The 10 Best Books to Read for Easter: Selections to Inspire, Educate, and Provoke

Excerpts from new and classic titles by bestselling authors in the field, presented by James Martin, SJ.

Contents

Introduction from James Martin, SJ

An Excerpt from Together on Retreat by James Martin, SJ

Title page

Chapter Six

An Excerpt from Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis

Title page

Book Three: Chapter One

An Excerpt from Simply Jesus by N. T. Wright

Title page

Chapter Fourteen

An Excerpt from Made for Goodness by Desmond Tutu and Mpho Tutu

Title page

Chapter Seven

An Excerpt from Not Less Than Everything by Catherine Wolff (Editor)

Title page

"The Worthless Servant" by Ann Patchett

An Excerpt from The Myth of Persecution by Candida Moss

Title page

Introduction

An Excerpt from The Greatest Prayer by John Dominic Crossan

Title page

Chapter Six

An Excerpt from God Wants You Happy by Father Jonathan Morris

Title page

Chapter Eight

An Excerpt from Will There Be Faith? by Thomas H. Groome

Title page

Chapter One

An Excerpt from The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything by James Martin, SJ

Title page

Chapter Fourteen

Also by James Martin, SJ

Copyright

About the Publisher

Meeting Jesus

“Cheap is good,” a Jesuit friend of mine likes to say, “but free is better.”

I agree. But free doesn’t have to mean worthless. This new (free) sampler of some of HarperOne’s most popular new and classic books will invite you into an entirely worthwhile variety of perspectives on the Christian message.

It’s the same message, of course—the message that was first proclaimed by the astonished disciples on Easter morning: Christ is risen! But Christianity has always been presented in slightly different ways, depending on the writer, the medium, and the audience.

If that sounds a bit heretical, consider the Gospels. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were all writing in different times, from different places, and, most important, for different audiences. That’s one reason why some of the Gospel stories don’t always “match.” To take the most obvious example, sometimes the Gospels don’t even agree on the names of the Twelve Apostles, which one would think a rather important piece of data.

The Gospel writers understood what their audiences needed to hear (and later read) and what parts of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection were most meaningful to them. So they each stressed certain stories, people, and themes more than the other three evangelists. Matthew’s audience, for example, was largely a Jewish audience, so he takes pains to draw out some of the Old Testament connections to Jesus’s ministry. Mark, on the other hand, was writing (most scholars say) in or around Rome, and so his Gospel seeks to encourage his audience to stand firm in their faith, and his narrative also highlights Jesus’s patient suffering. The variations in the Gospels aren’t proof that they’re inaccurate, just that they’re written by four different people at four different times for four different audiences.

The chapters you’re about to read in this worthy new collection hope to do something similar. No, I’m not comparing them to the Gospels. But they are written by talented writers and scholars who seek to present the person of Jesus, and the enduring impact of the church, to new audiences. The writers approach Jesus from a variety of viewpoints: carpenter from Nazareth, the Risen One, the Suffering Servant, the Man of Sorrows, and even the Man of Joys. They offer their insights on how his life, death, and resurrection influenced the early church, the contemporary world, and today’s believer. But they do so in different ways, to inspire, educate, and sometimes provoke.

Not all of these authors will agree with one another ( just like the Gospel writers don’t always agree). Nor do I agree with everything in this collection. But each of these writers displays their passion about the same person: the man who first called the fisherman by the Sea of Galilee to leave everything and follow him; who made the lame walk, caused the deaf to hear, and raised the dead; who defeated death on Easter Sunday; and who later inspired Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John to write their timeless works of faith.

So here’s an invitation: Why not try out these free chapters and see if you might want to read the author’s entire work? Let it be a kind of invitation. What do these noted authors have to say about Jesus and the mission of the church?

As the man himself said, “Come and see.”

--James Martin, SJ

Traditional site of the Breakfast by the Sea

CHAPTER 6

Third Prayer

The Breakfast by the Sea

NOW FOR OUR FINAL encounter with Jesus by the Sea of Galilee. But first a question. What is the worst thing you’ve ever done? Your greatest sin? What do you most bitterly regret? To whom were you the most insensitive or cruel? In short, what are you most ashamed of ?

Second, and more important, do you believe that God can forgive you for that sin? And do you believe that God forgives others for their sins? Finally, do you forgive others for their sins against you, no matter how great?

I know that’s a lot to think about. But those questions are at the heart of the Christian message. They are also at the heart of the Gospel reading often called the Breakfast by the Sea. Although this episode near the Sea of Galilee is often seen as the one in which Jesus bestows on Peter the title of pastor or shepherd, it is also a vivid story about the power of forgiveness.

Here is the final passage I’d like to invite you into, from the Gospel of John (21:1–19):

After these things Jesus showed himself again to the disciples by the Sea of Tiberias; and he showed himself in this way. Gathered there together were Simon Peter, Thomas called the Twin, Nathanael of Cana in Galilee, the sons of Zebedee, and two others of his disciples. Simon Peter said to them, “I am going fishing.” They said to him, “We will go with you.” They went out and got into the boat, but that night they caught nothing.

Just after daybreak, Jesus stood on the beach; but the disciples did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to them, “Children, you have no fish, have you?” They answered him, “No.” He said to them, “Cast the net to the right side of the boat, and you will find some.” So they cast it, and now they were not able to haul it in because there were so many fish. That disciple whom Jesus loved said to Peter, “It is the Lord!” When Simon Peter heard that it was the Lord, he put on some clothes, for he was naked, and jumped into the sea. But the other disciples came in the boat, dragging the net full of fish, for they were not far from the land, only about a hundred yards off.

When they had gone ashore, they saw a charcoal fire there, with fish on it, and bread. Jesus said to them, “Bring some of the fish that you have just caught.” So Simon Peter went aboard and hauled the net ashore, full of large fish, a hundred fifty-three of them; and though there were so many, the net was not torn. Jesus said to them, “Come and have breakfast.” Now none of the disciples dared to ask him, “Who are you?” because they knew it was the Lord. Jesus came and took the bread and gave it to them, and did the same with the fish. This was now the third time that Jesus appeared to the disciples after he was raised from the dead.

When they had finished breakfast, Jesus said to Simon Peter, “Simon son of John, do you love me more than these?” He said to him, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.” Jesus said to him, “Feed my lambs.” A second time he said to him, “Simon son of John, do you love me?” He said to him, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.” Jesus said to him, “Tend my sheep.” He said to him the third time, “Simon son of John, do you love me?” Peter felt hurt because he said to him the third time, “Do you love me?” And he said to him, “Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you.” Jesus said to him, “Feed my sheep. Very truly, I tell you, when you were younger, you used to fasten your own belt and to go wherever you wished. But when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go.” (He said this to indicate the kind of death by which he would glorify God.) After this he said to him, “Follow me.”

A REFLECTION

In the final chapter of John, the Risen Christ appears to his disciples at the Sea of Galilee (also known as the Sea of Tiberias). The story you just read is one of his last appearances after the Resurrection. Interestingly, many Scripture scholars suggest that the story seems to be in the wrong place in the Gospel. It would seem to be more of a story of an initial appearance of the Risen Christ to the disciples, because not only are the disciples surprised by his appearance and not only do they fail to recognize him, but in this story several of the disciples have returned to their previous occupations.

The fishermen seem demoralized after the events of the crucifixion and have returned to their fishing boats. How often this happens to us! Even after an experience of God we revert to our old ways of doing things. In a word, we doubt. Plus, they have caught nothing during the night’s fishing. Symbolically, the disciples, called to be fishers of men and women, are able to do nothing without Jesus.

At dawn Jesus appears on the shore. He’s cooking a little breakfast and asks them to cast their nets again. When they do so, their nets are (once again) filled to the bursting point, and they recognize Jesus for who he is. And Peter, overjoyed, jumps into the sea to greet Jesus.

Now remember this is the same Peter who had denied Jesus before the crucifixion. Another person might have shrunk in terror or shame. But somehow, in the presence of Jesus, Peter instinctively knows he has been forgiven. It’s a human and hopeful response—he sees Jesus and is joyful. Somehow he instinctively understands Jesus’s ability to forgive.

That’s one of the points of that triple question Jesus asks Peter. “Do you love me?” he asks three times. And Peter says yes three times, counterbalancing his triple denial at the crucifixion (John 18:15–27). Over a meal, Jesus offers Peter a public opportunity to reestablish himself, to be reconciled to God and the community and to profess repentance through love. In a beautiful gesture, Jesus gives Peter the opportunity to set things right, without asking for an apology. One isn’t necessary because Jesus has already forgiven Peter and already knows he is repentant.

Moreover, Jesus calls on Peter to validate his affirmation of love by feeding Jesus’s sheep, that is, the Christian community. Peter is cast by Jesus in the role of pastor (which comes from a word meaning “shepherd”), a role linked to service and a willingness to lay down one’s life.

So forgiveness is linked to love. Jesus forgives Peter, the one who denied him, because he loves him. And Jesus forgives him totally, going beyond what would be expected, going so far as to appoint him as head of the church. In response, Peter will later offer, out of love, his willingness to lay down his life for Jesus.

Jesus’s forgiveness shows us love without limit. It shows us God’s love because it shows us God’s very nature: limitless, unconditional, radical.

The Breakfast by the Sea also reveals Peter’s willingness to follow Jesus to the end. Remember that in our first prayer period we meditated on Jesus’s invitation to Peter, “Follow me.” That story, which comes at the beginning of the Gospels, shows Peter dropping everything to follow Jesus. Now, at the end of the Gospels, Peter is again being asked to follow—to places where he may not want to go.

This emphasis on forgiveness in the Breakfast by the Sea is no less relevant today, for both the ability to forgive and the ability to accept forgiveness are absolute requirements of the Christian life. Conversely, the refusal to forgive leads inevitably to spiritual death. You may know people whose marriages have been destroyed because one or both of the partners refused to forgive. In almost every human setting (including churches), vindictiveness acts as a cancer, slowly eating away at relationships. The choice not to forgive leads only to anger, vengefulness, and despair.

In the Christian worldview, we are called to forgive everyone, from co-workers who say callous things to us to mass murderers. Does this sound too radical? It is. It is the radical nature of the gospel. It is the radical ethos of Christianity and the radical stance of Jesus, who, after all, when faced with the one who denied him, made him the head of the church, and who, from the Cross, asked God to forgive his executioners.

The gospel by the sea is a gospel of forgiveness. Jesus shows us that forgiveness leads to new life, that it is tied to love, and that it is profoundly freeing. Forgiveness is a life-giving force that reconciles and unites. It is a gift both to the one who forgives (because it allows freedom from resentment) and to the one who needs forgiveness (because it allows freedom from guilt). As he stands by the Sea of Galilee, Jesus embodies this gift of forgiveness.

Forgiveness is the force that allows Peter to leap joyfully into the water at the sound of Jesus’s voice. It is the power that will give him a voice with which to testify to his belief in the Risen Christ. And it is the energy that enables us to renew ourselves as disciples and to respond when we hear Jesus say to us, as he said to the disciples by the Sea of Galilee all those years ago, “Follow me.”

PRAYER

Now let’s enter into the passage. By now, you know that Ignatian contemplation asks you to “compose the scene” using your five senses, in lectio divina you can ask yourself those four questions (What does the text say? What is God saying to me? How do I want to respond to God? What difference will it make in my life?), or you can “rest” on a single word or phrase.

Remember to ask God to be present with you as you enter into the prayer. Here is the passage again, from the Gospel of John:

After these things Jesus showed himself again to the disciples by the Sea of Tiberias; and he showed himself in this way. Gathered there together were Simon Peter, Thomas called the Twin, Nathanael of Cana in Galilee, the sons of Zebedee, and two others of his disciples. Simon Peter said to them, “I am going fishing.” They said to him, “We will go with you.” They went out and got into the boat, but that night they caught nothing.

Just after daybreak, Jesus stood on the beach; but the disciples did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to them, “Children, you have no fish, have you?” They answered him, “No.” He said to them, “Cast the net to the right side of the boat, and you will find some.” So they cast it, and now they were not able to haul it in because there were so many fish. That disciple whom Jesus loved said to Peter, “It is the Lord!” When Simon Peter heard that it was the Lord, he put on some clothes, for he was naked, and jumped into the sea. But the other disciples came in the boat, dragging the net full of fish, for they were not far from the land, only about a hundred yards off.

When they had gone ashore, they saw a charcoal fire there, with fish on it, and bread. Jesus said to them, “Bring some of the fish that you have just caught.” So Simon Peter went aboard and hauled the net ashore, full of large fish, a hundred fifty-three of them; and though there were so many, the net was not torn. Jesus said to them, “Come and have breakfast.” Now none of the disciples dared to ask him, “Who are you?” because they knew it was the Lord. Jesus came and took the bread and gave it to them, and did the same with the fish. This was now the third time that Jesus appeared to the disciples after he was raised from the dead.

When they had finished breakfast, Jesus said to Simon Peter, “Simon son of John, do you love me more than these?” He said to him, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.” Jesus said to him, “Feed my lambs.” A second time he said to him, “Simon son of John, do you love me?” He said to him, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.” Jesus said to him, “Tend my sheep.” He said to him the third time, “Simon son of John, do you love me?” Peter felt hurt because he said to him the third time, “Do you love me?” And he said to him, “Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you.” Jesus said to him, “Feed my sheep. Very truly, I tell you, when you were younger, you used to fasten your own belt and to go wherever you wished. But when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go.” (He said this to indicate the kind of death by which he would glorify God.) After this he said to him, “Follow me.”

Now take some time to pray with this final passage.

Looking out at the Bay of Parables

Please give yourself 30 to 60 minutes for your prayer.

Continue with the retreat when you are ready.

REFLECTION QUESTIONS

Perhaps these questions might help you reflect on your prayer:

Did the disciples seem dejected as they went out to fish?

What did the Risen Christ look like?

What was the expression on Peter’s face when he saw Christ?

Did anything about forgiveness touch something in your own life?

Do you feel that God can forgive you for anything you have done?

Was there any one word or phrase that touched you?

Pay attention to all of this.

Overall, ask yourself:

What might God be saying to me through this passage?

What insights about my own life might be being revealed?

What questions might God want to raise in my life?

Where am I being invited to grow?

Finally,

What would you like to say to God?

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I

The Three Parts of Morality

There is a story about a schoolboy who was asked what he thought God was like. He replied that, as far as he could make out, God was ‘the sort of person who is always snooping around to see if anyone is enjoying himself and then trying to stop it’. And I am afraid that is the sort of idea that the word Morality raises in a good many people’s minds: something that interferes, something that stops you having a good time. In reality, moral rules are directions for running the human machine. Every moral rule is there to prevent a breakdown, or a strain, or a friction, in the running of that machine. That is why these rules at first seem to be constantly interfering with our natural inclinations. When you are being taught how to use any machine, the instructor keeps on saying, ‘No, don’t do it like that,’ because, of course, there are all sorts of things that look all right and seem to you the natural way of treating the machine, but do not really work.

Some people prefer to talk about moral ‘ideals’ rather than moral rules and about moral ‘idealism’ rather than moral obedience. Now it is, of course, quite true that moral perfection is an ‘ideal’ in the sense that we cannot achieve it. In that sense every kind of perfection is, for us humans, an ideal; we cannot succeed in being perfect car drivers or perfect tennis players or in drawing perfectly straight lines. But there is another sense in which it is very misleading to call moral perfection an ideal. When a man says that a certain woman, or house, or ship, or garden is ‘his ideal’ he does not mean (unless he is rather a fool) that everyone else ought to have the same ideal. In such matters we are entitled to have different tastes and, therefore, different ideals. But it is dangerous to describe a man who tries very hard to keep the moral law as a ‘man of high ideals’, because this might lead you to think that moral perfection was a private taste of his own and that the rest of us were not called on to share it. This would be a disastrous mistake. Perfect behaviour may be as unattainable as perfect gearchanging when we drive; but it is a necessary ideal prescribed for all men by the very nature of the human machine just as perfect gear-changing is an ideal prescribed for all drivers by the very nature of cars. And it would be even more dangerous to think of oneself as a person ‘of high ideals’ because one is trying to tell no lies at all (instead of only a few lies) or never to commit adultery (instead of committing it only seldom) or not to be a bully (instead of being only a moderate bully). It might lead you to become a prig and to think you were rather a special person who deserved to be congratulated on his ‘idealism’. In reality you might just as well expect to be congratulated because, whenever you do a sum, you try to get it quite right. To be sure, perfect arithmetic is ‘an ideal’; you will certainly make some mistakes in some calculations. But there is nothing very fine about trying to be quite accurate at each step in each sum. It would be idiotic not to try; for every mistake is going to cause you trouble later on. In the same way every moral failure is going to cause trouble, probably to others and certainly to yourself. By talking about rules and obedience instead of ‘ideals’ and ‘idealism’ we help to remind ourselves of these facts.

Now let us go a step further. There are two ways in which the human machine goes wrong. One is when human individuals drift apart from one another, or else collide with one another and do one another damage, by cheating or bullying. The other is when things go wrong inside the individual—when the different parts of him (his different faculties and desires and so on) either drift apart or interfere with one another. You can get the idea plain if you think of us as a fleet of ships sailing in formation. The voyage will be a success only, in the first place, if the ships do not collide and get in one another’s way; and, secondly, if each ship is seaworthy and has her engines in good order. As a matter of fact, you cannot have either of these two things without the other. If the ships keep on having collisions they will not remain seaworthy very long. On the other hand, if their steering gears are out of order they will not be able to avoid collisions. Or, if you like, think of humanity as a band playing a tune. To get a good result, you need two things. Each player’s individual instrument must be in tune and also each must come in at the right moment so as to combine with all the others.

But there is one thing we have not yet taken into account. We have not asked where the fleet is trying to get to, or what piece of music the band is trying to play. The instruments might be all in tune and might all come in at the right moment, but even so the performance would not be a success if they had been engaged to provide dance music and actually played nothing but Dead Marches. And however well the fleet sailed, its voyage would be a failure if it were meant to reach New York and actually arrived at Calcutta.

Morality, then, seems to be concerned with three things. Firstly, with fair play and harmony between individuals. Secondly, with what might be called tidying up or harmonising the things inside each individual. Thirdly, with the general purpose of human life as a whole: what man was made for: what course the whole fleet ought to be on: what tune the conductor of the band wants it to play.

You may have noticed that modern people are nearly always thinking about the first thing and forgetting the other two. When people say in the newspapers that we are striving for Christian moral standards, they usually mean that we are striving for kindness and fair play between nations, and classes, and individuals; that is, they are thinking only of the first thing. When a man says about something he wants to do, ‘It can’t be wrong because it doesn’t do anyone else any harm,’ he is thinking only of the first thing. He is thinking it does not matter what his ship is like inside provided that he does not run into the next ship. And it is quite natural, when we start thinking about morality, to begin with the first thing, with social relations. For one thing, the results of bad morality in that sphere are so obvious and press on us every day: war and poverty and graft and lies and shoddy work. And also, as long as you stick to the first thing, there is very little disagreement about morality. Almost all people at all times have agreed (in theory) that human beings ought to be honest and kind and helpful to one another. But though it is natural to begin with all that, if our thinking about morality stops there, we might just as well not have thought at all. Unless we go on to the second thing—the tidying up inside each human being—we are only deceiving ourselves.

What is the good of telling the ships how to steer so as to avoid collisions if, in fact, they are such crazy old tubs that they cannot be steered at all? What is the good of drawing up, on paper, rules for social behaviour, if we know that, in fact, our greed, cowardice, ill temper, and self-conceit are going to prevent us from keeping them? I do not mean for a moment that we ought not to think, and think hard, about improvements in our social and economic system. What I do mean is that all that thinking will be mere moonshine unless we realise that nothing but the courage and unselfishness of individuals is ever going to make any system work properly. It is easy enough to remove the particular kinds of graft or bullying that go on under the present system: but as long as men are twisters or bullies they will find some new way of carrying on the old game under the new system. You cannot make men good by law: and without good men you cannot have a good society. That is why we must go on to think of the second thing: of morality inside the individual.

But I do not think we can stop there either. We are now getting to the point at which different beliefs about the universe lead to different behaviour. And it would seem, at first sight, very sensible to stop before we got there, and just carry on with those parts of morality that all sensible people agree about. But can we? Remember that religion involves a series of statements about facts, which must be either true or false. If they are true, one set of conclusions will follow about the right sailing of the human fleet: if they are false, quite a different set. For example, let us go back to the man who says that a thing cannot be wrong unless it hurts some other human being. He quite understands that he must not damage the other ships in the convoy, but he honestly thinks that what he does to his own ship is simply his own business. But does it not make a great difference whether his ship is his own property or not? Does it not make a great difference whether I am, so to speak, the landlord of my own mind and body, or only a tenant, responsible to the real landlord? If somebody else made me, for his own purposes, then I shall have a lot of duties which I should not have if I simply belonged to myself.

Again, Christianity asserts that every individual human being is going to live for ever, and this must be either true or false. Now there are a good many things which would not be worth bothering about if I were going to live only seventy years, but which I had better bother about very seriously if I am going to live for ever. Perhaps my bad temper or my jealousy are gradually getting worse—so gradually that the increase in seventy years will not be very noticeable. But it might be absolute hell in a million years: in fact, if Christianity is true, Hell is the precisely correct technical term for what it would be. And immortality makes this other difference, which, by the by, has a connection with the difference between totalitarianism and democracy. If individuals live only seventy years, then a state, or a nation, or a civilisation, which may last for a thousand years, is more important than an individual. But if Christianity is true, then the individual is not only more important but incomparably more important, for he is everlasting and the life of a state or a civilisation, compared with his, is only a moment.

It seems, then, that if we are to think about morality, we must think of all three departments: relations between man and man: things inside each man: and relations between man and the power that made him. We can all co-operate in the first one. Disagreements begin with the second and become more serious with the third. It is dealing with the third that the main differences between Christian and non-Christian morality come out. For the rest of this book I am going to assume the Christian point of view, and look at the whole picture as it will be if Christianity is true.

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14

Under New Management: Easter and Beyond

IF I SAY THAT THERE IS a whole book to be written on the subject of this chapter, writer and readers may be permitted to share a wry smile. I have already published extensively on Easter and its meaning, and for much of this chapter I shall simply summarize what I have argued at length there.* But for the purposes of this book we need to draw out one strand in particular. At its simplest, the meaning of Easter and what quickly followed was the meaning that resulted from the events about this Jesus, the Jesus we have been studying so far. The difference between this Jesus and the various “Jesuses” of popular imagination—inside the church as well as outside—will emerge as we proceed.

A New World

When Jesus rose from the dead on Easter morning, he rose as the beginning of the new world that Israel’s God had always intended to make. That is the first and perhaps the most important thing to know about the meaning of Easter.

Of course, I have said “when,” not “if.” I have argued in detail elsewhere that the only possible explanation for the rise of Christianity and for its taking the shape it did was that Jesus of Nazareth, three days after being very thoroughly dead (roman executioners were professional killers and didn’t let would-be rebel leaders slip out of their clutches), was found by his followers to be very thoroughly and very bodily alive again. His tomb was empty; had it not been, his followers would have believed they were seeing some kind of an apparition. Such things were well known in the ancient world, as in fact they are today. Equally, they really did see, touch, and share food with Jesus as a real, bodily presence; had they not, they would have concluded that an empty tomb meant that the grave had been robbed. Such things were better known in the ancient world than they are today. The combination of empty tomb and definite, solid appearances is far and away the best explanation for everything that happened subsequently.

Of course, I have said “when,” not “if.” I have argued in detail elsewhere that the only possible explanation for the rise of Christianity and for its taking the shape it did was that Jesus of Nazareth, three days after being very thoroughly dead (Roman executioners were professional killers and didn’t let would-be rebel leaders slip out of their clutches), was found by his followers to be very thoroughly and very bodily alive again. His tomb was empty; had it not been, his followers would have believed they were seeing some kind of an apparition. Such things were well known in the ancient world, as in fact they are today. Equally, they really did see, touch, and share food with Jesus as a real, bodily presence; had they not, they would have concluded that an empty tomb meant that the grave had been robbed. Such things were better known in the ancient world than they are today. The combination of empty tomb and definite, solid appearances is far and away the best explanation for everything that happened subsequently.

“Solid?” I hear someone ask. Didn’t they tell stories about this risen Jesus going through locked doors, not always being recognized right away, and eventually vanishing upward into thin air? Yes, they did, and we have to take those stories seriously too. They don’t correspond to what first-century Jews, the majority of whom believed in eventual resurrection, would have thought “the resurrection” would be like. (For another thing, they never imagined that “resurrection” would happen to one person in the middle of time; they believed it would happen to all people at the end of time. The Easter stories are very strange, but they are not projections of what people “always hoped would happen.”) The stories don’t fit, in fact, into either of our regular categories. We tend to divide things up into solid, physical objects, on the one hand, and evanescent, insubstantial “objects” or appearances, on the other, such as (so we imagine) ghosts. But the stories of the risen Jesus have a different quality altogether. They seem to be about a person who is equally at home “on earth” and “in heaven.” And that is, in fact, exactly what they are.

Remember—before this gets too confusing!—that “heaven” in biblical thought is not a long way away from “earth.” In the Bible, “heaven” and “earth” overlap and interlock, as the ancient Jews believed they did above all in the Temple. Remember too that “heaven” and “earth” are not like oil and water, resisting one another and separating themselves out. Most people in today’s Western world imagine that “heaven,” by definition, could not contain what we think of as a solid, physical body. That’s because we are Platonists at heart, supposing that if there is a “heaven,” it must be nonphysical, beyond the reach of space, time, and matter. But suppose Plato was wrong?

Suppose, in other words, that the ancient Israelite scriptures were right, and that heaven and earth were after all the twin halves of God’s created reality, designed eventually to come together. Suppose that what has kept them apart all this time is that the human creatures who were put in charge of the “earthly” part of this creation had rebelled, and that their rebellion had generated a sufficient head of steam for “earth” to declare, as it were, independence, the desire to rule itself. And suppose that this self-rule had become extremely powerful, keeping the two spheres separate and effectively tyrannizing “earth” with the regular weapon of the tyrant, that is, death itself.

Suppose, then, that the creator God had finally come in person to break the tyrant’s weapon and inaugurate the new world in which the original purpose of creation would be fulfilled after all. That, it seems, is what the early Christians believed was going on when they met Jesus, very much alive again and appearing to be equally at home in “heaven,” where they couldn’t see him, and on “earth,” where they could. Think back to what we said earlier about space, time, and matter. What we are witnessing in the resurrection stories—which, obviously, are quite unlike any other stories before or since and therefore invite the skepticism they have received as much in the ancient as in the modern world—is the birth of new creation. The power that has tyrannized the old creation has been broken, defeated, overthrown. God’s kingdom is now launched, and launched in power and glory, on earth as in heaven.

This is what Jesus said would happen within the lifetime of his hearers. A new power is let loose in the world, the power to remake what was broken, to heal what was diseased, to restore what was lost. The kingdom that Jesus had inaugurated strangely, mysteriously, and partially during his public career through his healings, feastings, and teachings was now unveiled in a totally new dimension. If we think of Jesus during his lifetime in the way we have throughout this book and then ask about the meaning of Easter, the answer is obvious. This is the real beginning of the kingdom. Jesus’s risen person—body, mind, heart, and soul—is the prototype of the new creation. We have already seen him as the Temple in person, as the jubilee in person. Now we see him as the new creation in person.

The thing about the new creation is that it simply overflows with the power of love. Read the stories, especially the longer ones in Luke 24 and John 20–21. Jesus meets his followers. They are sorrowful, ashamed, and anxious. He calls them by name. He tells them not to be afraid. He explains what’s going on. He deals with them individually. The meeting with the two on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24) is one of the most gently powerful stories ever written. The brief conversation between Jesus and Peter in John 21 is one of the most moving human encounters ever recorded. There is a love, a deep, moving warmth that goes out from Jesus. But this love is strong, powerful, life-changing, life-directing. New creation has begun; and its motivating power is love.

That is why, in Luke’s gospel, the risen Jesus tells his followers to go and announce to the world that a new way of life has been opened, the way of “repentance” and “forgiveness” (24:47). To us Westerners, that sounds a bit gloomy, as though it’s a perpetual act of contrition, dredging up our “sins” in order to hear someone declare them forgiven (until next time!). But it’s far, far bigger than that. The old creation lives by pride and retribution: I stand up for myself, and if someone gets in my way I try to get even. We’ve been there, done that, and got the scars to prove it. Now there is a completely different way to live, a way of love and reconciliation and healing and hope. It’s a way nobody’s ever tried before, a way that is as unthinkable to most human beings and societies as—well, as resurrection itself. Precisely. That’s the point. Welcome to Jesus’s new world.

Here, then, is the message of Easter, or at least the beginning of that message. The resurrection of Jesus doesn’t mean, “It’s all right. We’re going to heaven now.” No, the life of heaven has been born on this earth. It doesn’t mean, “So there is a life after death.” Well, there is, but Easter says much, much more than that. It speaks of a life that is neither ghostly nor unreal, but solid and definite and practical. The Easter stories come at the end of the four gospels, but they are not about an “end.” They are about a beginning. The beginning of God’s new world. The beginning of the kingdom. God is now in charge, on earth as in heaven. And God’s “being-in-charge” is focused on Jesus himself being king and Lord. The title on the cross was true after all. The resurrection proves it.

Ascension and Enthronement

If Easter is about Jesus as the prototype of the new creation, his ascension is about his enthronement as the one who is now in charge. Easter tells us that Jesus is himself the first part of new creation; his ascension tells us that he is now running it.

Once more, you can only understand the ascension if you push out of your mind the idea of “heaven” you began with and try to imagine a more biblical picture instead. For most people today, as we’ve said already, “heaven” is a location of a completely different sort from the world in which we live. It is timeless, nonphysical, immaterial. (People sometimes say “spiritual” at this point, but that’s a misleading description of the way the early Christians thought and spoke. For them, “spiritual” had to do with the work of God’s Spirit; and God’s Spirit was at work most definitely within, not apart from, the world of space, time, and matter.) So when Luke tells the story of Jesus going up to heaven in a cloud, forty days after his resurrection, and when Paul writes of Jesus being “exalted” to heaven (e.g., Phil. 2:9–11), the one thing we should not think of is that, after his death, Jesus is now “going to heaven” in the normal modern sense of that phrase.

There are four things to remember about the ascension. Each of them contributes to its meaning within the story we have been telling. First, to repeat, heaven and earth are not a long way apart. They are meant to overlap and interlock and finally to be joined fully and forever. And the whole point of Jesus’s identity, all along, is that he has been a one-man walking Temple; he has been, already, the place where heaven and earth have met, where people on earth have come into contact with the life and power of heaven. So for Jesus “going to heaven” isn’t a matter of disappearing into the far distance. Jesus is like somebody who has two homes. The homes are right next door to each other, and there is a connecting door. One day the partition wall will be knocked down and there will be one, glorious, heaven-and-earth mixture.

What that illustration doesn’t quite catch is that heaven and earth are not the same kind of space. They are not merely contiguous, like two next-door houses. Heaven permeates earth. If Jesus is now in “heaven,” he is present to every place on earth. Had he remained on earth, he wouldn’t have been present anywhere except the one place where he was. The ascension enables him to be present everywhere.

Second, and most important for our whole theme, heaven is the place from which the world is run. It is the CEO’s office. You can see this in the dramatic scenes in the book of Daniel, where this or that pagan king is warned about “the God of heaven.” That doesn’t mean, “Good, he’s safely in heaven, a long way away, so we can do as we like.” It means, “God is in the place where he can call the shots, and you’d better watch out!” This is how, in the story of Jesus, the long narrative stretching back to his baptism (and, in Luke particularly, to his birth) comes to its climax. He was born to be king of the world, the king who would upstage Caesar himself; he was baptized as Israel’s messiah, who in Psalm 2 would rule the nations; and now he is enthroned, installed officially as what he already was in theory. This, along with the resurrection, is part of what Jesus meant when he told his followers that the “son of man” would “come in his kingdom” and that they would see it (Matt. 16:28).

This, indeed, is part of the point of Luke’s description about Jesus being “lifted up” and taken out of sight by a “cloud” (Acts 1:9), which brings us to the third point about ascension. If, as I have stressed, “heaven” and “earth” are not far apart, but are actually meeting and mingling in and through Jesus, why this vertical movement? Here we may want to remain open-minded as to how much Luke intends this description to be a literal account of a concrete reality and how much he is intending primarily to evoke that famous passage in Daniel 7:13 in which “one like a son of man” comes on the clouds of heaven to be presented before and enthroned beside one who is called “the Ancient One.”

What I mean is this. Luke certainly intends us to be thinking of Daniel 7 in all its political significance. This is the moment at which Israel’s representative is installed as the true world ruler, with all the warring pagan nations made subject to him. How much Luke intends us also to be thinking of an actual physical event it is hard to say. There is no problem, as far as I can see, about it being a physical event; as some have suggested, an upward movement is perhaps the best way of indicating a departure from one sphere in order to arrive in another. But neither the ancient Jews nor the early Christians believed that “heaven” was a location within our present continuum of space and matter, a location situated at some distance from our world and to be reached by a primitive form of space travel. We are, after all, at this point at the edge of worldview, of language, of all human thought. We should not expect to be able to put a story like this into easy contemporary categories. Better to stick with this third point about ascension, that it is the fulfillment of Daniel 7. This is the great reversal, the moment when God welcomes the one who has suffered as Israel’s representative at the hands of the monsters and is now to exercise judgment over them.

This brings us to the fourth and last point about the ascension. Anyone reading Luke’s account at the beginning of Acts and already being familiar with the world of the early Roman Empire would realize what was happening. After the death of Julius Caesar, people swore they had seen his soul ascending to heaven. Augustus, Caesar’s adopted son, promptly declared that Julius was therefore a God; which meant that he, Augustus, was now “son of God.” This was, to put it mildly, of considerable political advantage. When Augustus himself died, the process was repeated, as it was with many (though not all) of his successors.

Luke’s story isn’t an exact copy of this tradition. Luke, after all, like all the early Christians, is a monotheist. There is no sense in which he supposes he is describing the adding of another God to the collection of them already “in heaven.” And Jesus himself is “son of God” in a sense that would take several generations of prayerful thinkers to explore fully. Nevertheless, the parallel is sufficiently close to make any readers in the Roman world realize what is going on. Jesus is radically upstaging Caesar. Actually, if we think of the story as the opening frame of the book of Acts, we get the point, because the closing frame is Paul in Rome, under Caesar’s nose, announcing God as king and Jesus as Lord “with all boldness, and with no one stopping him.” The whole book is the story of how Jesus, exercising his power as the CEO of earth as of heaven, sends out his followers as ambassadors to make his kingdom a reality, climaxing with the strange paradox of Paul in chains announcing that the Roman world has a new emperor. It is that paradox, indeed, that sets the tone for all kingdom work in the present time, as we shall see again presently.

But even ascension is not the last moment in the story. Something stranger still is to happen in the future. The Jesus of “yesterday” is to become the Jesus of “tomorrow.” The story is incomplete without its final scene.

The Return of Jesus

“Look out of the window,” say the skeptics. “If you think Jesus is already installed as king of the world, why is the world still such a mess?” Fair question. But actually the story so far—even the story of the ascension itself—is not designed to make the sort of claim to which that sort of objection would pose an ultimate problem. Even the story of Jesus’s resurrection and his going into “heaven” are only the beginning of something new, something that will be completed one day, but that none of the early Christians supposed had been fully accomplished yet.

The early Christians were, after all, a small minority, staking their daring and apparently crazy claim about Jesus from a position of great weakness and vulnerability. They were perceived, with some justification, as a threat to the established order, and so they attracted criticism, threats, punishment, and even death. But their threat to the present world was not of the usual kind. They were not ordinary revolutionaries, ready to take up arms to overthrow an existing regime and establish their own instead. Celebrating Jesus as the world’s rightful king—as we see them doing in our earliest documents, the letters of paul—was indeed a way of posing a challenge to Caesar and all other earthly “lords.” But it was a different sort of challenge. It was not only the announcement of Jesus as the true king, albeit still the king-in-waiting, but the announcement of him as the true sort of king. Addressing the ambitious pair James and John, he put it like this: “Pagan rulers . . . Lord it over their subjects. . . . But that’s not how it’s to be with you” (Matt. 20:25–26). And, as he said to Pilate, the kingdoms that are characteristic of “this world” make their way by violence, but his sort of kingdom doesn’t do that (John 18:36). We all know the irony of empires that offer people peace, prosperity, freedom, and justice—and kill tens of thousands of people to make the point. Jesus’s kingdom isn’t like that. With him, the irony works the other way around. Jesus’s death and his followers’ suffering are the means by which his peace, freedom, and justice come to birth on earth as in heaven.

Jesus’s kingdom must come, then, by the means that correspond to the message. It’s no good announcing love and peace if you make angry, violent war to achieve it! That, as we shall see, is the watchword for the “today” bit of the story of Jesus. But what about the “tomorrow” or “forever” bit? What is the ultimate future?

Jesus’s first followers were unequivocal: Jesus will return. He will come again. He will reappear in power and glory, triumphing over all the forces of death, decay, and destruction, including the structures that have used those horrible forces to enslave and devastate human lives. The present mode of the story is not the end. Pundits debate the origin of the phrase, “it ain’t over till the fat lady sings” (the best guess is that it’s a metaphor from opera, though it is applied to sport and even to church services). But in the Christian story it ain’t over till the master returns.

As with the ascension, there are several things we need to say right away about this extraordinary claim. (By now we ought to be getting used to extraordinary claims, not because we are dealing with fantasy or “supernatural” speculation, but because Jesus himself opens the window on a world that, though real and solid, is very different from the world as most people see it.) And the first thing is: don’t believe everything you read about the rapture.

In fact, don’t believe most of what you read about the rapture. Many Christians, particularly in North America, have been taught for the last century and a half that when Jesus returns he will come down from “heaven” and that his faithful people (i.e., Christians) will then fly upward into the sky to meet him and be taken to heaven with him forever. Books, movies, a million radio and TV shows, and tens of millions of sermons have drilled this picture into the popular imagination. Indeed, for some people today the rapture is more or less the center of their faith.

But it’s a complete misunderstanding. It’s based on a misreading of what Paul says about the return of Jesus in 1 Thessalonians 4:14–17, just four verses, with the idea of a “rapture” in only one, as the basis for a complete theory of everything:

For, you see, if we believe that Jesus died and rose, that’s the way God will also, through Jesus, bring with him those who have fallen asleep.

Let me explain (this is the word of the Lord I’m speaking to you!). We who are alive, who remain until the Lord is present, will not find ourselves ahead of those who fell asleep. The Lord himself will come down from heaven with a shouted order, with the voice of an archangel and the sound of God’s trumpet. The messiah’s dead will rise first; then we who are alive, who are left, will be snatched up with them among the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air. And in this way we shall always be with the Lord.

What Paul is doing, not for the first time, is mixing his metaphors. The basis of it all, offered here as comfort and hope for the grieving, is that the Lord “will come down from heaven.” Paul describes this in language that would remind biblically minded hearers of the scene in which Moses comes down the mountain. That’s the significance of the archangel’s voice and the trumpet. But then God’s people will be exalted, like the “one like a son of man” in Daniel 7:13, so that after their own suffering and death they will be with their Lord forever. And the result is that Jesus will have his “royal appearing,” like Caesar coming back to Rome after a visit to the colonies. His glad, loyal citizens will “go out to meet him,” not in order to stay with him out in the countryside, away from the city, but to escort him in triumph and splendor back into his capital.

Of course these metaphors, when pressed, don’t all fit together. You’re not supposed to be able to draw the scene in a sketch-pad. Think of the book of Revelation, where in 5:6 we find the lion who is also a lamb “standing there as though it had been slaughtered” (slaughtered lambs don’t normally stand up), with seven horns (we can just about imagine that) and seven eyes (that’s a bit harder). The point is that this language is not meant to be taken literally. It’s a mixture of code, metaphor, and political cartoon.

But the fact that this particular picture is a rich mixture of such styles of writing doesn’t mean that nothing is going to happen. Some think that once you’ve said something is “metaphorical,” you mean it’s “all in the mind,” with no corresponding events in the real world. On the contrary. Paul is giving his readers a set of lenses through which to look, but the event itself at which they are to look is definite, clear, and vital. Lose this and you lose everything. Without the “second coming,” seen in proper biblical terms, following Jesus is reduced to a “way of being religious,” a private spirituality with a vague and uncertain personal hope, but with no prospect at all of a world radically transformed by Jesus as its rightful Lord. Some, indeed, are content to make that reduction, leaving Christian faith as a “spirituality” that one might find helpful, but without any thought of the ancient vision of the Psalms and Isaiah, of the whole world healed, judged, put right, transformed under the sovereign rule of Israel’s messiah. That fits quite nicely within the postmodern reaction against an older and arrogant Christian “triumphalism,” but it is a lot less Jewish and a lot less Christian, and it has little to do with the actual Jesus himself.

Believing in the second coming itself is anything but arrogant. The whole point of it is to insist, over against not only the wider pagan world, but against all self-delusion or pretension within the church, that Jesus remains sovereign and will return at last to put everything right. This putting right (the biblical word for it is “justice”) is the sort of sigh-of-relief event that the whole world, at its best and at many other times too, longs for most deeply. All sorts of things are out of joint, both on a large and a small scale, in the world; and God the creator will put them straight. All sorts of things are still going wrong, corrupting the lives of human beings and the larger life of the environment, the planet itself; God the creator will put them right. All sorts of things are still wrong with us, Jesus’s followers; Jesus, when he comes, will put us right as well. That may not be comfortable, but it’s what we need. Believing he will do it is part of Christian humility. Waiting for it is part of Christian patience:

When the king is revealed (and he is your life, remember), then you too will be revealed with him in glory. (Col. 3:4)

Beloved ones, we are now, already, God’s children; it hasn’t yet been revealed what we are going to be. We know that when he is revealed we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is. (1 John 3:2)

But how will it happen? Thinking of the second coming or of Jesus “returning” often raises the same kind of problems that we saw with the ascension. People who still think that “heaven” is a long way away, up in the sky, and that that’s where Jesus has gone, imagine that the second coming will be an event somewhat like the return of a space shuttle from its far-off orbit. Not so. Heaven is God’s space, God’s dimension of present reality, so that to think of Jesus “returning” is actually, as both Paul and John say in the passages just quoted, to think of him presently invisible, but one day reappearing. It won’t be the case that Jesus will simply reappear within the world the way it presently is. His return—his reappearing—will be the central feature of the much greater event that the New Testament writers promise, based on Jesus’s resurrection itself: heaven and earth will one day come together and be present and transparent to each other. That’s what they were made for, and that’s what God will accomplish one day. It has, in fact, already been accomplished in the person of Jesus himself; and what God has done in Jesus, bringing heaven and earth together at immense cost and with immense joy, will be achieved in and for the whole cosmos at last. That is what Paul says at the heart of one of his great visionary prayers:

His plan was to sum up the whole cosmos in the king—yes, everything in heaven and on earth, in him. (Eph. 1:10)

This means that the second coming takes on all the dimensions present in Israel’s scriptures, the dimensions of the whole creation singing with delight when Israel’s God comes to “judge” the world (Pss. 96; 98). “Judgment” in this sense is like the “judgment” given when a poor widow finally has her case heard, the bullies who have been oppressing her are firmly rebuked, and she is vindicated. “Judgment” is what happens when someone who has been robbed of home and dignity and livelihood is upheld, with everything restored. “Judgment” is what happens when a forest that has been damaged through overzealous logging, on the one hand, and acid rain, on the other, is wisely replanted and the source of pollution identified and stopped. The world is out of joint, and God’s “judgment” will perform a great act of new creation through which it will be restored to the way God always intended it to be.

To speak of the second coming is therefore to speak of God’s whole new world, the new world envisaged in Revelation 21–22 or Romans 8, and of Jesus at the middle of it, administering God’s just, wise, and healing rule. Jesus is the truly human being who will, in the end, take the properly human role (as in Genesis) of reflecting the creator’s image of wise and fruitful order into the whole creation. That is what his “coming” and his “judgment” will mean. God will do for the whole cosmos, in the end, what he did for Jesus at Easter; the risen Jesus, remember, is the prototype of the new creation. God will do this through Jesus himself; the ascended Jesus, remember, is the ruler within the new creation as it bursts in upon the old. And God will do it through the presence of the risen and ascended Jesus when he comes to heal, to save, and also to judge.

That is why it is not arrogant to believe in the second coming. There are arrogant ways of thinking and speaking about it, of course, as though when Jesus returns we, his people, will be able to put our noses in the air and look down smugly on everyone else. A moment’s reflection will show how silly this would be. Think back over the last twenty-four hours or the last seven days. Suppose Jesus had been there, physically present beside you, throughout that time. Would you have been happy to have him see what you did? Hear what you said? Know what you thought? When he comes, as the New Testament insists, he will bring to light all the hidden things that are now in darkness and expose the thoughts and intentions of the heart. He comes, of course, as the one who died for us; there is no doubting his love. But his love is the love that wants the very best for us and from us, not the sentimental kind that doesn’t want to make a fuss and so refuses to confront the thing that’s actually wrong. He loves in the way a doctor or a surgeon loves, wanting the best, working for life, dealing powerfully and drastically with the cancer or the blocked artery. The only proper Christian way to think of the second coming is, as I said, with humility and patience.

But also with faith, hope, and love. “And our eyes at last shall see him, through his own redeeming love.” That is our hope, our longing, our delight. Even so, we pray with the second to last verse of the Bible, “Come, Lord Jesus.”

Jesus Today

Jesus yesterday, Jesus tomorrow. What about Jesus today?

We omitted (deliberately) one of the other vital events that, in the New Testament, complete the story of Jesus. The resurrection is all about Jesus as the prototype of the new creation. The ascension is all about Jesus as the ruler of the new creation as it breaks into the world of the old. The second coming is all about Jesus as the coming Lord and judge who will transform the entire creation. And, in between resurrection and ascension, on the one hand, and the second coming, on the other, Jesus is the one who sends the Holy Spirit, his own Spirit, into the lives of his followers, so that he himself is powerfully present with them and in them, guiding them, directing them, and above all enabling them to bear witness to him as the world’s true Lord and work to make that sovereign rule a reality. This—the coming of the Spirit, the story of Pentecost as in Acts 2—is a vital part of the story of Jesus. Again, I and others have written a good deal about this. All we can do here is to summarize the main points in the light of what we’ve said about Jesus so far.

The Acts of the Apostles is the New Testament book that is most obviously about what happens when the Spirit comes. It should be equally obvious that the Spirit enables Jesus’s followers to do and say things that the authorities, both Jewish and pagan, see as dangerous nonsense—just as they did with Jesus himself. When many people today think of the Holy Spirit, they think simply of personal spiritual experience (perhaps including “charismatic” gifts such as “speaking in tongues”) or powerfully effective spiritual gifts such as healing. These are there in Acts, to be sure. But the story line is not about the church discovering these gifts and simply enjoying them for their own sake. It is about the church living as a new community, giving allegiance to Jesus as Lord rather than to the kings and chief priests who rule the Jewish world or the emperor or magistrates who rule the non-Jewish world. “We must obey God,” declares Peter, “not human beings!” (Acts 5:29).

We shouldn’t be surprised, then, at how it works out. Since the whole story of Jesus’s ascension and the Spirit’s arrival in Acts 1–2 is basically about Jesus as the new Temple ( joining heaven and earth together) and the Spirit enabling the church itself to be an outpost of that new Temple (humans, creatures of earth, being indwelt by the very breath of heaven), the conflict focuses on temples: first, the Temple in Jerusalem (chap. 7), and later the temples in Athens (chap. 17) and Corinth (chap. 19), before coming back to the one in Jerusalem (chaps. 22–26). The underlying issues in Acts—provoked by the Spirit—are about the things that come together in the Temple, namely, God and power. Who is the true God? Where is he now living? And, above all, who is now in charge? For the early Christians, the answer was, “Jesus.” “They’re saying,” said their accusers in Thessalonica, “that there is another king, Jesus!” (17:7). Well, precisely. That’s what the whole story has been about.

But, again, it’s a different kind of kingship. That too is what the whole story has been about. The story of “how Jesus became king” in Jerusalem, Judaea, Samaria, and across the world (the program announced in Acts 1:8) is anything but the smooth, triumphant procession of a conquering worldly monarch, obliterating the opposition by the normal military methods. The methods of kingdom work are in accordance with the message of Jesus as king; that is, they involve suffering, misunderstanding, violence, execution, and, in the final spectacular scene (before Paul gets to Rome with the message of this new world emperor), shipwreck. Luke tells the story of how Jesus becomes king in Acts in a way that matches exactly the message of how Jesus became king in his own public career.

We see the same picture when we look at the other books of the New Testament. Whether it’s Paul’s letters or the ones ascribed to Peter, whether it’s Hebrews or that spectacular set piece of apocalyptic imagery we call Revelation, the message is the same. Jesus is the Lord, but it’s the crucified Jesus who is Lord—precisely because it’s his crucifixion that has won the victory over all the other powers that think of themselves as in charge of the world. But that means that his followers, charged with implementing his victory in the world, will themselves have to do so by the same method. One of the most striking things about some of (what we normally see as) the later material in the New Testament is the constant theme of suffering, suffering not as something merely to be bravely borne for Jesus’s sake, but as something that is mysteriously taken up into the redemptive suffering of Jesus himself. He won his victory through suffering; his followers win theirs through sharing in his.

The Spirit and suffering. Great joy and great cost. Those who follow Jesus and claim him (and proclaim him) as Lord learn both of them. It’s as simple as that.

So how does all this work out today? How does the vision of Acts look—the vision of the risen and ascended Jesus sending out his followers to proclaim him as the world’s true Lord—when we come forward twenty-one centuries and into our own day?

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7

WHERE IS GOD WHEN WE FAIL?

The second parish where I served after my ordination to the priesthood was St. Philip’s Thokoza, near Alberton. St. Philip’s was wonderful for our family. We finally had a house after living in a single-car garage in my first parish. Leah was teaching at a local primary school, so our finances were a little better too.

I was the curate in charge of St. Philip’s. It was an out-station of St. Peter’s Chains, Natalspruit. The rector of St. Peter’s Chains, my supervisor, was a wonderful man, Archdeacon Voyi. He really gave me all the latitude I could want. He allowed me to run St. Philip’s almost as though I were the rector. I came with all the enthusiasm of someone recently priested.

One of the things I instituted in the parish was a daily Eucharist and the office of Evensong. I divided the parish into two sections, and on Fridays, instead of holding worship in the church, we had our service in one section of the parish or the other. We chose a house that was central to that section, and I would celebrate the Eucharist there in the morning. In the afternoon I would go and visit the sick and homebound in the other section of the parish. It was all so beautifully organized. I really thought I was the cat’s whiskers.

Two things happened in close succession. The first was that I experienced one of the most wonderful things that could happen to a priest. I had gone to give a sick Communion to one of my parishioners who was ill. He was a man I was visiting quite regularly. After this particular visit someone came to the house to say that very soon after I gave him Communion he died. I felt very good, maybe even a little cocky, about being such a good and faithful pastor.

Not long after this experience I had another that was very different. I had completed my regular Friday rounds and was asked to visit a parishioner in the section not scheduled for visits. I had been told that the old lady was not well. A visit would have been more than was strictly required of me, but it would have been no great inconvenience. Thokoza was not very big, and her home was not too far from where we lived. I could have gone. But it wasn’t the week for pastoral visits in that section. I didn’t go. I went home. A few days later, before I got around to visiting her, she died.

I came down with a real crash. I had fallen victim to my own presumptuousness. I had refused to yield my neat schedule to a real need. I had put my own small convenience above the needs of someone in my care. I had given in to my own laziness. And now there was no way to repair the damage. It was particularly painful for me, a pastor. I claimed to follow Jesus. Even in a rush to heal one man’s daughter, didn’t Jesus pause to heal and hear another person in need? Did Jesus not abandon his haste to attend to the woman with a flow of blood (Luke 8:40–56, Mark 5:21–43, Matt. 9:18–26)?

That failure was a very humbling experience. It helped to shape my ministry. It dragged me away from my pride in my own plans and schemes. Knocked to my knees, I had the opportunity to rethink my life and my way of working. My smart designs and I had been shoved off the throne at the center of my life. God had my attention.

The years since those incidents have been marked by successes and by failures, from the small dramas of family life to the more public actions on the world stage. Leah and I have parented our children through their teenage years and beyond. We endured the jealousies and the screaming matches, and the unsuitable suitors that our children brought into our home. We learned, in that time, how little we knew and how heavily we had to lean on the grace of God.

The work of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission is also behind me. In many ways that was a stellar success. I worked with an incredible and gifted team of people. We helped South Africa on the road to healing much of the anguish that apartheid had wrought. But we failed to draw white South Africans into full participation in our work. That is a source of sadness. I have been able to endure the failures and maintain some humility in spite of the successes because of what happened in Thokoza. One legacy of the time in Thokoza has been the prayerful listening that has become so central a part of my ministry and my life.

To some of us the humiliation of failure seems to open a wide gulf between God and us. We imagine that God turns away from us in disgust. What I discovered was that failure could be a bridge across the chasm that pride had created. As long as I considered myself and my plans to be of paramount importance, I circumscribed the arena for God’s action. In fact, my neat schedule and orderly life left little space for anyone to educate or influence me. That failure in Thokoza was a gift to me and to my ministry.

A failure can also be a gift when we have allowed ourselves the delusion that we are self-made. One of the enduring fictions of our time is that of the “self-made millionaire.” The failures on the road to achieving the dream of wealth may be the windows through which self-aggrandizement can be ushered out to open a space for God. When we imagine we are self-made, we confine God to a controllable corner of our lives. After all, if we are self-made, then we are in charge. We know how our lives are meant to look and how to make them look that way. Failure offers us a chance to discern the hand of God in the pattern of our lives. It offers us the opportunity to acknowledge the contributions of so many people, remembered and forgotten, who have all had a part in shaping the people we have become.

The gift of failure may be a deep encounter with God. The biblical prophet Moses did not experience his theophany—his encounter with God made visible—when he was riding high as a prince of Egypt. His first encounter with God, his call, and his sending came when he had been brought low. He had fled Egypt as a murderer. Instead of winning the respect of his people, he had garnered their scorn and derision. He was no longer regarded as a prince. He was living in Midian as a fugitive and a hired hand when he saw the bush that was aflame but not consumed by fire.

It may be so for us also. It may be only when we have reached the end of our rope that we finally realize that the only secure handhold is God. When we recognize that we can no longer rely on our own resources, we open a space for God to work. When the myth of being self-made explodes in our face, we can fully awaken to the abiding presence of God. At times like these, failure is a blessing. When pride in our skill or good fortune has taken hold of us, failure may knock us to our knees and bring us to our senses.

But sometimes failure is not a blessing dressed as a curse. When love, faith, and work cannot hold two people together, a failed marriage is the devastating result. When lectures, blandishments, and punishments cannot curb a wayward child, the outcome may be a ruined life. When the best efforts of the defense team still end in a guilty verdict for an innocent person, the failure of the justice system can end in jail or even death. When dire illness does not yield to medical intervention, the failure of treatment ends a life. When people have done all that is humanly possible to achieve success and have fallen short, the gift is hard to discern. In fact, there may be no gift in failure for the people most directly affected.

And failure does not always surrender its gifts in the moment. The lessons of failure can be hard to learn. We may have to endure the same pain two, three, or more times for the teaching to take hold. The failure of the global community to halt the Nazi holocaust made world leaders say “never again.” The failure to halt the Rwandan genocide prompted us to say “never again” again. We did not learn the lesson the first time. We may not yet have grasped the lesson of our failure fully. But now there is a global community that will not let the horror of Darfur be smothered in silence. Now there are world leaders who are not prepared to let tyranny reign unchecked in Burma/Myanmar. Now many voices raise the outcry about the fate of Tibet. Neither despots nor democrats can act with impunity. Even dictators cover themselves with the fig leaf of sham elections.

Each year we inch toward a more perfect way of living as a global community. Each year some places in the world succeed in the experiments in governance. Each year some countries fail miserably. Their leaders make no effort to uphold human rights. Their governments do not try to promote the well-being of the population. Despotic rulers are concerned with keeping the comforts of authority for themselves and their cronies. As long as people of conscience continue to call those in authority to account, the failure is miserable but not complete. For the failure of the human endeavor to be complete, it would have to be bound by the span of one human life. But we have already seen—in the lessons of holocaust, in cancer care, in the end of apartheid, and the peace accord that ended the Troubles in Northern Ireland—that the Portuguese adage holds true: God writes straight on crooked lines.

No lines could be more crooked than those that tell the life of Jesus Christ. In human terms, Jesus’s ministry was a failure. That failure is, in a sense, at the heart of Christian theology. The cross is a bloody and brutal failure. Jesus had shown such amazing love and compassion. He had really made a wonderful pitch for love. You would have thought that people would have seen what a tremendous guy he was. But that was not the result of his ministry. The end result, in human terms, was failure. It was a failure that seemed to be recognized even by the elements. The narratives that describe Jesus’s death tell of a dark, lowering sky. Jesus, in a very human voice, cries out to God from the cross, “Why have you forsaken me?” Those are words that any one of us might have spoken from the depths of our disappointments. Jesus also speaks the words of faith “Into your hands I commend my spirit.” He didn’t know that there was going to be a resurrection. There was no hotline through which he heard the whisper “Don’t fret, my son. It’s going to be OK!” So he flung himself into what could well have been an abyss. His disciples had abandoned him. One betrayed him, another denied him three times, and the rest fled. It all seemed a colossal failure.

Then there was Easter. Christian churches celebrate Easter, the feast of the Resurrection of our Lord, with joy and pageantry. The first disciples probably faced the risen Christ with more mixed emotions. The accounts of Jesus’s life and death all note that his disciples deserted him upon his arrest. Peter had been with Jesus since the beginning of his public ministry. He had vowed to stand by Jesus no matter what. Jesus predicted that before the cock crowed the dawn of a new day Peter would have denied him three times. It was so. The women, who were the most courageous of those who had followed Jesus, stood at a distance at his crucifixion. Those who had been his closest friends were marked by betrayal. At the moment of truth they failed in their promises. For them the fact of a resurrected Jesus cannot have been an unalloyed joy.

The grief of Jesus’s death and the guilt of their desertion and denial were feelings they could have learned to live with in due course. Human life is marked with failures large and small. Those mistakes and misdeeds either teach life lessons or remain as unhealed wounds on the psyche. What the disciples did not expect was to have to face the one they had betrayed in the sure knowledge that he knew of their betrayal. They had failed miserably. They must have come with more than a little trepidation to their first encounters with the risen Christ.

Failure can do one of two things to us: it can be a stepping-stone to success, or it can open a door to despair. Judas, who betrayed Jesus into the hands of the authorities, was so ravaged by shame and guilt that he killed himself. Peter, who denied that he even knew Jesus—let alone that he was a close friend and disciple—responded differently. His failure demolished the pride and bluster that had been his chief characteristics. He realized that, on his own, he really didn’t amount to much. His newfound humility opened the space for God to use him. He became as the Christ had named him: the Rock upon which the church was built.

Peter may have had a moment of uncertainty. His failure might have made him unsure whether to run toward or away from the risen Christ. When we fail we may want to hide from God. But God does not turn away from us. God doesn’t reject us. Our failures may give God a better chance to get our attention. We assume that God keeps a scorecard of our successes and failures. We think that God operates as we do, ready to record and reward our accomplishments but equally ready—if not more ready—to punish our deficits.

Mystics and people of prayer through the ages have assured us that they hear God differently. The writer of the biblical book of Isaiah hears God’s assurance: “My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways.” The English mystic Dame Julian of Norwich surprises us by saying, “There is no blame in God.” Julian sees in God pity for the woe our wrongs create for ourselves and others, but no blame.

We may feel shame for the deficits and disappointments that are of our own making. We may want to apportion blame when our failures are not our fault. But God’s ways are not our ways. God holds all eternity in mind, and God knows all our flaws and our weaknesses. Sometimes we count failure when God has something else in mind.

I had known from an early age what I wanted to do. I wanted to be a doctor. I had felt a strong urge toward that profession. Though I succeeded in earning admission to medical school, I failed to raise enough money to be trained as a doctor. I turned, instead, to teaching. I enjoyed teaching. My temperament and training seemed to suit me to that vocation. When the government instituted the iniquitous Bantu Education system for black South Africans, I could not continue to teach. My conscience would not allow it. I started training for ordained ministry. I would have dearly loved to be a doctor; I hope I would have been a good one. I counted my inability to attend medical school a failure. I considered the end of my teaching career a failure too. Only in retrospect have I come to know that neither event was a failure. The end of each opportunity was an opening for me to take a different path.

The measure by which we judge success or failure is not God’s yardstick. In fact, success and failure are often more a testament to our own arrogance. We think we know what our lives are meant to be. We believe we know how God must use us. We have the plan. When our plan doesn’t work, we are devastated. As my wise friend Oprah Winfrey says, “We spend so much time staring despairingly at the door that has just closed that we don’t notice that hope has opened a window.”

What might our lives feel like if we didn’t march through them with a scorecard, keeping a tally of our failures and successes? How would it be to stop pretending omniscience? Can you imagine being able to trust that the outcome of your efforts will be right, whatever the outcome? Even when it looks as though every effort is marked with failure?

The bishop who pastored me through the first stage of my call to ordained ministry could have counted his efforts a failure. He worked hard to bring an end to apartheid and ensure justice for all South Africans. He died in England in 1980. That was before I won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984. It was before F. W. de Klerk was elected president of South Africa in 1989. It was ten years before Nelson Mandela was released from prison in 1990. When he died, Ambrose Reeves was a deportee who could not return to South Africa. He was a faithful laborer who did not live to harvest the fruits of his labor.

When Ambrose Reeves was expelled from South Africa in 1960 he had long been a thorn in the side of the South African government. He had arrived in South Africa in 1949 to serve as the Anglican bishop of Johannesburg. Three years later his confrontations with the apartheid government began.

The Anglican Church had a long history of providing a high-quality education to Africans. The government recognized that such an education was subversive to the aims of the apartheid state. One of the lynchpins of that system of racial oppression was the Bantu Education policy. The policy did not pretend to afford black South Africans an education comparable to that of their white compatriots. Its goal was to educate black people for subservience, for serfdom. Reeves denounced the policy as the “intellectual crippling of a nation” and declared, “Whatever the cost, we must make it plain to the government, the members of our Church, and all the African people that we disagree so profoundly with the policy . . . that we cannot be party to it in any shape or form.”

The Diocese of Johannesburg refused to sell its schools to the government, as the law demanded. Instead the diocese shut down all its schools. It was a lonely stand against injustice. Johannesburg was the only diocese to refuse to cooperate with the act that established segregated schools. Other dioceses and denominations sold their property to the government and ceded control of their institutions.

In 1956 Reeves entered another battle. Early one December morning, 155 people of all races were arrested and charged with high treason, a capital offense in apartheid South Africa. On the day of their arrest Bishop Reeves agreed to chair their defense fund. With his group he found the money to retain some of South Africa’s finest legal minds to represent the accused. The fund was also quickly able to secure bail for the defendants. The trial dragged on for five years. By the time the verdict was read, Bishop Reeves had been expelled from the country.

He was deported the year of the massacre at Sharpeville. In so many ways that incident marked a turning point for South Africa. On March 21, 1960, police opened fire on a crowd gathered at the Sharpeville police station to protest the iniquitous pass laws. Sixty-nine people were killed, and almost two hundred were wounded. The police claimed they had come under attack. They maintained that they had shot the protesters in self-defense. But the evidence showed that most of the injured were shot in the back as they tried to flee. In the ensuing days and weeks Bishop Reeves worked tirelessly to ensure that the truth about the massacre was known. When he went home to England on a long leave, he used the opportunity to describe what he had seen to the European media.

He returned to South Africa in September 1960. Two days later he was rounded up by security police and deported.

Nothing that Ambrose Reeves did was crowned with spectacular success. In the wake of the Sharpeville massacre the state clamped down on dissent. It outlawed black political organizations and arrested black political leaders. The victims of the police excesses of that day received no redress. The treason trial did end in acquittals for all the accused. But less than two years later the Rivonia trial began. The Rivonia trial was named for the suburb of Johannesburg where most of the accused were arrested. Driven underground by banning, the African National Congress had decided to take up arms. They had formed uMkhonto we Sizwe or MK (the spear of the nation). Those who stood in the dock for the Rivonia trial were virtually the entire leadership of the MK. Many of them had been accused in the first treason trial. The Rivonia trial ended in convictions and life sentences for Nelson Mandela, Govan Mbeki, and six of their co-accused.

School segregation and the Bantu Education Act were put in place in spite of the refusal of Bishop Reeves and his Johannesburg diocese to cooperate in their implementation.

Had Ambrose Reeves failed? Yes and no. He had not achieved the outcomes he had hoped for, the ends he had planned, and the goals for which he had worked. But the seeds his actions planted bore fruit many years later.

Bantu Education became the flash point for protests that engulfed South Africa and began the unraveling of oppressive state control. The people tried for treason in the 1950s became icons of the struggle to end apartheid. Though silenced by the prison walls, they inspired antiapartheid campaigners around the world. The massacre at Sharpeville and the international publicity that it garnered brought apartheid to the attention of the world community. The campaigns to isolate South Africa played an inestimable part in securing our freedom. They began in the months after Sharpeville in response to that mayhem.

In the span of his life Ambrose Reeves failed. But each of his failures laid another paving stone on the path to a free South Africa. He did not achieve the outcomes for which he worked in his time in South Africa, or even in his lifetime. The change for which he strove did not come in time for him to see it. But he worked for the good. What he achieved was good enough in the short term. And, ultimately, what he accomplished was good and right.

“It’s amazing how much you can accomplish when it doesn’t matter who gets the credit!” insists the adage. It’s still more amazing how much we can accomplish when we can let go of the illusion of our own omniscience, let go of the accomplishment tally, and live a surrendered life.

You do not need to be a churchman to live a surrendered life. All of us can trust that choosing goodness will always, ultimately, result in creating rightness. And anyone can decide to choose goodness. Anyone can decide to set aside the tally list of successes and failures—and the stress and anxiety that accompany the task of keeping the list current. None of us can see eternity. None of us knows with perfect clarity what the end will be. But when we choose goodness we can be certain that, in the fullness of time, the end will be right.

What would you concede if it didn’t matter who got the credit? What would no longer matter if you were not hostage to the accomplishment tally? How much peace could you claim by trusting that the choices that you made for goodness would ultimately turn out right? Just picture the freedom that comes with living a surrendered life. A surrendered life is not effortless. One who lives a surrendered life applies oneself with all due diligence. But one who lives a surrendered life can trust that no effort will be in vain. Though the good end may not come in the span of one human life—or even of one generation—the good will be the end.

Whether we surrender our lives or we march forward, head down, to the beat of our own drummer, God’s love reaches out to us. Even though God reaches out to us, we often turn away from God. That is sin. In the next chapter we will explore why God allows us to follow our own paths. I will begin with a story from my life as a college chaplain.

But first let us turn into the stillness and listen to God speak with the voice of the heart:

Failure and shame shut your eyes

So you can’t see me.

Anguish and pain shriek with your voice

And you can’t hear me.

Guilt makes you turn aside

And you think I have walked away.

But through it all I am right here,

Right here where you wept lonely tears for me,

Right here where you thought you didn’t want me to be.

I AM.

“Why have you forsaken me?”

I hear the cry through all eternity.

Child, I am here.

I know what you are doing.

I weep for you when you slide away from all that is right,

when you turn your back on all that is good.

I weep for you.

I see the harm you do.

In my hand I hold your hand.

In my hand I hold the hurting hand of the one you are harming.

Right now,

In this moment,

I stand between the two of you and neither of you see me.

In one hand I hold the hand of my beloved child

My dear one who is blinded by suffering.

In my other hand I hold the hand of my beloved child

My dear one whose savagery and shame hide me from sight.

But I am here

Beside you both,

Between, within, and all around you both.

I AM.

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Made for Goodness

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THE WORTHLESS SERVANT

CHARLES STROBEL

Ann Patchett

IN THE MIDDLE OF JUNE in Nashville, a few days before the summer became unendurably hot, I was in the car with Charlie Strobel, driving out towards the river. To grow up Catholic in Nashville is to know at least some of the members of the Strobel family, and long before Charlie and I became friends, I knew the stories of what he had accomplished, and what he had lost. We were on our way to the Stadium Inn to visit some homeless men who were about to get their own apartment, and while he drove, Charlie told me a story about Father Dan Richardson. Father Dan was the priest at Assumption, the North Nashville parish in the poor neighborhood where Charlie grew up. It was not too far from where we were headed now.

“Father Dan was a father figure to me,” Charlie said, his own father having died when he was four. “We lived down the street from the church, and by the time I was in the third or fourth grade, I was an acolyte.”

Assumption was a parish with an older congregation, and Charlie remembered the funerals coming one after the other. For every funeral, Father Dan gave the exact same homily. “We knew it word for word. We could mouth it along behind him,” Charlie said, and though he is sixty-nine now, a good distance from his altar boy self, he begins the recitation:

“Father Dan would say, ‘We’re on this earth to get ready to die. And when we die, God’s not going to say, “Charlie [Ann, Sally, John, fill-in-the-blank], what did you do for a living? How much money did you make? How many houses did you have?” God is only going to ask us two questions: “Did you love me?” and, “Did you love your neighbor?” And we can imagine that Charlie [Ann, Sally, John, fill-in-the-blank] will answer truthfully, saying, “Yes, Lord, You know I loved you. You know I loved my neighbor.” And then God will say, “Well done, good and faithful servant. Now enter into the kingdom of heaven.” ’ ”

Charlie smiled at the thought of it. “He nailed it every single time. He had this soft voice, and his cadence was perfect. Even though I knew exactly what was coming, it never failed to grab me. It was sad, especially if I knew the person who had died, but I never heard it as anything but a positive and hopeful message. We come from God, we return to God, so death was never frightening.”

Charlie realized then that he had missed his exit. Neither one of us had been paying attention to the interstate, and neither of us was sorry. It gave him time to finish the story.

“Even after I grew up and became a priest, I could never call him Dan. It was always Father Dan. I’d always say to him, ‘What are you going to get me for Christmas this year?’ And he’d say, ‘A bridge,’ because the homeless lived under bridges.” Father Dan, who was Irish, was always one for a joke.

“When I went to see him for the last time before he died, we had a personal talk, a father-son talk, and I told him how much I loved him. Then I said, ‘Now I’m going to be your priest,’ and I did his whole routine—‘We are on this earth to get ready to die, and when we die, God’s not going to ask, “Dan, how much money did you make?” He’s going to ask two questions: “Did you love me?” and, “Did you love your neighbor?” And I know you’ll say, “Yes, Lord, you know I loved you. You know I loved my neighbor.” And God will say, “Enter, good and faithful servant.” ’ ”

I was struck by how often the lessons we learn when we’re young, the things we could never imagine needing, make it possible to meet what life will ask of us later. “I’ve grown to be who I am,” Charlie said, “because of those life experiences each of us has.”

In its finest hour, the Stadium Inn must have been a cheap motel where fans of the opposing teams could spend the night after a football game. But any football fan who booked a room there now would be able to realize the error of his ways without ever getting out of the car. When we pulled up to the front, Charlie stopped and looked at the men sitting on the steps, then he looked at me. “I’ll leave the car running,” he said, trying to calculate how long he might be inside. “You lock the doors and wait.”

When I told him I was happy to go with him, he gave me an enormous smile. “Oh, that’s wonderful,” he said. He reached in the backseat and pulled out a two-burner hot plate. The Stadium Inn was what my policeman father would call a flophouse, a pay-by-the-week motel of the lowest possible order. Charlie greeted every man and woman who leaned by the door or sprawled in the lobby. He announced our plans to visit Ron and Sid to the woman at the front desk, who claimed to have no idea who they were. Then he told her he was Charlie Strobel and that he was expected. “Oh,” she said, smiling and nodding. She gave us the room number and directed us to the elevator. Ron and Sid would soon be moving into their own apartment, an apartment that had no stove. They would need a hot plate. We took the one we had upstairs.

Every human catastrophe the carpet in the hallway had endured over the years had been solved with a splash of bleach, which rendered it a long, abstract painting. Beneath the low yellow light, the row of closed doors each thumped out a distinct musical beat, including the door we were standing in front of. I saw an eye study us at the peephole and then pull away. I stepped to the side, certain that I must look like a parole officer. “Sid,” Charlie called out in the tone of a cheerful and persistent relative who had dropped in for a visit. “It’s Charlie. Open up the door.” He waited, and then he knocked again.

It was a long wait, but finally the door cracked open and a single dark eye peered out of a cloud of cigarette smoke, then the door opened wider. “Father!” the man said, and gave Charlie a hug. (Charlie can do without the title, as he thinks it creates a distance between people. Still, if the word Father makes anyone feel better, he accepts it.)

Sid and Ron are salt and pepper shakers, Sid with dark brown hair and a heavy brown beard, Ron with faded red hair and a greying beard going halfway down his chest. Both men wore loose jeans, tank tops, baseball caps. Neither could have weighed more than a hundred pounds, their upper arms no bigger than their wrists. Introductions were made and they shook my hand. For all their reticence about opening the door, they were clearly pleased we had come. There were two unmade beds in the room with a heaping ashtray between them, a console television playing the country music station. A shopping cart was parked against the wall, neatly packed, its contents tarped over and tied. “We’re ready to go,” Ron said, giving the cart a pat. “We’ve got somebody coming tomorrow to help us move.”

“Are you staying sober?” Charlie asked, his voice making it clear that he will be proud of them if they are, and love them still if they are not.

“We are, Father,” Sid said. “Four days, Father,” Ron said.

Charlie tried to lead them in a conversation about how much better it was to be clean, and though they clearly wished to please him, their hearts weren’t in it. They planned to find jobs once they settled, maybe dishwashing. Ron took off his baseball cap and pushed back his hair to reveal a long scar running across his forehead. “I don’t know though,” he said. “I don’t think so clear since I got hit.”

Charlie gave them the hot plate and they marveled at the newness of the thing, still in the box. They talked about the move, and Charlie promised to get them bus passes. When we were finally ready to leave, both men hugged him again and promised good behavior for the future. They told us about a man five doors down the hall, someone who wasn’t doing as well at staying out of trouble, and so we went and knocked on that door for a long time, but despite the music blaring from the other side, no amount of calling could draw anyone out.

“That’s the best I’ve seen them look in a long time,” Charlie said cheerfully as the shuddering elevator dropped to the first floor. “Their eyes looked good, didn’t you think?”

I hadn’t seen their eyes before, but I was struck by the sweetness of both men, and how more than anything they looked tired. Homelessness is an exhausting and dangerous state of being.

Charlie has a good story that he likes to bring out for fund-raisers—that his career with the homeless can all be traced back to a single peanut butter and jelly sandwich he made for a man who knocked on the rectory door when he was a young priest at Holy Name. The next step came soon after that, as he explained in a lecture he gave at the local Unitarian church:

They were in the church parking lot, sleeping under my window, and the temperature that evening was dropping below freezing. I didn’t think too long about it, probably because I knew I would talk myself out of it. As a pastor, I knew the consequences of such a decision were far greater than simply giving a dozen men one night’s lodging. What do you do tomorrow night when they return? And the next night and the next night and on and on? One simple decision could be parlayed into a lifetime commitment. What would the parishioners say? Or the bishop? Or the neighbors? For the moment, I decided that it was the thing to do. Like Scarlett O’Hara, I found myself saying, “I’ll worry about that tomorrow.” So I invited them to spend the night, and they’ve been with me ever since.

It was while he was trying to meet those immediate needs that Doy Abbott arrived.

“He was my terrorist,” Charlie said. “Every morning he woke me up to demand breakfast. He was a regular back at Holy Name. He kicked in the screen door. We had to have that door replaced three times. He cussed out everyone in the parish. He expected everything to be done for him. My mother used to say to me, ‘Doy is your ticket to heaven.’ And I’d tell her, if he’s my ticket to heaven I don’t want to go. Everyone in the parish was afraid of him.”

Everyone except Mary Hopwood. She was the housekeeper and the secretary and the bookkeeper for the parish. She’d come to work at the age of fifty-five, after raising twelve children of her own. With Doy her tone was always quiet and respectful, and he was respectful in return. They listened to one another.

“About that time I read something Dorothy Day had said. She said what she wanted to do was love the poor, not analyze them, not rehabilitate them. When I read that it was like a light clicking on. I thought about Mrs. Hopwood. I realized that Doy was not my problem to solve but my brother to love. I decided on the spot that I was going to love him and not expect anything from him, and overnight he changed. He stopped the cussing, stopped the violence. I feel we became brothers. I was his servant and he was my master. I was there with him when he died.”

Charles Strobel founded the Room In the Inn and its Campus for Human Development in 1986 as a center of learning, respite, shelter, and relief for the homeless. Like the homeless, he can pretty much be found there seven days a week. Originally, it was formed as an organization of local parishes of all denominations that welcomed the homeless in for a meal and to spend the night once the cold set in. The first building they had was traditionally dismal, with some classrooms for AA meetings and art projects, showers, clothing, and a place to pray. Charlie’s primary gift may be his ability to serve the poor, but he possesses the equally necessary gifts of being able to work with a board, the local government, the police, religious organizations of every stripe, and the people who have the money to underwrite his vision. His radical idea was that the homeless need not be served in low, dark places, and that people with nothing should be able to stand beside people with everything and hold up their heads. The building that now comprises the campus is new and looks it, as stylishly modern in its glass and steel construction as the expensive condominiums that sprawl through Nashville a few short blocks away. The dignity with which Charlie had always treated the homeless was finally reflected in their surroundings. The mission statement of the campus reads, Emphasizing the scriptural ideals of love and community through service to the homeless, our Campus provides faithful people of Nashville an opportunity to respond directly to the broken and the disenfranchised among us. The fellowship with the poor is at the heart of our purpose.

Which basically means that I am the person the campus is serving. This center is there to give me the chance to experience what has been the enormous joy of Charlie’s life—the opportunity to respond directly to the broken and disenfranchised among us.

“All you have to do,” he tells me, “is give a little bit of understanding to the possibility that life might not have been fair.”

The trouble with good fortune is that people tend to equate it with personal goodness, so that if things are going well for us and less well for others, we think they must have done something to have brought it on themselves. We speak of ourselves as being blessed, but what can that mean except that others are not blessed, and that God has picked out a few of us to love more? It is our responsibility to care for one another, to create fairness in the face of unfairness, and find equality where none may have existed in the past. Despite his own dealings with unfairness, this is what Charlie has accomplished.

When Charlie’s father died of a heart attack at the age of forty-six, he left behind four children between the ages of eight years and four months. Afterwards, Charlie’s mother, Mary Catherine Strobel, who had lost her own mother in a house fire when she was an infant and her much-loved father when she was sixteen, took a job working as a clerk for the fire department for $185 a month. There were also two great-aunts that she took care of, Mollie, who was eighty-one at the time, and Kate, who was seventy-eight. The way Mary Catherine interpreted her husband’s death and their subsequent hardships was that none of it was God’s fault. God, along with their father, would be right there watching over them.

And while God, in the newfound company of Martin Strobel, watched the children from heaven, Aunt Kate and Aunt Mollie watched them during the day while Mary Catherine worked. “They were the reason it was so easy for me to believe Jesus’s words, ‘I am among you as one who serves,’ ” he said of his aunts. “And that led me to the next step in logic, to believe that God loves us and provides for all our needs—just as any devoted servant would—because I had experienced it so lovingly from Aunt Mollie and Aunt Kate.”

He told me a story from Luke 17, in which the servant who does everything that is asked of him and then, joyfully, does more, is called a “worthless servant” (or an “unprofitable servant,” or “a servant who deserves no credit,” depending on the translation). It is a state of loving service so deep, so all-encompassing, that the servant loses himself, so that the worthlessness becomes a kind of transcendence. “They were worthless servants,” Charlie said, remembering his aunts, his mother. “They wanted nothing more than to serve us, which means that we were their masters. They did everything they could for us. They never disciplined us. I never remember their asking me to help them around the house.” Charlie asked whether I was following him, because the concept of the achievement to be found in worthlessness can be a murky one. It is not the stuff of Sunday sermons. Certainly, I could think of many instances in which people who had been served were not then inspired to go and serve others, but if being profoundly loved enabled us to love profoundly then, yes, I understood.

“Wouldn’t that be a wonderful thing to have on your tombstone?” he said to me. “Worthless Servant?”

I told him I wasn’t there yet, but that I could see it as something to aspire to.

“I hesitate to say this,” he said, and then he gave such a long pause that I wondered if he did in fact plan to proceed, “so many people have struggles with their faith, but God has never been a struggle for me. I’ve been a struggle for me, but I could never honestly believe in the nonexistence of God.”

It was the only thing he hesitated to tell me for the entire day. He felt it might be cavalier to admit that something that was so difficult for so many had come to him, and stayed with him, without effort.

In the main lobby of the Room In the Inn there is a sculpture of a tree on the wall with more than 650 leaves. Every leaf bears the name of a homeless man or woman who has died in Nashville, and the presence of God did not waver any time a new leaf was added. It did not waver in December 1986, when Charlie’s mother, Mary Catherine Strobel, then seventy-four, was kidnapped from the parking lot of Sears in Nashville and murdered by an escaped convict from Michigan, the first victim in a spree that ultimately took six lives.

But the way the story was remembered over the years was that she had been working at the Room In the Inn at the time, and that she was killed by a homeless man. People said that Mary Catherine had started the Room In the Inn, and that Charlie took up her work as a penance. By making her murder a consequence of her own associations, people could safely distance themselves from such a random act of violence. Charlie was often asked if he would continue his work after his mother’s death. “If it was worth doing before,” he said, “why wouldn’t it be worth doing now?”

“Many have said that she did not deserve to die the way that she did,” her son said at the funeral mass. “Yet for years, we have heard it said that ‘God did not spare his only Son but delivered him up, and the Son emptied himself and humbled himself, obediently accepting even death, death on a cross.’ In Mama’s death, our family believes that the viciousness inflicted on such gentleness and kindness, as was her way, brings about a great communion with Jesus. So, how can we question its course? It seems to run true to the form of Jesus’s own death. And why speak of anger and revenge? Those words are not compatible with the very thought of our mother.”

“Of course her death changed all of us,” he told me that afternoon after we had left Ron and Sid, while we were on our way to visit a formerly homeless woman in the hospital who was struggling to care for her grandchildren as her health declined sharply. “But maybe not the way people thought it did. Our mother’s death helped me focus on what was important. After that I became more single-minded about what I should be doing with my life.”

There is throughout the course of life a long line of fathers and sons, parents and children, servants and masters, forgiven and forgivers, and at different moments we are called on to take up one role and then the other. When we do it right, we are bearing the example of Christ in mind. When we finally made it back to the Room in the Inn, it was past 8:00 in the evening and still light out, the longest day of the year. The achievement of Charlie’s life surrounded us, not the dazzling building or the flowers stretching out in front of the property, but the crowd of people spreading out in every direction. This was the place they had come to feel safe, to feel loved. These are the people he serves.

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Not Less Than Everything

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INTRODUCTION

SHORTLY BEFORE MIDNIGHT ON December 31, 2010, a young woman named Mariam Fekry paused at her computer to share her thoughts on the expiring year with her friends and Facebook acquaintances. She happily wrote, “2010 is over. This year has the best memories of my life. Really enjoyed this year. I hope that 2011 is much better. Please God stay beside me and help make it all true.”[1] Mariam’s dreams for the coming year lasted a little more than a quarter of an hour. At twenty minutes past midnight, January 1, 2011, a car bomb exploded across the street from al-Qiddissin (“The Saints”) Church in Alexandria, Egypt. Mariam, her mother, aunt, and sister Martina were among the more than twenty Coptic Christians killed in the blast. After a long day of preparing food, the four women were attending midnight Mass in celebration of the New Year. Young and beautiful, Mariam was, by all accounts, full of life. She attended university, taught Sunday school, and had high hopes of that year finding the elusive man of her dreams and settling down. She was only twenty-two when she died.

The explosion sparked clashes between police and locals in Alexandria. People filled the streets protesting the lack of government action and the mistreatment of Christians in Egypt. Copts, a minority in Egypt, angrily hurled stones at the authorities, stormed a nearby mosque, and threw religious books into the streets. That the source of the carnage was unknown only made the situation worse. Conflicting newspaper reports attributed the bombing to the terrorist group al-Qaeda and to local Egyptian Muslims. While both the head of the Coptic Church and the Egyptian president called for peace, protestors defiantly chanted, “We will not be afraid” and “With soul and blood we will redeem the cross.”

In the media and on the Internet, Mariam and the other Christians who died in the New Year’s Day attack were hailed as something more than innocent victims of terrorism—they were acclaimed as martyrs. Mariam became the face of martyrdom in the cyber age: her Facebook wall, the site of her final message to God and the world, was flooded with messages from people she had never met. People were drawn to this beautiful young woman, attracted to her innocence, and inspired by the tragedy of her story. Christian bloggers asked Mariam to pray for them. Virtual support carried none of the risks of in-person protest, of course, but thousands joined online groups dedicated to her memory and posted homemade video tributes to the modern-day martyr. Even the president of Egypt talked about “the blood of the martyrs” killed in the attack. Many of the virtual memorials dedicated to Mariam connect her to the heroes of the early church—to St. Polycarp, to Sts. Perpetua and Felicity, and to the host of Christian saints that preceded her. The form of her celebration is modern, but the ideas behind it are ancient. Contrary to what people might have imagined, the admiration for and love of the martyrs is as alive as ever.

In the blink of an eye the terrorist attack on the church in Alexandria changed from an unjust act of violence to a cause for religious martyrdom. There is no doubt that the church in Alexandria was targeted precisely because it was a place where Christians met, but the moment that Mariam and her relatives started to be called martyrs, the popular perception of the event changed. No longer was the attack simply an act of horrifying violence perpetrated by a terrorist group. Nor was it the unfortunate result of local religious, political, and social tensions. It became a direct and outright attack on Christianity as a whole. Rather than “turning the other cheek,” the Christian community was militarized. Once Mariam became a martyr, she and the other Christian victims were seen as soldiers in a two-thousand-year-old religious conflict: a conflict between Christianity and the world, a battle between good and evil.

The perception that the events in Alexandria were part of a larger struggle between Christianity and the world fueled the retaliation that followed. The violent Christian responses to the bombing were grounded in a sense of religious self-preservation and self-righteousness. Even though it was unclear who was responsible for the bombing, the protestors targeted specifically Muslim institutions. Their slogans show just how intimately their acts of violence were related to their Christian identity: the protestors saw the attack on the church as one more entry in a history of unjust violence against Christians. By resisting this persecution, even with violence, they were actively assisting Jesus: they shouted that their blood would redeem the cross. Under ordinary circumstances no Christian would presume to play such an important role in the world. By using this language, the protestors aligned their actions with the death of Jesus. The introduction of religious language and the theologizing of violence made the deaths of the victims of the New Year’s Day bombing meaningful and intelligible to a traumatized Christian community. But it also had the effect of encouraging people to fight in defense of their faith.

Ironically, it is the belief that Christians are persecuted that empowered the protestors to attack others. Against the objections of church leaders that the violence should end with Mariam and the other victims, the Christian protestors replied that they were unjustly persecuted and that their actions were sanctioned by God. The rhetoric of persecution legitimates and condones retributive violence. Violence committed by the persecuted is an act of divinely approved self-defense. In attacking others they are not only defending themselves; they are defending all Christians. This idea isn’t simply the by-product of strained twenty-first-century Christian-Muslim relations. The view that Christians are by their very nature at odds with the world is an ancient one. Its roots lie in the history of Christianity and, more specifically, in the way Christians think of themselves as the successors of the early church.

The Age of the Martyrs

SINCE THE DEATH OF Jesus, hundreds of thousands of Christians have been hailed as martyrs. A recent study estimates that over the course of the past two thousand years as many as seventy million Christians have died for their beliefs—more than the total number of fatalities in World War II.[2] Some of these individuals are household names—Joan of Arc, Martin Luther King Jr., Sir Thomas More, and Oscar Romero—while others are just anonymous Christians executed en masse, not even leaving their names behind. These martyrs are held up as models for all kinds of Christian conduct. Churches, schools, and infants are named after them. Their stories are taught to children in Sunday school, and their deaths are remembered as glorious examples of lives lived in obedience to God. But why?

Considered from a modern secular perspective, martyrdom is a very strange concept. Today, people work hard to stay alive: we vaccinate our children, get annual checkups with doctors, take antibiotics, avoid antibiotics, look both ways when we cross the street, drink green tea, and wear seat belts, all as part of an effort to avoid dying a moment before we have to. Given that we expend so much effort staying alive, it might seem strange to think that anyone would choose to die. And yet, even today, people are still willing to give up their lives for a cause they believe in. Even if they are reluctant to take the plunge themselves, many more respect those who have sacrificed their lives for others. Where did this idea of martyrdom come from? Why would someone die for his or her religious beliefs? How is it that people can see violence and death as something good and holy?

The valorization of martyrs, in fact even the title “martyr,” can be traced back to the early church. According to the Bible, persecution has been a part of Christianity from the very beginning. In many ways, this persecution began with Jesus himself, for, although they differ in numerous important details, the Gospel writers are in agreement that Jesus was unjustly sentenced to death. In the Gospel of John, Pilate actually declares Jesus innocent (19:4), and in the Gospel of Matthew he reluctantly washes his hands of Jesus’s blood before condemning him to die (27:24). Historians have noted that some of Jesus’s sayings and his disruption of Temple affairs were dramatic enough to warrant his arrest and execution.[3] Yet to readers, the death of Jesus seems unwarranted. This sense of injustice sits unexpectedly comfortably with the idea that Jesus’s death was purposeful. He died for our sins, after all. Yet even though Jesus gave up his life for humanity, no one reading the Gospels would come away with the impression that he deserved it.

At the time, most Jews expected a victorious military messiah who would liberate them from the tyrannical Romans. But for the followers of Jesus, the death of their leader changed the way they thought about conquest and death. Although some Christians argued that the crucifixion was an elaborate magic trick and that Christ never really died, the majority started to see the suffering of the innocent as a good thing. The fact that the Son of God willingly embraced death for the salvation of others necessarily meant that death for God must be good—otherwise why would he have done it? The death of Jesus and the promise of the resurrection became a model for Christians. In times of persecution, the answer to the question “What would Jesus do?” is that Jesus would die.

The idea that Jesus’s death should be an example for Christians is not an inference made by careful readers attempting to decipher the opaque meaning of the Bible. Jesus actually tells his followers that they should expect to find themselves arrested. Even more pointedly, Jesus insists that his followers should “take up their cross” and follow him (Mark 8:34–38). Later generations of interpreters have worked hard to read this passage figuratively, but for early Christians this was an unambiguous call to martyrdom.

Jesus was the first to die, but his death quickly became a model for his followers. In the New Testament book of the Acts of the Apostles (chaps. 6–7), an articulate young man named Stephen attracts the attention of the Jewish authorities. He is brought before the Jewish high council, where he is charged with predicting the destruction of the Temple and invited to defend himself. Stephen offers what is possibly the least effective speech of defense in recorded history. Rather than repudiate the charges, he delivers a passionate speech in which he indicts the Jewish people for always rejecting and persecuting their prophets. He calls the Jews betrayers and murderers and accuses them of killing the messiah. The people are enraged; they drag Stephen out of the city and stone him to death. Stephen’s execution actually proves his point: he argued that the Jews had always rejected and persecuted the prophets of God, and they promptly killed him. With Stephen’s speech and the story of Stephen’s death, the author of Acts creates a tradition in which the true people of God—the followers of Jesus—are constantly under attack.

Stephen stands at the head of a long line of early Christian martyrs. According to tradition, all but one of Jesus’s apostles met gory, untimely ends. Peter was crucified upside down in Rome, Matthias and Barnabas were stoned, James the Just (the brother of Jesus) was thrown from a precipice and then beaten to death with clubs, and—perhaps most horrendous of all—Bartholomew was flayed alive. The drama of these stories made them wildly appealing; they were the campfire stories and bestselling novels of their day.

The persecution only began with the apostles. In 64 CE a great fire ravaged Rome, devastating the city in a mere five days. The emperor Nero, who may well have been responsible for starting the fire himself, used the Christians as scapegoats for the disaster.[4] As a punishment, Nero apparently devised grotesque executions for the Christians: he covered them in animal skins and had them torn apart by dogs, and he doused them in tar and used them as human torches to light the night sky. Christians weren’t ordinary criminals, and they didn’t die ordinary deaths.

As Christianity grew, so did the ranks of the martyrs. According to the fourth-century historian Eusebius, first- and second-century Christians were racked, whipped, beaten, and scourged. They were condemned to the amphitheaters to face wild animals, forced to fight gladiators, beheaded or strangled quietly in jail, and burned publicly as a mark of shame. Tens of thousands were arrested and executed, but despite these and other tortures, the martyrs stood strong and resolute. Even in periods of fierce persecution and faced with threats of rape and torture, they refused to recant their beliefs, preferring martyrdom and unity with God in heaven to long life with their families on earth. Even though the night sky was lit with the pyres of Christian martyrs and the streets ran red with the blood of the saints, Christianity ultimately emerged victorious over the Roman Empire and became the powerful world religion that we know today.

We might expect that continual persecution and the desire to achieve martyrdom were a threat to Christian survival. After all, if everyone is killed for the faith, who is left to practice it? Paradoxically, we learn, for Christianity the reverse was true. When early Christians described the growth of the faith during this period, they credited martyrdom with its success. Writing around the turn of the third century, a North African lawyer named Tertullian famously wrote that “the blood of the martyrs is the seed” of the church.[5] The way the early Christians tell it, martyrdom was a necessary part of Christian existence and fostered the survival of Christianity. The deaths of Christians fueled the growth of the church and were an integral part of its success; the popularity of the stories of the early martyrs played an important part in both disseminating the Christian message and converting people to Christianity.

For the first three hundred years of its existence, the tradition maintains, Christianity was a persecuted and suffering religion. During this period—the so-called Age of the Martyrs—its members were hunted down and executed, and their property and books were burned by crusading emperors. Women and children were thrown to the lions and boiled alive in cauldrons, as maddened crowds bayed for blood. The history of early Christianity, as we have received it, is a history of victimization and pain. Yet despite these overwhelming odds, Christianity survived, and with the ascension of the Roman emperor Constantine in 313 CE Christians at last had the freedom to practice their religion in peace.

Modern Stories of Persecution

DURING THE SEVENTEEN HUNDRED years since Constantine’s acceptance of Christianity, Christians have not forgotten their persecuted roots or the importance of martyrdom. Whenever Christians have felt threatened, they have returned to the New Testament and to the martyrs of the early church for consolation and inspiration. During the Reformation, an English Protestant named John Foxe wrote a Protestant history of martyrdom entitled the Acts and Monuments of the Christian Church.[6] Foxe lived and wrote during a dangerous, turbulent time, full of religious conflict and uncertainty. In 1553 Mary Tudor, the daughter of the frequently married Henry VIII, became queen of England, and England was restored to Roman Catholicism until her death in 1558. Her religious reforms were met with resistance from devout Protestants, and nearly three hundred people were burned at the stake for heresy. Foxe’s book told the stories of these English martyrs as part of a grand history of martyrdom, beginning with the martyrs of the early church, moving through the medieval period, and concluding with the events of his own time. His book cast the Protestant martyrs as the heirs of the apostles and the early church and their opponents as agents of Satan. There were two sides in Foxe’s world—the true church and the devil-led Papists—and they were engaged in a battle to the death. The book was an instant success; it was reprinted in multiple editions and turned Foxe into a literary celebrity.[7]

Modern Christians often interpret their experiences in the world and interactions with others as part of this history of persecution and the struggle between good and evil. Sometimes this idea inspires great courage and heroism and provides comfort to the sick or dying. And there are places in the world where Christians face real violence. This violence often goes unpublicized and unnoticed. The fact is, though, that the influence of these stories isn’t limited just to situations where the oppressed or suffering need help. It is not only the suffering and oppressed who think of themselves as persecuted. Martyrdom is easily adapted by the powerful as a way of casting themselves as victims and justifying their polemical and vitriolic attacks on others. When disagreement is viewed as persecution, then these innocent sufferers must fight—rhetorically and literally—to defend themselves. In this polarized view of the world, disagreement and conflict—even entirely nonviolent conflict—is not just a difference of opinion; it is religious persecution. The source of the persecution is often explicitly demonized, labeled “evil,” or cast as warfare. From Rick Santorum’s statement during a speech in 2008 that “Satan is attacking the great institutions of America”[8] to Rick Perry’s campaign promise to “end Obama’s war on religion,”[9] the idea that Christians are under attack is pervasive.

On April 14, 2012, Daniel R. Jenky, the bishop of Peoria, Illinois, delivered one of the most controversial sermons in recent American memory. During his sermon at the Mass for the “Call to Catholic Men of Faith” rally, he challenged his audience to practice “heroic Catholicism.” Heroic Catholicism, in this case, meant standing—and voting—against the Obama administration and opposing the U.S. Department of Health and Human services mandate. There’s nothing surprising about a Catholic bishop opposing abortion and contraception, but what drew heated responses and fervent debate was the implicit comparison that Jenky made between President Obama, Adolf Hitler, and Joseph Stalin. Jenky stated, “Barack Obama—with his radical, proabortion and extreme secularist agenda—now seems intent on following a similar path” as other governments throughout history who “have tried to force Christians to huddle and hide only within the confines of their churches.” Jenky singled out the Nazi and Stalinist regimes as antecedents to Obama’s health-care reforms.

Bishop Jenky’s homily immediately highlighted the divisions among the already polarized Catholic laity. His comments about Hitler and Stalin in particular were met with public declarations of support, horror, and outrage. They serve as code words for genocide and, whether Bishop Jenky intended this or not, they implied that Obama’s policies might set us on the road to another Holocaust. Although some defended Jenky’s right to free speech and the content of his sermon, others called the comparison morally reprehensible and rhetorically suspect.

Yet Jenky’s repeated exhortations to Catholics to “fight” drew upon a much lengthier history of the church. This was not just about Obama, Stalin, and Hitler; this was about the history of the church in the world. Jenky said:

For 2,000 years the enemies of Christ have certainly tried their best. But think about it. The Church survived and even flourished during centuries of terrible persecution, during the days of the Roman Empire. The Church survived barbarian invasions. The Church survived wave after wave of Jihads. The Church survived the age of revolution. The Church survived Nazism and Communism. And in the power of the resurrection, the Church will survive the hatred of Hollywood, the malice of the media, and the mendacious wickedness of the abortion industry.[10]

Jenky here invokes the now standard Christian idea that the church has always been persecuted. The position in which the church finds itself is nothing new. Catholics should not fear opposition, he says, because “the devil will always love their own, and will always hate us.” If you are not with us, he implies, you are with the devil, Judas Iscariot, Hitler, and Stalin.

Similar uses of the rhetoric of persecution in discussions of American society are not limited to clergy. It spills over into political commentary and reform. In 2003, David Limbaugh, the younger brother of celebrity talk-show host Rush Limbaugh, published Persecution: How Liberals Are Waging War Against Christianity.[11] The book describes itself as a “call to action” for modern Christians who, like Christianity’s founders, should stand up and defend their right to religious freedom. The basic thrust of the book is that, although Christians are no longer thrown to the lions, they suffer other forms of oppression. As Christians and as patriots they must defend themselves. By linking his assessment of the Christian experience to both the founding fathers and conservative politics, Limbaugh implies that being an American and being a Christian are the same. Moreover, being an American Christian means being persecuted by others. The dust jacket of the book even depicts a prowling lion poised to strike the unsuspecting reader. In other contexts, we would not consider those whose civil rights and political liberties are firmly protected to be persecuted, but Limbaugh interprets his situation within this framework. He claims that contemporary American Christians are persecuted, and in so doing he links the modern world to the early church.

The connection between patriotism, Christianity, and political issues is still at the forefront of modern politics. In August 2011 Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum publicly complained that the “gay community . . . [had] gone out on a jihad” against him.[12] The issue at stake was gay marriage and comments Santorum had made about homosexuality in general. By repeatedly stating that his position was rooted in the Bible and characterizing the position of his critics as holy war, Santorum claimed that he was the victim of religious persecution. Even though Santorum is a political figure whose words and actions have ramifications for others and, thus, invite scrutiny and criticism from the public, he cast his critics as persecutors. In doing so he implied that he was the victim of hatred, that this was not a matter of differing opinions, and that his opponents had no reason for criticizing him. It wasn’t even a question of whether their arguments were good or bad; in Santorum’s view they were attacking him because he is Christian and, as such, he is part of a long tradition of the Christian persecuted.

But Santorum went much further than this. By using the hot-button term “jihad” Santorum grouped his critics with suicide bombers and terrorists. He could have used Christian language like “holy war” or “crusade,” but instead he invoked the horrifying specter of 9/11 in order to suggest not only that gay-rights activists are unchristian, but also that they are un-American. They are like the outsiders seeking to attack America. As a true patriot and true Christian, he is just defending himself. Whatever a person’s opinion on gay marriage, it is clear that gay-rights activists are not, in reality, in league with al-Qaeda, but this is exactly what Santorum implied. At this point the issues themselves had completely vanished. For Santorum, it had become a case of “us versus them,” and they’re with the terrorists.

The use of this kind of polemical rhetoric is not limited only to the writings of conservative politicians. On June 5, 2012, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd published an editorial called “Is Pleasure a Sin?,” the subtitle of which is “In Its Jihad on Nuns, the Vatican Shows No Mercy to a Sister of Mercy.”[13] The subject of the piece was the response by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to an academic book by Yale Divinity School’s emerita professor Margaret Farley. The subtitle of the article and the selection of the strikingly evocative term “jihad” implicitly serve to highlight the apparently unchristian nature of the Vatican’s decision. The characterization of the Vatican’s actions as persecution continued into the body of the article, as Dowd went on to describe the event as a “thuggish crusade.” However we might regard the decision made by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith or the content of Dowd’s argument, the rhetoric of persecution is no less damning and polarizing than in Santorum’s case. Only the target and content of the politics are different. The rhetoric reinforces the divisions in the Catholic Church by characterizing the hierarchy as persecutors, and it automatically designates the actions of that hierarchy as hateful, irrational, and of the very worst kind.

In these contexts, the use of this language of persecution is discursive napalm. It obliterates any sense of scale or moderation. This stymieing, dialogue-ending language is disastrous for public discourse, disastrous for politics, and results in a more deeply poisoned public well for everyone. When all areas of modern society and politics are recast as a battle between God and Satan, good and evil, “us” and “them,” then people are compelled to fight. Evil must be identified, resisted, and uprooted. Resisting this “evil” might mean resorting to physical violence or outright war, but if Christians are being “attacked” and “persecuted,” then what else can they do? Just as in the early church, today’s innocent, victimized Christians should stand their ground rather than seek compromise or resolution. It’s what the martyrs would have done. It’s what Jesus would have done. Persecution has always been a part of being Christian, and it always demands the same response.

The Myth of Christian Martyrdom

IN THIS UNDERSTANDING OF what it means to be a Christian, a lot of weight rests on the history of the early church. Bishop Jenky’s speech cites only Jesus and the early Christians before moving to the modern period. If there was no persecuted early church, he could not claim that Christians should expect persecution. Even though Jesus predicted the suffering of his followers, it is the belief that Jesus’s statements were proven in the persecution of the early church that gives force to the idea that Christians are always persecuted. It is this idea, the idea that Christians are always persecuted, that authenticates modern Christian appropriations of martyrdom. It provides the interpretative lens through which to view all kinds of Christian experiences in the world as a struggle between “us” and “them.” Without this history and interpretative lens, each situation would have to be judged on its own merits. Disagreement and oppression might be the result of differing opinions, injustice, and conflict, not a cosmic battle between good and evil.

What if Christians weren’t continually persecuted by the Romans? If there had never been an Age of Martyrs, would Christians automatically see themselves as engaged in a war with their critics? Would Christians still see themselves as persecuted, or would they try to understand their opponents? Would the response to violence be to fight back or to address the causes of misunderstanding? Would we be more compassionate? Would we be less self-righteous? The history of Christianity is steeped in the blood of the martyrs and set as a battle between good and evil.[14] How would we think about ourselves if that history were not true? The language of martyrdom and persecution is often the language of war. It forces a rupture between “us” and “them” and perpetuates and legitimizes an aggressive posture toward “the other” and “our enemies,” so that we can “defend the faith.” Without this posture and the polarized view of the world upon which it relies, we might—without compromising our religious or political convictions—be able to reach common ground and engage in productive government, and we might focus on real examples of actual suffering and actual oppression.

As we will see, the traditional history of Christian martyrdom is mistaken. Christians were not constantly persecuted, hounded, or targeted by the Romans. Very few Christians died, and when they did, they were often executed for what we in the modern world would call political reasons. There is a difference between persecution and prosecution. A persecutor targets representatives of a specific group for undeserved punishment merely because of their participation in that group. An individual is prosecuted because that person has broken a law. The issue is complicated with respect to the ancient world, both because religion and politics were not neatly divided and because religious freedom was not an inalienable human right. But there is something different about being prosecuted under a law—however unjust—that is not designed to target or rout out any particular group. It may be unfortunate, it may be unfair, but it is not persecution, and it is very far from the myth of how Christians were treated by the Romans. This is not an inconsequential detail. The myth of persecution assumes that the other demonically inspired party is deliberately and continually trying to attack the church. But, as we will see, although prejudice against Christians was fairly widespread, the prosecution of Christians was rare, and the persecution of Christians was limited to no more than a handful of years.

The evidence for Christian martyrdom is of three basic types: evidence for persecution from Roman sources and archaeology, stories about martyrs, and descriptions of Christian martyrdom in the writings of church historians. On the Roman side, there is very little historical or archaeological evidence for the widespread persecution of Christians. Where we do have evidence for persecution, in the middle of the third century, it is not clear that the Romans were specifically targeting Christians at all. Even the so-called Decian persecution in 250 CE was about political uniformity, not religious persecution. Nothing in our evidence for Decius’s legislation mentions targeting Christians. Before Decius, the prosecution of Christians was occasional and prompted by local officials, petty jealousies, and regional concerns. That Christians saw themselves as persecuted and interpreted prosecution in this way is understandable, but it does not mean that the Romans were persecuting them. This interpretation does not match up with the political and social realities: Christians were ridiculed and viewed with contempt, and they were even sometimes executed, but they weren’t the subjects of continual persecution.

Then there are the stories about early Christian martyrs, commonly known as “martyr acts” or martyrdom stories. Most of these stories have been handed down from generation to generation and accepted as authentic on the basis of tradition. The vast majority of these stories, however, were written long after the events they purport to describe. There are literally hundreds of stories describing the deaths of thousands of early Christian martyrs, but almost every one of these stories is legendary. There are many pious reasons why someone might choose to fabricate a story about a martyr, and there are plenty of examples of genuine errors, but for those interested in the history of martyrdom, fabrication causes a problem. In some of these cases, scholars are not sure that the people described in these stories even existed, much less that they were martyred.

The problem with forged martyr stories was so widespread that in the seventeenth century a Dutch Jesuit priest named Héribert Rosweyde began to sort through the European manuscripts that preserved the earliest stories of the martyrs. The enormousness of the task of cataloging thousands of manuscripts proved to be too much for Rosweyde alone, and the project was eventually taken over by a group of scholars led by an ambitious priest named John Bolland. The Society of Bollandists, as they came to be known, spent the next three centuries culling the corpus of hagiographical literature (literature pertaining to the saints) into a huge sixty-eight volume collection of texts about the saints. Of these sixty-eight volumes of texts and commentary, they decided that only a handful of stories were historically reliable. The rest—the vast majority—had been thoroughly edited or had simply been made up.

Scholars of early Christianity agree that there is very little evidence for the persecution of Christians. Although there are references to the deaths of Christians in the writings of the early church, these are vague and often exaggerated. For the first two hundred and fifty years of the Christian era there are only six martyrdom accounts that can be treated as reliable. These stories describe the deaths of Christianity’s oldest and most beloved saints: the elderly bishop Polycarp, the young mothers Perpetua and Felicity, the teacher Ptolemy, the philosopher Justin Martyr, the martyrs of Scillium, and the brave members of the churches of Lyons and Vienne in ancient Gaul, modern-day France, who endured unspeakable tortures at the hands of the Romans. Even today some of these martyrs are mentioned in the religious services of the Catholic Church.

When we look closely at even these stories, however, it becomes clear that they have been significantly edited and changed. They refer to theological ideas that didn’t exist in the period described in the stories and contain elements borrowed from other ancient sources. Details like these suggest that even the earliest stories have been tampered with. This difficulty isn’t limited to just stories about martyrs. Early Christians, like many others in the ancient world, constantly updated and rewrote their sacred texts. The fact of the matter is that there are no stories about the deaths of martyrs that have not been purposely recast by later generations of Christians in order to further their own theological agendas.

The problem becomes even more acute when we look at the ancient evidence for martyrdom. Christians, and early Christians in particular, like to think of their martyrs as unique. The fact that early Christians were willing to die for their beliefs has been seen as a sign of the inherent truth of the Christian message. Why would the apostles have been willing to suffer and die for Jesus if he hadn’t really been resurrected from the dead? Why would early Christians have been martyred if Christianity weren’t true? Today, we are pointedly aware that martyrdom is not an exclusively Christian practice; virtually every religious group holds the deaths of their heroes in high esteem, and many people have died for religions that no longer exist. Yet many still declare that there is something special about the character and nature of Christian martyrs. Even in the ancient world, Christianity wasn’t alone in respecting those people who were willing to die for their beliefs. In fact, Christianity adopted the martyrdom idea from non-Chris tians. Long before the birth of Jesus, the ancient Greeks told stories about the deaths of their fallen heroes and the noble deaths of the philosophers, the Romans saw the self-sacrifice of generals as a good thing, and Jews in ancient Palestine accepted death before apostasy. The idea of sacrificing oneself for one’s religious principles, country, or philosophical ideals was remarkably common. An ancient Greek or Roman would have expected an honorable person to prefer death to dishonor, shame, or failure. This kind of conduct wasn’t even seen as heroic; it was expected.

Many people would argue that even if Christians aren’t the only ones to respect martyrdom, Christian martyrs are in some way different or special. This isn’t just because one’s own martyrs are always good, while other people’s martyrs are crazy; this is because there is a general perception that Christian martyrs are somehow intrinsically better. They are thought of as peaceful, passive, kind, and humble. And yet not all ancient martyrs were portrayed as pacifists. Some martyrs were, by modern standards, suicidal. The second-century teacher Justin Martyr describes how at the execution of a Christian named Ptolemy two Christian bystanders volunteered to die.[15] Many martyrs were prepared to accept death in exchange for rewards in heaven. Some looked forward gleefully to the Day of Judgment, when they would be able to watch their persecutors condemned to eternal torment.[16] This is hardly the kind of irenic behavior that people think of when they imagine Christian martyrs.

If the historical evidence does not support the theory that Christians were constantly persecuted, then why do we think they were? The answer lies in the writings and interests of the historians of the early church and the hagiographers (writers of saints’ lives) from the fourth century on. I have already referred to the fourth-century historian Eusebius, who wrote predominantly during the reign of the emperor Constantine. Eusebius’s selection of persecution as one of the enduring currents in the history of Christianity has deeply affected not just our knowledge about martyrdom, but also the extent to which we see it as a central part of Christian history and identity.

There’s almost no evidence from the period before Constantine, or the Age of the Martyrs, to support the idea that Christians were continually persecuted. Most of this information comes from later writers, especially from the anonymous hagiographers who edited, reworked, and even forged stories about martyrs during periods of peace. The stories of beloved martyrs like St. Valentine, St. Christopher, and St. George were written long after the time in which these people supposedly lived, by authors who were preserving folklore, not facts.

The reason these Christians invented martyrdom stories and saw their history as a history of persecution is because then, as now, martyrdom was a powerful tool. Early Christians respected saints as holy people with a special connection to God. And, as already noted, there was no better argument for the sincerity of an individual’s belief than the fact that he or she was prepared to die for it. As such, in later times martyrs were powerful spokespersons for the church. When early Christians wanted to prove the antiquity and orthodoxy of their own opinions, they would edit or compose a story attributing their own views to an early Christian orthodox martyr. An anecdote in which a martyr denounced a heretic was worth a hundred rational arguments about why that heretical position was wrong. Martyrs became mouthpieces for later religious positions.

At the same time, martyrs were deeply cherished by the Christian laity. Martyrs were ordinary people—slaves, women, and children—as well as bishops and soldiers who had risen above the constraints of their circumstances to display exceptional courage. For those who experienced hardship and heard stories of the sufferings of martyrs, these Christian heroes were deeply personal sources of inspiration. They were part superhero and part celebrity and, according to Christians, they now enjoyed rewards that were, literally, out of this world. In a world in which social mobility did not exist, they lived a dream that many dared not imagine.

This attraction to and love of holy persons was harnessed in the cult of the saints—in the construction of martyr shrines to house the remains of saints. These centers of worship attracted pilgrims and thus revenue. This led to competition between pilgrimage sites, as various towns tried to attract visitors to the graves of their saints. The institutionalization of martyrs and competition between religious centers required ever more exciting and dramatic stories. Thus, from the fourth century on, there was a veritable explosion in the production of stories about martyrs. These stories were then supplemented with descriptions of miracles and visions associated with specific churches and shrines. They drew the Christian faithful to obscure towns and out-of-the-way shrines, and in exchange they offered them the opportunity to commune with the memory of their heroes. Stories were an integral part of this connection. It was said that when martyrdom stories were read aloud, the saints were truly present, sweet smelling fragrances would fill the air, and the world of the martyr and the world of the pilgrim would meet.[17] With so much at stake, martyrdom stories multiplied in order to meet this demand. Martyrdom mattered to people, and the love people felt for the martyrs led to pious exaggeration and well-intentioned forgery.

The same is true even today. Martyrdom continues to matter. Persecution remains an integral part of how Christians think and talk about their history and themselves. It endures in the claims of Christian politicians and commentators that they are persecuted and under attack, and it is powerful precisely because it refuses to acknowledge its own power. Everyone agrees that a country that is invaded by enemy forces is morally justified in defending itself. In the same way, when the powerful and politically secure claim that they are persecuted, oppressed, and attacked, then they can claim that all of their actions are born out of self-defense. They can act aggressively and even violently and maintain the moral high ground in the knowledge that they are the victims.

The purpose of this book is to show that the foundations for this idea are imaginary. The traditional history of martyrdom is a myth, a myth that gives Christians who deploy it in the sorts of examples adduced here the rhetorical high ground, but a myth that makes dialogue impossible. The recognition that the idea of the Christian martyr is based in legend and rhetoric, rather than history and truth, reveals that many Christians have been and remain committed to conflict and opposition in their interactions with others, but also that they don’t have to be. Christians can choose to embrace the virtues that martyrs embody without embracing the false history of persecution that has grown up around them. Correcting the misunderstandings that surround martyrdom in the early church is not a question of tidying up some ancient facts or revising our understanding of events that happened in the distant past. This point is not merely academic. The view that the history of Christianity is a history of unrelenting persecution persists in modern religious and political debate about what it means to be Christian. It creates a world in which Christians are under attack; it endorses political warfare rather than encouraging political discourse; and it legitimizes seeing those who disagree with us as our enemies. It is precisely because the myth of persecution continues to be so influential that it is imperative that we get the history right.

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6

Give Us Our Daily Bread

Give us this day our daily bread.

Matthew 6:11, KJV, NRSV

It was called the “excavation from hell,” because, when first discovered, the first-century Kinneret Boat was the consistency of soft cheese or wet cardboard. And its necessarily swift excavation was followed by a longer and slower, but equally difficult preservation process.

Lake Kinneret is a harp-shaped body of water known to Mark as the “Sea of Galilee” (1:16; 7:31), to John as the “Sea of Galilee, also called the Sea of Tiberias” (6:1), and to Luke, proud of his experience of the Mediterranean Sea, as simply the “Lake of Gennesaret” (5:1). But, after the droughts of 1985–86, water levels were so low in the Kinneret that wide swaths of the lake bottom were visible off Magdala on the western shore. And equally visible, almost a mile north of Mary’s ancient home, was the oval outline of a sunken boat.

On Friday, January 24, 1986, Moshele and Luvi Lufan, brothers from nearby Kibbutz Ginosar, discovered and protected that mud-embedded boat until official archaeologists arrived—Kurt Raveh and Shelley Wachsmann, from the Israel Antiquities Authority, but especially Orna Cohen, of the Conservation Laboratory at the Hebrew University’s Archaeology Institute in Jerusalem. They worked swiftly but extremely carefully to encase the sodden hull in a cocoon of polyurethane, fiberglass, and polyester, which enabled them to float it—yes, actually float it—to Kibbutz Ginosar’s recently constructed Yigal Allon Museum. There a crane lifted it onto dry land and, eight days later, into a specially constructed preservation tank.

The boat’s timbers were about 90 percent water, which had to be slowly and carefully replaced with polyethylene glycol—the required forty tons were a gift from Dow Chemical. Fourteen years later “The Ancient Galilee Boat”—as the sign says—was finally lifted into its present display position on a stainless-steel frame in the Yigal Allon Centre on the shore of Lake Kinneret.

The 8-by-26-foot boat required a minimum crew of five and could hold either ten passengers or their equivalent weight in cargo. It had four oars, a double rudder, and a square sail. It was, in fact, exactly like a boat on a mosaic excavated earlier in Magdala itself. The keel was one-third cedar—from an older boat; the other two-thirds were carob and jujube (Christ’s Thorn). The planks were of cedar and the frames of oak, but, in all, there were twelve different types of wood in the boat.

In other words, it had been kept afloat by expert boatwrights working with inferior materials. Then, one day when even that was no longer possible, they stripped it of everything usable and pushed it out from their boatyard to sink in an offshore graveyard for old boats.

It is but a single boat, but it is also the only one from the first century CE ever discovered in Lake Kinneret. I take it as a symbol—not an argument, let alone a proof—of what life was like on the lake in the time of Jesus. “The Galilee at this time was economically depressed,” writes Shelley Wachsmann in his book The Sea of Galilee Boat. “The timbers used in the boat’s construction are perhaps a physical expression of this overall economic situation.”[1] And the late J. Richard Steffy, one of the founding members of the Institute of Nautical Archaeology at Texas A&M University, noting the combination of the boatwrights’ excellent craft with inadequate materials, told Wachsmann, “There is something pathetic about this hull.”[2] One wonders, of course, for whom and by whom the lake was “economically depressed.” One wonders if all, or only some, of the first-century boats on that lake were in such a “pathetic” state.

The Yigal Allon Centre’s display of “The Ancient Galilee Boat” is visually beautiful and pedagogically excellent. The wall is dominated by a banner headline in Hebrew and English: “The Mystery of the 2000-Year-Old Boat.” Underneath is a giant olive green question mark as big as the lines of questions in Hebrew to its right and in English to its left. Here is how those questions appear (my numbers):

To whom did this boat belong?

[1] To Jesus and his disciples

[2] To the fighters of the Migdal battle

[3] To a fisherman from the Sea of Galilee

Almost the same heading, with “mystery” enlarged, and those same three questions are repeated again in an explanatory placard elsewhere in the room (my numbers):

MYSTERY shrouds the 2000 Year Old Boat

[1] Did this boat witness the events sweeping over the Sea of Galilee in Jesus’ time? Is this the boat that bore the Nazarene and his disciples to the surrounding villages to preach the gospel to the people?

[2] Perhaps this was an ordinary fisherman’s craft, which was converted for use in battle in the great first-century Jewish rebellion against the Romans.

[3] Or was it a simple fishing boat that plied the waters in quest of the daily catch until it was scuttled and abandoned on the shore?

The simplest answers to those three questions are, respectively, possibly, probably, and certainly. But what is also certain is that its “crazy-quilt patchwork construction” illustrates the difficult life of at least one peasant fisherman’s family on that first-century Sea of Galilee. With that firmly in mind, here are my own three rather different questions.

A First Question. Herod the Great, the Rome-appointed “King of the Jews,” died in 4 BCE. The emperor Augustus divided Herod’s kingdom among his three sons—Archelaus, Antipas, and Philip. Herod Antipas received Galilee and Perea, two unconnected territories with Galilee to the west and Perea to the east of the upper Jordan. Then, for the next twenty-five years Antipas stayed very quiet, until the 20s CE, when popular unrest against him began. So here is the problem. What did Antipas do differently in the 20s CE to cause animosity after that long and peaceful period?

A Second Question. Or, better, the other side of that first question. Why did two successive movements of nonviolent resistance arise in the territories of Antipas in the 20s CE? Remember the baptism movement of John and the kingdom movement of Jesus seen already in Chapter 4. Why, with John in Perea and Jesus in Galilee, did those populist movements start precisely at that time and in that place? Why then? Why there?

A Third Question. This one has multiple subquestions. Why is there so much “fishy” stuff in the gospels? Since Jesus was from inland Nazareth, why was it that “he left Nazareth and made his home in Capernaum by the sea [of Galilee]” (Matt. 4:13)? Why were so many of his disciples from fishing villages and specifically from ones on the northwest quadrant of the lake? Think about just these six examples.

Mary was from Magdala, whose Greek name, Tarichaeae, means “salted fish.” Peter moved from one fishing village, Bethsaida, to live with his wife and mother-in-law at another such village, Capernaum (John 1:44; Mark 1:29–30). Also, “Philip was from Bethsaida, the city of Andrew and Peter” (John 1:44). And “As Jesus passed along the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and his brother Andrew casting a net into the sea—for they were fishermen. . . . As he went a little farther, he saw James son of Zebedee and his brother John, who were in their boat mending the nets” (Mark 1:16–19). They were called to “fish for people” (Mark 1:17).

Finally, recall all those stories about fish or fishing. There are six versions of the miraculous multiplication of loaves and fishes—two in Mark (6:34–44; 8:1–9), two in Matthew (14:14–21; 15:32–39), and one each in Luke (9:12–17) and John (6:4–13). There is also the story of the net-breaking catch of fish told before the resurrection in Luke 5:1–9 and after it in John 21:1–14.

Jesus is seldom far from boats and nets, fish and fishers, seldom far from the Sea of Galilee, which became the Sea of Tiberias. Why is that, and what does it mean? And, for our present context, what does it have to do with “Give us this day our daily bread”? The Abba Prayer is about daily bread, not daily fish. Why so much emphasis on “fish”?

Jesus called Herod Antipas “that fox” (Luke 13:32), but although “that fox” planned carefully and moved slowly, he ultimately failed dismally. Throughout forty-three years of rule under three different Roman emperors, he had one driving ambition: to become like his father, Herod the Great, the Rome-appointed “King of the Jews.”

Antipas’s first attempt brought him before the emperor Augustus at Rome in 4 BCE. His father had first proposed him as his royal heir, but then changed that designation to his brother Archelaus. Augustus gave neither of them the supreme title of “monarch” (full ruler), but made Archelaus “ethnarch” (“people ruler”) of Idumea, Judea, and Samaria and Antipas “tetrarch” (“quarter ruler”) of (unconnected) Galilee and Perea.

Antipas’s third attempt brought him before the emperor Caligula at Rome in 39 CE. But another Herodian prince named Agrippa had grown up at the imperial court and knew well both Caligula and the next emperor, Claudius. Caligula’s response to Antipas’s request for kingship was to send him into exile, and a few years later it was Agrippa I and not Antipas who became the second and final “King of the Jews.”

Antipas’s second and main attempt, however, was under Tiberius, the emperor in 14–37 CE, and that is my present focus. Any hope of royal ascendancy required Antipas to succeed on two fronts simultaneously. Externally, for his Roman masters, he had to increase his productivity and, internally, for his Jewish subjects, he had to increase his popularity. He could fail on one front if the Galilean peasantry rebelled against him at home and on the other if the Jerusalem aristocracy appealed against him at Rome.

As he moved cautiously forward on both fronts, Antipas modeled his actions on those of Herod the Great. His father had curried imperial Roman favor by building a new capital city and a magnificent state-of-the-art port at Caesarea on the coast. He had also garnered popular support with a very political marriage.

A Jewish royal family known as the Hasmoneans had ruled a then independent Jewish homeland for one hundred years before the Romans arrived in the 60s BCE. When the Romans conquered the land of Israel, they replaced the Hasmonean with the Herodian dynasty. Then, in the hope of appeasing the people and decreasing general resentment, Herod the Great married a Hasmonean princess named Mariamne. But Herod the Great, who often makes Henry VIII look both magnanimous and monogamous, eventually executed his Hasmonean queen.

Herod Antipas got his model for imperial advancement from his dead father. He planned a new capital city for increased productivity and a new political marriage for increased popularity.

Productivity. Sepphoris, Antipas’s first capital city, looked out from its centrally located hillock onto the surrounding valleys and hillsides fertile with cereals, olives, and grapes. Not much more could be done there to increase his tax base from peasants living mainly at subsistence level and always in danger of slipping downward from small landowners to tenant farmers to day laborers.

His solution was to create a new capital city, to locate it on the mid-western shore of the Sea of Galilee, and to name it Tiberias in honor of the new emperor. For reasons religious and political, social and economic, capital cities tended to stay where they were—apart, that is, from natural disasters rendering them uninhabitable. So, granted Antipas wanted a capital city, why put it at that location? Why on the lake? What was Antipas’s intention for Tiberias when it finally opened for business at the start of the 20s CE?

It was, quite simply, to commercialize the Sea of Galilee and make it, as we saw above, the Sea of Tiberias. Romanization worked by urbanization for commercialization, and Antipas planned to exploit the lake the way he was already exploiting the land. Think about exports: dried fish, salted fish, and even that execrable fish sauce, called garum, that the Romans loved so well.

Popularity. To guarantee his general popularity across the entire country, Antipas decided on his own version of a Hasmonean-Herodian connection. He divorced his wife, a princess from Arab Nabatea in Transjordan. And he persuaded Herodias, granddaughter of the beloved Mariamne, to divorce her husband, Herod (Philip?). Double divorce and, of course, double trouble.

You can now understand how both John and Jesus deliberately undermined that drive for increased popularity and how intolerable such opposition to their hopeful plans must have been for Herodias and Antipas. John the Baptist told Antipas, “It is not lawful for you to have your brother’s wife” (Mark 6:18); and Jesus told them both, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery” (Mark 10:11–12). Those accusations were not just moral criticism, but political interference with Antipas’s royal plans.

Imagine as well what his plans for Tiberias did to peasant fishers and their villages along the lake. There were probably taxes for every stage of fishing—for having a boat, for fishing with dragnets, maybe even for casting a net from the shore. You might also have to sell your catch to Antipas’s warehouses for dried and salted fish. No wonder Jesus’s two most prominent disciples—Mary and Peter—were from fishing villages within a fishing economy changed utterly by the advent of Tiberias.

Magdala, for example, had been the most important fishing center on the lake before the arrival of Tiberias and, situated as it was just a few miles to the north, its prosperity must have been severely strained by Antipas’s new creation. Mary would have known, before she ever heard the voice of Jesus, that the situation was not right, fair, or, more important, the will of God.

Recall what we saw in Chapter 4 about the seismic clash between the tectonic plates of empire and eschaton in Daniel 7. In the first century CE those plates carried on their respective surfaces the contemporary kingdom of Rome and—as always—the kingdom of God. But all seismic convulsions—even those that start slowly—take place in very specific place and very particular time. And so it came to pass that it was precisely along the shores of the Sea of Galilee’s northwest quadrant—from Tiberias through Magdala and Capernaum to Bethsaida—that the violence of Rome’s empire and the nonviolence of God’s eschaton confronted one another in the 20s of the first common-era century.

We also saw in Chapter 4 that those who opposed Jesus knew that his visionary program had something to do with food, with “eating and drinking,” and so they mocked him as a “glutton and a drunkard” (Luke 7:33–34). But his program was actually about who owns the earth, the land, and the lake—God or Rome—and who, therefore, owns the food produced by earth, land, and lake. If “the earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it, the world, and those who live in it” (Ps. 24:1), who owns the lake and all the fish in it? If, as God claims, “the land is mine; with me you are but aliens and tenants” (Lev. 25:23), who owns the Sea of Tiberias?

Antipas had multiplied the loaves in the valleys around Sepphoris, and he now intended to multiply the fishes in the waters around Tiberias—for the kingdom of Rome. But a magnificently parabolic counterstory tells us how Jesus multiplied the loaves and the fishes—for the kingdom of God.

As I mentioned above, there are six versions of this story in our present New Testament. But for my present purpose I focus on the first one in Mark as the earliest gospel. It begins with this introduction:

They [Jesus and his disciples] went away in the boat to a deserted place [literally, to the desert] by themselves. Now many saw them going and recognized them, and they hurried there on foot from all the towns and arrived ahead of them. As he went ashore, he saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd; and he began to teach them many things. (6:32–34).

Mark takes it for granted that, by God’s power, Jesus can do whatever he wants. It is therefore very important to watch carefully what Jesus does and does not do in any given situation. It is necessary, in other words, to read fully and completely the entire story that follows that introduction in 6:32–34. Think of it as a one-act play with five scenes.

Scene 1: Solving the Problem. After a day of teaching, evening approaches, and the problem is where such a large crowd would find food. Two deliberately opposing answers are given to that problem—one from the disciples and the other from Jesus himself:

When it grew late, his disciples came to him and said, “This is a deserted place, and the hour is now very late; send them away so that they may go into the surrounding country and villages and buy something for themselves to eat.” (6:35–36)

But he answered them, “You give them something to eat.” They said to him, “Are we to go and buy two hundred denarii worth of bread, and give it to them to eat?” (6:37)

That is a rather fascinating interchange. It sets up the story’s intentional confrontation between two solutions: the disciples’ solution, “send them away,” and Jesus’s solution, “give them something to eat.”

That opposition is the core of this narrative and, as the story continues, Jesus brings the disciples repeatedly into the middle between himself and the crowd, so that their solution (“send them away”) is changed into his solution (“give them something to eat”). It is, of course, a miracle, but it’s a miracle in a parable that emphasizes especially their responsibility for the distribution of God’s food to God’s people. Watch the constant dialectic of “He/Jesus said” and “they/the disciples said” as the story continues.

Scene 2: Seeking the Food. Next, “He said to them, ‘How many loaves have you? Go and see.’ When they had found out, they said, ‘Five, and two fish’” (6:38). In his parallel version, John is somewhat embarrassed at any hint of ignorance from Jesus and rephrases: “Jesus said to Philip, ‘Where are we to buy bread for these people to eat?’ He said this to test him, for he himself knew what he was going to do” (6:5–6). But John’s adaptation also spoils Mark’s intention of forcing the disciples repeatedly into the middle between Jesus and the people.

Scene 3: Seating the Crowd. “Then he ordered them to get all the people to sit down in groups on the green grass. So they sat down in groups of hundreds and of fifties” (6:39–40). Once again, the disciples are deliberate intermediaries between Jesus and the crowd. But why that huge time-consuming organization in the midst of a miracle? And why in hundreds and of fifties? Why bother? I hold any answer until later.

Scene 4: Distributing the Food. Even—or especially—at this central moment, the disciples are still intermediaries. “Taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to his disciples to set before the people; and he divided the two fish among them all. And all ate and were filled” (6:41–42). Notice those four italicized verbs for future discussion below.

Scene 5: Gathering the Fragments. Afterward “they took up twelve baskets full of broken pieces and of the fish. Those who had eaten the loaves numbered five thousand men” (6:43–44). We can presume that “they” are, once again, the disciples as intermediaries between Jesus and the crowd. Indeed, in this case, John makes that explicit: “When they were satisfied, he told his disciples, ‘Gather up the fragments left over, so that nothing may be lost.’ So they gathered them up, and from the fragments of the five barley loaves, left by those who had eaten, they filled twelve baskets” (6:12–13).

What exactly is the function of such a detailed narrative? Two elements help us see the purpose. The first element we have seen already. Jesus brings the disciples over to his vision that, with the kingdom of God already present on earth, they are responsible for the adequate distribution of food. “You give them something to eat” prevails over “send them away.” And it is indeed striking that the Twelve agree that collaborative eschatology involves teaching the people, but not feeding them. For Jesus, however, the teaching is about feeding.

As already seen so often, the Great Divine Cleanup involves a fair distribution of God’s earth for all God’s people. But how can anyone else do what Jesus did—if you take the story literally? As told, it is certainly a miracle. But if it is—and I suggest that it is—a miracle in a parable, we are asked to think about meaning and implication. This is where a second element becomes equally important.

Jesus could—as Mark certainly believes—have made food suddenly appear, have brought down food from heaven, or even turned stones into bread—for others. Indeed, you might think that a location “in the desert” indicates that Jesus will provide food from heaven as God did in the desert during Israel’s Exodus from Egypt (Exod. 16). Furthermore, that awkward division of the people into hundreds and fifties might recall a similar division of the people by Moses during that same Exodus journey (Exod. 18:21, 25). It looked like Mark was preparing us for a new exodus and a new food-from-heaven miracle.

That is not, however, what Jesus did. Instead of any exodus-like option, Jesus multiplied actual food already there, already present, already available: “He said to them, ‘How many loaves have you? Go and see.’ When they had found out, they said, ‘Five, and two fish’” (6:38). Why bother with that? Why not just do it from scratch? That is where those four verbs become important:

TAKE → BLESS → BREAK → GIVE

Even when Mark repeats and shortens the story in 8:1–9, he still retains that sequence of those four verbs: “He took the seven loaves, and after giving thanks he broke them and gave them to his disciples to distribute; and they distributed them to the crowd” (8:6b–7). Why is their sequence so significant?

I read Mark’s parable to say that there is more than enough food already present upon our earth when it passes through the hands of divine justice; when it is taken, blessed, broken, and given out; when food is seen as God’s consecrated gift. The now present kingdom of God is about the equitable distribution of our earth for all. Jesus simply enacts that parable of God as Householder of the World.

I take two elements from that inaugural story in Mark 6:32–44 to pursue throughout the rest of this chapter. A first element is that combination of bread and fish. “Bread” is widely used in the biblical tradition as a simple summary for “food,” but why keep bringing in “fish”? It is easy to imagine Jesus “breaking” bread, but doing the same to fish is somewhat messier. No wonder, therefore, that in John’s version the multiplication story in 6:5–13 is followed by a long discourse on Jesus as the “bread of life” (6:35, 48), but not the “fish of life.”

A second element is that fourfold sequence took, blessed, broke, and gave—in whole or in part. That sequence is too solemn and repetitive not to be significant. It emphasizes that God—through Jesus—has first to bless the food or that God—through Jesus—has first to be given thanks for the food before Jesus passes it out. It has been thus made sacred or, better, reclaimed for God to whom it had always belonged. I look next at those two elements in that order: first, the bread and fish, then the few verbs, took, blessed or gave thanks, broke, gave.

Those six multiplication—better, distribution?—stories about bread and fish all take place during the earthly life of Jesus. But there is another story about bread and fish from after his earthly life. Well, actually, Luke 5:1–11 has a version of this other story at the very start of Jesus’s public life, while John 21:1–14 has it at the very end. Both locations emphasize its importance—either as an inaugural or terminal event in his life here below. But my present focus is on John’s postresurrection version.

This Revelation of the risen Jesus is the only one ever recorded as taking place at the lake, on the shore of the “Sea of Tiberias” (John 21:1). The scene is not set, for example, in a room at Jerusalem, as in Luke 24 and John 20, or on a mountain in Galilee, as in Matthew 28. Instead, in John 21, we are back on the lakeshore to consummate this seismic disturbance where it first began. Here is what happened:

Gathered there together were Simon Peter, Thomas called the Twin, Nathanael of Cana in Galilee, the sons of Zebedee, and two others of his disciples. Simon Peter said to them, “I am going fishing.” They said to him, “We will go with you.” They went out and got into the boat, but that night they caught nothing. Just after daybreak, Jesus stood on the beach; but the disciples did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to them, “Children, you have no fish, have you?” They answered him, “No.” (21:2–5)

Then Jesus tells them where to cast their nets, and they can hardly handle the amount of fish taken at the word of Jesus:

Jesus said to them, “Cast the net to the right side of the boat, and you will find some.” So they cast it, and now they were not able to haul it in because there were so many fish. . . . The other disciples came in the boat, dragging the net full of fish. . . . Simon Peter went aboard and hauled the net ashore, full of large fish, a hundred fifty-three of them; and though there were so many, the net was not torn. (21:6, 8, 11)

There is no consensus on the symbolism of the 153 fish. I myself take it to mean—by whatever symbolism—that Jesus and not Antipas is in control of the lake. It is no longer the Sea of Tiberias; it has become the Sea of Jesus.

In John’s story Jesus had already prepared a meal of bread and fish even before their miraculous catch: “When they had gone ashore, they saw a charcoal fire there, with fish on it, and bread” (21:9). Then their fish is added: “Jesus said to them, ‘Bring some of the fish that you have just caught’” (21:10).

Of the four verbs, took, blessed, broke, gave, in Mark’s multiplication story, John has only three somewhat different ones in his version: “Jesus took the loaves, and when he had given thanks, he distributed them to those who were seated; so also the fish, as much as they wanted” (6:11). Those three are reduced to two in the postresurrection catch story: “Jesus came and took the bread and gave it to them, and did the same with the fish” (21:13). Still, I think, John intends to connect those two meals with Jesus. In other words, what happens before the resurrection continues after it. But what is that?

My proposal is that the kingdom movement of Jesus intends to take back the lake for God! It is about the lake as microcosm of the earth, and the question is to whom the lake-as-earth belongs. To Rome or to God? We know that the “bread’ of the Abba Prayer means food in general and not just bread in particular, but with Antipas’s establishment of Tiberias to commercialize the lake, to control its fishing industry, and to upgrade his tax bases, food focused on fish in the 20s CE.

That is why Jesus was always around nets and boats, fish and fishers, and why there is still so much “fishy stuff ” in the gospels. And why that ancient boat is an incarnational symbol of what Tiberias did to Magdala in the first century CE. In the beginning was fish because, when those peasant fishers and fishing villages lost their economy to Antipas’s new city of Tiberias, there was first no fish to sell and soon no bread to eat.

One of the temptations refused by Jesus was to turn stones into bread—for himself—after he had fasted forty days in the wilderness. He quoted what Deuteronomy 8:3 says about the manna in the desert: “‘One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God’” (Matt. 4:4; Luke 4:4). Of course. But the word from the mouth of God is that all God’s people should have a fair share of God’s food from God’s earth. It is about the just Household of the divine Householder. It is never just about food. It is always about just food.

I have followed that trail of bread and fish from Mark 6—as already seen in detail—to John 21, that is, from before to after the resurrection of Jesus. I now do the same for that solemn fourfold verbal sequence took, blessed or gave thanks, broke, and gave. Again the trail starts at Mark 6—already seen—but this time it leads us to Luke 24, that is, once again, from before to after the resurrection.

The walk from Jerusalem to Emmaus and the succeeding meal is found only in Luke’s account of Easter Sunday. Two disciples “were going to a village called Emmaus, about seven miles from Jerusalem” (24:13). One of their names is given as Cleopas (24:18) and, following the patriarchal chauvinism of standard Mediterranean custom, the unnamed disciple is most likely his wife.

Jesus joins the couple as they journey along, “but their eyes were kept from recognizing him” (24:16). They tell him of their disappointed hopes concerning “Jesus of Nazareth, who was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people” (24:19) and, in response, Jesus, “beginning with Moses and all the prophets, interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures” (24:27).

But even that is not enough to allow them to recognize the unknown stranger as Jesus. Looking back later, “they said to each other, ‘Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?’” (24:32). But even that opening of the scriptures by Jesus does not open their eyes to Jesus. That only happens with this climax:

As they came near the village to which they were going, he walked ahead as if he were going on. But they urged him strongly, saying, “Stay with us, because it is almost evening and the day is now nearly over.” So he went in to stay with them. When he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him; and he vanished from their sight. (24:28–31)

Why does the couple not evince any surprise at the sudden Revelation and equally sudden disappearance of their risen Lord? It is because that story is a fairly obvious parable about earliest Christianity’s standard ritual in community worship.

First comes the reading of the scriptures. That is necessary, but not enough. It warms the heart, but does not yet reveal the Christ. That happens only when food—and household—is shared with the random stranger. Only then can you announce that Christ “had been made known . . . in the breaking of the bread” (Luke 24:35). Notice, by the way, the word “break.” They each could have had individual bread before them at a meal, but that verb emphasizes the sharing of communal food rather than the enjoyment of a personal supply.

How are we to understand those three stories—in the desert from Mark, by the lakeshore from John, and at Emmaus from Luke? First of all, that continuity from Jesus before to Jesus after the resurrection is significant. Of all the many things Jesus did before his resurrection, it is that multiplication of bread and fish and the invocation of those four verbs in Mark that reappears as bread and fish in John 21 and as those four verbs in Luke 24. Why is that important?

There is, I think, a confrontational edge to that emphasis on “fish.” It is not a passing criticism of Antipas from the earthly life of Jesus (Mark 6), but involves what Jesus is and ever remains as the Revelation of God. It is, to repeat, about Galilee’s lake as a microcosm of God’s world—who owns it, controls it, distributes it (John 21). Furthermore, that distribution is by sharing even with—or especially with—the random stranger. Only then is Jesus still present in the Christian community (Luke 24).

I turn next to two other stories that continue and even consummate those preceding three texts. Once again, the first story is set before and the other is set after the resurrection of Jesus. Here the continuity is from Mark in 14:22–25 to Paul in 1 Corinthians 11:20–34.

Mark uses that same fourfold verbal sequence took, blessed, broke, and gave during what we call the Last Supper and he calls the “Passover meal” (14:14, 16): “While they were eating, he took a loaf of bread, and after blessing it he broke it, gave it to them. . . . Then he took a cup, and after giving thanks he gave it to them” (14:22–23). Passing the common cup emphasizes, as does breaking the common bread, that the symbolism is about sharing communal food and not just consuming individual supplies.

The standard sequence of those four verbs draws our attention to the fact that bread and fish has now become bread and wine. On the one hand, bread and wine is simply the Mediterranean way of expressing food and drink. Recall, for example, the poetic parallelism in Proverbs about those who “eat the bread of wickedness and drink the wine of violence” (4:17) or are invited to “eat of my bread and drink of the wine I have mixed” (9:5). On the other hand, that sequence of bread and wine allows the equation of bread with the body and wine with the blood of Jesus. Why make that equation?

We think of ordinary death as a separation of body and soul or flesh and spirit. But violent death—for example, execution—is a separation of body and blood. The eucharistic meal recalls that Jesus not only lived for the just distribution of food and drink, but died for insisting on that same thing. He was not demanding charity, generosity, or even hospitality. Rome did not crucify people for those proposals.

Jesus was insisting that the world and its food—summarized as bread and wine—belonged to God and not to Rome. For that he died violently on a cross—so that “bread and wine” led to “body and blood.”

It follows, therefore, that Christians participating in the Lord’s Supper are collaborating with the justice of God as revealed in the life and death of Christ. Jesus says nothing about his substitution for us, but rather invites our participation with him. “He took a cup,” for example, “and after giving thanks he gave it to them, and all of them drank from it” (Mark 14:23). So how exactly does that work out in practice? One answer comes from Paul, writing on that very question to the Corinthians.

Roman householders often gave feasts that included not only their social equals, but also their freed slaves, clients, and assorted hangers-on. That was, of course, a deliberate display of hierarchical power. But at such banquets, Roman moralists asked, should all get the same food and drink? Some said of course not. At the end of the first century CE, the poet Martial—who would eventually flee Rome for his native Spain—complained bitterly in his Epigrams about such calculated social humiliation. “Let us eat,” he demanded, “the same fare” (3.60).

Others said yes, of course. One of Martial’s patrons was the very aristocratic Pliny the Younger. He insisted indignantly in his Letters that his custom was “to give all my company the same fare.” But that meant, he continued, “that my freed slaves do not drink the same wine I do—but I drink what they do” (2.6). “Social equality” there was cultural slumming. And that was the problem Paul ran into with the eucharistic meal at Corinth.

The original title “Lord’s Supper” meant the Lord’s style of supper, that is, a share-meal where all alike got enough of the same food and drink. Equality in Christ meant equality in menu. It was not, of course, our symbolic morsel and sip, but a true meal. What happened at Corinth was that the drag of cultural normalcy pulled the Lord’s Supper back into Roman hierarchical expectations.

When the various small Christian communities of Corinth celebrated the Lord’s Supper together at the home of a better-off member, the nonworking “haves” arrived early and ate the upper-class food and drink that they brought. When the “have-nots” arrived later after the day’s work, they had to make do with what was left. Paul is, to put it mildly, not pleased with them:

When you come together, it is not really to eat the Lord’s supper. For when the time comes to eat, each of you goes ahead with your own supper, and one goes hungry and another becomes drunk. What! Do you not have homes to eat and drink in? Or do you show contempt for the church of God and humiliate those who have nothing? (1 Cor. 11:20–22)

What is his solution? He begins by insisting that his own understanding of the Lord’s Supper is very traditional:

I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, “This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” In the same way he took the cup also, after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.” (1 Cor. 11:23–25)

Once again, we have three of those four verbs, took, gave thanks, and broke; gave is left implicit. But what I especially emphasize is that phrase “after supper.”

That sequence of first the bread-as-body, then the supper, and finally the wine-as-blood puts the supper in the middle. The haves cannot come and have their better supper first and then celebrate the eucharistic meal with whatever bread and wine is left over. The full and very real supper is in the center of the symbolic ritual.

From bread and fish to bread and wine, from the life to the death of Jesus, from before to after the resurrection, it is always about God’s food in God’s world for God’s people. All of that is packed into the simple challenge of “Give us this day our daily bread.” The Lord’s Supper is already present in the Lord’s Prayer.

When we read or hear, “Give us this day our daily bread,” that simple word “bread” carries with it all those share-meals with Jesus during his life, before his death, and after his resurrection. It contains the multiplication meal, the Emmaus meal, the lakeside meal, and the eucharistic meal. It is the daily bread of daily justice along with the daily danger of challenging daily injustice.

But, despite the almost cliché status of “our daily bread” in English ( just try an Advanced Search for the phrase on Google), the Greek is strikingly unusual. It is literally:

The bread of us the daily (epiousian) give to us today. (Matt. 6:11)

All the other units in the Abba Prayer start with the verb involved: “be hallowed,” “be come,” “be done,” “forgive,” “do not bring.” But here the “bread” comes first, and then the adjective “daily” (epiousian) gets special emphasis, as in that preceding literal articulation.

The adjective epiousia is found in the New Testament only in Matthew 6:11 and Luke 11:3. Our major Greek dictionary translates it: “the coming day, sufficient for the day . . . from hē epiousia hēmera, the coming day.” The meaning is: enough for today, but also with assurance of the same for tomorrow. It is a request that “our daily bread” be never again exceptional or conditional as in the past, but always normal and unconditional in the present and the future.

The best way to understand that vision of “our daily bread” is to go back before the Abba Prayer or any of those meals with Jesus—during his life, before his death, or after his resurrection—to the far older story of the “bread from heaven,” in the desert during the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt. It is daily bread as bread daily.

You will recall, from Chapter 3, that the Priestly tradition moved from Sabbath creation through Sabbath day and Sabbath year to climax with Sabbath jubilee. That same tradition created a magnificent parable to sum it all up and located it during the Exodus from Egypt. It is a vision of the Sabbath day, but also of how God distributes food as manna/bread for all. It is also the best commentary on “our daily bread” in the Abba Prayer of Jesus as meaning enough bread for today, and tomorrow, and every day to come.

The people complained of hunger in the desert, and “the Lord said to Moses, ‘I am going to rain bread from heaven for you’” (Exod. 16:4). The promise is that “you shall have your fill of bread; then you shall know that I am the Lord your God” (16:12). When the manna appeared, the people “said to one another, ‘What is it?’ [Hebrew man hu’, hence manna]. For they did not know what it was. Moses said to them, ‘It is the bread that the Lord has given you to eat’” (16:15).

The manna is quite simply God’s bread, but there are five very precise instructions for harvesting this miraculous food from heaven:

The Lord said to Moses, “I am going to rain bread from heaven for you, and each day the people shall go out and gather enough for that day.” (16:4)

“On the sixth day, when they prepare what they bring in, it will be twice as much as they gather on other days.”. . . On the sixth day they gathered twice as much food. (16:5, 22)

“Gather as much of it as each of you needs, an omer [about a half gallon] to a person according to the number of persons, all providing for those in their own tents.” The Israelites did so, some gathering more, some less. But when they measured it with an omer, those who gathered much had nothing over, and those who gathered little had no shortage; they gathered as much as each of them needed. . . . Morning by morning they gathered it, as much as each needed. (16:16–18, 21)

“Let no one leave any of it over until morning.” But . . . some left part of it until morning, and it bred worms and became foul. (16:19–20)

On the seventh day some of the people went out to gather, and they found none. (16:27)

Those parabolic emphases are quite clear. When God directly distributes food there is enough for each and every day (daily bread?); there is miraculously the same amount for each person per day no matter what each takes; there is no hoarding because it spoils overnight; there is no food even present on the Sabbath, but twice as much the day before; but when that pre-Sabbath bread is kept overnight, it “[does] not become foul, and there [are] no worms in it” (16:24).

There is, however, one very interesting aspect to the people’s “fill of bread” (16:8, 12), to “the bread that the Lord has given them to eat” (16:15). It is the householder who is commanded by God to pick up enough bread for the entire household each morning: “Gather as much of it as each of you needs . . . according to the number of persons, all providing for those in their own tents” (16:16). It is, as always, about the householder and the house as microcosm of the Householder and the House.

We are now ready to move to the prayer’s next challenge, and this book’s next chapter. What will it be? What, in fact, must it be? Every peasant farmer or city artisan as well as every decent landlord or good emperor would have known immediately the answer to that question. The other side of enough food for today is no debt for tomorrow.

Here is an example on the imperial level. Rome’s ancient Senate House, the Curia Julia, now contains two large bas-reliefs from the time of the emperor Trajan at the start of the second century CE. They were originally located outside in the Forum, but are now better protected by the Curia’s covered roof.

One of the images is of Trajan distributing food to the orphaned children of Rome. Those are symbolized by a woman with a baby in her arms coming toward his seated figure. The other image shows a line of people carrying debt tablets to the emperor to be burned at his feet. With those records gone, the debts are expunged.

Enough food for today must also involve no debt for tomorrow. So, a hundred years before Trajan, Jesus connects food—positively—and debt—negatively—in his Abba Prayer. But notice one other feature of that transition from bread to debt and on to temptation.

The prayer’s first half on God’s name, kingdom, and will had no “ands” between them. Each of those three challenges involved the other ones even despite a deliberate climax in presentation. God’s name cannot be hallowed except through the coming of God’s kingdom, which results in God’s eternal will being done on earth. But the prayer’s second half is cumulative; hence those “ands” between bread and debt as well as between debt and temptation. It is not about bread or debt or temptation, but about all three together in a crescendo. So what comes next after “Give us our daily bread” is—and must be—“and forgive us our debts.”

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CHAPTER 8

Living Saints: Bringing It Home

Among the many wonderful parts of being a priest is the chance to comfort people in the throes of tragedy. Like pastors and clerics of many religious traditions, I visit the sick, bury the dead, console survivors and victims, and mediate conflict. Although it is difficult at times to be so often and intimately involved in emotional and physical trauma, almost without exception I come away from these experiences with renewed hope in God and in the human spirit.

This hope is not easy to explain. In fact, the greatest argument against the existence of an all-loving and all-powerful God is precisely the fact that hope is necessary. If God were to keep us from suffering, if he always intervened and made us well, if heaven were on earth, we wouldn’t need faith or trust. The argument is a strong one: Why does God make things so difficult for his children?

If there is no rational, acceptable answer to that question, if God does not offer us a way forward, out of natural or self-inflicted messes, I would have to agree that Christianity is a big farce. I certainly wouldn’t put my trust in a God who had no answer to real human suffering.

But there is a way forward. I believe that the Faith-Hope-Love Cure—the Divine Cure—is God’s usual way of healing us from within from every one of our ailments. No matter what comes our way, if we allow God to dwell within us through the theological virtues, nothing can defeat us. Some days will feel worse than others, our lives or the lives of our loved ones may even be cut short here on earth, but with faith, hope, and love we will not despair because we know God is always at our side. As we pass through this imperfect world and get our bumps and bruises, we do so with joy and meaning, knowing that God has something wonderful waiting for us just around the corner, both on earth and in heaven.

THE FAITH-HOPE-LOVE CURE IN ACTION

In other parts of this book, I have changed the names or circumstances of individuals to protect their privacy. I would now, however, like to introduce you to Cynthia Mernagh of Akron, Ohio. I have asked her permission to narrate her story and use her name because she’s the greatest testimony I have ever witnessed of living faith, living hope, and living love. Her story needs to be told. Her life is a testament to the Divine Cure and its power to make us profoundly happy, no matter what life brings our way.

Cynthia is married to Dan, and together they have eight children. Six years ago Cynthia was diagnosed with an advanced stage of breast cancer. Her children were between five and nineteen years old at the time.

When I was a cynical teenager I knew “Mrs. Mernagh” mostly as the lady from the neighborhood who always expressed euphoric joy about things I considered to be altogether ordinary and even boring. I can still hear her high-pitched greeting as she entered my house, or welcomed us into hers. For the hundredth time she would tell me and my older brother how wonderful it was to see us. Joe and I had no interest in greeting any of my mom’s friends, but Mrs. Mernagh, with all of that enthusiasm directed at us, was to be avoided especially.

Looking back now on our contact with Mrs. Mernagh, one thing stands out: we knew that her joy was genuine. Although we responded to her kindness with rolled eyes and devious chuckles, we knew this woman was real.

Now we know just how real and holy she was and is. After several years of remission, Cynthia’s cancer returned and has now metastasized. It is in her spine, pelvis, lungs, and skull. In this crucible of physical and emotional suffering, Cynthia has shown everyone around her what it means to be a Christian, displaying the miracle of grace God can perform in a willing and generous soul.

A couple of months ago, Cynthia shared with a group of women in the neighborhood her situation in these terms:

Despite radiation and several rounds of chemotherapy, my cancer continues to spread. This shows me that life can be full of surprises and changes, and emphasizes the reality that we are not ultimately living for this life alone. Each day, I must ask, “What is it that you want from me today, Lord? How is it that I can best complete your will?” I must resist the temptation to be afraid or to play in my imagination the scenario for my children of “life without Mom.” I have only each day to love God, to love Dan, and to love my children and others. That’s my mission right now. In reality, I suppose that this has always been my mission.

In just a few sentences, Cynthia describes for us the Divine Cure. I have been so deeply moved by her life with cancer that I asked if she would be willing to go into more detail with me as a contribution to this book. Specifically, I told her I wanted her to tell us what faith, hope, and love mean for her, now that she knows she’s dying and leaving her husband and children behind.

The day I was to speak with Cynthia she began to experience new difficulty in motor skills, and her doctor ordered her back in for more tests. She was also very tired. But her last e-mail to me, in response to my suggestion that maybe we should delay our conversation because of these complications, says it all: “9:30 A.M. it is!!” I doubt that Cynthia wrote those exclamation marks because she felt like talking at 9:30 A.M. She wrote them because she willed passionately to do the right thing.

Keep in mind as you listen to Cynthia that she has already made straight the path of the Lord. It is evident from her approach to life and death that there are no major issues she has avoided dealing with. I find with most people that some significant issue from the past stands in the way of experiencing God’s grace as Cynthia does. God can still give a person a level of peace in difficult times, but the issues that have never been cleared away, either through the six Make Straight the Path steps or through the process of getting unstuck (as described in chapter 3), stop the mighty flow of grace from sweeping in and taking over our soul, as it obviously has done for Cynthia.

What follows is a window into our conversation. As you read Cynthia’s responses, I invite you to think back on how we defined living faith, living hope, and living love. This is what such habits look like in one person in very difficult circumstances. But Cynthia didn’t form the habits when she got sick; they were a way of life for her dating back at least as long as I’ve known her. The Faith-Hope-Love Cure isn’t just for sick people, but seeing what those theological virtues have done in and for this good woman is an inspiration for all of us to make them get a hold of us beginning today.

FATHER JONATHAN: Cynthia, what does faith mean to you now?

CYNTHIA: It’s just knowing God as my Father who loves me. And knowing too that his love for me doesn’t depend on what I do or don’t do. For example, he doesn’t love me less or more now that I’m sick. I can trust in him because his love for me is like this.

FATHER JONATHAN: What about hope?

CYNTHIA: It would be hard for me to imagine life without the ultimate hope of someday arriving in heaven. Also, hope is confidence in the fact that my suffering will bring about good for others.

FATHER JONATHAN: But how would your suffering help someone else?

CYNTHIA: Well, for example, one of my children was going through a hard time, and so I told Jesus, “You can let my cancer come back and I’ll offer that up for the sake of my child; I will unite my suffering to the suffering of Christ.” One week later we found out that my cancer was back. So I know I can bring life to others. That’s my mission right now.

Another example is I have a niece who is suffering anorexia, so when I don’t feel like eating because I’m so sick, I eat for her. This is a little sacrifice I offer up to Jesus.

FATHER JONATHAN: But what does your eating have to do with her eating?

CYNTHIA: Well, I naturally think of her when I don’t feel like eating, so I know Jesus understands that when I go ahead and eat (that’s what the doctors want me to do), God will give her a special grace. I’m trying to do for her what she can’t do for herself because of her sickness.

That reminds me: I think there’s so much suffering going to waste in the world. Offering up my suffering as a prayer is my mission. It’s the tool that I have. I even offer up my suffering for things like the economy and this recession we’re in, for people to get jobs. When Jesus was suffering on the cross and prayed for us, don’t you think his prayer was especially effective?

FATHER JONATHAN: I know you’re awfully tired these days. Do you ever feel too tired to pray? Do you actually say prayers in full sentences? How do you pray?

CYNTHIA: That’s a very good question, because if I relied on my own memory to remember what prayers to say, I couldn’t pray at all these days. I trust that the good Lord knows my heart. I don’t have to say sentences or even words. I’m just connected with him and he reads my heart.

FATHER JONATHAN: What does love mean for you? How do you practice it?

CYNTHIA: Oh, well, I’m sorry if I repeat myself here. Faith, hope, and love are just so interconnected for me. I say to the Lord, “This cancer was your idea. This is your gift to me. I hope I do a good job carrying it.” That’s how I try to love God: by carrying my cross the best I can.

We’ve taken on a little family motto. It goes like this—it’s just three lines, so it’s easy for me to remember: “Remember the past with gratitude, live the present with passion, and look to the future with confidence.”

Living the present with passion is my favorite. Although I’m tempted to fear what will happen to the children when I’m no longer here, I’ve decided that such fear just keeps me from living the present with passion. So, for example, last week I started volunteering at my church. I’m working in the sacristy getting the altar and everything ready, and cleaning. Dan and I were a little bit worried when I started because we don’t know how long I’ll be able to keep the job, but I thought, “I’m still alive right now, so we don’t have to worry about how long I can do it.”

Again, the real temptation is to start wondering what things will be like for Phillip, for example, who is only twelve years old. But we’ve decided as a family that we’re going to pedal this bicycle together. We aren’t going to worry. We’re just going to keep on pedaling.

FATHER JONATHAN: Is there any one thought that helps you stay so strong?

CYNTHIA: Well, there’s one scripture passage that means a lot to me. It’s Hebrews 10:35–36. I especially like the first part. It says, “Surrender not your confidence, for it has a great reward.” The rest of it goes like this: “For you have need of endurance, so that when you have done the will of God, you may receive what was promised.” So that’s what I say to myself when I take my daughter out to practice for her driving test: “The Lord is in charge; don’t surrender!” Or the same when I’m taking care of Andrew. [Andrew is my uncle. He has special needs and has been living with Cynthia and Dan for several years.] God only shows us so much, so we have to just keep going and trust in God our Father, who loves immensely, no matter what we can do or can’t do.

Before saying goodbye, Cynthia invited me to come visit them the next time I’m in Ohio. In her words, “It would be wonderful to see you!” and she meant it now just as she did when I was a teenager. This time I got it. Sadly, Cynthia passed away a few weeks after our interview.

Cynthia was grateful for the past, she lived the present with passion, and even as she was dying, she looked to the future with confidence. Because she collaborated with God’s grace, the Faith-Hope-Love Cure kept her from defining herself as a sick person, or as a mother who was about to leave her husband and children, or as a victim of an undeserved disease.

Instead, she saw herself for who she really was: a daughter of a loving Father who knew her suffering, was on her side, and would be faithful to his promise to bring about a greater good out of all of this suffering. Faith healed her intellect by freeing her from shallowness—she perceived supernatural truth. Hope healed her memory by freeing her from fearful thoughts of all the terrible things that could possibly occur. And love healed her will by freeing her from self-centeredness and allowing her to live her days focused on the people and God whom she loves. Cynthia was deeply happy, and that’s evidence of the Divine Cure.

Because I know the Mernagh family, I already know what greater good God may be bringing forth from the tragedy of Cynthia’s illness. One little piece of that good is that six of the eight Mernagh children have decided they want to become missionaries and are already studying to accomplish this dream (five of the boys are studying to be priests!). Their love for God started long before their mother’s sickness, but it was the faith, hope, and love they found in the home—in the good times and in the bad—that gave them the vision and desire to do something big for God, their loving Father, and for others. Listen to what Cynthia told me about raising her children:

From the outset of our marriage, Dan and I desired to raise our children to love and serve the Lord. What was most important to us, our individual relationship with the Lord, was what we most desired to pass on to our children. What good would it be if they succeeded in many areas, if they enjoyed many material possessions, if they won the acclaim of others—what would any of this matter apart from the joy of personally knowing and loving the Lord?

A relationship with Christ is a gift, and, like a vocation, is one that only the Lord can give. Understanding this, we strove to put our children in the best position to receive this gift.

If Christ were at the center of their lives, then we knew that whatever vocation to which they were called would be lived to the full.

So Dan and I determined that we would work hard to fulfill what we saw as the main job that we had as parents: helping our children discover their own vocations and preparing them to live these. One of the best ways that we could do this was to provide a stable marriage and family life for the children. Dan and I had observed many family situations where disunity between parents, lack of forgiveness or affection, financial stress, anger, or serious sins resulted in grown children struggling with poor self-esteem and the inability to make prudent decisions. By contrast, a secure home environment provides for emotionally healthy and secure children. It gives them the confidence to launch themselves “out into the deep” to follow Christ’s call for their lives and to face life in general.

Maybe you feel a long way away from living the Faith-Hope-Love Cure as Cynthia and Dan have done it. The good news is we don’t have to be like Cynthia and Dan. Just as Cynthia says to the Lord, “This cancer was your idea. This is your gift to me. I hope I do a good job carrying it,” so we can thank the Lord, in our own words and ways, for permitting the particular sufferings in our life, no matter what they are. All we have to concern ourselves with is “doing a good job carrying it,” as Cynthia said. Carrying our cross well will look very different for each of us. We may not sound as spiritual as Cynthia did or think such spiritual thoughts. But if we’re going to allow God to have his way with us through the Divine Cure, we can rely on the enduring truths on which faith, hope, and love depend. These truths do not change.

Think, for example, of Cynthia’s great hope in heaven. Where did she get that? She got it from the Bible. She got it from the church. She got it from prayer. It’s a divine promise God made to us thousands of years ago. And it’s personal: there will come a time in our existence, not long from now, when God will look at us knowingly and lovingly, embrace us as his prodigal children, and wipe away every one of our tears.

Perfectly aware of the heart-wrenching cause of each of our tears, tuned in to the highly personal, backstage drama that provoked them, our loving Father will make our tears go away forever—if we let him—and will fill our heart to the brim with beatitude, contentment, and joy.

This spiritual journey starts with God-help (we have been loved by God, he has given us life, and he sustains us), it continues with self-help (using the natural mechanisms God has given us of intelligence and will), and it is brought to fruition through more God-help, in the form of faith, hope, and love.

SOAK YOURSELF IN SPIRITUAL TRUTH

No matter the degree of divine life we have developed in our interior, we can make it grow by reflecting on God’s Word:

And [God] will wipe away every tear from their eyes; and there will no longer be any death; there will no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain; the first things have passed away. (Rev. 21:4, NASB)

Every day holds out to us a choice between shallowness and living faith, between fear and living hope, between self-centeredness and living love. We can rely solely on our intelligence and moods to tell us whether or not we should be happy, based on temporal and changing circumstances (many of which we have no control over), or we can enrich our reason, memory, and will with spiritual truth and start counting on God’s master plan for our happiness.

Doing this requires meditating on the Word of God. It requires opening our eyes and seeking out what God may have to say about our situation, even if we don’t understand it yet.

It takes only a moment to make a leap of faith into the supernatural realm. Remembering that God’s plan encompasses both our eternal salvation and our earthly happiness (beatitude), we can say a prayer like this:

Jesus, some things don’t look so good today. In fact, I’m tempted to think everything looks bad. I don’t know how things will turn out. But I do know the end of the story. You and I, and the people I love, will win. Every one of my tears, and the tears of my loved ones, will be wiped away. I believe in you. I love you. Today I will do my part.

The specific words don’t matter. If the above words don’t suit your circumstances, say any other prayer of praise and commitment, from the heart.

Thousands of years before that beautiful verse from the book of Revelation—the above-quoted verse about wiping away our tears—and still hundreds of years before Jesus’s birth, the prophet Isaiah foretold our encounter with this merciful and all-loving God. Isaiah describes divine consolation of our pain as even more than the wiping away of tears. He says God will care for us with the tenderness of a mother who nurses her child: “As nurslings, you shall be carried in her arms, and fondled in her lap; as a mother comforts her child, so will I comfort you” (Isa. 66:13, NAB).

Today we can either wallow in our emotional wounds or enjoy the passion of now and confidence in tomorrow. We can stay on the surface or we can go deep and imagine the fabulous future that awaits us. This isn’t just positive thinking; it’s spiritual mind-management that syncs our brain and emotions with truth. It is discerning which thoughts are of God (the ones that invite us to be more like him) and which thoughts are useless, at best, and more likely temptations of Satan, who wants us stuck in the past, sad, and hopeless. It is regulating which thoughts have permission to stick around and which ones we’ll tell to keep on moving because they aren’t from God.

THE FAITH-HOPE-LOVE CURE IN OUR DAILY ROUTINE

While life’s most difficult moments can be tipping points that challenge us to go from good to great in our spiritual life, as we saw in the last chapter, we don’t have to wait for exceptional times to be transformed by the Faith-Hope-Love Cure.

If we were ever to doubt that ordinary life can have great value, we would need only to recall that the first thirty years of Jesus’s life were spent—intentionally—in obscurity. He lived with his parents, worked as a carpenter’s apprentice, and worked no known miracles. These years were not mere preparation for important things he would do later; they were part of his saving work. He was living his Father’s will even before he began to preach, travel, and heal.

Jesus wasn’t alone in choosing such simplicity. Mary and Joseph played key roles in the history of salvation, but they did so in the quiet of their homes. The relative silence of the Gospel writers regarding Mary and Joseph makes their lives all the more powerful, for it tells us we can live the Faith-Hope-Love Cure right now in our own unexceptional circumstances.

Of course, a life of simplicity and obscurity alone doesn’t make us holy or even good. In the secrecy of our conscience, we make or break who we are. Whether we are public figures or completely unknown, nothing we do or say can take the place of how well we preserve our sacred soul. We do this by living faith, living hope, and living love in our daily routine.

This section of the chapter is an invitation to continue translating our desire for self-improvement, holiness, and happiness into a lifelong spiritual program. Perhaps we fear that we might not be growing fast enough or even going in the right direction. Our lives are full of activity. We don’t think about spiritual things all the time, or even every day. Most of our time is spent working to pay bills, picking up the kids, doing laundry, and taking care of other routine matters. We worry about our husband and what he’s doing and whether he’s happy with us. We worry about how we’ll get the kids through college. And amidst all of that activity, we ask ourselves whether life boils down to one big distraction.

Maybe we are distracted, but the good news is we don’t need to run off and join a monastery to get focused on the right things. By taking human form, Jesus elevated our humanity, giving it divine dignity. God not only made our souls in his image and likeness; he made himself—Jesus—in our image, with all the complications that being human implies. The Bible tells us Jesus was like us in all things but sin. For this reason we can say with confidence that we can be like Jesus even when we’re doing very mundane things. All the work of keeping ourselves financially stable, healthy, and happy can be part of our spiritual life.

Our union with God depends on how we do the things we do. There are three fabulous entrance points into the Divine Cure that we can apply in our daily routine—that is, doing the things we do:

1. Do ordinary things in an extraordinary way.

2. Let go of just causes.

3. Consult regularly with the Senior Partner.

Do Ordinary Things in an Extraordinary Way

I know a man who shines shoes on the corner of Sixth Avenue and Forty-Seventh Street in New York City. In good fun and with admirable efficiency, he whistles at, jokes with, heckles, and berates potential customers as they pass by his stand. He has turned what could be a very boring job into a happy show that makes others smile and brings him a whole lot of business too.

I know many others who make a lot more money than he does, who never have to drum up business as he does—and who don’t smile half as much as he does. One day as I sat high in my friend’s chair, I asked him what keeps him so happy. I asked him if he had suffered much in his life. He responded by telling me a harrowing story of personal betrayal by his former wife, the mother of his children. It happened years ago, but it still affects his daily life as he deals with a broken family.

“So why are you so happy?” I asked. “Given all that’s happened, aren’t you angry? With all of that in your background, how can you always be smiling and making people laugh?”

His answer surprised me for its profound simplicity. “I made a decision a long time ago not to worry about the things I can’t change.”

“So do you just not think about it, or what?” I persisted.

“Yes,” he replied, “basically that’s it. I’m not ignoring reality, but I decided I don’t need to go down that road. I don’t want revenge. I don’t want hate. Life is what it is, and I’m moving forward. There are so many good things to be grateful to God for—why would I focus on the one thing that went really bad?”

He later revealed that he keeps a very cordial and healthy relationship with the mother of his children, for their sake, but also for his. His days are a blessing for others—including those family members—and are totally his because he hasn’t let his heart wallow in self-pity or anger.

My friend didn’t explain his approach in spiritual terms, but what he has chosen to do is deeply spiritual. He has protected his soul from the devil’s favorite weapons of anger and resentment and has chosen to live each moment with passion and look to the future with confidence. There’s a lot of faith, hope, and love there!

The difference between a life of general distraction and one of profound spirituality is actually quite small in terms of what we have to do to go from one to the other. This is because we don’t get holy by doing holy things. God makes us holy by dwelling within us; all we have to do is invite him in through faith, hope, and love.

How many negative thoughts will run through our minds if we let them? Take a fast today from all negative thoughts and summon up positive, true thoughts to put in their place. What comes out of your mouth is what is already in your heart. Make your heart pure, and life will look better for you and everyone who comes near you. Look for the good in yourself and others, all day long. Let people around you know the good you see in them and in their actions.

Today is a blessing, and it is all yours. It is filled with opportunities of grace and life. Today you can live ordinary things at work and at home in an extraordinary way. You can choose to be fully engaged in every activity, because as a child of God everything you do, as unimportant as it may feel, has great value in your Father’s eyes. The formula for a great day is incredibly simple: be aware of who you are; seek God’s will in the big things and in the little things too; and do whatever you do with dedication, grace, and a smile.

Let Go of Just Causes

There is no faster entry into the Divine Cure than through cultivating a heart of mercy in our daily routine. Forgiveness is the ultimate merit badge and the defining characteristic of a mature Christian; it is the crown jewel of personal development. No other human affair brings us closer to Jesus in his redemptive act of suffering, death, and resurrection than our free-will choice to forgive those who trespass against us.

Yesterday someone made fun of me for a gaffe I made on television. He did it in front of people whose opinions of me I admittedly care too much about. For several hours I ruminated over what he’d done. I stoked the fire of my wounded pride with useless and uncharitable thoughts about his possible intentions.

Still stuck in my pettiness, I walked by a security guard whose job it is to ensure that only authorized personnel enter certain secured areas of the building. Out of the corner of my eye I saw an important on-air personality rush through one of the doors, crashing into the security guard as he passed through. It was quite evident that the reporter knew he’d hit this gentleman—the contact was considerable—but he expressed no apparent concern other than waving his hand over his shoulder as he scurried away, as if to show some generic regret. I went over and spoke to the security guard to make sure he was all right. He responded with these words: “I’m fine; in fact, I’m even better than before, because it’s good to get humbled every once in a while.” Now that’s living faith, living hope, and living love!

Immediately I turned to God, remembering my simmering resentment over a perceived slight. “Jesus, I’m handing over to you my negative feelings,” I prayed. “Forgive me for being so silly.”

Practicing mercy in our daily routine brings us close to the heart of Jesus. And the more we reflect on how much mercy God has shown to us, the more we will want to show mercy to everyone around us. Think of this: God became man in the person of Jesus of Nazareth in order to forgive us. He came to earth because forgiveness is that sweet—so sweet that he was willing to be crucified by us, his own children, so he could share mercy with us.

During the Easter Vigil service in many churches throughout the world, this ancient sequence is sung: “O happy fault . . . that gained for us so great a Redeemer.”

O happy fault? Yes! If it weren’t for original sin, and for our personal sin, we wouldn’t know the breadth and power of divine love. Nor would we know how our participation in this forgiveness can set us free from our deepest and darkest emotions of anger, resentment, and fear. Surely it would have been better never to have offended God, just as it would have been better for the Prodigal Son never to have left his father; but in God’s logic, so unlike our own, what should never have happened is now transformed into an incomparable blessing. A huge debt that we could never have paid on our own has been forgiven, and now we are embraced by God as prodigal children whom he loves, not because of how good we’ve been or what we can do for him in the future, but only because we are his children. And because he loved us in this manner, we know what true love is and are capable of loving others in like form.

Jesus taught Christian forgiveness most perfectly as he hung from the cross and forgave his executioners and those who were behind his gruesome death (Pontius Pilate, some Jewish leaders, the disciples who betrayed him, you and me). He looked at us as we were killing him and groaned, “Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.”

The basis of Christian forgiveness is not the leveling of the scales of justice. Forgiveness is not a calculation of sufficient payment. It is not a debt-reduction gimmick. Just the opposite is true. Christian forgiveness is letting go of a just cause we rightly have against someone. It is burning the accounts-receivable file and going right back into friendship and love with people whom, because of our selfless love, we see no longer as our debtors, and as if they never were.

Forgiveness is a decision of the will to let go, completely, and only out of love. What about forgiving someone who refuses to ask for forgiveness? What about forgiving someone who doesn’t want to be forgiven? What about forgiving someone who doesn’t think she’s done anything wrong? Yes, yes, and yes. Radical forgiveness of this type, day in and day out, will move us quickly into the Divine Cure, where we accept at the core of our existence that our happiness doesn’t depend on anyone treating us well, but rather on union with God, who has forgiven us of much more than anyone owes us.

Consult Regularly with the Senior Partner

We spoke in the first chapter of this book about our role as Junior Partners of the Holy Spirit. God has chosen to depend on us for his work of salvation, charity, and justice. We are his hands and feet in a world dying of a lack of love.

In our daily routine we can be Junior Partners by forming a habit of regular consultation with the Holy Spirit. We can do this not just when we find ourselves in a predicament, but rather as we plan and execute each and every day.

Start out your morning with prayer. The outline for Christian meditation I offered in an earlier chapter is one method. But no matter how you pray, make sure you talk to Jesus about the things that weigh on your heart. What are your concerns for the day? Write them down. What do you have to accomplish? Make a list. Set a plan. Present the plan in prayer to your Senior Partner, the Holy Spirit, and ask him if he has any items for you to add to your agenda. Now alter your plan accordingly. His concern for your day is bigger than yours. His resources are infinite, and he places them all at your disposal.

Are you anxious about a meeting? Take time, in prayer, to figure out why. Ask yourself probing questions. Does that person you’re meeting with make you feel insecure? Is it his tone of voice, his haughty demeanor, his questioning of your motives? The Holy Spirit will surely tell you that attitude is his problem only, and it doesn’t make you any better or worse in God’s eyes. Let it go. Turn instead to the One who made you, because he willed you here on this earth, and he accompanies you today as you set forth.

Our consultation with our Senior Partner, our loving Father, doesn’t end when our morning prayer is over. Throughout the day we’re constantly making decisions. Whenever there’s a decision of consequence, don’t go it alone. God is with us and wants to inspire us to do the right thing. One simple method that my dad taught me and that helps me a great deal is “PTA”—pray, think, and act:

1. Pray. Place yourself in God’s presence and ask him to enlighten you.

2. Think. Use the wonderful mind God gave you to think through the problem at hand.

3. Act. Now act in accordance with what you think God would have you do.

Contact with God at this practical level won’t make us spacey or disconnected. Just the opposite is true. We are more fully engaged in our activities when we have the consciousness to stop for a moment, turn our mind toward God, and ask him for guidance and strength. A glance his way helps us know when silence is best, when confrontation is called for, when going the extra mile is the right thing to do.

Regular glances toward God can also help us experience how very much he knows our needs and wants. God wants to love us with personal and intimate gifts. So when we look to him for guidance, his inspiration will point us toward things that will make us truly happy. Maybe you haven’t been exercising as you should because you hate running on the treadmill. You can bet that God will inspire you with better, more exciting ideas than treadmills. He knows you. Maybe you will remember that invitation from your friend to join his soccer team. Maybe you will decide to buy a bike. Or perhaps the Holy Spirit will inspire you to buy flowers for your wife and she, through you, will experience God’s love in a gift that is a perfect fit.

ACTIVE CONSENT

I can’t finish without making a final distinction between the responses of “resignation” and “consent” when our spiritual journey comes on hard times we cannot change. I just got a call from a man I’ve been in conversation with for a couple of years. Andrew and I first talked when he discovered that his wife—the mother of his three children—had been cheating on him for almost ten years. After going through the normal psychological and spiritual stages of shock, disbelief, anger, and so on, he finally settled a year later into a deep sadness, what he called a “manageable” depression. He was “resigned” to living with something he could never change and would never get over. His resignation was not a willful act. It was a default position of emotional indifference.

When he called me today, I could hear new life in his voice. I knew that he and his wife were going on a marriage renewal retreat, and I figured this must have done it. But according to Andrew, they went and came back in the same exact condition. “So why the joy in your voice?” I asked.

Andrew told me that on the retreat he had decided to start his regular prayer time again. He had no interest in praying about the relationship. He had given up on its ever getting better and didn’t expect anything from God in that regard. After all, it wasn’t his fault. Andrew explained to me, however, with excitement in his voice, that he had felt an unexpected inspiration in prayer to accept his wife’s infidelity as something God had permitted. Even though Andrew had accepted her apology some time earlier and they were living together again, mostly for the sake of the children, he had never accepted what had happened as being part of a reality God had allowed. In other words, he had resigned himself to the situation, but it was a completely passive response.

The joy Andrew had experienced by actively accepting his situation can be explained by the principle of consent. Consenting to a tragic situation is very different than resigning oneself to it. Have you offered your consent to God’s permissive or active will in your life? Have you actively accepted your situation? Have you told God you’re confident he will bring forth a greater good out of it?

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CHAPTER ONE

To Teach (and Learn) as Jesus Did

Looking to the Master at Work

At the outset, let me make crystal clear that the defining core, greatest asset, and most enticing feature of Christian faith is Jesus Christ. This may seem obvious, and yet it is worth stating at the outset, because Christians often lose sight of this simple truth: the heart of Christian faith is Jesus Christ. It is not the scriptures, or the dogmas and doctrines, or the commandments, or the sacraments, or the Church, or any other one “thing”—important and vital as all these are. Rather, as the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) so well summarizes: “At the heart . . . we find a Person, the Person of Jesus of Nazareth, the only Son from the Father” (n. 426).

Note well that this statement names the core “Person” as both the Jesus of history, the one “of Nazareth,” and the Christ of faith, “the only Son from the Father.” So Christians are called to be disciples to that carpenter from Nazareth who walked the roads of Galilee, who preached the reign of God with its rule of radical love, even of enemies; who fed the hungry, cured the sick, consoled the sorrowing, and welcomed the marginalized; who claimed to be the kind of messiah who brings liberty to captives, sight to the blind, good news to the poor, and freedom to the oppressed (Isa. 61:1; Luke 4:21); who presented himself as “the way, and the truth, and the life” (John 14:6) and invited all and sundry to “come follow me.” Such is the way that the historical Jesus modeled for us.

To follow the way of Jesus, however, we need him also to be the Christ of faith, the Son of God, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, who by his life, death, and resurrection makes it possible for us to so live. The paschal mystery—Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection—forever mediates to us “God’s abundant grace in Christ Jesus” (1 Tim. 1:14, NAB; see also 2 Cor. 4:15; 9:8; Titus 3:6). Because of his dying and rising, we can live as disciples of Jesus. Whatever we do by way of educating in Christian faith, then, Jesus Christ must be its defining center. We must teach disciples to follow his way and then to embrace him as Lord and Savior, and likewise teach what he taught us of God, of the Holy Spirit, and how to live as people of God. The defining value of our curriculum is “the boundless riches of Christ” (Eph. 3:8).

For Christian religious educators, teaching Jesus Christ and teaching what he taught must be the heart and soul of our educating in faith. At the same time, might it be that we are also to teach as Jesus did?[1] At first blush, this may well sound like a pious platitude or a naive proposition. After all, we are living in a very different time and context than Jesus did. Shouting from a hillside to a crowd below (no microphone) or trudging dusty roads in search of disciples (no Web outreach) is hardly a model for us today. Neither do we have his miracles at the ready to encourage people to faith. Jesus was then; we are now.

Admittedly, a time-and-culture chasm exists between us. Nevertheless there is something enduring about human nature, something true for all time and in every culture, and likewise about Christian faith. Jesus would be the first to encourage us to take full advantage of all the modern means of communication and every instructional technology at our disposal in order to mediate God’s word into people’s lives. Likewise, Jesus would advise us to craft all communication of his gospel “according to the mode of the receiver,” in other words, in ways likely to be effective in our time and place.

This being said, we are ever called “to teach in his name” (Acts 5:28). So our “intended learning outcomes” should surely reflect those of Jesus, and our approach to promoting them should be inspired by his teaching style and be consistent with how he went about it—certainly not inconsistent. For example, our approach should reflect Jesus’s welcome for all, his respect for learners, and the way he actively engaged them with the ordinary and everyday themes and symbols of their lives, even while he taught them “as one having authority” (Mark 1:22) and invited them to discipleship (1:17). Conversely, to be inhospitable and excluding, disrespectful of learners, oblivious to their lives, wishy-washy in what we teach, and indifferent about people’s responses would be teaching in ways antithetical to Jesus’s and the faith he represented.

To detect his style of teaching we have to rely on the hints we find in the Gospels. Jesus never articulated nor do the Gospel writers describe his teaching style per se. On the other hand, the Gospels refer to his public ministry as “teaching” some 150 times. Nicodemus had it right, “We know that you are a teacher who has come from God” (John 3:2). So the Gospels contain numerous clues about teaching as Jesus did. Before examining some of those clues, however, pause and take note of how you imagine Jesus’s teaching style.

For Reflection and Conversation

- From your own encounter with Jesus through the Gospels, what was he hoping to achieve by his teaching? That is, what do you think was the learning outcome he intended in people’s lives?

- How would you describe Jesus’s pedagogy, his overall approach to teaching? List its most salient features.

- How does Jesus’s approach compare with your own?

Educating in Whole Faith for God’s Reign

For God’s Reign: To appreciate and be inspired by how Jesus may have taught, we first need to detect why he taught—his purposes in teaching. Surely Jesus crafted his approach to serve his intentions, and every educator in faith should do the same. Otherwise, what we hope to teach may be defeated by how we go about it. In teaching, medium and message are ever intertwined, and this is particularly true of educating in Christian faith.

Scripture scholars now agree that the symbol “reign of God” summarizes how Jesus understood his life’s mission and what he intended to catalyze in people’s lives by means of his public ministry. Over and over, Jesus’s teachings begin with the words “The reign [or kingdom] of God is like . . .” Repeatedly he talks about who belongs to God’s reign, how to be among them, and so on. As the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) attest, the reign of God is constantly on Jesus’s lips and is clearly the touchstone of his life and teaching.

Though the scholars agree that the reign of God was the focus of Jesus’s ministry, they debate what exactly he meant by it. The reign or kingdom of God was a favored symbol in the Jewish faith of the time, yet Jesus gave it his own spin as well. Clearly he intended it to mean the realization of God’s intentions—God’s will—for all people and all creation. This is the work of God within human history. However, when teaching disciples to pray “Your kingdom come,” he taught them to immediately add “Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” (Matt. 6:10). In other words, and as reflected throughout the Bible, God takes God’s people into covenant partnership, to live as God intends. So we have kingdom hope for what God is bringing about, and kingdom responsibility to do God’s will now—on earth. Well, then, what is God’s will for us?

The response from the whole gamut of biblical Revelation is that God intends the best of everything for everyone, all the time, and the integrity of God’s creation. God’s intention is for all people to enjoy and live with faith, hope, and love, with peace and justice, with mercy and compassion, and with holiness and wholeness of life and to fulfill all the authentic desires of the human heart, which are God’s desires for us as well. The Hebrew scriptures summarize the realization of God’s reign as shalom (“peace with justice”). Jesus summarizes it this way in John’s Gospel: “I came that [you] may have life, and have it abundantly” (10:10). We can well name God’s will as fullness of life for all.

The Bible makes clear that what God wills to us becomes God’s will for us—in other words, what God wants us to have is how we should live. God is ever active within human history on behalf of God’s reign and takes humanity into covenant to so live. Since God wills the integrity of creation, the people of God must be its good stewards (Gen. 2:15); because God wills justice to all, people in covenant with God must do the works of justice and promote it in society (Mic. 6:8); and so on. From the perspective of Christian faith, Jesus is the catalyst of God’s reign within human history. The paschal mystery is the powerhouse of grace that works through us to realize God’s reign now and to ensure its completion at the end time. Jesus is both “the way, and the truth, and the life” (John 14:6) by which we are to live for God’s reign and the Savior who makes it possible for us to do so.

After that, it seems wisest to say that for Jesus, the “reign of God” was a tensive symbol in the sense that it had many meanings, often with “both/and” paradoxes. Thus, Jesus taught God’s reign as a symbol of both hope and command, of promise and responsibility, as comforting the disturbed and disturbing the comfortable. He spoke of it as already present in him, but yet to come in its fullness, as a reward in the hereafter and to begin here as well, as something to be realized as both personal holiness and social justice, as a deeply spiritual yet also a social reality, to shape both the prayers and the politics of disciples.

According to Mark, the first Gospel written, this is how Jesus launched his public ministry: “Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news’ ” (1:14–15). At the end of his ministry, the good thief on the cross echoed the central theme of Jesus’s life when he requested, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom” (Luke 23:42). Luke concludes the Acts of the Apostles by saying that Paul spent his time “proclaiming the kingdom of God and teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ” (28:31). Jesus taught God’s reign and now we, like Paul and the first Christians, must continue to teach what Jesus taught—the reign of God—and to teach Jesus as our Lord and Savior, God’s definitive agent in the ongoing coming of God’s reign in human history.

So “to teach as Jesus did” means that the coming of God’s reign and God’s will being done on earth as in heaven should be our overarching purpose in Christian religious education. God’s reign should be the ultimate guideline that helps us decide what and why and how to teach, shaping our whole curriculum in Christian faith. Indeed, God’s reign in Jesus of love and compassion, peace and justice, fullness of life, and the stewardship of creation is to be the overall criterion in how we understand any symbol, text, or tradition of Christian faith.

A student new to the study of theology came to me greatly perplexed by all the apparent contradictions she was finding in her study of scripture. What was she to make, for example, of Jesus’s two contrasting statements, “I have not come to bring peace, but the sword” (Matt. 10:34), on the one hand, and on the other, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you” (John 14:27)? I explained that we always need what the scholars call “a canon within the Canon,” in other words, an overall “rule” or “measure” (the meaning of Greek canon) that guides our interpretation, explanation, and application of any text of sacred Scripture or teaching of Tradition. The “reign of God” as God’s will and intentions for us can serve as such a canon. In this light, Jesus’s statement favoring peace must be taken as the overall intent of his gospel. It is important for teachers and parents, with the guidance of the Church, to have such a ready-at-hand canon.

Now we need to ask what Christian faith might look like as it does God’s will on earth. This will indicate Jesus’s more immediate intentions—within the overarching ambit of God’s reign—and thus guide our own.

In Whole Faith: The Gospels make clear that Jesus’s immediate hopes were that the people he taught would become disciples. His overarching purpose of bringing about God’s reign would be served as people converted their lives and followed the way that he modeled and his dying and rising made possible. Such is the lived faith to which he invited people. The learning outcome he intended for disciples was for them to live as people of God after his example. We can say, then, that his educating intent was precisely that there would be faith on earth—as long as we understand faith as very holistic.

So often in English, “faith” is reduced to mean “belief,” that is, what people claim to accept as true in their heads. Of course, belief is an aspect of Jesus’s understanding of faith, but so too is a trusting relationship with God coupled with the morals and values by which disciples are to live. “Faith” for Jesus has a power-packed triple demand—beliefs, relationships, and commitments—all rolled into a single way of life. The Gospels reflect that Jesus educated for a whole faith, one that engages people’s heads, hearts, and hands—their entire way of being in the world.

There are many particular instances in which Jesus taught what people are to believe, how they are to pray and trust in God, and the ethic by which they should live. Perhaps the best instance of Jesus rolling all three into one for disciples is his preaching of the law of love as the “greatest commandment.” First, however, remember that Jesus’s preaching of the law of love was set within the greatest good news of his divine Revelation, namely, God’s unconditional love for all people. Fulfilling the “greatest commandment” must be our response to the God who has first loved us and will always love us.[2] As we read in 1 John 4:19, “We love because God first loved us.”

Responding to God’s love, then, is how disciples must live for the reign of God now, the lived faith that Jesus intends us to realize on earth. The three versions of the law of love, Matthew 22:34–40, Mark 12:28–34, and Luke 10:25–38, differ slightly from one another, and none quote Deuteronomy 6:5 exactly. The last is the parent text for love of God; Leviticus 19:18 is the parent text for love of neighbor as oneself. Nevertheless, all accounts emphasize that faith lived for God’s reign and in response to God’s love demands the whole of who we are, all our minds, our affections, and our wills.

In Mark’s version (my favorite), a scribe asks Jesus, “Which commandment is the greatest of all?” Note that he speaks in the singular and of the greatest—there can be only one tallest tree in the wood. Jesus responds by first repeating Deuteronomy 6:4: “Hear, O Israel! The Lord our God is Lord alone!” (nab). This is not in Matthew’s or Luke’s version; Mark, however, as the earliest Gospel, may be closest to what Jesus actually said. So Jesus was reiterating that the greatest commandment is based on the first of the Ten—to make God the God of our lives, to have no other gods besides God. Therefore, then, to put a God of love at the center of life requires a radical law of love that makes all three mandates—toward God, self, and neighbor—symbiotic with each other.

No Hebrew prophet before him had ever united Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18, but Jesus does: “ ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ ” At first blush, this looks like two, if not three, commandments—to love God, neighbor, and self. However, just as the scribe asked for the greatest, Jesus ends in the singular, “There is no other commandment greater than these” (Mark 12:31), confirming that the three are as one triangle.

The scribe responds and echoes Jesus with his own gloss of Deuteronomy 6:4: “Well said, teacher. You are right in saying, ‘He is One and there is no other than he’ ” (Mark 12:32, NAB). Indeed, God belongs at the center of a life of faith. Then, the same scribe, also departing slightly from the text of Deuteronomy 6:5, summarizes the triple love command as engaging heart, head, and hands: “To love God with all the heart, and with all the understanding, and with all the strength, and to love one’s neighbor as oneself ” (12:33). No wonder Jesus said to him, “You are not far from the kingdom of God” (12:34).

In Luke’s account, the question asked is not about the greatest commandment. Rather, a lawyer asks, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” In other words, “What life should I live to possess what matters most?” Note well how the lawyer poses the question—what to do? Jesus responds with the greatest commandment and concludes, “Do this, and you will live”; he implies here as well as hereafter. When the lawyer goes on to push Jesus with, “Who is my neighbor?” Jesus tells the parable of the good Samaritan and ends by saying, “Go and do likewise.” Note again the doing; the faith that Jesus taught must be lived (read Luke 10:25–37).

Matthew’s version falls short of Mark’s. Matthew rounds out something regarding the law and life of faith, however, with Jesus’s account of the last judgment and who will inherit God’s “kingdom prepared . . . from the foundation of the world” (25:34). This text makes clear that God wants our love for God to be expressed as love of neighbor, a love practiced to bring the best outcome for ourselves as well—to be among the sheep destined for God’s eternal reign. God will not say to those to be rewarded, “There was a hungry person one time and you fed him,” but rather “I was hungry and you gave me food,” and so on (25:31–46). For Jesus, the faith of discipleship is, indeed, a whole way of life. This will be important to remember when we imagine how best to educate for Christian faith. We will return to the theme of faith in Chapter 3 when we subsume these reflections of Chapter 1 to describe the purposes of Christian religious education.

For Reflection and Conversation

- Jesus’s teaching had the overarching theme of the reign of God. This is what he hoped to bring about in human history, the ultimate “learning outcome” for which he taught. What do you think? How might this inspire your own sense of grand purpose?

- How might it influence what you emphasize and highlight? How you teach?

- That people may come to faith was Jesus’s more immediate purpose, to a whole faith that shapes their beliefs, relationships, and values toward God’s reign. What do you think of such purpose? Anything to adjust in your own sense of “faith”?

- How might this shape what you teach? How you teach?

Watching the Master at Work

The New Testament word mathetes is usually translated “disciple.” In the world of the time, however, it also meant an “apprentice.” This humbler term reminds us that we are always apprenticed to the “Master.” As Jesus himself advised, “Do not be called ‘Master’; you have but one master, the Christ” (Matt. 23:10, NAB). So let us take a closer look at Jesus the master teacher at work and imagine ourselves apprenticed to him.

To appreciate Jesus’s distinctive pedagogy, I first note four salient features of his whole way of being with people as an educator. The particular pedagogy of individual educators is set within and permeated by their way of being with people. Even the best teaching methods will be less effective and perhaps defeated if an educator’s presence in learners’ lives is a negative one, for example, if the educator is authoritarian, elitist, manipulative, mean, or biased. The Incarnation was God’s way of being with us in Jesus. I detect that Jesus incarnated the divine pedagogy by being:

- Welcoming and inclusive,

- Respectful of learners,

- Compassionate and committed to justice, and

- Encouraging of partnership and servant leaders.

Welcoming and Inclusive: Jesus’s style was distinguished by its proactive outreach and radical inclusion. The two go hand in hand. Both would have been distinctive in his time and culture. To begin with, in that culture students would look for a teacher; teachers did not look for students. Jesus, by contrast, reached out into the highways and byways to recruit disciples. Following on, Jesus’s outreach was totally inclusive. Rather than focusing only on men or the elite, which would have been typical of teachers in his time, Jesus reached out to men, women, and children and to ordinary people—farmers, shepherds, merchants, homemakers, and fishermen. He reached out especially to the marginalized, to lepers and public sinners, to the physically and psychologically ill, to the poor and hungry, to the suffering and bereaved, to all who were oppressed by the cultural mores of the time.

The General Directory for Catechesis (GDC), the most authoritative recent document from the Catholic Church on religious education, summarizes this aspect of Jesus the Teacher: “Jesus made himself a catechist of the Kingdom of God for all categories of persons, great and small, rich and poor, healthy and sick, near and far, Jews and pagans, men and women, righteous and sinners, rulers and subjects, individuals and groups” (n. 163).[3] New Testament scholars point to Jesus’s table fellowship, his “eating with tax collectors and sinners” (Matt. 9:11), as symbolizing both his outreach and his inclusivity. The etymological roots of Greek katha holos—katholos—mean “to include all”; Jesus was truly “catholic” in his approach.

It is worth highlighting that Jesus fully included women within his community of disciples. There are many instances of his rejection of the male chauvinism of his time and place. Take, for example, his conversation with the Samaritan woman at the well in John 4. Jesus was not only speaking to a woman in public, but was explaining to her his core message, something teachers of his time would never do. Then he allowed the Samaritan woman to become a witness on behalf of his teaching to her own people, this in a culture where women were not allowed to bear witness. No wonder the disciples came back from the city, where they had gone to buy food (4:8), and “were astonished that he was speaking with a woman” (4:27—the verb there implies conversation). And well they might have been!

The clearest symbol of Jesus’s gender inclusivity, however, was that he welcomed women into his core band of disciples. All three Synoptic Gospels attest that the women at the foot of the cross had “followed Jesus from Galilee” (Matt. 27:55). This means that they were with him from the beginning of his ministry to its end at Calvary. Accepting John’s chronology, this would have been a three-year period. The Gospels place Mary Magdalene by name at the foot of the cross and then recognize her as the first witness to Jesus’s resurrection: “He appeared first to Mary Magdalene” (Mark 16:9). This made her—as reflected in her early church title the “apostle to the apostles”—the first to announce the resurrection to the rest. Jesus taught as much by such acts of inclusion as by his words of instruction.

Respectful of Learners: Jesus’s approach had tremendous respect for the learners. His whole intent was to empower people to become agents of their faith rather than dependents. He was not looking for docile devotees as a cult leader might do. Jesus wanted his disciples to become people fully alive to the glory of God. Matthew makes clear at the end of the Sermon on the Mount that Jesus was teaching “the crowds” (7:28), not just his inner circle of disciples. Imagine the affirmation experienced in the heads and hearts of ordinary peasant people when he taught them, “You are the salt of the earth; . . . you are the light of the world” (5:13–14). Think too of so many of Jesus’s miracles of healing; instead of boasting, “I have cured you,” Jesus’s typical comment was, “Your faith has made you well” (Mark 5:34). Note how he affirmed the widow’s mite, the prayer of the publican, the innocence of children, and so on. Respect and affirmation for all were hallmarks of his style.

Let religious educators note well the great respect Jesus showed for his learners’ discernment and decision-making ability. His call to discipleship was always by invitation and never by dictate. Apparently he always gave people the freedom to decline. For example, when some disciples found his teaching to be too “difficult” and left his community, instead of following after with threats or recriminations, Jesus turned to “the twelve” and asked, “Do you also wish to go away?” Peter’s response might imply that they had thought about it; he asks, “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life” (John 6:60, 66–68). The story of the “rich young man” in all three Synoptics (only in Matthew is he described as “young”; see 19:16–26) reflects a similar freedom. When Jesus challenges the man to move beyond obedience to the law and to embrace full discipleship, he declines and departs. Though saddened, Jesus does not threaten or send disciples to bring him back. His approach tells us that educating in faith must respect people’s freedom of choice. Anything less is unworthy of Jesus’s gospel.

Compassionate and Committed to Justice: New Testament scholars agree that a defining feature of Jesus’s public ministry was his compassion for those in need. One of his greatest parables taught that God is like a loving parent whose heart was “filled with compassion” upon seeing the prodigal return (Luke 15:20). We see Jesus’s compassion in the way he welcomed anyone who came to him with an open heart; he accepted all regardless of their condition or circumstance. Look at the welcome Jesus afforded Nicodemus, even though he came under cover of darkness (John 3:1–30); to Zacchaeus, though he had imposed heavy taxes upon his own people (Luke 19:1–19); to the bleeding woman, though her touch made him ritually unclean (8:43–48); and to the Roman centurion, though he was a Gentile and military official of the power ruling Jesus’s own people (Matt. 8:5–13). The list goes on.

Likewise, the work of justice was at the heart of Jesus’s ministry. His central teaching of God’s reign reflects as much. In his Jewish faith, God’s kingdom was understood as both a spiritual and a social symbol that calls people to holiness of life, which demands the works of peace and justice (see the Holiness Code of Leviticus 19). It is no surprise, then, that Jesus rejected every form of chauvinism and sexism, of racism and ethnic bias. The story of the Samarian woman hit all those bases. At the opening of his public ministry in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus declared that the great promise in Isaiah 61:1 of a Messiah who would be anointed by the Spirit of God to bring about justice was fulfilled in him. Jesus then spent the rest of his public life bringing good news to the poor, liberty to captives, sight to the blind, and freedom to the oppressed (see 4:16–21).

Encouraging of Partnership and Servant Leaders: The previous features imply that Jesus’s whole approach was to call people into a community of disciples, a community of partnership with him and with one another. From the beginning of his public ministry, we find Jesus calling disciples not just to follow him, but to become partners in his teaching. To the first two, the fishermen brothers Simon (later Peter) and Andrew, he said “Follow me and I will make you fish for people” (Mark 1:16). In other words, they would be partners in his labors. Midway through his public ministry, Jesus “called the twelve and began to send them out two by two” (i.e., in partnership), giving them the authority to carry on the work he was doing (see 6:7–13). A little later, Jesus called and appointed some seventy more disciples and likewise sent them out “in pairs” (see Luke 10:1–12), that is, in partnership, to teach what he was teaching.

Furthermore, Jesus’s community of disciples was to be a collaborative and egalitarian one. Though he designated leaders among them, they were to be servant leaders, serving as he had come to serve. The Gospels recount at least six occasions when Jesus, in one way or another, warned disciples that they were not to “lord it over” other people. The greatest among them was to be the servant of the rest (see Mark 10:41–45). Instead of placing themselves in control of people’s lives, he taught his community leaders to practice and encourage others in the egalitarian spirit of “little children” (see Matt. 18:1–5).

Whatever particular teaching methods we may employ, in order “to teach as Jesus did” we must try to set them within a way of being with people that is marked by being welcoming and inclusive, respectful of learners, compassionate and committed to justice, and encouraging of partnership and servant leaders. Though always no more than apprentices, by God’s grace and our own conscious efforts, we can at least aspire to approximate the example of the Master.

Now we’re ready to focus more precisely on Jesus’s pedagogy—his teaching style—as evident in explicit teaching/learning events. Though I’m surely a biased commentator, I propose that Jesus’s overall teaching dynamic was to lead people from life to Faith to life. He did so by:

- Beginning with people’s lives,

- Encouraging their own reflections,

- Teaching them his gospel with authority,

- Inviting them to see for themselves, to take his teaching to heart, and

- Encouraging their decisions for lived faith as disciples.

Beginning with People’s Lives: First, Jesus most often began a teaching event by inviting people to look at their present lives, their reality in the world. He turned his listeners to their own experience, to their feelings, thoughts, and values, to creation around them, to the beliefs, practices, attitudes, and mores of their religious tradition and culture, to their work and social arrangements, to their joys and sorrows, fears and hopes, sins and goodness—to life. His favorite teaching method in this regard was his use of parables in Matthew, Mark, and Luke and allegories (e.g., the Good Shepherd) or “signs” (e.g., wedding at Cana) in John. All of these begin with symbols of everyday life through which people could recognize their own lives and situations. In this, his pedagogy was to engage the very souls and thus the active participation of his listeners.

For example, Jesus’s parables were engaging stories—as stories always are—through which people could stop and recognize some aspect of their own experience and then see for themselves how to appropriate their teaching into their everyday lives. When he taught the parable of the sower, he most likely was talking to farmers; the parable of the fine pearls was likely told to pearl merchants, the lost coin parable to a group of women, perhaps gathered at the village well, and so on. Jesus engaged people’s interests and made them active participants in the teaching/learning dynamic by raising up real-life themes and issues of concern, by turning his listeners on to what was “happening.”

Encouraging People’s Own Reflections: Second, Jesus invited people to think about their lives in a whole new way. He wanted his listeners to recognize that great things like the reign of God and their own eternal destiny were being negotiated in the ordinary and everyday of their lives. He wanted them to reflect on the falsehood of hypocrisy, the emptiness of ritual detached from doing God’s will, the faith contradiction in hating any group or class, the unconditional love of God regardless of one’s worthiness or lack thereof.

Again, his commitment to encouraging people’s own reflections was epitomized in his use of parables. Indeed, his parables often turned people’s perspectives upside down. None of Jesus’s first hearers would have expected the Samaritan to be neighbor, or the father to welcome home the prodigal, or the prostitutes and tax collectors to enter the reign of God before the religious leaders. Such “reversals” were Jesus’s way of getting people to reflect critically, perhaps to change their minds and hearts, to see their lives and possibilities in a whole new way. We might say today that his teaching style invited people to a critical consciousness (in the sense of “discerning”), to reflect upon and question their own reality and to imagine how to live more faithfully as people of God.

Teaching His Gospel with Authority: Third, from the very beginning of Jesus’s public ministry, people recognized that he “taught them as one having authority” (Mark 1:22). In the midst of his stories and conversations, Jesus also took strong positions in teaching his gospel. On the one hand, he clearly cherished the Jewish tradition of his people, obeyed its precepts, quoted its scriptures, and said that he had come not to abolish the Law and the Prophets, but “to fulfill” them (Matt. 5:17). On the other hand, Jesus claimed the unique authority to reinterpret the tradition, to point to how people were missing out on the spirit of the law, and to propose a new vision for living as a people of God: “You have heard it said . . . but I say . . .” (5:21–22). Jesus himself did what he recommended by way of drawing old truths and new wisdom from the tradition: “Every scribe who has been instructed in the reign of God is like the head of a household who brings from his storeroom [or treasury] both the new and the old” (13:52, NAB).

It is important to note here that Jesus, in fact, had no official authority in his culture. He was neither an appointed rabbi nor a member of the Sanhedrin. So what was the source of his authority? It must have come from the integrity of his life, that is, from his personal conviction matched by lifestyle. Given how radical his teaching was—love of enemies, praying for persecutors (Matt. 5:43–48), loving even as God loves (John 15:9)—it is amazing that no one ever accused Jesus of failing to practice what he preached. Oh, he was accused of eating with sinners, breaking the Sabbath, ignoring dietary laws, and more, but never of hypocrisy. Jesus must have walked the walk as well as talked the talk. That makes for real authority; faith educators take note.

To recap Jesus’s pedagogy thus far, he invited people, first, to look at and, second, to reflect upon their lives in the world; third, he taught them “the Faith” with authority, both the old and the new of it. Now, I propose that there were two additional dynamics ever present in his pedagogy, however subtle: he invited people to recognize for themselves what this faith might mean for their lives and then to make decisions for discipleship.

Inviting People to See for Themselves: Fourth, Jesus taught in a way that invited people to recognize for themselves his spiritual wisdom, to take to heart and personally embrace the truth he was teaching. Jesus often blessed those “with the eyes to see and the ears to hear.” More than physical seeing and hearing, he wanted people to open themselves up to and make their own what he was teaching. He enabled the Samaritan woman to come to see for herself, and see for herself she did. “Could he possibly be the Messiah?” she wondered (John 4:29, NAB). The same was true for her friends. Although at first the woman was a witness to her village on Jesus’s behalf, in time they too came to recognize him for themselves. They said, “It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the Savior of the world” (4:42). The greatest example of Jesus’s wanting people to “see for themselves” is in the story of the Risen Christ and the two bewildered disciples on the road to Emmaus; we review this in detail below.

Encouraging People’s Decisions for Lived Faith as Disciples: Fifth, Jesus’s invitation to discipleship—to lived faith—was ever on offer. The intended outcome of his whole public ministry was that people might decide to live for the reign of God, following his “way, truth, and life” as disciples. Jesus was adamant that to belong to God’s reign people cannot simply confess faith with their lips, saying “Lord, Lord,” but must actually “do the will” of his “Father in heaven” (Matt. 7:21). That surely requires decision. After washing his disciples’ feet, Jesus told them, “As I have done for you, so you should also do” (John 13:15, NAB), and again, “Love one another as I have loved you” (15:12). Jesus even went so far as to say, “Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother” (Mark 3:35). From his opening statement inviting people to “repent, and believe in the good news” (1:15) to his farewell discourse (“Abide in my love . . . keep my commandments,” John 15:9–10), Jesus invited people to the decision for lived faith.

As seen previously, Jesus had a holistic sense of faith; his was a faith that entailed knowledge, relationship, and commitment. Though it was holistic, however, Jesus didn’t necessarily see faith unfolding in that order—from head to heart to hands. Oftentimes he put the doing of faith first, which would then lead to relationship with him, and then on to true knowledge. For example, “If you obey my teachings, you are really my disciples; you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:31–32, Good News Bible). Notice that the living leads to discipleship, which leads to knowledge. In whatever order, discipleship to Jesus calls for decision—cognitive, affective, behavioral—for Christian faith that is realized. As John has Jesus say, “Whoever lives the truth comes to the light” (3:21, NAB).

In summary, Jesus engaged people’s own lives and encouraged them to reflect on them. He preached with authority the old-and-new faith that was his gospel. He invited would-be disciples to see for themselves how to integrate “life” and “faith” and to make decisions for lived, living, and life-giving faith for themselves, for others, and “for the life of the world” (John 6:51). Jesus’s pedagogy was one of bringing life to Faith to life—as lived faith.

- What is your own response to the above portrayal of how Jesus taught? What would you add to this description? What do you most appreciate about his approach?

- When you compare Jesus’s teaching style to yours, what similarities or dissimilarities do you recognize? Are there any decisions you need to make?

On the Road with the Risen Christ

The commitments and dynamics outlined above are evident in Jesus’s approach to teaching throughout his public ministry. Nowhere are they as vividly represented, however, as in the story of the Risen Christ and the two disciples on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24:13–35). Read the text for yourself. Imagine being “on the road” with the two disciples and the Stranger they encounter. Experience this teacher at work. Note the rhythm and movements of his pedagogy. It is a classic instance of an educator crafting a teaching/learning event based on life to Faith to life.

The story begins on “that same day”—Easter morning. The Risen Christ, appearing only as a fellow traveler, joins two discouraged disciples as they set out on the journey, seven miles or so, from Jerusalem to the village of Emmaus. Clearly these two are in great anguish, traumatized by the fate that has befallen their beloved Jesus. The Gospel reports that they “looked sad” and says that they “had hoped”—note the past tense. Perhaps the two were running away from Jerusalem, afraid that as Jesus’s disciples they might suffer the same fate. Maybe they were even changing sides? Emmaus was a Roman garrison.

When Jesus encounters them, they are, as we might expect, engaged in a lively conversation about “all the things that had happened.” He simply joins their company and walks along “with them.” What a great description of the primary posture of the religious educator—neither for, nor against, nor behind, nor ahead of, nor under, nor over, but walking along with people. Meanwhile, “their eyes were kept from recognizing” their new traveling companion.

We can well ask why they didn’t recognize Jesus. Were they blinded by their disappointment and discouragement? Were they simply preoccupied with their own pain and certainly not expecting a Risen Jesus? Note too that Luke’s Gospel often portrays faith as seeing for oneself what should be seen; maybe they’ve simply lost faith? A better pedagogical question, however, is why Jesus didn’t introduce himself. An amazing aspect of this Teacher’s approach is that he never tells these two disciples what to see. Rather, he crafts the teaching/learning dynamics so that eventually they come to see for themselves.

Jesus begins the pedagogy by turning the two to life, to look at and reflect upon what is going on for them and within their own souls. He asks, “What are you discussing while you walk along?” They stop, “looking sad,” and one of the two, Cleopas by name, essentially responds, “What a silly question.” Cleopas infers, reasonably, that Jesus must be a “stranger in Jerusalem” and the only one who doesn’t know “the things that have taken place there in these days.”

The Stranger simply asks, “What things?” What an amazing question for the Christ to ask. Surely no one knew better than he what had gone on in Jerusalem over the past week. So why ask? Clearly, Jesus wants them to name and reflect upon what is going on in their lives, to tell their own story and vision of it. And that is precisely what they do. They recount their version of how “Jesus of Nazareth, a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people” had been taken and crucified, shattering their hopes that he was “the one who would set Israel free” (JB). They admit their confusion and disbelief at the report from some women disciples who had gone to the tomb before dawn on this third day and had not found his body, but saw a vision of angels “who said that he was alive.” They explain that other disciples—they imply men—went to the tomb, found it empty “just as the women had said; but they did not see him.”

The disciples’ own life situation and its generative theme—sadness and loss of hope—is now out on the table. Only then does the Stranger move the conversation to their shared Faith tradition, prefaced by noting that the two are “slow of heart” to recognize fulfillment of the ancient messianic prophecies. He then reviews with them “the things about himself in all the scriptures” (no wonder it takes all day to walk the seven miles), interpreting his life as the fulfillment of God’s promises through the prophets. Further, the Stranger explains that it was “necessary” that the Messiah “should suffer these things and then enter into his glory.” Perhaps this is why they still don’t recognize him; they were hoping for a great political Messiah who “would set Israel free”—from the Romans—whereas he came as a suffering servant. He has set up a dialectic between their hopes for the messianic promise and how it was actually fulfilled.

At this point, both the story and vision from the disciples’ own lives and the Story and Vision of their faith community are in discourse. Even so, the two disciples still do not “see,” and the Stranger continues to resist telling them. Reaching Emmaus, he appears ready to travel on. The Stranger intrigues them enough, however, that they press him, “Stay with us . . . the day is now nearly over.” The offer of hospitality convinces him to remain; “he went in to stay with them.”

When the three sit for supper, the Stranger, as a guest, makes the unusual move to act like the host. As a good educator, he is proactive for the desired learning outcome. Luke uses the same four verbs for actions with regard to the bread that appear in all three Gospel accounts of the Last Supper; the Stranger takes, blesses, breaks, and gives it to them. And with that “their eyes were opened, and they recognized him.” The Greek verb translated “recognized” here means that the disciples “knew” Jesus with their whole being, that they were bonded with him.

We can well ask, why now? Was it an echo from the story of the Last Supper that struck the chord? Perhaps. Was it a result of their offering hospitality to a stranger—an important theme in Luke—that is rewarded by the gift of spiritual sight, by which Luke means faith? Maybe. All of us have had experiences of meals that opened our eyes to see something more, that bonded relationships. The Latin com panis, literally “with bread,” is the root of our word “companion.” We’ve likely experienced the blessings that can come from offering hospitality. Note too that the story reflects the pattern of worship emerging in the first Christian community, with the Liturgy of the Word on the road and the Liturgy of the Eucharist at the table, always a privileged locus for seeing what should be seen. The Risen Christ, however, was already present to these two disciples; they simply needed to recognize him for themselves. Meanwhile, note again the amazing feature that Jesus never tells the two disciples what to see. Rather, he waits and waits for them to come to see for themselves. I’ve found such patience to be the greatest challenge in my own teaching style.

After they saw him for themselves, the text says, “he vanished from their sight.” Again we may ask, why vanish now? Maybe Jesus’s work was done? Perhaps teachers can recede when students have come to see for themselves? We can also ask where he went. To another Emmaus road, surely. A student once asked me, “Professor, did this ever happen?” I replied, “Yes, regularly!” The Risen Christ promised to be “with [us] always to the end of time” (Matt. 28:20, JB). We are always on some Emmaus road and the Risen Christ ever walks “with” us—if we would but recognize him. But surely the best response is that the Risen Christ disappeared into them, into us, into the Body of Christ, as Paul imagined the Church (Rom. 12:4–5). With Christ present to us as the “head” (Col. 1:18) and by the power of the Holy Spirit enlivening this Christian body (1 Cor. 12:4–11), we are now his agents in the world, commissioned and empowered to teach both what and how Jesus taught.

So finally the two disciples put it all together. As they think back over the experience, they say, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?” The Stranger on the road must have had great passion for what he was teaching; that’s the only way to make people’s hearts—souls—“burn.” Now, having come to see for themselves and with faith renewed, they decide to turn around and return to Jerusalem. When people come to know in the depths of their being, they can’t just toddle on home as intended. Their very “being” is changed by such “knowing” (more in Chapter 4). These two disciples are compelled to return to Jerusalem, to come back to life again with renewed faith. The Gospel says, “That same hour they got up and returned to Jerusalem”; this would have been a hazardous journey, late at night. But when Christians come to know for themselves, as much recognition as cognition, they are called to go share and live the good news.

When the two reach Jerusalem, they find that the little Christian community is gathering together again, beginning to assemble its new faith Story and Vision. They are greeted with, “The Lord has risen indeed, and he has appeared to Simon!” Although the two from the Emmaus road respect this emerging Story of the Christian community, they don’t lose their own story either. “Then they told what had happened on the road, and how he had been made known to them in the breaking of the bread.” Again, note that the conversation and presentation on the road were important, and yet recognition happened in the “breaking of the bread.” It continues to happen today in all the ways that we break bread together, the bread of friendship, the bread of right and loving relationships, and the bread of Eucharist, the ultimate encounter with the Risen Friend—a Stranger no more.

The Emmaus encounter is a paradigm story that can inspire every educator in Christian faith—every teacher and parent—to “teach as Jesus did.” The Emmaus road story leaves no doubt that Jesus’s approach was to enable learners to bring their lives and their pressing issues to the spiritual wisdom of the Faith tradition, and then to bring that Faith back to new and renewed commitment to lived, living, and life-giving faith. Surely this is the best hope for our own pedagogy as well.

To Learn as Jesus Did?

We know precious little about Jesus’s childhood. Except for the “finding in the Temple” incident (Luke 2:41–52, about which more below), the Gospels suggest nothing from shortly after Jesus’s birth until he begins his public ministry, usually dated around the age of thirty. In view of the fact that Jesus was raised in the rural village of Nazareth, in the social backwater of Galilee, how do we explain his keen ability—evident throughout his public ministry—to quote and cite the Hebrew scriptures and to debate points of the law? Although Nazareth was an out-of-the-way town, we know that it had a synagogue (see 4:16). Growing up, then, Jesus would have attended synagogue school where the hazzan, or reader, was the teacher. Since Joseph was a carpenter—a skilled tradesperson—Jesus’s family would have had the resources to pay the hazzan’s teaching fee, thus assuring Jesus of a formal religious education.

Beyond Jesus’s schooling, he also would have been socialized into the Jewish faith of his culture. He learned from participating with his family and neighbors in Sabbath worship and by keeping the high holy days both within the family and at the synagogue. Add to these the many informal conversations that must have gone on in the home. In those days people had little entertainment other than communal conversation, and favorite topics were faith and politics. Further, there was a strong Jewish tradition of the father instructing the sons. We know from the Gospels that Joseph taught Jesus his carpenter trade: “Is not this the carpenter?” (Mark 6:3). Surely Joseph also taught Jesus about his faith tradition and, with Mary, directly influenced his values and outlook on life.

Contemporary research affirms such extrapolations about the influence of Jesus’s family and life context. The social sciences agree that the influence of home and parents is paramount in the formation of children’s identity and values. Likewise, numerous doctoral dissertations about teaching style conclude that teachers tend to teach the way that they were taught. Taking both points, we can presume that Mary and Joseph had a very positive influence on Jesus and the kind of person he became. Likewise, they must have modeled a pedagogy that exemplified inclusion, respect, and partnership and must have encouraged their son to bring his life to Faith and his Faith to life.

There is a theological question percolating here. How did Jesus come by his extraordinary values? For example, where did he get his totalizing version of the great law of love? Even love of enemies? Love tolerant enough to turn the other cheek, to go the extra mile? Why did Jesus challenge the racism and sexism of his culture and dare to fully include women in his community of disciples? As already noted, the defining feature of Jesus’s public life was his compassion toward any and all in need. Well, where did he get his deep commitment to caring for the poor and hungry? Apart from the resurrection, feeding the hungry is the only miracle reported six times in the Gospels (once in both Luke and John; twice in Matthew and Mark).

Of course, we could respond, “Well, Jesus was the Son of God.” True indeed. Christians believe that Jesus was God’s “one, perfect, and unsurpassable Word” of divine Revelation to the world (CCC, n. 65). Yet the dogmas of Christian faith insist that the one person Jesus had two natures; he was fully divine and fully human. Likewise they affirm that the humanity of Jesus was assumed, but not absorbed by his divine personhood. In other words, Jesus’s divinity did not suspend his humanity. We read in the ancient declaration of the Council of Chalcedon (451 CE): “One and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ” was “perfect in divinity and perfect in humanity . . . consubstantial with the Father as to his divinity and consubstantial with us as to his humanity.” Echoing Chalcedon, the Catechism teaches: “The distinction between the natures was never abolished by their union, but rather the character proper to each of the two natures was preserved as they came together in one person” (n. 468). As a result, Jesus had “to inquire for himself about what one in the human condition can learn only from experience” (n. 472).

Without getting into the timeless debates about how the divinity and humanity of Jesus coexisted in one person, we can surely say that the human and historical figure Jesus had to be taught and needed to learn throughout his childhood. Clearly, Mary and Joseph were his most significant teachers.

So, now, where did Jesus initially get his extraordinary values and outlook on life? The only answer must be—as for all of us—from his parents. Read the Magnificat (Luke 1:46–55). Recognize the God that Mary believed in, and the source of Jesus’s values becomes patent. Mary had a powerful sense of God’s presence and rejoiced in God, who intervened in her life as Savior. Mary’s was a God whose mercy endures forever, a God who scatters the proud, puts down the mighty from their thrones and raises up the lowly, who fills the hungry with good things and sends the rich away empty-handed, who always keeps promises. In this light, no wonder Jesus came into his home synagogue at Nazareth on a Sabbath day, “as was his custom,” looked for what scholars have called the most radical social justice text in all of scripture, Isaiah 61:1–2, and proclaimed that he was its fulfillment (see again Luke 4:16–21).

Christians have long revered Mary, lionizing her great faith, and rightly so. We believe that God chose her from all eternity for an extraordinary role in God’s work of salvation, to become mother to the “Son of God” (see Luke 1:26–38). Mary’s “let it be with me according to your word” (1:38) was the great human fiat that made possible God’s incarnation as one of us in Jesus. Beyond Mary’s vital role in parenting Jesus, the Gospels report her presence in Jesus’s public ministry. According to John’s Gospel, she prompted Jesus’s first miracle, or “sign,” at the wedding feast of Cana (2:1–12), and John’s Gospel places her at the foot of the cross (19:25).

What about Joseph? Consistent with Jewish custom in Galilean villages of the time, Joseph would have had at least as significant a role as Mary in Jesus’s education and apprenticeship. In keeping with cultural practice, we can imagine the men who came by Joseph’s carpenter shop being engaged in conversations about faith, helping to immerse Jesus in the spiritual wisdom and knowledge of his Jewish tradition.

Matthew’s Gospel describes Joseph as “a righteous man,” that is, a just person. When he found out that Mary was pregnant “before they lived together,” he refused “to expose her to public disgrace” and wanted “to dismiss her quietly” (1:18–19). What extraordinary sensitivity and concern Joseph had for his beloved Mary. He could well have felt personally offended and taken a very different position, even leading to her ruin; presumed adulterers could be stoned to death. Yet, though Joseph was surely bewildered by the turn of events and unable to explain them, he was intent on protecting Mary. We can infer that Joseph helped to nurture Jesus’s later respect for women.

Besides being a man of compassion, Joseph must also have been a person of deep faith. He was instructed by an angel in a dream to “take Mary as [his] wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.” It would have been understandable, however, for Joseph to awake, say, “Yeah, right,” and dismiss it all as just a dream. Instead, Joseph takes a great leap of faith and does “as the angel of the Lord had commanded him.” (Read the whole story in Matthew 1:18–25.) Such was the great faith that Joseph modeled to his son Jesus.

After the nativity narratives, the only instance we have in the Gospels of Mary and Joseph in a shared parenting role is the story of the twelve-year-old Jesus being lost for three days before they found him in the Temple (Luke 2:41–52). Setting aside pious sentiment and accepting not only Jesus as fully human but Mary and Joseph as well will help us to appreciate this story all the more.

The Holy Family, along with relatives and friends, had gone up to Jerusalem for the festival of Passover. The text says they did this “every year” (Luke 2:41). Returning home in a community caravan, Joseph and Mary had gone a day’s journey before they even realized that Jesus was missing. Each must have presumed that he was coming along with other family or friends. Imagine the absolute panic of Mary and Joseph, maybe even a few tense exchanges: “I thought he was with your people”; “Well, I thought he was with your people.” As the couple hurried back to Jerusalem, they must have been worried sick about their only son, a young boy, lost in a dangerous city. They searched for another two days without success.

Apparently, the Temple was about the last place they tried, and there he was, “sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions.” (Note that asking good questions, the mark of an open learner, would become a feature of his pedagogy.) According to Luke, Mary, cool as a cucumber, walked up to Jesus and asked calmly, “Son, why have you done this to us? Your father and I have been looking for you with great anxiety” (nab). But I wager that much more than that happened and got said. Can’t you imagine Mary and Joseph rushing into the Temple upon sight of their young son, scooping him up in their arms, smothering him with hugs and kisses, with an avalanche of inquiries about what had happened to him, if he was all right, if he’d had anything to eat, if anyone had hurt him. Then, though the text makes it sound as if Jesus was simply spending a little time in “his Father’s house,” I imagine his making a typical twelve-year-old’s retort: “But you should have known where to look for me.” Sound like a preteen? And who knows what Mary and Joseph said next.

According to the Gospel, Mary and Joseph “did not understand,” a common plight of parents, especially of twelve-year-olds. Then the Gospel reports that “he went down with them and came to Nazareth, and was obedient to them.” In fact, he didn’t leave home again until he was thirty years of age. Then, the story ends with the summary report “and Jesus increased in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favor”—in other words, under Joseph’s and Mary’s good parenting.

No matter how we interpret this story, it surely assures parents that Mary and Joseph can be their intercessors with Jesus amid the challenges of parenting in any age, including our own. They know about parenting from the inside and also about raising a child in “the Faith.”

Beyond this, if we are to enable people to “learn as Jesus learned,” then we simply must give priority to parents and the home (our major theme in Chapter 6). Even the Holy Family reminds us that the socialization of the home makes parents the primary educators of their children in faith. I believe Jesus, Mary, and Joseph would assure us of as much.

For Reflection and Conversation

- What are the best insights or wisdom you’ve recognized for yourself in this chapter about teaching and learning “as Jesus did”?

- How might you take such insights or wisdom to heart and put them to work in your own approach to educating in faith?

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CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The Contemplative in Action

Our Way of Proceeding

ONE OF MY FAVORITE moments in film is from a foreign movie, first released in 2006, called Paris, Je T’Aime, a series of twenty vignettes by a group of international directors. Each story takes place in Paris. One depicts a love affair; another a meeting between a father and daughter; another a violent and bloody murder. In one vignette, Alexander Payne, the director of the film Sideways, offers the story of Carol, a mail carrier from Denver, who has saved her money for a dream vacation to Paris. She’s even taken French language lessons for the past two years in preparation for her big trip.

Carol, played by Margo Martindale, seems a good soul, a middle-aged woman who lives with her two dogs, and who has traveled to Paris alone. Though she describes herself as happy and speaks about her friends, an element of loneliness suffuses her wanderings. Her tale, which takes the form of an oral report to her French class back home, is told in a voiceover. Carol’s thoughts are conveyed in very simple words—since those are the only ones she knows in French.

Toward the end of a long day of sightseeing and sampling local restaurants, Carol wanders into a sunlit park and sits on a wooden bench. During the morning, she was surprised to find herself so pensive—about her work, her friends, her two dogs, her lost love, and her mother, who has recently died from cancer. As she sits silently, Carol sees signs of life all around her: couples talking animatedly, children in a playground, a woman resting on the green grass. A breeze gently stirs her brown hair. Then something extraordinary happens.

In her halting French, translated for the viewer in the English subtitles, Carol says this:

Sitting there, alone in a foreign country, far from my job and everyone I know, a feeling came over me.

It was like remembering something I’d never known before or had always been waiting for, but I didn’t know what. Maybe it was something I had forgotten or something I’ve been missing all my life.

All I can say is that I felt, at the same time, joy and sadness. But not too much sadness.

Because I felt alive.

Yes, alive.

As she says this, a look of peace washes over her tired features.

I’m not sure if the filmmaker intended to portray a spiritual epiphany (though Alexander Payne went to a Jesuit high school). And I’m not sure if Carol, who is the star of, after all, a five-minute movie, was intended to be a spiritual person. But in simple words, she not only expresses what we spoke about in an earlier chapter as an “uncommon longing,” but opens a window onto one of the goals of the way of Ignatius: to be alive.

YES, ALIVE

In these pages we’ve traveled together along the way of Ignatius. Now you have a right to ask: Where does that way lead? What’s our destination?

In our first chapter, we talked about how five hypothetical Jesuits would define the way of Ignatius. Four answers were suggested: being a contemplative in action; finding God in all things; looking at the world in an incarnational way; and seeking freedom and detachment. These are all goals for the traveler along the way of Ignatius.

The first goal is illustrated by the fictional Carol, who feels, perhaps for the first time in her life, alive. She notices. She is aware. As she sits on that Parisian park bench, she discovers a connection. Significantly, the next words in her voiceover are: “That was the moment I fell in love with Paris. And I felt Paris fall in love with me.” Awareness moves her to love.

In real life, Carol would have a choice to make—beyond simply deciding whether to change her hotel reservations and stay a few more days in France. Or even beyond deciding that Paris is now her favorite city. She can accept her experiences as just “feelings,” or she can wonder if they might have another source.

The contemplative in action, according to St. Ignatius Loyola, not only contemplates the active world and sees wonderful things, but also sees in those wonderful things signs of God’s presence and activity. The contemplative in action is deeply aware of God’s presence even in the midst of a busy life. It is a stance of awareness. Awareness of God.

That leads us to a second goal: finding God in all things. By now you’ve seen how everything can be a way to experience God. In the past chapters, we’ve talked about encountering God in prayer, worship, family, love, music, nature, decision making, working, living simply, friendship, even during times of suffering. In all things. And in all people. And we’ve talked about an easy way to jump-start that awareness, to help you find God in everything: the examen. The contemplative in action seeks God and seeks to find God in action.

That means that he or she sees the world in an incarnational way, a third definition. God dwells in real things, real places, and real people. Not just “up there” but “all around.” (Though I’m not denying that God is also “up there” in heaven, wherever or however that is.) For Christians, Jesus is the incarnation of God, but you don’t have to be Christian to have an incarnational worldview. The more you travel along the way of Ignatius, the more you see the incarnational God.

And the more you travel along the Ignatian way, the more you will want to go further. The more you experience God, the more you will want to experience God more. The more you know God, the more you will want to know God more.

To do this, you need to maintain a measure of detachment and freedom, a fourth goal. You desire freedom from anything that prevents you from following along the way. You want to free yourself from any excess baggage. You want, as Ignatius said, to be free of “disordered attachments.” And you have to be careful not to start down paths that will lead you away from God. As Ignatius would say, you have to “discern.”

So tying it all together, you could say this: Contemplatives in action seek to find God in all things by looking at the world in an incarnational way, and, in their quest, they realize their desire for freedom and detachment, which helps them move even closer to God. That’s probably a fair summary of Ignatian spirituality.

That’s been my experience, too.

In the past few chapters, I’ve offered some personal examples of God’s activity in my life, not because my life is more important than anyone else’s, or more spiritual, or even normative. Rather, it’s to show you that anyone can experience God if he or she moves along the path of Ignatius.

When I entered the Jesuit novitiate at twenty-seven, I had little experience of prayer. I couldn’t imagine that I would ever have a “personal relationship” with God. I couldn’t imagine that I would be free of some of the unhealthy patterns that had been with me since childhood. I couldn’t imagine walking along a new path. I couldn’t imagine a new path at all. I couldn’t imagine, in a word, change.

But God had already imagined it.

The path of Ignatius has invited me to continual growth, freedom, and movement toward becoming more aware, more loving, more authentic, and, “yes, alive,” to quote Carol. I’ve tried to show how this happened in ways that are personal, because that’s where God is usually most alive, in our most intimate selves, intimior intimo meo, nearer to me than I am to myself. If we allow it to happen, God can work that way in all of our lives, which is why I include some real-life stories from the Jesuit saints, Jesuits I’ve known (some of whom seemed like saints), and many other friends and companions, both men and women, whom I’ve met along the way of Ignatius.

But those qualities—growth, freedom, movement, love, authenticity, even feeling alive—are not the final goals. The goal of the Ignatian way is not a quality, but something else.

THE ROAD IS OUR HOME

The goal is God.

I’ve tried to write this book in a welcoming way so that as many readers as possible will be able to use it—from the doubtful seeker to the devout believer. Ignatian spirituality is a resource for a wide variety of people, not just Jesuits, not just Catholics, and not just Christians. Just as there are insights from Zen Buddhism that are useful to me as a Christian, so there are practices and techniques from Ignatian spirituality that can help the Zen Buddhist. And the person who is Jewish or Muslim, too. Anyone can use these practices to better his or her life.

But to understand fully the end of the journey, you have to understand the destination. For Ignatian spirituality is meaningless without God. The end is not a place. It’s God.

Remember the analogy I used about the Spiritual Exercises at the beginning of the book? The Exercises are not meant to be read, they’re meant to be experienced. It is similar to an instruction book about dancing. It wouldn’t do you much good if you just read the book; you have to dance before you can understand it.

Well, there’s a partner in that dance: God. It’s a cheesy image, I know. (At this point you might be imagining yourself dancing with an old man with a long white beard—or if you weren’t, maybe you are now!) But it’s a reminder that the goal of the path is a relationship with God, who wants to be in relationship with you. Who wants to dance with you.

For me, Ignatian spirituality has been the primary way through which I’ve met God in my life. It’s been my path to God. And to Jesus Christ. Ignatius’s practices and insights have enriched my appreciation for my religious tradition, for Scripture, for community, for prayer, for . . . almost everything. The way of Ignatius has helped to lead me into relationship with God, something I would have thought impossible at age twenty-seven.

But no one, in this lifetime, reaches the end of the journey. After our deaths, I believe, we shall meet God “face to face,” as St. Paul says. But on this earth we will always be pilgrims along the way.

That’s why the image of the path has been the dominant image that I’ve used for Ignatian spirituality. That’s also why I like what Jerónimo Nadal, one of Ignatius’s early companions, said: “The road is our home.” He meant that Jesuits were always traveling, always en route to some new mission, always open to move.

But Nadal’s comment carries another meaning, too. It means that we are always on the road to God, and the more we come to understand the destination, the more we feel at home on that road.

God is the goal. So is our offering of ourselves to God. That’s part of the friendship. In any real friendship, there is, as Ignatius says, an exchange of gifts. “Each shares with the other.” God offers himself (or herself ) to us, and we offer ourselves to God. So that’s why I would like to end this book with a challenging prayer, taken from—what else?—the Spiritual Exercises. It’s about giving something to God.

Yourself.

TAKE, LORD, RECEIVE

Throughout these past chapters, we’ve mentioned the four weeks of the Spiritual Exercises. As we moved along, I introduced you to selected aspects about each week as they related to the topics we were discussing. The First Week invites you to look at gratitude for God’s gifts in your life, and then your own sinfulness. You’re led to a grateful awareness of yourself as a loved sinner. In the Second Week, you imagine yourself accompanying Jesus of Nazareth in his earthly ministry of preaching and healing. The Third Week takes you, imaginatively, into the story of Jesus’ passion and death, which gives you new perspectives on suffering.

But there’s one more week we haven’t yet talked about: the Fourth Week, which focuses on the Resurrection.

By the end of the Spiritual Exercises, most retreatants are delighted to be able to meditate on the joyful stories of the Resurrection: Jesus appearing to Mary Magdalene and the disciples, Jesus forgiving Peter for his betrayal, and Jesus feeding his disciples by the Sea of Galilee. And in a burst of pious enthusiasm Ignatius even added something to the New Testament: a scene of Jesus meeting his mother after the Resurrection. “Although this is not stated in Scripture,” he writes, “still it is considered as understood by the statement that he appeared to many others.”

At the close of the Fourth Week Ignatius invites us into a wonderful contemplation, which is often rushed through by people anxious to wrap up their retreats. (People on retreats are human too!) It’s called the Contemplation to Attain Divine Love.

Said differently, it’s a contemplation designed to help us understand God’s love for us. To help us do so, Ignatius offers us one thought exercise and then a variety of typically rich metaphors.

First, he suggests, remember “with deep affection how much God our Lord has done for me” and “how much he has given me of what he possesses.” This is similar to the type of gratitude included in the examination of conscience.

Second, says Ignatius, think about the way that God “dwells” in all his creatures. In the elements, God gives them existence. In the plants, life. In the animals, sensation. In human beings, intelligence. And in yourself, in whom God dwells, “giving me existence, life, sensation, and intelligence; and even further, making me his temple, since I am created as a likeness and image of the Divine Majesty.” How does God “dwell” in you?

Third, consider how God labors in all of creation. That’s always been a powerful image for me. God labors on our behalf and on behalf of all creatures, “giving them their existence, conserving them,” helping them to grow and be themselves.

Finally, think of how all these gifts—and others, like justice, goodness, piety, and mercy—descend from God “as the rays come down from the sun, or the rains from their source.” God is at work, with you, and for you.

All these images are beautiful invitations to think about and experience God’s love for you.

But there’s more. Within that final contemplation is one of the most famous, and perhaps most difficult, of all Ignatian prayers. It’s often called the Suscipe, taken from the first word of the Latin prayer. Coming at the end of the Exercises, the Suscipe prayer is an offering to God. After the four weeks of the Exercises, after meditating on God’s wholehearted love for you, people are often moved to respond wholeheartedly. Like many of the Ignatian ideals—including indifference, detachment, humility—this prayer is a goal.

Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty,

my memory, my understanding, and all my will—

all that I have and possess.

You, Lord, have given all that to me.

I now give it back to you, O Lord.

All of it is yours.

Dispose of it according to your will.

Give me love of yourself along with grace,

for that is enough for me.

Like I said, a tall order. It is a prayer of total surrender. I offer you everything, God. All I need is your love and grace. This is all I need to be “yes, alive.”

Why am I ending this book with such a “hard” prayer? To remind you that the spiritual life is a constant journey. For me, I don’t think I’ve ever been able to say that prayer and mean it completely. That is, I still want to hold on to all those things. And I’m not sure that I can say yet that all I need is God’s love and grace. I’m still too human for that. But as Ignatius said, it’s enough to have the desire for the desire. It’s enough to want that freedom. God will take care of the rest.

So together you and I are still on the way to being contemplatives in action, to finding God in all things, to seeing God incarnate in the world, and to seeking freedom and detachment.

The way of Ignatius has been traveled by millions of people searching for God in their daily lives. And for that way—easy at times, difficult at others, but always moving us closer to God—we can thank our friend, St. Ignatius Loyola.

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Together on Retreat

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TOGETHER ON RETREAT: Meeting Jesus in Prayer. Copyright © 2013 by James Martin, SJ. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

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Mere Christianity

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Simply Jesus

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All Old Testament quotations are taken from the New Revised Standard Version, copyright © 1989, National Council of Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. All New Testament quotations are taken from The Kingdom New Testament: A Contemporary Translation, by N. T. Wright, copyright © 2011 by Nicholas Thomas Wright.

SIMPLY JESUS: A New Vision of Who He Was, What He Did, and Why He Matters. Copyright © 2011 by Nicholas Thomas Wright. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

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Made for Goodness

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Not Less Than Everything

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The Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

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The Myth of Persecution

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The Greatest Prayer

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God Wants You Happy

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Will There Be Faith?

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Unless otherwise noted, all biblical quotations are taken from the New Revised Standard Version, copyright © 1989, National Council of Churches of Christ in the U.S.A.

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The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything

Excerpted from The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything. Written by James Martin, S.J. Published by HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

Fratribus carissimis in Societate Jesu

Grateful acknowledgments are made to the following sources for granting permission to use their material: The poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J., are used with the permission of the British Province of the Society of Jesus. Selections from A Pilgrim’s Testament: The Memoirs of St. Ignatius Loyola, translated by Parmananda Divarkar, S.J.; The Spiritual Exercises: A Translation and Commentary, by George E. Ganss, S.J.; and One Jesuit’s Spiritual Journey: Autobiographical Conversations with Jean-Claude Dietsch, by Pedro Arrupe, S.J., are used with the permission of the Institute of Jesuit Sources. Selections from The Song of the Bird, by Anthony De Mello, S.J., and He Leadeth Me, by Walter Ciszek, S.J., are used with the permission of Random House, Inc. Selections from With God in Russia, by Walter Ciszek, S.J., are used with the permission of America Press, Inc.

THE JESUIT GUIDE TO (ALMOST) EVERYTHING: A Spirituality for Real Life. Copyright © 2010 by James Martin, S.J. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books

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*  The Resurrection of the Son of God (London: SPCK; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003); Surprised by Hope (London: SPCK; San Francisco: HarperOne, 2008).

1. Mariam’s story captured public attention and appeared in newspapers and on websites throughout the world. The text used here comes from Fouad Ajami, “Pity the Christian Arabs,” Newsweek, January 16, 2011; http://www.newsweek.com/2011/01/16/pity-the-christian-arabs.html.

2. This figure was given in a study by Italian scholar Antonio Socci in his book I Nuovi Perseguitati: Indaginesulla Intolleranza Anticristiananel Nuovo Secolo del Martirio (Alexandria: Piemme, 2002). Of these seventy million, Socci estimates that approximately 65 percent died in the twentieth century. Socci takes a much broader view of persecution than we will in this book.

3. To ancient spectators Jesus’s overturning of the tables in the Jerusalem Temple would have been understood as a symbolic destruction of the Temple. In other words, it was an act of sedition. See E. P. Sanders, The Historical Figure of Jesus (New York: Penguin, 1993), 259-60.

4. The story about the great fire of Rome is found in the writings of the Roman historian Tacitus. According to Tacitus, Nero punished the Christians because they were a handy scapegoat (Annals 15.44). This wasn’t, strictly speaking, religious persecution. Moreover, as we will see later it may not have happened.

5. Tertullian, Apology 50.

6. The full, rather lengthy title of John Foxe’s work is Actes and Monuments of these latter and perillous Dayes, touching matters of the Church, wherein ar comprehended and described the great persecutions and horrible troubles, that have bene wrought and practised by the Romishe Prelates, speciallye in this Realme of England and Scotlande, from the yeare of our Lorde a thousande unto the tymenowe present. Gathered and collected according to the true copies and wrytinges certificatorie, as wel of the parties themselves that suffered, as also out of the Bishops Registers, which wer the doers thereof (London: John Day, 1563). Foxe’s book was reprinted in 1570, 1576, 1583, 1596, 1610, 1632, 1641, and 1684.

7. The virulently anti-Catholic tone of Foxe’s tome cast long shadows over English history, as it has shaped English Protestant identity ever since. When it was reread in the seventeenth century, it contributed to what historians call the “Catholic myth”: the belief that the Catholics were engaged in a worldwide conspiracy to overthrow the government and enslave the people. The popularity of the “Catholic myth” contributed to the marginalization of Catholics and even to the outbreak of the English Civil War. The influence of Foxe’s writing on anti-Catholicism in England is discussed by Owen Chadwick in The Reformation, vol. 3 (New York: Penguin, 1990), 128. Foxe’s appropriation of the history of martyrdom and his demonization of Catholics only led to and endorsed further violence and oppression. In the words of Elizabeth Evenden and Thomas S. Freeman: “Well into the nineteenth, if not the twentieth century, Foxe’s woodcuts would keep the memory of the Marian persecution green and rub salt into the wounds of sectarian hatred” (Religion and the Book in Early Modern England: The Making of Foxe’s “Book of Martyrs” [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2011], 229).

8. Jonathan Mann, “Will Satan stop Rick Santorum?” CNN, February 24, 2012; http://articles.cnn.com/2012-02-24/politics/politics_mann-santorum-satan_1_rick-santorum-satan-latest-poll?_s=pm:POLITICS. Santorum’s speech was delivered at Ave Maria University. He went on to say that Satan used the “vices of pride, vanity, and sensuality” to attack America and to describe the state of affairs as “spiritual war.” These remarks resurfaced in his 2012 bid for the Republican presidential nomination.

9. Rick Perry, in “Strong,” presidential campaign video (www.rickperry.org), released December 2011.

10. All Jenky quotes are taken from the transcript of his sermon provided by The Catholic Post; http://www.thecatholicpost.com/post/PostArticle.aspx?ID=2440.

11. David Limbaugh, Persecution: How Liberals Are Waging War Against Christianity (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2003).

12. The remarks were made on Friday, August 26, 2011, at a campaign lunch in Spartanburg, South Carolina, and were widely reported in the national press.

13. Maureen Dowd, “Is Pleasure a Sin?”; http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/06/opinion/dowd-is-pleasure-a-sin.html? (accessed June 10, 2012).

14. It might be argued that it is not only the myth of martyrdom, but also apocalyptic literature that fosters this worldview. As many scholars have demonstrated, whether or not the authors of apocalyptic texts were persecuted, they claim to experience persecution and often warn their audiences of impending arrests and executions. Persecution and apocalypticism are, thus, entangled with one another. In the study of Revelation, for instance, Adela Collins has argued that, although the author of Revelation was not actually persecuted, he believed that he was. See Adela Yarbro Collins, Crisis and Catharsis: The Power of the Apocalypse (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1984).

15. Justin Martyr, Second Apology 2. It is really an accident of preservation that has meant that Justin is known in lay circles as “Justin Martyr,” while, for example, Cyprian is known just as “Cyprian.”

16. In the Passion of Perpetua and Felicity, the martyr Saturus says to the crowd, “Note our faces diligently, so that you may recognize them on that day of judgment!” The implication here is that the martyrs will watch their opponents condemned.

17. Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1981), 4, 78-79.

1. Shelley Wachsmann, The Sea of Galilee Boat: An Extraordinary 2000-Year-Old Discovery (New York: Plenum, 1995), p. 358.

2. Wachsmann, Sea of Galilee Boat, p. 147.

1. The title of this chapter echoes the fine pastoral letter issued by the U.S. Catholic bishops; see To Teach as Jesus Did (Washington, DC: USCCB, 1973).

2. See Daniel J. Harrington, Jesus: The Revelation of the Father’s Love (Huntington, IN: Our Sunday Visitor, 2010).

3. Congregation for the Clergy, General Directory for Catechesis (Washington, DC: USCCB, 1998).

Table of Contents

Introduction from James Martin, SJ

An Excerpt from Together on Retreat by James Martin, SJ

Title page

Chapter Six

An Excerpt from Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis

Title page

Book Three: Chapter One

An Excerpt from Simply Jesus by N. T. Wright

Title page

Chapter Fourteen

An Excerpt from Made for Goodness by Desmond Tutu and Mpho Tutu

Title page

Chapter Seven

An Excerpt from Not Less Than Everything by Catherine Wolff (Editor)

Title page

"The Worthless Servant" by Ann Patchett

An Excerpt from The Myth of Persecution by Candida Moss

Title page

Introduction

An Excerpt from The Greatest Prayer by John Dominic Crossan

Title page

Chapter Six

An Excerpt from God Wants You Happy by Father Jonathan Morris

Title page

Chapter Eight

An Excerpt from Will There Be Faith ? by Thomas H. Groome

Title page

Chapter One

An Excerpt from The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything by James Martin, SJ

Title page

Chapter Fourteen

Also by James Martin, SJ

Copyright

About the Publisher