Poem

This week I'm reading the book of John. I'm on schedule, but I don't have time to write about anything. However, I did write a story-poem (or a poem-story) today. I've just started writing these short prose pieces that I like to think of as poems, because no one writes stories that are this short. The form was mostly inspired by Jesus' parables, but the key difference, as I discovered when talking about them with Edwin, is that where Jesus wants to either confuse people or teach them a specific lesson about the kingdom of heaven, I want to communicate, not a lesson, but instead a motion of the spirit, like submission or redemption or love. I intend to keep trying until I get it right...but here's the one I just wrote. Can you tell what the motion is supposed to be?

There once was a little clover growing in the tall grass. It was beautiful, each leaf formed in perfect proportion. The birds and butterflies flew around the field and perched on trees and flowers, but the little clover was left unseen. Then, one day, a man came and stopped. He dug a hole, transplanted the clover into a tiny pot, and brought it back to his house. Then, he invited all his friends to come over and admire it.

Luke

The book of Luke is confusing. With Matthew, Mark, and John, it is easier for me to get an approximation of what they are trying to do: Matthew focuses on Jesus' teachings as a way of describing the counterintuitive nature of the Kingdom of God. Mark, as it was the first Gospel written down, focuses on a minimalist narrative, interspersing teaching with healings and miracles as evidence that Jesus not only taught about the Kingdom, He also ushered it into existence. John, written much later than the other three, includes radically different information, and is centered around seven signs of Jesus' divine nature as well as a series of individual encounters he has with people as if to record personal testimonies that He is indeed the son of God.

Luke, however, is strange. It starts off by claiming to be a historical account of Jesus' ministry: "It seemed fitting for me as well, having investigated everything carefully from the beginning, to write it out for you in consecutive order" (1:3). And at first it proceeds that way. Luke starts off earlier than the other Gospels do, recording not only the conception and birth of Jesus but also those of John the Baptist. However, when Luke gets to the middle, where Jesus' ministry mostly consisted of going around to different places and telling parables, our narrator seems to drop the sense of chronology he has so far been giving us. The parables of the Good Samaritan, the Prodigal Son, and the Rich Man and Lazarus seem to be inserted into a vague "sometime" in Jesus' ministry. Then, when He enters Jerusalem for the last time on a donkey, Luke goes back to a strict "consecutive" account of the Passion and resurrection.

I have not done any additional research into the date of composition, but it seems to me that the only explanation for Luke's departure from a chronological narrative is that he was writing this Gospel with his predecessors' works sitting in front of him (or at least in the front of his mind). And when he got to the middle, he saw what they included and thought to himself, "Oh, but this is such a good story, how could they have left it out?" And so he ended up putting in a few extra things without bothering too much about explaining exactly when they happened. I am glad he did, even if it seems to confuse his overall project. However, while this might explain the mechanics of his Gospel, I still haven't got a handle on the overarching theme he is trying to communicate about Jesus. More on that the next time through, I hope.

T. S. Eliot

I read this for my modern poetry class and had to post it, it's so beautiful. T. S. Eliot wrote The Waste Land in the middle of a failing marriage and in that first poem depicted the hopeless alienation of the modern state of existence. Afterwards, he became a Christian and wrote The Four Quartets about how it is possible for humanity to become purified so that we can reach the timelessness of eternity. Read this section with Christian theology in mind.

The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre--
To be redeemed from fire by fire.

Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire.

--The Four Quartets, "Little Gidding" Part IV

Get Up and Walk

Mark 2:1-13

I first heard the story of the paralytic when I was very young, and ever since then, it has seemed like a no-brainer: The paralytic is lowered through the roof; Jesus forgives his sins; the Pharisees mentally challenge His authority; Jesus heals the man physically to prove His divine power. However, in the context of the Kingdom of Heaven, this apparently straightforward healing takes on new overtones. As mentioned below, the Gospel of Matthew contains mostly Jesus' descriptions of God's Kingdom. Those descriptions are otherworldly enough, but how do we know they are true? How do we know that God actually operates under a system where our sins are forgiven at the drop of a hat? We know because the Gospel of Mark records instances in which Jesus ushers the Kingdom into the physical realm. He says to the paralytic, "Your sins are forgiven"; but He also says, "Get up and walk." The healings recorded in this Gospel and the others are not only examples of Jesus' compassion for the sick, they moreover become incarnations of the Kingdom. Jesus is not just a human teacher: as in the beginning when He created the universe through the power of His word, so now in the Gospels, His words both describe an eternal realm that exists parallel to our own and also thrust that realm into the fabric of our everyday lives. If Jesus did not heal, we would be as Moses, able to glimpse but not enter the Promised Land.

The Kingdom of Heaven

This time through Matthew, I thought about the Kingdom of Heaven. Through Jesus' words, starting from the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew deconstructs our most basic assumptions about how to live, instincts like, "it is better to be happy than to mourn," or, "if someone attacks me, I should defend myself." He overturns our systems of value in episodes like the one where Jesus tells the rich young ruler to sell all his possessions: "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven." Nietsche, Sartre, and Camus thought they were doing groundbreaking work with their existential crises; actually they were two thousand years behind the times.

The Kingdom of Heaven is not like the kingdom of this world. It is alien to us, and that is the beautiful thing about the message we find in the Gospels. I started going to a small group at Campus Crusade at Berkeley, and last Tuesday we discussed arguments for the existence of God. Afterwards, I was thinking about why I believe God exists, and one of the main reasons is the foreignness of the content in the Bible, mostly in Jesus' teachings. No human being, using only his or her imagination, would be able to create a world that runs so counter to our natural instincts. The kingdom of heaven is greater than I can understand, and that is why I am glad to believe in it.