Christ speaks in stories as a way of preparing his followers to stake their lives on a story, because existence is not a puzzle to be solved, but a narrative to be inherited and undergone and transformed person by person.
The frustration we feel when trying to explain or justify God, whether to ourselves or to others, is a symptom of knowledge untethered from innocence, of words in which no silence lives, of belief occurring wholly on a human plane. Innocence returns us to the first call of God, to any moment in our lives when we were rendered mute with awe, fear, wonder. Absent this, there is no sense in arguing for God in order to convince others, for we ourselves are not convinced.
The One who asked that the cup of rejection might be removed from his lips does not summon his disciples to a life of moral rigor alone. He is not appealing for them courageously to transform their torment into understanding. Nor does he speak out of dread for his own imminent and supremely unjust death. He is pleading that his Kingdom might come by some other means than the cruciform suffering that his disciples will surely encounter because of their faithfulness to him and his gospel. As with the silent but firm answer that Jesus receives in Gethsemane, so with the equally clear though implied answer to Sunday’s hard query: There is no other way than the Cross.
I recently reached a nice round number of Tumblr followers, a number that honestly kind of shocks me given how absent I’ve been lately from Tumblr and from the internet in general (my pageviews are way lower now than they were when I had 100 followers though, so someone explain that to me).
General housekeeping things:
Yea, we are very sick and sad
Who bring good news to all mankind.
This austere and reticent approach to the language of Christian hope springs from Williams’ most elemental intuition: that it is Jesus who teaches us to speak of God; that the bleak landscapes of Gethsemane and Golgotha map out the strange topography of God’s inner life. At the real heart of things are kenosis, crucifixion, resurrection - in other words, tragedy and its transfiguration. Christian hope is not a cosmic optimism, not a denial of tragedy. It is the vision of a lamb standing amid the ruins of history, ‘looking as if it had been slain’ (Rev. 5:6).
Over on Mere Orthodoxy, Matthew Lee Anderson reviewed the highlights of their posts from 2012. I’m featured in July with “the definitive take-down of a spurious C.S. Lewis quote.” (His words, not mine.) Go check it out!
Jeffrey Weiss writes at RealClearReligion:
Tolkien created Middle-earth with a very particular — and particularly Christian — set of moral laws. There is no Christ, of course, but there is a coherent mythos with the equivalent of God, angels and lesser supernatural figures. And the story of the One Ring, about the inherent corrupting power of worldly might, builds to a single moment that exemplifies Tolkien’s theology.
To recap: In book and film, Frodo has heroically carried the Ring to the one spot where it can be destroyed. Instead, he claims it and — in that one moment — Gollum attacks and bites off Frodo’s finger with the ring. In the book, this is what follows:
“But Gollum, dancing like a mad thing, held aloft the ring, a finger still thrust within its circle…And with that, even as his eyes were lifted up to gloat on his prize, he stepped too far, wavered for a moment on the brink, and then with a shriek he fell. Out of the depths came his last wailPrecious, and he was gone.”
In the movie, after Gollum bites off his finger, Frodo heroically launches himself at Gollum and hurls them both over the side. Gollum falls with the Ring into the lava but Frodo is barely saved by Sam.
I’ll grant that Jackson’s version is more exciting, in the same way that loading Ophelia with a suicide vest and having her blast herself to smithereens center-stage would liven up a production of Hamlet. But that wouldn’t be Shakespeare.
Here’s the key for Tolkein that Jackson ignores: Frodofailsin his quest but the quest succeeds. Jackson, however, has Frodo win.
To put it in Tolkien’s Christian framework, salvation in the book could not be achieved even by the most heroic efforts of men (or hobbits). To a secularist, Gollum’s fall might be read as an accident. To Tolkien, it was always providential, an act of grace.
Grace is forgiveness we can’t earn. Grace is the weeping father on the road. Grace is tragedy accepted with open arms, and somehow turned to good. Grace is what the wasteful death on Skull Hill did.
Mending is not the same thing as never broken. We are not being promised that it will be as if the bad stuff never happened. It’s amnesty that’s being offered, not amnesia; hope, not pretense.
