The Bible as Literature
The Ephesus School
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The Only One Who Loves
One way or another, people want to control what the teacher says and what the teacher does. They want control. Every relationship, no matter what people tell themselves, is about their power. They want to purchase God online, have him delivered to their door, and display him at parties as part of their collection. The most wicked phrase in the human lexicon in any language is “I love you.” It is a lie, Habibi. Human beings are liars. They are incapable of love. Every time you have preached about love, philosophized about love, mourned a person’s inability to love or be loved, you have accrued divine wrath against you. Do you really think all of this is about your love? Let’s be honest before God: I do not love you and you do not love me. After so many years of ministry, the vast majority of those for whom I have slaved want to control what I say and what I do under the pretext of love and how hard they work. Well, Habibi, I do not need your love. I have fallen into the inevitable, terrible, terrifying and unmanageable hands of the iconoclastic, invisible, and inexistent God. You can’t find him pleasuring himself with friends, or hanging out at comfy social gatherings with “loved” ones. He holds vigil with those who die alone, like little girls assailed by machine-gun fire in the back seats of cars, or suffocating alone, bleeding out in bombed hospital rooms. Does your post modern god exist? “What’s the point,” you ask, in your dystopian haze, as you plan “your life” for “your children”? God is definitely real, and it has nothing to do with you and your military industrial solipsistic white picket nonsense in the suburbs, which you call “love.” “We have to unite to save democracy.” No, dummies. You have to stop killing kids. The true God, the one whom you do not love, meets his children under the rubble. Under your boot. I became a priest to teach. I am not so arrogant as to imagine that I am capable of love. The only difference between you and me is that I admit it to myself and I tell you to your face, in his name, not mine. He is my God. In him do I trust. But people do not trust God or love him, let alone the priest because they come to church for the building. Their investment is with the building. The building is their future, not God. Their building is their hope, not the teaching. Their building is their white picket fence in the suburbs. In their mind, priests come and go, but the building abides forever. But that is not what the Good Book said: “There was silence, then I heard a voice:‘Can mankind be righteous before God?Can a man be pure before his Maker?If God places no trust in his slaves,if he charges his angels with error,how much more those who live in houses of clay,whose foundations are in the dust,who are crushed more readily than a moth!Between dawn and dusk they are broken to pieces;unnoticed, they perish forever.Are not the cords of their tent pulled up,so that they die without wisdom?’” (Job 4:16-21) This week’s episode is dedicated to the unearned love presented to me by God, a beloved wife of 25 years, who has been a steadfast companion in difficulties. She continues to support me, in her words, not because she loves me or because we are family, but because she believes in the content of what I teach. If only there were more people like you, Alla. You may be flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone, but I thank God every day that I did not make you. This week I discuss Luke 6:12-23. (Episode 530) The Destructive Power Of Motherly LoveBy Anthony Costello"One of the most chilling scenes in fiction is the portrayal of a mother named “Pam” in C.S. Lewis’ novel, The Great Divorce. In the story, Lewis envisions the eternal separation between heaven and hell, where we encounter a number of ghostly beings who are invited to visit heaven from what is presumably hell (or possibly purgatory). For a moment, these vapor-like specters are allowed to see th
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