Justification

In printers' language, tojustifymeans to set type in such a way that all full lines are of equal length and flush both left and right; in other words, to put the printed lines in the right relationship with the page they're printed on and with each other. The religious sense of the word is very close to this. Being justified means being brought into right relation. Paul says simply that being justified means having peace with God (Romans 5:1). He uses the nounjustificationfor the first step in the process of salvation.

During his Pharisee phase, or "blue period," Paul was on his way to Damascus to mop up some Christians, when suddenly he heard the voice of Jesus Christ, whose resurrection he had up till now considered only an ugly rumor. What he might have expected the Voice to say was, "Just you wait." What in effect it did say was, "I want you on my side." Paul never got over it.

As far as Paul was concerned, he was the last man in the world for God to have called this way, but God had, thereby revealing that God was willing to do business with him even if he was in the process of mopping up Christians at the time. Paul also discoveredthat all the brownie points he had been trying to rack up as a super-Pharisee had been pointless. God did business with you not because of who you were, but because of who God was.

All the Voice seemed to want Paul to do was believe that it meant what it said and do as it asked. Paul did both.

At a moment in his life when he had least reason to expect it, Paul was staggered by the idea that no matter who you are or what you've done, God wants you on God's side. There is nothing you have to do or be. It's on the house. It goes with the territory. God hasjustified you, lined you up. To feel this somehow in your bones is the first step on the way to being saved.

You don't have to hear a Voice on the road to Damascus to feel it in your bones either. Maybe just noticing that the sun shines every bit as bright and sweet on Jack the Ripper as it does on Little Orphan Annie will do the trick. Maybe just noticing the holy and hallowing givenness of your own life.

~originally published in Whistling in the Dark and later in Beyond Words

King

You think of the newly anointed King David conquering unconquerable Jerusalem and crowning his triumph by bringing into it the ark of God as all the people made merry with lyres, harps, tambourines, castanets, and cymbals. You think of the pope himself proclaiming Charlemagne emperor andaugustuson Christmas Day and all Rome going mad with enthusiasm. You think of Shakespeare's Henry V comforting his troops on the eve of Agincourt and of thegrands leversof Louis XIV, which rivaled in splendor the rising of the sun. Muffled drums and vast crowds of mourners followed the deaths of kings, and the peal of bells and dancing in the streets their births. The person of the king was so sacred that affronts upon him were punished with the most horrible of torments, and his touch had the power to heal.

Passionate loyalty, adoration, terror, awe-no words are perhaps too strong to describe the feelings evoked in his subjects by the mere sight of him, and it's no wonder. He held the power of life and death over them. Their destiny was in his keeping. He defended the kingdom against all enemies both from within andfrom without. Hewasthe kingdom. If he rejoiced, it rejoiced with him. If he was angry, the earth trembled and the crops might fail.

"Who is this King of glory? The Lord of hosts, he is the King of glory!" proclaims the Psalmist (24:10). This rich metaphor is used again and again in Scripture. Yahweh alone was King over Israel, the prophets thundered: to be feared, to be loved, above all else to be obeyed. When the people decided they wanted a king of flesh and blood like all the other nations, Samuel warned them that the consequences would be tragic (1 Samuel 8:4-18), and history proved him correct in every particular. In the long run Israel as king and kingdom vanished from history altogether.

When Jesus entered Jerusalem for the last time, it was as King and Son of David that his followers hailed him. If it was a king like David the conquering hero that they were looking for, they were of course bitterly disappointed. What they got was a king like David the father, who, when he heard of his treacherous son's death, went up to his chamber and wept. "Would I had died instead of thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!" he cried out. They were the most kingly words he ever uttered and an uncanny foreshadowing of his many-times great-grandson who some thousand years later put his money where David's mouth had been.

~originally published in Whistling in the Dark and later in Beyond Words

Kingdom of God

The Kingdom of God is not a place, of course, but a condition. Kingship might be a better word. "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done," Jesus prayed. The two are in apposition.

Insofar as here and there, and now and then, God's kingly will is being done in various odd ways among us even at this moment, the Kingdom has come already.

Insofar as all the odd ways we do God's will at this moment are at best half-baked and halfhearted, the Kingdom is still a long way off-a hell of a long way off, to be more precise and theological.

As a poet, Jesus is maybe at his best in describing the feeling you get when you glimpse the Thing Itself-the kingship of the king official at last and all the world his coronation. It's like finding a million dollars in a field, he says, or a jewel worth a king's ransom. It's like finding something you hated to lose and thought you'd never find again-an old keepsake, a stray sheep, a missing child. When the Kingdom really comes, it's as if the thing you lost and thought you'd never find again is yourself.

~originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words

Knowledge

Knowing something or somebody isn't the same as knowing about them. More than just information is involved. When you are a knower, you don't simply add to your mental store and go your way otherwise unchanged. To know is to participate in, to become imbued with, for better or worse to be affected by. When you really know a person or a language or a job, the knowledge becomes part of who you are. It gets into the bloodstream. That is presumably why the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was the one tree Adam and Eve were warned to steer clear of.

When in their innocence they knew only good, they could be only good. As soon as they knew evil too, a whole new glittering vista opened up before them. Next to obedience appeared the possibility of disobedience; next to faithfulness, faithlessness; next to love, lust; next to kindness, cruelty; and so on. Even when they chose the good way, their knowledge of the evil way remained as a conscious and by no means unattractive alternative, preventing them except on the rarest occasions from being good wholeheartedly. And when they chose the evil way, their knowledge of good tended to turn even the sweetness of forbidden fruit to ashes in their mouths. Thus they became the hapless hybrids their descendants have been ever since. It was the curse God had tried to spare them. The serpent did its work well.

According to Thomas Aquinas, God can know evil by pure intelligence without becoming tainted by it the way a doctor can know the nature of disease without becoming diseased. Humans, on the other hand, not being pure intelligences but creatures of flesh and blood inhabiting a world of space and time, can know only through the likes of experience, experiment, will, and imagination, and once they start knowing evil that way, the fat is in the fire.

~originally published in Whistling in the Dark and later in Beyond Words

Koheleth

Koheleth means "Preacher" and is the name by which the author of the book of Ecclesiastes is known. When the rabbis got together to decide which books to put into the Old Testament and which to throw out, it is reported that Koheleth's almost didn't make it. You can't help seeing why, but at the same time you can't help being grateful to them for letting it in under the wire even so. In that great chorus of voices that speak out of the Bible, it is good to have this one long-drawn sigh of disillusion, skepticism, and ennui, if only because the people who read the Bible sometimes feel that way themselves, not to mention also the ones who wouldn't be caught dead reading it.

People are born and people die, Koheleth says, and the sun goes up and the sun goes down, and first the wind blows from the northand then it blows from the south, and if you think you're seeing something for the first time, just go ask your grandmother, and if you think you're seeing something for the last time, just hang around for a while, and the whole thing is as pointless and endless and dull as a drunk singing all six dozen verses of "Roaming in the Gloaming" and then starting in from the beginning again in case you missed anything. There is nothing new under the sun, Koheleth says, with the result that everything that there is under the sun both is old and, as you might expect in all that heat, stinks.

If you decide to knock yourself out getting rich and living it up, he points out, all you have to show for it in the end is the biggest income tax in town and a bad liver; and when you finally kick the bucket, the chances are that your dim-witted heirs will sink the whole thing in a phony Florida real-estate deal or lose it at the track in Saratoga. If you decide to break your back getting a decent education and end up a Columbia Ph.D. and an adviser to presidents, you'll be just as dead when the time comes as the high-school dropout who went into stuffing sausages, and you'll be forgotten just about as soon.

If you decide to be Mr. Nice Guy or Miss Goody Two-Shoes and never do the dirty on a pal, that may win you a gold star somewhere, but it won't keep you from getting it in the teeth like everybody else, because "there are righteous people who are treated according to the conduct of the wicked, and there are wicked people who are treated according to the conduct of the righteous," Koheleth says (Ecclesiastes 8:14), and we're all in the hands of God, all right, but "whether it is love or hate, one does not know" (9:1).

God has a plan for us, to be sure, but he leaves us in the dark as to what that plan is, and if God's plan happens to conflict with some plans of our own, guess whose way wins out? That is what the famous "A time to weep and a time to laugh" passage is all about(3:1-9)-that is, if you feel like laughing at a time that God has already pegged as a time for weeping, start reaching for the Kleenex.

"The race is not to the swift," he says, "nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to the skillful" (9:11), and that about sums it up. The dead are luckier than the living, he says, but luckiest of all are the ones who had the good sense never to get born in the first place.

But the rabbis in their wisdom let Koheleth into the Good Book anyway, placing him not far from the Psalms of David on one side and the prophecies of Isaiah on the other. Maybe it was their hope that in that location a little of David and Isaiah might rub off on him, especially one of the insights they more or less shared, which was that often people are closest to God when they need him most and that sometimes they know him best by missing him.

The Book of Ecclesiastes

~originally published in Peculiar Treasures and later in Beyond Words