“Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions. Even on the male and female slaves, in those days, I will pour out my spirit.”
Even when the Good Shepherd Gospel is not read at a funeral, the liturgy itself evokes this powerful image: “Acknowledge we humbly beseech you,” we pray, “a sheep of your own fold, a lamb of your own flock, a sinner of your own redeeming.” The bond between Christ and his own cannot be broken. Not by sin. Not by death.
Veronese’s painting of a remorseful (but bare-breasted) young woman? Donatello’s statue of a hideously aged but spiritually purified hermit? What about the many film versions of Jesus’ life that depicted Mary as a prostitute? They could all be traced back to the sixth-century sermon in which Pope Gregory I conflated Mary of Magdala with other women in the Gospels, and identified her as an iconic repentant sinner.
Come and see, says Jesus, kicking off his public ministry after his baptism. It’s a statement that’s got more than a little dare in it; more than a little edge. This is the Jesus that our rector Paul and I started referring to as ‘‘the Boyfriend.’’ We used it as a colloquial version of the ancient Christian name of ‘‘Bridegroom’’ for Jesus, but it felt more personal—and funny, if a little disturbing, because that’s how Jesus is.
At the end of Luke 13, Jesus takes us from Jerusalem – that city of ancient holiness and evil – goodness and sin – faithfulness and idolotry – and he puts us on the farm. Out in the yard. Jesus, the cosmic storyteller by whose Word the World takes shape, presents the whole history of God’s people as what goes on in the henhouse. He paints a Gospel picture we can all remember, when the going gets rough.
We stood in the theatre where Paul, according to Acts 20, made his farewell speech. And we were able to calculate later how long the author of Acts envisaged it would take the Ephesian elders to get there and to return home knowing they’d never see Paul again. Two days later we gazed sadly at ruined buildings in Thyatira thinking of the judgment of Revelation 2:18-23 and wondering who “Jezebel” might have been.
Many of us read the New Revised Standard Version, and the King James of course, but alongside these, we value translations by individual authors. On my own shelves, for example, I read Tyndale daily, and I often read Everett Fox’s Five Books of Moses and Robert Alter’s translation, The Book of Psalms.
When I was a kid growing up in Washington, D.C., I was fascinated by the precincts around the Capitol, Washington Monument and White House. My dad’s office was always downtown, and there were many “boring” Saturdays, when I would have to tag along with him while he was slaving away in the office.
You can always tell when Jesus says something truly sensational and scandalous because people respond by searching for rocks to fling at his head. The eighth chapter of the Gospel According to John contains four instances of Jesus saying, “I am,” which is one way Jesus imparts his divine identity to his listeners.
Alison Flood in The Guardian: He enraged America’s religious right with his portrayal of God as a senile old man in the His Dark Materials