Of Christ and Nephilim: Westhelle's Hybridity as Choratic Matrix

Peace, all! Here's a little section titled, "Of Christ and Nephilim: Westhelle's Hybridity as Choratic Matrix," taken from An Unpromising Hope. Maybe a little weird. Maybe useful for Advent. 

So: hope you love it. 

Peace. 

Tom

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Of Christ and Nephilim: Westhelle's Hybridity as Choratic Matrix

For Westhelle, hybridity is also of great Christological import. Indeed, for Westhelle, Christ Christself is hybridical. So Christ is also by nature a transgression. That is, Christ transgresses simply by Christ being Christ. In the messiah, there is a crossing, a blending, an impurity according to hegemonic purity codes that legislate for differences to be separated and kept apart. For Westhelle, this is what Chalcedon holds to be at the very core of the Christian faith and salvation (Christ). Christ, in whom Christians claim the salvific, is fully human and fully divine. A hybrid! A transgression! How are we to speak of this?

Westhelle notes that according to some Talmudic traditions, rather than the stories of the first humans in Genesis, the story of the Nephilim in the same book would be better described by what the post-Augustinian West has come to refer to as the Fall. In the story, the sons of gods visit earth so as to come into (בּוֹא) the daughters of men, creating "the giants/mighty ones of old" (גִּבּוֹר) (Gen 6:4). Such transgression of worlds, argues Westhelle, according to this tradition, could result in no imagined good. And so, via the crossing (the chōra crossed between the sons of the gods and the daughters of men that lead to a hybrid or "third" kind of being), something of a curse would ensue—a flood, a reset button, after which the remaining animals and the people would re-conform to their natural and normal named and pure states. The crossing led to a certain kind of damnation (drowning) and a certain kind of salvation (starting creation anew).

It is apparent that the condemnative tradition, even where it clings to or emphasizes the salvific which is allegedly delivered by God to Noah and his family, fails to emphasize that Adam was charged with the naming in the first place (Gen 2:20). Why is this detail important? Names help us to call one another. As such, they may serve as a nonviolent way to identify and communicate with one another. Yet one possible result of naming is that the body may become imprisoned by the name. The body (and the being) becomes that which it is called. The name becomes a prison. Como se llama? "What are you called?" Tell me what you are called so that I can know who you are, so that I know where to place you in my memory and in my charts and in society.

If a name in this way becomes a restricting label (or a label becomes one's name as in the case of scientific sight), a category out of which one may not move, then the name/label acts as a holding cell, a barrier to becoming. A name is a barrier, a limit imposed on us, that may inhibit us from moving into choratic realms of metanoietic possibility. Understanding the story of the Nephilim (and subsequent flood) as a return of earth's creatures to their proper places/names/categories, misses the point. Adam imposed names (not God). In so doing, he bound himself and the other creatures to a delimited/defined/confined existence. Here is another kind of alienating Fall.

As the condemnatory/soteriological lens misses the mark, for Westhelle, hybridity and the choratic themselves become clarifying lenses with which to better view this story. This lens, coupled with an insight from Matthew and Luke, offers us a new vision. For Westhelle, where the space of the crossing/mixing was seen as a sort of Fall to Talmudic interpreters, so it is in a similar mixing/transgression of the Holy Spirit and another daughter of humans that God is born human, and at the same time a human, called by the name Mary, becomes theotokos.

Here is what we uncover with a choratic/hybridical/eschatological lens: that mixing which was imagined as leading only to the terror of a flood (condemnation and death) is seen by the gospel writers as precisely that which gives birth to human salvation by the action of God. That is, the mixing itself—the hybridical and choratic space of crossing (and its fruits)—is the matrix through which salvation and damnation both appear to lie nearby and at hand. As such, the space is apocalyptic.

And this is the apocalypse: in the crossing, in our exposure, in rising through a barrier, we might find our life's final end and oblivion. In the crossing, we might find born something of life made new. In hybridity, in the transgression of delineations and dividing lines (including those that separate our bodies, our skin) there is a possibility that something of God is revealed. There, at the eschaton, among the eschatoi in Bethlehem, God passes through the chōra, from Mary's womb into the stable's midnight light. A transgression from the start, there God is targeted by the normalizing violence of the king (Matt 2:7–12).

There, in the crossing, in the eschata, in choratic space between places, we ourselves may come upon junkyards and graveyards, and perhaps even the one we once loved deeply, our rock and our redeemer, our cornerstone, now rejected, now in prison, now thirsty, now hung violently from wooden beam.

~Thomas R Gaulke, An Unpromising Hope (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2021). 

Advent Hope (& Thank You, We Love You, Chicago)

 Peace, all. A quick reflection for y’all this AM. Incomplete. And hopefully worth a read and some musing :) Peace. ~Tom

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“What’s insane is not [the bird’s] painful, clumsy, efforts to fly, but rather the hand that broke its wings.” - Rubem Alves, Tomorrow’s Child (1972)

Advent (Hope Against Hope)

For liturgical Christians, the season of Advent is around the corner–a season in which we sing and speak of and (at our best) summon something of hope. Hunger pangs of the heart. These we illustrate. With the colors of the night sky. Wreaths of green. Little candles pink and purple and blue. Sparks before the warmth. Of a sunrise that, fingers crossed, might be about to come. A rebellion against the cold. As best we can. From where we are. 

Hope has been an obsession of mine for decades. Especially, I’ve been drawn to agnostic hoping. That is: hope that is not so sure and not so certain at all. “A pessimism of the intellect and an optimism of the will,” as Gramsci was known to say. No promises here, but to heck with so much of what is. And: here’s to the Not Yet (as Ernst Bloch would call it). 

Faith, for me, in this frame, has been something like: the discipline of stoking a desire for the Not Yet. For not settling. For not letting an abusive world domesticate or slap us into submission. 

Such faith can be nurtured in what Rubem Alves has called “aperitif communities.” Not appetizer communities. We don’t want to be full on those bread sticks when the spaghetti arrives. Rather aperitif. A forestaste before a meal. A “sup” that makes us not full but hungrier. 

Sassy Faith

I was recently in a meeting in which the group was asked about “paths of faith that have inspired us.” I did not offer an answer at the moment. But my mind went immediately to an essay by Womanist theologian M. Shawn Copeland. One that has influenced my sense of hope and faith since it was assigned to us as reading my Dr. Linda Thomas at LSTC so many years ago. 

Dr. Copeland talks about this: 

Known commonly as the sassy tree, it is said that tea made from the bark of the West African ordeal tree was once used when putting people on trial. 

Specifically, the tea from the tree was used by people in power to “determine” whether or not a person was a witch. Meaning: whether or not someone practiced magic that was un-sanctioned by those “in charge.” 

In front of an angry and accusing mob, an accused person would be forced to drink the tea from the sassywood. If she died as a result, well then clearly (!) she must have been a witch! If not (if somehow the poison did not kill here) allegedly she was then free to go. 

The word sass arrived in the Americas and in the Caribbean, it is believed, in the 1600s. It was carried in the language and the hearts of people who were kidnapped and enslaved by the “company” and colonial powers. Here, the word took on a slightly different meaning. Folks also started using it as an adverb. 

That is: to act sassy, to be sassy, or to “sass back,” but also to “have sass” or “demonstrate sass,” on a new continent and in a new context of oppression, came also to mean “giving the master a taste of his own medicine,” or:

“Giving the oppressor a taste of his own poison.” 

According to Copeland, sassiness included acts suchs as: not taking abuse as it was offered by one’s “master;” talking back when it was not one’s right or privilege even to speak (but you did it anyhow); standing up against advances (including sexual advanaces) that, though they were ‘legal,’ were certainly not acceptable; and so on. Sassing back. Amen? 

In so doing, Copeland observes, folks like Harriet Jacobs, Mary Prince, Old Elizabeth, Sojourner Truth, and so many others were able to do something incredibly important. 

In the real chains and bonds of a dehumanizing system in a dehumanizing society, one that would prefer to see them only as property, through sass, these women were (nonetheless) able to assert their humanity. Said again: to sass-back (to resist–even if only for a moment) was humanizing. 

Whatever aggression or manipulations were being perpetrated, sass offered an interjection. A holy “No!” when a slaveholder was used only to YES. As it did (again even if only for a moment) it disrupted the power dynamic that allowed for and facilitated abuse. Sass did not change the whole system. Dammit. But it did offer a pause, an interruption, and an interjection that disrupted the imbalance. 

For the moment, the scales tipped. The valleys were lifted. The proud brought down from their thrones. 

Incomplete. Fleeting. But a foretaste. An outburst of desire for the Not Yet that is, in itself, a renunciation of bondage and a testimony of the last-becoming-first and much-prayed-for Reign of Love.

Fleeting. But still metabolized. An aperitif. God. Does it make you hungry? 

Hope in Hopeless Times

In the worlds I tend to inhabit these days, we talk about being strategic. How will we instigate real change? What tension will lead to actual turning? These are important questions, and keep us from running in circles and running out of energy right before we might need it the most. 

And Yet, in the quote from Alves above (about the bird not being insane for trying to fly–but only the hand that broke its wing being insane), there is a reminder for us that faith is not only nurtured by the pragmatic. The pragmatic does not always stoke in us that hunger of the heart, the longing, the optimism if the will, the discipline of faith that stokes forward-facing desire and longing. 

Beyond pragmatics, there exists in acts that might be described as “sassy”–acts that provide an interruption and a re-framing, a renunciation of what is and glimpse of the lowly exalted… 

Beyond pragmatic acts, there is something of desire shot-through, of hope, of hunger, of what we have sometimes called the “prophetic,” of the Spirt and of fire for the Not Yet, in the confrontation of abusive power (whatever the outcome). 

For in that confrontation, we receive something of a delicious, hunger-inducing drink. 

Chicago

So, to return to that question from that meeting: what paths of faith have inspired/stoked/influenced [us] lately? 

My answer is this: 

I think, at least for those of us who long in similar directions for Love to Reign and the lowly to rise up, little (nearby) has been as inspiring and hunger-for-justice-inducing as witnessing our beloveds in Chicago returning day after day in defiance to the crucifying powers who govern, fund, and empower ICE. 

My friends, my siblings, I love you, we love you. This fascism rising around us can seem to be a hopeless situation. Demonstrations may seem futile, the pain not worth it. And Yet, each act of resistance we see from afar is a testimony for us: insane is the hand who inflicts abduction, imprisonment, and abuse. And delicious is the world where the powers who inflict these things are resisted, disrupted, and ultimately overcome. 

Friends, siblings in Struggle, thank you for lighting the way for the Sun. Thank you for harkening the Dawn. Your work is beautiful. It moves us. It is the path, the Way, for the arrival of justice and peace and love. 

May we all walk in hope in such ways where we are, when we are, and with whatever it is that we’ve got.

Reign of Terror | Reign of Love | Random Reflection on ICE in Chicago

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For 20 years I lived in Chicago. I was called to the Bridgeport neighborhood and to the campuses in the South Looop, and in the end to Cicero. 

Whatever tragedies took place among us, whatever bodies in Chicago I personally marked with the cross of christ and chrism holding fast to the promise that neither life nor death can separate us from the Crucified and Resurrected One’s Love; whatever blunts lit mourning, tossed in with roses; tequila or holy water poured whatever grandmothers’ tears shed as we lowered a casket into the earth; never once did that mourning turn into terror the way it does when I see images of masked ICE agents sporting rifles, tear-gas and “pepper ball” guns. 

I have friends (perhaps mostly family members) who feel safe when they see images of masked men. Too much Batman and Lone Ranger for them? 

If I am being honest: this morning, I have no idea how to help them understand the feeling of nausea and mourning that wells up in me when I see the same images. I do not know how to help them feel the tension that overtakes my neck and back, how my toes curl. My legs kick unintentionally. My teeth grind. I’m no longer sure how to invite them into empathy by describing the pain and terror these tactics induce –if not for the actual targets of this white supremacist regime (those who actually really suffer) at least for me, because: I used to think that somehow (in that way) I could serve as a bridge; that I could communicate something to folks “over there” outside of the complexity and more into the images and story “as seen on TV.” And I hoped that that could make a difference. Perhaps in injecting some drops of compassion or “otherness” into their lives, I thought, there might be a chance that it’d “trickle up” or even down to those within their sphere. Maybe love would shatter even the most hardened heart. And if I’m being honest, well, sometimes it did. 

But this is heavy. And I’m not even sure why I’m sharing this this morning. But I guess I’m hoping that my perspective might speak to someone. 

⅔ of the “Alligator Alcatraz” inmates have been “lost” by ICE. They patrol city streets, Chicago, LA, Portland (?!), uninvited by local governments, a presence forced in by a party that used to talk about “states’ rights.” But this isn’t about contradiction. It’s about power. 

Humans, neighbors, people who are loved, parents, are disappeared, ripped away from homes and relationships. Killed. “LOST?!?!?!” Shit, friends. Shit. 

What does it take? 

To empathize? What does it take to demonstrate that this is nauseating, painful, dreadful, life-taking, terrorizing to your neighbbors and (if that is not enough) even to people you love? 

And if I may wear my pastor hat: 

What does it take (Christains) to see that, where those who welcome strangers entertain angels (Hebrews 13:2), whatever you do to harm any of these, so you have also done also to Christ (Matthew 25:40? This reign of terror is not love and it is not of God. And this violence is not safety. It is certianly the same kind of hegemony-reinforcing violence that was aimed at Chirst and the early Christians whose nonconformity and community made them targets. If I still spolke in terms of idolatry, I might say that the implementation of ICE is the worship of the Cross (the Roman instrument of torture that promised safety through the sacrifice of difference and hope, and not the worship of the Crucied One). 

And to gloss over it in whatever way y’all are . . . well, I don’t know what to say. 

Maybe this: 

Please. The heart of everything good we have been a part of together was compassion. Listening. Understanding. Adapting and growing based on the pain and the desires to live that we shared and heard. You know: love. Becoming. Etc. Getting better because we got together. Not anathemizing those who no longer fit the norm. But changing the norm for the sake of love. 

The heart of our shared faith is compassion, redemption. The resurrection of the crucified ones. For real. It’s image is the Feast shared, the multitudes singing and sharing bread and fishes and joy. It’s answer is not guns but redemption, reunion, concilation, and relation, the building of banquet tables from toppled prison walls. 

At least that’s what stuck for me. 

We never chanted anything about anyone being “locked up.” Lord, have mercy. But: remember when we used to sing “Break every chain?” Or “The Love Round?” “Love all humankind as you would love yourself?” Remember when you sang it like you meant it. If you’re down, I’m open to singing it again. 

That’s all I’ve got for you this morning. No editing here. Just words that needed to get out. 

And now it’s back to work for me.

 But our shared work: as society, as people of faith, is ongoing. And I don’t know… I guess to quote the prolific and most profound Mason Jennings, “What do we got if we ain’t got love.” 

Nothing. 

Nothing at all.

Friends, peace. Here's one of the 'interludes' from the book Matt Holmes and I published through Cascade Books a couple of years back, Everyday Armageddons. It's weird. And it's something of a reflection on one of Matt's incredible stories. I hope you dig it. Peace.

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Go and Show Yourself to the Priests

It didn't take much to read the writing on the wall. A finicky switch. A hot light. A fan's drunken buzz. A mirror. And a transparency.

Transparencies were sheets, thin and made of plastic. At times, they came in a roll. On them, a teacher, an instructor, an artist, an engineer, a mathematician, a lyric-loving praise band groupie, was able to write—or print, or draw, or smudge—examples, illustrations, analytics, iterations, or ecstasies, as they were dreamt, spoken, solved, stewed-upon, or sung.

And there they would shine. Transfigured.

Perpendicular from that place where they were laid.

For Belshazzar and everyone to see.

Before transparencies, there were other ways to share with light. The slide show. A magic lantern. The camera obscura. Shadow play, magic mirrors, trotting horse lamps, and Pythagoras, with Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, looking-glass in hand, inscribing magic blood-scripts onto the moon.¹

The desire for one to have one's beautiful insides illuminate a room full of eager eyes is not a modern one, alone.

This is what we do. We shine our beauty for the world to see. And when we can't shine it, we share it, wearing it on buttons and on our sleeves.

And what do we do with that, within, which doesn't sparkle? Those things for which we've built cages in the forgotten oubliettes below? Those desolate and deserted parts where the perennial heads of the Baptists and the empty chairs of Elijahs are stored?

These we shine differently.

Not with lamp and fan but with fire— beautiful and rollicking—but: uncontained, convicted in its violent consumptions; zealous and scalding and unpredictable.

The beautiful, we shine. The hidden smolders, its flames arriving involuntarily, provoked with the sound of the wind, passed gas in the boardrooms of the rich, its heat fixing insides onto faces of others, as it fixed them onto the lepers and the Lazuruses of Rome, so long ago. Their appearance, zombie-esque, evoking frightened disgust, summoning premonitions and paranoias, death's foretaste, acidic belch, nausea; their skin a screen of silver, the taking-place of the horror show: monsters, meannesses, guilty desires, fantastic fears. Freed at last from the captivity.

Illuminating.

Distorting.

The lepers and the Lazaruses.

Looked at, as the prophets would have it.

In the glow but seldom if ever seen.

So it was with the Worm King who roamed the streets possessed by Soterian fervor, making it certain that the tombs would remain empty for at least another day; saving what others threw away, caring for those left beaten and bloodied as the priests and their sacristans go about their days.

Home was complicated as all homes are. And yet, his public life was Eastertide.

No matter.

The house paint was flaking.

And eccentricities are leprosies, too.

So the neighbors couldn't help it.

They looked at a man who didn't save for rainy days, but who, rather, spent them saving. And all they could see was a monster. A hell erected there on the hill.

And a mirror.

If only they had known what they were seeing.

Lights and mirrors. Fire and insides. We do this to those who are dead, too.

Sometimes we call it a eulogy.

~Thomas R Gaulke, “Go and Show Yourself to the Priests,” in Thomas R Gaulke and Matthew Holmes, Everyday Armageddons (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2023)

What is Religion? Alves' Hope in the Key of Saudade

Peace, all. Here's a little blurb from the first book! Seemed like a good time to share some thoughts from/about our beloved Rubem. ~Tom

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In his 1981/1984 (Portuguese/English) work What is Religion?, Alves offers a presentation of religion that is both anti-dogmatic, as well as undogmatic, to the core. Here, for Alves, faith and hope are nearly one in the same. Hope, again, has to do with desire. Yet there is a departure from Alves' first works.

In 1972, Alves held that hope "is the presentiment that imagination is more real and reality less real than it looks. It is the hunch that the overwhelming brutality of facts that oppress and repress is not the last word. It is the suspicion that Reality is much more complex than realism wants us to believe; that the frontiers of the possible are not determined by the limits of the actual, and that in a miraculous and unexpected way life is preparing the creative event which will open the way to freedom and resurrection." In this sense of hope, there is in Alves a conviction and even a defiance tied to emotion—and still something (if only traces) of belief.

Further, faith here is to be moved (emotionally and physically) by such convicted, believing, and defiant hope: "Hope is to hear the melody of the future, and faith is to dance to it."90 There is something contained in faith of premonition, conviction, and rebellion.

But in What is Religion?, faith for Alves appears to become less of a convicted belief, and more of a desiring risk:

And the reader, perplexed, in search of a final certainty asks, "But does God exist? Does life have a meaning? Does the universe have a face? Is death my sister?" to which the religious soul could only reply: "I do not know. But I ardently desire that it be true. And I make the leap unreservedly. For it is more beautiful to risk on the side of hope than to have certainty on the side of a cold and senseless universe."

"It is more beautiful to risk on the side of hope than to be certain on the side of a cold and senseless world." It is subtle, but by the 1980s, as he slowly trades in the theological for the theopoetical, presentiment for the moment (the not quite certain hunch) becomes outweighed by the wager (that which we bet on—and live by—not because we fear risking hell with Pascal, but simply because we wish the contents of faith to be true, because to us it is beautiful). Belief in gods is traded for the desire that a god might exist and that the world might be kind. "Prayer is the sacred name that we utter before the Void."

In Protestantism and Repression, after hundreds of pages of describing what Alves sees as the problem with fundamentalism in Brazil, Alves finally concludes, "Is there a way out? I don't know. [It seems to me that] those who already possess the truth [those who claim to be certain] are destined to become inquisitors. Those who have only doubts are predestined to tolerance and perhaps to burning at the stake. That is why I see only one way out. We must consciously and deliberately reject truth and certainty before they take possession of us. We must make our own the sentiments of Lessing: [choose striving toward truth and never truth itself]."

Alves becomes anti-dogmatic and poetic not because of a disdain for theological constructs. They had helped him survive some very difficult years. Rather, he becomes anti-dogmatic because in his experience, rigid theological constructs were quite literally harmful to the bodies of believers, and became weapons in the hands of corrupt (and even well-meaning) authorities. Ultimately, they led not to freedom, but instead became the opium den of the enslaved. They encouraged that even the most persecuted become "saved" and thereby better adjusted to the feeling of their chains, believing that their prize was in the blessed beyond.

~Thomas R. Gaulke, An Unpromising Hope: Finding Hope Outside of Promise for an Agnostic Church and for Those of Us Who Find It Hard to Believe (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2021)

"The Unifying Potential of a Manichaeistic Worldview" | An Unpromising Hope

 

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This classic text (prefaced by the likes of Jean Paul Sartre and Homi Bhabha) took on a life of its own after its publication, inspiring and augmenting liberative and revolutionary movements worldwide, including and especially the Black Panthers in the US, who regarded it as something of a bible. Both its call for the last to become first, as well as its embrace of any means (which had tactically been a taboo idea, especially in the US during early movements for desegregation and Black Civil Rights) offered a framework and a fire for the revolutionary spirit as it was already being stoked worldwide in the 1960s and 1970s.

Perhaps most notable in Fanon's Wretched of the Earth, is Fanon's own relative (if cautious) comfort embracing a dualistic worldview. This worldview, indeed, is the one that had named Fanon himself as colonized, a worldview which clearly sought both to dehumanize him, and to reinforce the subjugation of his people by the colonizer. This, of course, Fanon stated himself. Nonetheless, it is not the dualism (which Fanon aptly refers to as Manichaeism) that Fanon loves. He does not. Fanon notes these damages, time and again. Both society and the human spirit are diminished by this polarizing heresy. Colonial Manichaeism reduces the colonized to enemies, "bad guys," "poisoners of values," "threats," and ultimately animals.

Anyone who is not "us" is the evil other. It is dehumanizing to the end. This is to be sure, even for Fanon.

However, knowing this truth, the fact remains for Fanon that this Manichaeistic world is the world as it is. It is the world which Fanon received by birth, and the one he must struggle within. Choosing not to believe in it will not make it magically go away. This dualism categorizes and kills, yes. However, and this is what Fanon appreciates, in embracing this Manichaeistic outlook, the colonized people do actually gain one thing. What they gain is the opportunity to be the colonized. That is, as the colonized becomes the name of a once multiplicitous people, so there emerges an identity of the colonized. With a common identity, the colonized have a better chance at unifying, at uniting against the colonizer, at overthrowing him: The colonized, unite!

In receiving and adopting this imposed label, the colonized are given a name with which they might rise up and assert their humanity against those who would rob them of it and in turn create a world where their lives are truly valued. To adapt a phrase made famous by Audre Lorde, Fanon takes the colonizer's tools and does turn them back on the colonizer in order to dismantle the colonizer's house. The fight for liberation is a fight for the humanization of the colonized, and a more humane world for the colonized. In a world that turns one into an animal, even a caged animal, and even a caged work horse, this is not simply counter-cultural, but, rather, revolutionary work.

We must remember in any case that a colonized people is not just a dominated people. Under the German occupation, the French remained human beings. In Algeria there is not simply domination, but the decision, literally, to occupy nothing else but a territory. The Algerians, the women dressed in haiks, the palm groves, and the camels form a landscape, the natural backdrop for the French presence.

A hostile, ungovernable, and fundamentally rebellious Nature is in fact synonymous in the colonies with the bush, the mosquitoes, the natives, and disease. Colonization has succeeded once this untamed Nature has been brought under control. Cutting railroads through the bush, draining swamps, and ignoring the political and economic existence of the native population are in fact one and the same thing.

Colonization turns humans into landscape. Into animals. Into subhuman background characters in a movie that is about someone else, a movie which they will never direct, play a lead role in, and for which they will never receive compensation. Yet, says Fanon, "the colonized . . . roar with laughter every time they hear themselves called an animal by the other. For they know they are not animals. And at the very moment when they discover their humanity, they begin to sharpen their weapons to secure its victory." Again: for Fanon, "weapons" is very seldom a figure of speech.

Thomas R. Gaulke, An Unpromising Hope: Finding Hope Outside of Promise for an Agnostic Church and for Those of Us who Find it Hard to Believe (Eugene: Wipf & Wipf and Stock, 2021).

Luke 13:10-17 Translation/Paraphrase

Peace, all. Here's a translation of this week's RCL Gospel reading. ~Tom

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Luke 13:10-17

On the sabbath, Jesus was visiting a nearby synagogue. While he was teaching, a woman appeared. Against her will, she had been twisted up, unable to rise or to take a stand, for a spirit had possessed her for eighteen years. 

Seeing her, Jesus invited her to come into the crowd that had gathered. And as she arrived, he offered a declaration.

With compassion, he placed his hands on the woman. 

He took a breath. 

“Woman.” Beloved, he said. 

“From your affliction, you are set free.” 

At once, she rose up. She took a stand. And there, in the middle of Jesus’ bible study, she sang and shouted, giving thanks to God. 

But not everyone was happy. 

One leader of the place was visibly angry.

His indignation invited him into the crowd, for he was unhappy that Jesus had administered healing on the Sabbath. 

He spoke. 

“There are six days on which work should be performed.”

He looked at the woman. 

“Come on those days. Be cured. But not on the Sabbath.” 

The Lord responded.  

“You who perform with masks (ὑποκριταί)! 

On the Sabbath do you not untie your ox or donkey from the manger and lead it to water?

Do you not think that this woman, this beloved one, this daughter of Abraham whom Satan had tied and twisted for eighteen long years, should be unleashed from her bondage on this, the Sabbath day?” 

When Jesus said this, the faces of his opponents showed. A bit red. But the entire crowd was rejoicing with the woman at this and at all the wonderful things being done by him.