Well-read

Read wide without guidance
Like a squirrel, bulged cheeks
Devouring and hoarding
And the cache still reeks

Lusting and eager
More terrible than earnest
He's fracking the seams
To stoke up the furnace

Overseeing the pour
Forgetting the forms
The idea is dead
While the body's still warm

Each phrase like a key
On a ring in his head
"Boy's all right, and
He seems well-read."

Yep

Can't really tell if he's a philosophe or uniquely dim.
Pithy ejaculations of candour, insight and confusion.
The kind of guy you'd eat soup with.
He's much more interesting than people usually are,
and not only because he's an enigma or strangely entertaining.
He'd never harm a fly or even give em sass.
Even dogs know he's a good guy.
Word gets around, I guess.

This wooden house

Coldplay said "I wanna live in a wooden house, where makin more friends would easy."
It sounds good and made me feel warm and hopeful.
But I guess it must be a metaphor,
Cuz this house is my only new friend, and a leaky one at that.
Should've bought a hot tub.

The Ocean

I hate the ocean
It's far too wide
That black, salty expanse
of weeds and hidden animals
and endless horizons.
That's not my domain.
A lake is much better
if I see smoke of a distant campfire
then I know I'm not alone
Not like the Pacific.
And don't get me started on heaven.

Rolled, tossed about by doubt
And certain there's no certain way out
With faith that falls just to rise
I hear the fools profess to be wise
Fearing heaven, for meeting the hidden
God is one and the same as being stricken
Fear, duty, loneliness, pride
Direction, introspection, the faith inside
At the end of this road absurd
It's good
To know that, in the beginning
was the Word

WWJD? Pt. 2 - Should we do it?

My advice: read the first five chapters for a neat reading of the gospels.  For a systematic ethical rendering of Jesus or of a complete modern theological ethic, look elsewhere.
Disappointed, I must say that the remainder of The Politics of Jesus did very little in the way of offering distinct ethical advice.  The majority of the 2nd half of the book explains that Paul and Jesus did not, in fact, disagree in their view of ethics and that the early church did not see Jesus as a spiritual guide whose teachings were irrelevant to making political and economic decisions.  While essential in the flow of his argument, Yoder lost me with these points; he gets into detailed and even contrived counter-arguments against the supposed status quo Christian ethic that lack flow and are less than clear on his own position.  This brings us two-thirds of the way to applying a social exegesis of Jesus to a modern social ethic.  Yoder will not even say that we should follow Jesus' ethic as he described it, but rather discredits all the arguments to the contrary and leaves it up to the reader.  It is certain that he had a particular version of the Mennonite pacifist stance in mind and was only somewhat concerned with veiling that.  He is quite clear that Christians should not join in war, but allows room for policing and judicial authority.  There is an interesting bit on the willing subjection to government with full knowledge that one is actually free not to do so (the whole 'freedom through chosen submission' argument).  His reasoning is sometimes confusing and even seemingly contradictory.  He sometimes supported acting as an agent of change for social or economic ends, sometimes not, and the reasons for each situation are anything but systematic.
Overall, a good book with many interesting readings of the NT.  The relatively clear thesis, however, is not executed in an organized or even consistent fashion.  He proposed to build a bridge from exegesis to ethics, and it is my estimation that he did not do it clearly.  A fair amount of synthesis of his various chapters may translate into clearer principles but I half-expected him to do that for the reader.  The flavor of the book changed multiple times and it really reads like a handful of related essays edited together with a lengthy new introduction.

WWJD? Pt. 1 - What did he do?

At long last I have delved into John H. Yoder’s The Politics of Jesus: Vicit Agnus Noster.  And it is as good as I thought it would be.  Yoder treads carefully on ground that many of us have, unfortunately, trodden haphazardly and with little care.  Perhaps it seems obvious that a proper exegesis of the life and words of Jesus in the Gospels would come to affect the Christian’s social, economic or political ethic.  However, that is a dangerous leap to miscalculate.  That is not to say that, once taken seriously, bridging Jesus and our ethics will not bring about danger or the propensity to go about saying dangerous things.  Should we breach the status quo, we must consider first whether we are: proof-texting a homemade radicalism or mimicking the true ethics of Jesus.  The radical Christianities proffered by the ‘emergent’ and post-modern realms may very well coincide with the latter while triggering a whole generation of ahistorical ingrates to do the former.  I’ve been fired up by revolutionary talk, but without really knowing the ideas behind the ideology, I’m like a jihadist motivated by peer pressure – thrilled, killed, but not self-willed.  So what were the social, economic and political ethics of Jesus?  Should that be read as universally normative?  How would someone apply the ethics of Jesus in our context?

Read the book if you really want a good introduction to the topic.  Perhaps I’m impressed too easily, but there’s a few game changers.  Most Christians accept that the life and teaching of Jesus is normative on some level to us, whether or not that means crucifying yourself on Easter (like a few Filipino Christians do) or just following the Golden Rule.  So there are 2 questions we must consider: a) Exegetically - What exactly did he say and do?  AND  b) Ethically - On what level must/should we mimic that?  

What did he do?

a)  It’s often said that the Pharisees and the multitudes and even the disciples misunderstood Jesus’ mission on earth as political in nature, whereas Jesus single-mindedly lived his life as a working out of prophecy for the express spiritual purpose of forgiving the sins of mankind.  Yoder argues that the contemporaries of Jesus merely misunderstood the nature of his social/economic/political agenda.  However, Yoder also assents to the immaterial and spiritual agenda, so to speak, of the Incarnation.  So it is not that the message of Jesus is spiritual OR political, but spiritual AND political.  Using the text of Luke (which is often taken as explicitly rejecting the political interpretation of Jesus’ mission), Yoder shows how the birth, life, teachings and death of Jesus are inherently political.  People didn’t want to kill him because they misunderstood him.  They didn’t want to kill him because he broke the Sabbath.  They wanted to killed him precisely because they did understand him and how dangerous his political ethos was to the status quo.  In fact, from the temptation in the desert to the garden of Gethsemane, Jesus is portrayed as having to come to grips with how the multitudes will implement his kingdom.  He prayed the Father would remove ‘this cup’ from him – why?  Was he only afraid of death or was there some alternative way the story could end that Jesus was not only considering but praying for?  Moments later Peter draws his sword to protect Jesus, who asks rhetorically ‘Shall I not drink the cup the Father has given me?’  It seems Peter and Jesus may have had the same thing in mind (armed insurrection), but only one had the self-control to choose the high road.  The social, political and religious order in Judea were broken and Jesus spent most of his time talking about that and showing how that could change.  Many saw him as leading the way to massive reforms and, certainly, he intended his teachings to lead to exactly that.  He willingly entered Jerusalem as a king, drove the moneychangers from the temple to assert his authority there and even asked the disciples to carry a sword.  Still, remained true to his own ethical teachings.  His kingdom would be different.

The Year of Jubilee - AD 26

Much of what Yoder goes on to explicate as the ethical agenda of Jesus involves the concept of the year of Jubilee.  Jesus literally proclaimed a year of Jubilee in AD 26, asked his disciples to forgive others their debt as their debts had been forgiven them.  He talked about money more than any other topic – this is common knowledge – but how he talked about money and what they meant to his audience, that’s the real interesting thing.  Jesus made constant reference to all of the main aspects of the Year of Jubilee and their application in his context.  That he came to proclaim release to the captives need not be spiritualized.  That he counselled the landless peasants to make friends with their enemies on the way to debtor’s court is not without reason.  The parables about absentee landowners and wise stewards don’t just have timeless lessons to offer.  Jesus was a bit of a political pundit.

More to come…