Do Animals Have Souls?

By Sean McDonough, PhD
Associate Professor of New Testament

Dedicated readers of this blog (and might the plural, let alone the “dedicated”, be rather optimistic?) will note that the question in the title is a follow-up to a previous post involving the question of human “souls” – and more importantly, the question of how words work. This present piece springs from close observation of my dog at work and play…or more precisely, at rest and play, with the occasional duty of barking at people who pass by the house, and enthusiastically greeting those who enter it.

Now, with respect to humans, I argued that while we cannot expect to isolate an entity called “the soul” somewhere in a Platonic heaven, the word “soul” does mighty good work addressing the interior dimension of our existence. Right from the start, then, we recognize that since humans don’t “have” souls in the same sense that they have bus tokens or a mole on their cheek, we would assume that animals don’t have them, either. This is a crucial point, since without it we can find ourselves split in two by a putative decision tree:

Do animals have souls?

No> Wantonly ridicule, kill and eat them

Yes> Refuse to make any use of them whatsoever, and set up animal focus groups with a view towards creating greater inter-species cooperation.

It doesn’t work that way.

The question about animals “having souls” is really a question as to whether they have an “interior dimension of their existence” that warrants the use of the word “soul”. And here the evidence is a bit mixed. The crucial element in determining the presence and nature of such an interior dimension is, generally speaking, speaking. I use “generally speaking” not only for the delight of having “speaking” appear twice in a sentence, but also because we can assume the presence of the interior dimension of a person who is unable to communicate with words. But generally we know what is in a person’s “soul” because they tell us about it.

Animals do not do this, Doctor Doolittle aside. They can’t tell us whether Eli Manning is an “elite” quarterback, or whether a beautiful sunset can reasonably be termed “sublime”. If the proverbial roomful of monkeys ever did bang out Shakespeare’s works on their monkey-friendly word-processors, it would only be by accident, not intent.

Even as I write this, I can sense the growing wrath of animal lovers. So I hasten to add that even if animals don’t communicate with language which reveals an interior dimension of life perfectly analogous with that of humans, they surely communicate in all sorts of other ways. Pain, fear, anger – a growl or a whine or a nip can get that dimension of their “inner” experience across quite clearly. And while dogged materialists will strive to tell us canines can’t really be sad, as a dog-owner and recent viewer of Benji the Hunted, I feel comfortable in affirming that they can…at least in some sense.

And it is with precisely such equivocation that I want to conclude this brief exploration of the animal soul. We can know quite a bit about what humans are like on the inside. We simply can’t know what is going on with animals with the same level of precision. So using the language of “soul” is probably not the most helpful thing to do. But that hardly establishes an unbridgeable chasm between the animals and us. The Scripture is quite clear that whatever unique qualities humans bring to the table, we are all of us, human and animal alike, part of God’s creation, distinct from the creator himself (Revelation 4, where humans are mixed in with the beasts in the persons of the “living creatures”, is a particularly vivid illustration of this fact). The Scripture also warrants using animals in labor and for food, so I eat my cheeseburgers with a clean conscience.

And if my dog ever questions me about that, I’ll just point out to her that she eats the hamburger, too.

December Faculty Forum

By Sean McDonough, PhD
Associate Professor of New Testament

It’s always a dangerous thing to think when you are preaching. You start wondering why the guy in the fourth pew is staring out the window, or whether you have sufficient time to include the illustration about illuminated medieval manuscript, and suddenly you have no idea what you are actually saying at that moment. What’s even worse is the ensuing awareness of your dissociation: how is it that I’m talking and at the same time I’m aware I’m talking? How many “I”’s can there be?

I was reminded of this as I looked out my window at the bare branches of the winter trees outside my office. A few years ago I was preaching in a hall with large windows in the back, looking out on the same bleak tree-scape that greets me this morning. And as I was (at least supposed to be) teaching, I was struck by how human those particular trees were looking that day.

I had been set up for such arboreal anthropomorphizing for a long while. If the Wizard of Oz’ witch and winged monkeys set the standard for childhood terror, the malicious apple-flinging trees of the same film weren’t far behind. On the positive side of the ledger, I have always thought Tolkien’s Ents are just about the best thing Middle-Earth has to offer, hoom, hoom. I am one of the few people who thought the Two Towers film could have been vastly improved with a few more hours of Entmoot-musings from Treebead and his companions. I grew up on an acre of land that was almost entirely covered with tall pines, and spent much of my youth wandering through the woods down the road.

But what I saw that day, and this, was not simply the generic human-ness of trunks and boughs. These trees, it seemed, were doing something quite specific – stretching out their bare branches to the grey skies, crying out to God for the renewal of Spring, calling out for their own annual resurrection.

In the bleak mid-winter, on the cusp of Christmas, in the bareness and brokenness of our own lives, may we go and do likewise.

The Sea in My Hand?

By Sean McDonough, PhD
Associate Professor of New Testament

Last night I found myself holding the sea in my hands.

Now, I first need to point out that it was only the Barents Sea, which Wikipedia describes as “marginal” -- “marginal” being a technical term for territorial waters, with no disrespect intended…though how the Barents itself feels about the description is another question. (Its former name, the Murmans Sea, has a certain allure, until one realizes that it translates to, “The Sea of Norwegians”.)

The second, and even more critical, thing to note is that I wasn’t actually holding the Barents Sea. I was actually holding a few plastic pieces from a 3-D globe puzzle one of my sons is working on. The pieces had fallen on the floor and I had slipped them into my pocket while cleaning up. The pieces represented the Barents Sea – they weren’t the sea itself.

And now for the inevitable lesson.

As we carry our Bibles about, in our hands or in our heads, we can sometimes imagine that the mere possession of the book magically sanctifies us. The words on the page, or the smart phone, or the brain cell, seem to possess a talismanic power to lead us on the path of blessing. We have God’s word, and thus to some extent God, right in our hands.

I want to choose my words carefully hear, and assure the reader that my goals here are modest. I believe the Bible is God’s Word in a unique way. I am not getting into the question of whether the Scriptures simply contains the word, or whether it needs to be activated by the Spirit to become God’s word, or any of those questions which understandably keeps theologians up at night. All I am saying is that the words on the page gain their currency because they point to something greater than themselves: the reality of God and his kingdom.

Take the words, “Jesus is risen from the dead.” Five simple English words, with one English-ed Greek name itself derived from a Hebrew original. I hope you hear them as the stunning climax of the greatest story ever told. But that power comes not from the mere words, but from the fact that they point to the truth that God did in fact raise Jesus from the dead.

The fact that the words are sign pointing to something doesn’t diminish their value; it establishes their value. My puzzle-solving son remarked the other day that we ought simply to print out endless barrels money so people can have whatever they want. (Note to government officials and presidents of large banks: this is not actually a good idea.) I tried to explain with my own feeble economic understanding that the dollar bills only stand in for, or mark out, value; the paper points towards one’s labor or one’s land. So it is with words, at least in many instances: they point towards reality.

This is no idle academic musing. When we focus merely on the words in Scripture, and not on the reality they are gesturing towards, we can end up deluding ourselves with a “faith” that is nothing more than the barest assent to a few propositions. We need to recognize that God’s word is there to throw us into the reality of his kingdom, with all the peril and promise that holds. The word is there to point us to a God who actually does hold the Barents Sea, and the whole cosmos, in his almighty hand.

What Words Do and Don’t

By Sean McDonough, PhD
Associate Professor of New Testament

“What is Conscience?” That was the question on the poster for a college roundtable discussion, replete with a picture of Homer Simpson flanked by Little Devil Homer and Little Angel Homer. (I still tend to speak of Little Devil Donald Duck and Little Angel Donald Duck…times change.) What interested me was not so much the question of conscience itself, but rather the way we talk, and therefore think, about things like conscience. (We are back, in other words, to the same concerns we raised in our previous Every Thought Captive posting.)

“What is Conscience?”, for instance, may imply that there is some absolute entity Conscience out there (where?), and that it is of the utmost importance that we figure out precisely what it is so that we use the word correctly. Academics serve as a kind of Truth in Advertising Commission, determined to make sure the product matches the label and the label matches the product. Granted that Conscience does not consist of two tiny spiritual beings atop separate shoulders, what is it…really?

But I am not at all sure that this is how words function – or at least how words like Conscience function. The picture of Devil Homer and Angel Homer might be silly, but it still effectively communicates the reality that we often find ourselves in inner conflict about what to do in a given situation. It is as if there are two voices inside me offering different counsel, and yet both those voices are somehow me. Devil Homer and Angel Homer provide a humorous visual expression of that reality; the word “conscience” just labels the same phenomenon a bit more efficiently. (The rabbis, for their part, spoke of the Good Inclination and the Evil Inclination within people; so it is not as if this is a new issue.)

You could fruitfully explore how we get that sense of good and evil, or how it works out in various individuals or cultures, but it is not as if you were going to discover something you didn’t know a good deal about already. The reality gives birth to the word, and not vice versa. The word does not magically capture the essence of the thing and bury that essence within the letters. It simply points more or less effectively to what we know.

You could use another word to point to it, if you wanted.

We face something similar in recent discussions of “the soul”. There has been a raft of commentary both inside and outwith the evangelical world lately to the effect that we don’t have a soul. It would be more accurate, some suggest, to say that we are a soul. Now, there is certainly something to this. Many Christians assume that God is only concerned with invisible person within them, and not with the body they just happen to inhabit. But surely the Scriptures have their eye on the whole person as a responsible (or irresponsible) member of the community of faith, such that one’s actions are just as important as one’s inner thoughts and feelings. The fact that the Bible regularly uses psyche for life in general rather than just the “soul” gives added weight to these critiques. If we turn to everyday life, we can all cite examples of where physical illness precipitates a change in our “soul” – the kindly and patient grandmother turns crotchety in her old age; the learned and affable mentor becomes confused and depressed with the onset of Alzheimers. Was it their “soul” that changed, or their body?

But does that really mean that all this talk in Scripture and the church about a “soul” is completely misguided? Of course not. Just as “conscience” effectively points towards the idea of inner conflict, so “soul” crisply captures the reality that we have an interior awareness of things distinguishable from mere bodily functions (even if that awareness is admittedly enmeshed with bodily functions). We can make decisions to do things that our bodies don’t necessarily want to do, from leaving the last brownie on the plate to rushing into gunfire to rescue a fallen comrade. Everyone knows this, and “soul” is the way we point towards that thing we already know about.

The trouble only comes when we imagine that the “soul” is a “piece” of us in the same way that our gall bladders or our toenails are – that if we disassembled a human we would find the soul squished inside the chest cavity or tangled around their kidneys. Once we get past that, we can recognize that “soul” is a perfectly adequate way of speaking about that interior dimension of a person that we all experience – indeed, it is far more adequate than having to go around speaking of “that interior dimension of a person” all the time. We don’t need to give an exhaustive account of precisely “what” the soul is, or precisely how it functions – it could be the sort of thing that simply doesn’t yield to that kind of investigation. Scientific investigation and philosophical speculation might not be the right tools for thinking about “soul” or “conscience”.

But the words “soul” and “conscience” are pretty good ways of speaking about those realities in everyday life.

Watch Your Language

By Sean McDonough, PhD
Associate Professor of New Testament

Most readers of this piece will already know that the word “theology” consists of the Greek words for “God” (Theo’s) and “word/speech/account” ((logos). What we sometimes forget is that this logos is our account of God, and not God’s account of himself. Theology walks down the path of human language. Trouble, as it often does, lies on either side of this path.

On the one side, we may be tempted to despair that we can say anything meaningful at all about God. This sentiment has been around for ages, but it is particularly popular in the modern non-Christian world. All our words about God, to cite the popular fable, are just the gropings of blind men describing an elephant. (The twist, of course, is that the enlightened tale-teller knows it’s an elephant – but this never seems to get noted.) Christians, who have experienced God’s Word in the deeds and words of Jesus the Messiah, can steer clear of that danger pretty easily.

The other trap is one to which evangelicals are perhaps more prone; and that is imagining that our language about God is simple and exhaustive, and thus – unlike all other human speech -- needs no qualifications. Indeed, for some people the search for just this kind of unequivocal speech about God constitutes the essence of the theological task.

The first sign that God himself does not seem to endorse this sort of talk comes from the nature of Scripture itself. If the goal of theology is to give a perfectly straightforward, reasonable account of God, we have to admit the Bible does a pretty poor job of it. We have compilations of stories from a distant place in a strange language, none of which explain themselves very much. We have commandments which are rather more straightforward…but while some of them make instant sense (“don’t mislead a blind man on the path”), others remain obscure (“don’t boil a kid in its mother’s milk”). Even the clearest summary statements about God can raise some questions even as they answer others: “The Lord, the Lord, compassionate and gracious, showing mercy to thousands and judgment to threes…” So, yes, he is more merciful than judgmental: but how does he decide when to be which?

In response to this we often try to be clearer than Scripture itself. “The most important thing to know about God”, some will assert, “is that he pursues his own glory.” Now, there are any number of Scripture passages that back up this assertion, and thus every Christian ought to heartily affirm it. But as soon as we put the thought into a specific language, and speak it to actual people, problems arise. To take the most pressing one: the idiom “to seek one’s own glory” in modern English carries overwhelmingly negative connotations. The bare statement, “God seeks his own glory”, is in danger of painting a portrait of God as a megalomaniacal dictator, the Kim Jong-Il of a cosmic North Korean kingdom. Surely we must do better than that.

But what can we do? We can’t simply shrink back and refuse to speak about God. He has said and done too much in our presence to make that a viable option. We have to speak. But if we take the Scripture as our guide, we will be liberated to speak of him in a fully human language comfortable with paradox and qualifications. We will be happy to let God’s speech about himself provide the model for our speech about him.

We will also embrace stories as meaningful forms of theological discourse, not mere tales to be moralized or theologized before they are of any use. To return to our example of “God seeking his own glory”: we could rightly devote an entire tome to explaining that God’s pursuit of his own glory is a world away from our pursuit of our own glory, that his pursuit involves embracing those lower than himself rather than annihilating them. Those would hardly be wasted words.

But we could also simply read the story of the crucified Messiah, “lifted up” upon the cross, and see it all in a moment.

Cutting through Time

By Sean McDonough, PhD
Associate Professor of New Testament

Few writers capture the natural world better than John McPhee, and his 1971 book Encounters with the Archdruid is one of his best. In it, he tells the story of arch-conservationist David Brower meeting up in the field with, in turn, a mining expert, a developer, and the US head of dam-building. The last encounter involves a rafting trip down the Colorado River, which causes McPhee to reflect on one of his driving passions, geology. He is speaking of the layers of rock through which the Colorado has driven down through the millennia:

"The Tapeats Sandstone is the earliest rock from the Paleozoic Era, and beneath it the mind is drawn back to the center of things, the center of the canyon, the cutting plane, the Colorado. Flanked by its Bass Limestones, its Hotauta Conglomerates, its Vishnu Schists and Zoroaster Granites, it races in white water through a pre-Cambrian here and now. The river has worked its way down into the stillness of original time."

For some, the mere thought of process in creation, let alone the vast quantities of time needed for such processes to proceed, is enough to trigger floods of anxiety. Does this not threaten to take away the glory of God in creating the world?

Hardly. The thought of God taking his time to create is precisely what Genesis 1 is at pains to stress, however we might interpret the word “day” in the text. The fact that he might have taken more time than we expect to have brought the world into its present state simply gives us more space to contemplate his infinite majesty. Indeed, it’s hard to see how a stock phrase like “infinite majesty” can find any purchase in our minds apart from rooting it in the very large numbers provided for us by geologic time.

The point is not to pick at numbers: once we get past ten thousand years or so, we lose any meaningful existential connection to the figures. (It is like trying to measure the distance to the sun with a ruler – you are not going to get close, even if you stand on tip-toe.) The point is that the Bible invites us to think of the world as really old, and to think of God as even older than that.

There is something else at work here as well. God not only takes his time to create, he also creates a world with what Colin Gunton calls Selbständigkeit or a “proper independence”. This is not the absolute independence imagined by the atheists or Deists, but rather the meaningful existence of the creation as something other than God. This is best captured in Genesis in the account of the creation of plants: “And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so (Gen. 1:11).” God creates in the beginning; but he also (literally) sows the seed for the perpetuation of creation through the ages.

As we wander through God’s world then, or as we watch the Colorado wander along its course through the canyons, we should be alert both to the record of what he has done in the past, and the wonder of what he is still doing in the present. Only then will we develop the confidence that he is indeed willing and able to bring the promise of creation to its fulfillment in the ultimate future…however long he takes to do it.

Bibleconomics?

By Sean McDonough, PhD
Associate Professor of New Testament

Granted, Freakonomics it’s not. But the title is meant to raise the question – does the Bible have anything to do with Economics? My answer, as you probably expected, is yes…but how that should play out in pastoral ministry may be somewhat unexpected.

There are three basic approaches one finds with respect to economics in the American pulpit. In perhaps the majority of churches, economics is more or less ignored, apart from the occasional mention of the need to “help the poor” when the day’s Scripture reading makes that conclusion unavoidable. The second approach, more familiar in mainline churches, is to stress concern for the poor much more frequently, with “concern for the poor” generally defined as supporting left-ish economic policy. In reaction against this, one encounters churches which mount a robust defense of capitalism, often as part of a right-leaning political package.

The latter two approaches tend to rest on (at least) three assumptions: 1. The Bible engages with economic issues; 2. The Bible clearly encourages one approach to modern economic practice; 3. The Pastor’s job is to know the correct answer to point 2.

The first assumption, as I have already indicated, is a pretty good one. The Bible regularly addresses economic concerns, from the command to Adam and Eve to fill the earth and subdue it, right through to the kings bringing their glory into the New Jerusalem in Revelation (on the supposition that their “glory” includes the products of culture). It surfaces in obvious ways in the commands in Deuteronomy to permit gleaning, and in more subtle ways in places like Revelation 18, where “Babylon” is condemned for its luxurious self-indulgence and its exploitation of subject lands.

But the latter two assumptions are highly questionable. Let us start with point 2. The economic world of the Bible does of course have some connections with modern economies, but there are significant differences as well. A caricature may help make the point. We can imagine a toga-clad forebear of Scrooge McDuck swimming in a sea of gold coins as a paradigm for the ancient view of wealth. I have it, you don’t, and it’s all stashed away in my vault far from your prying hands. This is significantly different from a modern person with a stock portfolio, whose wealth is in fact active paying salaries, funding factory building, and doing all sorts of other things. This hardly frees the modern rich person from the need to be generous and self-sacrificial. But it does raise interesting questions as to how loving your neighbor works itself out in a complex global economy.

Assumption 3 is even more questionable. Unless you happen to have an especially handy pastor, you wouldn’t typically call upon them to fix your burst pipes. You would call a plumber. Why do we imagine it is any different with economics? The minister’s job is to orient people to the landscape of God’s word, not to imagine she can traverse every square foot herself. Rather than promulgate half-baked economic theories, pastors need to equip economists and business people and NGO activists to be the sorts of Christians who can use their unique abilities to further God’s kingdom.

In the blog, midwinter

By Sean McDonough, PhD
Associate Professor of New Testament

I don’t usually like to use the word “blog”, since I find it horrifically ugly. But it fits February. Like the month itself, I’ll keep it short.

At this time of year my soul often feels like the old snow covering most of the ground: melting, irregular, and spattered with grey. It is no wonder the classic film Groundhog Day is set when it is. Of all the times one might be fated to re-live, February would be the worst. Most of us wish they could crop it back well beyond than the usual twenty eight days. Bill Murray’s bitter response to a woman inquiring about the weather captures the mood best: “"You want a prediction about the weather?.. I'll give you a winter prediction: It's gonna be cold, it's gonna be gray, and it's gonna last you for the rest of your life.”

I hasten to add that we are talking about feelings here – of course life in its goodness goes on, even in February, and there have been many reasons to celebrate even then: birthdays, “Kiss Me” sweets from a Valentine, Patriots Super Bowl victories…the list is hardly endless, but there are redeemable features.

Still, the greatest thing about February is that eventually it’s over, and with it winter. The snows of March and April are like young love, flitting into the world only to be vaporized by the long light of day. The Green Party may never win every four years in November, but they win every Spring.

This struck me with particular force the other day as I drove up the hill at Gordon-Conwell. We had had a few warm days, and there on the verge of the road the snow had pulled back a good foot to unveil the forgotten grass. I half-expected a dove to pluck a blade and fly it into my opened window. We had been adrift forever, it seemed, in an endless sea of snow…but the frozen waters were receding at last.

Not long now until Snow-ah’s ark settles for good.

What Jesus Learned

By Sean McDonough, PhD
Associate Professor of New Testament

The book of Hebrews is not standard Christmastime reading. But I was struck by the Advent relevance of these verses from Hebrews 5:8-9: “Although he was the son, he learned obedience from what he suffered; and after he was made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation to all those who obey him.”

It is easy for us to become functional Docetists, who imagine that Jesus only seemed to become human – after all, he is who God is, so how could he get mixed up with us? We might somewhat grudgingly concede that his incarnation is necessary for him to be a sacrifice for sins (a point Hebrews is also at pains to make in a later chapter), but does it really make a difference in who he is?

The answer of Hebrews is a resounding Yes. This portion of the book focuses on Jesus’ role as high priest. In order to be a faithful high priest, the author reasons, Jesus has to be able to sympathize with the people. He cannot do this if he has not experienced the same things they have experienced. And so he states quite carefully that Jesus learned obedience. This does not mean, of course, that Jesus had to “learn to be obedient” in the way we do – by combatting our inveterate tendency to disobey. But it does mean that he needed to experience suffering and temptation first-hand to qualify as a high priest. How else could he genuinely relate to us as we struggle in this world day by day?

Verse 9 makes the same point in equally expressive language – Jesus’ sufferings “perfected” him. In a sense, Jesus was already perfect – but with respect to being qualified as our high priest, he needed those sufferings to complete him for the job.

It is difficult to know what is more marvelous here: the astounding theological truth that the incarnation is absolutely integral to Jesus’ role as high priest, or the unspeakably powerful comfort it is to know that Jesus really does understand what we are going through even in the darkest times. As we strive to maintain our faith-filled obedience in this world (remember, he is the source of salvation to those who obey him, v.9), it is a blessing to know that he himself has learned obedience through his sufferings, and thus can be trusted to help us stay faithful no matter what the circumstances might be. And because he saw his task through to the end – been “ perfected”-- he can help us as we struggle towards maturity in our lives [the same root lies behind Jesus’ “perfection” in v.9 and the call to Christian maturity in v.14].

The blessings of Christmas, then, certainly do not end in the manger, nor do they even end at the cross. What Jesus learned on earth is a source of continuing comfort, as we bring our troubles day by day to our sympathetic friend and priest.

Pain, and Glass, and Beauty

By Sean McDonough, PhD
Associate Professor of New Testament

It may seem strange to find beauty in an obituary, and stranger still when the subject of the obituary is virtually unknown. But there is much of it to be found in the Economist’s heartbreaking tribute to the stained glass artist Michael Lassen, who died in a fall from Durham Cathedral in September (http://www.economist.com/node/17199498?story_id=17199498). I will do little more here than note the most salient points, and implore you to read it in its entirety.

Lassen had been working on the Transfiguration of Christ in the south quire at the time of accident. The obituary describes his fall:

He was fitting a small panel at the bottom left-hand side, a pane of bruised blue glass that showed the broken and suffering about to be transformed by light, almost the last piece in the window, when he fell. He was not particularly high up, working at the ledge. But stone flags are unforgiving.

We see there a hint of the poignant match of the man, and the moment, and the message that was to come fully to light a few weeks later:

But when September 25th came, the day of dedication, he was remembered in a different way. The clue lay in George Herbert’s poem “The Windows” which was sung as an anthem at evensong. Man was “a brittle crazy glass”:
Yet in thy temple thou dost him afford This glorious and transcendent place To be a window, through thy grace.
As the congregation pressed through afterwards into the south quire aisle they found the windows still wreathed in incense, like the cloud of God that had enveloped Jesus on the mountain. Through it shone the glass. Its golds and blues were smoky in the evening light, but the central column blazed white, like the transfiguration of a man; and of all men, named or un-named, whose lives and skills are embedded in the stone and glass of great cathedrals.

A Clod, and Unknowing

By Sean McDonough, PhD
Associate Professor of New Testament

I went into the Montreal Museum of Modern Art (more properly le Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal) in a positive frame of mind. Sure, some of the pieces might be perplexing, and at times I might wonder whether the proverbial roomful of monkeys (armed with brushes rather than typewriters) might produce a more interesting product, but there could be some very interesting stuff in there as well. Entry that evening was free, so I figured I did not have much to lose.

The results were mixed. At the risk of revealing myself as a bourgeois clod, I found much of the material rather pointless. A hanging video monitor shows a woman’s face; the colors change every so often. That was pretty much it, but from the description on the wall (I will spare you the tortured postmodern prose) you would think she had precipitated a quantum leap in human consciousness. It is bad enough to look at a piece and think, “I could have done this.” It’s worse when your next thought is, “But why would I want to?” Tedium and self-indulgence hung over most of the exhibits.

But not all. The highlight was an extended look at the works of the Québécois artist Paul-Émile Borduas. It was encouraging to see from his early works that Borduas was fully capable of doing what many of us would consider art: representation of natural scenes, still-lifes, and so on. I suppose most of the artists on display in the museum have similar talents. But without the evidence on display in front of you, there is always the lingering suspicion that some of them really might be talentless hacks bluffing their way to fame. There was no such concern with Borduas.

This naturally gave me a more sympathetic approach to his later, more abstract works. He had clearly done these pieces for a reason. The most striking of his later works was Translucidité. You can view the picture here (http://amica.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/AMICO~1~1~96423~220818:Translucidit%C3%A9?qvq=w4s:/what/Paintings/Huile+sur+toile/;lc:AMICO~1~1&mi=30&trs=229), though the image does not capture the intense textures of the work, the violent ridges of white paint that cut into the colored portions. I loved looking at it.

As for what it means, that of course is almost entirely subjective. But I saw it as a painting trying to struggle out from behind a white cloud of unknowing – a cloud that not only obscured whatever was back there, but twisted it as well, so that only the slightest hint of the “original” painting could be glimpsed.

As such, it struck me as a moving metaphor for what life is often like: for the ideas we can’t quite express, the relationships we don’t quite understand, the ambitions we can’t quite realize. As Christians, we may believe in Absolute Truth. But that hardly means we know that Truth absolutely, nor that we can adequately express what we do know. Is this postmodernism? I don’t think so, since it was the apostle Paul himself who said that in this present age we see through a glass dimly. Borduas helps us to at least see that truth clearly, and beautifully.

De-centered

By Sean McDonough, PhD
Associate Professor of New Testament

There is no gravitational pull quite so strong as that exerted by the human imagination.

And I don’t mean that in a good way.

The sun may hold eight planets in its sway (or nine, depending on what they are saying about poor Pluto this week), but my mind can bring the entire cosmos into its orbit. The universe swirl around Me, and each thing in it grows or shrinks in significance depending on how it shapes my town and my job and my family. It’s an absurdity, of course, but it is an absurdity that plays itself out each day of our lives.

I was reminded of this recently when I made my first trip to Hong Kong. The city was a wonder, with buildings stacked upon buildings like the playroom of a Lego-mad millionaire. The biggest building in town, the recently completed International Commerce Center (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Commerce_Centre), stands at the edge of Victoria Harbour and virtually cries out, “Yes, we’re going to build. We’re going to build big buildings, and we’re going to build one after another after another and dare anybody to stop us.” As if the scope and scale were not enough, every night a dozen or so of these skyscrapers on Hong Kong Island light up with a soundtrack booming in the background. You can see it all from the Avenue of the Stars, Hong Kong’s answer to the sidewalk outside Grauman’s Chinese Theater. (I got my picture by Jackie Chan’s handprints, though the Bruce Lee statue is the more popular venue.)

But the buildings weren’t the only impressive thing about the city. The subway was clean and efficient, the streets safe, the opportunities for shopping and eating endless. More surprising was the natural beauty of the place. The crowded and touristy Peak Tram on Hong Kong island quickly gives way to a stunning walk around the Peak for the moderately adventurous, and I had the Sunset Peak trail on Lantau all to myself the last day of my trip. The volcanoes may have stopped spewing fire long ago, but they are still in the business of providing spectacular views.

As I reflected on all this, it struck me how even on my most “selfless” days, I still assume that the world essentially revolves if not around me, at least around eastern Massachusetts where I live…or at least the Eastern Corridor from Boston to DC. Yet a visitor from Hong Kong must find Boston a quaint little city, or maybe even a provincial village – a few good schools, yes; at least one very nice modern building (the Hancock Tower), a pleasant river, with some nice scenery around if you have a car and a few hours to spare. But the Hub of the Universe? Not hardly.

It was a blessing to be de-centered in this way. The practical implications for thinking about the mission of the church in the modern world are obvious: you don’t need Philip Jenkins to tell you the church is no longer a Western cultural phenomenon (if it ever really was one to begin with). A bit of vacation time and a plane ticket can open your eyes soon enough. And the theological implications are equally clear. We are not at the center of things, whatever our addled brains might tell us. The center does not lie in me, or in Boston, or even in splendid Hong Kong. The center is ever and only the throne of God: “Then I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and on the sea, and all that is in them, singing: ‘To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb be praise and honor and glory and power, for ever and ever!’” (Rev. 5:13).

Something about the Sea

By Sean McDonough, PhD
Associate Professor of New Testament

I have never lived far from the ocean. Even if the busyness of life keeps me from heading to the sea, it is a comfort to know that it is out there close in its grey infinitude. You don’t need to press your ear against a sea shell to hear its voice beckoning. The sound of the waves goes well beyond earshot.

What is the ocean’s allure? Personal history of course plays a part. If half my childhood summers were wasted in the slough of despond that is 1970’s television (“Joker, joker…and a triple!”; “Marcia, Marcia, Marcia!”), the rest were spent on the beaches of Duxbury, MA. There was plenty of opportunity to think as you walked to Duxbury Beach from the mainland, across what was said to be the longest wooden bridge in America; or as you walked down its six miles of sand. From the prospect of high waves to ride in youth to the reality of broken romances in adolescence, the ocean was the backdrop for much of my life. All of this clings to your mind as determinedly as the sea salt once stuck to your skin.

On a more philosophical level, the sea side incarnates the tension of land and liquidity, changelessness and change. The shore may erode through the slow decades, the sea may explode in hurricane force, but the shore is still the shore and the sea is still the sea. The marriage endures through the storms. Yet the sea is always shifting: changing color, changing shape, changing depth. A friend of mine admitted that he was reluctant to move to St. Andrews in Scotland because living by the sea would be so monotonous. He happily discovered how wrong he had been. The Greeks said you can’t step into the same river twice; the same could be said of seeing the sea. For the land-loving Israelite, such shape-shifting made the sea a ready image of the chaos that always threaten to engulf the world (Daniel 7, Revelation 21:1). But even they knew that down deep it was the magnificent handiwork of the living God, and even the dread Leviathan was just a (Ps. 104:24-26).

The sea is also the great repository of memory, a magnet for musings. Dylan Thomas writes in the beginning of “A Child’s Christmas in Wales”, “All the Christmases roll down toward the two-tongued sea, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street; and they stop at the rim of the ice-edged fish-freezing waves.” It is a great gray slate waiting for you to scratch your thoughts on its surface. There is no therapy quite so satisfying as simply spinning your shredded soul into the forgetfulness of the deep. Not for nothing did God promise that he would cast our sins into the depth of the sea (Micah 7:19); there they can be drowned as dead as Pharaoh.

And so the sea’s highest call is to remind us of God: beautiful in his simplicity, ferocious in his wrath, unfathomable in the depths of his sin-swallowing grace.

The Graced Wenham Swamp

By Sean McDonough, PhD
Associate Professor of New Testament

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of canoeing on (and briefly in) the Ipswich River. I have caught glimpses of the river as I have driven about the North Shore, but that is a very different thing from snaking through its length – it is a bit like looking at faucets and sinks with no sense of the pipes behind the walls.

The highlight of the trip was spending the night in the midst of the Great Wenham Swamp, an entity I had known up to this point only as a Great White Space with intermittent green brushstrokes on the town map. Here, just a few miles from GCTS, I felt I was in the New England equivalent of the Atchafalaya Basin or the Everglades – no alligators or poisonous snakes (though the mosquitoes did their level best to fill the “threatening animals” category), but plenty of water, plenty of wildness…and most importantly, plenty of birds.

I had been a low-level birdwatcher in the days before the flood of work and family commitments swallowed up the discretionary time necessary for standing around in the woods and waiting for things to turn up. My sightings were mostly happenstansical. I sat by the pond at the end of the road of our house in Duxbury and looked up to see inches away a Cedar Waxwing, with its sublime coloring and its punk-rock-sunglasses eyeband. I almost literally stumbled upon a brilliant blue Indigo Bunting on a path just off Route 20 in Waltham. I was astounded by the size of the wings and the bright red head of a Pileated Woodpecker I spotted while wandering in the woods at a church picnic in Townsend. A friend at work gave me a copy of Birds of North America and I was hooked, (or netted, as the case may be).

But that was long ago. I am now restricted to what flutters into our suburban neighborhood – the usual assortment of sparrows and crows, with the occasional cardinal or goldfinch to brighten things up. Even here, of course, strange and wonderful things can pop up – a pair of wood ducks alighted on our neighbors’ tree one morning a few weeks ago. I didn’t know they were wood ducks right away, but a google search of “ducks in trees white bands on head” kept turning up “wood duck” in response, and I had the diagnosis confirmed by Rick, a friend of mine who actually knows what he is doing in the ornithological realm.

He was in fact there with me in the Great Wenham Swamp. He showed me a few of the wood ducks flying past our little island hideaway, along with a Baltimore Oriole; my delight at the brilliance of its plumage (viewed through high quality binoculars) was matched only by my delight at the fact that it looked exactly like the picture of the oriole that adorns the Hamilton- Wenham Little Leaguers’ caps. While Rick describes himself as only a moderate birder, he was able to identify birds by calls and flight with remarkable ease.

It struck me then, as it has struck me before, how the experience of birdwatching reflects so closely the experience of God’s grace .(It also is an experience of grace, of course, if you appreciate birds). You can put yourself in a position to see certain birds if you choose the right time of day and the right setting, and if you keep your eyes and ears open…but you can’t make them come. They come when they want. In the same way, the gift of God’s grace will come and go as he pleases. But by patient attendance on his Word and consistent fellowship with his people, we can be in a position where the likelihood of finding his grace increases exponentially. But it is never under our control -- which is just as well. Wood ducks will very occasionally pop up on suburban streets; and the grace of God will sometimes appear where you least expect it.

Everything I Needed to Know I Learned from My Puppy

By Sean McDonough, PhD
Associate Professor of New Testament

Not literally, of course: my five-month old puppy is no help when it comes to parsing Aramaic verbs, or understanding the history of the Quakers, or finding the perfect sermon illustration. (She has written an interesting paper on economic factors leading up to the Maccabean revolt, but that is a story for another day.) But I did want to pass along a few life lessons I have learned sojourning with our little canine companion:

Love Keeps No Record of Wrongs: Well, yes, I actually learned this from 1 Corinthians 13:5; but it is nice to see it lived out on a daily basis. Step on her toes, be late with her meals, keep her in her “gated community” in the kitchen away from the rest of the pack: do what you will, she still wakes up each morning delighted to see you. “Hey! It’s you! Awesome! I am so totally stoked to see you! I love you!” What makes this especially appealing is the fact that it stands in such stark contrast to a culture in which keeping a record of wrongs is something of a national pastime. Real or imagined slights dominate the headlines and percolate down to every level of society. People are forever worried about whom they might offend, and so we endure treacly talk high on affirmation and low on content. Paying attention to what we say is a crucial life skill and a core biblical value; but paying attention to how we listen is equally important. We need to listen charitably, and we need to get rid of the little Book of Slights we all carry around in our hearts.

Alpha Dog Shakedown: Don’t worry: I didn’t learn this from our puppy; it’s something we do to our puppy…and we do it, I must add (see prior paragraph) with the full approval of ultra-dog-loving trainers. The Alpha Dog Shakedown consists of grabbing the puppy by the scruff of the neck and holding them down until they know, with Tony Danza, Who’s the Boss. The ADS has become a nice way for me to capture the sense of many of God’s Old School dealings with his people. God is not simply a nice guy, as many popular portraits make him out to be.

The Bible describes God not only as kind (which he undoubtedly is) but also as our Master who is perfectly willing to shake us up and pin us down as the need arises. The best personal example may be Jacob wrestling with the angel. While Jacob “prevails” in some sense, the dislocation of his hip is a painful and perpetual reminder of who is in charge.

Boundaries Can Be a Good Thing: We are repeatedly told nowadays to “color outside the lines”. What we once would have called “bad coloring” has now become a metaphor for the need to unleash the creative genius within all of us. We are likewise encouraged by everyone from pop stars to car manufacturers that there are “no boundaries” in life. Well, try driving your Ford Explorer off a cliff and see how far that gets you. The fact is, there are boundaries to what we can do, and attending to the boundaries God puts on our lives is a way of ensuring happiness, not restricting it. Our puppy would love to roam freely about the house; she would less love ingesting Lego pieces, so for now she stays in a clear and limited space. She would equally enjoy dashing headlong into the wide world outside. Since this would also involve dashing headlong into oncoming traffic, we keep her on a leash. Legos and automobiles are both good things, but there are rules that govern their use, and if you don’t learn those rules you will have some serious problems.

Help From Above: Franz Kafka is best known for his disturbing stories of personal paranoia and nightmarish bureaucracy. But he is also the author of the charming “Investigations of a Dog”, in which the title character tries to probe the mysteries of dog life. His task is made almost impossible, however, by his inability to recognize the role of humans in caring for and carrying around his canine kindred (hence investigations of “floating dogs” and food dropping from the sky). Whatever Kafka’s intent might have been, I have found it to be one of the most winsome shakedowns of atheism in modern literature. I am grateful that our own puppy has advanced well beyond Kafka’s dog in her understanding. While in the early days she did stare at the floor waiting for bits of popcorn or cheese or toast to magically appear, now she looks up at us. She knows where her daily bread comes from. Do we?

Through the Blistered Glass

By Sean McDonough, PhD
Associate Professor of New Testament

St. Patrick’s Day has come and gone. I celebrated it in our Exegesis of Revelation class by reading a bit of William Butler Yeats’ poem The Wanderings of Oisin. It recounts the tale of the Irish hero Oisin and his faery lover, with St. Patrick cast in the role of the disapproving, joy-killing Christian. The poem begins:

S. Patrick. You who are bent and bald, and blind,

With a heavy heart and a wandering mind,

Have known three centuries, poets sing,

Of dalliance with a demon thing.

Oisin. Sad to remember, sick with years,

The swift innumerable spears,

The horseman with their flowing hair,

And bowls of barley, honey, and wine,

Those merry couples dancing in tune,

And the white body that lay by mine;

But the tale, though words be lighter than air,

Must live to be old like the wandering moon.

Now by any orthodox account, Yeats was as woeful a theologian as he was wonderful a poet – and not simply because of his treatment of Patrick in the Wanderings. He was a devotee of Theosophy, a blend of Platonism, mysticism and highly doctored Buddhism that quickly degenerates into a vague, incoherent babble of Quarternaries, Triads, and something called an Etheric Double (you can read more on Yeats and Theosophy here: http://www.yeatsvision.com/Theosophy.html).

Why, then, read him in a course of Revelation? The answer is that, for all the becloudedness of his vision, Yeats still sensed or saw something, and spoke of it, in a way that often puts the church to shame. The words “the swift innumerable spears” are great poetry not only because they trip liltingly off the tongue, but because they evoke the remembrance of faded martial glory better than a thousand essays on the subject. In a much greater way Revelation, and all the apocalyptic bits of the Bible, offer us a vision of God’s kingdom that cannot be captured by staid, prosaic analysis. The seers throw us into the maelstrom of God’s grace and judgment; they set before us the horrors of the Abyss and the wonders of the New Jerusalem. They are so wild and dis-orienting we tend to avoid them altogether.

But doing so wraps a tourniquet on the church’s spiritual imagination. I have often contemplated teaching a course Horrible Protestant Fiction; I am now inclined to add another, Non-Existent Protestant Poetry. Both are exaggerations, of course; I am sure that worthy endeavors in both fields have been undertaken by the sons and daughters of the Reformation. But we Protestants do tend to be prosy proclaimers and inveterate explainers, with little patience for the ambiguity that inevitably resides in lean lines of verse. And I suspect our relative neglect of apocalyptic (aside from its utility for end of the world calculations) is a part of the problem.

We must of course reckon with the rarity of poetic genius. The wind bloweth where it listeth, and God’s scatters his creative gifts as he sees fit. As often as not they end up in what we consider the wrong hands (see our prior blog on Avatar for further evidence). We may have “acres of diamonds” at our feet, as Russell Conwell used to preach, but we don’t appear to have acres of Yeatses in our pews waiting to be furrowed. But those few who are genuinely gifted will not thrive if the church puts before them an impoverished, visionless Christianity. Preachers and teachers need to spread before their people the banquet of imagery in Revelation and Ezekiel and Daniel and Zechariah. If such texts prove rather hard to manage, that is a large part of the point: we shouldn’t want a God who fits so comfortably into our old word order that we can never move into his new one. If he does not shake us up, he can never wake us up.

Tolkien saw all this as clearly as anyone, though he did not make the connection with apocalyptic explicit, and his essay On Faery Stories remains the essential treatment of the topic. But it is fitting to end with an image, from the writer Frederick Buechner, in his book The Alphabet of Grace:

The window by the table where I work has large, old-fashioned panes with wavy places and blisters in the glass…my eyes are fixed sightlessly on the window just beyond the writing table and remain fixed there for I have no idea how long. Finally their sight returns and I see that all this time I have been looking at the window without knowing that I was looking at it. Through it there is a white picket fence across the street, and one of the blisters in the glass pane has taken an oval-shaped piece out of the fence and out of the grass beyond the fence; it looks as if there is some kind of hole in the world there, some kind of oval-shaped entrance to another world inside this world. (pp.89-90)

Are we willing to go through the blistered glass?

Primitive Doesn’t Come Cheap: A Few Thoughts on Avatar

By Sean McDonough, PhD
Associate Professor of New Testament

In a fractious world, it is always nice to see a consensus emerge…even if it only concerns a blockbuster film. James Cameron’s much discussed Avatar has received pretty uniform reviews: great special effects (floating mountains!) and solid action sequences (a giant burning tree falls!) are balanced by a hopelessly derivative plot (Pocahontas in outer space) and a risible utopian ideology (primitive society=good/technological society=bad). The fact that most film critics (hardly a theologically orthodox bunch) seem to have been unimpressed with the movie’s shallow philosophizing was especially heartening: it was a small victory for common sense in the public square.

I would add only two points to the emerging consensus. Both of them are rich ironies lodged in the very heart of Cameron’s utopian vision. First, Cameron makes his case for the superiority of a natural, non-technological culture by using the highest of high-tech paraphernalia. The planet Pandora (Cameron is no Tolkien when it comes to name creation) is stunning to look at, but it is just an illusion; a digitized paradise that is lost the moment the projector turns off. A longing for Eden is natural enough, but we can’t simply wish ourselves back there, no matter what our CGI budget might be. There is a reason the Bible never provides a map back to the Garden. The way to God’s presence lies forward, not back.

The second point concerns Cameron’s relentless assault on capitalism, and especially on what used to be known in radical circles as “the military-industrial complex”. There is nothing particularly complex about Avatar’s portrayal of business – or at least the dirty business of obtaining Pandora’ s prize, the floating substance unobtanium (sic). Gargantuan tractors chew up most of Pandora’s flora, while military machines napalm the rest. As the remorseless capitalists firebomb the virgin forest, our hearts are meant to burn with vaguely Marxist rage.

The problem with this, though, is that Avatar cost anywhere from 250-500 million dollars to make, and I presume Cameron did not borrow the money from friends or hold an Avatar bakesale to fund the project. No, he is enmeshed in one of the most ruthlessly capitalist industries this side of Pandora, the Hollywood film machine. Consider among many angles on this Fox’ sly strategy to maximize Avatar’s profitability:

“Fox is also reportedly catching a break on the marketing side through deals with companies such as IMAX and Panasonic. And then there's also the chipmunk factor -- specifically Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakuel,, which opens a week after Avatar for the studio and is considered a ‘relatively safe sequel to a chipper family comedy that cost about $60 million and took in $217 million at the domestic box office when it was released two years ago.’ Thanks for the solid, Alvin!” (Scott Cellura, “How Much did Avatar Cost?” http://movies.ign.com/articles/104/1043543p1.html)

So if you want an interesting night out at the cinema, you can go ahead and see Avatar (Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakuel will by most accounts prove a bit disappointing). But if you want any substance, don’t turn to Cameron; you will only find yourself enmeshed in a thicket of self-contradiction.

Silent Night

By Sean McDonough, PhD
Associate Professor of New Testament

Silent Night, Holy Night

All is calm, all is bright…

It is a beloved, and lovely, song…but I do wonder just how silent things were in Bethlehem that night. Singing choirs of angels, singing in exaltation, would presumably be pretty noisy, especially if they were joined by all the citizens of heaven above; you couldn’t help but hark. Back in the manger, baby Jesus may have been meek and mild, but I don’t think that would stop him screaming his little lungs out as he gasped his first breaths of air. Mary was likely pretty animated herself as she labored to push out her first-born. And while I cannot claim any real knowledge of animal husbandry, I would not be surprised if the oxen and sheep and donkeys made a racket themselves in response to all the busy-ness of the birth.

But if the silence of the song doesn’t quite work at the literal level, it does harbor a profound theological truth. Amidst all our work and worry and words, Christmas is a time to sit still. We exhaust ourselves all year with writing and theorizing and speculating about the problems of the world and how we can solve them; now at last we can be silent and hear God’s Answer.

Mick Jagger, Choir Boy

By Sean McDonough, PhD
Associate Professor of New Testament

The title is, as they say, a literal fact. While it might be hard to imagine, the Rolling Stones front man did indeed sing in the church choir in his youth. I learned this the other day while perusing According to the Rolling Stones while waiting for my son to finish his music lesson. The book also featured some rather endearing reflections from Jagger’s bandmate Keith Richards on his own early musical experiences. The young Stone-to-be apparently spent much of his boyhood surreptitiously searching for primitive rock-n-roll on his transistor radio. He would hear half of Heartbreak Hotel…the signal would fail…and he would be heartbroken himself, yearning to hear the rest of whatever was troubling Elvis.

Now, in light of their subsequent less-than-innocent behavior, it would be easy to laugh these memories off. We might conjure up images of a young robed Mick belting out Jumpin’ Jack Flash at St. Peter’s Evensong service, or raise questions as to what else Keith might have been up to behind his parents’ backs beyond illicit listening to Chuck Berry. But there is something touching about seeing these notorious rakes as at least semi-innocent youths discovering the joy of music. We are so accustomed to their bad-boy rock and roll image we forget that they started off as ordinary kids.

And it made me wonder if a part of God’s astounding ability to forgive lies in the persistence of his memory. Throughout the Old Testament, God rehearses the story of Israel, nowhere more pointedly than in Ezekiel 16 (a passage, as it happens, with imagery as graphic as anything the Stones came up with). It is all here: Israel’s humble origins, God’s grace in the Exodus, Israel’s relentless pursuit of foreign gods, and the devastating judgment that ensues. One might imagine that God would completely wash his hands of this sinful people, yet in the end he speaks a word of hope: “… yet I will remember my covenant with you in the days of your youth, and I will establish for you an everlasting covenant” (Ezek. 16:60, ESV).

Grizzled veterans of various sorts often like to weigh in with the phrase, “I’ve seen it all.” Well, God really has seen it all. What is remarkable is that his relentless recall has not left him embittered and hopeless; rather it moves him to compassion as he remembers how things once were, and how they might be again. I imagine it would give him great Satisfaction to one day see Mick Jagger back in the church choir.

Nasty Neighbors at the Lost and Found

By Sean McDonough, PhD
Associate Professor of New Testament

My favorite quiz show moment came years ago on the late, lamented “Tic Tac Dough”, hosted by the effervescent Wink Martindale. A map of the United States was displayed on the screen, with one state lit up in red. The contestant was asked to identify the state. With that peculiar confidence born of complete cluelessness, he answered soberly, “I believe that’s Ohio, Wink.” While memory fails me as to precisely which state was in fact lit up, I do remember that it was one of the most un-Ohio-like of the fifty – perhaps California, Texas, or Montana.

Sometimes apparently easy questions can trip us up. Imagine, for instance, that Wink Martindale were to pop into your living room just now and ask, “For fifty points: what is the unifying theme of the stories of the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the lost son in chapter 15 of Luke’s gospel?” Most of us would immediately reply, “I believe that’s, ‘lost things get found’, Wink.” And we would be correct. Mostly.

I say, “mostly”, because when you look a little more closely at Luke 15 as a whole, you will see that God’s love for the lost is, strictly speaking, the premise for Jesus’ main point, rather than the main point itself. Notice how the chapter begins: “Now the tax collectors and ‘sinners’ were all gathering around to hear him. But the Pharisees and the teachers of the law muttered, ‘This man welcomes sinners and eats with them.’ Then Jesus told them this parable.”(Luke 15:1-3 NIV). We would expect the parables that ensue to be directed as much to the Pharisees’ grumbling as to the fact that sinners are coming to Jesus.

This is exactly what we find. About half of the parable of the lost sheep takes place after the little lamb is already safe and sound: “Then he calls his friends and neighbors together and says, 'Rejoice with me; I have found my lost sheep.' I tell you that in the same way there will be more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who do not need to repent” (15:6-7). The parable of the lost coin ends the same way: “And when she finds it, she calls her friends and neighbors together and says, 'Rejoice with me; I have found my lost coin.' In the same way, I tell you, there is rejoicing in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents” (15:9-10). And we are all familiar with the elder brother in the story of the prodigal son, whining that he never gets to have a party with his friends.

It is not difficult to see Jesus’ point: rather than grumbling like the elder son, the Pharisees and teachers of the law ought to be like the neighbors who rejoice with the shepherd and the woman. We don’t lose the familiar blessings of the parables by noting this: the fact remains that God really is on the hunt for sinners. It is still perfectly appropriate to wrap up an evangelistic meeting with a thoughtful reflection of the prodigal son’s return home (though even there we might ask whether in the world of the parable the son is driven more by pragmatic food-based incentives rather than a heartfelt longing for dear old dad).

What we gain, meanwhile, is a valuable lesson for all of us who have been in the fold for a while. While we would of course never come out and grumble, “Why are all these sinners becoming Christians?”, it is all too easy for veteran saints to slip into the habit of downplaying the “shallowness” or “emotionalism” of new converts. Just as parents have to make a concerted effort to remember what it was like to be child, so older believers have to make a concerted effort to remember the undercurrent of pure joy that accompanies a genuine turning to God. May we rejoice with God and his angels for his continual work to seek and to save the lost.