further:more

Themes: Random

Something is seriously messed up when I walk out of Thai La-Ong Restaurant onto King street, and think to myself, “Ahh, Fresh Air.”

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further:more

Themes: Random

The other day I sat in a cafe for two hours wearing my full ear headphones without playing any music. I have become a connoisseur of quiet.

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Raising the Dead

Themes: Random

I’m working on an essay that explores the trial motif in John’s gospel. Basically, the idea is that John has patterned his narrative as a great trial between God and the world worked out through the means of trials between Jesus and the Jews.

I’d never noticed before the relation between Jesus raising of Lazarus and his own death.

Throughout the Gospel of John, we are being orientated through the narrative to understand that the glorification of Jesus will be via the cross. Knowing that changes the way you read this text:

When Jesus heard it, He said, “This sickness will not end in death but is for the glory of God, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it.” (John 11:4)

After raising Lazarus the story transitions immediately to the discussion in which the Sanhedrin Council that resolves that Jesus must die. Then, throughout Chapter 12 we keep hearing about the raising of Lazarus on the lips of the crowd. It is the event within John’s Gospel that parallels the clearing of the Temple in Matt-Luke. It is the event which effectively brings about his own death.

It adds poignancy to Thomas’ miserable aside:

Then Thomas (called “Twin”) said to his fellow disciples, “Let’s go so that we may die with Him.” (John 11:16 HCSB)

Life for Lazarus means death for Jesus.

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The Yiddish Policemen's Union

Themes: Random

Over the weekend I read a novel that I’ve had my eye on for a while.
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon. It was good to curl up with a book and live in another world for a little while.
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union really is another world.
Chabon has dreamed up a universe in which, following the failure of the State of Israel in 1948, a Jewish homeland was declared in Alaska. Millions of Jews have settled into the Federal Territory of Sitka and call themselves the ‘Frozen Chosen’.
It a disconcerting read. The world is recognisably ours, the year 2007. And yet, throughout the book you keep discovering that their history isn’t quite ours. The War turned out differently, Russia turned out differently, obviously Israel turned out differently.

That’s the great strength of fiction, making the familiar strange again so that we can grasp truths usually too far within the focal range of our mental or moral vision.

It’s a detective story, and a love story, and cheesy to boot. It’s also profoundly Jewish, there are lots of Yiddish words that never get explained other than through context and usage. I love that, that’s how language works. Most of what I hear everyday is incomprehensible, and from the rest 9/10 is redundant for working out what is really going on. Why do we persist with pretending that language is a system of engineering principles?

Along with plenty of Yiddish, the novel is loaded with the great Jewish themes which fortify the most resilient narrative identity that has ever existed: Exile, Redemption, Fatherhood, Alienation. All with a classically American Jewish sense of neurotic humour.

My favourite paragraph was also the last. Surely that is how it should be. In the spirit of thongs, I reproduce it here without any expilination.

“For days Landsman has been thinking that he missed his chance with Mendel Shpilman, that in their exile in the Hotel Zamenhof without even realising, he blew his one shot at something like redemption. But there is no Messiah of Sitka. Landsman has no home, no future, no fate but Bina. The land that he and she were promised was bounded only by the fringes of their wedding canopy, by the dog-eared corners of their cards of membership in an international fraternity whose members carry their patrimony in a tote bag, their world on the tip of the tongue.”

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Welcome back…

Themes: Random

Well, once you stop blogging for a while, it becomes very hard to start again. Where do I start?
I think that was the problem I ran into in South Africa. There was so much to take in and think about each day that I could easily have spent the whole time writing and ruminating on our time there, and spent no time living and enjoying it.
We have lots of photos of South Africa though, I think that I’ll create a few galleries and post some commentary with them over the next few weeks. I would be good to share some of the images and stories with those of you we haven’t been able to see face to face.
Most of all, I’ve been wanting to write and say thank you to all those people who helped us raise funds to travel to South Africa, we’re hoping to write and thank you individually soon.

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Total Depravity

Themes: Random

I love listening to John Piper preach – the guy is completely off the leash.
I’ve started downloading his talks on Romans and listening to them on the way to College in the mornings. So you should understand my link to the following clip to be an appreciation of the humour, not a comment on the man…

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