Lk13v3-4 "..unless you repent, you will all likewise perish .. (v5) unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.." If that is faith, then 41 is bourgeois, it was said last night. 41 lacks energy, lacks confrontation, lacks contentious contending, lacks urgency. 41 is found by such as he to be insufficiently provocative, insufficiently uncomfortable. 41 allows too many for too long to go unchallenged in their unexamined response to a call to repentance. 41 should make more the gouge of love, more piercing their concern for the lost, more harrowing their horror of deep concern. Affable lukewarmth brooks no absolutes, ventures no imperatives, invokes no hell. 41 is bourgeois, it was said last night. Jesus would have none of it. Rv3v16. T praised H for daring to ask - for there is love.
Lk13v5-6 Lamenting, indignant, frustrated, verging on despair, at the lack of figs in certain areas. With this picture there is both space to acknowledge the wrong, the lack, the slowness, the missed opportunities. But more than this, there is also tentative, aching and fragile hope in this picture v7-9, both probabilistic and prophetic, that it won't always be this way, that figs will fruit just round the corner. Please God. Teach us to dig and fertilise with the grain of your grain.
Lk13v7-8 "..for three years.." I remember thinking at Nottingham about a university-as-Babylon analogy, which hinged on the three year undergraduate season being as Daniel&Co's three years in Nebuchadnezzar's court Dn1v5 a season long enough to enculture conformity, to mould and establish sappling minds to a pattern. Three years recurs, it is the season that Paul spends with the Ephesians Ac20v31-32 - admonishing with tears, that they might be built up and bear fruit. And, most prominently, it is the season of Jesus' ministry, calculated variously by scholars as covering three passovers Jn2v13 / Jn6v4 / Jn11v55. Equally also, three years conjures a sort of third-and-final climax, like third wave coffee and third wave feminism, at various scales Jesus is the decisive and determinate third chapter, after first the Law and second the Prophets have failed. What season are you in? What fig trees are you seeking to bring to fruition? What could you achieve in three years?
"..Why should it use up the ground?" Take up space, but don't merely take up space. KJV "Why cumbereth it the ground?" This fig tree is rendering the ground barren and infertile, the scale of this sterile tumour is preventing the growth of neighbouring vines. Somewhat as the anthropocene is net drain on the world's resources, humans are a virus taking up space, a plague, a waste of space, a bloated ecological footprint exceeding the planet's carrying capacity?
Culture's cognitive dissonance doesn't know what to do with it's own fecundity. There is a problematic oscillation between the stark nihilism of environmentalism's anti-human 'have-fewer-children' mantra, and the unfettered infinity of secularism's uncaused and causeless unbound cosmology. There must be a third way. The moral universe is not the unconstrained anythingness of a multiverse, it is not purposeless, it is ordered by finity and directed by ambition. The world is weighty, personally purposive and held to account. Every square inch of soil is culpable, all the rocks that would cry out, every wisp of cloudy heavens would declare glory, there are no unsacred places, only desecrated places. You are not meant to be a blithely addicted consumer, you are meant to be a hyperactively stewardly producer. Bear fruit in keeping with repentance. You are not meant to be a gnawing, listless vandal, you are meant to be a wise, and sacrificial gardener. Bear fruit in keeping with repentance. Time and space are finite, doing nothing is a culpable evil.
"..dig around it and put on manure.." What does this look like in my life? Dig and disrupt dry ground, dismantle and re-form, loosen up the rigid assumptions, get to the roots. And then put on manure, the steaming rich mix of questionable and probably unhygenic shit, the composting renourishment. You have one year to make up for lost time. Would that you had failed faster, there is so much to unlearn, there is so much work to do and so little time. God help us.
Lk13v7-8 Appendix. Recent other thoughts on fruit
~ Mt13v21-22 Unfruit. What is this 'fruit' of which Jesus speaks? Gal5v22-23? Fruit of Love Joy peace etc? Or Jn12v24? Fruit containing multiplied seeds? Seeds, as sex, serve analogies for both flavour and fertility, both pleasure and procreation. [Against this...] what are our brambly strangly sterilising flavour-robbing parable-addlers. Be weeding.
~ Ps128 Be fruit full. In your praxis and allegory, flavour and ambition, diet and delight. An apologetic for the blessedness of being fruitful is needed in the now: where families are abandoned, children are aborted and the table is substituted with television. The blessedness of such blessings is not self-evident for many..
~ Mt13v5-6 Often when the bible talks of roots and shoots etc it is we who are the proverbial plant. As in the complexity of Rm11's grafting in, of Eph3v17's 'being-rooted in love' or Col2v6's 'rooted in Christ'. Here however we are the soil: that substance whose key quality is its capacity to contain, absorb, nurture and support. How can we learn so deep a capacious receptivity to grace but by coming to know that earthy soily one in whom we are likewise and thereby rooted..
~ Mt21v19-20 This fig however faces a more annihilationist eschatology: this little figgy went to hell. Judge my fruit? Jn15v2. Assess my flavour? Jm3v12. Are my texts fruitful to multiply? Or are they fig leaves to cover my shame? Gn3v7
~ Rm11v21-22 I am not immune from the creeping decay of nominalism, the glib rot of self-satisfied moralism, the blight of comparative praise. I am prone to the veneering of faith, presenting as the simulacrum of a plant, having resplendent leaves but no fruit, being all bark and no bite.
Lk13v9-10 cut it down. CUT IT DOWN. I have been in a slash and burn sort of mood. I want to cut it down and not have to bother with this vexing, mocking, energy-draining, boring, stupid tree any more. I want to both acknowledge that there is some wisdom in this. Scripture does tell us to cut things down, to cut them out, to abandon them completely, to be black and white about things. But. But first. But first be patient. But first labour some more. But first try doing it differently. Or even just try hard in the same ways for a pre-set amount of time, and give it everything you have - throw everything at the tree, try to love it deeply even though it is so vexing. Today Marcel told me that 'despair is a form of impatience'. Yes. Okay then God, Teach me some patience. Teach me to bear with. help me till this soil and work out nutrients and light, even though I'm clumsy and tired and I'd rather not. We've been circling round this fig tree metaphor these days and my faith is thin and I'm fearful of all this evening could be. Would you please lead me gently, lead us gently, place our hands in the soil and show us how, unhurriedly, step by step. Would you bring us back to our vulnerability. Would you bring us to gratitude and reverence. Please, Jesus, we ask for your prophetic voice in our specific need. Amen.
Lk13v11-12 🔞 "..had had a disabling spirit for eighteen years.." Have you..? Who was I eighteen years ago? What spirit has characterised that time since? What have I become? What has wracked my mind and musculature during the course of that season? The year was 2000. Secondary school was begun. Tick follows tock tumbles. Time takes it's own time and entrenches. The mangle, mask and unadventure of this sophisticate's learnt self-gagging. *What is a disabling spirit?* What is yours? Whence the kill switch? Whither the restart? What is disability's opposite? What would an abling spirit look like?
🦀 "..could not fully straighten herself.." JBP's stand-up-straight-with-your-shoulders-back is all well and good for those who can muster the serotonin from some forgotten well ~ and even then, I fear it risks to fan the flames of unfettered dominance heirarchy conflicts by facading bravado and is liable to end in tears. JBP is at his best when he is being clinically observative, less so when he is being ideologically prescriptive. I was deeply struck at the time by his portrait of an agoraphobic client (p20-22) and I am brought back to it now, recalling her defensive crouch. We are integrated beings, soul, mind, body, and our conditions are spiritual, mental and physical. Life is a stance, a posture, a gait, a dance. All of which die a slow death in the pathological self-reinforcing fortress of anxious mental feedback.
🆓🆓🆓 "..you are freed.." You are freed. You are freed. You are freed. Over and against the stoic cadence of default conservative evangelicalism, muddled as it is with dull white guilt and modern melancholy, Jesus takes away suffering. I am still trying to learn this. It is a hair's breadth from the prosperity gospel, but the alternative is Christian masochism. Try these intentionally uncomfortable St Mary's maxims on for size:
- Jesus loves you, but I'm his favourite.
- God is nice and he likes me.
- If God intends suffering to be punishment-for-unbelievers and purification-for-believers, why did Jesus spend so much time taking it away?
🙏 This is not to be glib about real suffering, but insofar as I tend towards self-inflicted theologically-exacerbated mental anguish, and insofar as I wallow in the learnt limited ambitions of sub-supernatural Christianity, Jesus calls me today to not resist the freedom he has for me.
Lk13v13-14 v11 'she was bent over and could not fully straighten herself'...v13 he laid his hands on her and immediately she was made straight.' This prompted thoughts on what it is to be 'straightened' out, in various different ways. Reading Ps27 yesterday morning N commented on v11 that the image of the 'straight path' is one often used by 'cousins' in their understanding of the path to God, a picture often countered by Christians with images of Mt7v13 the path as narrow. N reflected that Christians could be better at using the imagery that the Bible gives us of the straight path as a point of connection and communication with them about The Way. I went looking for other references to the straight path - as well as Ps27v11, we have Pr3v6 and Heb12v13. I noticed that all of the verses are about healing, actually. Being straightened out, or walking the straight path, in the scriptural imagination, seems less to do with behaviour modification and more to do with healing. Perhaps interesting that we Christians, seeking ongoing healing all of us, don't talk much about the straight path. I think culturally we now honour the idea of the winding path - we think that complexity = authenticity, we think that our wounds demonstrate that we are doing something right. Many of the stories we tell fetishise the idea of a complicated and convoluted journey. God absolutely meets us on the long and winding road, and God's grace is that there are no forks or bends in the road that cannot lead back to Him with dazzling glory, but we perhaps do well to remember that this kind of story itself is not necessarily the mark of faith. The way is narrow, the way is hard, but there is also a simplicity and straightness to the way that God wants to bring us to, as part of our own healing itself. God wants to bring us to straight paths, to unselfconscious, one-foot-in-front-of-the-other walking with Him. It is He that makes our paths straight, this is a healing that he offers us - let us not resist it.
Lk13v15-16 Religione's Sabbath, like the W1A's Way Ahead Group is thus: “The fact is this is about identifying what we do best and finding more ways of doing less of it better” How do you Sabbath? What is the doing of not-doing such that you are being-still and letting-God without neglecting appropriately responsive contextual compassion? Sabbath, rightly divined, sifts the hypocritic oafs from the hypocratic oaths, but how? How do you Sabbath?
The difficulty or tension, occurs for me, in two areas:
🏗 What is work? ~ the definition of work-as-work and work's agency
📆 What is time? ~ the purpose of sabbatical time and its ordering principle
🏗 Religione's fastidious unwork is a category error that is upside-downed by Jesus.
Consider: 🥌 [Rolling a stone down a hill] 🏋♂ [Pushing a stone up a hill] ~ which of these is a picture of the life of faith? Whose is the strength, who is the agent, who gets the glory? Jesus calls us to a total life whose yoke-is-easy-and-burden-is-light. Jesus calls us as a redeemed humanity, a faithful humanity, whose work, eschatologically anticipated by being imminently embodied, is to live all-sabbath all-the-time. No? And how so? What is the yoke of Jesus' easy yoke such that the yoke is easy even while there must be toil and sweat-of-brow-tilled-soil this side of proverbial eternity? Do we distinguish between light recreational works of faith in a sacred domain, as distinct from legitimate heavy lifting in a secular domain? Surely not. All works are weighty and undertaken with due reverence. In all domains God is the author and the power. All works are his to achieve. But, if so, what then is it appropriate to do on Monday that it is inappropriate to do on Sunday?
📆 Irreligione's unsabbatical time is not the true freedom of the fulfilment of the law which Jesus offers. Even as redeemed we are yet are finite beings constrained in time, dabbling in eternal truth, casting infinite images, suggesting substance beyond our frail frames. Sabbath as a 1 in 7 days must yet endure, because without such choreography the centre cannot hold, the dance is unspun and arhythmic, a privatised and unrelational chaos portending to nothingness. Against the nihilism of mechanised atomised infinity, Sabbath rest is crystalised to a sublime excellence on a day of synchronised and coordinated, quorate and elaborate rest - where we-as-we achieve a display of heaven by intentional total-peace togethering. Thus is a personal infinity's arc rehearsed weekly.
Lk13v17-18 'What is the Kingdom of Heaven like, to what may I compare it?' Praying simple prayers that as I write to deadlines today my writing would breathe out a sense of what-the-kingdom-is-like, not getting too tangled up in its own terminology or caveats, remembering the original thought and desire in the seed of the paper which was a a hope to speak something of the is-like of kingdom hope. What is the Kingdom like? How might I compare it in pictures & prose, how to analogise & analyse? May my words, by God's grace, be themselves like seeds - more than they initially appear to be.
Lk13v19-20
🌳🦅 Does the tree know that birds are nesting in it?
🌳🦅 The tree's very essences a structural redundancy, for-itself glorious superabundance.
⛓👾 The Kingdom of Heaven is like the blockchain a persistent Hb13v14? transparent Rv21v18? secure Mt16v19? public Jn12v32? apend-only Rv22v19? ledger..
⛓👾 In more seriousness, the Kingdom of Heaven is like the blockchain in that it is infrastructural, a trellis gamed towards justice, an intrinsically self-regulated counter-culture, an affront to monopolies of capital, a universe of possible flourishings sprung from a tiny seed.
🌳🦅 And, we are the birds, or we are the branches?
Lk13v21-22 'mixed into'...'until it worked all through'. The kingdom of heaven is like yeast, and I am like dough. Mixed through, infected with grace, but in this picture the kingdom is not instant but process, God is unevenly distributed through my being, so I seem well seasoned in one season, and suddenly barren and lost again so soon. 'Until', says the parable, 'until the yeast is worked all through', 'until the whole batch of dough rises'. The yeast has not been extracted from the bread, how could it be? Rather, the dough is still being worked on. And God is an excellent breadmaker. She will not fail to yeast the whole.
Lk13v23-24 🚪 Mind the gap in this slimming world's liminality where the Gods of jot and tittle are gate-keeping a capricious obscurity. Thread the needle betwixt skinny love's hens teeth and there you'll find a dark web of minority interests where the unhedged are unhinged. The many-and-not-the-few wait outside, adolescent and unformed, having narrowly avoided this tight squeeze, this tapering road to becoming an individual. Everywhere where you are you only are, with accursed and glorious singularity, you are ever increasingly selectively electively this-and-not-that. As with one-man-and-one-woman-for-one-lifetime, the good life has a particularist partiality, a zoomed in monogeneous honing. Do the one thing, because hell is everything else.
Lk13v25-26 I don't know you. Hands down the most troubling verse in all of scripture. I read this from N.T Wright last week, and I think it offers something important on Luke 13v22-30: 'The point of 1 Corinthians 13 is that love is not our duty; it is our destiny. It is the language that Jesus spoke, and we are called to speak it so that we can converse with him. It is the food they eat in God’s new world, and we must acquire the taste for it here and now.’ (Surprised by Hope, p288.) The wonderful and terrible thing is that if we do not open ourselves to love, if we do not live inside love, we have no language with which to speak to Jesus. How could we know and be known by him if we resist love? If we do not love we will not be able to taste the Kingdom which has already been given us. What a terrible thought. Teach me your language, teach me your food, though it seems so confronting. I want to subsist in this love.
Lk13v27-28 The Kingdom of God as you know it.. Is the Kingdom visceral? Is it actual? Is it literal? Is it worth the bother? Is it urgent? Is your Kingdom experience a high stakes game writ to a gritty beat of resilient compassion rapped in a howling unflinching weather-all vigour? Is the Kingdom a doing? And, do you?
v26 _"We were in your general vicinty, eating. You were in our streets and we allowed it.."_ Jesus paints excoriating a plaintive plaintiff with a passive voice whining to defend their own dull death died in a by-standing superstitious form of faith. The passive hope of umpteenth generation C-of-E's, lipserving evangelicals, labouring that tawdry cadence of exquisitely banal cognitive assent, lukewarmly name-dropping their pedegree, glibly self-satisfied at their association to dead wasps.
Such passivity is unadventure. Such passivity is to work evil. v27 "workers of evil.." Evil prevails down the lubricated tubes of negligence and the wide road of lazy familiarity. Dull and deathly, riskless religione, disingenuous and yet, so magnetically attractive to the worst parts of me. How comfortable I quickly am with performative nostalgia and a caricature of my own faith.
Knowing about Jesus is not knowing Jesus. Merely knowing about Jesus, that is hell. ~ Where do you know Jesus from?
Lk13v29-30 in v23 Jesus is asked a question about the quantitative measurements of salvation. v24-28 his initial response is to shift the discourse from a third-personal inquiry to second-personal interrogation. Essential and existential, he judo flips abstract intellectual questions and directs them back to our own naked souls, for whom it matters, even though we pretend it does not. Once he has brought us through this face-to-face with our own souls, he moves back, in these two verses, to speaking descriptively, in the third person. Notice how v29-30 thus speaks to, but is so different in tone from, the original question in v23. Jesus describes, using poetic language, who will be caught up in the drama of salvation, but what he emphasises is that this will be generous, diverse and unexpected. Having brought us through a terrible personal examination we are set free to think more expansively, humbly and qualitatively about the Kingdom of God.
Lk13v31-32 🦊 Tell that fox, that "Monday left me broken, Tuesday I was through with hopin', Wednesday my empty arms were open, Thursday waiting for love, waiting for love, Thank the stars it's Friday, I'm burning like a fire gone wild on Saturday, Guess I won't be coming to church on Sunday, I'll be waiting for love, Waiting for love to come around..." ~ That is Avicii's holy week.
Pharisees in the faux-concern of acrobatic hypocrisy turned up to 11, Jesus in kapow!-too-busy-for-religione. It is a sizzling dialogue. Jesus is a man with a plan. Herod wants to kill you.. Yeah, fam, and I'm gonna let him. 📆 God, teach us to number our days Ps90v12, as ones whose days are numbered Jb14v5 Dn5v26.
Lk13v33-34 Jesus' mother hen metaphor may be about many things, but one key thing it demonstrates about the mother-heart of Jesus is the fierce desire to protect at all costs, including the cost of one's own life. We are currently watching Humans, which depicts, in Karen's realisation that she is unable to put herself in physical danger, the realisation that she cannot mother, for this is, definitionally, the cost. 'I can only look after Sam when it poses no threat to my own wellbeing...I can't be a mother.' So Jesus-as-mother-hen, gathers us under Ps32v7 strong wings, unto death, protecting us bodily from the dangers of cats and fires, giving up his own body to death in order to protect us, chirping and helpless, under the strong maternal gift of love's all-things sacrifice.
Lk13v35 🕰 "often" Jesus offers often with a frequent frequency upon a rhythmed occasion. This is no background noise of default natural grace, it is a chord struck in time. Tune in, oftly oftentimes. The invitation is an interruption, it is a junction, a happening, a gathering. A collective attending. A synchronised muster point. Now.
🐣🐣 "would have gathered" shoulda woulda coulda but the luster flock would not, the broody clutch could not, so the shattered smattered are scattered. cruelly cast to the four winds, driven by the centrifuge of their own hypocrisy - the falcon cannot hear the falconer over the cacophony of the roost's feathered frenzy. Shut up birds?
🏚 "desolate" Silence falls. Things fall apart. Entropic dischord tumbles disintegated and rolls dispersed to a nothingness. The opposite of gatherfold is spilt milk, so we ooze out until we are a translucent tensile narrowing to a brittle pitch, a surface stain. But. Over against the precariat hutching clung in terror, we home swell central and eat communal, merry the middle muster with married mettle gusto, throb in sync to a warm pulse in a fire's flame in a critical mass round a hearth's hope of a home's heart. We resolate housing, to neologise, we make one in the sola solar son's sun.
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