Lk11v1-2 "Teach us to pray.." What is prayer? 🙏🤲👏🛐 What is prayer such that it could be taught? What is prayer such that this is what would be taught? What exactly is being taught here that we should extend both by direct imitation as 'The Lord's Prayer' and by extrapolation as a broad principle in life? How do you pray? How do you teach others to pray? What of posture, tone and content is necessary and sufficient to the prayeriness of prayer? What is not prayer? If you asked Jesus, "Teach me to pray" what would you be hoping to gain ~ what output or impact in your life would you hope for as a result? If he answered you with this prayer, what would you do with that?
Prayer begins with a direct address: "Father" ~ intimate, singular, archetypally masculine, responsible and not tyrannical, protective and providing, confronting and enworlding.. What is the richest possible interpretation of Jesus' choice of addressing God as Father, as Abba, and how do we practice and export the coherence of this signifier?
Establishes the relative position of the addressed: "hallowed" ~ being superlatively above me, utterly other, we are talking to infinity, total and unbounded power, total and unblemished purity, unabstractable and irreducible, more-than. The passive voice of hallowed tends to sound generalised or historic, as-has-been-hallowed, and, while it is a true statement of fact, God's name is hallowed regardless of whether we hallow it actively, what is said by saying it? What is emphasised, what is implied, what is required to say the hallowed with impunity?
States our common cause: "Kingdom" ~ that it would come, not wistfully but declaratively, in us individually, in the households and churches we constitute, and in the world beyond us, the Kingdom's character and structure, the quality of the King's kingship reign over us, the quality of the King's administration between us. The Kingdom is us, and it is beyond us, in that we are not-and-not-yet, yet in the now, we are the Kingdom, we are it's citizenry, it's ambassadors, the means and measure of it's constitution in the world. Thus for his Kingdom to come, we must go.
Lk11v3-4 Noting perhaps for the first time that in the prayer Jesus taught us we're invited to ask for our daily bread before asking for the forgiveness of our sins (both, of course, after recognising that God is our Father). Can we dare believe it? This seems so against the grain of what we're constantly taught in evangelical circles - that we have to deal with sin & repentance & forgiveness first, and only then can we access the abundance, provision, grace & expansiveness of relationship with the Father. In all prayer, all theology, all comportment towards God, others, ourselves, the rest of creation and the intertwining narratives of all these, we are taught: ask forgiveness first, only then can you contemplate or lean into the provision of God because only then are you in right relationship. But Jesus puts these the other way round. Again I am put in mind of the merciful spacious place as the positive place in which we first find ourselves in Christ, the spacious place which in which there is even room for our sin. Of course, when we recognise really truly that God is our Father and the source of our daily bread, we will naturally turn to repentance, that is, turn from the idols born of pride, fear and small-mindedness, to align ourselves with the heartbeat that orders the spacious place. We will turn from our sin. Asking for forgiveness of our sins is crucial, but if it doesn't flow from recognition of God as Father and Provider, it's just sin-management, just a sin-confession cycle (and addiction), just surface and superstitious. Maybe I would have a more appropriate relationship with my sin and brokenness if I took seriously the fact that Jesus orders prayer this way? Less obsessive, less panicked, with greater faith for actual transformation? What if I tried praying more of my prayers in this sort of order, including asking and assuming for the strength, nourishment & care of God before then turning to examine sin and brokenness and then seeking repentance? Let's try it.
Lk11v5-6 🌃🍞
Daily Bread v3 is for your Friends v6.
Your Friends are on a Journey, at Night, without Food.
Grace fails not in Production but in Distribution.
God's reality is Grace.
Our participation in Hospitality is Justice more than Mercy.
Hospitality is Grace conduited.
Full receipt of Grace is contingent on our Perception.
Our Perception is obscured by our Fallibility, Dullness and Self-relation
~ Prayer is a Dialogue between the Finite Fallible and the Infinite Infallible --> Persist in Prayer proportionally to mitigate the consequences of Fallibility.
~ Prayer is Conscious Clarification by Explicit Articulation of the World's Need --> Persist in Articulation of Need proportionally to unlearn Dullness.
~ Prayer for Hospitality's provisions is Intercession is compassionate World-facing --> Persist in Intercession proportionally to combat Self-relation.
Lk11v7-8 This is a bit of a perplexing analogy, and I'm sure there is more to be mined, more to lean into. Pitfalls of prosperity theology and works-based righteousness on every interpretative side. Noting that it's not evident to me that we're supposed to analogise the reluctant friend to God at all from Jesus' words, but in any case holding all this in tension for the time being, I've been rolling this phrase from v8 around my mind: 'shameless audacity' (NIV) 'imprudence' (ESV), 'not ashamed' (GNB), 'importunity' (KJV) , 'shameless persistence' (NLT). This is the posture we're allowed and invited to take before God in the face of our frustration. The space we're in is large and expansive. There is space for literal shame-less-ness. There's space for audaciousness, there's space to not give up on your desires at first frustration, space to articulate your most complicated longings, there is space to make a fuss, there is space to state your desires for yourself and your desires for others. Reflecting on Ps109 in a group a couple of weeks ago someone remarked that they would be pretty happy if, in their most frustrated, persecuted and rage-filled moments they were able to at least bring their desire for vengeance to God, to articulate these excessive feelings in the light rather than in the darkness. I am an excessive being, I realise. I feel absurdly and confusingly complex, disproportionate, overthought, sensitive, needy. I am these things whether I bring them to God or not, but where I am ashamed to bring these things to God, which I often am, they leak out everywhere else instead. There is room for this excessiveness before God, this parable suggests to me today, room to demand, room to rage. Before God, and nowhere else, is the right place to be imprudent. (Imprudence before God is the condition of prudence before others, perhaps - taking those feelings and needs to the right place, getting the bread from the right place, not demanding it from the wrong place, and so having excess bread to give away when face to face with friends.) So loosen up.
Lk11v9-10 👏 If the implausibility of "everyone who asks receives" is too much, and if the caveat by ESVSB is dryly unsatisfying: "does not mean that believers always receive what they ask for, because God is wiser than they are and has better plans for his children than they could imagine" what to do?
🏆 There is a general you-have-to-be-in-it-to-win-it maxim extractable from the advice, rather like the God-blesses-those-who-turn-up kind of thing.
🙈🙉🙊 Then, self-evidently, but actually quite provocatively, consider: it would be peculiar for the door to be opened to you if you didn't knock, for you to find something specific that you weren't looking for, to get an answer to a question that you definitely weren't asking. Going slightly further. I receive that Jesus aggressively presumes on the God hypothesis, poking me do the doing of belief in the God that I surprise myself that I actually believe in. If there are no atheists in the trenches, and if this is not just toying with wish-fulfilment. If any part of you is not completely nihilistic, if one the worst day ever you might pray to God, if there is any coherence to that worldview at all.. then what would it look like to live not minimally, but maximally, in a way that is consistent with the God hypothesis. Scary. Asking, seeking, knocking is often too much for my pride. British-mustn't-grumbleisms, keep-calm-carrying-onisms, ask-not-what-your-country-can-do-for-youisms, the subtle self-reliant self-identity that never asks for anything from others, and so certainly doesn't ask it from God. To ask is to concede lack, and that is a hard thing. And then, what if God answered your prayer, a doubly scary thing, an appalling responsibility, akin to survivor's guilt, the awkward gravity of gratitude. Christianity is not so much something that people have tried and found wanting, it is something that has been found hard and has been left untried.
😱 Ask. Seek. Knock. ~ for one thing every day that scares you.
Lk11v11-12 What are these verses for? On the tender subject of earthly fathers, on the fraught topic of analogies and disanalogies between divine and human fathering. Jesus here suggests that however bad our earthly fathers are, we should recognise that they are not actively malevolent. The implication being that their brokenness comes from confusion, apathy, unprocessed emotional dysfunction of other kinds, but not active malevolence. One immediate response is that it's not evident that this is actually true in all cases. One hears terrible stories, of fathers who actively will evil on their children, who wish them ill, who give them scorpions and snakes entirely as a means of wielding power, vengeance, hatred. This is not nothing, but I suppose this is the exception rather than the rule, and in my own case I can repeat these words in truth: my father is not actively malevolent. Whatever his weakness, he has never been out to trick me, out to harm me. He is not oriented towards my harm. This is, of course, not sufficient as a picture of God's fatherliness towards us, but maybe it is a good place to start, an entry point for meditation on the Father Heart of God, particularly for those of us who don't really understand the analogy, who find the concept of Father hard to grasp even. God is not actively malevolent. It's so interesting that even holding that basic truth before the heart for a while reveals that in some ways I disbelieve even this. In some ways I believe that God is out to get me. I believe that God's feelings towards me are that of disgust, revenge, trickery. I believe that God might give me scorpions. I don't trust Him at all. There is more that's needed here, this meditation must go beyond God's non-malevolence through His non-indifference (& so perhaps disanalogies with human fathers), to recognise His active overflowing grace & love. But start here: God is not out to get you. Allow your muscles to untense as you recognise areas of active distrust. The distrust has to be unweeded if every other flower of surrendered trust is to flourish.
I am reminded of the need for an apophatic meditation:
1. God is a Father
2. God is not a Father
3. God is not not a Father
These levels of meditation invite us to wrestle with the analogies & disanalogies between God and our earthly fathers, recognising God's ultimate transcendence.
Lk11v13-14 ".. [v9 ask, seek, knock..]: how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him?"
🗣 "Ask" Verbalise it, springing from your centre, out of your own poverty, be unfurled, be vocal, comport yourself, dispose yourself, orient your being in recognition of your need and as an articulation of God's available supply. Ask for the Spirit. Ask aloud. Interrogate. The Spirit is the answer to your question.
🔭🔬 "Seek" Go into the world and catalogue the variety of a diverse and God-breathed world, explore the infinity of God's provision and character, discern and receive, filter signal from noise, scour. Seek the Spirit. The Spirit is the destination you are looking for, the treasure hidden, the prize waiting to be found, a revelation discovered rediscovered and incrementally expanded in scope by ever more by earnest research.
🚪 "Knock" For there is something to knock. Between you and the Spirit's abundance there is a wooden panel, an opaque membrane, a slammer in the aperture of revelation. There is an architecture to unbelief, somewhat of our own making, tap at it, for where it resounds hollow, there is the Spirit's dwelling, there is where we have encased him. Knock on the timber you've boxed the Spirit in with, let him out, let him in, by knocking.
Lk11v15-16 Initially a bit perplexed by this - surely the demonic way is one of division, disunity, fragmentation, chaos? But thinking about this a little more it makes sense that evil has to presume on good. Evil can't not use God's resources, because God's resources are the foundation of reality. The Satanic spread of disunity has this hypocritical quality - Screwtape's nephew can only divide humanity by collaborating with his uncle. Super-villians and evil geniuses have to rely on virtues of co-ordination, intelligibility & strategy, which are godly virtues characterised by unity. How embarrassing for them demons - there is nothing useful that's originally theirs. It's all borrowed. The goodness of God is more fundamental than the distortion of evil, it's further down, more original, it's the condition of all coherence, even coherence used for distorted ends. You cannot escape God, you cannot get outside God, there is nothing you can do that doesn't presume upon the creation, sustanence and order of God. Don't be like the demons, leading a double-minded existence, trying to use a reality that already belongs to God against Him. Rather, recognise that the principles of unity that run through every dimension of the universe and make anything possible are in fact principles to submit to, to align yourself with. At some level you have to do this anyway, why not surrender all you are in a joined up way, why fight the source of life?
Lk11v17-18 👑💔 "..every kingdom divided against itself falls.." Unity is a military imperative and we are at war. Our orchestra coach tour carries a diversity of instrumentalists to play a diversity of tunes but, to the extent that we are on the same bus, we have to want the same destination, probably by the same route, probably at the same speed. This wisdom principle which should guide 41, St Marks and the PJs also applies as an cautionary observation of evil's unity as being a one thing ~ Jesus has a concept of the organised evil which we are to oppose. Beyond mere honour amongst thieves, or pragmatically allied supervillains, Jesus opposes a singular diabolical conspiracy. Healing, exorcisms, preaching the gospel - these are doing battle against one enemy, a breaking in and breaking out captives from the hegemonic totality of imperial evil.
💪👹 "..for you say that I cast out demons by Beelzebul.." The people of Jesus' day observed that power was at work in this display of exorcism. They logically considered it must have been rendered by the greatest greater-than. What is the most powerful force in the world? Death. Death and its entropic entourage are what we orient our being around resisting, that which we pay greatest heed to. In that universe all power is tyrannical, all masculinity is patriarchy, all motives are ulterior, all politics are realpolitik, everything is untrustably selfish all the time. Unless. Unless there is a different ultimate force, unless resurrection is real, unless love wins. The victory of Jesus is a victory of power, and power has always been suspect because the greatest power has always been death. But this has changed.
Lk11v19-20 Drawn to this phrase 'the finger of God'. Why does Jesus use this phrase? The internet is full of theories as to the right interpretation of this phrase, with many suggesting that it is primarily evocative of God's power (even His little finger is more powerful than demons, etc). This is surely part of what's going on here, but as I think about this this afternoon I'm drawn to the other use of this phrase in Exodus 32v18 on Mount Sinai, and the what-it-is-like to do something in the power of God. The 'finger of God' could evoke a dramatic lone figure on a hilltop, theatrically pointing this 'finger' at the demons to be cast out, the wrongs to be righted, the mountains to be moved. Hunting baddies with the mighty power of Roald Dahl's Magic Finger..
And yet. This isn't what the finger of God is like in Ex32v12-18...this is one of the most intimate, dialogical moments between God and Man that we find in the OT. God converses with Moses, they are close like friends, and in offering the Commandments, truths sculpted for the freedom of the human heart, God puts His finger on the human heart. Moses experiences God putting his finger on him, touching him. Touch is a form of communication (I have just been writing this morning)...the finger of God is a communicative act by God, and when Jesus says that he casts out demons, I wonder that he means that he knows the touch of the Father as the source of His power. The Father puts his finger on the place to pray into, and Jesus, who knows how to listen, follows the finger, feels it pressing on him in communicative love, and so does what he feels his Father doing.
Lk11v21-22 👹🌍 The world as we know it is a "palace" belonging to a "man" who is sufficiently "strong" and appropriately "armed" to keep his "goods" "safe".
🖥🏯 In the storehouse of another's wealth, we were the swag. The analogy works elegantly transferred to the world of social media giants for whom we are the product, we are pixels on their screen, we are pods in their matrix of value extraction, we are indentured clickbait, we are tradable entities racked inside their elaborate warehouse palaces of data-mining.
🔗 The facebook parallel is neat but flimsy by comparison to the moral universe where all of life is a system of slavery. The world could delete facebook and unplug the whole internet and they would still be labourers under an inherited curse, still stuck in a system of working off the debt of their fathers.
🎢 The system is a "palace" - a dreamworld, a not entirely uncomfortable containment, and the world (esp digital natives) is born into a sort of Stockholm syndrome.
⚔🔫 The system is a subjugation by a "strong man" who is also "armed" ie. if you could riggle out he could still shoot you, if you could call for a friend's help he could shoot them. The world is in a predicament that they cannot be merely educated out of.
🆓 But we are free. Set free for freedom Gal5v1. So, be free, actively, intentionally and with a profound and grateful sense of the undeserved gift of it, and with a sense of the time-limited urgency to summon all the inmates inside to the breach in the prison wall.
Lk11v23-24 Those not gathered with Jesus scatter. This I think is in part just an articulation of the true truth that to be ungathered _is_ to be scattered. What is it to be scattered? It is to be cut off from, at a distance from, one's people. It is for the distribution and communication between these people to have no pattern, no rhythm. To be scattered is to live an arbitrary intersubjectivity, leading to loneliness and ineffectiveness. If your world is not characterised by gathered centres of people with whom you regularly and rhythmically do your life, then you are leading a scattered life. London is a place set up to scatter people - many are the connections, but their disordered hit-or-miss once-in-a-while nature means that it's easy to slide through life without real gathering-with, and so it is to live scattered. We're apt (culturally and otherwise) apt to think that there is a neutral state of not-gathered-with-others-but-neither-scattered, the lone individual first, and from this starting place we can either be gathered with others or scattered, but this is not true - as soon as you are not gathered-with, you are scattered. So to with God. If your life is not gathered regularly and rhythmically into the life of the trinity, you are already spiritually scattered.
Lk11v25-26 🚯 Tidy your room.
"Put your house in order." Is38v1
"Wash yourselves.." Is1v16
"Create in me a clean heart.." Ps51v10
"~ manage your household, if you want to take care of the church.." 1Ti3v5
"..take the log out of your own eye.." Mt7v5
Tidy your room.
But. It is not enough to merely tidy your room, as evil can abide in a tidy room more efficiently.
Lk11v27-28 And so I can trust that even if my worst fears come to pass, I still have everything I need. May I know it in my knower. Amen.
Lk11v29-30 "An evil generation seeks a sign." 🚸💥 A cosmic sign rendered in the sublime. Settling for a signifier, we are satisfied by the significance of mere signification. Everything that leads us to savour surface and simulacra is a substitute saviour. Jesus will not be a substitute for himself. Proto-modern and post-imperial, consciences seared by Roman occupation, these Jews, as we, pursue pornographic power-over ~ the brutalistic justice of and against an infinite machine. Resentment seeks spectacle: a visual vandal's visceral revenge? Show us whatcha got Jeezus.
🐋 Not Jesus. He goes beneath surface. As Jonah. To hidden depths.
Lk11v31-32 We're always navigating a historical perspective which neither falls into a naive myth of progress nor a luddite nostalgia for the past. With this in mind, the thought that Jesus puts before us here, that our ancestors will be incredulous at what our generation failed to see, failed to pursue, failed to labour for - is a thought we can heed whatever our generation. Each generation takes for granted different things, comforts themselves in different ways, has been hurt by the previous generation in different ways, faces a different cultural and technological landscape. I pray for eyes to see the ways I am formed qua millennial, and thus a better sense of my blind spots. May I learn all the more a queenly wisdom and a prophetic conviction that breaks in from outside my specific cultural moment. Amen.
Lk11v33-34
See saw sight with a swop shop sheen
Give lights out, let light in
Glean light's gleam and reflect.
Lest a dash dot darker darken
Rather look like light alighting lightly.
And let it.
🔦🕶 “No one after lighting a lamp hides it in a cellar" who is the agent of these two verbs? Who lights it? Who hides it? Me? But this is not to frame Christian revelation as self-aware enlightenment. But what then? What is my agency in the light which is in me? Sight is elective. Sight is subjective. Sight, like a laser sight, goes out from you, a reader-response rendering of reality? Sight is lensed, filtered, and fundamentally augmented by belief. Seeing is believing. Sight is an act of faith. Seeing is receptive but also projective - a worldview is worldforming.
"..so that those who enter may see the light.." 11v9 "seek.." // 11v29 "don't seek.." The sight and light of Christianity is different to sign-seeking. Signage is monological and totalitarian, a broadcast fiat, an autarch's injunction. There is no negotiating with traffic lights. Don't seek a sign. Rather seek to dialogue with the light and thence to take that dialogical approach to light and sight to the world. Rather seek to be a conduit of light, perpetually translating and refracting.
“No one after lighting a lamp hides it under a basket" Why not?
🔥 Fire hazard? What is the danger of your light under a bushel? Lk24v32 heartburn. Rm12v20 headburn. We are combustible people. Burn rightly.
⛽ Opportunity cost? What is the cost of your light under a bushel? Wasted fuel. Time is short.
Lk11v35-36 "See to it then, that the light within you is not darkness."
Q: How? Don't eyes adjust to the light they're in?
A: Ps36v9 In your light we see light.
Lk11v37-38 "..astonished that he did not first wash.."
🕵♂ Wednesday in Holy Week is Spies Wednesday. I was meditating earlier that it is strange that Jesus should have needed to be betrayed with a kiss - that is, to be marked out and distinguished because he was otherwise indistinguishable from the mass, a spec amongst the great unwashed. No special hat, no special glow, no special cleanliness.
🧜♂🚿 The character Strickland in The Shape of Water is portrayed as measuring a man by his bathroom routine - real men only wash their hands before they pee.. Cleanliness is next to oddliness, clinical madness, vain OCD Pharisaism, peculiar anxieties about the appearance of things and contagion. As with thoughts on David's murderous instinct - religione's inherent moral disgust must lead to genocide as the only form of cleansing, in a world without grace.
🤢 Moral Disgust: (On this, at 35:50)
Lk11v39-40 Reading this alongside our Maundy Thursday reading: Jn13v6-9, we see Jesus resisting washing and insisting on washing respectively. In both cases he uses metaphor to invite his interlocutors into a symbolic understanding of a literal transaction. With the Pharisees he refuses ritual as a way of trying to disrupt them, as a means of trying to bring their attention to something under their skin, a confrontation with their hearts. With the disciples he institutes a new ritual, a new sacrament, to hallow their imaginations into a realisation and remembering of their communion with the Christ. We too must hold our rituals with both these prongs, using discipline and disruption both as a way back to the deeper magic of Christ.
Lk11v41 "Give." Because giving is "cleaning". A generous giver is a jet-washer, the gushing aeration of a stagnant commons. Give because having is an impediment to being. Having desiccates. It is the taxidermy of reality's golden-egg-laying goose. Give because Wealth-Ownership is anathema to the Kingdom, your stuff is sanctified as holy only when it rendered wholly as Gift-Couriership. Give against the peril of wealth (On this, at 44:20-51:30) Give because evil is a distortion as an accretion, like a tumour on an aerofoil. I often think of evil is a distortion as a subtraction, as a sinned-against stolen-from ~ which it is also sometimes. More often for me, evil is my bloatware, my Mt18v6 drag-net ball-and-chain, my Hb12v1 clings-and-entangles cluttered inventory of mediocrities. Give because property is theft - it's all ill-gotten if you presume to hold on to it. Give your whole self - material privilege is as much a conceit as a Pharisee's presumption of moral and social privilege. Give even and especially that away. Strip yourself of the illusion of righteousness and the paraphernalia of privilege, on this, Good Friday of all days. Yesterday the boys of Boys Breakfast discussed betrayal and death, and I pondered Jesus' many deaths: physical, but before that emotional, political, relational. Then last night watching The Passion of the Christ, the flayed flesh from bone, the visceral harrowing of dignity. Give that away.
Lk11v42 How shall we give? Give like you give an uncensored flying fuck. Give until it hurts. Give to within an inch of your life. Give something primary, sacrifice something structural not ornamental, cut meat not herbs. Why give? Imagine a world where fundraising was redundant. Imagine there was no charity 'sector' but that everything and all was total compassion, a social commons of frothing unfettered bubbling abundance. Contra the appalling bureaucratic banality of the contemporary bootstrapped third sector serving on a shoestring, mere palliative foodbanks eeking out corrupt representation in the market place for virtue signalling, fighting over the breadcrumbs that fall from the spice rack of an anaemic commons. Jesus contrasts the mere charity of mint-tithing with "the neglect of both justice and the love of God" Fussing over quotas, subsidising social provision, these necessarily obscure and displace the proper concern for justice and its proper calibration by God's infinite love. The whole orientation of guilt offerings and coin boxes is wrong. The therapeutic generosity of texting BEAT to 70200 to give £3 on your commute is a game of distraction. It is not even close to appropriate justice. So, give. Give yourself away. And to that end, know yourself, then self-understand as given to giving.
Lk11v43-44 "You are like unmarked graves, which people walk over, without even knowing it." This is such an evocative image for me. Think of all the pre-conscious death that I've absorbed from my interactions with others throughout my whole life, that I am still unaware of. Think of all the ways in which all that is a trajectory towards death, decay and sin in me, has been absorbed by others, transforming them, without them even knowing it. We are always in a network of unconscious transactions, which is why life-to-God has to be bone-deep-transformation rather than behaviour modification. We are transmitting and receiving more than we know, so we have to be transformed all the way through, rather than simulating a life that we think we should be living 'as a Christian'. If it hasn't gone all the way through then it won't touch what is happening 'without knowing it' - and these are the primal things that form us. This is a huge and daunting challenge, it asks us to invite the Holy Spirit to show us all the unmarked graves we've ever walked across without knowing it, and it asks the Spirit to show us where we are buried in the cold ground, and where we are apt to 'contaminate' others with this death of ours. Finally it asks for the faith to believe and lean into the truth that the Father has united us with the Son, and so we can participate in his resurrection all the way through - this too 'before we even knew it', as we say at the infant's baptism or dedication. This too is true. This was my prayer for Easter: "teach us...and before you teach us, birth us," for we need to be transformed, both in and before our knowledge.
Lk11v45-46 v42 "Woe to you Pharisees.." I think I know who the Pharisees are, and I've pondered this species of religiose leadership variously previously
- Mt23v4 The Pharisees' burdens are barea and dysbastakos: heavy and awkward, the rucksack is weighty and poorly packed, you're pulling a train and by hooks in your flesh, you know when your muscles shudder because the load is both very massive and very unstable.
- Mt22v17-18 ..concerned with thresholds of permissibility, housing regulations, minimum standards, abstracted principles..
- Lk7v31-32 Pharisaism is a numbing. Definitionally. A bulletproof superego, overburdened with cerebral fortifications and self-made mendacity. Such cannot dance, and cannot cry.
"Woe to you Lawyers.." Luke distinguishes between the Pharisees, woed in 11v37-44 and the Scribes/Lawyers woed in 11v45-52. The distinction is subtle, but informative. Religione is a corporate animal, a multipersonal complexity, an organised crime. Religione exploits the charismatic as well as the bureacratic.
- Pharisaism is characterised in three woes:
1. v42 hypocrisy of mint tithing,
2. v43 pride of loving the best seat
3. v44 stealth of being death disguised.
- Scribic Lawyerism by nuanced contrast is woed thus
1. v45 miscalibrated moral quantification as it pertains to the present
2. v47 re-writing history as it pertains to the past
3. v52 controlling interpretation as it pertains to the future.
~ These are assistant sins, we scribes are technicians, ISTJ religiose administrators, oiling the entrenching mechanisms of dogma. Knowledge, as we think we know it, is not neutral. Scribing is so value laden, so dangerous. Being a civil servant in religione's administration is a culpable evil.
- Be careful how you invoke oughts as these are deadly.
- Be careful how you speak of history, what you omit and what you lionise.
- Be careful the (mis)interpretations you make, and how that suffocates hope for everyone who hears.
Lk11v47-48 Prompted by PPJ's observation (45-46) that Luke has Jesus rebuking both the Pharisees and the Scribes with different woes: PPJ notes the distinction between personality types - public, extroverted types vs behind-the-scenes introverted types - and the different weaknesses in these that lean to different forms on sin. I would add that this might also be read as through the lens of the two big 'factions' in the Evangelical church - Charismatic and Conservative. Those who lean to the former perhaps lean towards the sins of spectacle in the marketplace and more of a complacency in the application of faith to ethics. The latter perhaps lean towards the sin of legalism and the dulling of prophecy. The passage doesn't quite map perfectly here, holding this lightly, but the thought that our Christian sub-culture defines our weaknesses as well as our strengths is worth critical reflection, and provides a reason for trying to practice a broad church, an ecumenicism, rather than a tribalism, for the greater sanctification of the whole body.
Lk11v49-50 Fifty years ago yesterday, Martin Luther King was assassinated. A prophet, an apostle, persecuted and killed. Who killed him? 🙋♂ I did.
- Prophets are perennially inconvenient.
- We are perpetually evil.
Jordan Peterson, notedly not a historian, nevertheless makes the valid observation from Browning's Ordinary Men and Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago about who perpetrated evil in history. The honest answer is that I did. Evil is not so much out-there, as it is in-here. My depraved capacity in another context is capable of untold evil. Within me is a selfish monster, vindictive, corrupt, shameless, and Mt5v21-22 - it's all murder.
Lk11v51-52 "This country is fed up of experts"? The ugly pseudo-public-discourse which pits elitism against anti-intellectualism serves no-one, and re-enforces both of these vices. As per coffee snobbery/excellence discussions at the weekend, the key to knowledge does exist - scripture and nature hold keys to life and are worth studying at ever high-resolution, for the glory of God. To reject expertise altogether is to barricade oneself out of the Real. But it is possible for experts to hold this key and never use it, to barricade themselves and others out of whole-hearted knowledge of the Real and so out of the Kingdom through abstraction, compartmentalisation, hypocrisy, disembodiment, alienation, self-seeking, pride. Whether your proclivity is to reject expertise altogether or to use expert knowledge as a weapon to protect self and choke others: be released, for the way, the truth & the life of Jesus is a challenge and a freedom from this proclivity. Access to the Kingdom is the easiest of access, open to children and fools, and it is also the deepest densest ever-more real reality that will always exhaust your taste for detail and excellence. Rather than being locked in a conflict at the gate, know that all are welcomed in with ease, and that there's space inside for every manifestation of Kingdom-life with whatever is at hand. Commit in this space, to a life of learning from the multi-faceted expertise of others.
Lk11v53-54 "Provoke him to speak about many things" Ancient whataboutery, a hypothetical hoo-ha rising to a red herring's rhetorical raucous ruckus. Hairsplitting verbal bluster. Self-defeating defensive conjecture. My life is an intellectual edifice, a ferociously busy construction site perpetually scaffolded, paradoxically and Escheresquially elaborate. Riddled. His yoke is easy. Jesus says: "learn from me, for I am gentle" Mt11v29
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