new wineskins. After all, if he merely poured out the new wine, the old wineskins would explode and the new wine would be wasted (Matthew 9:17).

Jesus, Son of Joseph

In this sense, Jesus’s ministry resembles that of Joseph in the Book of Genesis perhaps more than any other figure in the Old Testament. Joseph, if you recall, is the favorite son of Jacob, who is almost murdered and then sold into slavery by his envious brothers. Joseph faithfully perseveres through trials of many kinds and eventually becomes a great prince in Egypt, to whom his brothers unknowingly come begging for food in the midst of a famine. Importantly, they do not recognize him when they come, but he recognizes them. He can see the truth. They cannot.

At this point, the text subtly hints that Joseph truly loves his brothers and is ready to forgive them on the spot, even though they show no indication of remembering who he is or what they have done to him. But—shock and horror—instead of simply revealing himself and forgiving them on the spot, Joseph opts for another, less direct route. He not only remains concealed to them, but adds new and deeper layers of concealment. In fact, he initiates a long-con against (for?) his brothers, which takes a few chapters to play itself out.

Meanwhile, the modern Christian reader is thinking, “Joseph, why don’t you just forgive them if you love them so much!” But no, he won’t. Not like that. Joseph understands something that we don’t. So he proceeds with his long-con. He frames and accuses his brothers of a crime, forcing one brother to be held captive in Egypt while they go and retrieve their youngest brother, Benjamin, the new-favorite son of Jacob, that is, the new Joseph. They don’t want to do it, but Joseph forces their hand. Then, when they finally bring Benjamin back, Joseph frames Benjamin of an even higher crime! The brothers are absolutely terrified. All the horrible memories are coming back to them. They have already had to live with their father’s grief, having lost one favorite son by their own misdeeds. Now it’s all happening again. But, at the very last minute, Judah (the one whose idea it was to sell Joseph into slavery in the first place), steps up and says to Joseph, “Take me. Let me take my brother’s place, so he can go home to his father.” At this, Joseph finally breaks down and reveals himself, and the family is reconciled.

Concealment. Concealment. Revelation. No. No. Yes.

And why? Why does Joseph put his brothers through all this agonizing hiddenness? Because the brothers needed more than mere revelation (which they could not have received anyway) and more than mere forgiveness (which would have been for a crime they hardly acknowledged). They needed the soil of their hearts to be tilled, so that they would finally be ready when the moment of revelation and forgiveness came.

Joseph somehow understood all this. Being the son of Jacob, it was in his blood to be a trickster. His father had tricked his brother Esau so that he could receive the blessing. Now Joseph had tricked his brothers so that they could receive the blessing. He perfected the family trick through love, being at once the image and the redemption of his father.

Jesus, then, is the new and final Joseph (it’s no wonder his father’s name is Joseph and, by the way, his grandfather’s name is Jacob!). He conceals in order to reveal at the proper time. He tricks us, not ultimately to throw us off, but to lead us finally to the proper reception of the blessing he has always wanted to give but which we could not receive until the trick reached its climactic conclusion. The cross is the climax of the trick: stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Greeks, a moment no one was ready for and an ending no one (but Satan) could have wished for. And yet, somehow, the whole world was sucked into that one place and time—Jews and Gentiles, friends and enemies—to deny him, scoff at him, and nail the nails into his hands and feet. God was murdered, and we were all participants.

It was a good trick, the best trick. He led the horse to water, and the horse drank. At the cross, we were forced to face ourselves and him, being simultaneously condemned and redeemed by the Light we would have otherwise eternally fled. Now, thanks to him, we can walk in the light as he is in the light and share in the blessing which he always intended to give but which we could not and would not receive, until he became the curse for us. What we meant for evil, he meant for good (Gen. 50:20). That is how Jesus was Joseph to us.

Conclusion

The secret hidden in the Parable of the Sower is that Jesus is not only the seed-planter but also, and perhaps more importantly, the master soil-tiller. The truth (the seed) is simple, and there’s plenty to go around. The problem is the lack of fertile soil. Jesus’s words and deeds in the Gospels can be seen as one big project of soil-tilling in preparation for the crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension of Christ. Likewise, our present calling can be seen as the soil-tilling of our neighbors’ hearts as we await his second coming in glory.

The American church has spent decades debating the question “What is the gospel?” under the seeming assumption that, if only we can zero in on the best and clearest formulation, then the truth will “sell itself.” But as Jesus’s ministry makes clear, the truth rarely works that way. Get the biggest megaphone you can find. Speak the truest, clearest words you can imagine. It still will not go through. Or, even if it does, it may yet be choked out by thorns you failed to account for. Christ’s own method was not the megaphone method. He didn’t go around repeating the same straightforward message to different audiences, but rather approached each and every person and occasion with a different tack. Where he found weeds, he tugged at them gently. Where he found a path, he brought out the bulldozer.

95% of Christian ministry is soil-tilling.

Jesus came to till the soil of our hearts, to play the long game with his disciples, not just giving them the truth, but making sure the truth he wanted them to receive could, in fact, go in. The kingdom of God is a patient kingdom. Even when Peter confesses that he is the Christ, he’s not ready. (Get behind me Satan!”) Even when Jesus dies, he’s not ready. (“You will deny me three times.”) Even when he appears to him in a vision after the resurrection and Pentecost with the revelation of Gentile inclusion, Peter can hardly receive it. (“Surely not, Lord!”) And yet, he does receive it, and founds the church upon these very truths, which once had fallen on the path, rocks, and thorns of his own sinful heart.

So it is with us. God is founding a patient kingdom in us. The mustard seed is becoming the largest tree in the garden. The Spirit is tilling the soil of our hearts to receive more and more of him. And we must do the same with one another. This is how Christ preached the gospel. This is how he is remaking the world. And this is how we join him.

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Happy New Years Eve Everyone!

As we enter this new year, it’s a fitting time to take stock of the rhythms and patterns that shape your daily life, the ones you chose and the ones you didn’t, the ones that need to be pruned so they can bear more fruit and the ones which perhaps need to be cut off and thrown into the fire. Now might also be the perfect time to adopt new patterns and practices for the sake of deepening your relationship with Jesus.

In my local community, we’re slowly amassing a group of like-minded believers who want to grow in holiness. To this end, we have committed to five historic Christian practices to help re-embody our faith, and we’d love for you to join us. Here’s a quick synopsis of the five practices with some links to get you started:

1. SCRIPTURE: We share a common reading schedule, usually one passage from the Old Testament, one from the New Testament, and a Psalm each day. Learn more: How To Read The Bible

2. PRAYER: We pray on our knees the first minute we get out of bed and the last minute before our head hits the pillow. Learn more: How To Pray

3. FASTING: Fasting makes space for God. We do it in different ways in different seasons (e.g. internet fast on Sundays; no meat or dairy on Fridays; special alms-giving in summer). Read on to see what we’re doing in January. Learn more: Why We Fast

4. CHURCH: Make a commitment to physically go and worship with other Christians at a local church every Sunday. Learn more: Losing Our Religion

5. AUTHORITY: Begin to ask God for a trustworthy pastor, priest, or spiritual leader. Then approach that person and give them authority in your life. Learn more: What Is A Priest?

For more on the integration of Christian faith and practice, read this:

21 Days of Prayer & Fasting (Jan. 4-24)

Speaking of fasting, my local church has traditionally set apart three weeks in January as a special season of prayer and fasting. This year, the dates are Sunday, January 4 through Saturday, January 24th. You don’t have to be super hard-core about it. The idea is to choose a measurable fasting commitment which you will actually keep. Most people choose one or two habits to give up, which cost them something and therefore drive them to prayer on a daily basis. For instance, my students usually give up all liquids but water (coffee is the hardest part for many!) and social media. Our family usually does some variation of the “Daniel Fast,” which is briefly described in the images below. You can also pair this with an internet fast on Sundays.

Feel free to ask me about it if you have questions. Again, the point is to drive us to prayer: to make space in ourselves which only God can fill. And remember not to draw attention to your fasting outside the community of those joining you (and not to judge those who don’t join). These practices are for the secret place. Your Father who sees in secret will reward you. For more on fasting, read or listen to this:

January Scripture Readings

The readings for this month are as follows. If you’re the analog type, you can access the reading plan here and print it out or bookmark it on your phone or computer. We also have a personalized plan on the Dwell app (FREE for you!), which automatically loads each new day’s Bible passages. You can read or listen right on the app. It’s pretty awesome. You have to create an account to get started, but once you’re in, it’s free thanks to VB Fellows footing the bill (we welcome your donations to help keep it going).

In the past, the plan has consisted of three regular readings per day: a Psalm, an Old Testament passage, and a New Testament passage each day. But for this month, we are beginning very simply with just a Psalm and a New Testament reading for each day. The best way to form a habit is baby steps! As usual, I recommend watching the excellent Bible Project video introductions linked below before you begin. Happy reading!

Hope you will consider joining us on this journey in the New Year. Feel free to share with friends and let me know if you have questions.

— Ross

P.S. If you haven’t yet, check out my latest series on moving mountains:

Since 2016, my friend Thomas Dixon and I have shared our reading lists with one another at the end of each year. Over that time, I’ve slowly expanded my list to include my favorite essays, interviews, movies, and music. Besides being a good excuse to catch up with a friend, these lists have allowed us to cheat off of each other’s recommendations for future reading. I hope it will help you in similar fashion. Skip to the bottom for my absolute “Best of 2025.”

NOTE: These are not all works published this year; just things I read and listened to in the last twelve months (mostly listened to—I’m an audiobook person). Following Lewis’s advice, I tend to read old things and re-read the best things.

— Ross

P.S. Check out last year’s list for more recommendations.

2025 Books I Read

1. Deschooling Society, Ivan Illich - rare that a work of nonfiction can wake me so thoroughly from my own philosophical slumber, but this book did; Illich’s thinking has more potential to radicalize me than most, so I have to be careful when reading him; DS is a glorious, prophetic, out-of-the-box take on our society, which made me think differently about many things without necessarily agreeing with the author on all those things; thus, my favorite kind of read; here’s a taste:

   Since there is nothing desirable which has not been planned, the city child soon concludes that we will always be able to design an institution for our every want. He takes for granted the power of process to create value. Whether the goal is meeting a mate, integrating a neighborhood, or acquiring reading skills, it will be defined in such a way that its achievement can be engineered. The man who knows that nothing in demand is out of production soon expects that nothing produced can be out of demand. If a moon vehicle can be designed, so can the demand to go to the moon. Not to go where one can go would be subversive. It would unmask as folly the assumption that every satisfied demand entails the discovery of an even greater unsatisfied one. Such insight would stop progress. Not to produce what is possible would expose the law of ‘rising expectations’ as a euphemism for a growing frustration gap, which is the motor of a society built on the coproduction of services and increased demand. [...]

   Man has developed the frustrating power to demand anything because he cannot visualize anything which an institution cannot do for him. Surrounded by all-powerful tools, man is reduced to a tool of his tools. Each of the institutions meant to exorcise one of the primeval evils has become a fail-safe, self-sealing coffin for man. Man is trapped in the boxes he makes to contain the ills Pandora allowed to escape. The blackout of reality in the smog produced by our tools has enveloped us. Quite suddenly we find ourselves in the darkness of our own trap.

2. The Four Loves, C. S. Lewis - thousandth read; could read it every year; maybe I just will.

3. The Wake, Paul Kingsnorth - a very dark novel; pretty masterful depiction of pre-modern perspective, for my money; but not exactly an enjoyable read; those who think Kingsnorth’s last couple of years raging against the modern machine is based on some kind of naive dream that “earlier times were better times” should read one of his novels; he may be a bit radical in his rejection of our present civilization, but he is also far from quixotic about the past.

4. The Last Battle, C. S. Lewis - people will say it’s not his best, that it’s sorta weird and he could have ended it stronger, etc; I say it’s wonderfully and fittingly weird, and I wouldn’t change a thing about it.

5. The Language of Creation, Matthieu Pageau - has become a yearly slow-read for me these last few years; I see new things all the time thanks to Matthieu’s symbolic perspective; possibly one of the most important theological books of the 21st Century (certainly the most important to me, but then again I don’t read much contemporary theology).

6. The Place of the Lion, Charles Williams - my favorite work of fiction this year; opened up an entirely new perspective through which to understand Lewis and the spiritual imagination of the Inklings; it was almost uncanny to learn that someone had basically already written a kind of That Hideous Strength before Lewis had even converted to the Christian faith; highly, highly recommend.

7. Planet Narnia, Michael Ward - re-read for a book club; I don’t have a high appreciation for much “Lewis scholarship” (other than the masterful work required to compile and publish his own original essays, letters and other unpublished works), but this book is a work of absolute genius; it has opened a door for me that no other book about Lewis or the Inklings—and I’ve read many—has. Forever grateful to for recommending this one.

8. The Great Divorce, C. S. Lewis - I read it every other year with my surf camp staff (in a rotation with Screwtape Letters); never gets old.

9. The Talisman, Sir Walter Scott - first read; hard to stick with it at first, but then I was glued; sublime prose and a fascinating perspective on the relationship b/t Christianity and Islam in the time of the Crusades. Plus, things like this (a description of the knight Kenneth falling in love at first sight):

   But to Kenneth, solitude and darkness, and the uncertainty of his mysterious situation were as nothing--he thought not of them--cared not for them--cared for nought in the world save the flitting vision which had just glided past him, and the tokens of her favour which she had bestowed. To grope on the floor for the buds which she had dropped--to press them to his lips, to his bosom, now alternately, now together--to rivet his lips to the cold stones on which, as near as he could judge, she had so lately stepped--to play all the extravagances which strong affection suggests and vindicates to those who yield themselves up to it, were but the tokens of passionate love common to all ages. But it was peculiar to the times of chivalry that, in his wildest rapture, the knight imagined of no attempt to follow or to trace the object of such romantic attachment; that he thought of her as of a deity, who, having deigned to show herself for an instant to her devoted worshipper, had again returned to the darkness of her sanctuary--or as an influential planet, which, having darted in some auspicious minute one favourable ray, wrapped itself again in its veil of mist. The motions of the lady of his love were to him those of a superior being, who was to move without watch or control, rejoice him by her appearance, or depress him by her absence, animate him by her kindness, or drive him to despair by her cruelty--all at her own free will, and without other importunity or remonstrance than that expressed by the most devoted services of the heart and sword of the champion, whose sole object in life was to fulfil her commands, and, by the splendour of his own achievements, to exalt her fame. Such were the rules of chivalry, and of the love which was its ruling principle.

   Are you kidding me? In this light, I must insist once again on the greatest love song of our time:

10. The Practice of the Presence of God, Brother Lawrence - hadn’t read it since I was a teenager; a classic for a reason; actually a harder read than I recalled, which is odd since most classics are much easier for me in my 40’s than they were in my teens; it’s still beautifully simple, but it didn’t hold my attention the way it did the first time (maybe just me?):

    Let us thus think often that our only business in this life is to please GOD, that perhaps all besides is but folly and vanity.

11. C. S. Lewis Essay Collection, C. S. Lewis - I finish it and then I start it over again; I don’t know why, but somehow it’s Lewis’s essays more than his fiction—and definitely more than his published non-fiction books—which really make me feel like I am getting to know the man and his perspective on things; hot take: if I could only have one book with his name on the front, it would be this one.

12. Twelfth Night, William Shakespeare - the first of my little summer trip through Bill’s most popular comedies; such a fun one; I thought about it for weeks afterward.

13. The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky - fourth(?) read; does it get any better than this?; still see new things in it; appreciated the story as a whole more this time around, whereas in the past I have felt it to be his least unified work, a kind of mosaic of stories and philosophical musings without a totally unified narrative; this time I saw the unity:

    At some thoughts one stands perplexed, especially at the sight of men’s sin, and wonders whether one should use force or humble love. Always decide to use humble love. If you resolve on that once for all, you may subdue the whole world. Loving humility is marvelously strong, the strongest of all things, and there is nothing like it. (Father Zosima)

14. Measure for Measure, William Shakespeare - my new favorite play (h/t again); I will resist the urge to tell you all the reasons here, but suffice it to say it is thoroughly Christian, deeply symbolic though also quite entertaining on its face; the biggest shocker for me was seeing afterward how many contemporary critics have completely missed its meaning thanks to their own cynical takes on gender, sexuality, and politics; honestly it’s a form of robbery; it made my apolitical self want to come out as stridently, dogmatically anti-woke just so college students could have a chance to appreciate Shakespeare again.

    Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

    He who the sword of heaven will bear
    Should be as holy as severe,
    Pattern in himself to know,
    Grace to stand, and virtue go;
    More nor less to others paying
    Than by self-offenses weighing.
    Shame to him whose cruel striking
    Kills for faults of his own liking.
    Twice treble shame on Angelo,
    To weed my vice, and let his grow.
    O, what may man within him hide,
    Though angel on the outward side!  (The Duke, Act 3, Scene 2)

15. Saving The Appearances, Owen Barfield - this man is slowly transforming my epistemology; read at your own risk:

    “Science, with the progressive disappearance of original participation, is losing its grip on any principle of unity pervading nature as a whole. The knowledge of nature—the hypothesis of chance—has already crept from the theory of evolution into the theory of the physical foundation of the Earth itself. But more serious, perhaps, than that, is the rapidly increasing fragmentation of science. There is no science of sciences, no unity of knowledge; there is only an accelerating increase in that pigeon-holed knowledge by individuals, of more and more about less and less.”

16. Unspoken Sermons, George Macdonald - reading these sermons years ago changed my life; reading them again felt like reading them for the first time; the man seems to have broken for himself the dim glass through which the rest of us see our Lord. Here’s a snapshot from ONE sermon, which I chose at random:

    The liberty of the God that would have his creature free, is in contest with the slavery of the creature who would cut his own stem from his root that he might call it his own and love it…who poises himself on the tottering wall of his own being, instead of the rock on which that being is built. Such a one regards his own dominion over himself…as a freedom infinitely greater than the range of the universe of God’s being. If he says, ‘At least I have it my own way!’ I answer, You do not know what is your way and what is not. You know nothing of whence your impulses, your desires, your tendencies, your likings come. They may spring now from some chance, as of nerves diseased; now from some roar of a wandering bodiless devil; now from some infant hate in your heart; now from the greed or lawlessness of some ancestor you would be ashamed of if you knew him; or it may be now from some far-piercing chord of a heavenly orchestra: the moment it comes up into your consciousness, you call it your own way, and glory in it! (Series III, Chapter 5, “Freedom”)

17. Lilith, George Macdonald - possibly my favorite novel of all time, but every time I recommend to others, they tend to falter on the middle part (which is admittedly long and slow); this time, however, we read it as a book club and I think I was able to make many converts in the process; this book is a deep well; it’s like swimming around in a nightmare of death only to have it turn into the best dream you’ve ever had (and yes, it’s literally a story about death and sleep and dreams); I still feel I’ve hardly reached the bottom of it, but this read I went pretty deep.

    “What does it all mean?” I said.

    “A good question,” the Raven rejoined. “Nobody knows what anything is; a man can learn only what a thing means. Whether he does depends on the use he is making of it.”

    “I’ve made no use of anything yet.”

    “Not much, but you know the fact, and that is something. Most people take more than a lifetime to learn that they have learned nothing and done even less.”

    Okay fine, one more:

    [Mr. Vane:] “But surely I had no power to make [the Little Ones] grow.” [The Raven]: “You might have removed some of the hindrances to their growing.” “But what are they? I did think perhaps it was the want of water.” “Of course it is! They have none to cry with!” “I would gladly have kept them from requiring any for that purpose.” “No doubt you would⁠—the aim of all stupid philanthropists! Why, Mr. Vane, but for the weeping in it, your world would never have become worth saving!”

    Okay fine, one more more:

    “We stood for a moment at the gate whence issued roaring the radiant river. I know not whence came the stones that fashioned it, but among them I saw the prototypes of all the gems I had loved on earth⁠—far more beautiful than they, for these were living stones⁠—such in which I saw, not the intent alone, but the intender too; not the idea alone, but the embodier present, the operant outsender: nothing in this kingdom was dead; nothing was mere; nothing only a thing.”

18. The Taming of the Shrew, William Shakespeare - not Bill’s most well-loved play and perhaps for good reason (though it did give rise to one of my wife’s favorite movies, Ten Things I Hate About You); weird but still enjoyable, with plenty of gems like this:

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    Why are our bodies soft and weak and smooth,
    Unapt to toil and trouble in the world,
    But that our soft conditions and our hearts
    Should well agree with our external parts? – Katherina, Act 5, Scene 1

19. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, William Shakespeare - probably most people’s first experience of Shakespeare (it was for me and for my kids, who had to act it out with their homeschool co-op a few years back; deserves its premier place.

20. The Once And Future King, T. H. White - super fun read; my son also enjoyed it; but I could see why the Inklings didn’t love it; a modern, casual, humorous adaptation of the Arthurian stories that’s not casual and humorous enough to be Monty Python and yet somehow too casual and humorous to feel like you’ve really entered the world of the legends themselves; not the way I would want the Arthurian stories to be introduced to my children (I’ll take Howard Pyle), but perhaps a nice light take on them for those already familiar; The Sword and the Stone by itself is still pretty magical though.

21. The Day Boy & The Night Girl, George Macdonald - somehow I didn’t even know this little gem existed until this year; a story about two children kidnapped and raised by a witch who only lets the boy live during daylight hours and only lets the girl be awake at night; besides being a great idea for a modern folk tale, it’s a brilliantly simple exploration of the mysteries of gender.

22. Grimm’s Fairy Tales, The Brothers Grimm - was pretty amazed at how readily my boys locked onto these stories compared to most things we read together; some of these stories are very weird–like a foreign language that you know means something but the meaning is veiled to you, we were sometimes tempted to think it was just narrative gibberish; other times the stories resonate for days or weeks; it’s a treasure trove for sure.

23. The Consolation of Philosophy, Boethius - as a Lewis aficionado, I’m embarrassed to say this was my first time reading the whole thing through; I loved it so much; can’t recommend highly enough:

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    Love, all-sovereign Love!—oh, then, 
    Ye are blest, ye sons of men, 
    If the love that rules the sky 
    In your hearts is throned on high!

24. Sir Gibbie, George Macdonald - the man’s soul is miles deep; I cannot imagine not being amazed by him for the rest of my life; this tale—forgive me, I say this as a huge Dostoevsky fan—struck me as a more maturely Christian version of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot.

    Alas for the human soul inhabiting a drink-fouled brain! It is a human soul still, and wretched in the midst of all that whisky can do for it. From the pit of hell it cries out. [...] There are sins which men must leave behind them, and sins which they must carry with them. Society scouts the drunkard because he is loathsome, and it matters nothing whether society be right or wrong, while it cherishes in its very bosom vices which are, to the God-born thing we call the soul, yet worse poisons. Drunkards and sinners, hard as it may be for them to enter into the kingdom of heaven, must yet be easier to save than the man whose position, reputation, money, engross his heart and his care, who seeks the praise of men and not the praise of God. When I am more of a Christian, I shall have learnt to be sorrier for the man whose end is money or social standing than for the drunkard.

    Or this:

    Having no natural bent to literature, but having in his youth studied for and practised at the Scotish bar [school of law], he had brought with him into the country a taste for certain kinds of dry reading, judged pre-eminently respectable: the history was mostly Scotish, or connected with Scotish affairs; the theology was entirely of the New England type of corrupted Calvinism, with which in Scotland they saddle the memory of great-souled, hard-hearted Calvin himself. Thoroughly respectable, and a little devout, Mr. Galbraith was a good deal more of a Scotchman than a Christian; growth was a doctrine unembodied in his creed; he turned from everything new, no matter how harmonious with the old, in freezing disapprobation; he recognized no element in God or nature which could not be reasoned about after the forms of the Scotch philosophy.

25. They Flew, Carlos M. N. Eire - hot take warning: I can’t remember a book which received such high praise from people I trust that fell so flat for me; not that the book was bad; don’t get me wrong: what it set out to do, it did excellently; as a historical accounting of some of the wildest miracles in the history of the church (mostly taking place at the dawn of modernity!), it’s an absolutely fascinating project, and the historical data seems carefully and thoughtfully put together; maybe this was just the moment in which I realized I don’t care for modern secular history; I wanted less lists and forensic corroborations of facts (I get it, lots of people flew) and more…meaning; I understand that we must still pretend that modern historians are not in the meaning business—other than to paint a picture of the philosophical and theological imaginary out of which these events supposedly took place—they’re “just giving the facts,” and I do actually appreciate an air of neutrality, but for my money, I wanted more; I don’t think this was any fault of the author, who seems a more brilliant man than I; I guess I just discovered that some people really care about facts more than I do and are less curious (or at least more humbly silent) than I about what such facts might imply about the world in which they supposedly occurred; it felt a little like those old apologetics books from the 90’s trying to give forensic proof of the resurrection of Christ; I can see how that could be a valid use of scholarship; perhaps 70% of my disappointment is just personal preference as to how to show the reality of a thing (for me, if the meaning of an event resonates and integrates with the rest of reality, I judge it as more trustworthy than merely if the scientific method has verified the available data), but again I admit this is mostly personal preference; the other 30% of my issue is perhaps more objective, and it has to do with the way people imagine we know things about the past: I take it as rather straightforward that the past is not present, and therefore that factual access to events that occurred before our time are not accessible to us in the same way; our access to the past, whether we like it or not, is facilitated almost entirely by means of narrative, that is, by means of past peoples’ presentation of facts not unfiltered—but necessarily filtered—through their meaning and their value structures, and requires us to dance to their tune (not our own) if we want to know them (archaeology is, of course, an exception to this rule, and yet is all the more in danger of anachronism since the “direct access” which it affords tends toward an overly confident approach, unknowingly filtering past facts directly through our present imaginary and then telling modern stories under the guise of revealing ancient truths); anyway, my over-criticism is probably mostly coming from the fact that, as I read this book, I was writing about the meaning of miracles myself, and felt the book to be stubbornly unwilling to converse with my particular interests, which is my problem, not the author’s, so take all this with a large grain of salt.

26. English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, C. S. Lewis - still haven’t quite finished it, but part of the reason for that is that the very long intro, “New Learning and New Ignorance,” which could be published as a book in itself, so captivated me on this reading that I read it FOUR times before continuing to the rest of the book; it’s a rich philosophical and theological exploration of the West’s slow turn to modernity:

    Man with his new [scientific] powers became rich like Midas, but all that he touched had gone dead and cold.

27. The Hidden Life of Trees, Peter Wohlleben - not a big science guy, but I try to read at least one science book each year; this one blew my mind, and if you’re familiar with my “On Moving Mountains” series, you’ll see why:

    In the symbiotic community of the forest, not only trees but also shrubs and grasses—and possibly all plant species— exchange information this way [by communicative networks of call-and-response]. However, when we step into farm fields, the vegetation becomes very quiet. Thanks to selective breeding, our cultivated plants have, for the most part, lost their ability to communicate above or below ground—you could say they are deaf and dumb—and therefore they are easy prey for insect pests. That is one reason why modern agriculture uses so many pesticides. Perhaps farmers can learn from the forests and breed a little more wildness back into their grain and potatoes so that they’ll be more talkative in the future.

    As in the world of Prince Caspian’s Narnia, our once “talking” world has become deaf and dumb. But since it may have been our own spells that put it to sleep, perhaps we can also be the ones to wake the world to its former (and, more imporantly, future) glories.

28. Against the Machine, Paul Kingsnorth - most of you will have heard too much of this book already from other sources; I’ll just repeat what I have said before about Kingsnorth’s anti-civilization project: For those frustrated by Kingsnorth’s seeming all-or-nothing style, try to hear him prophetically, not strictly theologically. It may not be a categorical fact that civilization is always a sinful structure, that jellyfish tribes & Christian barbarians are always the way forward, but if, as I believe, we are passing from a Joseph Moment to a Moses Moment, Kingsnorth’s emphasis is appropriate and will prove even more true over time. Also, you gotta love this quote he drops from Chesterton:

    The whole modern world has divided itself into conservatives and progressives. The business of progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.

29. The Story of the Trinity, Bryan M. Litfin - a great little beginner-level read on the history of the doctrine of the Trinity by an old professor of mine from UVA.

30. The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights, John Steinbeck - this was a gem I had no idea existed before a few months ago; bummer he never completely finished it; critical reviews, as I understand, were mixed, mostly lamenting the fact that he did very little new with the text other than clean up Malory’s archaic language for a younger/modern audience and add his own style and emphases to the narrative, but that’s exactly what I love about it; there are, in my opinion, too many “modern adaptations” of things which, lacking the humility of a translator (which is already a creative and interpretative work in itself), insist on making the original work better by asserting their own “improvements;” the irony here is of course that if anyone had the talent to create his own Arthurian world, it was Steinbeck; and yet he was humble enough not to do so; cheers to that; still quite Steinbeckian though, in its own way; a shame he didn’t finish it.

31. The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis - an almost yearly read; much of my recent essay series “On Moving Mountains” is in response to some of the loose threads left by this brilliant critique of our modern perspective on reality.

32. Waiting on the Word, Malcolm Guite - beautiful collection of Advent poems with just the right amount of commentary; I don’t care for commentary generally, but I find, with poetry, a good commentator really helps me love and appreciate every word more; Guite is that kind of commentator; plus he picks great poetry:

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    By God’s birth 
    Our common birth is holy; birth
    Is all at Christmas time and wholly blest
    --- from “Christmas and Common Birth” by Anne Ridler

33. On Fairy Stories, J. R. R. Tolkien - fourth or fifth time reading; always opens new doors for me; if Lewis is the father of my thinking, Tolkien is the mysterious uncle who interjects a different style and perspective on the same truths at just the right times and in just the right ways:

    The Gospels contain a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories… The Birth of Christ is the Eucatastrophe of Man’s history. The Resurrection is the Eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy… There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true, and none which so many skeptical men have accepted as true on its own merits… Art has been verified. God is the Lord, of angels, and of men—and of elves. Legend and History have met and fused. But in God’s kingdom the presence of the greatest does not depress the small. Redeemed Man is still man. Story, fantasy, still go on, and should go on. The Evangelium has not abrogated legends; it has hallowed them, especially the ‘happy ending’.

34. Jack and the Fallen Giants / Rapunzel and the Evil Witch, Jonathan Pageau - speaking of fairy tales…these are small books, so I thought I’d include them together; Pageau’s fairy tale series continues to amaze; I especially love Rapunzel, my favorite and, I think, the deepest so far; I’ll be teaching my students on it this Spring.

2025 Podcasts

Not a big year for me and podcasts…

1. “The Symbolic World,” Jonathan Pageau (most)

2. “Interesting Times,” Ross Douthat (most)

3. “The Rest Is History,” Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook (a few)

2025 Interviews, Courses, Essays, & Lectures

1. “Metacrisis: Interview with Jordan Hall,” by Pavel Schelin - brilliant discussion; this was the interview that became the backdrop for my own interview with Jordan a few weeks later entitled “The Divine Economy”

2. “Sexuality After Industrialism” by James Wood - my favorite essay of the year over at Mere Orthodoxy, reflections on Ivan Illich’s book Gender; I think I read it while I was writing “Partnership Over Compromise,” which turned out to be the most popular essay I’ve ever written on Substack.

3. “Feminism, the Body, and the Machine” by Wendell Berry - another (obviously much older) piece on the same subject matter: gender and the possibility of home-based economics in the post-industrial age; excellent from beginning to end.

4. “We Must Become Barbarians” by Paul Kingsnorth - this one blew my socks after; turned out to be one of the grand finale chapters to Kingsnorth’s aforementioned book Against the Machine, and rightly so; the notion of “cooked barbarians”—those living within the walls of the Empire, who pay their taxes, etc but nevertheless pay it little homage and have formed their own subtle village-style economy under its nose–-has stuck with me.

5. “Symbolism Masterclass,” a course by Jonathan Pageau - a work of absolute genius; I have said it before, but I think Jonathan Pageau (perhaps paired with his brother Matthieu) is the closest thing our generation has to a C. S. Lewis; he sees things that few others see and communicates them on a popular level in a way that few others can; I don’t think Pageau has been gifted with quite the same level of clarity in communication as Lewis, and it shows, especially in courses like this; it’s not as easy to follow as I was hoping, especially for the uninitiated—I’ve struggled for years to find the right way to share this man’s work with people who know nothing about him—but still…no one’s really doing what he’s doing; I thank God for this man.

6. “Tolkien & Universal History,” a course by Richard Rohlin - okay fine, Richard Rohlin is kind of doing what Pageau is doing; but he doing it with Pageau at Symbolic World, so yeah; Richard is another faithful genius, and this course was great for people like me who love Tolkien but don’t really “nerd out” to him like so many of his followers do; I learned a lot; highly recommend.

7. “Deeper Yet Into Creation and Renewal” an interview w/ Matthieu Pageau - had to throw something of Matthieu in here; still think “The Language of Renewal” is the most mind-blowing interview I’ve watched in a couple of years at least; looking forward to his next book; this interview is great too though!

8. “When A Heart Is Really Alive: George Macdonald and the Prophetic Imagination” by Malcolm Guite - a wonderful lecture by one of my favorite contemporary thinkers talking about one of my favorite writers of all time.

9. “Conversation of Michael Levin with Iain McGilchrist #2” - I mentioned I don’t read or follow much science, but I’ve been following both of these two quite closely, since both seem to have (certainly McGilchrist does have) a deep philosophy undergirding their science, which seems rare these days; this was a great conversation; both of these men’s work have informed my recent essay series, “On Moving Mountains”

10. “The Over-Diagnosis Crisis” w/ Dr. Suzanne O’Sullivan - another deep interest/concern of mine, tackled with admirable skill and nuance by Dr. O’Sullivan; glad to see a publication like Unherd having these kinds of conversations.

11. “Jordan Peterson vs. 20 Atheists” - okay, I wouldn’t say this was one of my favorite videos of the year, but it definitely made me think a lot; in general I think Christian critics were too hard on Peterson after this one; but that’s not all I think; you can read more of my thoughts here: “On Prophets & Their Demise”

12. “Brave New Biology” w/ Jonathan Pageau, Michael Levin, & John Vervaeke - man, this conversation was thrilling and terrifying; Levin confirms, through biological research, what so much of my theological explorations have posited about the difference between power and authority; as it turns out, even the cutting age of science is discovering the world is made primarily of “call-and-response,” not “cause-and-effect.”

2025 Music I Enjoyed

Alas, not a lot. Mostly just listened to Bach, Billy Joel and Fleet Foxes again. The new Jacob Collier was good, as usual. The new Taylor Swift not so much. released a great little EP about marriage; he came and played it on our backyard, which was wonderful. And my friend William Sumner continues to write beautiful stuff like this.

2025 New (& Old) Movies & Shows I Watched

1. Severance (Season 2) - I don’t know; I loved the first season, but it just felt like the second season was far too slow getting to the punch line; whole episodes where hardly anything happened; they saved FAR too much for the final episode, but I admit that the final episode did not totally disappoint; I sort of hated it when I first watched it, but then Jonathan Pageau’s analysis helped me appreciate it more; did I feel like it wasted my time at times? yes; is it still the most original, most intelligent, and possibly deepest show on the internet right now? also yes.

2. The Minecraft Movie - was actually pretty fun for being an obviously not very good movie; I admit I just love Jack Black being Jack Black.

3. Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning - not everyone liked this one, but I finished the series feeling grateful for what it had accomplished; definitely some cliche moments and less-than-profound messages baked in, but the main theme that stood out to me from the films, which was emphasized beautifully in the last, is this: Ethan Hunt is a man who refuses again and again to save the world at the expense of his friends and loved ones, a thing which his governmental superiors continue to fault him for. Is he seriously going to put the whole world at risk to save the person he loves…again? Yes, he is. You see, Ethan somehow understands the Christian paradox of love, which is this: to love your neighbor is to do your part in saving the world. Whereas to love the world despite your neighbor is to save neither. Because Ethan embodies this truth, his sacrificial actions (like those of Christ) not only save his loved ones, they really do save the world. Moreover, his actions (like Christ’s) inspire others to sacrifice themselves with him, which in turn saves and redeems the world even more. It’s almost like Tom Cruise has been reading Dostoevsky…or the Bible. Or maybe not. Either way, the films are haunted with this paradoxical truth, just as our civilization is still haunted with the Christ we have tried so hard to leave behind.

4. Fountain of Youth - pleasantly surprising National-Treasure-style good-humored adventure flick, directed by Guy Ritchie, starring John Krasinki and Natalie Portman (what could go wrong); honestly, really the only thing that went wrong was that the ending was a bit intense and over-bearing, sort of along the lines of people’s faces melting off in Raiders of the Lost Ark; not enough wisdom or experience or creativity to know how to depict spiritual danger.

5. Stick (Season 1) - first season was really enjoyable; Owen Wilson seems like he kinda plays himself and I’m all for it; not as good as Season 1 of Ted Lasso, but a nice effort in that direction.

6. The Waltons - it was a Waltons year for our family; maybe my favorite show we’ve ever watched as a family; the script-writing is formulaic, but in the best way; no problem presented is every easily or tritely solved; life is complex, even when it is simple; the line between good and evil runs straight through the human heart, and yet, through suffering, perseverance and love, good does seem to triumph again and again; highly recommend.

7. 30 Rock - I don’t know why, but this show still makes me laugh more than almost any other; interpret that as you will; I’m not particularly proud of it, just being honest.

8. The Big Short - re-watched this one on a plane with my wife last week; can’t remember watching something with such clever writing and story-telling; not sure if it’s underrated, but man, I forgot how good it was.

9. Ready Player One - hadn’t seen it before; the whole family really enjoyed it, though we were definitely rooting for the whole virtual world to be destroyed at the end; nevertheless, exceeded expectations.

10. Master & Commander - took some convincing to get the whole family to watch this with me, and though there were some grisly parts, everyone enjoyed it; and for me, it was just as much of a masterpiece of writing, acting, and directing as I remembered.

What did I miss? I really want to watch the new Frankenstein and the new Knives Out. A good friend also told me to watch Train Dreams. Those are the three on my list for the new year.

Ross’s Best of 2025:

• Best Classic Fiction I Read: Lilith, George MacDonald (1895)

• Best Contemporary-ish Fiction I Read: The Place of the Lion, Charles Williams (1931)

• Best Non-Fiction I Read: The Hidden Life of Trees, Peter Wohlleben (2016)

• Best Show or Movie I Saw: Severance, Season 2 (2025)

Ross’s Best of 2024 (for the record):

• Best Classic Fiction I Read: Phantastes, George MacDonald (1858)

• Best Contemporary Fiction I Read: The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco (1986)

• Best Non-Fiction I Read: Poetic Diction, Owen Barfield (1928)

• Best Show I Watched: Dark Matter (2024)

Ross’s Best of 2023 (for the record)

• Best Classic Fiction I Read: Robin Hood, Louis Rhead (1910)

• Best Contemporary Fiction I Read: Hannah Coulter, Wendell Berry (2004)

• Best Non-Fiction I Read: Remaking The World, Andrew Wilson (2023)

• Best Film I Saw: Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan (2023)

Ross’s Best of 2022 (for the record)

• Best Classic Fiction I Read: East of Eden, John Steinbeck (1952)

• Best Contemporary Fiction I Read: Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, Susanna Clarke (2004)

• Best Non-Fiction I Read: Seeing Like A State, James C. Scott (1998)

• Best Film I Saw: Pig, with Nicolas Cage (technically 2021)

That’s it! Please share your own “Best of 2025” in the Comments. I’d love to know hwat I missed. Merry Christmas & Happy New Year!

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Old Tom Bombadil is a merry fellow, 
Bright blue his jacket is, and his boots are yellow. 
None has ever caught him yet, for Tom, he is the master: 
His songs are stronger songs, and his feet are faster.

Intro: Magic or Mastery?

As I begin this third installment of my essay series on moving mountains (check out Part 1 and Part 2 if you haven’t yet), I’m trying to fight the nagging fear that some might judge this to be the most annoying of the three. At the close of my last essay, I posed a question:

What would it look like to be trustworthy to a mountain for long enough to change its mind so that it wants to respond to our call? How can we begin to remake our lordship into love so that it can finally become true lordship? I have some ideas.

Indeed, I have one idea in particular. But—here’s where the annoying part comes in—my idea is not exactly a packageable solution. You could not apply it today and be impressed with how well it’s working tomorrow. If it ‘works’ at all, it works like a mustard seed becomes a tree. And so the best way I know how to communicate it is to begin to paint a picture, or series of pictures, of how a tree grows, in hopes that that picture becomes a path and that path takes us toward the solution we seek.

Of course, I understand the frustration of those who already feel like this series needs to “get to the point.” I feel it myself. But if the question at the heart of this study is, “How might we (literally) move mountains?” the answer doesn’t lend itself to a quick summary, nor to a quick anything. Jesus did not train sorcerers, but sons. And sons (and daughters) must first stumble through the awkward and unfit stages of infancy and adolescence before their inheritance can be rightly realized.

St. Francis, we’ve been told, commanded birds and fish and wolves in much the same way that Jesus commanded the storm. How did he do it? And how can we follow in his footsteps? The idea that drives these final two essays is that Christian miracles are not what we often think. In particular, they are less like magic and more like mastery.

I don’t mean scientific mastery exactly, at least not the kind that has built our modern machines. Today’s technologists have more in common with yesterday’s alchemists than they might care to acknowledge. Even their ‘mastery’ is more like that of the magician than the proper scientist.1 Nor by mastery do I mean the kind of spiritual techniques that drive the “name-it-and-claim-it” side of charismatic Christian culture. Such charismatics are perhaps most in agreement with my general premise, that we can move mountains with a mustard seed of faith. Amen. Yet that very belief has sent many down the short road of spiritual power rather than the longer, more arduous path of authority and mastery.

I tell you the truth, the kingdom of heaven is like a musical instrument which few have the patience to play, not because it is impossibly hard, but because it is the kind of instrument that takes nothing less than a lifetime to learn. But to the one who keeps playing and does not stop, it will produce a song unlike any that has ever been heard in the history of the world. Many will try to play it, but few will hear its song.

Andy Crouch has argued that the central project of our cultural moment is to replace instruments (which require patient mastery over time) with devices (which give us what we want when we want it). Andy was talking about literal technologies, but I suspect the same can be said of our contemporary spirituality. We want an experience of God, and we want it now. This is why many of our evangelical and charismatic worship services—and even more of our popular worship music—appeal to a pattern that resembles that of Simon the Sorcerer much more than the Persistent Widow.

Technological and spiritual devices play the role of the genie. What the genie gives, he gives immediately, obviously, automatically. What he takes, he takes slowly, incrementally, and almost imperceptibly. That is the hidden bargain we make with our favorite wish-granters.

Mastery, on the other hand, works in almost exactly the opposite manner. What it takes is obvious from the start: nothing less than your immediate, consistent, embodied devotion. But what it gives, it gives slowly, subtly, and most of all, sustainably.

St. Francis understood—and more importantly embodied—this kind of mastery. He fulfilled his role as a cosmic middleman, forging relationships of trust and trustworthiness with God above and creation below. And the immediate result, perhaps, was that more birds followed him than people. But that didn’t last long. Within only a few years, his influence surpassed that of many popes and kings combined. Mastery is slow. But as my Navy Seal friends say, “Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.”

The Tortoise And The Hare

The thesis of this series is that God works primarily according to the subtle economy of call-and-response and only secondarily according to the more obvious economy of cause-and-effect, and that human beings were meant to do the same. The physics of heaven is authority: “Let there be light,” which governs the physics of earth: “And there was light.” My claim is a simple one: Call-and-response is what actually rules the world. Call-and-response governs cause-and-effect. This is how everything works. This is why life is beautiful. This is why love is real. But this is also why our world and our own hearts remain so tragically un-redeemed, even after the Redeemer has come and conquered.

Our Lord said it himself: his kingdom is not of this world. It operates according to a different principle. Cause-and-effect is automatic, like pushing a button on a device, like Newton’s Third Law of Motion. But call-and-response is not. For every action, there is not an equal and opposite reaction. It does ‘work’—his word does not return to him void—but it doesn’t work in straight lines. Christ’s “conquest” of Rome took three hundred years longer than his disciples were hoping for and required only one major act of force: his enemies nailing him to a tree. The kingdom of call-and-response is a long-game. Authority is the tortoise, and power is the hare. The tortoise is winning, and he will certainly win in the end. But his victory may look like defeat all the way up to the finish line.

Moreover, believing in such a kingdom (even a little bit) is no small thing. It’s like putting your money on the tortoise as you watch the hare blow past him. Why would anyone ever make such a bet? Of course, most of us don’t. Most of us bet on the hare, the way of power. And we choose it because, most of the time, it works. Power is a pretty straightforward deal. When Moses strikes the rock instead of speaking to it as the Lord had commanded, it still produces water for the people. When Adam and Eve take the fruit from the forbidden tree, it still feeds them and gives them knowledge. Only later do they find, in each case, that their methods cost them the Promised Land.

It is my contention that much of our contemporary world is operating according to a similar protocol. We are striking the rock, stealing the fruit, betting on the hare, and enjoying our victory all the way up to the moment of defeat. We are suckers for push-button solutions to deeply non-push-button problems, because, again, they seem to work. And also because, though our hearts yearn to be something like married to the good world that God gave us—yes, even to its storms and sea monsters2—we are neither patient enough nor courageous enough to commit ourselves to that union. So we settle for a kind of profitable promiscuity, which pays the bills without “tying us down.” And the water we force from the rock and the fruit we steal from the tree tastes…fine. It almost satiates.

But let’s say you did bet on the tortoise. What would that be like? Well, it would be like losing, for a long time, before you win. Like reorienting yourself toward the patient mastery of a much longer race, fixing your eyes on a finish line you cannot even see. This is the way of faith. This is the way of authority. And I think it’s the way mountains are moved. Call-and-response is a long-game compared to cause-and-effect. But it might not take as long as you think. Again, slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.

Come In, She Said, I’ll Give Ya…Diapers For The Storm

And they woke him and said to him, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” And he awoke and rebuked the wind and said to the sea, “Peace. Be still.” And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm. He said to them, “Why are you so afraid? Have you still no faith?” And they were filled with great fear and said to one another, “Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?” (Mark 4:38-41)

Last year’s blockbuster Twisters was not a bad film. As the follow-up to Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton’s 1996 thriller Twister, of which little-kid-Ross was a big fan, the sequel delivered a similar plot and spirit, though with one major difference, which bothered me more, the more I thought about it.

Both movies focus on two courageous storm-chasing scientists, a man and a woman, who put themselves in the path of massive tornadoes to see how they work, in hopes of saving future lives. Both pairs are haunted by tragic backstories thanks to the monsters they now chase. Both pairs are faced with the strange necessity to get up-close-and-personal with the beautiful and deadly unknown, whether it be a city-swallowing tornado or their possibly-romantic counterpart. Both movies are ultimately about communion.

But whereas in the original story, the aim is to get close enough to the storms to gain deeper knowledge (for the development of better warning systems), in the sequel, the protagonist Kate has a different, more impatient plan. She has invented a means of overpowering tornadoes by shooting super-absorbent polymers—the stuff diapers are made of—into the cyclone in order to suck the moisture out, forcing the storm to collapse. In short, she doesn’t want to know the tornados so much as to kill them.

Thankfully, this strange tension between killing and communion is soon resolved in the person of Kate’s romantic prospect, Tyler, who not only saves the day but, in my opinion, saves the film. Tyler (played by Glen Powell) is an intelligent, thrill-seeking redneck who actually does still chase twisters for the awe and wonder of it. Despite his coarse exterior, Tyler represents a more patient relationship with the storms they’re chasing: “It’s part science and part religion…When you love something, you spend your whole life trying to understand it.” One could almost imagine him speaking to the storm and the storm listening.

At first, Kate thinks Tyler is an idiot, but eventually his partnership—and rare ability to put himself right in the middle of these cyclones—helps her to reclaim not only her initial love for the storms but also, more importantly, her love of the people and place she left behind (for a fancy desk job in New York City of all places) after a traumatic experience with a twister years earlier.

All this doesn’t exactly derail Kate’s mission to kill the beast that killed her friends—the polymers work in the end—but by the grace of God the filmmakers seemed to intuit that tornado-diapering alone would hardly suffice as a compelling conclusion. So, in the penultimate scene, as in the original film, the lovebirds are forced into the heart of the storm where together they behold and admire its beauty and wrath. And this gives them the courage to behold the mysterious beauty they see and fear in one another. Love, after all, is not a storm you can simply kill from a distance, but which must overtake and almost consume you like a twister before you can see exactly what it is and what it’s worth.

By now, you can probably see where I’m going with this. From a Christian perspective, there are two ways to calm a storm: you can force it, as Kate does in Twisters, or you can speak to it, as Christ does in the Gospels. The first has to do with power or cause-and-effect; the second has to do with authority or call-and-response. Understanding the difference between the two may ultimately frame what you think the Christian life is, and is for. But again, what kind of person could speak to a storm, and how would one learn to do so?

The Playful Authority of Tom Bombadil

I mentioned J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings once already in this series. Imagine, I said, that not unlike Sauron forging the one Ring of Power in order to enslave all the races of Middle Earth, God gave to Adam and Eve a kind of “ring of authority” by which they were meant to lead and guide the created order into further and deeper love and faith and glory. But that ring, too, was lost. The dominion of Adam was corrupted.

What I didn’t mention then was that I think Tolkien also had this notion on his mind, this curious distinction between power and authority. His clearest depiction of it is in the character of Tom Bombadil, who, in my view, seems to possess the very ring of authority I’m talking about.

The Lord of the Rings, as anyone will tell you, is a story of good versus evil. But more specifically, it’s a story about the problem of power, about how power can corrupt even the best men who wield it uncarefully, and about how something more than power is required if goodness is to win in the end. But what? Courage, hope, faith, and loyalty might all be suitable answers, judging from the main characters of the story, who, armed with such virtues as these, defend Middle Earth from the rule of Sauron. Yet in the early chapters of Tolkien’s epic, we meet another figure, who represents a different—and, I think, even deeper—answer to this question.

Tom Bombadil is the oldest living being in Middle Earth. The hobbits first meet him in the Old Forest, when he stumbles almost haphazardly upon their dire encounter with Old Man Willow, who has swallowed Merry and Pippin into his trunk. At the height of their desperation, Frodo hears the faint sound of a man singing nonsense in the distance:

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Hey dol! merry dol! ring a dong dillo! 
Ring a dong! hop along! fal lal the willow! 
Tom Bom, jolly Tom, Tom Bombadillo!

This is how we meet the oldest and most ‘powerful’ being in all of Middle Earth.

Frodo and Sam stood as if enchanted. The wind puffed out. The leaves hung silently again on stiff branches. There was another burst of song, and then suddenly, hopping and dancing along the path, there appeared above the reeds an old battered hat with a tall crown and a long blue feather stuck in the band. With another hop and a bound there came into view a man, or so it seemed. At any rate he was too large and heavy for a hobbit, if not quite tall enough for one of the Big People, though he made noise enough for one, stumping along with great yellow boots on his thick legs, and charging through grass and rushes like a cow going down to drink. He had a blue coat and a long brown beard; his eyes were blue and bright, and his face was red as a ripe apple, but creased into a hundred wrinkles of laughter. In his hands he carried on a large leaf as on a tray a small pile of white water-lilies. [...]

‘My friends are caught in the willow-tree,’ cried Frodo breathlessly.

‘What?’ shouted Tom Bombadil, leaping up in the air. ‘Old Man Willow? Naught worse than that, eh? That can soon be mended. I know the tune for him.’

Keep in mind, the hobbits had been fighting for their lives. Just moments before, they had tried to set the tree on fire, but that had only made things worse. And yet Tom immediately ‘knows the tune for him’. Without the slightest change in his whimsical tone, he sings to the ancient tree, and at once it lets Merry and Pippin go. Tom then invites the hobbits back to his home, where they learn more about their mysterious rescuer.

‘Fair lady!’ said Frodo [speaking to his wife, Goldberry], ‘Who is Tom Bombadil?’

‘He is,’ said Goldberry, staying her swift movements and smiling.

Frodo looked at her questioningly.

‘He is, as you have seen him,’ she said in answer to his look. ‘He is the Master of wood, water, and hill.’

‘Then all this strange land belongs to him?’

‘No indeed!’ she answered, and her smile faded. ‘That would indeed be a burden,’ she added in a low voice, as if to herself. ‘The trees and the grasses and all things growing or living in the land belong each to themselves. Tom Bombadil is the Master. No one has ever caught old Tom walking in the forest, wading in the water, leaping on the hill-tops under light and shadow. He has no fear. Tom Bombadil is master.’

The trees and grasses and creatures of the wood belong to themselves, she says—that is, they have their own agency, their own undisturbed purposes, their own life and existence—but Tom is the master. He has no interest in power, and yet he rules the whole forest realm. How? By his songs. By his words. By his playful authority, to which even the most hardened and powerful creatures of the forest submit without question.

Later that night, the hobbits tell Tom the tale of their journey thus far—of Gandalf, of the Black Riders, and even of the ring.

‘Show me the precious Ring!’ [Tom] said suddenly in the midst of the story: and Frodo, to his own astonishment, drew out the chain from his pocket, and unfastening the Ring handed it at once to Tom. It seemed to grow larger as it lay for a moment on his big brown-skinned hand. Then suddenly he put it to his eye and laughed. For a second the hobbits had a vision, both comical and alarming, of his bright blue eye gleaming through a circle of gold. Then Tom put the Ring round the end of his little finger and held it up to the candlelight. For a moment the hobbits noticed nothing strange about this. Then they gasped. There was no sign of Tom disappearing! Tom laughed again, and then he spun the Ring in the air – and it vanished with a flash. Frodo gave a cry – and Tom leaned forward and handed it back to him with a smile.

The depth of foresight required to include such a careless and comical figure as Tom Bombadil so near the beginning of an otherwise quite dark and treacherous quest seems to surpass even Tolkien’s own ingenious machinations. I really think it might be the most important tangent in all of modern story-telling. Yet, at first glance, it seems like a terrible idea. With respect to the story as a whole, Tom appears as an almost cartoonish shock to the system, a jarring aside, too definitively early in the story to pass for a mere tangent, and yet too disconnected from the rest of the narrative to justify its central position. It’s the sort of episode any good editor would tell you to cut. Peter Jackson did cut it from his film adaptations, though out of respect, not disdain. Yet one can hardly imagine how it would have played to include Tom in the movies.

Tolkien himself is far from denying the incongruity. If anything, he overstates it in Letter #144:

Tom Bombadil is not an important person – to the narrative. I suppose he has some importance as a ‘comment’. [...] He represents something that I feel important, though I would not be prepared to analyze the feeling precisely. I would not, however, have left him in, if he did not have some kind of function.

But what is that function? I think we can begin to see it if we consider the impression the Peter Jackson movies left without Tom Bombadil ever gracing the screen. The films, in my view, are a masterpiece. However, without Tom, they do come dangerously close to convincing us that the struggle for Middle Earth is primarily a struggle between good power and bad power, which was never Tolkien’s objective.

The ring doesn’t represent “bad power” so much as power itself. Like the devil’s temptation of Christ in the wilderness—“I will give you all the kingdoms of the world. Only bow to me,”—the ring makes power primary. That is its trap. Straight-line power becomes the master, when it was meant to be a servant. Christ would claim the kingdoms of the world as his own, but not by such means. Likewise, the Fellowship must trust not in the Ring of Power itself to defeat Sauron, but in the unlikely success of a defenseless hobbit zig-zagging his way across Middle Earth and into the adder’s den.

In other words, the Fellowship bets everything on the tortoise. And yes, Aragorn and Gandalf do use good power against bad power to protect the hobbits on that journey (and to protect the kingdoms of men from utter ruin). But they understand that such battles are only secondary affairs, that all of it will have meant nothing if Frodo and Sam are unable to sacrifice the ring—to “give it back” to the fire from which it came—just as Tom Bombadil had so effortlessly given it back to Frodo at the beginning of their quest. In this way, Tolkien cleverly gives us a picture of the end of the quest at the beginning. Tom is Frodo’s plausibility structure for doing the impossible.

After leaving Bombadil’s home, the hobbits soon find themselves in another deadly impasse, this time in the hands of a barrow wight (an evil spirit of the tombs), who has captured and cast a spell on them with its own cold song. But just before the end, Frodo remembers what Tom taught them: not some great power of self-defense, but a call for help, a song.

In a small desperate voice he began: ‘Ho! Tom Bombadil!’ and with that name his voice seemed to grow strong: it had a full and lively sound, and the dark chamber echoed as if to drum and trumpet.

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Ho! Tom Bombadil, Tom Bombadillo! 
By water, wood and hill, by the reed and willow, 
By fire, sun and moon, harken now and hear us! 
Come, Tom Bombadil, for our need is near us! 

There was a sudden deep silence, in which Frodo could hear his heart beating. After a long slow moment he heard plain, but far away, as if it was coming down through the ground or through thick walls, an answering voice singing:

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Old Tom Bombadil is a merry fellow, 
Bright blue his jacket is, and his boots are yellow. 
None has ever caught him yet, for Tom, he is the master: 
His songs are stronger songs, and his feet are faster. 

Frodo’s song is an image of childlike prayer. Not perhaps the sort that can move mountains (yet), but at least the sort that has come to believe that mountains can be moved by the one who has authority to do so. Notice the play between slow and fast. There is a long, slow moment in which Tom seems nowhere in sight. Then he appears, singing of his victory, “His songs are stronger and his feet are faster.” Tom’s authority is not like the power of the barrow wight, not even like Gandalf’s magic. He is older and more patient than Gandalf, more patient even than death itself. After Tom sings away the demon, he and Frodo carry the unconscious hobbits out of the tomb and lay them down, still as death, on the ground. Tom sings again, and the hobbits wake to new life. Even death bends its ear to the master’s song.

This is our last encounter with Tom Bombadil. The rest of the narrative will be driven by clever plans and courageous deeds. Wizards and warriors will arm themselves and expend their strength in the great battle against the Dark Lord. And it will not have been in vain. But neither will it have been the main event, since, all the time, the secret to Sauron’s destruction lay in the tiny hands of a hobbit from the Shire.

And what is that secret? Not the ring itself. No, the secret is rather the knowledge that the ring is not the secret. The secret is a mustard seed of faith, a growing hope that a word or a song really can drive out the darkness and raise the dead to life. Faith enough to lay the ring down, or else to do something even more impossible: to carry it and guard it and fight to hold onto it for just long enough to let it go forever. Perhaps not even Bombadil could or would have done such a thing himself. Perhaps Gandalf was right that Tom would have only misplaced the ring or thrown it away, since he cared so little for power.

Either way, I think it was Tom who first showed Frodo what a mustard seed of faith could do, by teaching him to sing a joyful song in the black of the tomb. In that moment, Frodo became not the master, but at least the master’s apprentice. The song was not yet his own, but at least he had learned to sing it.

Unfortunately, the ring did not then become lighter for Frodo, as it had been for Tom. Nor could Tom carry the burden that was his alone to carry. Nevertheless, Frodo had tasted and submitted himself to the playful authority of Tom Bombadil. And in doing so, he had come to know something of the subtler physics of Middle Earth, which few beside him would ever see so clearly.

‘Hey! Come Frodo, there! [said Tom, after Frodo had put on the ring, thinking himself invisible to all in Tom’s house]. Where be you a-going? Old Tom Bombadil’s not as blind as that yet. Take off your golden ring! Your hand’s more fair without it. Come back! Leave your game and sit down beside me! We must talk a while more, and think about the morning. Tom must teach the right road, and keep your feet from wandering.’

In a sense, Tom did go with Frodo on the rest of his quest. After leaving the Old Forest, Frodo would assume the pseudonym “Underhill” seeking to keep his identity under wraps as they entered Bree. I hadn’t noticed until this reading that “Under hill” is the exact phrase used to refer to the otherwise nameless house of Tom Bombadil.

You Will Say To This Mountain

For truly, I say to you, if you have faith like a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move, and nothing will be impossible for you. (Matthew 17:20)

Like Frodo, we are perhaps far from embodying the kind of mastery we see in Tom Bombadil or Saint Francis. But like Frodo, we can become apprentices. We can learn to sing our Lord’s songs, even if they are not yet our own. And when we do, we find that Christ’s mastery, like Tom’s, is a patient game of relationship and participation. He conquers by converting. Even Death is no exception to this rule. How did Jesus move the mountain of Death? He moved it not by stripping it of its agency, not by ignoring its formal and final cause, but by acknowledging the best natural good it had to offer and calling that natural good to submit to an even higher purpose.3

The natural purpose of death is to end life. When life is good, death’s purpose is at odds with goodness. But if life has become corrupted, then death has an opportunity: it can become a double negative for the glory of God. Death can take up its cross. It can work against itself for the good of life, to purify and invite new birth. This is how Christ’s authority operates. It doesn’t force even death to change its tune, but rather takes the most dissonant notes in creation and harmonizes them into his divine symphony. In Christ, Death does lose its sting, yet without losing its place and purpose. Instead that purpose is integrated and perfected. This is mastery.

Now, through the lens of Christ, we can better comprehend other miracles which bear the same trademark. When Moses parts the waters of the Red Sea, the waters do not become mere raw material in his hands. They are rather enlisted and consecrated as God’s host (in every sense of the word). Far from ceasing to be waters of chaos, they actually become God’s weapon of chaos against Pharaoh’s army. First, Moses lifts his hand, and the waters stand at attention on his right and on his left, as though awaiting orders. For a moment, they appear to have had their very nature stolen from them, as God’s people walk on dry ground. But that is only the beginning of the miracle. Then Moses raises his hand again, and the waters fall upon their enemies, simultaneously obeying their own nature and God’s greater purpose. The sign becomes a sacrament. The waters become the hand of God without ceasing to be waters. What was once “good” is now being made perfect through Moses’s faith.

But what of the mountains we wish to move? Mountains, too, are more than raw material. They were called good when God made them, and that goodness remains. The believer trusts the goodness of the mountain, even if he cannot yet see it, even if the mountain stands in his way. In fact, death and mountains are most alike—and perhaps most like God—in their permanence. The glory of a mountain, one might say, is to be immovable. But the even greater glory of a mountain is to move when Adam says so. And the glory of Adam is to represent God’s wisdom, not his own, when he tells the immovable to move. If all goes well, the mountain submits to Adam as Adam submits to God, and both mountain and mover are perfected in the process. But all does not go well. Adam abandons his post. And so Christ comes to restore it, announcing that through him, the new Adam, we can finally say to the mountain, “Move from here to there,” and it will move.

I do not mean to say that all prayers take this shape, by the way. Not all prayer requires the authority to command a mountain. The bleeding woman and the blind man do not speak to their own bodies. They pray to Jesus to do what they obviously cannot do of their own accord. This is the kind of prayer with which we are most familiar. Like Frodo singing Tom Bombadil’s song in the tomb, we pray most often as children asking our Father to do what we do not yet have the authority to do. We ask, and he responds. When the small child pleads, “Daddy, tell Fido to give me back my toy,” a good father does as he is asked. All prayer must begin this way.

But it will not be long—and the child will not have grown very much older—before the father says something more like, “Why don’t you tell Fido to give the toy back?” Probably he will say it with a smile on his face the first few times, but he will have meant it nonetheless. After all, the dog is not only his but his child’s. And he wants his child to know his authority by slowly putting it into practice. The father is in the business of imparting his dominion, however annoyingly ineffective it might be for the child at first. Like an instrument you do not yet know how to play, there is no other way to learn besides trying and failing (at first) to play it. It will not just “happen.”

Likewise with mountain-moving. We are not told that, if we have faith, we will ask the Father to move the mountain, and he will move it. We are told rather that we will ask the mountain, and it will move. I grant that the two are intimately related. The child’s authority comes from the Father’s. In a sense they are one and the same authority. But they are not the same act. Like the child with his dog, we are meant to embody the father’s authority within ourselves, to make it slowly and faithfully ours, not as usurpers but as heirs.

No one explains this notion better than Lewis’s Screwtape, senior devil in the Tempters’ Training College:

To us a human is primarily food; our aim is the absorption of its will into ours, the increase of our own area of selfhood at its expense. But the obedience which the Enemy demands of men is quite a different thing. One must face the fact that all the talk about His love for men, and His service being perfect freedom, is not (as one would gladly believe) mere propaganda, but an appalling truth. He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of Himself — creatures, whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively like His own, not because He has absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to His. We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons. We want to suck in, He wants to give out. We are empty and would be filled; He is full and flows over. Our war aim is a world in which Our Father Below has drawn all other beings into himself: the Enemy wants a world full of beings united to Him but still distinct. [...] For His ignoble idea is to eat the cake and have it; the creatures are to be one with Him, but yet themselves.

That’s as far as I’ll go today. In my final installment, we’ll explore what this dominion might look like in practice: how to proceed from asking God to move mountains to asking the mountain to move by God’s authority (and our own). As hard as it may be to imagine, Christ has given us his Spirit and has promised that we will do even greater things than he. This is our inheritance. And creation waits with eager longing for the children of God to be revealed.

Many thanks to and for the gracious help editing this one. If you enjoyed this post, please hit the LIKE and RESTACK buttons below. Thanks!

Hi friends,

Below you’ll find the Scripture readings for the month of December, which are geared toward the season of Advent. If you’re new here, I’d like to invite you join us in committing to five simple practices for re-embodying your faith. For more on the integration of Christian faith and practice, check out this post:

What Is Advent?

Advent means “coming.” Traditionally, the church has devoted this season to waiting on our Lord in two particular senses. First, in the season leading up to Christmas, as the days grow darker and colder, we put ourselves in the spiritual place of Israel, who waited expectantly for the Messiah to arrive. Second, since we know that Christ has come, we set apart this season as a special time of preparing for and expecting his glorious return to judge the living and the dead. As I have written elsewhere:

The Advent tradition has an already-not-yet structure to it. We sing “O Come, O Come Emmanuel” in a minor key, imagining ourselves as Israel long ago, waiting for the king to arrive. But that longing is also truly ours, since we still await the day He will come again and wipe every tear from our eyes. We sing, “Joy To The World, The Lord Is Come,” knowing that he did come 2000 years ago, yet also imagining and enacting the day when He will come again and make all things new. As our communion liturgy declares:

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Christ has died
Christ is risen
Christ will come again

The Plan

The readings for this month are as follows. If you’re the analog type, you can access the reading plan here and print it out or bookmark it on your phone or computer. We also have a personalized plan on the Dwell app (FREE for you!), which automatically loads each new day’s Bible passages. You can read or listen right on the app. It’s pretty awesome. You have to create an account to get started, but once you’re in, it’s free thanks to VB Fellows footing the bill (we welcome your donations to help keep it going).

Why These Readings?

Most months the readings don’t skip around this much. We generally read from one book in the OT, one in the NT, and one Psalm. This month is a bit different. First, I have scaled it back to only two readings per day, just to give an easy in-road to newbies. Next, I’ve chosen all the Psalms which I think give the strongest taste of the coming Messiah. This includes all the proper “Messianic Psalms” as well as a few others that I think speak clearly and beautifully of the coming Christ. For the other readings, I mostly used the traditional Advent readings which the church has read for hundreds of years during this season. This also includes the main “Christmas” readings from the Gospels and some key Christmas and Advent passages from the New Testament epistles, which are mostly about the Second Coming. Traditionally, those should come before Christmas, but that was too much, so I figured they’d fit well in between Christmas and New Years. Some of the readings this month might seem a bit difficult or obscure. My advice: let each chapter be a little Easter Egg hunt. Ask, “Where is Jesus in this?” He is there, I guarantee it.

Bonus: 3 Quick Tips On How To Read The Bible

1. How To Not Quit: Ours is not one of those reading plans that takes a big time commitment. Again, we like baby steps. We have purposely kept it short and simple, so that it can be sustainable for a lot of people with different rhythms and attention spans to consistently do it together. Even still, some of us will fall off and miss a few days in a row. That’s okay. Don’t give up. Don’t feel like you have to go back and catch up. Just pick up on the new day and keep going.

2. How To Get The Most Out Of It: As I have mentioned before, I recommend saying a short prayer as you begin, then reading or listening to the two passages, then ruminating on some small part of the reading the rest of the day. Also, it’s good to have a couple of other people in a group chat who are also committed to read with you. Then you can share encouragements and questions about whatever stood out to you from the day’s reading over text. So, if you begin tomorrow, don’t do it alone. Invite one or two friends to join you.

3. How I Read The Bible: A number of people have asked me how I approach the Scriptures. I won’t answer that here. But a couple of thoughts: 1) Rumination: When I was young, I would get so excited when I came across any part of a passage that I thought I really understood. And then (nobody told me to do this, but…) I would ruminate on that little nugget of light for the rest of the day. “How can I use that key to unlock other doors in the Scriptures? How might that key unlock doors in my own life?” Etc. It helped me a lot. Now that I’m a 40 year-old geezer, I tend to get more excited about the bits of Scripture I don’t understand. I’ll take those dark, mysterious nuggets where Jesus says something seemingly incomprehensible, or where two back-to-back stories in a Gospel reading seem to have nothing in common—e.g. “Why on earth did Matthew place these stories next to one another?”—and I’ll chew on that the rest of the day. Rumination is a major, though somewhat hidden, theme in the Bible. Some truths can only be seen if you wait, stay awake, and keep your eyes on the seemingly invisible prize. So…ruminate. 2) Images Over Words: A big breakthrough for me was realizing that the Bible is made up more of images than words. Through our modern lens, words tend to be more important. We like things to be precise and technical. So when we see a certain word recurring, we want to give it a precise and technical definition. “Justified…what does that mean?” [Google what the experts say.] “Oh, now I understand. Ok, sanctified…” [Repeat the process.] Don’t get me wrong, you can learn good things that way. But ultimately, it won’t go deep enough. When Paul, for instance, uses the terms justification and sanctification, he’s not merely using technical terms. Justification is an image from the world of the law court. Sanctification is an image from the world of the temple. When he uses these terms, he doesn’t just want you to cognitively understand. He wants you to step into the picture he’s painting. To come into his world. This is why Jesus speaks almost entirely in images or parables. Even the actions he takes—healing a blind man, feeding 5000, pulling a coin from the belly of a fish—are more like living parables (like the dramatic acts of OT prophets) than mere factual occurrences. Once you see that, the Bible comes alive in a new way. Across the Old and New Testament, images hyperlink to each other far more effectively than mere words. Once you see the images, you begin to see the connections. Another way to say it: the words on our Bible’s pages are simply not the words of the original text. They are translations from at least three different languages. Specific words themselves may even be debated. But the images remain transcendent. The words are there to express the images, and the images are there to express realities that go far beyond words. In a possibly apocryphal story, Hemingway was once asked how he managed to write so simply and briefly. His response was, “I would use no words if I could.” Hemingway didn’t want his readers to get caught up in the means of narration itself. He wanted them to feel like they were living in the pictures he presented. He wanted them to taste and see, not merely to define and understand. In this, I think he was accidentally imitating Jesus.

Much love and blessed Advent!

— Ross

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Welcome to Part 2 of “On Moving Mountains,” an exploration of Jesus’s teaching on faith, dominion, and the impossible. If you haven’t read Part 1, here’s a quick synopsis:

Why did Jesus say we could move mountains if seemingly no one can move mountains? What kind of faith can do such things? In quantitative terms, we’re told no more than a mustard seed will suffice. But what of the quality of such faith? I propose the quality is that of authority, not to be confused with power. Authoritative faith speaks to the rock rather than striking it. Jesus does not overpower the storm, but tells it to be still. Whereas power ignores or diminishes the agency of the other, proper authority restores and redeems agency by calling the other—be it a person, a demon, a storm, or a mountain—to submit to that which is higher.

This, I believe, is our calling. Just as the world was made by speech—by call and response, not cause and effect—the world must be remade in like fashion. And human beings were meant to be not only subjects of, but participants in, that remaking. Authority is a lost art in our time. (Picture St. Francis asking the birds to stop singing so he can finish his sermon.) I don’t claim it will be easy to recover, but if we could, perhaps we could still move mountains with a word.

Intro: Why Authority Matters

In Part 1, I drew a distinction between power and authority and suggested that Christ’s ministry amounted to the reclamation of Adam’s authoritative dominion on behalf of the human race. In other words, the Word became flesh, so that you could move mountains.

In Part 2, I hope to show why this matters. If our sins have been forgiven and our “relationship with God” has been restored, what does it matter whether we regain authority over creation? Most of us just want to be “saved.” That is enough. We don’t care to be in charge of anything.

But this, Jesus says, will not do. Sin has left us not only alienated from God but from the world around us and from our priestly role on behalf of that world. We have fallen out of right relationship with our surroundings, and all creation is suffering because of it. The solution, Jesus says, is faith, which brings reintegration not only of ourselves but of the cosmos through us.

So…what is faith exactly?

Dominion and Imago Dei

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” (Genesis 1:26)

I am not one to have pet peeves, not because I am such a good person, but mostly because I am woefully unobservant of my immediate surroundings (which is actually one of my wife’s pet peeves about me). But one pet peeve I do have has to do with the way Christian academics tend to use the term imago dei. And no, it’s not because I find their use of Latin pretentious. I like Latin; it’s pretty. It’s because I believe that most of our declarations of “being made in the image of God” are missing the point.

Today the phrase imago dei is typically used to highlight the inherent value and rights of every human being. And of course, I agree with their main point. But it’s half a point at best, like a prince who is always ready to remind you of his royal rights, but conveniently quiet when it comes to his royal responsibilities. I believe we’ve put the cart before the horse, and in doing so, we’ve actually diminished our view of human worth rather than adding to it.

The first question the Bible answers about human beings, when it tells us that we are made in the image of God, is not “What is our value?” but “What is our role?” That is to say, the prince can indeed be confident of his worth…once he understands his purpose. Purpose precedes value. Purpose is the ground of value. What we find in Genesis 1 is that to be made in the image of God is to be given a purpose like his, a priestly role and responsibility over creation that mirrors his own. This is what sets us apart from the rest of the created order; this is what gives us authority over Nature and, at the same time, what makes us subservient to her. (“For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve.”)

As Christians, we have become accustomed to believing that true faith means something like the humility of “helpless dependence.” And I don’t deny that that is where it must often begin. But the prince who abdicates his throne because he deems himself helplessly unfit for office only feigns humility. For the truly humble prince, the throne symbolizes not so much his fittedness as his function, which he can no more abdicate than his own body and blood, however unfit he may feel to uphold it. For him, the key question is not so simple as, “Can I do it?” (No, you can’t.) The question is rather, “How can I do what is impossible for me to do, yet which I nevertheless must do, because it is my role and my destiny?”

This is the predicament in which the human race finds itself after the fall. This is why the covenants, the law, the temple, and the prophets all point not merely to our personal/individual forgiveness and redemption, but to the full restoration of the cosmos under God through human beings. And the New Testament doubles down on this point. Why else would St. Paul declare, even after Christ has come and died and conquered Death, that all creation groans in eager expectation—not only for Christ’s return, but for what?—for the sons of God to be revealed (Romans 8:19). For nothing less than the restoration of Adam’s dominion.

It will trouble no small amount of Christian souls to hear this—languishing as we are in the aftermath of a thousand failures of authority—but we are most like our Maker when we are reigning. “Do you not know that we will judge angels?” We were made for thrones and crowns and, dare I say, glory. The fact that we now covet, steal, and kill for the high position that would otherwise be ours by inheritance does not change the fact that creation still waits for us to assume that position rightly.

And yes, when finally we receive our crowns from him, there will be nothing better to do with them than to throw them back down at his feet. But that is precisely my point. Crowns were made for service. Again, even the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve. That is his glory. That is what makes him Lord of all.

In what follows, I hope to show the relationship between faith, salvation, and dominion, in particular the reinstatement of imago dei. It is by grace you have been saved, through faith. But this is not so much a formula as a portal into new creation, the newness of which we are only beginning to taste and see.

For instance, if it is true that we are saved through faith, what can it mean that Jesus tells us that even a mustard seed of this faith can command mountains? Do we possess this mustard seed? Can we move mountains? No? Who then can be saved? “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible [in us!].”

Jesus’s promise about mountain-moving was neither arbitrary nor hyperbolic. Nor, as I have said already, is it an extra-powerful sign of an extra-zealous faith. On the contrary, as we will see, mountain-moving is a picture of what faith is meant to do and to be.

Recovering the Lock: Salvation as Restoration

For truly, I say to you, if you have faith like a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move, and nothing will be impossible for you. (Matthew 17:20)

Like most of Jesus’s teachings, I take the above saying to be, first and foremost, more of a riddle than a straightforward statement of fact. That doesn’t mean it isn’t also a fact. But it’s a riddle first, a riddle waiting to become a fact. Jesus’s words must first be seen as a problem before they can become a solution. Once a problem is well-understood, the solution is usually not long in coming. Sometimes our problems are self-evident. The bleeding woman wants to stop her bleeding. The blind man wants to see. Their needs are clear. They ask, and they receive. But no one, it would seem, needs to move a mountain. So why bring it up? That is the riddle.

Riddles are questions that make us ask more questions so that, eventually, we arrive at deeper answers. Good riddles unsettle us from the false contentment of automated solutions to problems we have hardly begun to consider. With such riddles, Jesus opened the spiritual eyes of his earliest disciples, and, in my view, the same teachings can still open the eyes of the church today, if we have ears to hear.

As Jesus often warned, the best way to stop up your ears is to believe you already have the answer. For modern-day evangelicals like myself, ironically, the claim that, “All answers are found in Christ,” can be one such ear-stopper. For certain, “All answers are found in Christ.” But what good is an answer to a question you haven’t even thought to ask? The problem for many Christians in our moment is not that we lack the key—Jesus is the Key, of course—but rather that we have lost the Lock.1 We don’t know how the Key works, much less what it opens. But the riddle of the mountain-mover shines a light once again on the Lock.

“Wait a minute,” you say. “We know the Lock. It is salvation from sin and death. That is what Jesus Christ opens for us, by the forgiveness of our sins.” And I don’t deny it. But the problem is even the word “salvation” has become for us an automated answer to a question we no longer know how to ask. There is, of course, nothing wrong with the word itself. “Salvation” is a glorious word. But like a key without a lock, it has begun to lose its meaning. No matter, it can be reclaimed.

In fact, in an attempt to reclaim it, let me suggest another word in its stead: “restoration.” Of course, this word too is imperfect. But notice how the word “restoration” appears to us slightly more in the shape of a question. “Restoration to what?” it seems to ask. Restoration to life? Yes. “Well,” you say, “this is exactly what is meant by salvation!”

Yes, but see, the question keeps on questioning: What is “life?” What exactly must be restored in order for life to be life? Is it mere biological function? “No, eternal life.” Exactly. But what is meant by eternal? Is it only a quantity? What is the quality of this “eternal life?” Again, what in particular must be restored? I reply: all that Adam lost. And what was he given in the first place? The answer to this question we have already shown, exactly as it is written in the very first scene of the Bible. But I warn you that you may not like the sound of it when I say it again:

Dominion. That is what Adam lost.

It is worth taking a moment to acknowledge the scandal, the stumbling block, we’re ushering in by choosing this word “dominion” as the telos of redemption. How about love, for instance? Restored relationship to God? Love is what Adam was made for, and love is what must be restored. Yes, in many ways, love is a far more pleasing answer than dominion.

And yet, once again, the problem with the word love is that it has lost so much of its meaning in use. It has been over-named and under-recognized. Perhaps even more than “salvation,” “love” has stopped being a mystery, a question, a lock, a portal. Like Christ himself, and like the salvation he came to bring, we have treated “love” as the obvious answer, as the golden key. And being overcertain of its value, we have lost and forgotten its purpose.

So I will insist, for now, on the word “dominion,” because it makes the questioner ask again: “Dominion over what?” “Dominion for what?” “How is dominion even good or loving or necessary?” To the last question, I answer that lordship may in fact be the highest form of love. (After all, “God is love,” is just another way of saying, “The Lord is love.”) But alas, we have all but lost the capacity to conceive of such a love. And so we must take the long road, rediscovering love through the lens of what seems almost its opposite.

Rediscovering The Key: Faith as Faithfulness

For truly, I say to you, if you have faith like a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move, and nothing will be impossible for you. (Matthew 17:20)

As long as we’re considering this teaching as a riddle, perhaps the heart of the riddle is the word “faith.” On the meaning of this word, everything else hinges. It is faith, Jesus says, that moves mountains. Okay, I believe. Why, then, won’t the mountains budge? Why won’t even my sore ankle budge? Again, what kind of faith can achieve such wonders? What even is faith? Well, how much time do you have? Just kidding. I’ll try to keep it brief.

The Greek word for faith in the New Testament (pistis) can be translated as both “faith” and “faithfulness.” In recent years, there have been great scholarly debates about whether Paul’s term pistis christou should be read as “faith in Christ” (as most of our Bibles have it) or “faithfulness of Christ.” Without entering the fray with regard to Paul’s intended meaning in each passage—there are great arguments on both sides—I take the ambiguousness of the term itself to be profoundly significant. For instance, are we justified by faith in Christ or by Christ’s faithfulness or (by extension) by Christ’s faith in the Father or by our faithfulness to Christ? To all this, the Christian can answer, “Yes.”

One way to appreciate the thickness of the biblical word faith is to incorporate both meanings simultaneously. Pistis, then, means something like faith-plus-faithfulness or trust-meets-trustworthiness, faithful faith and trustworthy trust, trust that proves itself able to be trusted.2 You may recall that in past essays, I have depicted Trustworthiness as a descending phenomenon, making the inaccessible meaning and certainty of heaven real and accessible on earth, and Trust as an ascending capacity to appreciate and count on the truth, beauty, goodness, or wholeness of a thing, despite its lack of certainty from our earthly vantage. Now, if that is the case, pistis can be understood as the center of the X, the faculty for discerning, inviting, and participating in the meeting of heaven and earth in our daily lives.

What I am saying is that the essence of pistis, not unlike its biblical counterpart agape (love), is found in its betweenness, in its inescapable relationality. You cannot merely “have trust;” you must trust in something, and that trust is continually tested by your trustworthiness to it. The degree to which you will count on, wait for, remain faithful to, and even reproduce the faithfulness of a person or thing shows whether you trust it or not. As C. S. Lewis puts it in Mere Christianity, “To have faith in Christ means, of course, trying to do all that He says. There would be no sense in saying you trusted a person if you would not take his advice.”

But notice that much of the “advice” we must take from Christ has to do with how we relate to others, especially to “the least of these.” The ultimate test of whether you have trusted your earthly father comes when you become a father or mother yourself. And this introduces a whole new level of betweenness.

Our trust in God is not merely offered up to him, but passed down to those who count on us in the form of trustworthiness. True biblical faith makes the Christian into a kind of cosmic middleman (or woman), mediating between God and nature as well as between God and others. As the New Testament declares over and over again, the faithful in Christ become ambassadors of Christ, not merely servants of the master, but stewards and overseers. We become priests, representing God to the world and simultaneously offering everything in the world back to God. The same faith which makes us dependent on Christ inevitably makes others dependent on us, requiring us to be like Christ to them. This is how reality works. And I am saying this is ALL part and parcel to what faith is.

Again, the way many of us talk about faith today, you would imagine that faith is literally all about dependence. You would think that Jesus told parables about servants who finally realized that they could do nothing at all but stop working and depend on the master’s good graces. “That is faith,” we say. But no, it isn’t. In fact, that’s literally what the wicked servant does in the Parable of the Talents. Meanwhile, the servants who multiplied their master’s wealth through risky-but-wise labor in his name are repeatedly called “faithful” (pistos).

That, then, is my functional definition of faith. Faith is the capacity to recognize and participate in reality by living constantly in the betweenness of trust and trustworthiness, ascending in trust to that which is trustworthy above you, and descending in trustworthiness to that which must trust you. And this betweenness—this priestly quality of faith, which makes us simultaneously servants and lords—also has a name in the Bible. It’s called (you guessed it)...dominion.

Lordship Redeemed

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” (Genesis 1:26)

Two themes immediately stand out in the text: First, that humans were made in the image of God, and second, that they were given dominion over all other created things. That’s it. Those are the two themes. Moreover, the remaining verses of the chapter make this all the more clear by restating the same two themes multiple times:

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” (Genesis 1:27-28)

Finally, we return to my pet peeve. Hopefully now you can see more clearly that the immediate meaning of imago dei is found in our role much more than in our rights. As Christ is Lord of all, we were made lords of this earth. I don’t say it’s what I would have chosen—even the Psalmist is like, “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, what is man that you are mindful of him?”—but this, apparently, is the sort of project that interests our Maker. He is no clock-maker, and we are no cogs. He is a Father and a King, and we are his servants, his children, and the heirs of his kingdom.

Admittedly, the fall put a pretty big damper on all this dominion stuff. Outside the Garden, “thorns and thistles and the sweat of your brow” becomes the new normal. The earth still yields its fruit, but not without a fight, and not without claiming its own sort of victory in the end (“to dust you shall return”). As it turns out, when you’re not faithful to your Lord, it becomes much harder to maintain your own lordship.

And yet, the dominion mandate remains, even outside the Garden. The Lord restates it to Noah after the flood, yet with a foreboding addendum—“the fear and dread of you shall be upon every [living thing]”3—a phrase which casts no small amount of doubt on the purity and stability of sinful man’s dominion over anything. Much like the curses of the ground and the womb, man’s dominion has been cursed.

Once Adam ruled Nature by means of authority. Whatever he named the animals, that they were. His authority was true, and therefore good. His lordship was love. But now, there would be discontinuity between call and response, between speech and reality. If Adam’s rule was once based on a relationship of trust and trustworthiness—between himself and God and between the world and himself—now, at least for a time, it would be based on power and dread. If you want the mountains to move, the Lord seems to say to Noah, you will have to force them. And they will not go quietly.

As you probably know, the rest of the Old Testament bears witness to this corrupted dominion—to the ever widening gap between lordship and love. But it also hints again and again at its solution, finally revealed in the New Testament: the resurrection of man’s authority in the person of Jesus Christ.

All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go, therefore, and make disciples… (Matthew 28:18)

All authority has indeed been given to Christ, not to us. And yet, because Christ is our Representative, what is true for him becomes true for us, through faith. Faith is the trust-and-trustworthiness that links us to him, that makes his fate our fate. If he dies, we die. If he is raised, we are raised. And if he rules, we shall rule with him. But that same faith is also the link between him—his glory, his lordship, his love—and the rest of creation. For we are his Body in the world, and we represent him to the world as he represents us to the Father.4 And if we are his Body, then we speak with his voice. And even the mountains will hear us and be glad to obey.

Easier Said Than Done?

But of course there is still one glaring problem with all this talk of faith and dominion and authority and mountain-moving. And that is that the mountains still won’t move. You might have supposed that, in the course of my theological musings, I’ve forgotten this brutal fact. But no, it hangs over every word. It’s the elephant in the room. If Christ came to restore our authority over creation, if Jesus said that nothing would be impossible for those who believe—and we believe—why does the impossible remain impossible?

You might have noticed that the subtitle to this final section is a play on words. I admit, “Easier said than done,” is a fair rejoinder to my mountain-moving manifesto, thus far. “Talk all you like. Ain’t nobody moving any mountains.”

Fair enough. But to be clear, my claim (and Christ’s) is not that we can move mountains, but that we will speak to them, and they will move of their own accord. Which raises the question: Is it easier to speak to a mountain than to move it? Is it easier to operate by call-and-response or cause-and-effect? Well, that depends.

The entire Atlantic slave trade, it seems, operated according to the premise that coercion was more profitable than negotiation, that cause-and-effect trumps call-and-response. And at least in the short term, the slavers’ premise proved true. It was easier done than said.

Again, is it easier to ask someone to marry you or to force them at gun point? Well, if they don’t trust you and don’t want to have anything to do with you, I suppose force would be “easier” in the sense that, in that moment, it would be the only way. Of course, it would be a terrible idea for the same reasons that the slave-trade was a terrible idea.

But notice, I don’t just mean terrible on a moral level. Both are bad ideas, even for those in control, because both are doomed from the start. They are unsustainable relationships, requiring ever-new and more exhausting acts of coercion—and accruing ever-new forms of collateral damage—just to push off an inevitable and disastrous expiration date.

But let’s return to the marriage example. If you want to marry someone who doesn’t want to marry you, there is another option besides forcing what cannot be forced or despairing of what can never be at all. The other option is to be faithful. To spend however long it takes proving yourself trustworthy, keeping your promises, laying yourself down and pouring yourself out for the sake of your beloved, being willing and ready to get stomped on by the other in the process.

This, of course, has been God’s game plan all along with regard to his people. This is how proper authority works. The physics of true lordship is steadfast love. Nothing easy about it. But, again, he is patient. And when the day comes, when his call rings true in our hearts, he will only speak a word, and we will be his. It will be almost…easy.

What would it look like to be trustworthy to a mountain for long enough to change its mind, so that it wants to respond to your call? It might not be easy, though perhaps far easier than with a person. Perhaps a mountain only requires a mustard seed of faithfulness, whereas the human heart requires far more.

In any case, how can we begin to remake our lordship into love so that it can finally become true lordship? I have some ideas. Perhaps you do too? If so, leave a comment. And stay tuned for Part 3, where I (finally) begin to explore how mountain-moving might actually become possible for us.

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Friends,

Earlier today, I put out a note saying I was just about finished with a massive 15,000 word essay (small book?) on Jesus’s teaching about moving mountains. I asked if I should post it all at once, break it up into 3 or 4 smaller essays, or quit writing altogether until I can learn to write shorter. The overwhelming majority vote was to release it in parts (thank you for not telling me to quit). So, without further ado, here is Part 1. Please leave your honest thoughts and questions in the comments, as it will help me to improve future sections before they come out.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

O LORD, our Lord,
		how majestic is your name in all the earth!
	You have set your glory above the heavens.
	 	Out of the mouth of babies and infants,
	you have established strength because of your foes,
		to still the enemy and the avenger.
	
	When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
		the moon and the stars, which you have set in place,
	what is man that you are mindful of him,
		and the son of man that you care for him?
	
	Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings
		and crowned him with glory and honor.
	You have given him dominion over the works of your hands;
		you have put all things under his feet,
	all sheep and oxen,
		and also the beasts of the field,
	the birds of the heavens, and the fish of the sea,
		whatever passes along the paths of the seas.
	
	O LORD, our Lord,
		how majestic is your name in all the earth! (Psalm 8, ESV)

---

Man’s conquest of Nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be Nature’s conquest of Man. (C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man)

Preface

Every so often I’m reminded that Jesus said things I don’t actually believe. Yes, I am a Christian, and I do believe everything Jesus said. But also, I am a Christian, and I don’t believe everything Jesus said, at least not fully, not yet. Here is a saying I’m only now beginning to believe:

For truly, I say to you, if you have faith like a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move, and nothing will be impossible for you. (Matthew 17:20)

I know what you’re thinking: “He’s a Christian. Shouldn’t he just believe all this supernatural stuff? Jesus did all kinds of miracles. So did his disciples. The whole faith rests on a man being raised from the dead, but moving a mountain is too much?”

Sure, but I know what you’re also thinking: “Wait a minute. He said he’s beginning to believe that people can move mountains. Like, literal mountains? Because as far as I know, no one has ever moved a mountain. Not even Jesus moved a mountain! He can’t actually believe that. Queue the predictable sermonic metaphor: ‘Life’s obstacles are the real mountains, etc, etc.’”

Now, hopefully, you’re with me. Both sides of you: the part that believes and the part that doesn’t. And don’t worry, I promise to spare you the metaphors. When I say I’m beginning to believe we can move mountains, I mean nothing less than literal mountains. I admit my faith in this regard is small, perhaps much smaller than a mustard seed. But if it only takes a mustard seed to move a mountain, perhaps it only takes a microbe to believe that a mustard seed can move a mountain. I think I may have found that microbe, and I’d like to share it with you here. After all, microbes can become mustard seeds, and mustard seeds can do more than move mountains: they can become the largest tree in the garden.

Buried Treasure

In the opening quotations, you may have noticed a rather stark juxtaposition. While the Psalmist wonders at God’s decision to give human beings (even infants!) dominion over creation, C. S. Lewis laments the effects of this apparent dominion. To whatever degree modern man believes he has outsmarted or overpowered nature, Lewis says, the truth is the reverse. Even and especially in our hyper-technical age, nature is having the last laugh. And of course this feels exponentially more true today than eighty-some years ago when Lewis wrote it. The algorithms we’ve built to solve all our problems are creating for us an even deeper problem, enslaving us not to the army of evil robots we might have feared, but to our own appetites, which we haven’t feared nearly enough.1 Yet Lewis wasn’t questioning the wisdom of the Psalmist or the wisdom of God revealed therein. He was rather prodding us to reconsider what our “dominion” over creation is meant to look like, since our current version isn’t exactly panning out as we might have hoped.

In this essay series, I intend to pick up where Lewis left off. I hope to show that our true dominion, which we must and shall regain, is not our conquest or power over Nature, as the sorcerers and technologists would have it, but rather our authority over her. Hidden in the subtle dilemma between striking the rock (power) and speaking to it (authority) we find our true purpose and the key to our redemption. Jesus’s images of his disciples telling mountains to move and trees to be uprooted and thrown into the sea are not extra-powerful signs of an extra-zealous faith, but simple signs—mustard seeds, in fact—of what true faith has always entailed: the reclamation of Adam’s authoritative dominion under God.

Of course, to modern ears, this distinction between power and authority will hardly register, since to us almost everything is power.

In the modern world, dominion means domination. Presidents and policemen can be said to have authority only to the degree to which they have the power to enforce it. As D. C. Schindler has pointed out, when Nietzsche declared that God was dead, he was probably speaking of authority in particular. Nietzsche’s “will to power” is a response to a world increasingly bereft of authority—that unseen relational principle by which laws and morals, kings and priests were established and trusted—while, at the same time, gaining incredible new powers.

Why is God dead? How did we kill him? It wasn’t simply by thinking secular thoughts. Nietzsche was living in the midst of a new scientific/mechanized age, where Bacon’s dream of overcoming nature with technological power was finally coming true on multiple fronts. The fairies and gods and spirits and angels of the Middle Ages were fading in the new light of man and his machines. Humans had become the only agentic beings in the universe. In this new mechanized view of the cosmos, everything else in creation became not so much subject to us—as it might have been in the Garden—but objects to be moved as we see fit. Those who did not recognize this shift, thought Nietzsche, were doomed to be slaves. Those who did recognize it could replace the gods.

Even if Nietzsche were overstating his case, even if authority had not been altogether killed by the new powers of scientific progress, it had at least been buried alive. Yet, not far beneath Nietzsche’s feet—and ours—lay a treasure which, if unearthed, might tempt us to sell all the powers of his industrial age and our digital age combined. This is the treasure which Jesus called “the kingdom of heaven.” We might also call it “the dominion of God” or, more broadly, “the love of God” or even “the gospel.” But for our present purposes, I will call it authority.

If Nietzsche had been right about the burial of authority, he was certainly wrong not to sell everything he had to gain the land it was buried on. Christianity is that land, and we who claim to be its inheritors in an age of unprecedented power would be fools not to start digging for what we’ve lost. Sleepers, awake! Mountains can still be moved with a word. At least, so I am beginning to believe.

The Ring of Authority

Crises of authority are not new. Nietzsche’s generation was not the first to wonder if the authority of God was finally giving way to the raw power of man. In Jesus’s time, the Roman Empire was Exhibit A for this line of reasoning. Even the Jewish religious leaders of the day seemed to operate not as stewards of God’s true authority but as cynical power brokers (“They honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me”). You have heard of a power vacuum. Let me introduce you to an authority vacuum. The people of God were living in one then, just as we are living in one now. This is why both Matthew and Mark record the same shocked response from the crowds after hearing Jesus preach for the first time:

The people were amazed at his teaching, because he taught them as one who had authority, not as the teachers of the law. (Mark 1:22, Matthew 7:28-29)

Jesus’s ministry marked the return of proper authority. But it was not only people who awaited the final filling of the authority vacuum:

For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. [...] For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. (Romans 8:22, 18)

How can the sun and moon groan? How can the trees wait? How can the birds eagerly long for the revealing of the sons of God? The foundation for this strange, agentic view of creation is laid in Genesis 1.

Contrary to the modern scientific vision, the creation account does not tell of a world of inanimate objects being zapped into existence and moved around by force. As I have spelled out in more detail elsewhere, God did not create mere objects, but agents, choosers, lovers with the capacity to hear and obey his commands. After all, he made the world by speaking (“Let there be light”). The creation narrative is absolutely full of commands, not only to human beings but to everything. God is no clock-maker. The sun and the moon are not so much “set in motion” as assigned their own proper jobs and jurisdictions over the day and the night. The birds and the fish are told to be fruitful and multiply. All created things reflect the likeness of God in at least this way: that all have the capacity for relationship with him, the capacity to respond to his word, the capacity to obey.

What I am saying is that God brought the world into being not by an act of power, but by an act of authority. He spoke, and reality obeyed his voice. And at the climax of this narrative, human beings are given the crowning glory of being made in his image. Like the rest of creation, we were made with the capacity to know and love and obey our Maker. But unlike the rest of creation, we were also given the capacity to speak to them as He had done. We alone were given authority to rule over creation just as He would rule over us. But, of course, the story takes a turn.

Imagine (bear with me here) a kind of brighter parallel to Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, except instead of Sauron forging the one Ring of Power by which he meant to enslave all the races of Middle Earth, God gave to Adam and Eve a “ring of authority” by which they were meant to lead and guide the created order into further and deeper levels of love and faith and glory. But the treasure of man’s authority was lost. Sure, the stories of the Old Testament tell of those few and fleeting moments in which the treasure seemed to have been recovered, then lost again. But the New Testament comes with good news. The ministry of Jesus Christ is the definitive unearthing of the primordial treasure of authority, the climactic proof that true dominion is something far more beautiful and powerful than mere domination.

Just as the world was made by speech—by call and response, not cause and effect—the world would be remade in like fashion.

In the Gospels, Jesus speaks, and not only the crowds but the whole created order seems slowly to awaken from its long agentic slumber. Jesus’s teachings and his miracles in the Gospel accounts appear haphazardly mixed, because they are inextricably linked: two parts of the same authoritative action. Even his miracles tend to be speech-acts. It’s easy to miss, but next time you open one of the Gospels, watch for this and you will see: Like his Father in the beginning, Jesus does not merely act upon things. He commands them, and they obey. He is, after all, the Word of God, which was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made. And so, when he comes to earth, he speaks, not only to men and women, but to demons and fevers, to storms and trees, to blind eyes and paralyzed bodies. He speaks to things which human beings would not normally dream of speaking to. And in their submission to his authority, they reclaim their own true health and power. Whereas raw power tends to ignore or diminish the agency of the other, proper authority restores and redeems agency by calling the other to submit to that which is higher.

This is why, by the way, all atheist arguments that begin with, “If God is all-powerful and all-loving (blah-blah-blah)…” are misguided. Simply put, God is not all-powerful in the sense they imagine. If he were, the world would have been set right long ago. But God’s primary means of making and moving and redeeming the world is authority, not power. Straight-line power has always been the “easy fix” according to His opponents. Just ask the devil in the desert: “Turn these stones to bread.” “Throw yourself from the pinnacle of the temple and let your angels catch you.” “Rule all the kingdoms of the earth; only bow down to me.” In that final temptation, we find that even Satan understands the primary place of authority over power much better than those who argue on his behalf. “Go ahead, rule everything,” he says, “as long as you answer to me.”

Every ruler bows to someone or something. Power always proceeds from some greater authority. Ironically, the most powerful people are often the least aware of this fact. They cannot see whom they serve until it’s far too late.2 And lest we be tempted to point the finger up the political or economic hierarchy, today the same can be said of every smart-phone user. The technological powers we continue to accrue and depend upon have hidden authority structures behind them, which are not advertised (nor even mentioned in the fine print), because not even their makers are fully aware of them. But lose your phone for a mere twelve hours, and you will discover beyond a shadow of a doubt that these are not “neutral tools” we carry around in our pockets.

Remember when God gave Moses the power to do signs and wonders in Pharaoh’s court, and, as it turned out, Pharaoh’s own magicians could do many of the same things? That must have been very disconcerting for Moses. But today we find ourselves in a similar situation, except worse: the modern tech-magicians produce the signs and wonders, and the faithful are left wondering if God can match their power. Sure, he can. But frustratingly, he often won’t. We pray for power, for results here and now. But if we’re honest, he doesn’t often prove himself to be the genie we’d hoped for. And so, rather than continue to ask and trust and wait as he taught us (Luke 18:1-8), we pray instead to our phones and computers, to experts, procedures, chemicals, and contracts.

We pray directly to the powers which give us what we want when we want it. And in doing so, we slowly forget the true shape of reality. We forget that God does not play that kind of game. We forget that the most important and meaningful things in our lives, even in an earthly sense—our loves, our longings, our purposes, and our peace—operate according to a subtler physics, which we lost the ability to recognize as soon as we lost the patience to wait for it. We forget that even the modern devices to which we constantly submit our requests, have other subtler masters, which become our masters to the extent that we depend upon them. And we forget, perhaps most of all, that we were made to master these masters.

Speaking To The Rock

The difference between Moses and the court magicians—even if Moses himself could not see it—was not primarily a difference in power, but in authority, not in what they could do, but in whose name they were doing it. This is the key to understanding much of the Exodus narrative. Egypt may have had chariots, but they did not have the Name of God. And this is what made Moses’s sin of striking the rock so consequential. Yes, on an earlier occasion, God had indeed permitted Moses to strike the rock. After all, God hadn’t shied away from acts of power in delivering his people from Pharaoh’s hand. But you can tell very early in the story that such acts were a last resort (or, from another perspective, a first step).

God’s purpose was never to form a people around his power, submitting to divine power if only to be able to wield it for themselves. That would make them no different than Egypt. No, the Lord had another plan. His second command to Moses about the rock—that he should speak to it rather than striking it—was a further and deeper iteration of the first, moving from the clear and physical boon of divine power to a subtler relationship of trust in divine authority. To the extent that Moses could submit to divine authority, he would begin to embody that authority himself, like a new Adam, naming and commanding created things to do his bidding (e.g. telling the rock to produce water). To the extent that he would not, even the power he had would be lost. “For to everyone who has will more be given, and he will have an abundance. But from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away” (Matthew 25:29). Power without authority is like a pair of good lungs under water.

But why tell Moses to strike the rock first, then change the command? Why not tell him to speak to it the first time? Well, for the same reason that Jesus stopped the woman’s bleeding and healed the man’s blindness before he stopped the bleeding of our souls and healed the blindness of our hearts. God is patient. The former requires only a word from him; the latter requires, among other things, a word from us. And he will woo us to speak that word by whatever means necessary. Power must sometimes come before authority, in our eyes, so that authority can finally come before power in our hearts. Or, to put it another way, God is in the business of turning microbes into mustard seeds, one interaction at a time.

In this light, the story of Abraham takes much the same shape as that of Moses. Small steps of faith early on lead to great experiences of power and promise. And yet all this leads where? To the altar upon which Abraham is commanded to sacrifice the son of that promise. For both Abraham and Moses, God presents the opportunity to convert power to authority by means of sacrifice. Now, for an infinitely deeper version of the same pattern, consider that in 1 Corinthians 10 Paul identifies the Rock which Moses struck as Christ himself. I can hardly begin to plumb the depths of what this suggests, but here’s a start: Just as the rock at Meribah becomes the stumbling stone that condemns Moses while also saving the people, Christ the Cornerstone becomes the stumbling stone that condemns—but also saves—us. Our “striking him” for the sake of signs and wonders should have led to our speaking to him for the sake of repentance and relationship, but instead our feeble and faithless attempts to speak to him led to our striking him to death. And yet, irony of ironies, while proper power couldn’t give way to proper authority, the very height of improper power nevertheless gave way to proper authority: by means of his crucifixion, we now proclaim him Lord of all. Yet still, if striking the Rock does not finally give way to speaking to Him, we may be struck by the Rock and crushed (Matthew 21:44).

Note that the relationship between power and authority in Scripture (and in life) is complex. It is not so straightforward as power:bad, authority:good. The point is not to replace the ways of the earth with the ways of the heavens. The earth is the body of the heavens just as heaven is the breath of the earth. In all of God’s redemptive acts, he is marrying heaven and earth by calling earthly things to submit to heavenly patterns. After all, even earthly things—from microbes to mustard seeds—already have the invisible patterns of heaven built in, whether they know it or not. The physics of earth (cause-and-effect) and the physics of heaven (call-and-response) both have their place, but if cause-and-effect does not submit to call-and-response, it will simply undo itself over time. “Dust you are, and to dust you shall return.”

For the sin of striking the rock the second time, as we know, Moses and Aaron were both sentenced to die in the wilderness rather than lead their people into the Promised Land. To the modern reader, the whole thing seems more than a bit unfair. But hopefully the Lord’s reasons are becoming a bit more clear to us now. As I mentioned in an earlier essay, we can see those reasons more clearly still if we consider what happens next:

What if Moses hadn’t died? What if he had gone on to lead the people across the Jordan? Could a man in his role, now apparently prone to striking things to which God had commanded him to speak, really continue to lead them into the Promised Land? I think not. After all, the entrance to Canaan was Jericho, and the walls of Jericho turned out to be another “rock” which was not meant to be struck but “spoken to.” Joshua was the man for that hour, as was Moses for his own.

Out Of The Mouths Of Babes

Why, though entreated by the devil and some of our very own prayers, does our Lord ultimately refuse to play the power game? Jesus himself gives the answer: Though his kingdom has entered this world, it is not of this world. The subtle physics of heaven is not power but authority—patient lordship over natural and spiritual realities via relationships of trust and trustworthiness.

Like treasure hidden in a field, like a mustard seed becoming a tree, like a little bit of yeast working through the whole batch of dough, so is his dominion. In a world transfixed by the power of nuclear bombs and artificial intelligence, the slow and subtle outworking of seeds and yeast would seem a feeble force indeed. Nevertheless, in the truest story ever told, the fury of the storm is not overpowered by a similar act of fury, but calmed by the breath of a word. “Out of the mouths of babies and infants, you have established strength.”

Here is my microbe of faith: I believe that Jesus Christ spoke to the storm, and that the storm obeyed him, not as an impersonal force ‘obeys’ a sorcerer or a scientist, but as a child obeys her loving father, because she loves him in return. I believe that Jesus spoke as a man, as Adam would have and could have spoken. Call it “supernatural” if you like (you would not be wrong). But it is no more supernatural than saying, “Pass the salt,” rather than picking it up yourself. In a proper relationship of trust, call-and-response is as ordinary as cause-and-effect. Finally, I believe that because he did this, we can too. In fact, I believe we must. We must learn how to speak to storms and mountains and broken bodies and confused minds. We were made for nothing less, and, as I hope to prove in future posts, our salvation involves nothing less than the restoration of this office. For faith and authority—faith and dominion—are not two separate things but one.

I don’t say it will “work.” Not right away. Not easily. I can’t say it’s working for me. The storms and mountains have little reason to obey me if my own body still won’t. Perhaps I haven’t given them reason enough to trust me yet. But they are slowly getting to know my voice. And I pray that each day it would sound more and more like His.

This summer I’ve been meditating on the Christian understanding of authority, especially as it relates to Jesus’s enigmatic statement, “You will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move,” and it has been blowing my dang mind. The question I keep coming back to is a simple one, but the implications feel earth-shattering (no pun intended): How does one move a mountain or calm a storm or heal a paralytic with a word? What kind of faith can achieve such things? In quantitative terms, we’ve been assured that no more than a mustard seed is necessary. But what of the quality of such faith?

I propose the quality is that of authority, not to be confused with power. Authoritative faith speaks to the rock rather than striking it. Jesus does not overpower the storm. He simply tells it to be still. That is what amazes the disciples: “Who is this that even the wind and the waves obey him?” Whereas power ignores or diminishes the agency of the other, proper authority restores and redeems agency by calling the other—be it a person, a demon, or a storm—to submit to that which is higher. Of course, you can always strike the rock, and it may very well still produce water. Most of the modern world is proof of this in one way or another. But what you find later on is that such methods often cost you the Promised Land. The forbidden fruit is still edible to those who take it out of turn, but it doesn’t give them what they hoped it would in the end. My thesis is this: Authority—that is, patient dominion over natural and spiritual realities via relationships of trust (picture St. Francis asking the birds to stop singing so he can finish his sermon)—is a lost art in our time, both in Christian and in secular spaces. But if we could reclaim it, perhaps we still could move mountains with a word. I’m dead serious.

Anyway, rest assured, there’s a weird, deep-dive essay coming soon for those interested. In the meantime, I thought I’d introduce the subject of authority with a much more straightforward piece on leadership.

What makes a good leader?

First, let’s admit that today “leadership” is a bit of a buzzword. I am the teaching director for a faith-based leadership program for young 20-somethings, and even I hardly know what people mean by it most of the time. The term “leadership” has remained impressively fashionable even as related terms like “authority” and “hierarchy” have fallen out of favor. It’s honestly strange. Grown men and women who show precious little respect for their own bosses, pastors, parents, and local authority figures, do not hesitate to sign their children up for “leadership” programs and opportunities in their schools and elsewhere. But why? Is it a cynical ploy to give their own children the corrupting reigns of power before someone else lords it over them? Or are they really holding out hope that somehow the next generation will redeem our tenuous relationship to authority? If so, how?

In the church, we speak of “servant leadership,” which ideally reflects Jesus’s teaching on the subject:

You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. It shall not be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be your slave, even as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many. — Matt. 20:25-28

Yet, as you may have noticed, Jesus is often misunderstood on this point, and not merely by non-Christians. Many pragmatic Christians have sought to become “great” not by serving but by—well, by simply becoming great—and ministering from that high place. Without necessarily compromising their morals, the pragmatic types tend to follow the world’s path to power and influence in order, then, to use that power and influence for Christ, doing as he would do. To be fair, I’ve seen enough success in this realm not to be totally cynical about it. But it’s at least worth acknowledging that this is not what Christ did. When the people tried to make him king by force, he fled.

On the other hand, there are those who so flee from the very idea of authority that, for them, the term “servant leadership” means little more than servitude. Don’t get me wrong. Serving others is a noble calling. But that doesn’t make it leadership. When James and John tell Jesus they want to sit at his right and left in the kingdom, he does not say, “Do not wish to become great. Rather, serve.” Instead he tells them that they have misunderstood the meaning of greatness and the means of becoming so: “You do not know what you are asking…Whoever would become great among you must be your servant…even as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve…” In other words, Christ does not merely replace greatness with servitude. He proposes a deeper union of the two. Those who wish to become great must do so by becoming low, just as Christ himself came to serve and, through serving, became Lord of all.

All disciples of Christ must become servants. Ironically, good leadership may in fact be the lowest (and therefore highest) form of servanthood. Without leaders—without fathers, mothers, teachers, coaches, pastors, elders, mentors—we would have no one to look up to, no one to learn from, no one to follow, no one to count on, no one to guide and protect us. It may sound strange to our egalitarian ears, but we all secretly long to look up. We need someone to be great, someone to be above us, lest we all fall down. And yet, when those above us let us down, we fall all the harder.

Whenever I teach on this subject, I ask my students at the beginning of class to think of one experience they’ve had with a good leader. Then I ask them to do the same with a bad leader (someone either ineffective or untrue to their office). As they share their experiences, two things become inevitably clear: First, leaders are crucial in shaping our lives and our souls, for better and for worse. Second, good leaders really are servant leaders, putting themselves as far below us as they are above us.

What I am proposing is that “servant leadership” is not just a Christian brand of leadership, like Christian rock music or Christian bookstores. Servant leadership is the only true, sustainable form of leadership. Christ’s warning applies as much to secular CEOs and Presidents as it does to you and me. The Gentiles may lord it over us for a time, but in the end, even Rome has a Pope where it once had an Emperor. It seems strange to call it a law of nature, but I believe it is: Whoever wants to be first, must be slave of all. To be great is to be a great blessing to others. Otherwise your so-called greatness is living on borrowed time. In leadership as elsewhere, only love is sustainable. Everything else is a resounding gong or a clanging symbol.

5 Signs of a Leader

I don’t tend to read leadership books, but I have been blessed with a number of truly great leaders in my life. These are my observations on what makes them so. If I’m simply repeating the points those books are making, well, here they are again but shorter and for free. If not, I’m pretty sure this is what those books should’ve said (and it’s still free). Here goes.

1. Articulate Purpose

This one should be the most obvious. A good leader shows you what to aim at, and shows it to you clearly. If there is confusion about the goal, it’s going to be very hard to get there, much less to get there together. Notice that this also makes the leader a servant. When the purpose is stated clearly, even the leader becomes subject to it. You are not merely following him. You are following what he is following. “Very truly I tell you, the Son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees his Father doing, because whatever the Father does the Son also does” (John 5:19). Every good leader has a purpose above and beyond himself, to which he is devoted. If your leader does not know his purpose or cannot state it clearly, this is cause for concern.

2. Assume Responsibility

It is not enough to state a purpose. The leader must be the one who bears the brunt of the responsibility for seeing it through and who bears the most blame if/when it fails. There’s an old (seemingly fading) tradition of corporate CEOs announcing their resignation when the company fails in one way or another. The failure may not have originated at the top. It often doesn’t. The main cause may have been located so far down the chain of command that the CEO did not and could not have even known about it before it was too late. Still, traditionally, the leader takes the wrap. And this is more than just symbolic. It comes from an understanding that those at the top are responsible not only for the top but for the whole stack. Every level.

Imagine that I, as the father of a household, declare to my family that we are going to rehab the whole backyard. Let’s say it’s a total mess. Hasn’t been touched in years. There’s vines and weeds and thorns growing in every direction. You can’t even see the ground. But we are going to transform it, I say. Okay, my purpose has been stated. But then, two weeks later, I find myself giving my eight and eleven-year-old sons (the help) a hard time because we haven’t even made a dent. Who’s fault is that? Who is most responsible? Well, they were pretty incompetent. I’d shown them how to start the lawn mower a hundred times, but they still couldn’t do it. Or perhaps they were lazy. They had the capacity to do the job, but they just chose to play video games instead. Maybe there was a misunderstanding. Their mother told them to clean the house before they started on the yard. My sons may be at fault (especially with the video games), but at the end of the day, it’s my fault fundamentally. I am the leader, and therefore the lowest as well as the highest. Even their fault is ultimately my responsibility (without ceasing to be theirs).

I run a surfing camp for a living. At the start of each summer, I remind all my staff that they are taking campers’ lives into their hands every time they step foot in the ocean with them. “The stakes are that high. The ocean does not mess around.” It’s admittedly a lot for a 19-year-old to bear, but I want them to feel and share the burden of responsibility. But that’s not all. My staff also know that I am their covering. If something goes terribly wrong, if someone needs to be held accountable, that person will always be me first and foremost. It’s my job to make sure they are fully equipped to do their job. If they fail, I have failed, and I am the first to blame. Everyone knows this. It would be an unsustainable job if they didn’t. Leaders assume responsibility.

3. Provide A Plausibility Structure

This is probably the most difficult and most technical aspect of good leadership. It may also be the most underappreciated, as far as I can tell. In a word, good leaders make a way. In many modern ventures—even in the church—you tend to see a lot of navy-seal-type leaders looking for navy-seal-type followers: “You gotta want it!” It is tempting to imagine that good leadership is mostly just about getting people from A to B by means of motivation and inspiration. Sure, motivation matters. But in most cases, the ground between A and B is a freaking wilderness, and all the motivation in the world won’t keep your people from getting lost in it. Humans need plausibility structures. Even navy seals have plans, traditions, procedures, and protocols. In fact, they’re famous for it.

Between every A and B that’s worth the journey, there is a very specific and usually pretty technical problem that needs to be solved. And the problem often requires real patience and humility to grasp. You may even need to get lost in it yourself for a while before you can effectively show someone else the way through, before you can make and mark the way for others. It’s nearly impossible, especially for a whole group of people, to traverse a wilderness without a path. Even when a path exists, it’s hard not to lose our way once or twice, sometimes so much so that we’re tempted to turn back. Good leaders cut clear paths so that others can follow them through the wilderness. Path-finding is the work of pioneers. Path-cutting is the work of servants. Both are the role of a true leader. “Turn left here.” “Wait til morning to cross this section.” “You’ll need extra supplies for that stretch. I didn’t have them the first time, but you will now.” This is leadership.

Returning to the backyard rehab, my boys need to see me using the mower for this purpose and the chainsaw for that. They may even need to put their hands on top of my hands the first few times they use the tool. To feel it when it’s running well and to feel when it isn’t. (Not that I’m teaching my eight-year-old how to use a chainsaw. You can’t prove that I did that.) They need to taste and see the plan, not simply to hear it from my lips. If I have shown them it is possible, they have an infinitely better chance of succeeding when they try to do it themselves. If I am doing it with them, perhaps all the more so. But more on that in point #5.

4. Balance Focus with Flexibility

I mentioned in point #1 that effective leaders become the servants of their stated purpose. This is generally a good thing and keeps the whole organization centered and driven towards a common goal. But there is also such a thing as becoming enslaved by your stated purpose, and enslaving others in the process. Overly single-minded leaders often become blind to the whole complex of limiting factors and constraints to which their goal is inevitably subject. And the more seemingly noble the goal, the more this danger is evident, which is why obsessive ideologues often do more damage at the helm than mere narcissists.

Of course, in the modern world, stubborn focus is often seen as a virtue rather than a vice…and for understandable reasons. Certain heights would never be reached if it weren’t for the courageous insistence of bold, single-minded leaders. We often celebrate these Captain Ahabs, these Cyclops-leaders as our best and brightest, forgetting that such stories don’t often end well. Achieving great purposes, especially as a team, requires more than just great drive and determination, more even than great plans and plausibility structures. It requires the wisdom to know when and how and how much to pivot from your original formula.

Almost nothing worth doing can be done in a straight line. And the primary limiting factor that often requires zigging and zagging is the people under your care. This applies to parents, coaches, and teachers as well as to CEOs and military commanders. The people you lead are the ones who, while possibly sharing your mission in a general sense, often cannot see the end as clearly as you and cannot run as fast or as far. That’s at least part of what makes you the leader and not them. You can, of course, keep spurring them on until they hit a wall and quit, until they no longer share your mission or no longer trust your leadership. (And will that have been their fault or yours? See point #2.) Or…you could pause and ask yourself, “How can I become their servant rather than making them my slaves? How can flexibility and forgiveness at this moment lead to further and deeper focus on our shared task in the end?”

In the Bible, God often introduces these pivots, these zigs and zags, at crucial moments in his redemptive plan. His overall aim does not change, of course. But when his people consistently fail to come alongside him, he allows for surprising detours. He introduces new ways, new paths for the sake of realignment. Flexibility and forgiveness, it turns out, are fundamental to success. Even when your initial purpose and plan are flawless, as in the case of our Lord, flexibility is needed. But our own purposes and plans are not flawless, so we should be all the more ready to pivot. Good leaders balance focus with flexibility.

5. Prove Yourself Trustworthy

Perhaps the most basic thing every leader must learn is that trust and trustworthiness are the fundamental currency of existence. The world, of course, would say otherwise. When even human beings are seen as objects to be moved this way and that, power becomes the dominant currency. But the Bible, from its very first chapter, insists on a different reality. Not even things are things to God. In the beginning, not only human beings but all creation is endowed with a kind of agency or capacity for relationship. Even the fish and birds—even the sun, moon and stars—are given jobs and jurisdictions. The whole created order, it would seem, has been set in motion not by a clock-maker but by an active, loving Father who expects a loving response. That’s the kind of leader God is. Dante was right when he said love was the true name of the gravity that moves the sun and the other stars. Power is subservient to love, even for God.

Now, trust and trustworthiness are something like the left and right hand of love; they are the way that love operates in the world. The whole Bible can actually be seen as an X-shaped story of trust and trustworthiness, where trust begins at the bottom-left and moves upward from earth to heaven and trustworthiness begins at the top-left and moves downward from heaven to earth. Love is made complete at the center of the X, the marriage of heaven and earth, the perfect union of trust and trustworthiness. The same, by the way, can be said of any organization. All who submit must trust, and therefore all who lead must prove themselves trustworthy. In the Old Testament, the Lord is the one who continually proves himself trustworthy while continually pleading with his people to trust him. This is even how he identifies himself at the beginning of the Ten Commandments:

“I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me.” (Exodus 20:2-3)

Trustworthiness, trust.

Let’s imagine, in my backyard rehab project, that I have stated the purpose clearly, that I have made myself the responsible party, that I have provided a plausibility structure to get the job done, and I have been sensitive to the constraints of my family members, making the appropriate concessions at the appropriate times for their sake. But somehow, after all that, the project is still doomed. We just never finish it. Why? I’m tempted to blame it on others, but the fact is, it was a big project, and I just couldn’t engender enough motivation, devotion, skill, teamwork or determination to see it through. Perhaps that is that. Or perhaps there’s more. If I dared to look even further into it, I might find an even deeper problem at the bottom of it all. As it turns out, I have proposed these sorts of projects many times before. I am, apparently, the sort of person who has plenty of big ideas, who talks a big talk—maybe even inspires others to share my dream—but who never tends to see these things through to the very end. And the people closest to me, consciously or unconsciously, know this about me. They may not even know that they know. Perhaps they want to finish the job just as much as I do. But when things get tough, there’s just nothing left in the invisible bank to see them through. They don’t trust me. It might be true that a mustard seed of faith could move mountains. But without even a mustard seed, we can barely move one foot in front of the other.

The hardest leadership lesson in the world is this: trust is fragile. There is only one thing that can keep the flickering flame alight, and it is not sexy. You must stay true, no matter what. As mundane as it may sound, this has become the central goal of my life.

It is a cliche in stories and films to depict kings and generals on the frontlines, leading their people into battle. But in real life nowadays, it’s almost unheard of. Just as modern warfare reassigned generals to rooms with radios and radars, far from the blood and mud of the battlefield, so too modern wisdom has reassigned leaders to places and spaces far removed from the day-to-day labors of their people. “Relentless delegation” is the wave of the future. There are more business books written today about how to “work oneself out of a job” than there are about how to lead others within one. I have no major qualms with delegation, especially if you’ve already cut the path for others to walk. However, the increasing removal of founders, owners and officers from the daily lives and work of their organizations’ members does seem to underestimate the primary source of human motivation.

What moves people, really? Why do people persist in doing hard things? Why venture into the wilderness? Why rush into battle? Despite what a million “mission and vision” statements may proclaim, people follow people, not principles. When we delegate, when we scale, we invite new benefits, of course. But we also open ourselves up to new forms of fragility. It doesn’t mean a leader shouldn’t grow his organization, anymore than a father and mother shouldn’t grow their family. Growth is a blessing. And yet, at every level of growth, the question must still be asked: Not, “What are they working for?” but “Who are they working for? Do they have someone to follow who will not let them down?” For my money, this is what makes or breaks our companies, communities, ministries and families. We are not Christ, but if we hope to be good leaders, we must be like him in this way most of all. We must become trustworthy.

If you enjoyed this post, please hit the LIKE and RESTACK buttons below. Thanks!

My writing time is short in the summer months because of surf camp, but this little topic kept coming to mind after my June essay on forgiveness, so I had to get it out. It’s a bit rougher than usual, but it has lots of good poetry, so I’m hoping that makes up for it. Much love to all.1

The Gospel According To Phantastes

Love, in real life, is never quite what we think. It is much, much better and also seemingly far worse. And yet there is nothing better than love. There is, in fact, no good at all but love, even when we only taste its bitterness.

I re-read George MacDonald’s Phantastes recently and discovered once again that his writing sings this truth in almost every line. But there’s one particular scene and theme from the book which has haunted me more than any other. It has to do with MacDonald’s very counterintuitive perspective on love and the suffering of love.

Earlier in the tale, the protagonist Anodos discovers the statue of a beautiful maiden, which he manages to awaken by singing to her. Once awakened, the maiden runs from him, and Anodos spends a good portion of the rest of the story chasing after her, to no avail. The whole episode calls to mind this enchanting bit from Yeats:

Later in the story, a kind fairy woman allows Anodos to take refuge in her home. That night, she shows him, in a vision, the woman he has been chasing. In the vision, the woman chooses to be with another man, a knight, who, by all accounts, is a better man than Anodos. He knows now for certain that he cannot be with her. He is second best, the “moon” to his “sun.” The maiden must be with the knight, not with him. He had perhaps been worthy enough to awaken her, yet not worthy enough to have and to hold her.

When the vision is finished, he falls into the motherly embrace of the fairy woman, who sings a song over him as he mourns. The song begins by lamenting with Anodos (whose name means “pathless”), but goes on to offer a surprising remedy for the heartbreak of unrequited love.

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O light of dead and of dying days! 
O Love! in thy glory go, 
In a rosy mist and a moony maze, 
O'er the pathless peaks of snow. 
But what is left for the cold gray soul, 
That moans like a wounded dove? 
One wine is left in the broken bowl! — 
'Tis — To love, and love, and love. 

Better to sit at the waters' birth, 
Than a sea of waves to win; 
To live in the love that floweth forth, 
Than the love that cometh in. 
Be thy heart a well of love, my child, 
Flowing, and free, and sure; 
For a cistern of love, though undefiled, 
Keeps not the spirit pure.

What is the remedy for the love-shattered soul? To love and love and love, says the woman, in what must surely be the most offensive answer to modern ears. The same love which caused your heart to break is yet the only wine left in the broken bowl. There is no other sustenance. If you had not loved, perhaps you would not have suffered thus. But the cure for the pain is only to go further into its cause. To love and love and love.

Perhaps this was the episode which led C. S. Lewis—after all, this was the book that “baptized his imagination”—to pen one of his most memorable meditations on the subject:

There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. […] The only place outside of heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers of love is hell.

But back to the fairy’s song.

What precisely is this love which promises renewal to the broken hearted and a path to the pathless? It is, she says, the love that floweth forth rather than the love that cometh in. Like manna in the desert, true love can be enjoyed only by being given and taken and shared, never by being stored up for tomorrow. “For a cistern of love, though undefiled, keeps not the spirit pure.” Oh my.

At the heart of the fairy’s “good news” is a truth rarely swallowed: that love is most truly itself not in the fact of being loved, but in the act of loving.

A more counter-cultural take on love you will not easily find.

Of course it stands in tension with our whole secular “self-care” moment. But it also seems to call into question many of our modern Christian articulations of “the gospel,” which tend to focus, almost entirely, on “the love that cometh in.”

The gospel, we insist, is that we are loved by God. This, apparently, is the good news our hearts have longed for. Yet why doesn’t it bring the lasting comfort which its words imply? Why doesn’t it stick? Why must we keep coming back, keep reassuring ourselves with the same bit of information over and over again? Of course, I am far from denying that we are infinitely loved by the One who made us. There is perhaps no greater truth in the universe than this. I simply deny that we can receive this truth—this love—as such. We are not cisterns, but fountains. Our hearts were not built to store up. We were built to overflow.

As I argued in my last piece, for Jesus and the apostles, the love of God does not function like a laser beam but a circulatory system. It does not flow one way only, and it certainly does not stand still once it arrives at its destination. Just as with our physical hearts, our spiritual hearts can only receive as they give and can only give as they receive. Input and output are inextricably linked. A cistern of love, though undefiled, keeps not the spirit pure.

“We love, because he first loved us,” (1 John 4:19) is not merely an explanation of where our love comes from. Of course it comes from God. But the apostle John is making a much bolder claim about what salvation is. He is saying we love because he first loved us. The sinner saved by grace is not merely the one who escapes condemnation and death; he or she is the one who enters irreversibly into the cosmic circulatory system of God’s infinite love, becoming not only blessed by God but actually like God, giving as he receives and receiving as he gives. The life he receives in Christ is quite literally the love of God, flowing out and flowing in and flowing out again, forever and ever. Salvation entails nothing less than the seemingly impossible transformation of the human heart, to love as he loves.

This is what has always captivated me about MacDonald’s writing. In each of his stories, reality takes on a quality—Lewis called it “holiness”—that is just too much for the protagonist, too good and true and real and palpable for any mortal soul to bear. And yet, the character must bear it, must obey it, must do precisely what he cannot do in the moment when it is most clear that he cannot do it. He must participate in the holy. He must be eclipsed by it, and yet somehow must become finally alive and real within it. All the forgiveness and redemption we know we need can only become ours by entering into and participating in that which most proves our unworthiness to receive it. To paraphrase Macdonald’s own words from elsewhere, the fire which burns us becomes our life. And that fire is his love. Nothing is as terrifyingly demanding as the love of God.

As Lewis explains (in an essay I can’t seem to track down at the moment), Dante’s famous concluding line about “the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars” is not exactly referring to the Love that comes from God, but rather to the Love of the heavenly bodies for God, which drives and regulates the Universe. Yes, they love because he first loved them. The planets wouldn’t exist without him. But in those heavenly bodies, Dante finally beholds that Love, which first made the world, now being properly returned to its Source in praise, giving shape to the eternal dance of all creation. And he is overwhelmed:

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Here powers failed my high imagination:
But by now my desire and will were turned,
Like a balanced wheel rotated evenly,
By the love that moves the Sun and the other stars

To put it almost too straightforwardly, the problem to which Jesus Christ is the ultimate solution is not merely, “How can God find a way to love us, despite our sin?” but rather, “How can God find a way for us to love him, despite our sin?”

What Christ accomplishes in us is nothing less than the transformation of our wills, of our wants, of our loves. We become worthy not merely because he calls us worthy, but because he makes us worthy by calling us and patiently forming us into lovers of the highest goods, into lovers of Him. Again, it is his love that does all this. But it is ours that must be changed. Otherwise there are no saints. Otherwise there is no salvation. A cistern of love, though undefiled, keeps not the spirit pure.

Notice that Jesus uses a similar image when speaking to the woman at the well in John 4:

Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.

Love, like manna in the desert, cannot merely be stored up. It must continually flow between us and overflow in us, lest it spoil in the heart of the receiver.

The Light Princess & How Salvation Actually Works

All this brings to mind another one of my favorite George MacDonald stories, The Light Princess. In an opening scene reminiscent of Sleeping Beauty, a wicked witch, sister to the king, has been uninvited to her newborn niece’s baptism. But, being a wicked witch, she attends the ceremony anyway and pronounces a curse over the child in front of everyone. In MacDonald’s version, the princess’s curse is that of “lightness” or loss of gravity, an inability to feel or embody the weight of things. The curse manifests itself both physically (they have to tie her down so she won’t float away) and emotionally (she’s always happy and never cries). An odd curse to be sure! And at first, it doesn’t seem so bad. But happiness without the possibility of sorrow, almost like sunny weather, day after day, without the chance of rain, is not as pleasant as it might appear. By the time the princess is full grown, sure enough, the land begins to share in the princess’s cursed pattern. Just as the princess cannot produce tears, the land fails to produce rain. Drought and famine begin to threaten the kingdom.

Meanwhile a noble prince has arrived from a far off land. Each night the princess goes for secret swims in the lake beside the palace. She has discovered that the water is the only place where she has some sense of gravity. The prince meets her there and swims with her night after night. Soon he falls in love with her. But whenever he sings to her of his love, she only laughs. She cannot seem to take him seriously.

Nevertheless, the witch becomes very concerned about the possible progress which the lake and the prince seem to represent. So she cuts a hole in the bottom of the lake, and the water begins slowly to drain away. With no rain to replenish it, the people say the princess will not live an hour after the lake is gone.

Around this time, a strange prophecy is discovered, written on a plaque near the bottom of the lake:

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Death alone from death can save.
Love is death, and so is brave--
Love can fill the deepest grave.
Love loves on beneath the wave.

The prince concludes from this that he must give his own life for the life of the princess, plugging the hole at the bottom of the lake with his own body. “She will die if I don’t do it. And life would be nothing without her. So I shall lose nothing by doing it.”

The reader is then led to believe that the prince’s sacrifice alone—his life for hers—will be enough to save the princess and possibly the kingdom. A clean exchange: the prince’s life for the salvation of all. A familiar story, no?

But the prince knows better. The prophecy proclaims no mere magical transaction. True salvation doesn’t work that way. After all the nights spent with the princess in the lake, the prince has come to understand that her curse is complex: it is not only on her but in her. It is hers now, not just the witch’s. And it manifests itself most deeply as an inability to love. He knows that, if his sacrifice is going to break the spell, it cannot merely bring her to life; it must bring her to love. And so, just before he dies, the prince sings to her:

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As a world that has no well, 
Darting bright in forest dell; 
As a world without the gleam 
Of the downward-going stream; 

As a world where never rain 
Glittered on the sunny plain; 
Such, my heart, thy world would be,
if no love did flow in thee.

Lady, keep thy world's delight; 
Keep the waters in thy sight. 
Love hath made me strong to go, 
For thy sake, to realms below. 

Let, I pray, one thought of me 
Spring a little well in thee; 
Lest thy loveless soul be found 
Like a dry and thirsty ground

When the prince finishes his song, the princess only laughs. In usual fashion, she is happy to have the prince give his life so that she can go on swimming in the lake. But when the prince goes down to his death, the princess finally sees the meaning of it all. She tries to save the prince, but by the time she pries his body from the depths, there is no life left in him.

And so, finally, she cries.

As the tears flow down her face, her spell is broken, just as the prince hoped it would be: “Let, I pray, one thought of me / Spring a little well in thee.”2 Rain falls on the land again, a rainbow stretches across the sky, and a waterfall fills the lake brimfull. The witch is defeated and the prince is revived.

“Death alone from death can save,” we find, did not apply merely to the prince’s sacrifice, but to the princess’s response. Both had to die, in a way, so that the princess could be made well, and so that the two could live happily ever after. The prophecy had to be fulfilled not only for her, but in her. And the end result is love.

In Conclusion: Love Is Better Than Life

Let me try now to say in a few simple words what is much more powerfully portrayed in poetry and fairy tales. Love is our life. Or, as King David famously proclaimed, “Your love is better than life” (Psalm 63:3). The “eternal life” we gain in Christ is not actually life as we normally see it at all: not eternal existence, but eternal love. Our Savior came to give us not perfect survival, but perfect union with him.

I am especially grateful for the works of George MacDonald, which have opened my eyes to this reality again and again.3

Some passages in Scripture are hard to interpret, because their meaning is subtle. The true significance may be buried beneath the surface, waiting to be unearthed. Others are hard for the opposite reason, precisely because they are so plainly stated. They are hard to see, not like a needle in a haystack, but like the sun.

“Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us,” is one such blinding light.

It comes in the middle of the most famous prayer in the middle of the most famous sermon of all time. We all know it. Many of us have prayed it thousands of times. Yet, its plain meaning is rarely swallowed. And lest we were tempted to settle for some subtler and more palatable interpretation, Christ himself seems to block off the exits with his very next statement:

For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses. (Matt. 6:14-15)

What could this mean other than what it straightforwardly states: If you do not forgive, you will not be forgiven? On this passage, I want to suggest three (possibly contentious) points:

1. We don’t tend to take Jesus at his word here.

2. He absolutely means what he says, and we ignore it at our peril.

3. Nevertheless, there is a secret mercy hidden in our Lord’s threat of unforgiveness.

WARNING: Point #2 is kind of a wild ride, as I end up wrestling with the bigger problem of how we do theology in general. But stick with me; it’ll pay off.

1. We Don’t Really Believe It (Forgiveness as Impossibility)

Imagine your minister delivering the following message on Sunday morning: “If you do not forgive, God will not forgive you.” How would our modern congregations—evangelical, progressive, or otherwise—receive that message? I’m fairly confident it would cause some confusion, possibly even outrage.

“Heresy! Works-righteousness! God’s forgiveness contingent on our forgiveness? Never!” Yet this is the teaching of our Lord, not only in the Lord’s Prayer and the Sermon on the Mount, but also elsewhere, as in the Parable of the Unforgiving Debtor (Matt. 18:21-35).

The Protestant—and, going back even further, perhaps, Augustinian—tradition has taken a clear stance here, which is worth summarizing at some length:

“Despite what Christ seems to say, our forgiveness is in no way conditioned on our performance. If it were, there would be no meaningful forgiveness of sins at all, since we could never hold to our side of the bargain. Sure, Christ spoke these words just as he also commanded us to be perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect. But he was merely restating the law of Moses, against which we have all been weighed and found wanting. His threat of unforgiveness is not so much false as out-of-date. The law does not have the final say. Grace does. No one could perfectly forgive their neighbor; no one, that is, except One. And thanks be to Jesus, who has done the forgiving on our behalf, who declared on the cross, ‘Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.’ Since he has done it, we do not have to. We are justified, not by our own obedience, but by his work on our behalf. Thanks to him, the threat of divine unforgiveness has come untrue. If anyone continues to speak the same threat over us now, it is not Christ but the devil.”

I will not argue with this theory at present, some of which I believe to be true and some false, or at least confused. But this should suffice as evidence for my first point: we do not believe it, nor can we conceive of Jesus’s warning, in its plainest sense, as merciful or good for us.

2. He Means It (Forgiveness as Analogy)

I want to be careful here. There is some risk in insisting upon a truth like this, for my own sake as well as for others. For my own sake, I don't want to invite Christ’s condemnation of the Pharisees upon myself. I don’t want to heap burdens on the backs of others which even I cannot carry. For others, I don’t wish to scandalize, to make you choke on a truth you weren’t yet prepared to swallow. These are real dangers. And yet, I fear an even greater danger on the other side, in evading or downplaying a truth that must be swallowed.

The history of Christian theology is chock-full of biblical interpretations that do not so much explain the words of Christ as explain them away. The temptation is understandable. An awful mystery has been placed before us: nothing less than the promise of unforgiveness for those who do not forgive (which, by the way, is seemingly all of us). But in our rush to explain it and resolve it, we forget that God in Scripture has called us again and again to wait, to trust, and to ruminate. To obey, even when we do not yet understand. To obey in order to understand.

So let’s begin with another thought experiment. Imagine that Christ’s words in the above passage are really, actually true. If you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will forgive you; if you do not, he, quite literally, will not. Let's assume that this is as true as the law of gravity, yet without throwing out all the other truths which you already accept regarding his grace and mercy and sacrifice, which might seem to contradict the present notion. Simply swallow it all. How, then, will the puzzle pieces fit together?

Perhaps we cannot know, at least not immediately. And what if the knowledge we lack is found precisely in the act of obedience, which we have been told so often we cannot accomplish? After all, it is Christ’s own words which suggest continually that our dealings with others are directly related to our dealings with him. Perhaps as we begin to do what he says, we will find out more and more how true it all is, how the pieces fit together.

But this, you say, does not compute. He has trapped us in a contradiction: If we follow and obey him, if we do as he says, then we can receive his forgiveness. Yet, we cannot follow and obey him, which is why we need his forgiveness in the first place.

But the contradiction is not as stark as we suppose. In fact, we are the ones making it so stark, not him. And we have done so in a very peculiar way.

First, we have unthinkingly assumed an “all-or-nothing” framework when it comes to God, a framework I call uttermost theology.

In uttermost theology, we assume we can only ever understand God’s commands and promises in an all-or-nothing sort of way. Our theological categories of sin and forgiveness become so “high” and infinite in scope that we lack any earthly analogy for them. Although Jesus taught us to call God “Father,” we entertain no parallels between our Heavenly Father and our earthly fathers. Whereas an earthly father can be obeyed or offended in some specific way, be it small or great, our Heavenly Father, according to the uttermost theologians, can only be obeyed or offended infinitely. With him, there are no small, specific acts of obedience or disobedience, and likewise no small, specific acts of forgiveness. If we have failed once, we have utterly failed and require nothing but utter absolution.

But this “uttermost” logic is causing us to miss Jesus in some very important ways.

To be clear, there is a sense in which it is all quite true. God is infinite and infinitely beyond all we can comprehend. Yet, if that were all we knew of him, then we could know nothing at all. But that is not all. Instead he has “come down” again and again from the heights of heaven, revealing himself in and through the most mundane specificities of the earth. Every molecule speaks of him. And though no word or image or analogy does so with perfect accuracy, he insists on making himself known by lowly means: not only through angels and prophets, covenants and commandments, but through the actions of a prostitute and the mouth of a donkey. Without diminishing the transcendent glory of the Godhead, he has nevertheless condescended to us through small signs and great ones, and ultimately through his Son, so that by means of incremental revelation we might gradually come to know him. This is the story of Scripture.

Yet this paradox of transcendence and immanence is hard to digest. So rather than live in the tension, we tend toward one extreme or the other. And in “uttermost theology,” we tend toward extreme transcendence: “The commandments of Christ are so far above us that we could never even dream of obeying them.” But when we use this logic, we burn the bridge he built for us. Our seemingly “high” treatment of God’s commands and promises leads us, almost accidentally, to reject those same commands and promises in our daily lives. The commandments we claim to hold so “high,” we ironically never even try to keep, because we have deemed it impossible to do so from the start. We do not give body or action or application to his words, and thus we never even begin to know what they truly mean. And when we lose their embodied application on earth, we also lose the heavenly blessing that body was meant to hold. In other words (to give away the end in the beginning), we lose our capacity to receive Him.

Don’t get me wrong. The commandments of our Lord are certainly “high” commands. They are reflections of the infinite, glimpses into the kingdom of heaven. Nevertheless, our experience of them must begin on the ground. “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven,” he says. In fact, every element of the Lord’s Prayer is like this. The prayer descends from the Father “who art in heaven” into common requests about our daily lives. It’s about daily temptations and trespasses no less than daily bread. In a few lines, we descend from the hallowed throne of heaven to the minute particularities of earth—and even further, into hell itself (“deliver us from evil”)—in order, ultimately, to offer everything up to God again.

To take another example, even the greatest commandment, according to Christ, is not to “love everyone infinitely,” but to “love your neighbor as yourself.” Why? Because things must first be specific in order to become general. They must begin small and close, like a seed you can hold in your hand, which when planted, becomes a tree which can hold you in its branches. And you don’t need to know how it happens. It’s not your job to make the tree grow. But if you aren’t at least faithful enough to plant the seed and stay where you planted it, what do you know of seeds and trees?

Even before Christ, God could say this about his commands:

For this commandment that I command you today is not too hard for you, neither is it far off. It is not in heaven, that you should say, ‘Who will ascend to heaven for us and bring it to us, that we may hear it and do it?’ Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, ‘Who will go over the sea for us and bring it to us, that we may hear it and do it?’ But the word is very near you. It is in your mouth and in your heart, so that you can do it. (Deut. 30:11-14)

Of course, Christ’s commandments are higher, in some sense, than those of Moses, yet they are also nearer. They point “further up and further in” to the kingdom of heaven, yet that same kingdom is now “at hand.” The Word has become flesh, so that his words may become flesh in us.

What I am saying is that the commandments were not merely given as an unattainable standard (though they may also be experienced as such). They are not merely a measure of justice, by which we fall short, but also—and perhaps even more so—a means of grace, by which we participate in him. As we do what he says, we come to know him. Each act of obedience becomes a kind of lived analogy. Without obedience, even imperfect obedience, we could not know him at all.

To return to the main example of forgiveness, we could not even conceive of the nature of the Father’s forgiveness except by struggling to forgive those who trespassed against us. Our daily acts of forgiveness—and, likewise, all acts of faith and obedience—become a kind of bridge by which we can finally experience the Father’s forgiveness. I do not mean that such acts make the Father’s forgiveness possible. It was always already possible in Him. Rather, it makes us into vessels who can receive and carry it.

This, however, does not fit into the “uttermost” framework.

“No bridge but Christ!” they say. And, to be clear, I don’t disagree. I’m simply stating the obvious: that a bridge is only useful to those who step out onto it. But the uttermost theologians object, since such a salvation entails taking steps at all. “Christ has spanned the expanse so that we don’t have to!” Sure, but we still need to get to the other side. “Christ takes us with him!” But how? It apparently just…happens. They have unconsciously traded the image of walking for that of teleportation, a natural and biblical analogy of faith for a magical and non-existent one.

And this is the problem. Ancient Christians envisioned a more patient union of heaven and earth. Jesus said the kingdom of God was like a mustard seed which becomes the largest tree in the garden—a seed which dies and grows roots and eventually sprouts branches, which reach imperceptibly slowly toward the heavens. A tree knows no other way but the long game. And they took this seriously. In their view, the God-man descended from heaven to earth in order to take and call earth up into heaven by means of daily, ordinary acts of trust, love, and faithfulness. Not that they imagined “earning” their way to heaven, as if such a foolish Tower-of-Babel project were possible. Rather, they assumed Jesus was calling them to participate in heaven, by his grace, here and now. “Follow me,” Jesus said. And they obeyed, or at least tried to.

By contrast, for us modern “uttermost theologians,” the whole journey between heaven and earth must be accomplished all at once or not at all. “It is finished,” replaces “Follow me,” rather than fulfilling it. The objective work of Christ replaces the subjective faith and faithfulness of the believer, rather than making it finally possible. The cross cancels discipleship instead of becoming its central symbol.

Without the tree-shaped bridge of participation, heaven and earth remain for us entirely separate entities, to be traversed only by means of divine teleportation. Salvation, once understood as mutual, self-giving relationship, becomes a kind of one-time transaction. The marriage of heaven and earth is replaced with a one-night stand. The whole cosmos is then bifurcated into “natural” (which means corrupted) or “supernatural” (which means deus ex machina), with nothing to bridge the gap in between. Our nature cannot be lifted up to God, and his super-nature cannot do anything but conquer and replace our corruption, which is to say, our whole selves.

But Jesus’s own ministry does not work this way. He does not come conquering and replacing. Rather, he comes speaking. He treats the things and creatures of this earth as still in some sense good, as still having at least enough agency and dignity to be spoken to by their creator. He tells the storm to be still, and it obeys. He tells the paralytic to pick up his mat and walk, and he obeys. He even tells his disciples that they may say to this mountain, “Move from here to there,” and it will move. And yet we are somehow to believe that he does not expect our obedience when he tells us to forgive those who have trespassed against us.

It is absurd.

I am not saying we can easily obey. On the contrary, we are sinners—as wild as the storm and as helpless as the paralytic. But if he says, “Walk,” we would be crazy not to try. And yet, as uttermost theologians, we do not try. Rather, we have transformed the palpable realities of obedience and sin and forgiveness and all the rest of it into technical theological terms of the uttermost heavens, which have no earthly specificity or application. “One sin,” we say, “is the same as a million.” Which is to say, it’s all an abstraction, to be resolved by another abstraction.

In such a world, what can forgiveness even mean? What does it feel like to forgive? What does it feel like to be forgiven? In the uttermost frame, we do not know. We have lost all analogy. Because we have not believed Jesus’s words about forgiveness, we have not done them. Because we have not done them, we have not understood them. And because we have not understood them, we have not even wanted to be forgiven. For wanting presupposes some knowledge of the thing wanted.

This is where we find ourselves as uttermost theologians of the 21st Century. We have avoided and disdained the specific teachings of Christ today, which might have been our bridge to knowing him, and have instead doubled down on an abstract and generalized blessing for tomorrow, which requires nothing other than the belief that we will receive it regardless of what we do or do not do, despite Christ’s clear words to the contrary.

We are like those who know we must make a very great and perilous journey, in which only one man has ever succeeded. That very man stands before us, pleading with us to follow him across the great abyss. If we do not, he says, we will surely die. Yet instead of fixing our eyes on him and putting one trembling foot in front of the other, we hang back, entertaining the rumors of some dreamlike technology which will get us to our destination without any effort on our part.

This, apparently, is our “good news:” not that the Son of God has bidden us to repent and to follow him as he leads the way to his Father’s house, where there are rooms prepared for us; but that having ignored and disdained his invitation, he will nevertheless take us where we would rather not go. “Christ will carry us!”

I think I understand why so many of us have come to believe this. As I have said, I believe some small part of it myself. But I would rather have him as my Lord today than as my divine technology tomorrow. I would rather at least try to do what he says, and when I fall short, cry out to him. At least then, when he hears, “Lord, Lord,” he will know my voice. And if he knows me, he will not leave me behind.

3. It Is Good (Forgiveness as Capacity)

Now that we have reclaimed analogy, and have seen at least in part how even small acts of real forgiveness become a bridge by which we can begin to conceive of and long for the infinite forgiveness of our souls, let’s go a step further. Our forgiveness of others offers far more than understanding and desire. It actually affords us the capacity to be forgiven, to receive a gift which we would otherwise have no room for.

See, the logic of the Uttermost God produces a world of what I call “laser beam doctrines.” In this world, the love of God and the blessings of Christ flow in a strict one-way current from God to us. He gives. We receive. That is the gospel. It is always about “being forgiven,” never about forgiving. In laser beam economics, it is not “Forgive us as we forgive,” but “Forgive us because we do not and will not.” But open your New Testament and you find a very different economy playing out in the teachings of Jesus and the other apostles. In the kingdom of God, love is not so much a laser beam as a circulatory system. Just as with our physical hearts, our spiritual hearts can only receive as they give and can only give as they receive. Input and output are inextricably linked.

I realize what this sounds like. Believe me, I do. But in my defence, I’m not the one who speaks this way about forgiveness. Almost no one does in the church today. But Christ did.

And yet, how could it be true? What symmetry or synergy could sinners possibly bring to the forgiving work of Christ? Again, we do not know. All we know is that our brother Christ has brought us a message from the Father: We must partner with him and the Father in their work. We must somehow participate in the circulatory system of their mutual love, otherwise there can be no place for us in their house.

But why? Why must he threaten our unforgiveness with unforgiveness? How could that be good? What is it specifically about our unforgiveness that might keep us from receiving the Father’s forgiveness?

Aha. Receive. What if the problem with forgiveness is not exactly that he will not give it, but that we cannot receive it? He cannot speak a word that will return to him void. Which brings us deeper into the notion of what forgiveness—and salvation—actually mean.

If forgiveness were a mere technical transaction, if “receiving” only meant that the stamp of absolution had been magically placed upon you, with or without your will, that would be simple enough. But if the forgiveness of God is primarily about restoring a relationship, well then, that is a more complicated matter. Then the receiver becomes a central part of the problem. God cannot merely give the gift he would like to give; he must find a way for us to be able to receive it (and therefore to receive him, which is the end of salvation). And, of course, that is exactly what he does.

Throughout Scripture, God’s primary mode of operation is relational. He relates to his people through covenants and commandments, through calls to faith and faithfulness. He works with and through imperfect men and women, not merely despite them. They must—the whole story seems to depend on it—actually heed his warnings, answer his calls, believe his promises, offer their only son on the altar, and speak to the rock instead of striking it. And even when they fail, striking the rock instead of speaking to it, God is faithful to carry out his purposes in their midst, yet again, not merely despite them, but through them. The whole thing is a two-sided relationship, because, of course, you cannot marry someone who doesn’t want to marry you.

This is how God saves the world. The love of God will not be eclipsed by our darkness, and yet somehow neither is the beloved eclipsed in his light. Because of his love, we shall neither die in the darkness (death by alienation), nor die of his light (death by holiness). We shall truly marry him. But we must be a pure bride. We must be sanctified if we want to be saved. Put another way, we must want to be saved if we want to be saved.

And he is patient. He plants the seed, tills the soil of our hearts, and waits for our love to grow. Just as trees are not merely zapped into existence, neither is the kingdom of God zapped into its fullness. When Jesus enters the scene at the beginning of the Gospels, he does not come giving out prizes: “Forgiveness for all!” Instead the message is this: “The kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe the good news.” And what is this kingdom like? “Like a mustard seed, which becomes the largest tree in the garden.” The marriage of heaven and earth cannot be merely announced in order to be enacted. First, both parties must take their vows.

This is the main problem with the Jesus-did-it-so-we-don’t-have-to gospel. Of course we have to. If we do not, we shall never be married to him, and we shall never be saved. Yes, grace speaks first. But it speaks in order to hear its beloved respond. He brings great gifts, but the gifts are not a one-way, laser-beam transaction. They are an invitation into a mutual relationship. “Repent, believe, follow,” “ask, seek, knock,” “eat my flesh and drink my blood,” “forgive or you will not be forgiven”...this is the language of urgent invitation into participation in him. It is a wedding proposal, a call to enter through his wardrobe, to taste and see, perhaps even to settle down and live in the world where he is king.

“If you do not forgive, you will not be forgiven” is not primarily a reflection of the Father’s justice, but of his mercy. It is the loving father who warns his son, “Do not take that path. It will not lead you out of the woods, but only further in.” But for the son who doesn’t trust his father and insists on going his own way, the warning can only be a judgement.

Near the end of The Last Battle, Aslan stands at the door of his eternal kingdom and opens his mouth to speak. Those who trust the Great Lion hear his loving voice welcoming them in. Those who do not trust him, at the same moment, hear only a snarl. The difference is in them, not in him.

If we will not enter his world, how can we partake of his gifts? And why would we enter if we are already content within our own kingdoms here and now? How can we receive his gifts if our hands are already full? It is hard for the rich to enter the kingdom of heaven, because entering means emptying. So much of Christ’s teaching revolves around these two themes, which are really the same theme: emptying and entering. The gift is indeed free, but we still cannot afford it. Why? Because, as he says repeatedly in the Sermon on the Mount, we have already received our reward. In this light, the very first line of the sermon can be seen as the key to all that follows:

Blessed are the poor in spirit,

For theirs is the kingdom of heaven

Why must we forgive? Because forgiveness makes us poor, so that we can finally be rich. Because forgiveness is the opening of our hands to God, precisely as we empty them of all our grievances. To forgive is to join his circulatory system of love, which is the heartbeat of the cosmos. Whatever we withhold for ourselves, that is what we cannot receive from God. The earthly treasures we store up here and now, including even our just judgements against those who have wronged us, take the space which heavenly treasures could have otherwise filled. We can hold on or we can let go. We can have one “reward” or we can have the other. But the one thing we cannot do is have both. We cannot serve two masters.

This has been one of the most difficult pieces I have ever written. I do not expect that it will have convinced most of my readers. Nor do I wish to scandalize you beyond what your conscience can take. For generations, we have preached that the free gift of God comes with “no strings attached,” an idea which cannot—and perhaps should not—be upended in one fell swoop. But as I have argued in previous essays, true grace is a gift with strings attached, and those strings mercifully bind us to Him. “Forgive us as we forgive” is one such string. Such a gift affords us the salvation of restored relationship. It affords us the ability, finally, to love Him and be faithful to Him as he has been to us. And this is precisely what it means to be saved.

“What is hell?” asks Father Zosima in The Brothers Karamazov. “I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.” So Lord, open our hearts to love others as you have first loved us. And forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.

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P.S. If you were expecting this essay to delve more practically into the complexities of forgiving others, stay tuned. This is the first in a series on forgiveness. More to come in due time. And I promise it will get more practical from here.

P.P.S. Big thanks to , , , , and Matt Fittro for reading and offering your thoughts when this essay was in its painfully unfinished stage. It’s probably still unfinished, but it’s much better than it was!

Truly, I say to you, among those born of women there has arisen no one greater than John the Baptist. Yet the one who is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he. (Matthew 11:11)

There’s a very strange story in the Old Testament about an unnamed prophet who is killed by a lion. The strange part is not that he is killed, but how and why it happens. I’ve been looking for an excuse to write about this for some time. Then came the recent dogpile on Jordan Peterson regarding this video of him debating twenty atheists, and it seemed as good an occasion as any.

What did I think of the video? I mean, sure, I’ll bite. But only for a moment, only as a setup for my weird story, which I think points to something more timeless about prophets and their plight.

We live in an age of prophets. False ones and true ones and many in between. They see things that we cannot or will not. They speak with authority in our public places—that is, mostly on our screens—warning and entreating us, calling us to heed the God or gods they represent. All prophets, as I think has said, are prophets of something. Even when they say they do not believe in gods or spirits, powerful spirits speak through them, for better or worse.

Of course, we don’t usually call these people “prophets.” We don’t usually believe in prophets, much less in gods or spirits. Yet still, we attend to them. We may even reshape our priorities according to their words. But we grossly underestimate the weight of responsibility and accountability that rests on their shoulders. The Bible, however, reminds us repeatedly that the stakes are high. In Deuteronomy 13, for instance, we find that false prophets are to be put to death. In 1 Kings 18, Elijah enacts this very commandment by slaughtering 450 prophets of Baal. Our strange story begins a few chapters earlier than this blood-soaked account. And though it only involves the cursed death of a single man, it’s even more offensive to our modern sensibilities. But first…

Jordan Peterson and the Atheists

I guess I should say from the start of this bit that I don’t really relate to the various take-downs I’ve seen, be they from Christians or non. I’ve followed JP pretty closely for years now, not precisely as a die-hard enthusiast, but as a genuinely interested religious person trying to glean all I can from his (mostly) secular approach to philosophy, psychology, and faith. Almost immediately I could see some major parallels with an early C. S. Lewis, and I was curious to find out whether his deepest philosophical inquiries would lead him closer to Christianity, as they did for Lewis.

Interestingly, they definitely have, to the point where he is now labeled as a “Christian” in a room full of atheists, despite the fact that he still refuses to assume that label for himself! This doesn’t mean I agree with all of his thinking. I have my qualms. But he is older and smarter and wiser than I in any number of ways, so I’ve enjoyed receiving what he has to offer.

I admit that I am more familiar with pre-daily-Wire JP. I haven’t kept up with him very well lately. I didn’t even watch the video in question until last night. But after the initial smattering of viral clips, I pretty much assumed the critics were right. And I wasn’t shocked. I have seen him fail before. The idea of locking him in a room with a bunch of young, feisty atheists racing to “own” the lobster man with one-liners before their two minutes of fame is up didn’t seem like a situation that would bring out his “winsome” side.

Peterson, by his own admission, can be a bit moody, or as the psychologists say, “high in neuroticism.” He is often cranky. He is sometimes distracted by his own inner monologue. These tendencies do not always detract from his stated mission of genuine, mutual truth-seeking. But when they do, he can find himself unable to hear the person who is talking to him. And this, in my opinion, is when he fails.

By the way, I think this would be true of most humans given a spotlight like his, and, for most of us, to an even greater degree. Fame is almost always at cross-purposes with love and sanity. We should not wish it even on our worst enemies. Or perhaps we should only wish it on them.

Anyway, I finally watched the video, and here’s the thing.

I really could not imagine him doing a much better job than he did. He was not having an “off night.” He was not more cranky than he usually is. (In fact, some of my favorite parts of the video were when he interrupted the dialogue in order to remind some of the younger men the importance of manners. Like a wise old man from almost any other generation than ours, he showed little patience for smart-alecks, while remaining hospitable and even complimentary of his more careful and respectful adversaries.) He did seem to hear most of his opponents. He generally responded to their questions and claims thoughtfully and respectfully, though not perfectly. I also think he succeeded in upending some of the more foolish assumptions and unexamined propositions that were placed before him.

His first and primary claim—that atheists do not understand the God they reject—was, in my view, proven beyond a shadow of a doubt. It was proven in almost every interaction, and it was certainly proven by the sum of the interactions. As someone familiar with Peterson’s rhetoric and the philosophical framework which undergirds it, this much was clear to me.

But mostly what I mean is, I could not imagine him doing a better job.

Certainly I could imagine other Christians—say, Wesley Huff or Bishop Barron or Jonathan Pageau or the late Tim Keller—saying far more of the things I would have wanted to say. I could imagine all those men representing the Christian faith more effectively in both their arguments and their demeanor. They would not only have represented Christianity well, they would have represented…Christianity.

This is not, however, what I understand Jordan Peterson’s vocation to be. He was not there to represent Christianity. He literally refused to be labeled a Christian on multiple occasions. Rather, he was there to do exactly what he did—and has done for a quite a few years now—to be a thorn in the heel of modern atheism.

Okay. I have said too much, far more than I intended, about the latest viral clip of Jordan Peterson, which will probably be forgotten a month from now anyway. But hopefully you will not forget the very strange story I’m about to tell you from 1 Kings.

The Man of God, the Lying Man of God, & the Lion

Recall that the Books of Kings and Chronicles tell the story of the long line of Israel’s rulers after David. Basically, despite a few bright moments, it’s not a pretty story. The kings continually fail to do as they should, the kingdom splits, and ultimately they end up in exile. There’s a kind of repeating chorus throughout the narrative that goes something like this:

Now so-and-so began to reign over Judah. And he walked in all the sins that his father did before him, and his heart was not wholly true to the Lord his God, as the heart of David.

But, near the beginning of the narrative, before this chorus becomes a pattern, we meet a man named Jeroboam. Near the end of Solomon’s reign, the prophet Ahijah meets Jeroboam and gives him a message. He tears his cloak into twelve pieces and says,

Take ten pieces for yourself, for this is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: ‘See, I am going to tear the kingdom out of Solomon’s hand and give you ten tribes. But for the sake of my servant David and the city of Jerusalem, which I have chosen out of all the tribes of Israel, he will have one tribe.’

According to Ahijah, Solomon has allowed the worship of foreign gods and has been obedient to the Lord like his father David. Therefore:

You [Jeroboam] will rule over all that your heart desires; you will be king over Israel. If you do whatever I command you and walk in obedience to me and do what is right in my eyes by obeying my decrees and commands, as David my servant did, I will be with you. I will build you a dynasty as enduring as the one I built for David and will give Israel to you.

After this, in an act eerily reminiscent of Saul, Solomon tries to kill Jeroboam. He then flees to Egypt, only to return after the death of the king.

Fast forward a bit, and, sure enough, Jeroboam becomes king over the northern tribes. But sadly, he does not do what the Lord commanded of him. Fearing that people might return to Solomon’s son Rehoboam of Judah, he sets up golden calves in Bethel and Dan as alternative worship sites to Jerusalem, leading Israel once again into idolatry.

Here begins (finally) the weird story of the death of the unnamed prophet in 1 Kings 13:

By the word of the Lord a man of God came from Judah to Bethel, as Jeroboam was standing by the altar to make an offering. By the word of the Lord he cried out against the altar: “Altar, altar! This is what the Lord says: ‘A son named Josiah will be born to the house of David. On you he will sacrifice the priests of the high places who make offerings here, and human bones will be burned on you.’” That same day the man of God gave a sign: “This is the sign the Lord has declared: The altar will be split apart and the ashes on it will be poured out.”

At the end of this speech, King Jeroboam raises his hand, ordering that the man be killed on the spot. But as he does, his hand withers, proving that the prophet is truly from God. When the prophet then heals his withered arm, Jeroboam is amazed and invites him to stay and eat with him in the palace. But the prophet is under strict orders from God. He must not stay in Bethel for any reason. He was sent only to deliver his message, then to leave the land for good. So he leaves.

Meanwhile another old prophet in the land hears of this man of God and of his words and deeds before the throne of Jeroboam. So he gets on his donkey and sets out to meet the man on his way out of town. Sure enough, he finds him on the road and invites him to come and eat with him. But the man refuses.

“I cannot turn back and go with you, nor can I eat bread or drink water with you in this place. I have been told by the word of the Lord: ‘You must not eat bread or drink water there or return by the way you came.”

But the old prophet answered, “I too am a prophet, as you are. And an angel said to me by the word of the Lord: ‘Bring him back with you to your house so that he may eat bread and drink water.’” (But he was lying to him.) So the man of God returned with him and ate and drank in his house.

That’s right. The one true prophet of God lied to the other true prophet of God, and told him the Lord wanted him to do what he was explicitly told not to do. And the younger prophet believes the older, and obeys. Then…

While they were sitting at the table, the word of the Lord came to the old prophet who had brought him back. He cried out to the man of God who had come from Judah, “This is what the Lord says: ‘You have defied the word of the Lord and have not kept the command the Lord your God gave you. You came back and ate bread and drank water in the place where he told you not to eat or drink. Therefore your body will not be buried in the tomb of your ancestors.’”

When the man of God had finished eating and drinking, the prophet who had brought him back saddled his donkey for him. As he went on his way, a lion met him on the road and killed him, and his body was left lying on the road, with both the donkey and the lion standing beside it. [...] When the prophet who had brought him back from his journey heard of it, he said, “It is the man of God who defied the word of the Lord. The Lord has given him over to the lion, which has mauled him and killed him, as the word of the Lord had warned him.”

So the great man of God is mauled by a lion. And the man who lied to him about the Lord’s will, now tells us that this death is indeed the Lord’s judgement against the man. But it gets even weirder…

When he hears of the incident, the old prophet saddles his donkey and goes to retrieve the (still intact) body of the man he seemingly betrayed. And there he mourns and cries, “Alas, my brother!” Finally, in an act of deep respect, he buries the man in a tomb reserved for himself and tells his sons,

“When I die, bury me in the grave where the man of God is buried; lay my bones beside his bones. For the message he declared by the word of the Lord against the altar in Bethel and against all the shrines on the high places in the towns of Samaria will certainly come true.”

And that is the story of the unnamed prophet who is killed by a lion.

Okay, But What Does It Mean?

One thing we’ve (re-)learned in the Jordan Peterson moment is that the world tends to lay itself out in hierarchies. We are always subject to “aboveness,” to authority, to frames and perspectives which have been imposed upon us whether we want them or not. To use a very simple example, children cannot survive—cannot even exist—without parents. But they also cannot perceive the world without the particular lens their parents give them. They may sometimes refuse to obey their parents when they are little. They may even grow to disagree with their parents’ perspectives when they are grown. But the one thing they cannot do is see the world outside of them.

A similar relationship can be found between the people of Israel and their rulers in the Book of Kings. If the top of the hierarchy fails to obey God, everyone is affected. As go the kings, so go the people. If you have bad parents, it doesn’t necessarily mean you will be a bad kid (though it might!), but it does mean your life and perspective will inevitably be shaped by that fact.

Yet parents are not the only hierarchical reality in the life of a growing child. Other powerful influences insert themselves from the outside, which sometimes prove even more influential, for better or worse. A prophet is like this. They seem to come out of nowhere, and yet they assume a position at the very top of the hierarchy. They seem to see things which parents and kings do not, and they speak with comparable if not greater authority.

Now, there are false prophets and true ones. For a growing child, “cool” older friends can have a kind of authority which undermines the healthy role of a parent. (False prophet.) Alternatively, a teacher or coach or youth leader or pastor can speak in a way that also counteracts the negative influences of one’s parents, but in a way that is ultimately good and necessary for the child’s growth and integrity. (True prophet.)

But notice that even the “true prophets” in this example are wielding a disruptive and potentially dangerous amount of authority. They may speak the truth, but they’d better remain absolutely true to that truth over the longhaul, lest the growing child become even more screwed up by them than by their own bad parents or false-prophet friends. There is nothing worse than being let down or betrayed by the best influences in your life. And yet, who can persevere at the top of the hierarchy? The air is thin and the ground exceedingly narrow in the high places where prophets stand and speak.

Hopefully you’re now beginning to see how the story of the unnamed prophet is less strange than it first appeared. In a time of hierarchical failure, a man of God is called to speak to the top. Which is another way of saying, he is called to be the top, for at least that moment, to represent the Lord to the king. His instructions are quite clear. His road is narrow. Come. Speak. Leave. Do not even stop to eat.

And he does it. The task may be simple, but it is not easy. The faith and courage required to speak such a message might exceed the capacity of every man in Israel. Yet this one man of God is faithful enough and courageous enough to do it. But as the rest of the story proves, he is not quite faithful enough to persevere at that level of responsibility. If you’re going to rebuke God’s chosen king for his wavering allegiances, you’d better not waver yourself.

But what about the old prophet who lies to him in order to test him? It’s harsh treatment to be sure. But why would a prophet expect otherwise? The one at the top is to be tested most of all, because he must be the most trustworthy. And the test is this: can you sustain this level of faithfulness? Because, if not, you certainly should not retain this level of authority. The stakes are too high, and as all true prophets inevitably discover, God is not messing around.

But notice, perhaps strangest of all, that the old prophet who sets the trap that gets the man of God killed is also the first to praise and honor him once he is dead. Was it some grave sin to agree to eat with another prophet who convinces you that the Lord has ordained it? Grave enough to die on the side of the road. But certainly not grave enough to ruin Israel or besmirch his name. It is only a very small sign of decline. But for those at the top, one small hint of deterioration, if allowed to continue over time, could become the thing that ruins everything for everyone. “Not many of you should presume to be teachers,” etc.

And so, for the person who truly loves God, it is better to die once your appointed deed is done. Yes, it is a judgement (judgement is inevitable), but perhaps much more, it is a mercy. You have done the job you were sent to do. That is enough. Better to die now than to live on to a day where you are no longer able to do what you did—no longer fully His, taking matters into your own hands, making decisions by your own wisdom, outside the narrow purview into which you were originally called. To be holy is to be so close to the fire of God’s life as to be always at risk of your own death. But such a death can be a blessing. Not all men are blessed with the kind of severe mercy that was shown to the prophet in 1 Kings 13. But because he was, his life ended well. Though his death was tinged with shame (as are all deaths), his life was honored and remembered.

There’s a powerful parallel of this in the life and death of Moses. The end of Moses’s life is famously—and one might be tempted to think, needlessly—harsh. After a heroic career as God’s prophet and judge—the burning bush, the plagues, the Passover, the parting of the Red Sea, the giving of the Law, the revelation of His glory, and the promise of Canaan—Moses strikes a rock instead of speaking to it…and the Lord tells him that he will not enter the Promised Land. Instead, he will die in the wilderness, and another (Joshua) will take his place.

Do we then conclude that Moses was an utter failure? Do we blot out his memory or even taint it with the shame of his final misstep? Of course not. Moses was the great prophet, perhaps the greatest in the Old Testament. But his time of leadership had come to an end. Was striking the rock instead of speaking to it some grave sin? Grave enough to die in the wilderness. But certainly not grave enough to undo all he had done with the Lord’s help. Yet what if he had gone on? Could a man in his role, now apparently prone to striking things which God had commanded him to speak to, really continue to lead God’s people across the Jordan? I think not. After all, the entrance to Canaan is Jericho, and the walls of Jericho, if you recall, are a kind of “rock” which must be spoken to rather than struck if they are going to fall. Joshua was the man for that hour, as was Moses for his own.

A prophet is given not only a task but a time. Those of us who feel we have a mantle to wear and a message to share would do well to count the cost, especially if we intend to speak of—or on behalf of—the one true God. For He is indeed merciful enough to cut our ministry short.

Harvey Dent’s famous line from The Dark Knight rings true here, but in a different way than the film intended: “You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.”

The true prophet’s aim is not to die a hero, but to die a man of God, to die holy, completely set apart for Him and seeking only His secret reward. It is, however, quite common to see men with a prophet’s mantle live long enough to serve more than one Master, to live for more than one reward. I don’t have anyone in particular in mind as I write these words. Not Jordan Peterson or anyone else. Perhaps I am thinking mainly of myself. But the lion awaits us all. My prayer is simply that I will remain faithful until the day he strikes. And even then to be able to say, with St. Paul, “Where O Death is thy sting?”

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Hello friends,

This past Friday was my last lecture of the year with the VB Fellows, in which I tried my best to summarize a year’s journey through the Bible and the Christian life. One of my end-of-the-year traditions with the fellows is to present an evolving list of proverbs which express the major themes of the course. (I also have the fellows write their own!) Another tradition is to have the fellows read my favorite sermon of all time, “The Consuming Fire,” by George MacDonald, which was originally written and preached to a small congregation in Scotland around the time of the American Civil War (mid 1800’s).

Macdonald’s sermon wrestles with some of the most difficult theological questions imaginable, namely the strange coexistence of love and hell, or more properly, of love and fire. What is love, exactly? And how could a God who is called “a consuming fire” also be called “love”? Macdonald’s exploration of this mystery is unlike any I have ever come across. It is, I believe, life-changingly profound (even if you don’t agree with every word). But also, it is no walk in the park.

In my early years teaching Macdonald, I noticed that, aside from the heavy theological lifting, a century and a half’s worth of language barrier also seemed to be getting in the way of the students’ comprehension. So I decided to rewrite this sermon with more accessible language for modern ears, adapting it as though it were a sermon you might hear in your local church in the 21st Century. (Sadly, we don’t tend to hear sermons of this caliber these days, but you know what I mean.) It is my attempt not to let the language itself get in the way of the message. I also bolded the most important passages throughout to make it even easier to see where the argument is going.

Anyway, without further ado, this is my adaptation of Macdonald’s sermon. (I’ve also included the audio, for those who prefer to listen.) I hope it awakens your soul at least half as much as it did mine.

— Ross

The Consuming Fire

Our God is a consuming fire. – HEBREWS 12:29

Nothing is inexorable but love. Love cannot be bargained with. It is not flexible. Its mind cannot be changed.

Love is unconditional, yet in a different way than we often think. We will say, There is nothing I could do that would make God love me any less or more. This is true and also false. True, because even your sin cannot change love’s mind about you. True, because the love that made you could not love you any less. But also false, because it presumes that love is indifferent toward what you do, and nothing could be further from the truth. False, because, while He could not love you any less, He would love you more and more.

You see, love does not—could not—merely love you “as you are.” It does love you as you are, but that is only the beginning of what love does. Love has always in view the absolute loveliness of the beloved. Where that loveliness is incomplete, love cannot love its fill, so it spends itself to make you more lovely, that it may love you more. Love is a successful perfectionist. It strives for perfection, even that itself might be perfected—not in itself, but in you. The same love that made you and loves you is also making you and loving you into the person you were meant to be: his perfect bride. Love will not settle for less than everything it desires. It is always working, always climbing toward its final, perfect consummation.

In short, love loves unto purity. Therefore all that is not beautiful in you, all that comes between lover and beloved, must be destroyed.

And our God is a consuming fire.

What? God is love! How could he possibly be a destroying, consuming fire? Yes, it is a hard truth. The most absolute of truths is often the hardest to grasp. Not because it is complicated, but because it is simple. It’s been right there the whole time, but you might go a lifetime without seeing it. And once you see it, you wonder how you could have ever missed it. It was not that you could not understand it, but that you did not see it. To see a truth, to understand it, and to love it are one and the same. Imagine living in the dark, having no concept of light. You feel something is missing. You struggle for lack of…you know not what. Then the light comes on. At first you hardly know what you’re looking at. Your eyes strain. Slowly, you begin to see all that you had been missing. Your perspective is transformed.

For this simple vision of truth God has been working for ages of ages. All of nature, history, and poetry, every divine vision and law, every creative act of God—and every destructive act—have conspired for this one purpose: that the eyes of your soul might be opened, that His life might become your life, and his love, which is his consuming fire, might dwell in you.

Let us look at the passage where this terrifying statement, “Our God is a consuming fire,” occurs.

Hebrews 13:28-29: “Therefore let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, and thus let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire.”

Notice, we are told we have received a kingdom that cannot be shaken. The kingdom of God is immovable. So let us serve the Consuming Fire with true fear—not the fear that cowers and craves—but the fear that surrenders all thoughts, all delights, all loves to the One who purifies with fire. His kingdom cannot be moved, because it is reality itself. Reality just is. It cannot be otherwise. So we must worship him with a fear that takes the shape of reality. All that is less real must go.

Verse 27: “He will shake heaven and earth, that only the unshakeable may remain.” When the fire of God comes, only that which cannot be consumed will stand. Only that which is pure as fire. He will have purity. It’s not that the fire will burn us if we aren’t pure. Rather, the fire will burn us until we are pure. And then it will go on burning within us, after all impurities have been consumed in the flames and there is no longer any pain, as the highest form of consciousness, the presence of God in us. Don’t get me wrong. When I say “impurities” I don’t mean your mistakes and imperfections, as though God were petty enough to make you suffer for such things. Evil alone is consumable. That is what burns away in us. And when the fire has finished its work, we will be able to look at God and fear him rightly—not fearing his power over us—but fearing his love. Such fear of God will cause a man to flee, not from God, but from himself; not from God, but to him, saying to the Father, “Give me something, anything, to do, that I might worship you and never flee from your fire.” And the first words he will say to us are found in the very next verse (13:1): "Let brotherly love continue." To love our neighbor is to worship the Consuming Fire.

The writer of Hebrews is talking about the fire that burned on the mountain at the giving of the Ten Commandments in Exodus. There, the fire was part of the revelation of God to the Israelites. And not just there. Think of the burning bush, before which Moses removed his shoes, which he could not even go near, which did not consume the bush. Both revelations of fire were terrifying. But the same symbol employed in the New Testament takes on a whole new meaning.

For the people of God in Exodus, what else than terror could such revelations of fire make them feel? A nation of slaves, into whose very souls the rust of their chains had eaten, yet who considered going back to the land of their bondage just to eat food they liked better...what else could such a people see in that fire but terror and destruction? How could they even conceive of the fire as purifying? They could not. Even if they had, the notion of suffering would have overwhelmed the notion of purification. They could hardly listen to any teaching that was not supported by terror. Fear was how God got through to them. They worshiped because they were afraid.

Are you saying that Mount Sinai was just a show, like parents frightening their children with false stories to teach a lesson? Was it not a true revelation of God?

If God showed them these things, God showed them what was true. It was a revelation of himself. He will not put on a mask. He puts on a face. He will not speak out of flames if the flames were not revealing something true about Him. However hard-headed his children may be, he will not terrify them with a lie.

No, the fire was a true revelation, but a partial one. It was a true symbol, but not a final vision.

Think about it: No revelation can be anything other than partial. If, our definition of a true revelation is that we be told all the truth, then farewell to revelation. In fact, farewell to being a child of God. For what revelation could we possibly receive from the Maker of heaven and earth other than a partial one? And a revelation is not untrue simply because it is partial.

For the receiver who is unready to hear, a very partial revelation might be more true than a fuller revelation. At least the former might reveal something to the person, whereas the latter would reveal nothing at all. Of course, if the partial revelation remained only what it was--allowing for no development or growth, chaining the one who receives it to its own incompleteness--it would be the worst kind of lie. No truth that is true is like that. True revelation always awakens the desire to know more.

At the moment of Sinai, the people of God were at their lowest: least ready to receive. Could they receive anything but the very partial revelation of fear? Here was a nation that had thought it a good idea to worship a golden calf! Now they were coming up against the reality of Yahweh Himself. How could they be anything other than terrified? Fear was the proper response, even if all it meant was that, for a moment, they trembled at a terrible fire above them, rather than worship the idol below.

Fear is nobler than comfort. Fear is better than no God, better than a god made with human hands. In fear, there is—deeply hidden—a sense of the infinite. Worship offered in fear is true, though still very low. It may not be acceptable to God in itself—his worshippers must worship in spirit and in truth—yet still it is precious to Him. For God does not see us merely as we are, but as we will be. Nor does he see us merely as we will be, but as we are growing into what we will be. He sees us as He made us and meant us to be: in His likeness and yet also growing more and more into His likeness.

We do not become who we are meant to be overnight. You may go through a thousand stages, each one of which might be embarrassing on its own. But put all those stages together and what you see is: progress, movement—however slow—toward the finish line. A condition which of declension would indicate a devil, may of growth indicate a saint.

So the revelation of fire at Sinai, though partial, was true, since it (1) appealed to the best of which the Israelites were capable at the time, and (2) made future, higher revelation possible.

But the revelation of fire is even better than that. The same fire that makes the sinner tremble makes the saint rejoice. For the saint sees further into the meaning of the fire, and has a better idea of what it will do to him. So it turns out the symbol of fire didn’t need to be superseded, only unfolded.

Imagine a man who still loves his sin, who is, in a sense, married to his sin, who feels as though some part of himself would be lost if he were to be separated from his sins. Now imagine a kind of lightning, which when it struck, could pierce a complete division between the man and the evil. How could such a man see that lightning as a Savior? That lightning which will destroy the sin and give life to the sinner? Would it be any comfort to him to be told that “God loves you so much that he is going to burn you clean?” Would the cleansing of fire seem to him anything more than what it must, more or less, be: which is to say, torture? He doesn’t want to be clean, and he cannot bear to be tortured. Does he really have any other option than to fear God, even with the fear of an unbeliever, until he learns to love him?

To the Israelites, the fire on Sinai is a symbol of vengeance. And isn’t that exactly what God has set out to do, though not in the way they might suppose? He is, of course, much better than they suppose. And his vengeance is a much better vengeance, though it could not seem so to them at the time. He is against sin. As long as, and to the degree to which, they and sin are one, he is against them—against their desires, against their aims, against their hopes and fears. He is against all that will destroy them in the end. That is how he is for them. The thunder and lightning, the darkness being torn in two with the trumpet blast, the horrible sights and sounds of that moment on the mountain are only the faintest image of the repulsion and disgust which God feels toward evil and selfishness. But if one hard-headed fool were to stop and fear those sights and sounds even for a moment, that would be a moment of pure grace. Because, in that instant, his heart would have taken one small step out of the delusion of sin and evil and into the reality of God and good. If he could delve only a little deeper beneath the surface of that fear, he might even start to see the simple fact that evil, not fire, is the fearful thing! Then he would gladly rush up into the trumpet blast of Sinai to escape the flutes around the golden calf.

If the Israelites could have understood this, they wouldn’t have needed Mount Sinai. But they could not. So they received a revelation of fire: a true, partial revelation, partial in order to be true.

Even Moses, the holiest of them all, was not ready for the revelation. What does he do? He seems so afraid that God will not spare his people that he offers himself as a sacrifice in their stead, asking that his name be blotted out of the book of life. Noble, no doubt. But what was his reasoning? Did he believe himself more merciful than God? That the true God, like the impostor gods of the nations, would be so capricious as to accept such an imperfect sacrifice? Could he not see that the only sacrifice the Redeemer was interested in was the sacrifice of the heart?

Or perhaps Moses was not so much striking a deal as voicing his despair. Either way, in his defense, how much could he have possibly understood?

Let’s imagine for a moment that Moses had actually seen the face of God when he was hidden in the cleft of the rock (and not just his back). What if God had somehow turned and allowed Moses to see his face...the face through which, one day, God’s very own emotions would be shown to men and women. What if the face had bowed to Moses in anticipation of the crown of thorns which, one day, Moses’ own people would place on his head, those same people whom Moses sought to defend from His seeming capriciousness. What if he looked into that face...the face of him who was bearing and would continue to bear their griefs and burdens, the face of the Son of God, who instead of accepting the sacrifice of his creatures for the sake of his own justice or dignity, gave himself up for them, the face of the One who suffered death not that men might not suffer, but that their suffering might be like his, leading them to Him.

If that face had turned and looked upon Moses, would he have lived? I say he would have died, not of awe or sorrow, not even of fear. But of the actual sight of the incomprehensible. Or else, if somehow infinite mystery had not killed him, he would have been left dazed and purposeless, with nothing left to do, now seeing that God was altogether unknown to him and unknowable. For all these reasons, Moses could have thanked God for not showing his face. Full revelation would have been worse than no revelation at all.

Ok then, you are saying that God is love, all love, and nothing but love. But by your own logic, might this revelation—this fullness of love—be too much for us to receive?

There are mysteries of God that no man understands, and there are mysteries that are known. If a mystery is known, even by a single man, then it is already a revelation. Even if the one man who has it presents it poorly, such a light should not be hidden under a bushel. I believe that God does not want to conceal anything but to reveal everything. I believe that he is always giving us more, bit by bit, as much as each of us can receive. The Father does not stop sowing his seeds because there are thorns and rocks and roads. He may even use the birds to carry it. Who knows, perhaps what withers on the rocks will decay into new soil in which the next seed will find deeper roots. Regardless, the person who has ears to hear will hear. And the person who does not will not. Even if he could, he would misinterpret it. Yet the one who is ready will hear, understand, and rejoice.

So when we say that God is Love, are we saying that all fear of him is groundless? No. Whatever we fear in God we will face, possibly far more. But there is something beyond the fear. A deeper self beyond our own sense of self. Whatever we call ourselves must be surrendered to the flames of his wrath, which is his love. In so doing, that self-made “identity” will be destroyed, and the self that God made will appear: awake, alive, and still carrying all the goodness of our past, which God had allowed, though we did not know him. Then we will know that we are fully ourselves. The greedy, weary, selfish, suspicious old man or woman will have died. The young, forever young self will remain. The person we thought we were will have vanished. The person we somehow knew we were deep down—though we had ignored it—will live on.

To be clear, I am not speaking—or not only speaking—of some future vision. Heaven and earth are being shaken. Whatever is destructible will be destroyed. This is a kind of law of nature. Only that which is unshakeable remains. So what happens when we, who are immortals, bury ourselves in what is destructible, only receive messages from the destructible realm around us, and have lost the ability to hear from the eternal voice that speaks within? We walk in darkness, burdened by decay. We need the Light to burn away the darkness, the Fire to burn away the decay. Now is the time to repent, to surrender to the light and the flames. It is not as though we have the option of escaping it. Inasmuch as we continue to cling to the darkness and decay, the burning will go on deeper and deeper. The fire avoided will burn like hell. The fire embraced becomes our life.

The man who loves God but is not yet pure invites the burning of God, which is not always torture. Sometimes the fire is mainly the light, yet still it purifies. To be made pure is the same as to be made alive, just as to be impure is to be dying.

The man whose deeds are evil fears the burning, and so lives in denial. But the more he comes out of his denial, the less he has to fear, and the less the fire will burn. Escape is hopeless anyway. Love is immovable. It will not get out of his way.

What about the man who resists the burning of God, who keeps far away from the consuming fire of Love? For him, there is nothing but the outer darkness. Imagine a man wandering farther and farther away from the warm light of the fire into the cold black wilderness beyond, until finally the last gleam of firelight has vanished from view. What does he find in that moment except the sick feeling of utter despair? Even if he cares nothing for God, God was the fire that was keeping him alive and warm and happy and safe. God was the one who gave him himself. But when God and the man are separated as far as can be without the man ceasing to be, when the man feels himself lost, abandoned, without support, without refuge, without aim, without end—for he cannot kill his own soul—then he will listen for the faintest sound of life. Then he will be ready to rush into the very heart of the Consuming Fire to know life again. Anything to escape the terror of nihilism, to exchange the land of living death for the land of painful hope.

What is it like to be without God? Let your imagination go to the worst conceivable horrors. Or imagine the depths to which minds much more depraved than yours have gone. Still you won’t have gone far enough. As Shakespeare puts it,

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to be worse than worst
Of those that lawless and incertain thoughts
Imagine howling?

But there’s a catch. Even the outer darkness is not without the consuming fire. Even at the end of being, there is fire. Fire without light, the black flame. God has withdrawn from the man, but not lost his hold on him. His face is turned away, but his hand is still on him. His heart has ceased to beat into the man's heart, but his fire keeps him alive. And that fire will go searching and burning in him. Because nothing exists without some semblance of the presence of God, which is his love, which is his fire.

O God, haven’t you shown us in Scripture that even Death and Hell will be cast into the lake of fire? And is not that fire the Consuming Fire of Yourself? In You, even death shall die forever. As Milton says:

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Hell itself will pass away, 
And leave her dolorous mansions to the peering day.

And on that day, when everything has been subjected to You, as Saint Paul writes, then truly You will be all in all. Then, I venture to say, every one of our poor brothers and sisters—O God, we trust in You, the Consuming Fire—will have been burnt clean and brought home. If the faint moans of hell could somehow reach the ears of the saints, would it not turn heaven itself into hell for us? And are we more merciful than God? Am I a more loving father than our Father in heaven? Am I a more loving brother than our Brother Christ? Would he not die yet again to save one brother more?

As for us, we come to You, our Consuming Fire. And You will not burn us more than we can bear. But You will burn us. And although it may seem to kill us, still we will trust You, even in the things about which You have not clearly spoken and we do not clearly understand. For blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.

Hi friends,

Mere Orthodoxy recently published an essay of mine entitled, “Why God Hides.” It is the first in a two-part series dealing with the hiddenness of God. Because of its welcome reception there, I thought I would post it here as well with an audio version. In it, I discuss the interplay between “atonement” (covering) and “apocalypse” (uncovering) as a kind of macro-framework for how God reveals himself…and why he hides.

I have a friend who is reading through the whole Bible in forty days. At such a pace, he says, you can tend to miss a great deal, but you also see things in the text you would never have seen otherwise. Here’s a question he sent me just the other day:

“Why do you think apocalyptic literature makes up so much of the biblical canon? Every time I read it, I feel lost.”

Let’s get technical for a second. By “apocalyptic literature,” my friend is speaking of a genre of Jewish/Christian texts, which depict a revelatory experience communicated through other-worldly interpreters to a human recipient, usually by means of highly symbolic language. And yes, such texts can be very hard to understand. Yet, if my friend had asked a bible scholar the question he asked me, the answer probably would have been something like, “Well, technically, there isn’t that much apocalyptic literature in our Bible, since Revelation and the second half of the Book of Daniel are the only two biblical texts which officially fit the genre. The vast majority of officially ‘apocalyptic literature’ comes from Jewish texts from the Second Temple period such as 1 Enoch, 2 and 3 Baruch, 4 Ezra, and the Book of Jubilees.”

Sure. But I still think my friend’s intuition was a good one. Many passages in the Old Testament contain strong apocalyptic elements, especially the books of Zechariah, Ezekiel, Isaiah, Joel and even Job. With a slightly looser definition, one can even see seminal versions of apocalypse as far back as Genesis and Exodus. However, the meaning of apocalyptic texts and their place in the larger context of Scripture is often misunderstood and underappreciated.

Though the term “apocalypse” literally means “unveiling” or “revelation” (thus, the English name for the last book of the Bible), in common secular parlance it has come to mean something more like “the end of the world.” For most people, the word carries terrifying and violent connotations. And indeed, those themes are present in many apocalyptic texts, which raises the question: if apocalypse ultimately has to do with the unveiling of God in the world, shouldn’t that be a good thing? After all, God is love. Shouldn’t we want him to appear?

Well, yes and no.

Two Movements: Atonement & Apocalypse

After the fall, the unveiling of the presence of God to humans becomes a complicated matter. Recall Moses’s request to the Lord on Sinai (“Show me your glory!”) and the Lord’s response to Moses.

“I will cause all my goodness to pass in front of you, and I will proclaim my name, the Lord, in your presence. I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion. But,” he said, “you cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live.” (Exodus 33:19-20)

In other words, direct divine revelation is apparently impossible without death by holiness. And yet, the Lord still provides Moses with a partial solution.

“There is a place near me where you may stand on a rock. When my glory passes by, I will put you in a cleft in the rock and cover you with my hand until I have passed by. Then I will remove my hand and you will see my back; but my face must not be seen.” (Exodus 33:21-23)

The Lord grants Moses a partial revelation (his back) by means of a proper covering (the cleft of the rock). This is crucial.

In another piece, I proposed that the Bible can be seen as the story of two opposite flowing streams, holiness (“setting apart”) and inclusion (“bringing in”), which ultimately flow together in Christ and in his church. I’d like to propose another related framework here, which can similarly help us to see the pattern of God’s redemptive scheme. In short, the Bible is the story of two seemingly opposite movements: atonement (“covering”) and apocalypse (“uncovering”).

Atonement as Covering

The word for “atonement” in the Old Testament is the Hebrew word kaphar, which literally means “to cover or conceal.” Some argue that kaphar also means “to wipe,” not merely “to cover,” and that the former makes more sense of its common use with regard to sin and salvation. I think both meanings can be taken together. If you picture the physical process of wiping, to wipe something literally involves covering the unclean thing momentarily and then removing the covering as the thing being wiped is made clean. In this sense, as we will see, the story of the Bible can be seen as a kind of slow-motion wiping from atonement to apocalypse.

Kaphar is the word used in “Yom Kippur,” the Day of Atonement, in Leviticus 16. The chapter begins like this:

The Lord spoke to Moses after the death of the two sons of Aaron who died when they approached the Lord. The Lord said to Moses: “Tell your brother Aaron that he is not to come whenever he chooses into the Most Holy Place behind the curtain in front of the atonement cover on the ark, or else he will die. For I will appear in the cloud over the atonement cover.” (Lev. 16:1-2)

Here again we see the problem of unmediated or improperly mediated exposure to God. The presence of a holy God is not to be taken lightly. In chapter 10, Aaron’s sons approached the Lord improperly and died. Now the Lord is reiterating to Aaron the proper way to come into his presence, which involves…coverings. First and foremost, Aaron is commanded to sprinkle the blood of a sacrificed bull and goat on the mercy seat (kaporet, sometimes translated “atonement cover”) and then on the altar. The sprinkled blood serves as a covering for the priest and for the people’s sin (though it is not explained exactly what this means). While in the Holy of Holies, Aaron is also commanded to burn incense in order to “conceal” the mercy seat.

[Aaron] is to put the incense on the fire before the Lord, and the smoke of the incense will conceal the atonement cover above the tablets of the covenant law, so that he will not die. (Lev. 16:13)

The idea here seems to be much the same. The smoke of the incense “covers” the room as the blood covers the mercy seat, so that Aaron will not die in the presence of God. And just as the smoke covers the room, a linen veil divides the Holy of Holies from the rest of the tabernacle and further layers of curtains and animal-skin coverings conceal the tabernacle, protecting the people from the danger of the holiness of God, so that they do not suffer the same fate as Aaron’s sons. Layers upon layers of coverings.

But this is neither the beginning nor the end of the story of coverings/atonements. After Adam and Eve eat of the tree, what’s the first thing they do?

Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves. (Gen. 3:7)

But when God appears, Adam and Eve seem to become immediately aware that their own coverings are insufficient. So they hide amongst the trees (further covering/concealment). The Lord then makes “garments of skin” for them and clothes them, a more costly and effective covering (death to cover them from death). But while this better covering proves enough to keep them alive, it is not enough to keep them in the presence of a holy God. Further layers are needed. They must be cast out of Eden. Cherubim and a flaming sword guard the way in. And of course, images of these same cherubim will eventually sit atop the mercy seat and be imprinted on the veils and curtains of the tabernacle.

As the story continues, Cain is covered with a mark by God after killing his brother. His ancestors cover themselves with cities and weapons. Fast forward to Exodus. The tenth plague, the death of the firstborn sons, passes over those whose doorposts are covered with sacrificial blood. After their escape from Egypt, the law is given as a covering over the people of God, as Paul eventually makes clear (see below). The law of Moses, like the tabernacle with its veils, allows the people of Abraham’s promise to stay close enough to the presence of God, through obedience, not to die of alienation, but also guards them from coming too close too casually, lest they die of holiness.

Apocalypse as Uncovering

But atonement/covering is not the whole plan. Yes, the people need to be protected from death by holiness. But protection alone—even forgiveness alone—is not the ultimate goal of God’s redemptive plan. You cannot marry someone if the veil is never lifted. The point of the veils of the tabernacle is not only to guard the way to the Holy of Holies, but also to mark the way in. The point of a veil, as strange as it may sound, is that the veil would be removed at the proper time. Think also of the symbolism of the cherubim, who not only guard the way back into Eden but also mark it out. Likewise, the flaming sword is not merely an obstacle but also, ironically, a light in the darkness.

As I have already hinted, this theme of uncovering (which is the literal Greek translation of the word apocalypse) occurs throughout the Old Testament, not just in later apocalyptic texts. The movements of atonement (covering) and apocalypse (uncovering) become a kind of X-shaped path to redemption, where covering/atonement starts on the top-left and, in a sense, decreases over time and uncovering/apocalypse starts on the bottom-left and increases over time. Christ’s earthly ministry in the Gospel accounts, by the way, can be seen as both the center of this X and as manifesting its own X-shaped pattern, a microcosm of the whole story of Scripture.

In the earliest chapters of the Bible, God begins to build in incremental hints and experiences of the coming unveiling. Circumcision is a central first step in this process, as it represents a removal of the garments of skin. This removal, as Paul later makes clear, is only external, so it is not the true unveiling. Rather, it is a sign of what is to come: the unveiling/circumcision of the heart for God. For further evidence of this gradual apocalypse, the Lord “appears” to Abraham more than once. Jacob, too, has a vision of angels ascending and descending a ladder to heaven; then he wrestles with God. Moses’s experience on Sinai, the giving of the law, etc, is perhaps the most dramatic version of this. Moses descends the mountain with a shining-but-veiled face, giving the Law to the people, which itself veils but also becomes a light unto their path. These are mini-apocalypses, which build toward an unveiling that cannot yet be, “lest you die.” Nevertheless, the unveiling shall come—and does come—in Christ.

Therefore, since we have such a hope, we are very bold. We are not like Moses, who would put a veil over his face to prevent the Israelites from seeing the end of what was passing away. But their minds were made dull, for to this day the same veil remains when the old covenant is read. It has not been removed, because only in Christ is it taken away. Even to this day when Moses is read, a veil covers their hearts. But whenever anyone turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away. Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we all, who with unveiled faces reflect the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit. (2 Corinthians 3:12-18)

This is why Paul, in the New Testament, warns Christians not to stake too much on Torah (the law). The law, Paul argues, is not an end in itself, but a means to the unveiling of Christ in the proper time. The law cannot save. Rather, it is a garment of skin, like the one given to Adam and Eve in the garden, given because of trespasses “until the time” of unveiling. Here’s how Paul puts it:

What I am saying is that as long as an heir is underage, he is no different from a slave, although he owns the whole estate. The heir is subject to guardians and trustees until the time set by his father. So also, when we were underage, we were in slavery under the elemental principles of the world. But when the set time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those under the law, that we might receive adoption to sonship. (Galatians 4:1-5)

The mini-atonements of the Old Testament (fig leaves, garments of skin, cherubim, law, priests, tabernacle, temple, veils and blood) serve as temporary guardians and tutors preparing the way for a final covering/atonement and a final uncovering/apocalypse. “Destroy this temple,” Jesus says, “and in three days I will raise it up,” (John 2:19). Jesus curses the fig tree (think: fig leaves) and rebukes Peter’s sword (think: Cain’s ancestors) on his way to the cross, where his blood would become the ultimate covering for the sins of the world, one final perfect atonement. And yet, the cross and the resurrection also become the first-fruits of the final apocalypse, the unveiling of the living God. The cross then, as its very shape suggests, is the center of the X.

The rest of the New Testament, then, can be seen, in part, as a working out of how these two streams—atonement and apocalypse—ultimately flow together (and are fulfilled) in Christ. Paul’s letters are particularly interested in this problem.

For Moses, the cleft of the rock served as a veil which allowed him to see in part. Likewise, the veil over Moses’s face allowed the Israelites to see him in part. The very thing which allowed us to see in part is now obstructing us from seeing more. The law of Moses pointed to Christ. But now that Christ has appeared, our attachment to the law is making us unable to see him. The Pharisees in Jesus’s moment and the Judaizers in Paul’s failed to see the true, non-ultimate purpose of the law, that is, a covering that leads to uncovering. They wanted a version of atonement without apocalypse, the covering of the law without the proper uncovering which leads to true union. Likewise, it could be argued that many Christians today are ironically tempted toward a similar attachment to Christ as atonement without Christ as apocalypse. We want to be covered by him, but not uncovered with him.

Jesus, the Veiled Unveiling

Once we have seen this pattern in Scripture, we can begin to see how Christ’s own life and ministry becomes a microcosm of this veiling/unveiling movement. The story of the Gospels begins with a series of revelations of Christ (who is the apocalypse), yet, at least at first, each unveiling is nevertheless dramatically veiled. The Christ, we learn, is to be hidden in the womb of a humble virgin from Nazareth. Angels appear to foretell the news, but only in unexpected places to unexpected recipients, who must “store it up” in their hearts. On the night of his birth, the great glad tidings come not to prophets, priests, or kings, but to shepherds tending their flocks by night. John the Baptist prepares the way for the Messiah quite obscurely in the wilderness. Veils upon veils.

When Jesus’s ministry begins, one expects that at least now the veil will be lifted. Not so. Those who come to the Gospels expecting a great and sudden unveiling of the Messiah, especially in the mouth and ministry of the man himself, are confused and disappointed at first. Why does he not simply reveal his true identity? Why conceal himself?

There is much that could be said about what scholars have called “The Messianic Secret,” but for now suffice it to say: Though Christ is the apocalypse, he is careful not to let the unveiling happen all at once. Both the Father and the Son prefer the incremental way in order to till the hearts of those whose soil cannot yet properly receive the seed. As Christ reveals in the Parable of the Sower, the problem is not the seed of the word, which is simple and plentiful, but the soil of our hearts, which is fraught with complications. Thankfully, God has become not only the seed-sower, but the soil-tiller, patiently preparing the hearts of his people for his coming apocalypse. For the disciples, the cross itself was the apocalypse that almost broke them. Had it not been for the patient work that Christ had already done in them, it would have broken them. The incremental way paid off. Yet even the incremental way has an end. This is why apocalyptic and proto-apocalyptic texts tend to be so frightening. The people are never quite ready for the unveiling, but it is coming nonetheless.

We get a glimpse of this in C. S. Lewis’s brilliant novel about heaven and hell, The Great Divorce. In the penultimate scene, the main character (Lewis) has spent the better part of the story as a ghost in the “Solid Country” between heaven and hell, a land that seems paused in a kind of prolonged twilight, awaiting the glorious dawn which might arrive at any moment. He imagines what it would be like to behold such a beautiful country in the light of day, but he also knows that, as a mere ghost, the light itself would be the end of him. His arduous journey toward the mountains has made him slightly stronger and more solid, yet still he has a ways to go. But suddenly…

Once more the quiet woods in the cool light before sunrise were about us. Then, still looking at [my guide’s] face, I saw there something that sent a quiver through my whole body. I stood at that moment with my back to the East and the mountains, and he, facing me, looked towards them. His face flushed with a new light. A fern, thirty yards behind him, turned golden. The eastern side of every tree-trunk grew bright. Shadows deepened. All the time there had been bird noises, trillings, chatterings, and the like; but now suddenly the full chorus was poured from every branch; cocks were crowing, there was music of hounds, and horns; above all this ten thousand tongues of men and woodland angels and the wood itself sang. “It comes! It comes!” they sang. “Sleepers awake! It comes, it comes, it comes.” One dreadful glance over my shoulder I essayed—not long enough to see (or did I see?)—the rim of the sunrise that shoots Time dead with golden arrows and puts to flight all phantasmal shapes. Screaming, I buried my face in the folds of my Teacher’s robe. “The morning! The morning!” I cried, “I am caught by the morning and I am a ghost.” But it was too late.

So it is in the prophets. Christ the Sun is coming, and all the atonements and coverings of the old covenant—and of the people’s own making—will not suffice to protect them from the morning. But, as the prophets say, if they trust and repent, they will receive the ultimate atonement and apocalypse, which is Christ himself, and will enter the wedding feast of the Lamb. Otherwise, they will not recognize him, refuse him, and be left outside in the cold.

So it is with us. Christ has come. But Christ is also coming. Will we be ready to welcome him or will we be caught unawares? Thankfully, our Lord is not only the coming One, but the One who makes us ready for his coming. He tills the soil of our hearts through the Spirit, just as he did for the earliest disciples, so that the seed of his word can take root and bear fruit in our hearts. Just as the apocalypse of the cross came for the disciples like a thief in the night, like an explosion giving light to, but also threatening, everything they knew, so will he come again. But thanks to Him, we can be ready.

Holy Saturday is a good time to remember: God hides in order to be seen.

The fleshless word, growing, will bring us down,
Pagan and Christian man alike will fall,
The auguries say, the white and black and brown,
The merry and the sad, theorist, lover, all
Invisibly will fall:
Abstract calamity, save for those who can
Build their cold empire on the abstract man.

from "The Incarnate One" by Edwin Muir

The other night my youngest son accidentally referred to Good Friday as “Black Friday.” I was teaching the boys some of my favorite Easter hymns before bed, so they would be ready to sing on Easter morning. That led to a discussion of the different days of Holy Week, of which Black Friday is…not one.

When I corrected him, laughing, he said, “Wait, what is Black Friday then?” Black Friday, I told him, is when everyone goes on a shopping spree for things they don’t need the day after thanking God for what they already have.

“Oh,” said my son, squinting. “It just seems like the day Jesus died should be Black Friday. It wasn’t good that we killed him.”

It was a fair point.

“You’re right,” I said. “It was definitely a black Friday. The Bible says darkness came over the whole land for three hours when Jesus died.” I went on—and I know this isn’t the conventional explanation, but—“We call Black Friday ‘black’ to remind ourselves that even though it seems good to go around buying random things at a discount, it’s not usually the kind of thing that brings light or life. Likewise, we call Good Friday ‘good’ to remind ourselves that even though it was the darkest day in history, it was truly good.”

My son had reminded me, once again, just how strange it is to be a Christian. How very strange to call Good Friday “good,” the day we murdered the Lord of Life. How quickly we forget the paradox which makes good good. How quickly “good” becomes a fleshless word. And not only “good” but “cross” and “sin” and “saved.” Fleshless words, abstractions which we swallow without chewing or digesting. “The word made flesh is here made word again,” writes Muir earlier in the same poem.

We sing of “the wondrous cross,” forgetting that the cross was not made of abstract wood, forgetting that “wonder” means awe—not only awesome but awful—even if somehow still good, forgetting that our Lord was not crucified so that we might merely sing of it from a safe distance. “The Son of God,” says George Macdonald, “suffered unto the death, not that men might not suffer, but that their sufferings might be like His.” As our Lord himself made clear, there is no safe distance from the cross.

If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. (Matthew 16:24-26)

What I am saying is that Good Friday did not merely save us from sin but from abstraction—from fleshless words and safe distances—from knowing about God rather than knowing him. For on that day, we knew him, intimately enough to kill him. And this knowledge, strange as it may sound, was the beginning of our salvation.

The cross of Christ was not so much a transaction as a trap. We were all drawn in—Jews and Gentiles, friends and enemies—condemning him, denying him, nailing the nails into his flesh. Palm Sunday’s “Hosanna!” may have been a fleshless word, but Friday’s “Crucify him!” certainly was not.

This is the predicament in which we find ourselves on Good Friday. We may sing that the cross was good. We are right to do so. But we may not, if we want to understand it—if we want to believe it—sing without some semblance of participative terror. Terror, first, because we are the ones who killed him. And second, because we are the ones who must follow him there, into the grave. He did not die so that we would not have to. He died so that death itself might be redeemed, so that we could die with him, and in him find new life.

The cross as fleshless word—as mere theory or history or formula—does not fix a thing. If it could, he might as well have been crucified on the moon, and much longer ago. But this would have accomplished nothing, because the problem was never in God, but in us.

So instead, in the fullness of time, the word became flesh and dwelt among us. And we did not recognize him. We would not come to him. But luckily, he came from a great line of tricksters, so he knew exactly what to do. He let the world be turned upside down, so that in rejecting and killing him we came to him. In rejecting and killing him, we recognized him (“Surely this man was the Son of God!”). We tore down the Temple without believing his prophecy that he would rebuild it anew. We ate his flesh and drank his blood, not because we trusted his words, but because we didn’t. We cursed him. We cursed ourselves (“Let his blood be on us and on our children!”).

But the trick worked.

Three days later, the world suddenly turned rightside up again, and all our curses became blessings. We were caught in his trap, caught up with him in his death, and therefore in his resurrection.

Only in retrospect—only once we had been dragged into the horrible climax of the story and emerged on the other side—could we see how he saved us, and from what. We had been trapped in a prison called Sin with a tiger named Death. Not recognizing the prison for what it was, we cried out for a savior to come and kill the tiger. But Christ, who knew better than we—who knew that our prison, our hell, was not death but sin—made the tiger his pet, his very weapon against its gates. And death became our doorway.

So we must die with him.

Yet, there is danger even here, danger that even “death” would become for us a fleshless word. Die how? Die when? But he has shown us. In everything he said and did, he has shown us the way out of that cold empire of the (increasingly) abstract man, and into his incarnate kingdom: Do not pray before men to be seen by them. Do not seek the reward of their praise. Instead go into your room and shut the door and pray in secret, and your Father who sees in secret will reward you. Forgive others their debts. If anyone would sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. Do not let your left hand see what your right hand is doing. Love your neighbor. Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. Do not store up treasures on earth. Do not worry about tomorrow, but seek first the kingdom and his righteousness.

What will happen to you if you live this way? You will be blessed…and you will die. You will die, one day. And you will die every day between now and then. Not accidentally or anxiously, as the coward runs from his fate. But confidently, willingly, as one who knows that, in Christ, death has become the doorway to life, trust and love the means to enter in. And the word of the cross will be made flesh again in you. And you will know the paradox that makes good good.

Thanks to Nathan Horner for sending me the Edwin Muir poem which begins this piece (after hearing of it from the great ).