#375 Interesting Links XLIII

Is sugar toxic?  That's the argument being made by Robert Lustig in a 90 minute presentation here.  The NYT magazine article about the topic is here.  As Dr. Lewis Cantley, director of the Cancer Center at Harvard Medical School says, "Sugar scares me."

When Jerusalem was sacked in 597 BC, its inhabitants were raped, tortured, and murdered.  The Babylonians even committed infanticide according to the Jewish history as found in the book of Ezekiel.  So how do we read this as Christian scripture given a loving God?  Dr. Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer (via Michael Bird) suggests that we, "read Ezekiel in tandem with Lamentations [and Job] and so complain that God has gone too far, and leave the response up to God."

Josh Rowley passes along a quote from Ron Sider (of Rich Christians In An Age of Hunger fame): "What the Almighty will do if thousands of praying, loving Christians non-violently face death in the search for peace and justice will remain shrouded in mystery--at least until we have the courage to try it"

John Updike sounds like the Protestant version of Flannery O'Connor here: "This age needs rather men like Shakespeare, or Milton, or Pope; men who are filled with the strength of their cultures and do not transcend the limits of their age, but, working within the times, bring what is peculiar to the moment to glory. We need great artists who are willing to accept restrictions, and who love their environments with such vitality that they can produce an epic out of the Protestant ethic ... Whatever the many failings of my work, let it stand as a manifesto of my love for the time in which I was born.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer from a 1932 essay: "Praying for the kingdom cannot be done by the one who tears himself away from his own misery and the misery of others, who lives unattached and solely in the pious hours of his 'own salvation.' The church may have hours in which it can sustain even that, but we cannot. The hour in which the church prays for the kingdom forces the church, for better or for worse, to identify completely with the fellowship of the children of the Earth and world. It bind the church by oaths of fealty to the Earth, to misery, to hunger, to death. It renders the church completely in solidarity with that which is evil and with the guilt of their brothers. The hour in which we pray for God’s kingdom is the hour of the most profound solidarity with the world, an hour of clenched teeth and trembling fists. It is not a time for solitary whispering, 'Oh, that I might be saved.' Rather, it is a time for mutual silence and screaming, that this world which has forced us into distress together might pass away and Your kingdom come to us."

Cool picture of a gorilla being evacuated from a Congo war zone here.

Walter Burghardt offer five suggestions for creating a contemplative life of prayer and expands on each of them at this link. First, seek out some sort of desert experience.  Second, cultivate a feeling for festivity, the experience of doing something utterly lacking in utilitarian value.  Closely related is the third suggestion: cultivate a sense of play.  Fourth, learn to let go, to not posses, to let experiences and things be ephemeral.  Finally, make contemplative friends, friends who radiate wonder, whose sense of delight is finely tuned.

The Afghan tribal elders know that America will go the way of all empires who enter The Graveyard.  It's only a matter of time.

Here's a bunch of art indexed by biblical text.

List of messianic pretenders.

#374 Lifted to Death

The particular Old Testament references through which we choose to view particular New Testament events will have a significant impact on the interpretation of that event.  That's largely redundant, but here's a drawn-out example.  John 12 contains the following account,

"The next day the large crowd that had come to the feast heard that Jesus was coming to Jerusalem. So they took branches of palm trees and went out to meet him. They began to shout, 'Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!  Blessed is the king of Israel!'  Jesus found a young donkey and sat on it, just as it is written, 'Do not be afraid, people of Zion; look, your king is coming, seated on a donkey’s colt!' (His disciples did not understand these things when they first happened, but when Jesus was glorified, then they remembered that these things were written about him and that these things had happened to him.)"

The contextual background to this passage is a political and cultural situation whereby the storied and formerly triumphant Jewish people were undergoing nothing short of an existential crisis as a result of assimilation into and domination under the Roman Empire.  Things are looking bleak and then, as indicated by the OT passages being quoted, the hopes of the entire nation for an anointed servant of God, a messiah, who would deliver them from their oppression appear to be coming to fulfillment.  However, the author of the gospel of John tells us parenthetically that at the time of these events, Jesus' own disciples failed to make any connection between what they were witnessing and the prophecies which foretold of the deliverance of their nation by a messiah and that they finally understood seemingly only as a result of his being later "glorified."

Not cooincidentaly, almost immediately on the heels of this explanation, the author has Jesus abruptly put an end to his ministry of public healing by refusing to entertain a meeting with some Greek proselytes who had requested some time with him, saying instead that,

"'The time has come for the Son of Man to be glorified... Now is the judgment of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out.  And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.' (Now he said this to indicate clearly what kind of death he was going to die.)"

And because of this second parenthetical, I've always interpreted this phrase about Jesus being "lifted up" in the same way, i.e. as referring to the type of death he would die, on a cross.  When asked how Jesus died, you might say he was lifted to death.  Allusions to the OT passage where Moses holds up a serpent on a stick always came to mind and just like that, this interpretation was confirmed and stuck.

But now there is a problem with John's interpretation of Jesus' motivation for using the phrase "lifted up."  It is that even after he was lifted to death on the cross, the disciples still failed to understand.  They failed to be drawn.  Good Friday came and went.  Holy Saturday came and went.  Nothing about Jesus being lifted to death was ever going to draw anyone, much less all men, to himself, except perhaps prolepticly.  In fact, the fact that Jesus was lifted to death was a very good reason why this man could not have been the hoped for savior-king of Israel.  After all, dead kings cannot be triumphant.  So we'll have to look elsewhere for the referent of the "lifted up." That will be the next post.