Living Wittily

1. Nahum Unplugged: Spending Time Understanding a Discomfiting Prophet.

Whether it's the first or one hundredth reading of Nahum, it's hard to make a constructive alignment between that prophet of vengeance and violence, and the Sermon on the Mount. And they both sit between the covers of the Bible. I've never liked Nahum. To be honest, I've never studied this angry prophet with anything like the care and humility that I bring to Isaiah, Amos and Micah; even Ezekiel and Jeremiah seem to have more to offer than rage and poetic genius dedicated to gloating.

So, recently I have read Nahum again, and again...This time I'm trying to listen to what he says and pay attention to what he writes. Listening to the text gets harder as you get older, I find! Because familiarity breeds assumptions, often unexamined assumptions. For example, having read it those first times, I concluded it was about vengeance, and vengefulness as a settled disposition is a sub-Christian and unethical mindset. Consequently, it seemed like a good hermeneutical move to put this prophecy into quarantine where it can't infect essential Christian values of peace-making, forgiveness, and love of enemy.

Which is the old trick of setting the Old Testament God against the New Testament revelation of God in Christ, and thereby avoiding the discomfort and theological potency of competing voices within the Bible. But as I've read Nahum recently, I've also re-read another prophet for whom I have much more time - Jonah. Mind you, Jonah too was out for vengeance, so much so that he managed to be offended by God's mercy and opposed to God's steadfast and faithful love in forgiving those who repent. 

What makes Jonah more palatable is that vengefulness, the desire to see retribution and justice through punishment, is finally and at the last moment thwarted by God's steadfast refusal to go back on his promise of forgiveness to those who truly repent. And, of course, both Nahum and Jonah have Nineveh in their sights. For those who suffered under the excessive cruelty and merciless power of Nineveh, that city was the focus of their greatest fears and most intense hatred. Those who suffered most at Nineveh's hands prayed to see it destroyed, dreamed of witnessing its violation and humiliation, and wanted to gloat over the impotence of mighty Nineveh before the unstoppable judgement of Israel's Almighty omnipotent God.

That longing for a changed world where the oppressor is oppressed, where the practitioners of cruelty experience some of the torture and trauma of the victims, is a deeply human form of psychological survival. In recent years trauma studies have begun to be used as an hermeneutical key to unlock the nature and motivation behind texts of terror, trauma, lament, grief and rage. The application of trauma studies to Lamentations and Jeremiah has opened up new ways of reading lament and texts of judgement as they issued from the experiences of the Exile, and the people's lived horror of suffering, loss, forced migration, cultural dislocation, and religious failure and humiliation.

Against such a background, and allowing for Nahum being written before the final Fall of Jerusalem, the end of the Judaean state in 587BCE and subsequent Babylonian exile of the people, this too is a text written out of trauma and the threat to the religious survival of a people. The book is unabashed in its language. The poetic skill of Nahum is in full flow, using a conveyor belt of fear-inspiring metaphors and a pervasive tone of joyous gloating over Nineveh getting its come-uppance with a vengeance! There is mockery and relief, rage and laughter, at long-remembered grievances and concentrated hatred of Assyria for unforgivable atrocities. The fall of Nineveh in 612 BCE was cause for unrestrained celebration by Assyria's conquered vassal states. The dam that had held back hatred and grief, rage and despair, collapsed under the weight of historical circumstance engineered by the God of Israel, vindicating the religious faith of an entire people disillusioned by the long nightmare that was Nineveh. But even in their worst nightmares, they had refused to disaffiliate from the Covenant God. No wonder what we get in this short prophetic book is Nahum unplugged.

But what to do with such a text of terror aimed at enemies who deserve all they get? How as a 21st Century Christian do I read Nahum and find some valid and viable application to where our world now stands? Why do we feel it necessary to harmonise the diversity of voices and biblical theologies that form our canon of Scripture? Is there an important place for those biblical voices that cry out in complaint and express longing for freedom, justice and the right to live without fear of oppression, suffering and the whim of the powerful? If so, have we any right to sanitise, or quarantine those voices born out of pain and sufferings borne, that many of us will never know in our own so limited and protected experience of life in a world broken, and we hope not beyond repair.

Over the next few weeks I'll try to work some of that out, and report back here when there's more to say.   

Thomas Merton on Doing What We Do Because It Matters.

Thomas Merton on the hard work of the vocation of peacemaker. The words apply to any vocation that calls for human caring, from pastoral ministry to peace-making, from social care to social justice, from priesthood to foodbanks, and from counselling to any deep accompanying of friendship:

 

"Do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort of work you are taking on...you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect.

 

As you get used to this idea you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself.

 

And there too a great deal has to be gone through, as gradually you struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people...In the end it is the reality of personal relationships that saves everything."

 

That kind of writing is why I still read Merton.

Fragments of Hope from Denise Levertov.

Now here's a thing. Some time last year I went looking for this wee book. It's a special little thing, fewer than 70 small pages, less than 30 pages. But I've read it and re-read it. I know some of the poems by heart. But could I find it?

Earlier this year I renovated the study and took every book out of it, and still no sign of Levertov's little gem of a book.

Then, just over a week ago I went to the University Library for the first time in over a year. I took out my wee satchel thing I use for such visits, and in one of the zip pockets there was my wee book!
Today looking for something else by Levertov there are copies of this 70 page book for £41.83 on Amazon - glad I found my copy!

Here is one of her finest poems from the volume:

For the New Year, 1981

by Denise Levertov

I have a small grain of hope–

one small crystal that gleams
clear colours out of transparency.

I need more.

I break off a fragment
to send to you.

Please take
this grain of a grain of hope
so that mine won’t shrink.

Please share your fragment
so that yours will grow.

Only so, by division,
will hope increase,

like a clump of irises, which will cease to flower
unless you distribute
the clustered roots, unlikely source–
clumsy and earth-covered–
of grace. 

A Brief Review of an Excellent Monograph

Just finished this as the early morning read. For a while now I read an essay or chapter first thing; I've always been a morning person.

 

This study by Nijay Gupta is much needed exercise in clarification and in bringing ideas into a creative conversation. On a smaller scale, but as a no less important work of exegetical and theological research and reflection, Gupta has done for 'Faith', some of what Barclay has done for 'Grace' as contested but key terms in Pauline discourse.

 

Gupta explores the use of the word family in the surrounding Jewish and non-Jewish culture, in the Gospels, and then in Paul. The result is a careful gathering and sifting of early Christian usage, and especially in the letters of Paul.

 

"Faithfulness of Christ and faith in Christ are not equal, but neither do they serve as opposites whereby one cancels out or substitutes for the other." (page 229) "Luther talked about faith as tethering of self to Christ through belief and trust." (Page 227)

 

I have a lot of such notes and extracts I want to hold on to, and examine more closely But as a sustained argument, this is a book rich in ideas, underpinned by even-handed research, and offering some positive alternatives to the defensive tactics of some scholars' who reduce theological and exegetical disagreements to zero sum games.

 

Gupta concludes that Paul's use of faith language can be translated and thus understood in several ways: Faith is more than but not less than belief - obeying faith, believing faith, trusting faith - and each of these implied in the call of God to a life of faithfully following after Jesus. I am much more comfortable with Gupta's more thickly textured approach to translation in which there is flexibility governed by context, and consequently a more nuanced and sympathetic understanding of what Paul was writing and saying when he uses the terms faith and belief.