Long-live the reading-group! Death to examinations!!

From Heinrich von Kleist, ‘On the Gradual Production of Thoughts Whilst Speaking, in Heinrich von Kleist, Selected Writings, edited and translated by David Constantine, London: J.M. Dent (1997), 405-9.

If there is something you wish to know and by meditation you cannot find it, my advice to you, my ingenious old friend, is: speak about it with the first acquaintance you encounter. He does not need to be especially perspicacious, nor do I mean that you should ask his opinion, not at all. On the contrary, you should yourself tell him at once what it is you wish to know.
…

[Using his sister as an the example of this practice]

[It is not] by skilful questioning she brings me to the crux of the matter, though that might often be the way to do it, I daresay. But because I do have some dim conception at the outset, one distantly related to what I’m looking for, if I boldly make a start with that, my mind, even as my speech proceeds, under the necessity of finding an end for that beginning, will shape my first confused idea into complete clarity so that, to my amazement, understanding is arrived at as the sentence ends. I put in a few unarticulated sounds, dwell lengthily on the conjunctions, perhaps make use of apposition where it is not necessary, and have recourse to other tricks which will spin out my speech, all to gain time for the fabrication of my idea in the workshop of the mind. And in this process nothing helps me more that if my sister makes a move suggesting she wishes to interrupt; for such an attempt from outside to wrest speech from its grasp still further excites my already hard-worked mind and, like a general when circumstances press, its powers are raised to a further degree…

It is a strangely inspiring thing to have a human face before us as we speak; and often a look announcing that a half-expressed thought is already grasped gives us its other half’s expression. [Bold is mine]

…

That a certain excitement of the intelligence is necessary even to revivify ideas we have already had is amply demonstrated whenever open-minded and knowledgeable people are being examined and without any preamble are asked such questions as: What is the state? Or: What is property? Things of that kind. If these young people had been in company and for a while the subject of conversation had been the state or property they would by a process of comparison, discrimination and summary perhaps with ease have arrived at the definition. But being wholly deprived of any such preparation they are seen to falter and only an obtuse examiner will conclude from this that they do not know. For it is not we who know things but pre-eminently a certain condition of ours which knows.

 

Only very commonplace intellects, people who yesterday learned by heart what the state is and today have forgotten it again, will have their answers pat in an examination. Indeed, there may be no worse opportunity in the world for showing oneself to advantage than a public examination. Besides the fact that it offends and wounds our sense of decency and incites us to recalcitrance to have some learned horsedealer looking into how many things we know who then, depending on whether they are five or six, either buys us or dismisses us: it is so difficult to play upon a human mind and induce it to give forth its peculiar music, it so easily under clumsy hands goes out of tune, that even the most practised connoisseeur of human beings, even he, not being acquainted with the one whose labour he is assisting at, may make mistakes. And if such young people, even the most ignorant among them, do most often achieve good marks this is because the minds of the examiners, if the examination is public, are themselves too embarrassed to deliver a true judgement. For not only do they themselves feel the indecency of the whole procedure: we should be ashamed to ask a person to tip out the contents of his purse before us, let alone his soul: but their own intelligences come under dangerous appraisal and they may count themselves lucky if they manage to leave the examination without having revealed more shameful weaknesses than the young finalist himself has whom they have been examining.

(Have you ever considered that an oyster is really a kind of elastic between two shells?)

… The bright points of stainless steel hooks and barbs prick out of the gray and rust. The brass spinners form seams of precious metals among the base. Ripe for the alchemy of the seas. These little plastic tackle boxes always come filled with compartments and into each one we place precisely the same jumble of hooksleadsinkersandspinners as all the others. Each compartment contains the chaos of the whole. Every tackle box I’ve ever seen is like this. Everything is like this. Set it aside.

I am interested primarily in the lures.
Of course.
After all, this is the Being of Fishing: the temptation of fish, the art of piscine persuasion unto death. “You will not surely die!” says the craftiest of God’s creatures to the innocent fish. “And when the fish saw that the bait was good for food and pleasing to the eye, she took some and ate it.”

The bottom of the box is filled with old lures. Scattered and discarded temptations. Hard wooden lures in lurid colours with bibs for bobbing, soft plastic lures that wriggle arousingly, lures that whir and spin: engines of discombobulation. Each attempts to embody the desires of fish. Each was purchased with hope, and cast into the waters with anticipation. Each is a salt-encrusted moment of ‘Fishing’…

(When did Man become the Tempter?)

… Fishing: an activity whose deepest phenomenological structure consists almost entirely of hoping. Standing on the edge of the world and hoping. Contemplating liminality and sublimity: land/water/sky/death. And hoping. Rising and falling with the movements of the celestial bodies. And hoping. Rhythmic, yet still. Consciousness focussed on receptivity: waiting for the little taps on the line. Morse code from beyond. Weirdly, this little school of fake fish, stranded at the bottom of a box is an archeology of human intentions and desires: formed, enacted, abandoned, mouldering.  Fishing generates a sweet awareness of power and a subconscious uneasiness. Moments, trivial to be sure, of planning, contemplation, exhilaration, frustration. Fishing is love and death, fashioned and handled with uniting desires.
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

There is a knot that every fisherman learns to tie. Seven turns, back through the eye-loop, through the loop now formed, slide down and pull tight. The blood-knot. I learned it from my father who claimed he could tie it in the dark. (Which was probably true back then). I have the same fat fingers as him: the same shaped hands that used to fascinate me when I was a child bored in church.
I never learned the blood-knot in a book. I bet hardly any fisherman ever did. We learned it as a tradition. The acts of tying, whether in the dark alone, with cold fingers and the wind peeling the skin from your ears, are enacted tradition. It ties more things together than just hook and line. Teaching it to others might be how we mend the world. Or break it.

(From, Memory, History, Forgiveness: A Dialogue Between Paul Ricoeur and Sorin Antohi, p. 20-21)

From 6pm to 8pm the Ringers would gather – I imagine from curious little offices in narrow stone buildings, places where they can still sell you insurance over a desk and keep your details in a drawer (with a curly metal key). Then the bells would begin to sound, individual drops at first, like rain on tin, dong, dong, ding, dong. Ringing them up. Hauling on them harder and harder, swinging them out of their slumber (they sleep like flying foxes, clinging to the unders of beams in the belfry). Hauling on them until they stand on their heads. Slipping into the stop position. Awake and ready, above the beam. Just poised there. Um, how to describe: upside down? Not moving, waiting. The largest weighs two tonnes. And some maniac 80 year old is right underneath hauling on its tail.

The sound in our flat was deafening. Most friday nights at 6pm found us weebling away down York St toward China-town, which is also deafening but more intimate. Everyone at home in a foreign land. And it come with bonus spring roll!

But not every Friday night:
Once I climbed the twisty stair to the bells and rang with the ringers.
Stepping into the ringing chamber was a little like  finally discovering that cicada in the grass – the one whose chirping you’ve heard every night of your summer life. You hunt him with your ears, and finally your fingers. You part the grasses. And he goes silent. You look each other, embarrassed, a weight of unexpressed intimacy, each having inhabited t’other’s imaginationing. Ringers and Rung for.

“You rung?”
“Well… [glance aside] … yes… I suppose we did? I didn’t realise we were ringing for anyone.”
“I came though, so I think you must have been. Isn’t that what ringing is about?”

The art of change ringing is peculiar to the English, and, like most English peculiarities, unintelligible to the rest of the world. To the musical Belgian, for example, it appears that the proper thing to do with a carefully tuned ring of bells is to play a tune upon it. By the English campanologist, the playing of tunes is considered a childish game, only fit for foreigners; the proper use of bells is to work out mathematical permutations and combinations. When he speaks of the music of his bells, he does not mean musician’s music – still less what the ordinary man calls music. To the ordinary man, in fact, the pealing of bells is a monotonous jangle and a nuisance, tolerable only when mitigated by remote distance and sentimental association. The change-ringer does, indeed, distinguish musical differences between one method of producing his permutations and another; he avers, for instance, that where the hinder bells run 7,5,6, or 5,6,7, or , 5,7,6, the music is always prettier, and can detect and approve, where they occur, the consecutive fifths of Tittums and the cascading thirds of the Queen’s change. But what he really means is, that by the English method of ringing with rope and wheel, each several bell gives forth her fullest and noblest note. His passion – and it gives a passion – find its satisfaction in mathematical completeness and mechanical perfection, and as his bell weaves her way rhythmically up from lead to hinder place and down again, he is filled with the solemn intoxication that comes of intricate ritual faultlessly performed.

(Dorothy L. Sayers, The Nine Tailors, 25).

The Ringers showed me something they were working on: a special peal to commemorate the 75th Anniversary of the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. [The bridge lives just up the road; its on-ramps, like arms, embrace the Bell tower.] Weeks later I was at home while they rung it. It went for hours, maybe 5? There was nothing even remotely resembling a melody. But I knew its genius: the written notation for the changes. The bell ‘music’, as manifested on the page, was shaped like a coat-hanger, or a Harbour Bridge…
Are you marvelling?
And maybe 9 people in the world knew this?
Everyone else just had to put up with the insane racket.

The bells were worshipping the Bridge.
It’s just that the language of bells is inscrutable.
As is the language of cicadas.
Except to lady cicadas
(I assume).

The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky proclaims the work of His hands. Day after day they pour out speech; night after night they communicate knowledge. There is no speech; there are no words; their voice is not heard. Their message has gone out to all the earth, and their words to the ends of the world.

(Psalms 19:1–4 HCSB)

Plays the strange music of the world:
in the plenitude of its intelligibility, found inscrutable.
Heard and not heard. Seen and unseen.
Or rather, heard and not understood, seen and unrecognised.
Hence, the slow-shaking incomprehension of the Universe
when addressed with that fundamental human question:

Why?

Image by DeusXFlorida

And the hand that did it rises trembling.
And the eyes rise trembling to behold it
To meet their accuser’s eyes wide. And trembling.

It was a rough deed, done with razorrrs
Watched with glass, that razor-sharpt eye
Done in a cold light, boding unforgiveness

We reach, each for the others face,
To sand the rough lines.
But stand, unfeeling him, and naked.

And ashamed, pupils pinpricks like conscience
Wide, whites-wide, shock of eyes
Track the reach for grace.

But there is none.
For them that slayed the Highwayman.

I. The Highwayman was the name for my beard. It was a good beard, about 3 months old, but bushy and red: the kind of beard that makes a man feel like he’s in the middle of something. The Highwayman was intended to be a grand project; a once-in-a-life-time snatch at hirsute glory. I was waiting ’til I could square cut him across my neckline, like a Victorian Bushranger. I’m grieving. I cut him off in front of the mirror on the weekend.

II. An Anglican Divine of Moore Theological College once called the Highwayman, “One of the World’s Great Beards”. I kid you not. Verbatim. He whispered it to me last week in the middle of a lecture on Emotions. I was moved. Although, on reflection I think it is deeply unfair to the present Archbishop of Canterbury. But, seriously, what did you expect at Moore College?

III. There is a lot of masculine identity bundled up with facial hair. I hadn’t realised this so intensely until the past few days. The Highwayman was a matter of comment for most of his life, his absence also was not without its pontificators. Blokes give other blokes a hard time about their lack of beard-growing prowess; and the beardless die a little inside. I once watched a piece of performance art in a gallery in Queensland where a bloke videoed himself drawing all over his face in texta. Again, I’m not kidding. It was strangely enthralling. Making a point about hair and manliness.

V. It was painful to look at myself in the mirror after the Highwayman went down. Hair shapes the face. I needed to get to know myself again. I should have expected this, I’ve been wearing glasses since I was a little kid. Glasses become a part of your identity. I don’t think I could stop wearing them now, even if my eyes were suddenly 20/20. It would be too much like a unilateral re-legislation of my identity. These things require negotiation. The swipe of a razor blade is too sudden.
But sometimes things just end suddenly; with a jerk. Such is life.

VI. It’s hard work growing a beard:
Firstly, it’s just basically uncomfortable.
Secondly, one must cultivate the moral fortitude to bear up under the comments and glances of the full gamut of society: from mates to random blokes. And women always have opinions, which they are willing to share…
But ultimately, one must persuade the Mrs.
It was the Mrs what done for the Highwayman.
My Delilah.

THE PREACHER’S PRAYER

LORD, when my heart is slow to feel,
And when my lips are slow to speak,
And yet my heart still Thee doth seek,
And yet my lips would Thee reveal;

 

Then send Thy gracious Spirit, Lord,
That He may my dull heart inspire,
And touch my lips with heavenly fire,
So shall I hear and speak Thy word.

 

And other hearts with love will glow,
And other lips Thy word proclaim,
So shall we glorify Thy Name,
And Heaven’s light shine on Earth below.

– William Saumarez Smith

I randomly started reading a book of poems today by William Saumarez Smith (1836 – 1909), published and edited 100 years ago (1911) by his sisters. The book has only ever had that one edition. As far as I can tell, Saumarez isn’t a particularly well known figure (even in Sydney), and the poetry isn’t spectacular, but as I read his poems and the short account of his life at the beginning of the book, I got a little teary.

William Saumarez Smith was Bishop (later Archbishop) of Sydney from 1890-1913. He died of a brain haemorrhage in his office – died with his boots on, as they say – the first Archbishop of Sydney to be buried in Australia. His poems are a little window into the world of a man who walked humbly and simply with his God. He loved God.

He also clearly loved the people around him. Most of these poems were written as little notes to friends, family, and acquaintances. There are many about saying ‘farewell’ to family in England; a few for his daughter; two for his grandson. His life wasn’t easy. He spent time as a missionary in India, had eight children, and his wife passed away shortly before they were to leave England for Australia in 1890. He came anyway.

As I said, it isn’t all great poetry, but it is the affective life of a godly man. I was humbled and encouraged. It touched me that his little notes have made their way down the generations and are still quietly glorifying God.

Actually, I was twice blessed today. Reading the poems of William Saumarez Smith was the second time I shared communion with the everyday saints, got to watch – just a little awestruck – at the resurrection life peaking out like the fingernail of a sunrise at Easter.

And we also bless thy holy Name for all thy servants departed this life in thy faith and fear; beseeching thee to give us grace so to follow their good examples, that with them we may be partakers of thy heavenly kingdom. Grant this, O Father, for Jesus Christ’s sake, our only Mediator and Advocate. Amen.

William Saumarez Smith, Capernaum and Other Poems, London: Elliot Stock, 1911.

Extract from the ‘Memoir’

As to his private life, “he lived much in his Bible,” said one who knew him, ” no one could go into his study and see the ‘stand up’ desk covered with his Bibles, authorized, revised, Hebrew, etc., without perceiving his life-long devotion to the written word.” Many will recall how beautifully he read the Lessons in the Cathedral and other churches.

In the strenuous life of a Bishop, times of relaxation were rare, but now and then he would take part of a day off to watch some important cricket match, with keen enjoyment.

His love for reading was intense, and it was wonderful how in his crowded life he managed to devour some of the books and writings of the day. How reading tempted him may be gleaned from his joke about himself that he was not to be trusted in a bookshop for fear of ” the indulgence of buying.” Languages also interested him greatly, and he could read eight or nine. On one occasion at the Baptism of some Chinese converts at the Cathedral, having specially learnt the words, he was able to baptize them in their own language.

[This train of thought begins here and it part of a series I've been working on since last year. You can find earlier articles by searching for the theme 'friends']

The different-ness of friends can be seen more subtly when we seek to locate the character of biblical-canonical friendships against a broader background of biblical relations. The drama of the Old Testament takes place among a set of characters who are bound together, not by an act of originative free association, but as a family. Israel was begotten, not made. Early in the story, as the plot thickens, so does the blood. Over time the family becomes greatly extended, internecine conflicts erupt, the extended family becomes the dispersed family. But always with the memory that Israel is a family: with all the pre-structured obligations and responsibilities invoked by kin. When the biblical authors need to characterise the relationship of biblical characters, whether to lament or berate, enjoin or celebrate, they find brothers. The usage flows on into the New Testament, the shared participation in the ‘family of Abraham’ becoming one of the key sources (along with the Fatherhood of God) for the Christian practice of referring to co-religionists as ‘brother’ or ‘sister’.

To characterise a relationship as filial is to immediately imply mutuality, that the relationship has a symmetry. Either party could rightly be called the subject of the predicate ‘is my brother/sister’.¹ The biblical-canonical tradition also has plenty to say about other non-mutual, asymmetric relations like master/slave, father/son, etc. But if we consider the biblical-canonical descriptions of friendship, we find that they don’t map easily onto this taxonomy of mutual/non-mutual relations. Biblical-canonical friendship is capable of being quasi-mutual. Clearly, two men (or women?) are envisaged as being able to mutually address each other as ‘friend’. But in the outstanding narrative descriptions of friendship there is a significant reticence to predicate the relation mutually. Abraham is God’s ‘friend’, but the usage is never reversed: God is never Abraham’s friend. We find the same thing with Jesus and his disciples: we do not hear the words, ‘I am your friend, if you do what I command.’ It’s very safe to assume that in both these cases, this subtle lack of mutuality is due to the maximal ontological difference between the parties. As a result, it would be risky to apply this lack of mutuality straightforwardly to human/human friendships. But if it is fair to characterise these relationships as ‘friendship’, and the biblical authors press us in this direction, then our concept of friendship must expand to include a level of difference, of inequality between the friends, that could even result in friendship being asymmetrical, i.e., not having precisely the same quality as it flows from one party to the other.²

Could it even involve obedience?

Footnotes
1. It’s probably easier to see what I mean if we contrast mutual with asymmetric relations.  A master/servant relation is asymmetric: the master and the servant do not share the same relation to each other. A master and servant cannot change places without changing their relationship. A ‘brother’ or ‘neighbour’ relationship is one in which the parties are equally/mutually ‘brother’ or ‘neighbour’ to each other. This point shouldn’t be confused with the fact that in both asymmetric and mutual relations the parties can be mutually constitutive of each other, i.e., one cannot be ‘master’ without a servant, nor ‘brother’ without a brother.

↑
2. We must be careful not to overstate our claim at this point. Not every friendship must be founded upon the kind of radical difference presupposed by the Creator/creature divide, but the biblical-canonical history pushes us to recognise that equality, which forms the root of the pathological narcissism Derrida detects in the Western canonical concept – cannot be made an essential quality of friendship.↑

1. Not the ‘approximate’, although it is worthy in its way. It is an attribute of God to be proximate to all and thus (a)proximate to human understanding. There are pleasant idle hours to spend in contemplation of the alpha privative. (Particularly one as odd as the ‘a’ in approximate). I nod in friendly estimation toward the Negative Theologian. But the via negativa is hardly a road, more of a fence to keep you on the road. We must journey further on the Way who proceeds.

2. And I challenge anyone to question my commitment to the ‘farther off’. Many of the finest things are farther off, don’t you think? Mountain ranges are an obvious case. In fact a double case: fine to behold from afar, and when you’re perched on the crest, making far-off things fine.
I long for the Delectable Mountains, to be shepherded in Immanuel’s Land; for the glimpse from Mt Clear of the gates of the Celestial City. I am tortured with the thought that perhaps they will always be farther off.

I lift up my eyes to the mountains—
where does my help come from?

Psalm 121:1

This, of course, is the dangerous ambivalence of the ‘farther off’. It can be constantly removing itself to the horizon. Perhaps because something in the human heart was created for visions, for anticipation and expectation, the ‘farther off’ is the most powerful of the modern techniques of power. Some things that appear farther off are not really there at all, no matter how fast you run. No trophy, no flowers, no flashbulbs, no line. The desire for the ‘farther off’ when undisciplined, when cultivated without wisdom or direction, flowers into an infinite dissatisfaction whose-not-entirely-approximate name is Hell.

The true lover of the ‘farther off’ engages a double aesthetic: on the one hand, a disciplined appreciation that somethings are fine simply because they are distant; and therefore one must keep one’s proper distance to love them truly. On the other, acknowledging that there is a ‘farther off’ which beckons us come closer: its name is ‘promise’. The true lover of the ‘farther off’ engages in this aesthetic discipline: cultivating joy, wonder, reverence, sublimity at the contemplation of the essentially ‘father off’; and yearning to come closer to the promised. (the cultivation of this discernment in human affairs is one of the true uses of philosophy, even of the post-modern hermeneutic of suspicion). This double aesthetic is the heart of Christian worship: it is its dynamism and transcendence; it is what makes it interesting for all eternity. It is the double aesthetic of the resurrection: the place where the true lover of the ‘farther off’ learns to cultivate discernment, to learn what it is that beckons us closer, and what demands that we remain distant. It is the double aesthetic of the Trinity and Incarnation. It is the character of God.

3. I rest my defence of the defence.

In defence of the proximate:

The proximate is neither approximate, nor farther off, nor promise.
It is what we must be in order to love them truly.

You and me and the friend
who draws near in faith.

“And they said one to another,
Did not our heart burn within us,
while he talked with us by the way.” (Luke 24:32 KJV)

I rest my defence.

(for Emma on her 30th Birthday)

Various Ways: God to prophet – prophet to God – God to people via prophet – prophet to people commenting on above – people to God via prophet – people to prophet commenting on above. And then all of the above performed while laying on your right side for a couple of years, cooking your food with excrement. Or doing a chicken dance.

Now the author of Hebrews adds another dimension to this choir of scriptural voices: God addresses his eternal Son in the words of Scripture.

Check out the chain of Old Testament quotations running from v.5 – v. 13. In quick succession the author gives us a list of instances when God could have (but didn’t) speak to angels in the words of Scripture: For to which of the angels did God ever say... [and repeated] To which of the angels did God ever say (Hebrews 1:5, 13 NIV11). And God certainly speaks about the angels in the words of scripture: In speaking of the angels he says… (Hebrews 1:7 NIV11) But this is just teasing. Look at the whole of verse 5 and let the implications of who God isn’t talking to really sink in:

For to which of the angels did He ever say,

“You are My Son; today I have become Your Father,”

or again,

“I will be His Father, and He will be My Son?”

When He again brings His firstborn into the world, He says,

“And all God’s angels must worship Him.”

And about the angels He says:

“He makes His angels winds, and His servants a fiery flame,”

but to the Son:

“Your throne, God, is forever and ever, and the scepter of Your kingdom is a scepter of justice. You have loved righteousness and hated lawlessness; this is why God, Your God, has anointed You with the oil of joy rather than Your companions.”

 And:

“In the beginning, Lord, You established the earth, and the heavens are the works of Your hands; they will perish, but You remain. They will all wear out like clothing; You will roll them up like a cloak, and they will be changed like a robe. But You are the same, and Your years will never end.”  (Hebrews 1:5–12 HCSB)

He isn’t talking to the angels because he is talking to his eternal Son.

The texts are presented with an extraordinary rhetorical flourish: the author seems to suggest that God is speaking these words directly to the Son at the same time as the text being read to the congregation. God speaks as the text is read. The words addressed in this letter to human ears, addressed at this moment by a human voice, are the words of the Father addressing the Son.  The moment of the ascension, when the words which had been applied to the Davidic Kings find their true referent in the King of Kings, that moment is made present to those assembled to hear the Letter read. God speaks and re-speaks those words, testifying again that Jesus is Lord, Creator (v. 10), Eternal (v.11-12) and God (θεος v8).

Who speaks in Scripture? The Father speaks about the Son, to the Son, for a human audience to hear and worship.

And yet, all the quotes above, words which the author of Hebrews explicitly attributes to God, come from the book of Psalms where their original setting is clearly on the lips of a human worshipper speaking them to God in praise (for his deeds).

We could never really responsibly undertake this task of understanding on our own. Fortunately we’re not. There has been brilliant work done, particularly in the last 50 years, on understanding the extra-biblical Jewish context into which Jesus spoke and acted. But this extra-biblical material (useful as it might be) pales alongside the remarkable treasure of the four-fold Gospel. In these strange, overlapping, dependent-yet-having-a-mind-of-their-own accounts, we get a narrative of Jesus’ life/death/resurrection/ascension that is embedded into an unsurpassed interpretation of how Jesus’ life fulfils and applies the Old Testament. Don’t miss this: each of the four Gospel writers takes the application of the Old Testament to the life-work of Jesus as a major aim of their writing. And yet they all approach the task slightly differently. There is so much to be gained in carefully reading the Gospels as an unparalleled school for the content and method of Old Testament application. Ultimately they are able to do this because the Gospels are the genuine apostolic voice, the words of those who had their minds opened to understand the Scriptures (Luke 24:44-45) by the one who himself exegetes God (John 1:18).

Check out Luke in all his sneaky goodness, using an Old Testament phrase from Isaiah to characterise the two elderly ‘waiters’ at the Temple. How do you think Luke applied Isaiah 52:9? But look at how he applies it, just slips it in there in passing… wild stuff:

There was a man in Jerusalem whose name was Simeon. This man was righteous and devout, looking forward to Israel’s consolation, and the Holy Spirit was on him. (Luke 2:25 HCSB)

 

At that very moment, she [Anna] came up and began to thank God and to speak about Him to all who were looking forward to the redemptionof Jerusalem. (Luke 2:38 HCSB)

 

Be joyful, rejoice together, you ruins of Jerusalem! For the LORD has comforted [consoled] His people; He has redeemed Jerusalem. (Isaiah 52:9 HCSB)

But the New Testament gives us a further interpretive context for understanding the Old Testament: the life and ‘reading-together’ of the first Christians. The early church was predominately Jewish and familiar with the Old Testament. As such, it was constantly engaged in reflecting on the significance of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection for understanding the history of God’s love and purposes for Israel, and in teaching and defending this application of the Old Testament. Most of the sermons in Acts follow this model, Stephen’s martyrdom sermon being a particularly shining example. The Book of Hebrews is an extended application of the Old Testament to the work of Christ and the life of the Church. It’s a major theme of Romans, Galatians, Ephesians. It’s even there in subtle ways as Paul structures and argues his way through the Letter to the Corinthians.

The New Testament age is also the ‘age’ to which we belong. We live in the light of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection while we await the final unveiling of his reign. In theological terms, the canonical context of the New Testament churches is our context. These are applications tailor-made for us.

I realise that much more could be said about how canonical interpretive contexts shape our Old Testament applications. If you’re really desperate to know what to do with Baalam’s Ass, simply being told to read more Bible might be cold comfort. But strangely it is a comfort. Because when you read the Bible you’re not reading it alone, you’re reading it as part of a fellowship. And this fellowship is itself written into the text and invites you to join. The Bible is an inviting book. And you’re always reading with the family.

The glorious company of the Apostles : praise thee.
The goodly fellowship of the Prophets : praise thee.
The noble army of Martyrs : praise thee.
The holy Church throughout all the world :
doth acknowledge thee