I can't believe I just discovered him. I just read Telling the Truth: the Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy & Fairy Tale and while I want to type the entire book into a blog entry, I'll have to settle for my favourite parts.
"Truth itself cannot be stated. Truth simply is, and is what is, the good with the bad, the joy with the despair, the presence and absence of God, the swollen eye, the bird pecking the cobbles for crumbs. Before it is a word, the Gospel that is truth is silence, a pregnant silence in its ninth month, and in answer to Pilate's question, Jesus keeps silent, even with his hands tied behind him manages somehow to hold silence out like a terrible gift."
"Pilate asks Jesus what is truth...and what Jesus hits Pilate over the head with is Pilate himself. Jesus just stands there in silence in a way that throws Pilate back on his own silence, the truth of himself. What Jesus lets his silence say is that truth is what words can't tell but only tell about, what images can only point to. The weight of these sad times is the weight of their eloquent silence, and even when you turn the sound back on again and Eric Sevareid or Shakespeare or Billy Graham starts putting words to things, behind the words the silence of the stones cries out like thunder."
"...in addition to particular truths, the prophets spoke truth, too, and that was when they were most truly prophetic...They put words to things until their teeth rattled, but beneath the words they put, or deep within their words, something rings out which is new because it is timeless, the silence rings out, the truth that is unutterable, that is mystery, that is the way things are, and the reason it rings out seems to be that the language the prophets use is essentially the language of poetry, which more than polemics or philosophy, logic or theology, is the language of truth."
"[The prophets] put words to both the wonder and the horror of the world, and the words can be looked up in the dictionary or the biblical commentary and can be interpreted, passed on, understood, but because these words are poetry, are image and symbol as well as meaning, are sound and rhythm, maybe above all are passion, they set echoes going the way a choir in a great cathedral does, only it is we who become the cathedral and in us that the words echo."
"To see [Jesus] weep is not a comely sight, especially this man whom we want to be stronger and braver than a man, and the impulse is to turn from him as we turn from anybody who weeps because the sight of real tears, painful and disfiguring, forces us to look to their source where we do not choose to look because where his tears come from, our tears also come from."
"The absence of God is just that which is not livable."
"Jesus shares with us the darkness of what it is to be without God as well as showing forth the glory of what it is to be with God. He speaks about it, and perhaps that is much of why, although we have not followed him very well these past two thousand years or so, we have never quite been able to stop listening to him."
"The tragic is the inevitable. The comic is the unforeseeable...Bored to death by his comforters and scratching his boils and facing the undertaker's unpaid bill for the multiple funeral of his children and entire household staff, how could Job possibly foresee that his bloodshot eyes would indeed behold, and by no means as a stranger, the one who laid the foundations of the earth and at whose work the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?"
"The comedy of grace as what needn't happen and can't possibly happen because it can only impossibly happen and happens in the dark that only just barely fails to swallow it up."
"The folly of preaching Christ crucified, preaching the king who looks like a tramp, the prince of peace who looks like the prince of fools, the lamb of God who ends like something hung up at the butcher's."
"It was not the great public issues that Jesus traded in but the great private issues, not the struggles of the world without but the struggles of the world within."
"It is the all-or-nothing ones who are held up as shining examples of what it is to have faith, to have life, to have courage or whatever it is it takes, and the better-be-safe-than-be-sorry one who gets it in the neck for taking the faith or life or courage or whatever it is he's been given and tucking it under his tail and sitting on it like an old grad on a hot water bottle at the fifty-yard line on a chilly October Saturday."
"People are prepared for everything except for the fact that beyond the darkness of their blindness there is a great light. They are prepared to go on breaking their backs plowing the same old field until the cows come home without seeing, until they stub their toes on it, that there is a treasure buried in that field rich enough to buy Texas. They are prepared for a God who strikes hard bargains but not for a God who gives as much for an hour's work as for a day's. They are prepared for a mustard-seed kingdom of God no bigger than the eye of a newt but not for the great banyan it becomes with birds in its branches singing Mozart. They are prepared for the potluck supper at First Presbyterian but not for the marriage supper of the lamb, and when the bridegroom finally arrives at midnight with vineleaves in his hair, they turn up with their lamps to light him on his way all right only they have forgotten the oil to light them with and stand there with their big, bare, virginal feet glimmering faintly in the dark."
"The good news breaks into a world where the news has been so bad for so long that when it is good nobody hears it much except for a few. And who are the few that hear it? They are the ones who labor and are heavy-laden like everybody else but who, unlike everybody else, know that they labor and are heavy-laden."
"Rich or poor, successes or failure as the world counts it, they are the ones who are willing to believe in miracles because they know it will take a miracle to fill the empty place inside them where grace and peace belong with grace and peace."
"That is the Gospel, this meeting of darkness and light and the final victory of light. That is the fairy tale of the Gospel with, of course, the one crucial difference from all other fairy tales, which is that claim made for it is that it is true, that it not only happened once upon a time but has kept on happening ever since and is happening still. To preach the Gospel in its original power and mystery is to claim in whatever way the preacher finds it possible to claim it that once upon a time is this time, now, and here is the dark wood that the light gleams at the heart of like a jewel, and the ones who are to live happily ever after are...all who labor and are heavy laden, the poor naked wretches wheresoever they be."
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