The way of imagination

  Love is a (subversive) verb      Jesus, the man who had preached love of enemy, is condemned, [1] both as a nationalistic freedom-fighter (i.e. a rival to Roman power) and to die the death of a rebellious slave (à la Spartacus).   A few days previous, Jesus had foretold the destruction of the Jerusalem temple by enemy armies within a generation, the foregone conclusion of the revolution that was, even then, in the air.   As he dragged his cross to the crest of Calvary, Jesus told the watching women to weep, not for him, but for their own sons who would grow up to become the very thing that he had been condemned as being – insurrectionists – and also, to share his fate (cf. Lk. 23.28-31).   Unless, of course, these young men were to grow up hearing the story of what happened to Jesus and take it to heart as a summons to lay down their swords and thus be saved…   As Jesus expires on Golgotha, the son of the empire who had overseen his exec...

  Choose your own ending: Jonas      As Jonas “receives” more and more memories from the Giver, [1] he begins to question the justice of the Elders’ decision (“back and back and back”) to implement “sameness” in the community.   It must be said – one of the reasons why Jonas was selected to be the next Receiver was that he is endowed with the “ Capacity to see Beyond”, an ability that was signaled from his birth by his pale eyes , which distinguish him from almost every other member of the community, all of whom have dark eyes .   This “capacity” manifested itself, in Jonas’ case, by his ability to perceive colour – a colour, as he would later discover, called “red”.   During the Ceremony of Twelve, when he was selected, Jonas had noticed that the Receiver-become-Giver also had pale eyes, as does someone else in Jonas’ life. [2]      Jonas’ father is a Nurturer, responsible for caring for “newchildren” until such time a...

       I suggest that Lois Lowry’s novel The Giver [1] offers a striking parallel to the Gospel-story [2] in that it presents us with an individual who is faced with an intolerable situation in the midst of their society, a situation which they feel compelled to change, but which they can change only by becoming the “enemy” of their society’s self-serving ideology.   Indeed, both the protagonist of The Giver and that of the Gospels must “betray” their people in order to give them the hope of a future.   In both cases, this betrayal is, in reality, a courageous act of self-sacrificial love, a love that is unreciprocated due to the inability of the members of their community to perceive either the gravity of their situation or what it actually means to love – or, for that matter, the hitherto undiscovered depths of human (and divine) reality.   This comparison of the two protagonists helps us to understand Jesus as someone who had to make the choice...

       Babylon: the word is, literally, in the context of Gn. 1—11 [1] , the stuff of legend.   If Genesis was indeed composed and/or redacted around the time when the Judahites were exiled by the neo-Babylonian empire of the 6 th century [2] , it clearly demonstrates just how long a shadow “Babylon” cast over the totality of Hebrew Scripture. [3]   “Babylon” was, in the Israelite imagination, a cipher for (pagan) empire. [4]   Indeed, with the (western) exceptions of the ancient Roman republic (6 th —1 st centuries) and 5 th -century Athens, the almost universal approach to “politics” in the ancient world was that of empire.   The people of God, for their part, were almost always on the receiving end of imperial power.   Indeed, the story of Israel as a nation is told as beginning with the departure of Terah and his son Abram from the general vicinity of Babylon to journey westward toward Canaan (Gn. 11.31-32).   The redactor of Genes...