I have an ongoing grievance against whoever designs the New York Times’ Spelling Bee game, because its dictionary of allowed words is inconsistent, incoherent, and capricious. I keep a running list of words that are absolutely words that the Spelling Bee won’t accept: mantic, concomitant, monocot, manioc, atlatl, clonal, tailfin, abattoir, hymnody, etic, emic, and backbeat, to name a few. But the one that makes me angriest—the word that I still type in every time I have all the letters available, just in case someone is monitoring the list of words people tried to play—is trinitarian. I don’t know why the game doesn’t accept trinitarian as a valid guess, especially since it does accept unitarian. But according to the New York Times, trinitarian is not a word.

This Sunday is celebrated as Trinity Sunday in many Christian traditions, though perhaps not in whatever traditions the Spelling Bee editorial team observes. Following Pentecost, which is the great unfurling of the Holy Spirit, Trinity Sunday serves as a day of theological consolidation—a day for synthesizing all the Christian ideas about the Spirit, Jesus, and God into the idea of (or, for many, the doctrine of) the Trinity.

The Trinity is one of those parts of Christianity that sparks passionate defenses and condemnations alike. For some people, the Trinity is a bedrock principle of Christian theology, and the idea that God is triune is a non-negotiable tenet of the faith. For others, the Trinity is unnecessary, unnecessarily complicated, and confusing. I can remember being taught metaphors for understanding the Trinity as a kid and as a teenager. The Trinity is like water, my teachers told me, which can exist as a water, liquid, or gas, and God is the same way, able to exist in three different forms. Or some talk about the sun, which we experience as itself and in its two emanations, which are light and heat. I can remember someone showing me a clover and noting how it is one plant with three leaves (though I was always very skilled at finding four-leafed clovers, which might itself be a metaphor for my heterodox tendencies). Metaphors and visual aids proliferate, but that’s probably just another bit of evidence to suggest that the Trinity itself is difficult to understand. If it were a straightforward idea, we wouldn’t need to compare it to so many different things to try to understand it.

The lectionary passages for Trinity Sunday attempt to collect some of the most trinitarian passages from the Bible. The trouble is that the Trinity itself does not make very many appearances in the Bible, and the times when the Trinity does appear can be quite vague or controversial, or they can require quite a bit of theological retrofitting. For example, the first reading for Sunday is the first creation story from Genesis—Genesis 1:1-2:4a. I suspect that that text is included because it features God (there’s one person of the Trinity) speaking creation into existence (there’s the second person, Jesus, the word of God), and God also appears as a wind (the third person, the Spirit, since in both Greek and Hebrew spirit is closely associated with breath and wind). It’s a tenuous connection, though the link is strengthened somewhat by the way Genesis is glossed in the first chapter of the Gospel of John: in the beginning was the Word. But it’s hardly a trinitarian slam-dunk.

The epistle reading is even thinner. It’s simply the concluding farewell portion of 2 Corinthians, where Paul mentions (in 13:13) the grace of Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit all in one breath. There’s otherwise nothing very special about this epistolary reading; it’s just there because Paul happened to refer to the three entities that we now know as the Trinity, all at the same time.

The gospel reading is not much better, if we are being honest. This is the so-called Great Commission, the concluding portion of the Gospel of Matthew where the resurrected Jesus sends out the apostles to baptize. Even if we leave aside the Trinity, this is a consequential and controversial passage, because the command to go therefore and make disciples of all nations has fueled a great deal of colonizing missionary work over the centuries. Many Christians took this passage as a command to evangelize the whole world, which often (and some would say always) also involved damage to the peoples who were on the receiving end of the missionary work. The Great Commission has been responsible for a lot of destruction, even as it is often lifted up by Christians as the noblest of charges.

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But the Great Commission isn’t here in the readings for Trinity Sunday because of its missionary potential, or at least it’s not here only for that. Instead, the Great Commission is here because it’s one of the clearest articulations of trinitarian thinking that can be found in the Bible. Here, the trinitarian formula—the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit—comes in the context of baptism. Jesus is suggesting that the apostles baptize people in three names, and those three names happen to correspond to our notion of the Trinity.

I can remember being taught in Divinity School that this passage might have been added later, but I have since come to doubt that. The evidence that it might have been added later comes from because of the passage’s anachronistic reference to the Trinity. Most scholars agree that the Trinity didn’t really develop as a fully-formed theological principle until long after the New Testament was written. The Council of Nicaea in 325 is often cited as an important date, though you can see the development of trinitarian ideas long before that and long afterward. If the Trinity wasn’t a concept in the first century, the thinking goes, then the Trinity cannot have been present in Matthew, and anywhere it appears to be present much necessarily be a later insertion. The Great Commission—according to this way of thinking—must have been tacked on at the end of Matthew by someone in the third or fourth centuries, who wanted to make the book more orthodox.

But most of the scholars and resources I trust the most seem to have accepted that the Great Commission is, indeed, original to Matthew (even though the word original is slippery and sometimes meaningless, as my students can tell you). This part of Matthew uses very characteristic Matthean language and ideas, and the trinitarian baptismal formula it cites seems to have been the one that was current in the region where Matthew might have been written. That region was likely Syria, and perhaps the city of Antioch. The other major early Christian writing to come out of that same region is a book called the Didache, usually dated to the second or first century, and the Didache too (in chapter 7) suggests baptism in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, just like Matthew does. So that link makes it fairly plausible that the followers of Jesus in Syria in the first or second centuries were baptizing people with trinitarian formulas, and therefore it makes it plausible that the Great Commission was original to Matthew and not added later.

So, the lectionary for Trinity Sunday has successfully collected some texts that point to the idea of a Trinity—that at least mention, in passing, the idea of a triune God, even if they don’t exactly argue for that idea. These passages are a bit of a Rorschach test; you can see a Trinity in them if you want to see a Trinity, but other people might look at the same thing and come to very different conclusions about what they’re seeing.

I count myself fortunate to have received a lot of my theological formation in a tradition (the Christian Church Disciples of Christ, part of the larger Stone-Campbell Movement or Restoration Movement) that offers people a lot of leeway in thinking about the Trinity. One of our founders, Alexander Campbell, could be a bit of a contrarian about theology and theological language, and he focused a lot of his energy on the Trinity. While Campbell seems to have broadly believed in the divinity of Jesus and understood that the Holy Spirit acted in the world, he rejected the notion of the Trinity on the grounds that the idea and the word were unbiblical. I feel much the same way; I am enough of a Protestant and enough of a New Testament scholar that I tend to privilege what’s in the Bible itself and I view with suspicion anything that belongs to later tradition. I’m with Campbell; I’m not rejecting the characterization of Jesus and the Spirit as divine exactly (though I’m not embracing it exactly either), but mostly I would love for us to dial back the confidence with which we proclaim things that are not very evident in our sources.

In fact, while many people understand the Trinity to be a way of proclaiming the expansiveness of God, my main objection to it is that the idea is unduly limited. Why only three expressions of God? If we believe in God, and we believe that God can show up in the world in more than one way, then why should we limit the varieties of God’s expression to three? If three divine persons, why not ten, or fifty? The Trinity strikes me as a half-measure, as if Christianity lost the courage of its convictions. Does God show up in myriad ways, or not? I would hope that God shows up in as many ways as there are human capacities for experiencing the world.

Alas, I am probably in the minority on that one. I find myself most convinced by arguments that the Trinity is a model for relationality—that the Trinity is evidence that God is always in relationship, even with God’s self, and that the Trinity points to that propensity for relationship. I like that argument, and I think it works the same whether it’s a relationality of three, ten, fifty, or some other number. I’m not militating against the Trinity, and I’m not trying to disabuse anyone of it, but I simply would prefer a more expansive view.

I am not sure what the word would be for the thing I would advocate—maybe something like multitarianism or polytarianism. But I am confident that—if we succeeded in introducing another option into the theological lexicon—that the New York Times Spelling Bee would not recognize it as a legitimate word.

I have been stuck in book-indexing purgatory. I don’t know if you have ever indexed a book before, but it is a tedious and mind-numbing process. I have my own system for doing it, involving a legal pad and several different colors of pens, but it still takes forever. The current indexing project, which is for my book that comes out this summer, is especially complicated, because it consists of three separate indices: one for subjects, one for modern authors, and one for ancient texts. I have been working on it for over two weeks, and I’m hoping to finish it today, but it’ll be close.

All that is a way of offering an excuse for what I’m about to tell you: that I didn’t write a full Substack post this week. I just have not had the time. (Adding to the stress of indexing: a fun plumbing issue in the house we just bought, that has the laundry room ceiling waterlogged and threatening to cave in). But there’s good news! This coming Sunday is Pentecost, one of the few Sundays of the church year that stays fairly consistent in terms of theme and texts. So I’m revisiting the past three years of Pentecosts and linking to my posts about them. So in some ways you’re getting three and a half posts this week, instead of one!

For Pentecost of 2025, I wrote about the way Pentecost is a story about difference and togetherness. The story of Pentecost is remarkable for the way it holds those two ideas in tension. On the one hand, the Book of Acts is telling the story with attention to the dizzying differences exhibited in the community of early Jesus-followers in Jerusalem. On the other hand, the story is essentially one of unity. Last year, in the first year of the second Trump administration, I reflected on how America holds a similar tension. As we approach the 250^th anniversary of the founding of the United States, and as we see sharpening debates about the meaning of America, I would say something similar again this year: that the story of Pentecost is a good guide to the way our differences can produce unity and togetherness.

In 2024, I wrote about Pentecost as a story about time, and about the ways the same situations, institutions, or ideas can look different with the passage of time. It’s remarkable, looking back at that post now, and thinking about the difference two years has made. In my own faith community, we are experiencing a moment of revitalization and new energy. I have heard that the same is happening elsewhere, too. Things will always continue to change, of course, but even our own circumstances remind us that change is constant, and no situation is permanent.

In 2023 I put a lot of history into my post about Pentecost, and I tried to reframe the day away from “it’s the church’s birthday” and toward an understanding of Pentecost as a vexed account of diasporic belonging. I wrote about the story of Pentecost as an expression of the ways powerful forces divide us and create anxiety in us as individuals and in systems. And I wrote about how Pentecost resists that kind of division and enmity, and offers us a model for building new solidarities in the face of the powerful forces that steer our world. It felt urgent to write that three years ago, and perhaps even more urgent today.

In my own preaching this coming Sunday, I think I am going to follow the lead of my colleague Dr. Albert Hernández. In his book Subversive Fire: The Untold Story of Pentecost, Hernández reminds us that historically speaking Pentecost has often been a catalyst for beginning or strengthening social movements, including movements for justice and social change. We live in a time when movements for justice and social change are sorely in need of strengthening, so I’m grateful for scholarship that helps frame Pentecost as a springboard for the work the world sorely needs.

We are living through a time of surging nationalism. In the eyes of history, the early 21^st century will be remembered as an age of nationalistic fervor and nativist zeal, and perhaps as a high-water mark of xenophobic energy. Hindu nationalism, Russian nationalism, and Hungarian nationalism have rocked elections and sparked wars. Israeli nationalism and Palestinian nationalism are locked in an existential struggle that both sides claim amounts to genocide on the part of the other side. Ethnic nationalisms have spiked in places like France and Germany and the United Kingdom in response to waves of immigration, and China has begun to consolidate its control over places (like Taiwan) it considers to be rightfully Chinese, even as it cracks down on internal ethnic minorities like the Uyghurs. And of course in the United States, forms of White Christian nationalism have reached levels of ascendancy not seen in decades, if ever.

Perhaps nobody represents the progress and achievements of White Christian nationalism in the United States as fully as Pete Hegseth, the Defense Secretary who calls himself Secretary of War. Hegseth makes new headlines weekly with his provocative style and confrontational ideas. He makes no apologies for his perspectives, including his position that Christianity deserves a more prominent place at the center of American life and at the vanguard of the American military. Hegseth was recently pressed in a Senate hearing about his constant references to Christianity as part of his leadership, including his participation in a prayer breakfast where he prayed for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy” and his forthright equivalencies between the goals of Christianity and the United States. “I am not ashamed of my faith in Jesus Christ,” Hegseth responded, quoting Romans in an apparent agreement with a Senator’s criticisms. For his part, Senator Jack Reed accused Hegseth of having “an intense interest in Christianity, in nationalism, and in not recognizing the talents of women and nonwhite men.” That last part is key; Hegseth’s Christianity seems designed to serve White men particularly, with Hegseth repeatedly privileging White men for promotions and blocking the progress of women and people of color. In a bit of language that revealed the depths of his Christian nationalist worldview, Hegseth recently likened the press corps to “Pharisees,” a common all-purpose insult wielded by anti-Semitic Christians.

Of course, Hegseth is not alone. Stephen Miller—though much less rooted in religious rhetoric and hailing from a Jewish family—seems to share many of the same biases in favor of a White America. Kristi Noem, though recently relieved of her duties, pursued a forthrightly Christian nationalist agenda as Secretary of Homeland Security. President Donald Trump himself announced a task force to root out “anti-Christian bias” earlier last year. Its leader, Paula White, has called the Black Lives Matter movement the “antichrist” and said that Jesus would not have broken immigration law. And millions of American voters empowered Trump and his government, not in spite of its appeal to White Christian nationalism, but because of it. It would be satisfying to claim that America has been hijacked by this ideology, but it’s probably more accurate to say that forms of White Christian nationalism have always lurked just below the surface of American life, emerging into full view from time to time when someone like Trump comes along. We live in one of those times.

It’s always tempting to imagine that we are the first to live in such moments. But we are not. Nationalism (and its close cousins, imperialism and colonialism and racism) are likely as old as humanity itself. I struggle to think of an example of a time when nationalism has been a constructive force in history, bringing more flourishing and well-being to the world. But nationalism has certainly been present for much of the world’s history, to much destructive effect. Nationalism never ends well, but it does seem to begin again and again.

It fascinates me, then, that the Book of Acts begins with a spasm of nationalism. Maybe you’ve never noticed it before, but it’s there, right at the beginning—and right at the beginning of this week’s lectionary passage. After a bit of editorial throat-clearing and recapping the transition from the Gospel of Luke to the Book of Acts, the author of Acts launches straight into a dramatic scene. “So when they had come together, they asked him” in 1:6, “‘Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?’”

That’s a straightforwardly nationalistic question, even if it’s an understandable one. To review a bit historically, this scene takes place in Judea, which by that time had been a Roman province for several generations. Before that, the region had been ruled by a parade of foreign powers—the Greeks, the Persians, the Babylonians, the Assyrians in the north—almost in an unbroken chain. You had to go back centuries to find a Judahite king, and centuries more before that to get to the glories of David and Solomon, who were already by the days of Jesus nearly a millennium in the past, as far away from Jesus and his disciples as the mythical King Arthur is from us. The disciples’ question in 1:6, “is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel,” is a gesture toward a centuries-long struggle for national coherence and self-governance, and toward the equally long history of domination by outsiders.

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Think about the disciples’ mindset in that moment. They were heirs to that history—they had inherited the desperate dispossession of a people colonized many times over. They had been born into foreign occupation and had grown up that way, learning to live their lives in the margins of someone else’s sovereignty and power. And then, in their adulthood, they had begun to follow Jesus around, watching him perform signs and wonders and gather steam as a popular figure. It had all seemed to come crashing down when Jesus was arrested and tried and executed, but then—miraculously—Jesus was alive again. That’s the moment when the Book of Acts begins: at the moment when everything seemed to become possible, suddenly and all at once. It was a very natural question to ask of their dead-and-now-alive-again leader, who many people were calling the messiah: have we lived to see the day when the kingdom will be restored to Israel?

The disciples’ question was a natural one to ask, but it was also nationalistic. Their question, “is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel,” assumes a certain arc to history. The question assumes that history has always been moving toward the ascendancy of a particular nation—toward the empowerment and triumph of one group of people over another. The disciples’ question was understandable, and it was understandably self-interested. The question assumed that the world had always been heading toward Israel’s supremacy, and that the only real variable was the timing of it. The pieces had seemed to fall into place, and you can feel the disciples’ excitement through the page. Is it now, they wanted to know, is it happening now, are you the one who is going to finally bring this to pass?

Jesus’ answer, basically, was no.

It’s a little less direct than that, in Acts. Instead of a simple no, Jesus says that “it is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority.” You could possibly interpret Jesus’ response as a form of not yet, but it’s more of a none of your business, and I think really the answer was no: this is not the time when the kingdom will be restored to Israel, and in fact you’re asking the wrong question. You can tell by the next thing Jesus says, which comes in 1:8: “you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” Faced with a nationalistic question laden with supremacist assumptions, Jesus changes the subject, and he points everyone outward, away from the nation and into the world. Jesus’ response to the disciples reveals that their assumptions about their place in history—and about the shape of history itself—have been mistaken all along. History had not been moving toward the restoration of Israel’s sovereignty, as the disciples had hoped and expected. Instead, Jesus tells them, history had been moving toward something less triumphant, less immediate, and less tied to the success of any particular nation: the power of something called the Holy Spirit, and witness.

Ask any first-year Greek student about the word for witness, and they’ll tell you that the same word also means martyr—one who witnesses at the cost of their life. That nuance was probably lost on the disciples that day (and anyway, Jesus was likely not speaking Greek but Aramaic, which would not have carried the double entendre), but for modern readers of Acts the implication is clear. The disciples had expected to live through the re-establishment of the kingdom of Israel, but instead they were going to be driven outward by the Holy Spirit and made to suffer as witnesses to Jesus’ resurrection. It feels like a bait-and-switch, even now at a distance of twenty centuries. The disciples had expected a political triumph and instead they had been given more work to do—work that for many of them would end in suffering and death.

That’s the way political energy always seems to resolve in biblical texts: not in triumph and restoration and glory and supremacy, but in conflicted resignation and the recognition that the things people had thought were ultimate were really secondary. You don’t get a lot of golden ages in the Bible; you never quite see the world organized and arranged in any way that straightforwardly props up one nation or people over all others. Nationalism is always thwarted in the Bible, and nationalistic hopes always seem to get dashed, sometimes in gut-wrenching fashion.

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I wonder whether Pete Hegseth understands that. Hegseth is an acolyte of Pete Wilson, an ultra-conservative Christian pastor who describes himself as a “paleo-Confederate,” wants to revoke women’s right to vote, and espouses a nakedly theocratic and Christian nationalist stance about American governance. Not long ago, Hegseth reported attending services at a church affiliated with Wilson’s denomination (the CREC), and that sermon advocated for a “biblically informed hatred.” There’s a view of power behind the CREC, Wilson, and Hegseth’s worldview: that God rides into battle on behalf of the faithful, that God is itching to elevate America to a position of prominence in the world, and that America can only fully serve God’s purposes when it is powerful, vengeful, violent, and holy.

None of that would have made any sense to Jesus, and all of it was explicitly rejected by the Jesus we meet in Acts 1:6-8. There’s a make our nation great again tenor to the disciples’ question in 1:6, and Jesus’ response was a swift and emphatic no, rejecting the disciples’ aspiration for their own nation’s ascendancy. Hegseth misunderstands Christianity if he thinks that Jesus would ever endorse nationalism, and indeed the Book of Acts goes out of its way to reject the notion out of hand. In place of nationalism, Acts envisions witness and suffering, and the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

Just like history will remember the early 21^st century as a high-water mark of nationalism, future historians will notice and remember the complicity of American Christianity with today’s nationalist and White nationalist aspirations. Christian nationalism has never been on the right side of history, and it isn’t on the right side of history now. With the benefit of hindsight current movements in American Christianity like the CREC and other nationalist movements will be criticized as misguided, racist, misogynistic, and (in my opinion) un-American. Our current surge of Christian nationalism will be remembered like the disciples’ question in Acts 1:6: as a spasm of misguided self-interest, answered swiftly by God’s emphatic no.

We are moving this weekend. As I write this, we are about three hours away from closing on a house, and by the time you read this, we will have been schlepping our stuff across town for three days in one of those lumbering moving trucks. After 19 years in Colorado, we are putting down roots and buying a nice four-bedroom brick house in one of the southern suburbs of Denver.

Packing and moving is an enormously challenge both practically and logistically, but it’s always emotional for me too—a time for a lot of reflection and not a small amount of self-loathing. The reflection comes from going through my stuff, deciding what needs to come with me and what I can let go of, and remembering all the circumstances and moments that I’ll be leaving behind. And the self-loathing is a byproduct of the same thing. As I sort through the mountains of my possessions and realize how very much stuff I own, I always find myself wishing that I could live differently—that I could be the kind of person who can move house in my car, who doesn’t need to think about storage space when looking at real estate listings. But I’m a packrat, and my whole family is too, so the process of packing and moving is always fraught with the realization that we have too much stuff and the frustration that comes with knowing that most of it will end up coming with us to our next house too.

The Book of Acts is a book about moving. For a long time, scholars have noticed how Acts is structured geographically and plotted by movement—how it begins with a story tightly focused on Jerusalem, and then gradually expands outward (as the key geographical verse in 1:8 says) to the ends of the earth. Of course, the earth doesn’t have ends, since it’s a sphere, and the Book of Acts doesn’t reach most of the earth anyway, since the book is set 2,000 years ago before most of the world was accessible to people in the eastern Mediterranean. But by the reckoning of the author of Acts—who probably hailed from somewhere in the eastern half of the Roman Empire, perhaps from Macedonia or somewhere in Syria or Judea—Acts does indeed travel a long way. From those beginnings in Jerusalem, the book follows its characters up into Syria, over into Asia Minor (what’s now Turkey), across the Aegean to Greece and Macedonia, and finally to Italy, where the story concludes in the city of Rome. Acts is a book of movement, and its geographical flow structures both its plot and its meaning. As Jesus says to his followers in 1:8, in a verse that serves as an epigraph for the whole thing, you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.

Historically, Christians have understood the passage that’s in this week’s lectionary to have been one of the most important stops along that journey to the ends of the earth. This story takes place in Athens, which was one of the intellectual capitals of Roman antiquity (along with Alexandria in Egypt and Rome itself). The passage features Paul, who is the main character of the second half of Acts and arguably of the whole thing. And traditionally, Christians have understood this week’s reading from Acts as a moment of triumph—as a high-water mark of Christian mission, where one of the faith’s great heroes made the case for Jesus and the God of Israel in the belly of paganism’s beast, tangling with the best philosophers and poets the ancient world had to offer. According to the traditional understanding of this encounter in Athens, Paul emerged the winner.

I’m not so sure. In my book that comes out in July, I argue that the story of Paul in Athens is far more ambiguous and ambivalent than most Christians think. I argue that while this story has usually been understood as a paradigmatic instance of Paul’s missionary prowess, and while most Christians read this passage as an account of a success in the most difficult of circumstances, a close reading (especially through a postcolonial lens) reveals that the story of Paul in Athens has a lot more minor notes than major chords. As I argue in that book, Paul doesn’t decide to go to Athens, he is taken there by others. He doesn’t choose to give his speech, but he is bullied into it by a gang of cool-kid philosophers, who call him a seed-picker (often translated “babbler” but probably carrying accusations of either country-bumpkin-ness or unoriginality, depending on which scholars you cite). Paul’s speech seems to have been underwhelming; a few folks came up to him afterward to express interest (in 17:34), but it was hardly an old-time tent revival. And most intriguingly, for this week’s passage, Paul didn’t even really talk about Jesus. Paul didn’t really even mention the God of Israel—not really. Certainly Paul’s speech was theological, and if you squint really hard you can see something of the Christian story in it, as in 17:30-31 with references to repentance, judgement, and a man whom he has appointed, who God has raised from the dead. But Paul doesn’t get very specific, and he doesn’t make his case emphatically at all really. Instead, Paul’s essential message is something like, you Athenians have all been right all along, you just don’t understand how or why. And Paul makes that case using the words of Athens’ own intellectual giants.

The quotations in 17:28 are the subject of quite a bit of scholarly debate. There are two quotations in question. The first is in him we live and move and have our being, and second one is for we, too, are his offspring. The second quotation is a bit easier to pin down than the first. The second quotation, for we, too, are his offspring, comes from the poet Aratus, from the third century BCE. Aratus was associated with Athens, where he studied and worked for a while, though he traveled around quite a lot. The bit that Paul quotes comes from a work called the Phenomena, and in its original context the line refers to Zeus. Paul, then, is quoting a poem by a Greek poet, which describes the relationship of human beings to Zeus, to make his point about his God to his Athenian audience.

The first quotation is a little harder to pin down. Many scholars believe that it comes from Epimenides, who lived in the sixth century BCE. The attribution relies on a Syriac commentary on Acts probably written by an 4^th and 5^th century CE Christian, Theodore of Mopsuestia, that links the line from Paul’s speech in Acts to a now-lost bit of writing from Epimenides. That’s a thin thread to hang an argument on—a bit of writing of uncertain authorship that cites a now-lost work of philosophy. But it’s as plausible as anything else. In the fragment of Epimenides that Theodore (or whoever it was) preserved, the line in him we live and move and have our being was used to describe Zeus too. (Another line from the same bit of Epimenides, a small aside about the untrustworthiness of Cretans found in Titus 1:12, is also described in the same piece by Theodore, opening the possibility that the early Christians were really reading a lot of Epimenides for some reason).

So, when Paul stood up in Athens to give his speech—his sermon, as many modern Christians would have it—he said very little specific about Jesus (not even mentioning his name), and only a little bit more about God. But what he did say, far from being an emphatic witness, was clothed in the language and traditions of Zeus and the religiosity of the Athenians. On one hand, that was entirely Paul’s point; he was trying to convince the Athenians that the religious devotion they had already always exhibited was not wrong, exactly, but simply misguided, and that they needed only to abandon their old pantheons and embrace Paul’s own God. But on the other hand, it’s somewhat stunning that Paul made an argument that way—that he cited two ancient Greek texts about Zeus to make his case about Jesus. Modern missiologists—people who study Christian missionary activity and offer best practices for undertaking mission—love this passage. They often read Acts 17:22-31 as the best example of contextual missions—of using a culture’s own traditions and texts and ideas to make the case for Jesus. Missiologists often see what Paul did in Athens as unambiguously good; they think he appropriately took the resources of an older tradition to make the case for his own. But viewed from the vantage point of postcolonial theory, Paul’s appropriation of Athenian intellectual and theological tradition looks less like savvy and more like grasping at straws—like Paul was trying desperately to find an entry point into a culture and a philosophical world in which he decidedly did not belong. It was quintessential seed-picker behavior.

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A slightly more generous reading of this passage might conclude that Paul was simply doing what people do when they move. After all, Paul had started out in Asia Minor, in his hometown of Tarsus, and he had made a name for himself in Judea, in and around Jerusalem, where he seems to have found his way into respectability and some degree of power. But then he had his call experience on the road to Damascus and everything changed, and as he moved westward on what modern Christians often call his missionary journeys, Paul needed to decide what to leave behind and what to take with him—and what to pick up along the way. This was a major theme of Paul’s career, and a major crisis in it too, if we take the evidence of his letters alongside Acts. Paul seems to have always been negotiating how much of Jewish tradition needed to be a part of the emerging Christian tradition, and he was always getting into disputes with other Jews about that (especially in 2 Corinthians and Galatians, and in parts of Acts like 21:27-22:29 where Paul’s story is very much wrapped up in disputes about proper Jewish practice and accusations that he was playing fast and loose with Jewish identity). It’s fair to say that much of the material about Paul is in some way connected to this question of how to negotiate one’s identity and tradition as one moves into new contexts and circumstances.

This passage from Acts 17 is often cited in an Athens-meets-Jerusalem sense—as a way to claim space at the intersection of rationality (Athens) and religiosity (Jerusalem). The Areopagus of 17:22 is often translated literally into the Hill of Mars or Mars Hill, and my own undergraduate college alma mater is named Mars Hill University because it was founded by Baptists who valued just that kind of back-and-forth between reason and faith. This story is a favorite one of people who want to situate themselves where intellectualism and religious devotion meet. That’s one of my favorite places to hang out too—at that specific intersection. I’m just not so sure that if we look closely, the story of Paul in Athens really fits that narrative. I think, rather, that after all his moving across the Mediterranean, in Athens Paul found himself out of his depth, pressed upon and picked on by the intellectual elite, and grasping for something to say that could convince the Athenian elite to take him seriously.

There’s one more thing before we end today. At the top of this post I mentioned my book that’s coming out in July from SBL Press. But I have another book coming out in October, also about Acts, and that book was featured in Publishers Weekly, as a part of an article about religious resistance to the second Trump administration. You can read the article here, and you can click here to pre-order that book!

I mentioned last week that I have two books coming out later this year, both about the Book of Acts. You can even preorder them if you are so inclined, here and here. Because the lectionary has a run of Acts texts coming up over the next several weeks, I am planning to spend late April and most of May writing about the major themes that come up in these lectionary passages and in the Book of Acts as a whole. It’s one way to make those seven years of research and writing pay off!

The lectionary for May 3^rd includes Acts 7:55-60, which is the climax of the story of the martyrdom of Stephen. Stephen’s story is long, stretching for all of chapters 6 and 7. Stephen’s arc begins in a controversy among the Jesus-followers in Jerusalem, in which two factions within the group come into conflict over the question of charity offerings to widows. The two factions seem to have represented distinct ethnic and/or linguistic clusters, though the way these groups are described is unique enough that scholars still skirmish over who, exactly, was involved. Acts called one group the Hebrews, which is a bit of a departure from the New Testament’s usual language of Jews, and the book called the other group the Hellenists. Most likely, the conflict was between Hebrew/Aramaic-speaking Jewish followers of Jesus and Greek-speaking gentile (non-Jewish) ones, though some scholars see both sides as ethnically Jewish and understand the division to be strictly linguistic. Whatever was the case, the two groups seemed to have been separate and distinct enough that their social systems were not very well connected to one another, because the Hellenists were complaining that the widows from their group were not receiving the same consideration that the Hebrew widows received. The Hebrews seemed to have held the power to distribute food in that dynamic, because they were the ones who altered their practice in the end—by appointing seven representatives to carry out food distributions to the Hellenist widows. It is not right that we should neglect the word of God to wait on tables, the Hebrews’ logic went in Acts 6:2, so they needed to appoint others to do it. It’s a fairly chauvinistic attitude if you think about it, but it did give an opportunity for a certain Stephen to rise to prominence.

Interestingly, the story of Stephen continues in chapter 6 with another conflict laden with ethnic tensions and tricky dynamics within the Jewish community. Acts describes (in 6:9-12) Stephen arguing with some fellow Jews, some of whom were diaspora Jews and others of whom belonged to the synagogue of the Freedmen, which has never been positively identified by historians or archaeologists. The way Acts tells it, Stephen was arguing in good faith, and he was winning, but the other people in the conversation were jealous of his wisdom and his Spirit-filled style. So Stephen’s interlocutors invented some charges of blasphemy against him, and they had him arrested. This will become a major theme in the rest of Acts: the followers of Jesus were denounced to the authorities on the basis of false charges, jealousy, or grievances, and sometimes the ones doing the denouncing were diasporic Jews. (Paul, much later in Acts, will be arrested for the final time at the instigation of some Jews from Asia, who succeed in getting him entrapped in the Roman criminal justice system). In chapter 6, though, Stephen was brought before the Jerusalem council. (The council is often called the Sanhedrin in English, but that is just a phonetic pronunciation of the Greek word for council, and probably not a proper name).

All of this was a setup, though, for the main part of Stephen’s story, which is his speech before the council and his death. Stephen’s speech begins in 7:2 and extends all the way to 7:53, and it is an expansive account of the history of Israel. This is what is sometimes called a salvation history in biblical-studies terms; it is a version of history that pays special attention to God’s saving role. Traditionally salvation histories organize and construe the past in a way that authorizes or explains the present; salvation history is a kind of origin story for the present-day. But Stephen’s salvation history took an unexpected turn. Rather than tell the history of Israel in a way that pointed directly to the Jewish tradition that united everyone present at that council hearing, Stephen told the history of Israel in a way that criticized the council and the vast majority of Jews who did not consider themselves followers of Jesus. You stiff-necked people, Stephen said, uncircumcised in heart and ears, you are forever opposing the Holy Spirit, just as your ancestors used to do. Rather than casting Israel’s history as a story of faithfulness, Stephen made it into a story of apostasy and violence, and he laid it all at the feet of the council that was hearing his case. Rather than disprove the charges of blasphemy against him, the speech probably strengthened the case that he was slandering the Jewish people and Jewish traditions. I’m not sure what result Stephen was hoping for, but the result was predictable: the people were enraged.

There’s an important observation to make at this point, which is that everything that happened to Stephen next is extrajudicial. It is unclear, historically speaking, what kind of authority the council would have had—whether it would have been legally allowed to execute someone or not. After all the council, and Jerusalem and Judea as a whole, were under the rule and authority of the Roman Empire, and the Romans were not big fans of sharing the power of capital punishment. But whatever the council’s mandate might have been, the scope of its powers seems to have been irrelevant, because what happened next in Stephen’s story was not really a sentence given by the council and carried out. Instead, it was a mob scene. Acts is a little bit vague about this. In 7:54, it reads that when they heard these things, they were enraged and ground their teeth at Stephen, and later in 7:57 they all rushed together against him. Acts declines to specify who they were, but I think we are supposed to infer that Stephen’s attackers were both members of the council and bystanders, since that is the pattern elsewhere in Acts. (Acts loves mob scenes, and often attributes acts of violence to mobs).

That brings us up to the passage that’s actually in the lectionary for this week, which is 7:55-60. I think it’s worth rehearsing all that prior material, because without it we would miss a lot of the context for Stephen’s death. That’s always a concern when interpreting the Bible; it’s always tricky to abstract a few verses here and there and assume we can understand them without knowing everything that came before and after, and without knowing all the other stories that intersect with the passage or are cited in them. In this case, Stephen is not quite attacked for the reason that Acts might want us to believe, even on the basis of Acts’ own telling. The way Acts puts it, Stephen is a straightforward martyr, killed because of his beliefs and because he had fallen into the hands of people who did not share his understanding of salvation history. That’s true to some degree, but it’s also true that Stephen died after a long day of arguing with people. He argued with the council (in a lengthy speech that accused them of being stiff-necked people), he argued with the people who denounced him to the council for blasphemy in the first place, and he only rose to prominence to begin with because of an argument between two factions that produced the need for seven new food distributors. Stephen sure did seem to pop up in scenarios of conflict and division! So perhaps it’s not that surprising that Stephen would find himself in a violent situation.

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But Stephen’s death in Acts is very much presented as a martyrdom, and Stephen is shown going to his death surrounded by all the signs of divine approval and acceptance. From his stance on the ground, Stephen was able to see the glory of God and Jesus (and he was filled with the Holy Spirit too, making this a vaguely trinitarian scene). He saw the heavens opened, and then as they were stoning him to death Stephen made two prayers, both reminiscent of the words Jesus spoke at his own death: receive my spirit (prayed to Lord Jesus, not to God as Jesus prayed it, since Jesus couldn’t have asked himself to receive his own spirit), and do not hold this sin against them, again prayed to Lord, presumably Jesus. And then he died.

What is at stake in Acts’ depiction of Stephen as a martyr? Why is the story told this way? The answer gets to one of the major important themes of Acts, and of the Gospel of Luke too (which most scholars agree was written by the same author). That theme is justice. Both Luke and Acts work very hard to show Jesus and his followers as just and upright people, and both of them go to great lengths to portray the opponents of Jesus and his followers as misguided, malicious, or even devious. At no point in Luke or Acts is Jesus or any of his followers persecuted or prosecuted rightly, in the view of the author. Every single time—whether it’s Jesus before Pilate, Stephen before the council, or Paul before the parade of Roman officials who consider his fate—Acts argues that Jesus and his followers are righteous and blameless, and that they are only persecuted or prosecuted because of incompetence or because of some malevolent agenda. At some point the reader can be forgiven for suspecting that if everyone is out to get you, they can’t all be part of a conspiracy, and some of them might have a point.

But that’s why Stephen is portrayed as a martyr—because in the framing of the Book of Acts, he did not do anything wrong, and indeed he could not have done anything wrong. Stephen was on the right side of history—the right side of salvation history, in Acts’ reckoning—and his death must have been unjust. In fact, one of the claims I will make in the book that’s coming out in July is that the Book of Acts is structured around three deaths, which are all martyr deaths. Two of the deaths are absent deaths—they aren’t depicted on the page. The first is Jesus’ death, which sets the stage for the whole story, and which is already accomplished by the time Acts begins. The second is Stephen’s death, which is very present in the early chapters. And the third is Paul’s death, which is absent at the end of Acts but which is implied, I think, in the awkward and abrupt ending of Acts and by the timeline of Acts’ composition, which suggests that the author must have known Paul’s fate, but withheld it from the reader. All three of those deaths were martyrdoms, in the sense that all three were unjust and came at the hands of people who acted out of ignorance and bad motives. There are other deaths in Acts, like Ananias and Sapphira in chapter 5 and Herod in chapter 12, but those are attributed to divine vengeance or a proper comeuppance. Acts always distinguishes between death as punishment and death as vindication. And Stephen’s death was a death of vindication.

What’s interesting about the way Acts treats death is that it points Christianity on a trajectory of thinking about and venerating martyrdom that comes to characterize the movement for most of its earliest centuries. Martyrdom, patterned in large part on the deaths of Stephen, Paul, and of course Jesus, became one of the hallmarks of the Christian tradition, and one of the primary ways Christians understood themselves and told their own story. Christians would end up seeking martyrdom in some cases, and they would celebrate martyrs and tell their stories. That part of Christianity is perhaps not quite as visible today, but it’s still present, and the discourse of martyrdom emerges in moments of crisis or in times of change. Think, for example, of the veneration of the Columbine High School student who was supposed to have confessed her faith before being shot (a story which was later substantially debunked), or think of the way some of the Christian right have celebrated Charlie Kirk. Christianity loves a martyr, and it always has, stretching all the way back to the day Stephen called the council a bunch of stiff-necked people.

I have always found that Christian fascination with martyrdom a little macabre and even—if I’m being honest—a bit melodramatic. That’s especially true for contexts like the United States, where Christians and Christianity are objectively not persecuted or oppressed. The constant cries of subjugation and the postures of martyrdom are a little unseemly, for a group that holds so much power. But in recent years some scholars have begun to turn the discourse of martyrdom toward far better and more just purposes, and purposes more aligned with the realities in which the martyrdom traditions arose. I’m thinking especially of James Cone’s work in The Cross and the Lynching Tree, which connects the New Testament’s stories about violent death with the experiences of Black people in the United States. That strikes me as a far more honest and useful appraisal of Christianity’s martyrdom traditions—as a way to ask questions about power, as a way to point to the oppressive strength of religious and political violence, and to argue for liberation. I look forward to seeing where people take Cone’s work next.

The Revised Common Lectionary typically includes four readings for each Sunday: a reading from the Hebrew Bible (or, as many call it, the Old Testament), a Psalm, a Gospel reading, and an epistle reading. Occasionally, though, the RCL replaces the Hebrew Bible reading with a passage from the Book of Acts, on the premise that both are historical kinds of texts. (That premise—that both Acts and the books of the Hebrew Bible are historical—is questionable and over-simplified at best, and it leads to all kinds of troublesome assumptions about the genres and importance of these texts, but those are the categories the lectionary uses). In the lectionary for April 26^th, the RCL does just that—it uses an Acts passage where the Hebrew Bible historical reading would ordinarily be.

The second half of 2026 is going to be a busy time for me and the Book of Acts. I have two books coming out this year about Acts, and both of them are available for pre-order now (though one of them is only available through online book shops, and not the publisher, yet).

First, scheduled for July, is my book To The Ends of the Earth: The Necropolitics of the Acts of the Apostles, coming out from SBL Press. It’s an academic book, and it has been a long time coming: I wrote the bulk of this book in 2019 and 2020, but a pandemic-era backlog has meant that it’s just now moving into production. In To The Ends of the Earth, I offer a postcolonial reading of Acts, using the political postcolonial theory of necropolitics as articulated by Achille Mbembe. Necropolitics pays attention to the roles of power, violence, and embodiment in the relationships between governments and persons, and the ways colonial settings in particular leverage violence against people and their bodies. As it turns out, that describes the Book of Acts really well! By reading Acts through a modern postcolonial theory, I’m able to offer interpretations of Acts that might not be available when we read the book from other modern perspectives. I’m really excited for this one to see the light of day!

Second, scheduled to be released on October 6^th, is By What Power: The Book of Acts, Autocracy, and the Power of Resistance, coming from Chalice Press. I wrote this book in late 2025, in the first year of the second Trump administration, as a response to the swelling authoritarian and autocratic trends in Trump-era American government. The premise of this book—which is aimed toward general audiences, and which might feel more accessible if you’re not a specialist—is that when we find ourselves living in times of autocracy or authoritarianism, the Book of Acts is a useful guide and companion. We might not ordinarily think of Acts (or any book of the Bible) as having much to say about modern political realities, but if you think about it, Acts is full of examples of jealous and self-serving rulers, mob violence, clashing visions of the future, courtroom scenes, ethnic discrimination, xenophobia, and more—just like our world today. By What Power asks what we can learn from the Book of Acts, and whether the experiences of the apostles from twenty centuries ago might offer guidance to us today.

The passage from the lectionary for this Sunday—Acts 2:42-47—is one of the most memorable passages in Acts. It’s one of several passages from the early part of Acts’ story that describe the harmony, peaceful coexistence, and flourishing of the apostles in Jerusalem in the wake of Jesus’ death and resurrection. In some ways, the Book of Acts is really two stories spliced together. The second half of Acts describes the activities of Paul and several other people as they spread westward from Jerusalem and into Asia Minor and Greece and eventually to Rome, carrying with them the seeds of what we now call Christianity. But the first half of Acts is focused on the immediate aftermath of Jesus’ death and resurrection, and the community of apostles he left behind, in and around Jerusalem. In this first part of Acts, the author describes the way a community and a way of life coalesced around devotion to Jesus and his teachings. Picking up where the gospels left off (most scholars think that Acts was written by the same person who wrote the Gospel of Luke, and that therefore Acts should be thought of as a kind of second volume of the same story), Acts follows Jesus’ followers as they reckon with his absence and attempt to build a life aligned with his example and his teachings.

One of the really striking thing about these early passages from Acts (which include 4:32-37 and 5:12-16, and arguably the Pentecost narrative in chapter 2) is their intense and possibly hyperbolic descriptions of harmony. Acts goes to great lengths to emphasize the unity of the earliest church—the ways everyone did everything together, without dissention or conflict. (That description of a conflict-free life helps to set up the story of Ananias and Sapphira, which comes in chapter 5, where the couple violates the sense of unity by hoarding some of their wealth. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t end well. More on them in a moment). In this lectionary passage and the others in the early part of Acts, the apostles are conspicuously unified and living in circumstances that might be described in idyllic or even socialist terms. They shared possessions and wealth (except Ananias and Sapphira), they went to the temple together, they prayed together, they ate together, and they had the approval of the broader society.

One of the really interesting questions posed by Acts scholars is whether this unity and togetherness described in the early part of Acts is historically accurate, or whether it’s aspirational. Was this the way the Jerusalem community actually behaved, or was this the way they ought to have behaved, from the perspective of the author who was writing several decades later? Acts, after all, frequently idealizes its stories. It frequently has its characters give speeches, for example, that perfectly suit the moment and that could not possibly have been remembered word-for-word the way they are presented. (One of the things I say in those books that you can pre-order above is that the speeches in Acts sound like the ones you make up in your head, lying in bed a few nights later, that reflect what you wish you had said in some big moment).

Perhaps the unity of the early Jerusalem-based followers of Jesus works the same way. Perhaps all that togetherness has more to do with what the late-first-century author of Acts thought should have been the case, and less with any reliable historical memory? We will never know for sure. If we take these descriptions at face value, though, we can notice some interesting patterns.

First, I think it’s really interesting that while the collective group is described as all who believed, the group’s activities are described in terms of practices. The all who believed of verse 44 comes from a Greek participle of the word for belief or trust—a construction that might be translated as all the believing ones. As many scholars have pointed out (mostly in the study of Paul’s letters), the Greek word that we typically translate as belief would have had multiple meanings in ancient Greek, and not just the intellectual agreement that we tend to use to define the word belief. So it’s possible that Acts meant something broader by all who believed than we would mean by it today. Maybe all the faithful would be a better translation—though I am hardly a skilled translator, so I suppose I’ll defer to the people who produced the modern translations on which we rely.

But I see a tension between the all who believed of 2:44 and the ways the life of the community was described elsewhere in this passage: as marked by wonders and signs, by having things in common, by selling their possessions and goods to distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need, in attendance in the Jerusalem temple, at communal meals, and in praising God. These activities all make good sense as expressions of devotion by a sect of first-century Jews, but they do not all correspond exactly to the idea of belief. What I’m saying, in more words than are necessary, is that their life together seemed to be more marked by action than by belief. Nowhere does Acts describe a creed or confession as a precondition of belonging, and nowhere in these togetherness passages does Acts impose any intellectual assent on the community as a requirement of belonging. Ananias and Sapphira fall down dead after hoarding their private property to keep it away from the group, but no one falls down dead for believing the wrong thing. Perhaps I’m making too much of this tension, or perhaps I’m imagining it as an outgrowth of my own (anti-creedal) religious formation, but it’s interesting to describe the group in terms of belief and then say nothing further about the nature of that belief, and instead focus on practices.

Another observation that’s related: these earliest followers of Jesus were thoroughly Jewish. That ought to go without saying, probably, but it’s worth repeating in this age of Christian anti-Judaism and Christian minimization (or hijacking) of Jewish influence. These people were essentially living out mainstream Jewish religiosity. There’s ample evidence of Jewish communalism in the first century; the community at Qumran, for example, seems to have shared resources and living space in common. Communal meals were known at Qumran too, and in other settings in Judea and across the Mediterranean. In its descriptions of signs and wonders, Acts is simply carrying forward a description of Jesus’ ministry, which was itself well within the traditions of Jewish miracle-workers. And of course, nothing could be more normatively Jewish in the early first century than going to the temple for worship. All those things together point to a community of Jesus-followers that would have looked identifiably Jewish to anyone who was observing them.

This is an important point, because Christians often idealize this early community of Jesus’ followers, and they tend to imagine that the Jerusalem community of Christians was somehow special or innovative—that they were the ones to invent the communalist or even semi-socialist patterns of life that Acts describes. But the followers of Jesus in Jerusalem that Acts describes were simply living in ways that other Jews had lived before them, and that might have even seemed somewhat normal for sects of Judaism in that time. Christians often imagine that the people in Acts were special, unique, or enlightened above everyone else, but they might have been very ordinary in the ways they chose to live their faith together.

When reading these accounts of early unity and togetherness in the community of Jesus followers in Jerusalem, a natural question arises for me: what happened? After all, Christians do not typically live in these idyllic and idealistic circumstances anymore. The early part of Acts describes an intensity of shared practices that seems to have been lost on the Christians who came afterward. While we might think of certain kinds of Christian communities that still practice some or all of these activities—like monastic communities, for example, or religious orders—most Christians worldwide do not live this way. Why not? Why the difference between these ancient followers of Jesus and the modern ones? Perhaps it’s the case that Acts is in fact being aspirational about the life of the early church, and they did not actually live that way. Or perhaps something has been lost along the way, and our shift toward belief as the litmus test of Christianity has led us away from the kinds of shared practices described in Acts. It might be that somewhere along the way, creeds and confessions took a central place and practices like communal meals, prayers, and shared ownership of property became less important.

That poses a question for those of us who claim the Christian tradition in the 21^st century. Are we content with the belief-based system of belonging that orders many parts of the church in our own times and places? Are we happy with the way we have organized ourselves? Or are there things we can learn and recover from those first-century followers of Jesus, who organized themselves in terms of economic solidarity, through practices of everyday life, and with experiences of communal worship and piety? Might we reclaim something of the revolutionary spirit of the people we meet in Acts 2:42-47, and have our shared belonging show up in the living of our values and commitments together?

Sometimes it feels like you could set your watch by the perpetual re-emergence of plans to teach the Bible in public schools. Those conversations seem to return like the seasons or like migrating birds: every year or two, some school board somewhere decides that instead of well-maintained buildings, competitive teacher pay, free lunch for everyone, or safety from shootings, what America’s schoolchildren really need most is some readings from scripture. Right now it’s Texas, which is considering adding the Bible to the list of required subjects as part of a wholesale revision of English and history curricula. Other places like Utah and Oklahoma have also considered adding the Bible to public schools recently, in one way or another.

Inevitably, arguments for teaching the Bible in public schools focus on its literary and cultural value. In that, I fully agree, though not in the way that the efforts’ proponents probably have in mind. The Bible is indeed a vast repository of cultural information, and knowing something about it can be important for interpreting all kinds of other texts and ideas. (Whether reading the Bible in public schools is a good way to help students learn to make those interpretations, or whether it’s worth reading the Bible at the expense of doing other things in schools, is a different question). And the Bible continues to hold immense sway in the modern world, with billions of people understanding it to be authoritative in one way or another. So it might make sense to expose students to the Bible, as literature and as a cultural artifact, because it does in fact play an important role in literary and cultural worlds.

Of course, the proponents of teaching Bible in public schools do not usually really mean what they say. They claim to want to teach the Bible as literature, but it doesn’t take much imagination to grasp what’s really going on. The people pushing Bible-in-schools agendas are usually conservative Christians, and they are often motivated by an evangelical zeal—by the idea that exposing millions of children to the sacred texts of Christians will cause some of those children to become Christians themselves. (Never mind that in places like Texas and Utah and Oklahoma, Christianity has already pretty much saturated the “market,” and there are not too many people of any age who are unaware of the existence of the Bible). Proponents seem to think about putting the Bible into public schools in the same way that the Trojans thought about drawing the horse through the city gates: once the Bible is on the inside, the hardest work will already be done. But as someone who teaches the Bible as literature for a living, I’m skeptical about how effective this particular Trojan horse might be.

My high school freshman came home from school the other day and reported that she is about halfway through reading this spring’s assigned novel, which is Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. “It’s a terrible book,” she said, and thinking back to my own high school experiences of reading it, I had to agree. “It has an interesting premise,” she told me, which is true, “but it’s just not very well done.” I can remember thinking the same thing, 30-something years ago when I had to read it. If high school freshmen can see straight through a modern novel with a dystopian (and eerily current-events-y) premise, what are they going to do with Deuteronomy? If they can immediately clock the stylistic dullness or redactional sloppiness of some of literature’s great works, what will they think of the Gospel of Mark, with its multiple endings, or of Paul’s letter to the Romans and its inscrutable middle section? I don’t think they will finish their homework and then suddenly all become Christians. I teach the Bible professionally to adults who are deeply personally and professionally invested in it already, and even then it can be hard to guide people through a close reading of it. Large swaths of the Bible make little sense, or hold scant interest for most readers, or are repetitive or vague or confusing. To be sure, references to the Bible show up relentlessly in other kinds of literature and in art, and the Bible motivates important geopolitical realities. But as literature, the Bible sometimes leaves a lot to be desired. A room full of 30 high school freshmen would be more likely to roast the Bible on TikTok than to break into a spontaneous religious revival.

All that is a way to introduce a few thoughts about the gospel reading from the lectionary for April 19^th, which is the Gospel of Luke’s account of one of Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances. This is the story of Jesus’ appearance to Cleopas and another unnamed disciple, on the road to Emmaus. (Interestingly, Cleopas is otherwise unattested in the New Testament, and Emmaus is unknown from archaeology, making this story a little unattached to any stable person or place). This story only appears in the Gospel of Luke, though it shares some things in common with other post-resurrection appearances of Jesus, as described in other canonical gospels. It’s an interesting scene, in my opinion, because it’s one of the “walk-and-talk” scenes of the type made famous by Aaron Sorkin’s scripts for The West Wing—long scenes of movement from one place to another that give characters an opportunity to chat with each other and do exposition for the viewers. It turns out that it’s more interesting to hear people explain things when they’re on the move! The same thing happens in this story from Luke. The two disciples were on the road from one place to another when a third person joined them on the road, and the three of them began to talk.

Here’s where reading the Bible as literature can be helpful. In this story, Luke employs what in literary analysis is often called dramatic irony, which is when the audience (or viewer or reader) knows something that the characters in the story do not know. This imbalance of knowledge creates tension in the story and in its telling, and it gives us as readers something to watch for. In 24:15-16, the narrator tells us that Jesus himself came near and went with them, but their eyes were kept from recognizing him. (That passive voice, their eyes were kept from recognizing him, is doing a lot of work in that sentence to keep things vague. What, or who, kept their eyes from recognition?). The story proceeds, then, with the reader knowing something important that Cleopas and the other disciple did not know, which is that the two disciples thought they were talking to a stranger but were actually talking with Jesus, and everything the characters say to each other is filtered through that knowledge. As readers, we know that there must eventually be a big reveal.

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Here’s where another bit of literary analysis comes into the story—a somewhat more advanced and obscure one. It was common in the ancient world for stories to employ what is called anagnorisis, or a motif of sudden realization or awareness. Stories sometimes used moments of characters having an epiphany as a turning point in the story. In modern storytelling, perhaps the most famous version of anagnorisis is the no, I am your father line spoken by Darth Vader to Luke Skywalker in The Empire Strikes Back—a line that then shifted the perspective of Skywalker within the story and shifted the understanding of the film’s viewers too, complicating plot points that they viewers had thought they understood. (The line is often misremembered and misquoted as Luke, I am your father—which is another commentary on the intricacies of storytelling!). Or (spoiler alert), we could think about the big twist in the movie The Sixth Sense, which was that Bruce Willis’ character had been dead the whole time, and which led to a dramatic scene in which the character realized what had already been true all along. Indeed, this was often the way that anagnorisis showed up in Greek and Roman literature—as a sudden realization that the person someone had been speaking with was actually a dead and departed relative or friend—unrecognizable until something clicked. Greek and Roman storytelling often relied on its characters come to a sudden new understanding of the identity of their conversation partners. So in Luke 24:31, when Cleopas and the other disciple suddenly realized that their new friend was actually Jesus raised from the dead, ancient readers would have recognized it as a literary device. They would have understood that the Gospel of Luke was engaging in artful storytelling, and they might have recognized the technique from other stories they had heard or read.

That is one of the most important outcomes of reading the Bible as literature: the realization that the Bible was written using many of the same techniques and patterns used by non-sacred literature. Scholars of the New Testament compare the gospels to romantic novellas, because Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John share a lot of DNA with cheap and popular books available in the ancient equivalent of mass-market paperback. Scholars of Paul compare his letters to formal letters written by other ancient people, because he used all the same structures that other ancient letter-writers used, and scholars of Acts often point out how that book shares a lot in common with ancient histories, ancient adventure tales, and, yes—ancient romances. The New Testament came from a particular place and time, and as literature from that place and time the New Testament reflects the literary styles and conventions that were popular there and then. The books of the New Testament are not really all that special, when compared to everything else that came from Greek and Roman antiquity—except that those New Testament books happened to be canonized and held sacred by billions of people for thousands of years.

Most people aren’t used to reading the Bible that way—as literature that belongs to a specific literary moment, comes from a particular literary culture, and exhibits the same features as many other literary works. Most people are used to thinking of the Bible as unique or special, as if it came from God without any human input or creativity. When you’re reading the Bible as literature, though, it suddenly becomes hard to keep believing in the Bible’s uniqueness. As a literary product, it turns out that the Bible is a lot like many other literary products. That’s a helpful realization if you’re a Bible scholar, because it helps you make sense of what the Bible is doing, even and especially in the difficult or obscure parts of it.

But reading the Bible as literature might not be the boon to faith that many proponents of the Bible-in-public-schools crowd imagine it would be. For many people, reading the Bible as literature will not elevate it to some special status, as the people pushing for it to be read in schools might think. Instead, reading the Bible as literature will lead many people to think of it as ordinary, uninspired, or normal for its time and place—neither unique or especially holy. That’s fine, in my opinion; people are allowed to think whatever they want to think, and no one is required to hold the Bible in any special regard. But if you think that putting Leviticus in front of a bunch of high school freshmen will lead them to faith, or if you think that assigning even a compelling bit of literature like the encounter with Jesus on the road to Emmaus will make believers out of teenagers, you’re likely to end up disappointed.

I’m writing this week’s Substack over an Easter Sunday lunch. When I lived closer to my family and my father’s parents were still alive, the whole family used to gather on Easter for what we called supper, which was a meal that began at about 2:00 in the afternoon and lasted for hours. Easter supper brought together all my dad’s siblings and their kids—my cousins—and we all piled into my grandparents’ small house, relatives lining the furniture and every spare bit of floor. My grandmother prepared mountains of food: ham certainly, and mashed potatoes and rolls and cornbread and roast chicken and potato salad and egg salad and slaw and all kinds of other things. Every one of her kids and their families brought something to contribute too, so that the kitchen table and counters were crowded together in a wilderness of food. We piled our paper plates high, and the grownups sat in the living room and caught up while we kids wolfed down our food and then ran wild in the woods out back.

Today, though, I’m having my Easter lunch alone, at an Indian buffet I like near our house. I’m having two kinds of basmati rice—one spiced with coriander and pomegranate seeds, and the other more aromatic with saffron and peas—with dal makhani and saag paneer and channa masala layered over the top, the way we used to eat pinto beans and rice when I was a kid. I could never have imagined this kind of food when I was a kid; I had never heard of Indian food, let alone eaten it, until I was in my twenties. But it’s delicious, and it’s great if you’re a vegetarian like me, and it’s strangely comforting to sit here eating it (they just brought me vegetable pakora and some naan) while remembering those Easter suppers from times past, and all the relationships and meaning that went with them.

Things change, don’t they? You probably have your version of that scene I just described. You probably have your own experiences of remembering and cherishing the past while living in decidedly new circumstances. I think that’s a key part of how we make meaning in our lives; we put memory up against our new experiences and something is generated in the friction between them. I don’t know that I would think as much about those Easter suppers at my grandparents’ house if I were still attending them every spring, but now that I know I won’t ever eat sweet potatoes and corn from a soggy and overloaded paper plate at my grandparents’ house again, those Easter Sundays past somehow mean more to me.

The lectionary for the Sunday after Easter tells a version of that kind of story, I think. The scene is a familiar one: the disciples were together much in the way they always were, gathering in the kind of community they had learned to treasure. But something was different: Jesus was dead, and something had happened to his body. The Gospel of John is sparse on details, but it seems that after Mary Magdalene reported to the group that Jesus’ tomb was empty and that she had had a conversation with Jesus in the garden, the disciples convened an all-hands meeting that evening. Although the text doesn’t say so, I imagine that someone brought something to eat, and they shared a meal. In one of the deadliest asides in the New Testament, John tells us that they gathered behind locked doors for fear of the Jews, which is probably best understood as a fear of the Judean political and religious power structure, which Jesus and his disciples were on the wrong side of—but which has for centuries been used as justification for persecuting and harassing and killing all kinds of Jews, including those distant in time and place from the ones in the story. John’s vague language left enough room for centuries of violence to sneak in. But in the first century, the circumstances faced by Jesus’ disciples in the wake of his crucifixion certainly would have inspired fear and no small amount of uncertainty, as the disciples struggled to make sense of Jesus’ death and then the news from Mary that he seemed to be alive again. They were together in spite of their fear (or perhaps because of it) that night in Jerusalem, and they had gathered in many of the same old ways. But everything had changed.

It was against this background that the story of “doubting” Thomas played out. To review the story briefly, as the disciples gathered in secret, Jesus appeared among them (despite the locked doors) and breathed on them, bestowing the Holy Spirit and also wishing them peace. When the disciples told Thomas about those happenings later, Thomas—who had not been there that night to see for himself—had a reasonable resistance and objection to the other disciples’ extraordinary claims. Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, Thomas said, I will not believe.

In my imagination, Thomas’ tone when he said those words probably matched the surrealness of the situation; Thomas was simply incredulous about the other disciples’ story. The story was, after all, unbelievable. I imagine that Thomas was willing to believe them, and maybe even eager to give credence to their extraordinary tale. But he needed something—anything really—to hang his belief on. It feels unfair to me that Thomas gets painted with the broad brush of doubt, when his continued presence in the community and his willingness to be convinced tell us that his belief was at least as active as his disbelief. And of course, in 20:26-29, Thomas did come to full belief; he did become fully convinced that Jesus was alive again. This is a story of Thomas’ belief really, and not a story of his doubt.

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Famously, the 21^st chapter of the Gospel of John feels tacked-on. If you read the 20^th chapter, and especially the last two verses of the chapter (which are also the last two verses of this lectionary reading), it reads like an ending. The end of chapter 20 has a benedictory quality, like a coda or an epilogue, that signals a conclusion to the story. There is a chapter 21 of course, but many scholars have concluded that it was likely added to the book later, and that the Gospel of John originally ended with chapter 20 and its story of Thomas’ journey to belief. I think it’s interesting, then, that the Gospel of John concludes with two scenes that play in that generative friction between memory and new experiences. It’s interesting that the Gospel of John ends with two everything-is-the-same-but-different-now scenes. My Easter lunch at an Indian buffet shared are enough common threads (a meal, a holiday, my own persevering consciousness) with other meals I have eaten on other holy days that I began to make meaning out of the juxtaposition. I think these scenes from John 20 shared enough common threads (the disciples gathering, perhaps a meal, their own enduring sense of community) that they are meant to speak to the generative energy of the juxtaposition. Jesus’ appearance among the disciples, not once but twice in John 20, adds to the same-but-different sense of things.

It’s a provocative way to end a gospel, or at least it was once a provocative way to end a gospel, before John 21 got tacked on at some point and pushed John 20 into the penultimate position. Versions of this same story pattern show up elsewhere in the canonical gospels, and in the Book of Acts too. There are other stories of divine presence, and Jesus’ own presence specifically, popping up when the disciples kept embodying the practices of community that they had once embodied with Jesus. These stories happen where and when the community returned to behaving after Jesus’ death in just the same the way it had before. The road to Emmaus in Luke, the Pentecost story in Acts, in Galilee at the end of Matthew, and the seaside meal in John 21—all of these moments of divine visitation came in moments when the community of the disciples was gathering and behaving much as they always had. And into that sameness came something different.

Memory is a powerful force, and storytelling is one of the most concentrated forms of memory. We tell stories as a way to convey our memories to other people, but we also tell stories as a way to mediate our memories to ourselves and to reinforce them—as a way to tell ourselves what is most important to us. As I sit on an Easter afternoon eating Indian food, I use the occasion to revisit memories of other Easter meals in other times and places, and to make meaning out of those memories. That same thing happens when we write, and especially when someone writes a book like a gospel. Gospels were vehicles for transferring stories to new audiences, and for sharing the story of Jesus’ life. But gospels were also ways for the community of Jesus’ followers to remember for themselves. Gospels were technologies for producing memory, and for protecting and preserving memory and for adapting it to new circumstances.

It’s not surprising, then, that the New Testament contains so many same-but-slightly-different stories. The post-resurrection stories all have that quality—an uncanny kind of difference, where things are mostly as they had always been (a walk on a road, a meal, a fishing boat), but held slightly at an angle, with those old familiar things suddenly taking on new meaning when viewed in the light of new experiences. Post-resurrection stories like the one in John 20 (and John 21, for that matter) helped the community launder their memories and place them into an evolving system of meaning. These stories helped people make sense of old experiences in light of new knowledge.

At the end of my meal, the smiling waiter brought over a small bowl of gulab jamun, which is a ball of fried dough soaked in a sugary syrup. It’s very sweet and cakey and dense, and in some ways it reminded me of a pound cake that had been drenched in a simple syrup, or a cake donut dipped in something sweet. The experience of eating the gulab jamun (I was only able to finish about half of it) reminded me of any number of other Easter desserts through the years, though I’m reasonably confident that it was the first time I had ever eaten that particular dessert on an Easter afternoon. Memory is funny that way; our minds are always making new sense of old memories in light of new experiences.

Perhaps that’s the best way to read the passage about Thomas from John 20—as the story of someone grappling with the past in light of the present, making sense of old memories in light of new experiences. Maybe it wasn’t that Thomas resisted belief, and maybe Thomas was perfectly willing to take his friends’ word for it about their own experiences. But it might be that Thomas simply needed an experience of his own—a new experience in new circumstances—in order to make full meaning out of the past.

Easter is all about Jesus. What could possibly be truer than that? In the defining drama of the Christian story, the dead-and-then-alive-again plot from Good Friday to Easter morning, Jesus is the star of the show, and Jesus takes center stage. We greet each other Easter morning with a call-and-response, Christ is risen, followed by Christ is risen indeed! Jesus is the one on trial, Jesus is the one hanging on a cross, Jesus is the one in the tomb, and Jesus is the one who rises again.

That’s the way we tell the story, but if you look closely in the biblical accounts of Jesus’ death and resurrection, you’ll find subtle and persistent evidence that the story is more complicated than that. Jesus takes center stage in our modern tellings, but not necessarily in the biblical versions. For starters, some of the earliest interpreters of the Easter story are careful to give credit for Jesus’ resurrection to God, not to Jesus himself. Paul, for example, usually frames Jesus’ resurrection in theocentric terms: God raised Jesus up, not Jesus rose. And even in this week’s lectionary passage from Acts (specifically Acts 10:40), the story goes that God raised him on the third day and allowed him to appear, which is a way of putting God at the center of things and making Jesus an example of God’s power, and not necessarily a power in his own right. Jesus only does what God allows him to do. And in the Matthew passage, the angel tells the women in 28:6 that he has been raised, in the passive voice, making Jesus the object or recipient of action performed by God. The biblical authors, who were likely all Jewish, were careful monotheists, and they avoided attributing too much of God’s prerogative to Jesus.

But the clearest example of Jesus taking a back seat in the lectionary readings for Easter Sunday comes in the reading from John. All four canonical gospels place women at the tomb as the first witnesses of the resurrection; that is one of the few things that all four gospels agree about. But the Gospel of John is the most specific and detailed about those women’s roles (or, in John’s case, about one woman’s role), and John tells the story in a unique way that emphasizes the perspective of a woman over the perspectives of men. And if we look closely at this passage (John 20:1-18), we see that the storytelling in John’s version really relies almost exclusively on the witness of Mary Magdalene. A few observations to illustrate the point:

• In 20:1, the story is introduced from Mary’s point of view, and the reader sees the scene through Mary’s eyes. Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the tomb, it says, leaning on Mary’s telling of the events. Mary alone is present at the earliest moment of Easter.

• Only through Mary does any other disciple get involved. In 20:2, Mary ran and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, to inform them of what she had seen. These two male disciples (I’m assuming the one whom Jesus loved was male, since the Greek pronoun in that clause is masculine) were early witnesses to the resurrection, but only at the invitation of Mary, and only secondarily to her.

• In 20:5, we get a scene inside the tomb from the perspective of the disciple whom Jesus loved. (Over the years many have speculated that Mary Magdalene might actually be this disciple whom Jesus loved, but this scene—where Mary and the disciple are both present—offers a Superman-and-Clark-Kent obstacle to that view). And then in 20:6-7 we get Peter’s perspective, and we learn what he saw. Neither male disciple grasped the importance of what they had witnessed, according to John, and in 20:10 they returned home.

• Beginning in 20:11, John offers another scene exclusively through the eyes of Mary, describing Mary’s actions, words, and state of mind. Although part of this passage is narrated in the third person, from the perspective of an omniscient narrator, this passage stays resolutely focused on Mary and her experiences.

• After the male disciples go home, Mary has interactions with a couple of angels, and then beginning in 20:14 she speaks with Jesus himself, who is unrecognizable to her until he addresses her. Their conversation becomes a way for the reader of the story to enter into it and experience the big reveal themselves; we are all being shown—and not told—about the resurrection through Mary’s eyes and feelings. The narrator could have simply said Jesus was raised from the dead but unrecognizable, but instead the narrator has us discover the reality through and alongside Mary, making her an avatar for the rest of us.

• Mary then continues her role as the first announcer of the resurrection, going in 20:18 to tell everyone else what she had seen. Although both Peter and the disciple whom Jesus loved had been there at the tomb, the story is told in such a way that Mary gets pride of place as the bearer of news about Jesus. (This is a bit of a theme in John; the same thing happens in chapter 2 where Jesus’ mother tells the wine stewards to do as he says, and in chapter 4 where the Samaritan woman turns into an evangelist after their conversation at the well. Women land a lot of announcer roles in the Gospel of John).

What can we make of all this? What is the importance of the Gospel of John telling the story this way, almost wholly through the experiences, words, and feelings of Mary Magdalene?

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One obvious takeaway is that John is privileging Mary Magdalene as the storyteller of the resurrection, over Peter and even over the disciple whom Jesus loved, who the Gospel of John otherwise gives a lot of credit. John is not alone in this pattern, as I have already mentioned; all four canonical gospels place a woman or women at the tomb of Jesus and make them the first discoverer of Jesus’ absence. They all tell the story through women’s experience, in one way or another. But John is alone in having Mary Magdalene, instead of a pair or group of women, visit the tomb first, and John is alone in having Jesus engage in an extended conversation with someone outside the tomb. And it’s a movingly intimate conversation, too, in frustratingly vague ways. When Jesus said her name, in 20:16, Mary recognized him and cried out to him. The next words out of Jesus’ mouth were do not touch me, or do not hold on to me in some translations, which is a strange and provocative thing to say. Did Mary try to grasp Jesus? Was she accustomed to doing things like that? Why did Jesus stop her? Did he understand why he stopped her? Or were Jesus’ words preemptive, designed to head her off for some reason, should she reach for him? The suddenness of his rejection of her physical touch has sparked curiosity and speculation for centuries.

Another takeaway, though, is that the Gospel of John (and the other gospels too, to some degree) tells the story of the resurrection through Mary’s eyes, and not through Jesus’ eyes. This is a noticeable gap in the narrative. If Jesus was indeed resurrected, and if he did appear to his followers many times afterward, then we might expect some narration of the events of the resurrection from the perspective of the inside of the tomb. We might anticipate that the disciples would have asked Jesus about his death, about what it was like being dead, and about what happens when one is raised from the dead. We might expect that the Gospel of John and the other gospels would offer a report—something like and on many occasions Jesus told us of the way the light began to enter the tomb on the third day, or something like that. But we receive no such narrative, and Jesus never tells his side of the story.

Instead, the resurrection (and the cross, and the trial scenes, and really the whole of the story of Jesus’ life and teachings) is told as a series of observations of Jesus, not narratives by Jesus. The gospels are not always clear about whose voices they are sharing with us, and whose experiences are being mediated, but they rarely if ever give us a clear picture of Jesus’ own ideas, thoughts, motivations, or private interactions. Even when Jesus is alone in a scene—such as in the story of the temptation in the wilderness, or praying in the garden of Gethsemane—we get a third-person omniscient perspective on it, not a direct account attributed to Jesus.

What’s unique about this part of the Gospel of John, though, is how it simultaneously sidelines Jesus’ experiences and puts Mary Magdalene front and center. We know what Mary was seeing (the stone had been removed from the tomb in 20:1, and two angels in white in 20:12, and Jesus standing there in 20:14). We know what Mary was saying, and to whom she was saying it. We even know her inner thoughts; we know, for instance, that she mistook Jesus for the gardener, in 20:15. We don’t really know anything about Jesus’ experience, except what Mary tells us, which is that he did not want to be touched.

Maybe I’m making too much of this narrative pattern. After all, the New Testament gospels are third-person accounts and not an autobiography or memoir penned by Jesus. We shouldn’t expect to encounter Jesus’ own thoughts and inner motivations in documents like these. Maybe it’s not surprising that others tell the story of Jesus’ resurrection, even if it is a bit surprising how consistently the women in the story get to be the narrators and the stars of it, when they took a supporting role (at best) in the rest of the story. But coupled with the consistent minimization of Jesus’ role in Paul, Acts, and elsewhere—where passive language is used for Jesus’ resurrection, and the action is so often attributed to God—I think it’s an interesting pattern.

Returning to Mary Magdalene for a moment, I think this pattern helps make sense of her place in contemporary Christian imaginations. Mary Magdalene is a bit player for most of the gospels, either standing at the periphery of the story or absent altogether. But then she bursts onto the scene at the tomb, with only the thinnest back story, and she appears (at least in John) as a rounded character who plays a complex role in things. It’s no wonder, then, that Mary Magdalene is frequently the protagonist of wishful conspiracy theories spun by people who want to broaden the story of religion and reclaim space for women’s voices. Mary Magdalene famously (or infamously, if you ask many biblical scholars) played a huge role in Dan Brown’s novel The DaVinci Code, and others have seen her as an exemplar of the Divine Feminine, as a hidden or suppressed female counterpart to Jesus, as Jesus’ wife or lover, as the true messiah, as the woman caught in adultery in John 8 or the woman with the alabaster jar of ointment who anointed Jesus’ feet. There is scant (or less) evidence for any of this, but the very thinness of Mary Magdalene’s characterization in the gospels make these extravagant tales possible. For most of the story, Mary is an absence large enough to fit any strange and unlikely possibility.

In the Gospel of John, though, in the scene of Easter morning, Mary Magdalene takes center stage for a powerful moment. Far more than the male disciples and even more than Jesus, Mary is the star of this narrative. When it came time to tell the story of the most important morning in the whole tale of Jesus’ life and death and resurrection, the Gospel of John chose Mary as the eyes through which readers would see the story, the ears through which they would hear it, and the body through which they would feel the fear and thrill of an unthinkable series of occurrences. And however thin Mary’s story might be everywhere else, her place on Easter morning is enough to keep us returning to Mary Magdalene, asking to know more.

Years ago, I was driving across the country for the first time, on my way from North Carolina to Colorado, and I was doing it in a moving truck. I was pretty decent at driving a large vehicle like that one, even as heavy and slow as it was, and most of that drive is pretty easy—uncrowded interstate highways and open straight lines of sight. But as I approached St. Louis heading west, things quickly got wild. Lanes were multiplying, from two to three to five to seven, and roads merged and split off in every direction. In the days before I had turn-by-turn satellite navigation, I kept my attention laser-focused on the signs for I-70, which I knew was supposed to dump me out on the other side of the city, in Missouri. But then at some point, the highway simply split in two. A median emerged out of nowhere and broke the six or eight lanes in half, sending some of them to the left and some of them to the right. Panicked, I looked in vain for some explanation. Which direction should I go to follow I-70, leading to Missouri where I intended to end up, and which direction was some other road I didn’t need to be taking?

No signage came to my rescue, so I stayed in the lane I was already in, veered left around the median, and hoped for the best. A mile later, my lane and the other lanes came back together without explanation. All the lanes had been I-70 the whole time, I just didn’t know it. It all led to the same place in the end. I still hold a grudge against the city of St. Louis because of that moment.

That instant of panic on I-70 through St. Louis came to mind this week as I was thinking about the gospel reading from the lectionary for Palm Sunday. There’s an interpretive fork in the road, thinking about the meaning of Palm Sunday. The road splits, as you’re contemplating what Jesus was doing, processing into Jerusalem like that, and you feel like you have to make a choice. Was Jesus processing into Jerusalem as an act of monarchical hubris, as a bold claim to the throne of Israel and Judea, and as an open rebuke to Caesar? Or was Jesus somehow critiquing Rome as he paraded through, rebuking the Roman state and parodying the pompousness of imperial showmanship? As Jesus rode atop a donkey strolling through adoring crowds, was Jesus playing the court jester, or did he want to be the king? It feels like the way you answer that question will have a controlling stake in how you interpret this story, and by extension how you understand Jesus’ mindset as he paraded into the City of David toward his death on a Roman cross.

Just as it turned out that all those St. Louis lanes led to the same place, I think that both of these major interpretive options for reading the story of Palm Sunday end up in the same place, even though they seem like they might be heading in different directions. That’s because the two big options—that Jesus was critiquing power, and that Jesus was trying to be the power—lead us to the same place. In both ways of reading the story, Jesus was playing out a drama that put himself in competition and conflict with Roman power. In both understandings, Palm Sunday elevates Jesus as an alternative kind of power, and in both ways of seeing things, Jesus rides into Jerusalem as a challenger to Caesar.

The Gospel of Matthew loves nothing more than footnotes—what scholars call fulfillment citations—explaining why things happened they way they did. There’s a huge one here in this passage, in 21:5, which is a citation of the prophet Zechariah. Zechariah’s oracle that your king is coming to you, humble and mounted on a donkey, and on a colt, the foal of a donkey serves to inform the reader about the significance of the details of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem. Jesus didn’t ride in on a donkey just for fun; he did it because Zechariah said he would do it. And Zechariah didn’t say just anyone would ride in on a donkey; he said that the king would ride in that way. So in the Palm Sunday procession, Jesus was very much acting out the scene that people thought the messiah might act. Jesus was playing to expectations of what a king of Israel and Judea might look like. Matthew, writing this story, very much wanted the reader to understand that on Palm Sunday, Jesus was behaving precisely like a king might be expected to behave. It was a provocative performance, designed to send a clear signal that Jesus was going to be challenging Caesar for power.

(And yes, in that last paragraph I described Jesus as riding on a donkey, and not on two donkeys, even though Matthew misunderstood Zechariah’s poetic parallelism and had Jesus mount up on a pair of donkeys—a logistical challenge that artists through the ages have struggled to capture, as you can see in the image above).

That’s one set of lanes, veering in one direction leading us in the direction of Jesus becoming a king. That’s one way of interpreting this passage: as Jesus’ audition to be the one to restore the lineage of David and liberate Judea from Roman rule. But going in the other direction, interpreting with a different set of assumptions, Jesus’ actions look like a parody of kingship. That’s because while it’s true that Jesus’ procession looked like an Israelite procession of a king, they also looked like a Roman imperial procession. In a time before mass media, imperial ideology often spread through images and actions. If you wanted to remind your subjects of your power, you might erect a statue, you might put your face on a coin, or you might inscribe a mighty edifice with a record of your name or your deeds. Many emperors took that approach. But just as importantly, emperors (and other Roman dignitaries) used processions (and, often, triumphs, which were processionals deployed to celebrate a military victory) to make a show of force. Processions were sort of like military parades, in that they put the power of the state on display for everyone to see. Even if someone in a far-flung province couldn’t read the inscriptions on a building somewhere, and even if they didn’t have enough pocket change to regularly see the emperor and his family on coins, a procession was effective at getting the point across. A Roman official or general, processing through town flanked by soldiers and other important people, was demonstrating and projecting power to everyone who could see, and everyone who would eventually hear about it. There’s a reason that military parades are a favorite tool of nationalistic and authoritarian governments.

It’s possible, then, the gospel writers told the story this way to mirror back these Roman displays of power, and to mock them in some way. It wouldn’t be the only instance of mockery and parody in the last week of Jesus’ life, after all. A group of soldiers mockingly called Jesus the king of the Jews in Matthew 27, and then affixed a plaque to the cross where Jesus died, claiming the same thing. While he was on the cross, passersby mocked Jesus, and according to Matthew so did the others being crucified at the same time. There was a sarcastic turf war playing out between Jesus and the representatives of Roman power in the last week of his life, and it would make thematic sense for the Palm Sunday procession to be another example of that, meant to undermine Roman claims to supremacy.

Those two major interpretive options—that Jesus was trying to be the king on Palm Sunday, and that Jesus was trying to parody Roman power as he rode into Jerusalem—might seem to diverge in different directions. But just like that highway in St. Louis came back together, I think these two interpretations of Palm Sunday both lead us to the same place in the end. In both cases Jesus was challenging Roman power, and in both cases his appropriation of kingly trappings to himself came at the expense of Roman power. Certainly, either way Jesus’ actions were provocative, and his actions led in short order to him coming to the full attention of the Roman state, being swept up into custody, and being punished with death for his pretensions to power, whether they were in earnest or not.

That last point is an important frame for Palm Sunday and all of Holy Week. Although Christianity has largely theologized Jesus’ death and cast his last days as a journey of self-sacrifice in the service of expunging sin, the New Testament gospels really tell a story of political conflict and entanglement. While modern Christians prefer to understand Jesus’ death in religious terms, Matthew and the other evangelists describe it in starkly political terms. They tell Jesus’ story as one of ratcheting tension between Jesus and the Roman occupation, in which Jesus’ increasingly provocative actions lead him farther and farther into danger. They are sure to name the names of the Roman officials (and captive underlings like Herod) who take Jesus into custody and keep him there, and they enumerate the soldiers who do the dirty work of attaching him to a cross. While Christians today often spiritualize Jesus’ death, the gospels are clear that he was executed by a government, and that that government executed him because they thought he was a threat to their power. Jesus died on a Roman cross, killed by the Roman state, because of the jealousy of Roman power.

So what? Well, we live in a time when expressions of state power and acts of state violence have become increasingly pronounced. As I write this here in the United States, there are rumors of ICE agents being deployed to airports in the name of security and efficiency, blurring the line between police and military and civil service, and raising the possibility of the kinds of violence and death that have been seen in Minneapolis and elsewhere. A war rages in the skies over Iran, threatening to spill out into the wider world. Massive protests are scheduled for this weekend. The world is a tinderbox, just like it was when Jesus hopped onto a donkey (or two) and tried to seize the throne for himself—or mock the people who already sat on it. People in power ratchet up violence to protect themselves, and suddenly from the perspective of people in power, everyone looks like a threat. Subtlety goes out the window, discourse curdles, and before long it doesn’t matter whether someone like Jesus was trying to be the king or be the court jester, because either way he ends up hanging on an imperial cross. Suddenly all the roads start leading to the same place, and it isn’t a place most of us want to go.

I am generally not a believer in the more supernatural-ish or miraculous aspects of Christianity. I don’t say that to cast aspersions on anyone who does believe those things; I don’t any longer get very vexed by people putting stock in things that I don’t. I don’t believe in (or care about, really) the virgin birth, for example, and it’s not really important to me whether and how miracles occur. I’m not denying those things exactly—it just does not matter very much to me. When it comes to those sorts of questions—even though I’m a New Testament scholar and an ordained minister—my positions are not really distinguishable from a non-theistic rationalist.

But the one place where my theology (or perhaps my metaphysics) gets a little woo-woo is when it comes to death. Having experienced the loss of a number of people who are close to me, including friends and close family members like my father and all four of my grandparents, I believe in some form of persistence after death. I don’t put a lot of time or energy into reconciling this seeming discrepancy, or trying to make it make sense. It’s not something that I feel the need to explain. Rather, my belief in presence beyond death is something that I feel instinctually, or maybe that I simply trust in some sense. It feels like it’s true, or that it ought to be true, and that’s good enough for me. I don’t think we all go to live on a cloud somewhere, but I also don’t think people simply disappear when they die. I don’t expect to ever see my father again, for example, but I do feel him around, sometimes. I don’t think I’m going to hang out in heaven with my grandmothers—though I would very much like to—but I don’t experience them as absent, either.

But sometimes I find myself wondering if this is a form of self-soothing. Perhaps, I find myself thinking, I believe it because it’s comfortable to believe it. Perhaps I sense the presence of departed family and friends because I want to sense their presences, and it feels good to imagine that I do. That’s certainly possible, and if that turns out to be what’s going on, that’s fine with me too. One thing I’ve learned from professional therapists is that there’s a lot to be said for doing what works and sticking with what’s effective. If death is an abyss that we all teeter over and eventually fall into, and if it helps me to entertain a vague hunch that it’s not just darkness all the way down, then why not do it? If death passes through all of our lives, why not find ways to cope with it? If that’s what’s happening, then I love that for myself.

The lectionary for the fifth Sunday of Lent is all about death. All four passages begin with experiences of death (or thereabouts), and they all wrestle with it differently. Ezekiel has a vision of a valley full of dry bones, and then watches the bones reassemble and come back to life. Psalm 130 begins with a cry out of the depths, continues with a soul in waiting and hope, and concludes with the idea of redemption. Romans 8 contemplates the distances between flesh and its death on the one side and Spirit and life and peace on the other. And John 11 is the grand and pathos-filled story of the raising of Lazarus. In all four of these passages, death is lurking, but in Ezekiel and John, death is in full view, already on the scene. And in those two stories, it is not only death that is on the stage, but life too, because in both Ezekiel’s vision and John’s raising of Lazarus, the plot turns on the ways death is thwarted. Death does not get its due in the valley of dry bones, because the dry bones join together and re-form into bodies that become covered in flesh, and the bones live again. And in John’s story, even though Lazarus is well and properly dead (Lord, already there is a stench, as Martha put it), Jesus calls him out of the tomb and Lazarus stumbles out again into the light.

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Lots of people turn lots of cartwheels, trying to make stories like these not say what they clearly say. Ezekiel is easy to dismiss because it’s a vision; it’s not meant to describe reality. The valley of the dry bones is easy to chalk up to metaphor (even though such valleys full of bones likely existed, in the wake of violence and war, and it might have been harder for ancient readers to dismiss the realities of a vision like this one out of hand). But John 11 is clearly intending to tell the story of an actual death and an actual resurrection. It’s not a metaphor (or it’s not only a metaphor); the stakes are life-and-death. So, people sometimes argue that Lazarus was not really dead, in some way or another. Perhaps he was in a coma, they say, or only pretending to be dead, or some other circumstance. They do the same thing for Jesus’ resurrection, too, claiming all kinds of things about the appearance of death or the theft of corpses. Because I’m not very invested in the miraculous, I’m not very interested in those scientific or medical or logistical explanations. I think John is trying to tell the story of a man who died and was raised again, and I think all four gospels were trying to tell stories about Jesus crucified and risen. Ancient people weren’t modern scientists, but they weren’t stupid either. They knew death very well, probably much better than we do, because they lived life in its shadow. John 11 is trying to describe a rupture in the normal order of life and death, and Ezekiel grounds his vision in the very real experiences of traumatic loss to violence.

So I’m left with a bit of a conundrum. I believe that Ezekiel and John (and Matthew and Mark and Luke) meant what they wrote down. I don’t think they were fooled into misunderstanding the way death worked. They were describing experiences of life after death, even if in the case of Ezekiel those experiences were had in the world of visions. But at the same time, I don’t really go in for all that supernatural miraculous stuff. I believe that they believed it, and that they had experiences of resurrection, if that makes sense, but I’m agnostic at best about whether or not dead people actually came back to life. That leaves me in the lurch a little bit, theologically, because I’m neither interested in affirming nor denying these stories. I don’t think dead people come back to life. But I do think dead people persist, in some way that I can’t understand or describe.

Theologically, resurrection is the central claim of Christianity. Sometimes this bothers me. Reading through the gospels, it sometimes feels like the story of Jesus is a bait-and-switch. For the first three-quarters of the story, Jesus is a teacher, a prophet, and a miracle-worker. He’s going around preaching the immanence of the Kingdom of God, throwing subtle shade at all kinds of power structures, and offering a fairly radical alternative way of life. And then at the end, it becomes a story about a supernatural miracle—a story about someone rising from the dead. I sometimes struggle to figure out what those two parts of the story have to do with each other. What was the point of all the moral teaching at the beginning, if it’s just going to turn into a miraculous escape from death? Why do the parables, the Sermon on the Mount, the healing stories, if it all comes down to history’s biggest plot twist? I think there are ways to bridge those two arcs and read the story coherently: death, like empire, is a power that needs to be overcome, or something like that, and both healing and resurrection are ways to talk about flourishing. But if you read the writings of the first extant interpreter of Jesus’ life, who is Paul, then you see that Paul very much got the message from Jesus’ life and death that the resurrection was the main event. Paul hardly mentions any of Jesus’ teachings or activities while he was alive; it’s like Paul didn’t know anything about them (which tells us that Jesus’ teachings weren’t an important part of the tradition Paul received about Jesus), or he didn’t think they were relevant (which tells us something important about the way Jesus’ teachings were received—or not received—by his followers after his death). Very quickly after Jesus’ death and resurrection, the moral content of Jesus’ life—and even just the narrative content of it—took a back seat to the cosmic implications of his rising from the dead.

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It’s interesting, putting Ezekiel’s vision of the dry bones together with John’s story of the raising of Lazarus, as the lectionary does this week. I think it’s interesting because the juxtaposition gives us two different options for how to think about persistence after death. John’s story, as I said above, is clear that this is a dead person who was brought back to life. It’s more than a vision and it’s more than a metaphor; John wants us to know that it was a sign (in John’s characteristic language), or a miracle. Ezekiel’s story, though, lives in the realm of vision. We are not supposed to imagine real people in this story; the dry bones are not individuals but a collective symbol. No one is picking out their neighbors from the assembled and reassembled flesh in Ezekiel, but John makes it clear that Lazarus was a friend to both Jesus and his disciples, and well known to many.

The vision of the valley of dry bones, then, feels like a good fit with my hunch that people persist after death. It makes sense to me as an expression of the feeling that the dead are not wholly absent, and that we can experience their presence sometimes, and that what is dead can find new life. (More on this in a moment).

But the story of Lazarus somehow goes too far. I think it’s too explicit for me, too on-the-nose, too hocus-pocus. If I had been the person writing the Gospel of John, I might have said that Jesus visited Lazarus’ tomb, and that afterward Mary and Martha and Jesus and his disciples all felt sometimes like they heard Lazarus’ voice in a crowd, and sometimes Martha thought she saw her brother out of the corner of her eye, and sometimes Jesus spoke with Lazarus in dreams. Maybe Peter suddenly remembered one day something Lazarus once said and smiled; maybe Mary saw Lazarus’ features in the face of a nephew. That feels truer to me—and honestly, more hopeful—than the resuscitation of a dead man. I don’t experience the dead in some Uno reverse-card, reverse-the-timeline form, and I don’t really think I want to. I experience the dead as a presence, as a form of comfort, as a suggestion and a memory and a glimmer and a reflex.

Every year as we approach Easter, I find myself feeling grateful that it comes in springtime. Where I live on the eastern edge of the Rockies, spring is only just beginning this time of year, and most of the trees are still bare. Some of the trees have started to bud and some of the perennials have started to push through the soil, but mostly everything is still asleep. The world this time of year always reminds me that dormancy is not the same thing as death, and that life has a way of staying hidden until it’s time. You can trust that it will all come to bloom eventually, but you can’t say some magic words or wave a wand and make it happen on command. (Notice, in the painting up top, that Jesus wields a staff or wand as he calls Lazarus out of the tomb. Most ancient depictions of this story look like that, and although it’s not a magic wand in the modern pop cultural sense, it does always make me smile and chuckle to see it). Rather, the world turns at its own pace, and life blooms and goes dormant in its own cycles, and something’s always alive somewhere, even if it doesn’t look like it. That seasonal perspective feels right to me, much more than anyone’s body rising from the dead. I’m glad Easter comes in spring, when I’m already reminded constantly that life always sits right beneath the surface, ready to break forth.

From the beginning, I want to acknowledge that some passages from the Bible are timeless. They remain relevant despite changing circumstances and shifting cultures, and they age like wine, getting better with time. And other passages age like milk, curdling and souring with the passage of time, the world changing around them. I don’t think it should offend us to acknowledge this. Some parts of the Bible simply don’t hold up very well in new contexts and circumstances.

The gospel reading from the lectionary for the fourth Sunday of Lent, John 9:1-41, is one of those passages that has curdled like milk. I think, in its earliest contexts and for its earliest readers, this passage was meant to invoke liberation and point toward something beautiful. This passage was likely intended for good. But as time has passed and our understanding has shifted, the things that the author of John (and Jesus too, for that matter) clearly thought of as uncomplicatedly or unambiguously good have shifted. Where once the experience of disability might have felt like a useful way to talk about sin, and where once the blatant anti-Judaism of this passage made a certain amount of sense to early followers of Jesus who were trying to differentiate themselves from Jews, both of those contexts have now shifted enough that this passage has become a real problem. Because of that, this is a tricky and dangerous section to read, and to preach. It requires a lot of contextualization and explanation to even use a passage like this in worship settings—contextualization and explanation that far too often does not happen. It’s even reasonable to question whether we should read a passage like that at all, especially in a season as prominent as Lent. I think there’s enough good in here to justify all the work it takes to interpret it responsibly, but others might feel differently. Proceed with caution!

One of the reasons I think this passage is worth keeping and paying attention to is that it is asking really good, fundamental theological questions about the causes of things. Why do bad things happen, the passage is asking, even if we might not agree with John or Jesus that disability is an obviously bad thing (or that ability is obviously good). Conversely, why do good things happen? How does causality work in this world? It’s a deep question of theology because it’s a deep question of life: probably most of us at some point or another will find ourselves faced with some event, diagnosis, circumstance, or condition, and we will find ourselves asking why.

The setup for this Gospel of John story is that the existence of a sightless man became the pretext for a discussion about cause and effect. (This is one of the basic ways this story is problematic: the way this man’s life and circumstances become fodder for a theological debate that at least at first did not consult him or consider his feelings or opinions about his own body). Jesus was walking with some of his disciples and saw “a man blind from birth,” and his disciples asked Jesus whose sin was responsible for the man’s disability. “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” There is a whole worldview embedded in their question, much of it having to do with causality. Their question assumes that disability is always a result of sin; it’s just a question of whose sin is to blame. It’s a question with roots deep in the Hebrew Bible, and especially what’s called the Deuteronomistic Tradition, which assumes that bad things (disability, but also conquest, poverty, environmental destruction, and misfortune) are the consequences of sin. This sin might be individual, it might be communal, it might be national, or it can even be inherited—but when bad things happen, the Deuteronomistic Tradition holds, it is because of sin.

Interestingly, this view of cause and effect is challenged elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible. Sometimes in the parts of the Hebrew Bible that transmits the Deuteronomistic Tradition, misfortune comes because God is punishing people, or allowing them to be punished. But in other places in the Hebrew Bible, misfortune has other causes. Most famously, the book of Job envisions misfortune as a kind of divine test, administered on God’s behalf by Satan to ensure a person’s perseverance and righteousness. In other places, especially the Psalms and wisdom literature, misfortune is something that comes into every life, and God is a comforting presence waiting to endure it with us. There are many ways to think about why bad things happen that don’t reckon them as the consequence of sin. But when they asked their question, the disciples weren’t thinking of any of those other ways. They wanted to know whose sin had caused the man’s blindness.

Jesus’ answer was, in its earliest contexts, probably meant to be liberatory. It was probably taken as evidence of theological progress. “Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” Jesus responded, rejecting the false dichotomy of the question. So far so good. But “he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.” Interesting.

In Jesus’ answer, one troublesome form of cause and effect has been swapped out for a different one. Neither the man’s sin nor his parents’ sin caused his blindness. Great. But God caused it, Jesus says, so that in this very moment Jesus’ actions might bring glory to God. Hmmm.

I’ll repeat that this explanation probably sounded good a long time ago. Jesus’ answer likely looked like justice, then, or at the very least it looked like deep consideration. It was an honorable way to talk about something that would have been thought of as dishonorable; it was a divine veneer on a condition that would have brought a lot of shame and marginalization to the man, as the disciples’ question demonstrates. If everyone assumed that his blindness was the result of sin, then saying it was the result of God’s will was probably a major upgrade.

But I’m not so sure that the explanation Jesus gives—that the man’s physical condition is a setup “so that God’s works might be revealed in him”—is the feel-good story that Jesus seems to think it is. Is this really how the world works? Obviously a lot of people think so (“everything happens for a reason”), but I have my serious doubts. Are all tragedies and illnesses and difficulties simply props in God’s great demonstration of sovereignty? Are all instances of thriving and flourishing just examples of God showing off? I have fundamental trouble seeing the world that way. (And this is before we get into the question of whether ability or disability map neatly onto things like “difficulties” and “flourishing”). All kinds of people pass through all kinds of experiences, and many of them have no obvious connection to any revelation of “God’s works.” We all know people who have had physical disabilities (like the man in this story), or who have experienced loss or grief or limitation of some kind. Many of us have lived those experiences ourselves. Are all of them opportunities for divine demonstrations? Or are only some of those experiences linked to God, and the rest are part of the arbitrariness of life? Either way, we are left with a capricious vision of God, and a wholly unsatisfying explanation of human experience.

While at the beginning of this story the man blind from birth does not get consulted and isn’t really asked about his thoughts, eventually the Gospel of John lets the man speak for himself. “I am he,” he says in 9:9, and then he goes on to tell his own story to his incredulous and curious neighbors. From that point onward, the story becomes a back-and-forth referendum on Jesus, in which the neighbors and others (“Pharisees” at first, then later “the Jews” in John’s characteristic way of speaking, though everyone in this story was Jewish) question the man’s experience and question Jesus’ powers. There’s a lot of second-guessing going on in this story—second-guessing of the man’s own experiences, and second-guessing of Jesus’ credentials and power. The crowd even asks the man’s parents to explain things, but to their credit, they simply refer people back to their son. “Ask him; he is of age,” they say, and “he will speak for himself.” This is an important move that John makes, and one of the only redeeming things in this story, in my opinion. In a story where everyone is speaking on this man’s behalf and discounting his experiences and his self-understanding, the man’s parents are the only ones to insist that their son’s voice should be heard.

Near the end of this passage, in 9:39-41, Jesus and the man are talking, and Jesus is revealing himself as the “Son of Man” in whom the man ought to believe. As part of that conversation, Jesus makes clear the meaning of the man receiving sight. “I came into this world for judgement,” Jesus says, “so that those who do not see may see and those who do see may become blind.” This leads “some of the Pharisees who were with him” to ask Jesus if he was talking about them. There are two things worth pointing out about this exchange. First, John has here returned to “Pharisees” rather than “the Jews,” which seems significant—and there is a certain degree of intimacy or at least proximity between Jesus and the Pharisees in this story. This is likely to reflect history, in my opinion; I think Jesus and the Pharisees were likely more closely aligned than the New Testament gospels often portray them. But second, this exchange shows how Jesus has reshaped disability into a metaphor for understanding, even as he began the story by denying that disability is an effect of sin. Here blindness becomes a way to talk about awareness or knowledge, pointing to how Jesus himself will foster understanding in some people while leaving others without knowledge. We do this colloquially all the time, though disability advocates consistently ask us to stop—we use sight as an idiomatic way to talk about understanding or knowledge. “My teacher helped me see something,” we might say, or “I had a blind spot,” or we “turn a blind eye” to something.

Considered as a whole, this story from John is a bit of a mess. It’s here in the lectionary for the fourth Sunday of Lent because the readings for that day carry themes of light and darkness, sight and unseeing, visibility and invisibility. As the fifth of Jesus’ seven “signs” in the Gospel of John, this story gets pride of place in a high season of the church year. This Sunday, tens of millions of people will hear this story read aloud and interpreted in church, and I find myself wondering what the effect will be. It’s a starkly anti-Jewish passage, which is bad enough, but this story also perpetuates the disability-as-deficiency message that it purports to reject. Even as the story begins with Jesus rejecting the idea that sin causes blindness, the story ends with Jesus claiming that blindness describes a lack of insight or understanding. The arc of this passage is hardly toward justice or liberation. The man who was born blind seems pleased with the fact that Jesus healed him, and that is good. But of the tens of millions of people who will hear or read this story this Sunday, probably tens of thousands of them will themselves be blind, or will have limited or diminishing sight. What will this passage mean to them?

The Gospel of John is beautiful, but it can also be harsh. That gospel sees the world in stark terms, and its pages are filled with allies and opponents, insiders and outsiders, divine and human—dichotomies that structure many of its stories. This oppositional posture creates a distinctive vision of Jesus; while the Synoptic Gospels portray Jesus as the leader of a band of itinerants, the Gospel of John portrays Jesus as a god come down to earth, an otherworldly being sojourning among people, always several steps ahead of everyone else, and not of the same nature as anyone he meets.

John’s tendency to sort the world into this-and-that patterns shows up strongly in the gospel reading in the lectionary for the third Sunday of Lent. This is one of my favorite stories in all of the New Testament: the story of the Samaritan woman at the well. Here as elsewhere, John shows the reader how the world is arranged in patterns of opposition and enmity—how Jesus’ passage through the world is filled with encounters with people to whom and with whom he does not belong, and who do not understand him. We saw it last week in Jesus’ encounter with Nicodemus, and we see it again with the Samaritan woman, who is very much meant to be interpreted alongside Nicodemus as paired examples of Jesus being misunderstood.

The story of the Samaritan woman plays out differently than the story of Nicodemus, even though they are structurally quite parallel. In both stories Jesus encounters someone, but in one story it’s in the middle of the night and in the other it’s at midday, and in one it’s a man and in the other it’s a woman. In both stories Jesus is misunderstood; in both stories the misunderstanding reveals something theologically important. In both stories something is revealed about Jesus’ identity vis a vis other groups—as opposed to other “teachers of Israel” in one story, and as opposed to Samaritans in the other. And in both stories the encounter ends with the departure of the other person, though Nicodemus departs into the unresolved night and the Samaritan woman departs to share the emphatic news of her meeting. The overall effect is that Nicodemus—a Jew, a learned teacher, an insider—is shown to be stuck in misunderstanding, while the Samaritan woman, an outsider, is shown to be receptive to Jesus’ teachings. There’s all kinds of play with categories of insiders and outsiders, understanding and misunderstanding, and belonging and otherness.

I want to focus on the dichotomies—the emphases on otherness—found in the story of the Samaritan woman. These dichotomies pervade the story, even as the story as a whole seems to want to subvert them and overcome them. John almost seems to be trying to pack as many oppositions into the story as possible, just to show how easily Jesus breezes past them. It’s the overcoming of difference that drives the plot, and it’s the surmounting of all the things that ought to make the story impossible that turn the Jesus of this story into a unifying and harmonizing figure.

The first and most obvious opposition is Samaritan vs. Jewish. This is how the whole story itself is framed: with Jesus coming to “a Samaritan city,” meeting “a Samaritan woman,” and being asked “how is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” The story’s central theological metaphor of living water would have worked just fine with any encounter with any person at any well (or not at a well, too, really). But John fills this text with reminders of ethnic difference, making sure the readers know how foreign and estranged this woman and Jesus ought to have been from each other. “Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans,” the narrator reminds us in 4:9b (in what I think was likely a scribal marginal note that got copied into the text at some point). These were two people—who were representing two nations, as we will see below—who were not supposed to be in any relationship with each other than a hostile one.

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Why? That’s a complicated historical question. It all goes back to the 700s BCE, when the Assyrian Empire defeated the northern kingdom of Israel, leaving the southern kingdom of Judah intact. Following their victories over rivals, the Assyrians employed an especially cruel and effective strategy for suppressing rebellion. They took the political and economic leaders of the conquered people somewhere else—they deported them to some other conquered place. And in turn, they brought in deportees from elsewhere—merchants and artisans and administrators and such—to help run the newly conquered territory. In this way, the Assyrians decapitated societies, ensuring that the people most likely to mount a nationalist rebellion were living far, far away. In the case of the northern kingdom of Israel, the Assyrians imported conquered outsiders to help keep the economy and government going, which predictably led to generations of intermarriage and ethnic mixture. A couple of centuries later in the early 500s BCE, the Babylonian Empire conquered the southern kingdom of Judah and did the same thing to them, bringing in outsiders and deporting many people to their capitol city. Upon the return from Babylonian exile a couple of generations later, the exiled Judahites set out to rebuild their society, including rebuilding their temple in Jerusalem, and rebuilding Jerusalem itself. That dynamic—returning exiles from the southern kingdom, a project of restoration in Jerusalem, and an ethnically mixed population in the former northern kingdom—led to some difficult struggles. There is evidence in Ezra and Nehemiah that the so-called “people of the land” (who were likely the ethnically mixed former northerners, the precursors of the Samaritans) and the returning Judahites clashed over ownership of the land, the symbolism of rebuilding the temple, and identity itself—over who belonged with whom, and where.

That’s why, another five or six centuries onward, Jesus and this Samaritan woman spent so much time talking about why they shouldn’t be talking to each other, and talking about their shared history and inheritance. They were both descendants of Jacob, after all, and they both understood themselves to worship the God of Israel, but they had very different understandings of where and how they should do it. They “did not share things in common” with each other, because of centuries and generations of enmity and difference. The Gospel of John places all that enmity and difference at the forefront of the story, never letting the readers forget how much stood between them. (And it’s remarkable that the only unambiguously good thing that the famously anti-Jewish Gospel of John ever says about Jews comes in this story, in 4:22, where Jesus says that “salvation comes from the Jews.” John is always anti-Jewish, unless he wants to draw attention to the power and status of Jesus by virtue of his Jewishness).

But ethnic identity wasn’t all that kept them apart. Gender also plays a crucial role in this story, and it forms another axis along which Jesus and the Samaritan woman are placed at opposing ends. John neatly tucks that difference into the question the Samaritan woman asks—the one we have already seen. “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” She might have said “a Samaritan,” but she names her own gender as a way of highlighting that it was not only ethnicity but also gender that distanced them from each other.

Indeed, this whole story is rife with performances of gender—and performances of what we might today call misogyny. In verse 7, Jesus rolls into the town, posts up at the well, and demands a drink from the first woman who comes along. Why couldn’t Jesus get his own drink? What made him feel entitled to make demands of a stranger? Was he used to being served in this kind of way? (The disciples’ reaction in verse 27, “they were astonished that he was speaking with a woman,” makes it seem like they did not see him interacting with women very often). The woman is taken aback; her question in verse 9 makes it clear that she had not expected any interaction from Jesus, much less a demand for service. And then later, beginning in verse 16, gender once again bursts onto the scene. “Go, call your husband, and come back,” Jesus tells her, and this new demand sets off a punchy and tense back-and-forth about the woman’s status. The woman responds that she has no husband. (Take a moment to perform the line “I have no husband” a few times, emphasizing a different word each time, and imagining which intonation the woman might have used, because it makes a tremendous difference in the meaning of her response). Jesus then shows that he knows more about this woman than he has been letting on: “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband,’ for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband.”

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There are many fascinating possibilities for making sense of this woman’s predicament. Most likely, in my opinion, she had been a participant in a levirate marriage, a practice in which women who did not conceive a son before the death of a husband entered into a purpose-specific “marriage” with a close male relative of her husband, in order to produce an heir for the dead man. (This is part of the plot of the story of Naomi and Ruth and Boaz, and also Tamar and Judah, and fascinatingly of the story of Onan, the classic proof-text against masturbation). I think it probable that she was infertile, or else that her dead husband was infertile along with his family, and she was passed from relative to relative until everyone gave up. Whatever the case was, this woman was not—as many modern interpreters seem to conclude—a promiscuous woman who chose all of her marriages. That simply was not how marriage worked at the time. “The one you have now is not your husband,” Jesus remarks, suggesting that she was in a relationship with someone besides the final male relative. I hope that in this last relationship, she was able to find happiness.

All of that, though, emphasizes the distance between men and women. John’s telling of the encounter depends on gender differences and plays them up. And in one last twist of the gendered knife, in verses 39-42, the people of the city believed in Jesus because of the woman’s testimony, until they had a chance to meet Jesus himself. After that, they made a point of going to the woman to tell her how little her witness now meant: “it is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves,” they told her. The Gospel of John really wants us to remember that the Samaritan woman was only a woman. Jesus, by contrast, is “a man who told me everything I have ever done” (4:29). His man-ness is central to John’s portrayal of him.

Beyond ethnicity and gender, the Gospel of John offers readers other signals that Jesus and this woman should be thought of in opposition to each other. My favorite example comes in a subtle but important transition that takes place in verses 20-22. Up until that point, the “you” of Jesus’ conversation with the Samaritan woman had been singular. They were talking directly to each other. In 20 (“…but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem”), 21 (“…the hour is coming when you will worship…”), and 22 (“You worship what you do not know…”), the “you” becomes plural. This is invisible in English, which does not really have a distinctive second person plural pronoun. (Shoutout to y’all, one of the most needlessly denigrated words in English). But in Greek, it is obvious that Jesus’ conversation with the Samaritan woman passes from a one-on-one exchange into a discussion between two ethnic groups, two religious groups, or two nations. Suddenly, Jesus and the woman are speaking not only for themselves, but on behalf of much larger collections of people. It’s a reminder that this whole exchange is grounded in that deep history of imperial violence, and in the enmity and difference that was imposed on Judahites and Samaritans over 700 years earlier. The substance of their conversation in those same verses—the question of whether proper worship should be carried out “on this mountain” (Mount Gerizim, where Samaritans worshipped) or in Jerusalem also dates back to that same period of Assyrian destruction. Even centuries later, Jesus and the Samaritan woman stand at opposite sides of a divide. And the Gospel of John does not want us to forget it.

The dichotomies of belonging and identity frame this story in John, as they do so many of that gospel’s stories. The upshot of this story, I think, is that Jesus is powerful enough and compelling enough to transcend those kinds of ancient differences—even as his words in the story reinforce some of the differences and reiterate the supremacy of his own people over the woman’s people (see 4:22 and 4:26). John parades all the oppositions and dichotomies—he tells the story in terms of enmity and difference—precisely so that he can demonstrate Jesus’ power to overcome them. In our own age of deep and sharp grievances—in our own time of dichotomies and enmity—the story of the Samaritan woman at the well offers a glimpse of what it looks like to resolve those kinds of separations, or at least to talk about whether they still hold any power. This isn’t some parable about leveling inequalities, or forgetting about old grudges. But it is a story about how new circumstances can lead us to understand that our inherited prejudices might not be worth defending anymore.

The story of Nicodemus, which is in the lectionary for the second Sunday of Lent, is usually thought of as a referendum on Nicodemus himself. It is usually read as a firm and thorough critique of Nicodemus and his role as a Pharisee…a leader of the Jews, whose encounter with Jesus is supposed to have shown him to have been less impressive than his credentials would suggest. The basic structure of this argument is that a) Nicodemus comes to Jesus by night, suggesting a certain reluctance or bashfulness or shame about interacting with Jesus, b) Nicodemus’ misunderstands Jesus’ words about being born from above, showing that Nicodemus is not as astute a teacher as Jesus and didn’t fully understand his own religious tradition, and c) Jesus outright rebukes Nicodemus in verse 10, where he accuses Nicodemus of not having the proper amount of understanding that might be expected or demanded from a teacher of Israel.

When we read it that way, this passage becomes a story about Jesus’ critique of Jewish leadership and religious understanding. It becomes an opportunity for Jesus to tee off on a Jewish leader, to assert that Nicodemus (perhaps like other Jewish leaders) is not as learned or spiritually astute as he should be, and most importantly to show Jesus’ own superiority. It’s not an accident that this story appears only in the Gospel of John; John’s gospel consistently portrays Jesus as smarter than everyone else and generally operating on a different plane than the rest of the people in the story. And John tends to have strong anti-Jewish undercurrents. This is a very Johannine story, in that sense; it’s a little drama that plays out for the purposes of demonstrating Jesus’ superiority, wisdom, and otherworldly understanding.

That traditional reading of the story of Nicodemus is so pervasive as to be the only real reading of this passage, for many people. If you have heard this passage interpreted, you’ve probably heard a version of that analysis. But that interpretation is not without its issues. Perhaps the most prominent problem with the traditional interpretation is that it slides very easily into anti-Jewish or anti-Semitic rhetoric. Although John 3:1-17 tells the story of two Jewish leaders (Jesus and Nicodemus) hashing out the finer points of being Jewish teachers, the traditional reading turns this into a conversation about Judaism and Christianity. It makes Jesus an avatar of Christianity, and it has him demonstrate the insufficiency or inadequacy of Judaism and Jewish teaching in a way that leaves little room for nuance. Jesus is a heroic Christian teacher, who entertains a Nicodemus too bashful to show up in the daytime, teaches him a thing or two, and dismisses him as unworthy.

That interpretation fails on the basic level of taking the text seriously, because it fails to account for the fact that both Jesus and Nicodemus held roles in the same religious and political and national associations, and that they met that night as equals, or that if anything Nicodemus was the party with more prestige. It also fails to account for the authorial perspective of John, which is of course biased toward showing Jesus’ coherence and authority, and which furthermore always shows Jesus as a commanding and correct force in the world. The result is an anachronistic view of the interaction which understands Jesus to have not only shown Nicodemus up, but to have shown that the whole enterprise of Judaism is based on shallow misunderstandings—textbook supersessionism and anti-Judaism.

What happens if we read this passage differently? What happens if we stop assuming that it was a conversation between representatives of Judaism and Christianity, and start taking seriously the idea that it was a conversation between two different Jewish people who each held a certain amount of authority in that system? I think it’s always worth flipping our reading around to see what else might be possible. It’s always worth asking what else might be true.

If we flip the interpretation and read it that way, the first thing we notice is that Nicodemus’ incredulity takes on a different tenor. The whole interaction between the two men (much like the interaction between Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well in the very next chapter of John, which is the companion story meant to be read alongside this one) rests on Nicodemus approaching Jesus with a degree of respect. Rabbi, Nicodemus begins, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do unless God is with this person. Nicodemus shows up expecting that Jesus is already tightly connected to God, and prepared to encounter Jesus as a colleague or fellow-traveler, even though Nicodemus likely held more status. Jesus’ response, though, was intentionally confusing (just like his response to the Samaritan woman will be in the next chapter). Very truly, Jesus says apropos of nothing, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above. The Greek word for from above is anothen, which confusingly also has the meaning of again, or a second time. Perhaps Jesus’ use of the confusing word was intentional, because he wanted to convey some nuanced meaning that relied on both definitions. But if that’s the case, the ensuring conversation is hard to understand. In 3:10, after some back-and-forth in which Nicodemus tries to understand what Jesus could possibly mean by his confusing statement, Jesus accuses Nicodemus of ignorance and professional malpractice. Are you the teacher of Israel and you do not understand these things, Jesus asks? But the misunderstanding was not a result of Nicodemus’ lack of theological sophistication, but of Jesus’ confusing word choice.

This dynamic might be familiar to anyone who has been a teacher, a minister, or someone else in a position of knowledge and authority, like Nicodemus. There’s a dynamic in those roles where sometimes people come to you with a question, and the question is obviously some niche thing that is designed to trip up the expert. What looks like an innocent question is actually a trap, or a gotcha. Physicians get gotcha questions about vaccines, teachers get gotcha questions about obscure historical events, and ministers get gotcha questions about creeds or doctrines. Musicians get encounters that are clearly designed to push a conversation toward a certain outcome, and policy experts get encounters designed to back them into a corner on some question of politics. Many people in fields with high prestige tend to have experiences like these, and it’s worth mentioning that they are often gendered, with men challenging women on their expertise and knowledge in a way that reveals that they never considered the woman’s expertise valid in the first place.

I got an email like this just yesterday. Do you ever teach about Romans 1, the email asked? It seems like an innocuous enough question, because I am in fact someone who teaches and preaches about the New Testament all the time. Yes, I teach about Romans 1. But there’s an agenda hidden inside that question. Romans 1 (and specifically Romans 1:26-27) is one of the infamous clobber passages in the Bible, which are purported to contain teachings about homosexuality (though the case is not nearly as clear as people think). So, this person was not actually interested in learning my thoughts on Romans 1, and they weren’t genuinely interested in learning at all. Rather, they were probably going down a list of people who work at progressive Christian institutions and trying to pick a fight with one of them. And likely, they were probably trying to produce a paper trail that they could screenshot and then post as evidence of liberal apostasy, or something like that. It was not a good-faith invitation to teach someone something, and it was not even a good-faith invitation to dialogue. It was a trap, disguised as an innocent question. I get these all the time.

There’s a way to read the interaction between Jesus and Nicodemus that way, I think. When I read their interaction, I get the sense that Nicodemus was an established authority with a lot of clout in the system who was approaching Jesus with respect and openness, and Jesus took the opportunity to score some points. (Or, perhaps it is better to say that the Gospel of John took the opportunity, since Jesus wasn’t the one who published the conversation). The way the conversation is reported, Jesus wasn’t talking like someone who was trying to be understood. He wasn’t clarifying the confusing parts of his language, and he wasn’t responding to Nicodemus’ responses with helpful additions. Instead, he let Nicodemus ask a few clarifying questions, declined to be more clear in response, and stuck to his unclear language to the end. Jesus comes across as a bit of a troll here, I think, and he’s engaging in what teenagers (who always have the best words for things) would call aura farming. He’s trying to improve his own status and appearance by staging an inauthentic interaction with an expert. Or—at least—the Gospel of John is doing that on Jesus’ behalf.

It was an effective strategy, because 2000 years later Christians are still reading this passage as evidence of Jesus’ superiority over Jewish teachers like Nicodemus. Twenty centuries on, we still hear sermons about how dense Nicodemus was, and how much more brilliant Jesus was by comparison. But we don’t very often pause to notice how the whole interaction was staged to make us come to that precise conclusion, and how its placement in the Gospel of John was never meant to give Nicodemus a fair chance. The whole conversation was a setup, designed to let Jesus show off his brilliance, like a rookie dunking on an All-Star in his first time on the court.

We will see a different version of this same dynamic next week, when the story of the Samaritan woman at the well will be the gospel reading for the third Sunday of Lent. The framing of the story will look a little different there, but the same dynamics pertain: that story too is a story designed start to finish to make Jesus look wise. There, too, the structure is designed to prove Jesus’ superiority over someone else and all the people they represent. We will look more closely at that story next week, but for now, as you encounter the story of Nicodemus and Jesus this week, pay attention, and ask yourself: is Jesus trying to be understood in this story, or is he trying to score some points?

The lectionary this week really wants you to think about sin.

It’s possible to draw out different themes from these readings, of course. Temptation is the most obvious possibility, with temptation playing a prominent role in the Genesis account of Eve’s encounter with the serpent in the Garden of Eden, in the Romans section that interprets that Genesis passage, and in Matthew’s account of the temptation of Jesus. Death is another possible theme, as it’s a theme in both Genesis and Romans, and it’s in the background of the Matthew text as a possible outcome of Jesus’ temptations. Midrash might even appear as a dark horse candidate, since several of these texts bounce off each other and interpret each other.

But to me, these readings are begging us to think about sin.

Sin is a strange thing to think about. Perhaps no concept is so central to the history of Christianity while also being so contested and so seldom agreed-upon. Parts of the Christian tradition give sin pride of place as the load-bearing beam of Christian theology. Augustine’s notion of original sin has dominated the past fifteen centuries of western Christian theology, giving Catholic and Protestant Christians a consistently low view of human nature. That low view of human nature was refined to weapons-grade by John Calvin, whose phrase total depravity still stands as a defining summary of human worthlessness for tens of millions of Christians. The evangelical traditions of my youth often spoke of sins, rather than sin, emphasizing the gravity of certain actions or transgressions as threats to salvation. And the Mainline traditions I have found in adulthood often emphasize sin, rather than sins, preferring to focus on systemic brokenness over any particular behavior. (More on that at the end). The Christian tradition offers multiple ways to think about sin, and the biblical tradition offers even more. There is hardly any agreement or unanimity among biblical texts about what should constitute sin or a sin. A quick software search shows 487 instances of the word sin in the NRSV, concentrated in the Torah where ritual expiations of sin are in view, the historical texts of the Hebrew Bible where sin describes the actions of ungodly kings and other scoundrels, the prophetic books where sin is a catch-all way to describe a state of moral degradation, and in the New Testament books of John, Romans, and Hebrews. The operating assumption behind most of those texts seems to be that sin is the kind of thing you recognize when you see it.

The Genesis passage from this week’s lectionary is ground zero for biblical sin. But curiously, the word sin isn’t contained in this passage at all. (The first biblical mention of sin comes a chapter later, in the context of the story of Cain and Abel). We probably associate this Edenic scene with sin not because Genesis says that that’s what it’s about, but because Paul reads it that way in Romans. Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, Paul begins in 5:12, so too (Paul says) will one man (Jesus) make many people righteous by removing or mitigating their sin. In other words, in Romans Paul is reading Genesis to make a nifty argument about the origins of sin. Sin, for Paul, is like a contagion that got into humanity through a Patient Zero (Adam, for Paul, and curiously not Eve—more on that below) and can only be eradicated the same way.

This way of understanding sin as a kind of pathogen that got into the human system once and got passed down from there would end up being really useful to Augustine a few centuries later, when he popularized the doctrine we now know as original sin. (A pretty-good joke for those preaching this Sunday: original sin is one that no one has ever tried before). I often have more sympathy for Augustine than others do. Yes, he can be misogynistic and self-centered, but I also get the sense that he was legitimately trying to work things out—trying to be the best version of himself he could be, even if it wasn’t ultimately all that great. A generous reading of Augustine’s idea of original sin, then, is that he was searching for a way to explain the fallenness of the world—a way to measure the distance between what we know to be good, and what we actually do. Original sin, for Augustine, was a way to account for why the world is so broken, and in some ways original sin is a way to be generous to humanity. It’s not that we choose all this awfulness, Augustine said, it’s that we cannot help but wallow in it. Jesus, in that view, came to cure us from the affliction.

Of course, the Genesis passage has lived on in other ways too. It’s one of the oldest and strongest fonts of Christian misogyny. Genesis tells this story as a psychological drama, with its four characters—Adam, Eve, the serpent, and God—dancing around each other in complicated patterns. God put Adam (and presumably Eve) in the garden of Eden and told them they could eat whatever they wanted, except for the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Books upon books have been written about the freedom and prohibition contained in that one command—the way God might have set up a temptation too alluring to pass on, and the way God’s warning that in the day that you eat of it you shall die turned out not to be true. Adam and Eve, for their part, are portrayed as innocents—as pliable but dutiful subjects to a lordly God. And then there is the serpent. Christian tradition has often called this being Satan, but Satan is nowhere to be found in the passage, only a serpent, a wild animal as Genesis puts it, who was more crafty than any other. The serpent, somehow, held a deep knowledge of the garden’s workings, and he was wise enough to convince Eve—correctly as it turned out—that God’s warning about dying was not entirely true. Eve ate the fruit, and she gave some to Adam, and the rest is history.

Myth makes sloppy doctrine, and for at least twenty-five centuries people have been trying to squeeze a doctrine of sin out of this fascinating story. I’m confident that the biblical authors never intended this story to explain sin for always and everywhere. (If they had intended it, they might have used the word sin even once). Myth resists systematization and reduction, because storytelling is by its nature generative—it multiples possibilities rather than limits them. Christians (and Jews) have read this story as a way to explain the origins of sin, but you might just as easily read it as a parable of the capricious unreliability of God, or the moral inertness of Adam, or the agency of the natural world. Instead, we have very often read it as an indictment of women. Never mind that if you read the passage closely and carefully, Eve wasn’t even there when God gave the command to avoid the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. If God had been in the habit of talking directly with women, all of this could have been avoided.

Paul was a learned Jew, and he knew his Torah. When it came time to lay out his ideas about sin, he turned naturally to Genesis, and to the story about how Adam let sin into the system. Paul had the fortune and the misfortune of living at the very dawn of the Jesus movement, and of being one of the first to try to make meaning out of Jesus’ life and death. And while the writers of the Gospels often looked to Isaiah and Jeremiah and the Psalms to talk about Jesus, Paul loved nothing more than to mine Genesis. Paul was what the Germans would call an urzeit/endzeit kind of thinker—someone who thought that the end always recapitulated the beginning. So Paul sometimes grabbed bits from the life of Abraham to understand why Jesus mattered, and here in Romans 5 he looked to the garden of Eden to understand sin. If sin had gotten in through one person, then sin would have to get out that way too, and so Jesus must have been the right person.

Notice how the idea (and word) of righteousness laces through this passage from Romans 5:12-19. Versions of the word show up in every verse between 16 and 19, and here Paul is using it as an antonym for sin. That, I think, is telling; for Paul, the opposite of sin is not not-sinning. It’s righteousness. Sin therefore is not an act but a condition; it is the fallenness that we inherit—to anticipate Augustine. Sin is the thing that’s broken about the world, and righteousness is what is possible because of Jesus. One of my favorite insights about this comes from a throwaway section in one of Krister Stendahl’s books, a short and majestic set of transcribed lectures titled Final Account. There, Stendahl observes that for Paul, sin was something like the sand in the machinery of the world. It was a thing that never belonged here, that somehow got in and started jamming up the works. I think that’s fairly true to how Paul understood things.

Like the Genesis passage, Matthew 4:1-11 manages to be a story about sin without ever using the word. This reading is the real star of the show, in the first Sunday of Lent—an account of the beginning of Jesus’ journey toward a reckoning with his role in salvation. This story, which takes place near the beginning of his public ministry, immediately following his baptism, sees Jesus dancing around morality with a figure that is alternately called a devil (verse 1, and several times afterward), a tempter (verse 3), and Satan (verse 10). The role of this figure is closest to that of Satan or a tempter, as he shows up in the book of Job: a kind of prosecutor or proctor for a divine test. Here, Jesus is presented with a series of temptations, all of which Jesus resists. I am not sure that succumbing to any of them would have amounted to sin in the base sense of the word; eating bread or protecting one’s body or ruling a kingdom are not sins in the ordinary meaning. But the way they are presented here, they are all sinful in that larger, cosmic sense; they are all sand in the machinery. Every one of Satan’s temptations demands that Jesus subvert the world to his own self-interest; every enticement the devil offers up is a provocation for Jesus to put himself first. Perhaps that’s the sense in which this passage is a parable about sin; it imagines selfishness as the least godly thing someone could do, and then has Jesus reject it, three times over.

I’m of the opinion that progressive Christians (or liberal Christians, or leftist Christians, or whatever you want to call us) should talk about sin more often. As it stands, we far too often cede the category to the conservatives, who use sin like a section in the world’s HR handbook, or who make sin into a weight so heavy that it always tips the scales toward depravity and damnation for any given person. You can get that view from the Bible, I suppose, if you squint hard enough.

But far more prevalent in the Bible is the idea that sin is a way to talk about the tragedy of existence—a vocabulary for cataloging brokenness. Sin is systemic, in the Bible, and it’s most often understood as an intrusion into our best intentions, which we might call righteousness. It’s the sand in the machinery and the dance we do with the devil, and it’s the conversation we have with the serpent when God isn’t telling us anything to our face. Sin isn’t the thing that’s wrong with any of us, it’s what’s wrong with all of this, and sin is therefore—as Paul might have been the first to point out—sin the first thing someone like Jesus might be able to free us from. If we good progressives/liberals/leftists see brokenness in the world, and not just in people—if we see depravity in systems and not only in individuals, and if we believe in the possibility of reform and redemption—then maybe we should be rooting for Paul to have been right about sin.

When I teach the New Testament intro course at the Iliff School of Theology—which I typically do between one and three times every year—I always especially enjoy the part of the class that’s devoted to the Synoptic Gospels. The Synoptics (Matthew, Mark, Luke) are fun to teach, because they are a little bit of a mystery. The mystery boils down to two big questions. First, why are the Synoptic Gospels so similar to each other? And the second is, why are the Synoptic Gospels so different from each other?

Those two questions are like two variables in an equation: the more you solve for one of the variables, the more the other variable becomes unknowable. (At least I think that might be true about variables in equations; I haven’t taken a math class in nearly 30 years). The closer you come to a satisfactory answer about why the Synoptics are so similar to each other, the harder it is to account for their differences. And the more you can zero in on an explanation for the differences, the harder it is to explain why the Synoptics should be similar to each other at all. The strange mixture of common traditions with distinctive features makes teaching—and learning—about the Synoptic Gospels a true pleasure.

One of the things I always tell students about the Gospel of Matthew is that Matthew, more than either of the other Synoptic Gospels and certainly more than John—frames Jesus’ life in terms of Moses. If you are trying to explain the differences between Matthew and the other Gospels, you could get a lot of the way there by simply noticing how Matthew always wants to make Jesus into a new Moses. The flight to Egypt in Jesus’ early childhood? Only Matthew tells that story, and he probably does it so that Jesus, like Moses, can flee from a despotic and murderous ruler and so that Jesus, like Moses, can have Egypt as a key location in his youth. The Sermon on the Mount? It’s on a “level place” in Luke, but Matthew probably puts Jesus on a mountain to make a more satisfying parallel with Moses’ reception of the law on the mountain. At several important junctures, where Matthew deviates from the Synoptic tradition, it’s likely because Matthew wants us to understand how very much like Moses Jesus was. The reasons for that are both a little bit obvious and a little bit hidden. Scholars tend to point out that Matthew was the “most Jewish” of the evangelists, but that claim leads to other important questions about what we mean by “most Jewish,” given that all the authors of the New Testament were likely Jews, and it doesn’t quite settle the question of what Matthew wants us to take away from the parallels between Jesus and Moses.

The story of the Transfiguration is a wonderful fit for Matthew’s agenda—so much that I wonder whether the specific events of the Transfiguration story were the inspiration for Matthew to frame his whole narrative in terms of parallels with the life of Moses—whether Matthew understood the Moses-centric experiences of the Transfiguration as a framework for the whole of Jesus’ life and ministry. If we just take the Transfiguration narrative as an average of all three Synoptic Gospels’ stories—without considering what’s specific to Matthew—we find a very Moses-coded story. Like Moses, Jesus goes up on a mountain. Like Moses, Jesus took three people with him (see Exodus 24:1). Like Moses, Jesus had an experience of God on the mountaintop. Like with Moses, Jesus’ appearance changed. Like with Moses, Jesus experienced God’s presence in clouds. Both stories even include Moses’ actual presence; Moses was obviously there for Moses’ mountaintop experience, but he (and Elijah) also appear in the story of Jesus’ mountaintop experience. The Transfiguration is already saturated with parallels to Moses’ experiences in Exodus, and I wonder how much the Jesus-as-Moses idea that Matthew holds so tightly might have had its origins with this story.

Before we get to the specific ways that Matthew tells this story, and the ways that Jesus’ story differs from Moses’ story, I have a question. What could it mean to tell Jesus’ story like this? What’s at stake in having Jesus undergo such a symbolic experience, and bringing him into such close conversation with Moses—a hero of Israelite history? What do the evangelists gain by sending Jesus up the mountain of the Transfiguration?

The most obvious answer is that it vaults Jesus into the upper echelon of important Israelite figures. Moses and Elijah are arguably two of the three most important people in the history of Israel, alongside Abraham, and having Jesus commune with them—as the story does—puts him in pretty rarified air. It also signals something subtle, I think, about Jesus’ role as a mouthpiece for God. Moses went up the mountain to receive the Law, after all; Moses became a conduit for God’s words. By telling this story, the Gospel-writers symbolically place Jesus in the same kind of role, as a mouthpiece for God and a conduit for God’s words—or Word, as the Gospel of John and later Christian theology would have it. Telling this story makes a lot of things clear about who Jesus is and why he matters.

But the story also clouds things a bit—no pun intended. If Moses had to ascend the mountain to meet God, does Jesus ascending the mountain imply that he had no other means to encounter God, and needed to do it on a mountain just like Moses? And if so, does that puncture the notion of Jesus’ divinity? Or, to ask a similar question, if Moses was transformed by his encounter with God atop the mountain, and his appearance was changed as a result, does Jesus’ transfigured appearance likewise suggest a transformation in him—and does that then imply that Jesus became something, on the mountain of the Transfiguration, that he had not been before? Those questions have profound implications for Christian theology, and they might not have been the kinds of questions that someone like Matthew—writing before the crystallization of Trinitarian thought—had in mind. But they are worthwhile questions for modern Christian to work through.

When we put the three versions of the Transfiguration story in parallel with each other, there are a few things worth pointing out about the distinctive ways the different Gospels tell the story. Mark’s version, for example, has Peter suggest the creation of three booths, one for you and one for Moses and one for Elijah, as a consequence of the disciples’ fear. For he (Peter) did not know what to say, for they were exceedingly afraid, 17:6 tells us. In Mark, which tends to make the disciples into bumbling and disappointing figures at every opportunity, Peter’s suggestion of preserving the moment is a mistake, prompted by his fear—the kind of thing he might not have said if he hadn’t been so afraid. Luke does something similar, having Peter make the suggestion of creating three booths while not knowing what he said, also leading the reader to believe that Peter’s construction plans were misguided, even if fear wasn’t the determining factor. But Matthew has Peter make the suggestion of the three booths in a clear state of mind, free of fear, without any suggestion that he was wrong to say it. That’s an interesting difference, I think, because it means that Matthew’s version is the one that asks the reader to accept at face value the idea that Jesus was just as important as Moses and Elijah. By omitting the idea that Peter was motivated by fear, Matthew turns Peter’s suggestion into an endorsement of Jesus’ importance.

Luke adds a detail that neither Mark nor Matthew include, which is that the disciples might have been asleep for crucial parts of the story. I say might have been, because the Greek grammar is a little unclear here, and different translations treat it differently. At Luke 9:32, the RSV says that Peter and those who were with him were heavy with sleep, and when they wakened they saw his glory and the two men who stood with him. In the RSV, the disciples fell asleep and woke to a surprising scene of Jesus and Moses and Elijah hanging out. But the NRSV reads now Peter and his companions were weighed down with sleep; but since they had stayed awake, they saw his glory and the two men who stood with him. That translation makes the disciples sleepy, but lets them stay awake for the whole event anyway. And the NRSVue reads now Peter and his companions were weighed down with sleep, but as they awoke they saw his glory and the two men who stood with him, returning to the RSV’s interpretation. It’s a small thing perhaps, but it’s a good example of how translation choices can shift the meaning of a story. Only Luke includes that vignette, though all the Synoptic Gospels say that the disciples fell asleep in the Garden of Gethsemane, near the end of Jesus’ life. Perhaps Luke was trying to build a motif out of exhausted disciples.

I want to point out one more difference between the three Synoptic accounts of the Transfiguration, this time a detail that’s (possibly) unique to Matthew, because I think it speaks to Matthew’s emphasis on Jesus as a new Moses. At the moment when Jesus begins to become transfigured, Mark says (in the NRSVue) that he was transfigured before them, and his clothes became dazzling bright, such as no one on earth could brighten them. (The Greek here actually says no fuller on earth could brighten them, and I wish the translators had put it that way rather than saying no one, because the detail of a fuller—a professional launderer, essentially, in the ancient world—adds such delightful specificity). Luke is a bit more specific, saying that the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became as bright as a flash of lightning. Where Mark focused only on the appearance of Jesus’ clothes but possibly left room for some change in the appearance of his face with the vague he was transfigured, Luke is clear that both Jesus’ clothes and his face changed in appearance. But Luke doesn’t say how the face changed, only that it did.

Matthew, though, is most specific of the three. And he was transfigured before them, it says, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became bright as light. The detail of Jesus’ face shining like the sun is unique to Matthew, and while the other two accounts are vague enough that you could imagine Jesus’ face shining if you wanted to, only Matthew insists on it. That’s likely because in Exodus 34:29-35, after Moses returned from encountering God on Mount Sinai, the Israelites would see the face of Moses, that the skin of his face was shining, and Moses would put the veil on his face to shield everyone from the light. Because Moses’ face clearly shone after his encounter with God, Jesus’ face did too, because for Matthew, Jesus’ life needed to parallel the life of Moses.

For Matthew, it was important to have Jesus’ face shine—just like it was important for the Transfiguration story to include all the other parallels to the story of Moses meeting God on the mountain—because Matthew wanted the readers of his Gospel to understand that Jesus was a new Moses. Matthew wanted Jesus’ life, both here and elsewhere in the Gospel, to look like the life of Moses. Why? Matthew clearly wanted people to understand Jesus as an important figure in Israelite history, who like Moses would lead the nation out of a time of trouble and subjugation and into renewal and freedom. Matthew, more than any other Gospel, insists on telling the story of Jesus with and alongside the stories of ancient Israel, always stopping to contextualize Jesus’ actions with citations of prophetic oracles, and always ensuring that Jesus looks and acts like Moses. For Matthew, Jesus was not just any preacher, prophet, or healer. Jesus, for Matthew, was a long-foretold renewal of the same saving action of God that Israel had been experiencing for centuries already. Jesus, for Matthew, was a new expression of an old idea—that God was watching out for God’s people. On the mountain of the Transfiguration, Matthew wanted to be sure to make that point clear, so he told the story as closely to the story of Moses’ Sinai experience as he could. That makes Matthew’s version of the Transfiguration stand out a little bit, when compared to the versions from Mark and Luke. It’s unique, the way Matthew tells this story. But it’s also unmistakably Matthean.

When we read the Synoptic Gospels, if we solve for the differences and try to understand why the three accounts are distinct from each other—as I have done above—we can start to get a sense of each author’s unique emphases. And if we were to solve for the similarities, and notice how they all tell essentially the same story, we might inadvertently paper over some of the real disagreements between the accounts. The tricky thing—and the rewarding thing—is to try to solve for both similarities and differences, all at once, appreciating how three Gospels can tell one story in three different ways. That’s the hard part of teaching (and learning) about the Synoptics, but it’s also what makes it so fun.

I am fascinated by the word righteousness. I think the fascination goes back to my evangelical days, when righteousness was thrown around as a catch-all word to describe the intersection of blameless behavior and pure intentions. I remember noticing the ways people would say righteousness to describe something both vague and specific: a standard that was hard to describe and therefore hard to attain, but easy to throw around as a goal or an ideal. It was a way to insinuate shame without having to shame someone out loud.

Although I am no longer part of the evangelical world, I do find myself returning to the word righteousness sometimes. I like to use righteousness in ways that cut against the grain of expectations. While when I was a young evangelical, righteousness often was used to describe sexual purity (you should strive to live righteously in your relationships, people would say, meaning that you should avoid expressing your sexuality in any way, or to describe ethics, as in God wants us to live righteously in the world, meaning that you shouldn’t listen to secular music but you should vote for “pro-life” candidates). So now I like to drop the word into similar kinds of situations, but in the opposite direction. The church ought to treat lgbtqia+ folks righteously, I might say, or the network of resistance in Minneapolis is protecting its neighbors righteously. I like the way the word plays against expectations, how it can reframe so-called liberal causes as examples of right behavior. I like the way righteousness points to a kind of ethical framework that somehow we think belongs to conservative Christianity, but which actually describes a wide range of actions in the world, even—and sometimes especially—ways that conservative Christianity would reject.

All that is to say that the word righteousness caught my eye in the lectionary readings for this Sunday. It appears in both the Isaiah passage and the passage from Matthew. Though the contexts for those two books are quite different, I think righteousness appears in each in ways that point to a common field of moral reasoning. That is to say, both Isaiah and Jesus in Matthew are interested in the question of right behavior, and they are both trying to work through what that might look like in the real world. Both are in conversation with ancient Israelite traditions of ethics, and both are frustrated with the ways ethics plays out in everyday life. And both, I dare say, are misunderstood by many Christians.

I want to start with Matthew 5:13-20, because I think it gets to the heart of Christians’ misunderstanding. In this passage—part of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount in Matthew—we find Jesus’ well-known comparisons of people to salt and light. Jesus is making an interesting claim here, especially when we begin to imagine the audience of his words. If he was speaking to a crowd of peasants and lower-class people, as seems likely, then Jesus was making a radical claim about who makes for a good moral exemplar. (The you in this passage is plural in the Greek, so he is addressing the crowd and not any one person). Jesus was pointing to the kinds of everyday folk who had showed up to his hillside sermon, and calling them the salt of the earth and the light of the world. That’s already a remarkable thing to say, because it places the virtues of moral uprightness among normal people, and not among priests, scribes, or other kinds of especially holy people.

This is just the kind of thing that Christians tend to take the wrong way. Christians often read Jesus as an anti-elite religious reformer, and especially Christians like to read Jesus as someone who was opposed to the Jewish religion and its representatives. Passages like this one, which highlight the virtues of everyday people instead of the Jewish religious leadership, sometimes get interpreted as attacks on Judaism itself. Protestant Christians especially like to see themselves (and their latent anti-Catholicism) in Jesus, and they like to imagine him as some kind of anti-institutionalist, just like the heroes of the Protestant Reformation were.

But Jesus seems to anticipate this argument; he seems to realize that what he has just said could be interpreted as an attack on religious elites. And he immediately closes that door. Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law and the Prophets, he said, but I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. And then later, Jesus says, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Both of these statements are interesting for the way they defend traditional forms of Judaism, and both of them are fascinating for how they anticipate and push back against modern Christian arguments. Christians, for example, love to take shots at the Jewish Law, and they love to describe it as a hollow form of righteousness that was always bound to be eclipsed and surpassed. (I heard a version of that argument just this past week, in a sermon that was assigned listening for a class I’m currently taking). Christians seem to think that Jesus was proclaiming some new and previously unknown form of righteousness, unconnected to or even opposed to his native Judaism. But notice how—as Jesus describes moral uprightness and righteousness—he begins with the pillars of Judaism itself. The Law and the Prophets refer to major collections of Jewish religious wisdom, that we now know as parts of the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament. While it is common for Christians to assume that Jesus meant to replace those things, here he is insisting that far from abolishing them, he is here to fulfill them—to make them whole.

When Christians want to make the argument that the Jewish Law is defunct or has been surpassed, we usually turn to our favorite straw man, the Pharisees. Christians (informed by the New Testament’s skewed descriptions of them) have long understood the Pharisees to be the paradigmatic Jews: hypocritical, hollow, and misguided. Pharisees, in the Christian imagination, are unrighteous precisely because they claim righteousness while being disingenuous about it. But here in Matthew 5, Jesus holds the Pharisees (and the scribes) as exemplars of righteousness and morality. They are the standard that must be met and exceeded if a person wishes to enter the kingdom of heaven. Far from dismissing Pharisees as false or misguided, Jesus holds them up as examples of righteousness. And far from casting the Law aside, Jesus holds the Law up as the endpoint of his own life and teaching.

Turning to Isaiah, I will make one more point about Christian misconceptions about the Law. Christians often think that we—and Jesus especially—were the first ones to ever notice that legalism can be restrictive, and that true righteousness can sometimes happen outside the Law. But that’s not true at all; Judaism is full of examples of people understanding that the Law is a structure and a guide but not a straitjacket. Jesus, in this regard, was just following tradition.

Look at Isaiah 58, for example. This is a passage, broadly speaking, that is about righteousness; it is about the right ways to live and behave. The passage is dealing very broadly in categories that the Jewish Law recognizes and speaks to—things like justice and injustice, oppression and freedom, evil and good. But this is not a legal text; it is a prophetic text. Isaiah is not interested very much in the letter of the Law; Isaiah is interested in the broad effect of the Law and the kinds of moral reasoning it engenders. Isaiah takes religious legal ideas like fasting and turns them into metaphors: Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the straps of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Further down, Isaiah suggests offering food to hungry people and satisfying the needs of the afflicted, and he understands that to be the necessary first step towards God’s restoration of Israel. Isaiah, centuries before Jesus and the Pharisees, understood the Law as a starting point but not an ending point; both Jesus and the Pharisees were simply carrying on an old tradition. Isaiah is interested in righteousness broadly speaking: Yet day after day they seek me and delight to know my ways, he writes, as if they were a nation that practiced righteousness and did not forsake the ordinance of their God; they ask of me righteous judgements; they want God on their side. The ordinances matter, but as Isaiah goes on to say, righteousness consists of the living out of those ordinances.

That perspective—which I also think lies at the heart of Jesus’ comments in Matthew 5—can inform Christians’ search for an ethics to live by. Neither Jesus nor Isaiah reject legalism or legal texts; they both see the Law as essential. But the Law is not the same thing as righteousness, and both Jesus and Isaiah are looking for righteousness. Both Isaiah and Jesus are interested in the ways broad legal ideas inform the living of everyday life, and the ways they intervene in the questions of justice and injustice that crowd around us.

Certainly plenty of injustice crowds around us today. Certainly our world could be improved if we all paid more attention to righteousness. But righteousness isn’t a question of rule-following and blameless behavior, in the way people used to use it when I was a young evangelical. Righteousness isn’t concordance of do-and-don’t. Instead, as both Isaiah and Jesus recognize, righteousness is about doing justice and living rightly in the world. Righteousness is an orientation toward setting the world right, toward freedom and liberation, and toward ending oppression. And in that sense, there is still plenty of room for more righteousness in our world.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about how the Revised Common Lectionary sometimes fails to offer anything inspiring—how the texts for a given week don’t really connect with anything going in the community or the world, and I end up looking elsewhere for inspiration. This week’s lectionary offers the opposite problem. Even though they are a part of a much longer cycle of readings and they were not in any way selected to respond to current events, the lectionary readings for February 1^st seem almost hand-picked to speak to the current moment in the United States. The world is bigger than the United States of course, and Christianity lives in many contexts beyond this one. But for those of us living in these difficult days in America, the lectionary this week has much to say to us.

First a word about these difficult days. It’s remarkable how many conversations I have these days that begin with me and the person I’m talking to checking in with each other. It’s not just an interpersonal kind of check-in, although it is sometimes that. Instead, it’s more of a is what I think is happening really happening kind of check-in—a way of trying to ground ourselves in the experience of someone else, to make sure what we are experiencing is real. It’s a bewildering time, because we are all going about our daily lives—going to work, caring for children, reading new novels and buying groceries and bingeing new shows. And at the same time, the world we know is coming apart at the seams. Masked and heavily armed federal agents abuse and kill people in the streets and in secret prisons. Our country’s most enduring and powerful alliances are crumbling—or, rather, we are taking a sledgehammer to their foundations. We kidnapped the president of a sovereign nation. In every official statement, the government tells us not to believe our own eyes, to believe that the bad guys are the good guys, and to pretend like the emperor is robed in glorious clothes. It seems inevitable that state and local law enforcement will end up in an armed conflict with federal agents, in Minneapolis or somewhere else. It seems inevitable that more protestors will die and more innocent people will be stolen from their homes and cars and thrown into an unaccountable and untraceable system of prisons.

One of the things I have been telling my own congregation is that we can take comfort in the idea that we are not the first people to pass this way. We are not the first ones to live under an authoritarian regime, and we are not the only ones to live at the mercy of an autocrat. It should dismay us that we have plenty of company here in this state of emergency, but it should also give us comfort that people in all times and places have lived with violence and fear and hatred. We are not the first to live these difficult days, and we won’t be the last.

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The lectionary this week speaks to that. The reading from the Hebrew Bible is a famous one—or, at least the end of the passage is famous. The reading is from the prophet Micah, and the last verse of this passage—Micah 6:8—can be found on thousands of bumper stickers and t-shirts. He has told you, O mortal, what is good, and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice and to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God? Even on its own, that verse is a moving summation of the life of faith—a call to simple virtues and discipleship. If I were the kind of person to get scripture tattooed on my body, this verse would be a candidate. But if we zoom out just a little bit, the verse takes on added meaning. The preceding verses read like a litany of religiosity—like a list of ways people might try to please God. It intensifies as it goes. Maybe I could make sacrifices, the prophet ponders rhetorically in 6:6: Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? The prophet keeps ramping it up. Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, he asks, or with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Here Micah is suggesting outlandish and grotesque expressions of faith—things that no one could actually even accomplish. And then Micah intensifies it one more time. Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? It’s hard to imagine a more intense—or alarming—expression of religious fervor. Micah is being intentionally outrageous here, suggesting extreme ways of getting God’s attention. But none of it is meaningful, the prophet says in that famous verse 8, because all God wants is justice, kindness, and humility.

The prophet Micah was one of those who went before us, through times of trouble and fear. He lived in the eighth century, when Jerusalem and Judah (and indeed the whole region) were under threat from the Assyrian Empire. Micah was living in times of fear and uncertainty and violence, which explains the increasingly frantic expressions of religious fervor. If you feel like you’re about to be crushed under the boots of a powerful empire, you’re probably going to search for ways to get God to protect you. But—Micah says—God isn’t interested in magical thinking or disingenuous expressions of religious devotion. Instead, God wants you to live ethically and to be a humble companion of God. Does that protect you from the Assyrians, or from ICE? No. But it does suggest that security can be found in basic decency shown to other people, rather than in extravagant genuflections to God. Be a good person, Micah is saying, be on the right side of justice, and stop trying to buy God’s protection and mercy. God isn’t interested in your burnt offerings and rivers of oil. God isn’t moved by displays of contrition. God wants you to be decent.

Matthew 5:1-12 has a lot to say about decency too. There, we find one of the two versions of the Beatitudes that are included in the canonical gospels. Many people have observed that Matthew’s version of the Beatitudes is decidedly less political than Luke’s version is. Matthew claims, for example, that blessed are the poor in spirit, while Luke says that blessed are the poor. Matthew says that blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, while Luke claims that hungry people are blessed—not spiritually hungry, but physically hungry. In every case in the Beatitudes, Matthew spiritualizes and Luke emphasizes the embodied human need. I do have a preference for Luke’s revolutionary version, but sometimes I think that the distinction does a disservice to Matthew. Matthew’s version, after all, still emphasizes all the same things that Micah was emphasizing in that passage we just saw: mercy, purity of heart, peace, righteousness. Matthew still emphasizes a baseline human decency, and his version of the Beatitudes still insists that people who exhibit that kind of decency will be the ones who will be comforted, who will inherit the earth, who will be filled, who will see God, who will receive mercy, and so forth.

Particularly relevant to the current moment, Matthew 5:10-12—the end of this section—imagines the status and position of people who are persecuted. People who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, or who are reviled and persecuted by people who utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account, are blessed especially, because they share an experience with the prophets before us, who were also persecuted falsely. As we think about the treatment of Renee Good (and her wife) and Alex Pretti, Matthew 5:10-12 would seem to have a lot to say. They were people who were trying to make their world better through civic engagement, and for their efforts they were murdered by their own country and mercilessly slandered on their way to the grave. Hundreds of others, whose stories don’t receive as much press, also find themselves hurt, taken captive, deported, and abused, and even killed, like Geraldo Lunas Campos just this past week. Matthew’s version of the Beatitudes might be less political than Luke’s, but they nevertheless imagine justice for people like Campos, Pretti, Good, and others who face abuse and death at the hands of tyrants.

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I saved 1 Corinthians 1:18-31 for last, because I think it speaks to those of us who are everyday folks. Here in 1 Corinthians, like in Matthew and Micah, Paul is imagining circumstances of strife and turmoil. Specifically, Paul is drawing a contrast between the foolishness of the story of Jesus and the wisdom of the world. He’s pointing out how the logics of empire, commerce, naked power, and violence cannot accommodate themselves to someone like Jesus, who went and got himself killed by some of his world’s most unbothered brokers of violence. The kind of life Jesus lived, and the kind of resistance he offered with his death, looks like foolishness to the powers-that-be, Paul was saying. And he was right to say it.

But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise, Paul wrote, and God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong. Say what you will about Paul—and there is a lot to be said—but that is a word. All the apparent powers of the world are empty, Paul was claiming, and all their demonstrations of violence and strength are meaningless. Instead, God chose weakness and foolishness, and Jesus chose death, which is not so very far from Micah’s doing justice, loving kindness, and walking humbly with your God.

My favorite part of this passage from 1 Corinthians is verse 1:26: not many of you were wise by human standards, it says, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. I like that passage because it locates Paul’s audience squarely within the humble people of the world. Maybe some were wise or powerful, but not many were. Most everybody Paul was talking to was normal.

As I watch the news rolling out of Minneapolis—and Tehran, and Gaza, and Myanmar, and everywhere else people fight for their freedom and dignity—I can’t help but notice how it’s the everyday folk who rise to the challenge. Not many of the people blowing whistles in Minneapolis are powerful people; not many of the ones offering field medicine to the victims of state violence in Iran have been trained for it. But they are doing it anyway, because it is the right thing to do.

Faced with a legacy of state violence and death—faced with the story of Jesus’ foolish death at the hands of a powerful empire—Paul noticed that Jesus’ death was not a failure but a victory, and that people like Jesus were not victims but victors. It’s an inversion that none of the powerful would ever be able to see—the way weakness always wins in the end. It’s counterintuitive, the way God chooses what is low and despised in the world to speak truth to the powerful. But it’s true anyway. And I find that a comfort for the living of these difficult days.

What is unity for?

I have been asking versions of that question for a couple of decades now. I think about that question in the world of religion. I come from a religious tradition—the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)—that places a heavy emphasis on unity. Unity is our polar star, we say, quoting one of the movement’s founders. But assuming we could achieve that unity, what would it be for? And I think about it the realm of politics, too. As the 250^th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence arrives, lots of people are appealing to unity as an antidote or solution to the current political moment of division and sharp disagreement. But who would be served by that unity? In congregations, workplaces, and groups of all kinds, we often appeal to unity. But to what end, and for what purpose, would that unity exist? We often treat unity as an obviously and self-evidently good thing, but often unity serves the status quo. Messages like let’s all get along and don’t rock the boat tend to benefit people who are already in power. And sometimes, calls to unity work to convince the people who are on the underside of power to be quiet about it—to accept their lower status or their oppression as the cost of keeping everyone on the same page.

That’s one of a thousand different reasons why the opening words of 1 Corinthians are so fascinating. If you look at the epistle reading for the week as it appears here, you’ll see that someone has titled this section An appeal for unity in the gospel. Those kinds of headings aren’t part of the Bible itself, but I think they’re useful as a window into interpretation—as a way to see how translators and editors think we ought to understand the biblical text. Here, whoever wrote this heading sees this whole section of 1 Corinthians as an appeal for unity. Is that what it is, and if so, who is served by that unity?

In many ways, 1 Corinthians is Paul at his most Paulish. In this letter he’s poetic, scolding, self-serving, inspiring, generous, haughty, and pouty. His tone is both intimate and aloof—both petulant and confident. Paul, in 1 Corinthians, displays the kind of tenderness that you see in other letters—a seemingly genuine bleeding-heart soft spot for people he loves. And he also shows a certain level of possessiveness, impatience, and callousness. In these verses in particular, we see a real appeal to purpose and togetherness, which Paul seems to think is very important, and which he believes is in jeopardy. But we also see the way Paul puts himself at the center of that purpose and togetherness, even as he protests that he has never put himself at its center. It’s a fascinating little dance, carried out with papyrus and quill at a distance of hundreds or thousands of miles.

This letter to the Corinthians seems to have been prompted by rumors. Paul says that it has been made clear to me by Chloe’s people that there are quarrels among you, which was enough to inspire Paul to action. We should pause here to notice how much is being papered over with the phrase Chloe’s people—how much unity is being manufactured by these words on the page. Most likely, Chloe’s people refers to people enslaved by a woman named Chloe, though some scholars think it could refer to members of her family or her business associates. I hold with those who think that Chloe’s people were probably enslaved workers who helped her do business in Corinth, who somehow ferried rumors and information back and forth to Paul. If that’s true, then the unity suggested by the phrase Chloe’s people is really a forced kind of unity—a unity imposed on the people against their will or without their consent. But I digress.

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The nature of the disunity reported by Chloe’s people was a kind of divided loyalty. Some of the Corinthians described themselves as loyal to one person or another—to Cephas, Apollos, Paul, or Christ. (It is utterly fascinating that Christ—who I would have thought would represent a higher category of belonging than any of Apollos, Cephas, or Paul—is listed here as an equal option among them). What seems to be happening is that people in Corinth had attached themselves psychologically or spiritually to one leader or another—to one or another personality—as the main aspect of their belonging. If you have been around organizations long enough, and goodness knows if you’ve been around churches long enough, this is a familiar pattern to you. There can be a history of ten different managers, and some employees still see themselves as loyal to one of them from years back. There might have been a dozen pastors in a congregation, but inevitably some people will remain loyal to one of them above all the rest, and will tell anyone willing to listen how that long-ago pastor is the real reason they are still there. We’ve all seen that kind of thing happen before, and that’s what seems to have been happening in Corinth. Chloe’s people reported that some of the Corinthians maintained loyalty not to the community or to the church, but to one charismatic leader or another.

Charismatic leadership has that effect, of course. That’s often what we say we want from leaders—that they should create personal connection, that they should inspire a feeling of belonging, that they should help people be bonded to the institution. The problem comes when those leaders move on from the system, but people have identified more with the leader than the system. That’s a problem for the system, and it’s a huge problem for the next leader. Something like that must have happened in Corinth, where waves of successive leaders (or simply a variety of people exerting influence over the community at the same time) created some divided allegiances.

Paul’s curious response to this was to center himself, in a roundabout way. Was Paul crucified for you, he asked, and were you baptized in the name of Paul? On the surface these rhetorical questions were meant to make the people realize that, no, Paul was not the point of the system as a whole. Paul’s questions were meant to point to the supremacy of the Jesus movement as a whole, over any particular leader of that movement. But underneath, Paul’s denial of authority was an assertion of authority. After all, his aw-shucks pushback against the idea that anyone would belong to him comes near the beginning of a sixteen-chapter letter in which Paul is attempting to project his authority over the community at a distance. 1 Corinthians is full of instructions, admonishments, and commandments, all of them coming from Paul. So his protests that no one ought to think of themselves as belonging to him—or anyone else—ring a little hollow.

As an aside, I find it funny how Paul goes on a little tangent here about baptism, saying that he only baptized Crispus and Gaius…oh and also the household of Stephanas…and maybe some others, he can’t really remember. It’s both a reality of what we would today call pastoral ministry (it can be hard to keep track of all the baptisms, weddings, and funerals, after so many years), and also a funny little attempt on Paul’s part to make a point that he ends up not really being able to make.

Paul’s appeal to the Corinthians—the thing he’s trying to convince them of, with all his talk of divided loyalties and unremembered baptisms—was to be unified. Or, at least, that’s what the section heading would have us think. But if we look closely at verses 10 and 11, we see that Paul is actually arguing for something slightly more nuanced. Now I appeal to you…that there be no divisions among you, Paul writes, because Chloe’s people have reported quarrels among you. Here Paul is asking for the absence of discord or the erasure of differences of opinion, which is certainly a step toward unity, but not unity itself. We don’t all suddenly agree simply because we stop arguing with each other. Paul goes on in verse 10 to ask that you be knit together in the same mind and the same purpose. This is a kind of unity, to be sure; threads that have been knit together do lose something of their individual thread-ness and together they take on the character of fabric. And Paul is asking that the Corinthians display same mind and same purpose. What Paul seems to be imagining is a community that magically shares a mind and purpose, without disagreement or division or quarrels.

Is that unity? Maybe. Certainly people who share a same mind and a same purpose could be said to be unified, like the threads in a piece of fabric would be unified. But I suppose that I have a philosophical question, at that point, about whether unity is a meaningful idea if everyone has already become the same. If everyone is unified, does the idea of unity have any special force? I am thinking of the new Apple TV show Pluribus, which if you haven’t seen yet, you should go and watch. In that show, everyone shares one mind, just like Paul seems to be imagining here. And they experience a form of unity because of it, but the show is constantly asking us, as the viewers, whether such a unity is useful or not—whether it is worthwhile to give up all our particularity and individuality so that we can have what Paul calls the same purpose.

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I’m a strong congregationalist, in the lower-case-c sense, and I’m a strong democrat, in a lower-case-d sense. I think governance works best when it happens at the level of the people. I resist autocracy in all its forms, whether it’s a political strongman or a bishop somewhere, duly authorized or not—or an especially strong-willed apostle, for that matter. In democratic or congregational systems, wisdom arises not when difference is flattened or erased, but when distinctions remain intact and the best course of action is contested. The part of me that values democratic and congregational systems, and resists autocratic leaders, gets suspicious when Paul wants to insist that the Corinthians be unified while also projecting his own power onto them in the form of a letter. When Paul writes a whole letter to tell people what to do, but opens it with a denial of his own authority, it gets my attention.

Often Paul gives away his endings—he says right at the beginning what he intends to conclude in the rest of the letter, just like they taught us to do in those five-paragraph essays we learned how to write in elementary school. Here’s what I am going to say, here’s what I am saying in three paragraphs, here’s what I said. Paul does the same thing in his letters, and I think this passage, which is part of the opening salvo of this letter, anticipates where he is going to end up later on in chapters 11-13 of 1 Corinthians. That section of the letter, which is desperately poetic and moving, is a passionate argument for unity. It begins with Paul’s instructions about the Lord’s Supper, which boil down to an argument for mutual consideration and thoughtfulness. It proceeds to his metaphor of the body of Christ, and the essential meaningfulness and usefulness of each part of the body. And it concludes in the famous 13^th chapter, the love chapter, which is not about love in the modern romantic sense but instead a reiteration of the idea of mutual forbearance and regard that he argued in chapter 11. Paul ends up, in 1 Corinthians, with a plea to unity, just like he began.

There are ways to read that unity as benevolent, and even selfless on the part of Paul. There are ways to understand the unity that Paul calls for as concerned only for the good of the congregation. But like with any call for unity, I’m left asking who is served by it. Whose unity would it be, what would be meaningful about it, and under what authority would the people be unified? With someone like Paul, just like with other kinds of leaders and politicians, I get suspicious about this unity, because I worry that ultimately points back to the person in charge. I worry that the unity ends up serving the one already in power. And maybe that’s ok—maybe the unity itself is worth enough to justify flattening all the difference. But I do wonder what good ideas got lost, and what valuable perspectives were silenced, if Paul got his way that there be no divisions among you. What was that unity for, and who was served by it?

Many times during the past fifteen years or so, I have felt overwhelmed and despondent because of things happening in the world around me. When Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown were killed without reason and with few consequences, it felt like something was coming undone in the world. When others continued to die in the same way and it became clear that things were not going to change quickly, I felt a heavy grief about the future. When the “birther” movement gained momentum and open racism found new footholds in American life, I felt foolish to have ever been optimistic about the Obama era. The open misogyny of the 2016 election, the chaos and isolation of the pandemic, the erosion of public trust in science and the return of MAGA-style paranoid politics, January 6^th, the violence and destruction in Gaza and in many other places, the ongoing spiral of climate change—it has all weighed heavily on me.

But I don’t think I have ever felt like I have felt this past week. I can’t recall fear and despair like this before. I keep trying to remind myself to put things in perspective and remember that there have been moments of real crisis and hopelessness at other times recently, but this feels different. The first full week of January 2026 felt like the week that the last guardrails broke and some kind of collision became inevitable. We kidnapped another country’s president and quickly made that country a petro-state puppet regime. (Not many are longing for a return to Maduro, but the precedent is alarming to say the least). Trump said that the United States’ actions in Venezuela would be constrained only by the president’s “own morality,” which is not reassuring. We are openly threatening war against our closest allies in a bid to seize Greenland. Bands of paramilitary forces roam American cities, rounding up anyone who seems to not belong by whatever arbitrary racist standard someone wants to apply, without regard to due process or status. Just this week already those secret police have shot several people, killing at least one, and several states are facing the prospect of deploying state forces to oppose national ones. The official position of the United States is that the January 6^th insurrection was fine, actually, and that the rioters who beat and tazed cops that day are heroes who deserve honor and restitution. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting officially passed into memory, the food pyramid was inverted to give beef tallow and alcohol new positions of honor, many childhood vaccines were taken off the list to be given regularly, vapid AI slop is everywhere, and Russia just fired a nuclear-capable missile into Ukraine. Things are bad.

With all that in mind, I looked at the lectionary readings for January 18^th, hopeful for some wisdom or inspiration. That often happens—that the lectionary will hold some spookily-appropriate reading that somehow speaks into the present moment with prescience and insight. But this time I didn’t find much to hang onto. That’s ok—the lectionary cannot be expected to speak into every eventuality and ephemeral condition of the world. That’s why many people abide by that old saying, that we should “preach with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other,” drawing inspiration from current events as much as sacred texts. There’s nothing magical about the Revised Common Lectionary or any other lectionary. It just happens to be very influential in the traditions of Christianity I know best, so I find it useful to think alongside it. I know, though, that many readers of this Substack don’t use a lectionary at all, and that they rely on the Spirit to lead them to useful and interesting biblical texts for use each week.

In that spirit (or maybe in that Spirit), I thought it might be useful to collect a few passages that have floated to the top of my mind recently, and offer them up as possible sites of reflection for the living of our current days. Some of these passages are found in the lectionary in one way or another, so it’s not as if they are neglected in the tradition. And some of them are missing from the lectionary, and therefore don’t get much attention in churches that follow it. But if you are looking, like I am, for some ways to grasp the circumstances we are living in, then maybe something on this list will be helpful to you.

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• Acts 8:26-40 is one of my favorite stories in the Bible, and it’s one that I have been writing about regularly for the past six years now, as part of a couple of books that I have coming out later this year. I love this story—as others do—for its swirl of complicated identifications and allegiances. Its narrative structure is straightforward: the apostle Phillip is sent to a wilderness road where he meets a traveler. They have a conversation, and the traveler professes belief and seeks baptism. After baptizing the traveler, Phillip is swept off to another place. It’s when you look closely at the details, though, that this story becomes provocative and even radical, especially for an age like ours. First of all, the traveler was Ethiopian, which means that he was not Roman—he was a foreigner and an outsider. He would have had dark skin and his presence would have been symbolic of life beyond the borders of the Roman Empire. Furthermore, the Ethiopian was a eunuch. Most likely, that meant that he was enslaved, and that he had been castrated as a youth to make him more suitable for imperial service. So the Ethiopian eunuch was a gender and sexual minority and subject to the power and violence of systematic slavery. And yet, the Ethiopian traveler was also described with lots of markers of privilege: he was riding in a carriage, he carried a scroll of the prophet Isaiah, and he was a court official of the Candace, which was the title of the queens of Ethiopia, and he had the position of treasurer. In this story of the Ethiopian eunuch, then, we have a remarkable affirmation of difference and inclusion—a story about inclusion and belonging that transcends boundaries of politics, geography, peoplehood, gender, sexuality, and class and status. Acts went out of its way to tell this story this way, which is a comforting reminder of the Bible’s inclusive vision, at a time when the broader American government and culture has begun to idolize exclusion and hatred.

• Isaiah 28 is a powerful chapter, but really I am including it here simply as a placeholder for many other prophetic texts. The prophets are full of millennia-old passages that would get you denounced as woke by people on Twitter in 2026. Isaiah 28 is a diatribe against corrupt rulers. It is an indictment of political and religious leaders who are described as prideful and drunken and confused. Those corrupt leaders say, “we have made a covenant with death, and with Sheol we have an agreement; when the overwhelming scourge passes through, it will not come to us. For we have made lies our refuge, and in falsehood we have taken shelter.” There’s a little political theology hidden in there, in photographic negative: that a good ruler will covenant with life and not death, that a good ruler will deal in truth and not lies, that a good ruler will not seek security at the expense of the people and will not hide away to keep themselves safe while everyone else suffers. The corrupt rulers of Isaiah 28 fail the test on all accounts, and it doesn’t take much work to find examples of rulers in our own place and time who similarly fail to measure up.

• The Book of Revelation is mostly omitted from the Revised Common Lectionary, which is a pity. While Revelation can be difficult to understand and frightening, and while recently it has been mostly owned by evangelical forms of Christianity in the United States, Revelation is also Christianity’s most sustained argument against empire, greed, and depravity. Revelation critiques Rome, but more than that it critiques the way all imperial systems deal in death and suffering. Chapters 17 and 18 are complicated and grotesque and deeply misogynistic, but they are worth reading and engaging because they draw connections between political ideology, power, money, and religious life. Chapter 18 in particular is a withering denouncement of what we might call imperial capitalism, familiar from our own day and time, and its practices of selling out human beings for profit and power.

• I recently saw an exchange on the internet where someone asked a supporter of President Trump which teachings of Jesus, exactly, he thought the President was following and advancing. Trump’s supporter replied with the “give a man a fish and he will eat for a day, but teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime” saying, which while wise was not said by Jesus but Confucius. The upshot of the exchange, at least as the folks on the internet were interpreting it, was that Trump’s supporters think he’s advancing the teachings of Jesus, but that they don’t actually know much about what Jesus taught, and Trump isn’t paying very much attention to Christian ideas. As I read that exchange, I thought about Luke 4:16-30. This passage does show up in the lectionary, because it’s an iconic moment in the life of Jesus. But it’s worth revisiting, because it’s such a powerful and compact summarization of everything Jesus taught. Like the Isaiah passage that Jesus is reading in this story, Jesus preached and practiced things that look both timely and radical in our world: release to the captives, healing to the sick, good news to the poor, and freedom for the oppressed. There is nothing in Luke 4:16-30 that fits with President Trump’s agenda and actions, and if anything this passage underscores how profoundly un-Christian the actions of the United States government have become. Not that the actions of the government need to be Christian; we are a secular democracy, not a theocracy. But it’s remarkable how much cognitive dissonance is required to be both a Christian and a supporter of this regime.

• Romans 16 is overlooked in so many ways. It is not a poetic passage. It contains no great or famous teachings. You’ve probably never heard a sermon or read a devotional about it. But it’s one of my favorite chapters in the New Testament, because it offers us a glimpse behind the scenes of the early Jesus movement. In this chapter, which comes at the end of Romans, Paul is sending greetings to everyone he knows in Rome. That was a practice with a couple of purposes. First, it was just practical. In an age before telecommunications, if you were already sending a letter somewhere, it just made sense to piggyback on that letter and say hello to your friends while you were at it. But second, the practice of including greetings served another purpose: to help build and maintain trust with friends and strangers. By greeting so many people in Romans 16, Paul was demonstrating to the Romans he didn’t know that he had a lot of friends, and that he could be trusted. We do this all the time—we meet someone and discover mutual friends who can help us build connections. What’s remarkable about Romans 16 is who he greets. Scholars have pointed out that—based on names—many of the people in this chapter would have been enslaved. And women show up frequently here in this chapter: Phoebe, Prisca, Mary, Junia (who is called an apostle), Tryphaena, Tryphosa, Persis, the mother of Rufus, Julia, and the sister of Nereus. As scholars have pointed out, not only is Paul greeting these women, but he is also describing them as hard-working and daring, pointing to their role in the Jesus movement. While Paul has a reputation for misogyny (partly deserved, partly not deserved, as I have argued elsewhere), here we see him using the valuable real estate at the end of a letter to lift up the contributions of women.

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• Matthew 1:1-17 is not thrilling prose. It doesn’t have a plot, at least not anywhere near the surface, and it’s quite repetitive. For that reason, it doesn’t show up in the lectionary. This is Matthew’s version of Jesus’ genealogy (which differs substantially from Luke’s version), and it draws a connection back from Jesus to Abraham, the great patriarch of the people of Israel. What I love about this genealogy is that Matthew constructs it in the most subversive way possible. The big picture of this genealogy is that Matthew wants us to understand Jesus as a natural endpoint of Israelite history—that history was always pointing to Jesus. He writes the genealogy so that there were fourteen generations from Abraham to David, fourteen from David to the deportation to Babylon, and fourteen from the exile to Jesus. By arranging history this way, Matthew is leaving out some obvious figures; it’s not meant to be a literal genealogy, but a claim to inheritance and purpose. But he’s also including some important cues to the reader that tell them how to think about Jesus and the history that produced him. Most remarkably, he includes five women in this lineage. Obviously everyone’s lineage includes women, but it was not ordinary in those days to pay much attention to them. Matthew, though, makes a point of naming five of them: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, the wife of Uriah (who we know as Bathsheba), and Mary. The inclusion of women should alert us that Matthew was going out of his way to show us something, and when we look closely at the stories of those women we can start to get a sense of what it was. Amy-Jill Levine has said that all five of these women had “obstetrical irregularities,” which is a way of saying that they all gave birth in unusual ways. Tamar and Ruth procreated after insisting on their rights under Levirite marriage rules, and both of them employed deception to accomplish it. Rahab was a sex worker who helped the Israelites as a spy. Bathsheba was either the victim of exploitation or the willing participant in an affair, depending on how you read the story. And Mary, of course, turned up pregnant before marriage, and was said by some to have given birth as a virgin. Furthermore, as Levine has pointed out, all of these women except Mary were gentiles—non-Jews who contributed to the story of Israel and to the bloodline of the Messiah. I like this passage as an example of how Matthew sneaks a radical message into a mundane text. Matthew is using something as boring as a genealogy to show that it wasn’t only heroes like Abraham and David who made Jesus’ life possible, but also outsiders and people on the low end of the social ladder. It’s a reminder—useful to us today, I think—that the people who seem to be in charge are not always the most important people in the long run, and small acts of resistance can pay off in big ways.

I could go on, and maybe sometime I’ll do another installment of these. For now, though, I hope you’ll find something in these passages that inspires you. We are living in frightening and dangerous times, but we are far from the first people to do so, and we can take comfort in the stories of the people who have gone before us, speaking truth to power, working for justice, and quietly but persistently throwing the powerful down from their thrones.