Fragments on Philopappos Hill

During my time in central Athens, I was surprised to find a lush, green space in the very heart of the city, bounded by a series of hills.

The Acropolis is the most famous of those hills, and the most densely constructed, laden as it is with Parthenon, Propylaea, Erechtheum and a series of temples to Athena, Zeus, and others.

Just east of the Acropolis, and much lower, is Mars Hill, or Areopagos, the Hill of Justice, an open, wind-swept rock looking up toward the Acropolis and out across the east and south of the city.

Pnyx is north of Mars Hill. Once densely populated, all that remains is an eroded stone platform with steps carved in its side.  

Further north is Hill of the Nymphs, topped by an observatory jarringly out of place when viewed from fields of wildflowers and ruins.

West of all these hills, taller by far, is Philopappos Hill, or Mouseoin, the Hill of the Muses. 

On my first day wandering in Athens, I explored the lower regions of all five hills, then sat a while on Mars Hill, watching the magpies sailing through the trees below.

Another morning, I walked up a trail to Pnyx and sat on a bench looking out toward the sea. A woman and her elderly mother shared the bench with me, and we had a friendly conversation that consisted of mostly nods and smiles, while the woman tried to help her mother understand that although I greeted them with “Yassas,” clearly, I couldn’t speak Greek.

My last free morning in Athens I decided I’d head to the top of Philopappos. The forecast promised rain, so I put my small umbrella in my bird bag, grabbed my binoculars and camera, and bought a coffee and croissant at the small coffee shop near our hotel before heading up Dionysiou Areopagitou, the pedestrianized street along the south base of the Acropolis.

Just as I reached the walkway leading up Philopappos, a school bus pulled up beside me and disgorged a merry crowd of middle school students who swarmed around me then separated into twos and threes, disappearing in every direction.

I noticed several packs of boys heading up the main trail, laughing and shoving, and decided to take a different route. I was hoping to see some birds along the way and that seemed unlikely in the wake of so much adolescent energy.

I wandered down along the ancient Koile road, dating back to at least 600 BC, and sat a while on the edge of a rock-cut terrace, part of the remains of a thriving community nearly three thousand years ago. Then I climbed one of the rock-cut staircases and started up the weaving paths toward the monument to Julius Antiochus Philopappos, erected around 114 AD.

Everywhere I went there were signs of normal urban life: a jogger crunching along the gravel path past the graffiti-embellished rocks that once were walls of shops and homes, dog walkers, lone shoppers carrying plastic sacks, occasional pairs of those middle school students, sitting and talking on a comfortable ledge or strolling lazily along.

Halfway up the hill I turned a corner and came across a rock-paved space with a picnic table and a good view toward the sea. A balding man looked up from his morning paper, nodded, then went back to reading.

Along the ridge approaching the peak, I noticed three things:

An interesting pattern of rock and ceramic fragments embedded in the path.

The start of rain, as the clouds darkened and thunder rolled in the distance.

And then, an odd banging noise, somewhere nearby, and the familiar sound of young teen boys shouting.

I pulled out my umbrella and hurried on. I was soon in the clearing at the base of the monument, where I found the cause of the banging I’d heard: a dozen or so boys were trying to wedge themselves into one of the metal guardhouses that dot the Athenian hills. The banging was an attempt to close the door; the shouting was the noise of those outside, still trying to wedge themselves in to escape the now pelting rain.

Just past the monument, an open rock face looked out over the Parthenon, Parthenon Museum, and the outstretched city. I stood a moment on the slippery rock, snapped a few photos, then hurried on, rain dripping all around me.

There were more patterns in the paving in the path. What had seemed like an isolated piece of spontaneous art was clearly part of a larger pattern. As the rain slowed to a drizzle, I paused to take photos, impressed by the whimsical variations in an overarching theme.

Not far down the hill I came to an interesting series of terraces, walls, and stone benches. The walls were part of the Diateichisma, fortification built in the 4th century BC, then periodically rebuilt, repaired, and kept in use until medieval times.

The terraces and benches seemed to honor the walls, to incorporate them, in the same way the paving had incorporated bits of rock and shards of broken pots.  I paused for a minute to admire the design and to note the view out toward the Parthenon, then stepped out of the way of a torrent of boys careening down the hill, shouting an energetic call and response as they vanished through the trees.

The trail ended opposite a church that bore the now unmistakeable design that had shaped the paving, benches and terraces. My guide books had said little about Philopappos Hill, nothing at all about the church, but I found a small plaque nearby that gave a hint of explanation: 

Dimitri Pikionis, an inspired architect, city planner, artist, set designer and thinker executed the landscaping of the archaeological area around the Acropolis, Philopappos’ Hill and St. Demetrios Loumbardiaris between 1951 and 1957. . . . He integrated the remains of the ancient habitations that were on the site. [The work] was done without preplanning, on site, using skilled craftsmen. 

Intrigued, I’ve since done more research on Pikionis. He taught architecture for years at the Athens Polytechnicum but completed few projects of his own: six houses, a school, a theater, a playground, an apartment building.

His influence, though, extends far beyond that. His work was organic – closely attuned to the landscape, careful to integrate historic and environmental features. He was insistent on using only native plants long before that idea was common.

A memorial written by one o f his students describes the way he both challenged and trusted the teams that worked on the Philopappos project, first clarifying the plan and offering vision, then “resting on a small stool, he let them free.”

What I know of Dimitri Pikionis is what I saw in the work on Philopappos Hill: a joyful energy, a whimsical reuse of historical fragments, an insistence on local context. And, apparently, a willingness to trust others with the vision – to allow an organic expansion of the work, beyond his personal reach.

In thinking of him, I find myself thinking of the Apostle Paul, whose footsteps we traced in the days just after my encounter with Pikionis’ work.

Paul did his best to embed the good news of God’s kingdom into the contexts where he traveled, quoting and repositioning bits of philosophy and popular wisdom he encountered on the way, doing his best to show a greater design, then entrusting the message to others on as he traveled on again.

I sometimes consider my own work fragmentary – gardens planted and left for someone else, projects half-done abruptly set aside. I feel a bit like Paul, planning to go one way, then directed somewhere else, investing in one place and time, then stepping away, forced to trust the work to others.

Pikionis’ work on Philopappos Hill reminds and encourages me: we are part of a pattern begun long before us, reaching far beyond us.

Our best work isn’t a grand structure, like the Parthenon, or some grand marble temple. 

It’s smaller, more organic, and in it's own way, more lasting:

Vision shared.

Next generation trained.

Fragments rearranged, and offered to others, in a context that brings new understanding, and invites others into joy. 

This is the sixth in a series, Texts in Context, revisting two formative weeks spent in Greece in March 2014. Earlier posts: 

Texts in Context: Yassas!

Mysteries

Proclaim Freedom 

Covering Shaven Heads
Life Lesson from Lydia

As always, your thoughts and comments are welcome. Just click on   __comments below to see the comment option.  

Proclaim Freedom

The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
    because he has anointed me
    to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
    and recovery of sight for the blind,
to set the oppressed free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. 

Decades ago, at our previous church, a new parish priest invited the congregation to join him in memorizing the passage above, Luke 4:18-19.

It was his way of announcing that our role, as Christains, was to follow Christ in enacting that anointing: proclaiming good news to the poor and freedom for prisoners, aiding in recovery of sight, actively, courageously, setting the oppressed free.

Freedom is mentioned twice there: freedom for prisoner. Freedom for the oppressed.

As we give thanks this Memorial Day weekend for those who have sacrificed to further the cause of freedom, I find myself wondering: what does it mean, now, today, to proclaim freedom for prisoners, to set the oppressed free?

During our travels to Greece, we spent a day in Corinth, one of the wealthiest commercial cities during the time of Christ.

We visited the the diolkos,  the paved passageway that allowed a five mile portage of ships across the Isthmian strait from the Aegean to Ionian Sea, and we stopped by the ruins at Kenchreai , the Corinthian port that served the trade routes heading west to Rome and other European ports.

Periodic earthquakes (most recently in 1858) prompted a population shift to an area several miles northeast of the original city, allowing more extensive archaeological investigation of ancient site than in cities like Thessaloniki, or even Athens, where new building has continually taken place on top of old.

Our group walked through the agora, often translated “marketplace” in the New Testament but, as our guide Costos Tsevas explained, more accurately “assembly” or “gathering place,” the center of political, philosophical, civil discourse. 

We gathered on the bema, the stone platform where citizens came to receive awards, face punishment, or take their allotted three minutes to present their point of view.

We saw the broken stone pillar, strangely worn and etched, reputed to be the post where prisoners, including the Apostle Paul, were beaten.

And we stared up at the Acrocorinth, the imposing castle high on the monolithic rock where the wealthy of the city lived in the shadow of the temple of Aphrodite. 

Ancient Corinth and Acrocorinth

Costos described the role of the pornai and heterais who plied their trade through the city streets, offering mystical union with the goddess through sexual encounter, and wearily carrying their profits up the steep road to the Acrocorinth.

The pornai were among the lowest tier of slaves, sent out by their owners to collect what they could of the currency flowing through the city. The heterai were more elite sex workers, in Corinth most often owned by the temple of Aprhrodite. Around 2 BC, an observer, Strabo, wrote: 

 “The temple of Aphrodite was so rich that it employed more than a thousand hetairas, whom both men and women had given to the goddess. Many people visited the town on account of them, and thus these hetairas contributed to the riches of the town: for the ship captains frivolously spent their money there, hence the saying: ‘The voyage to Corinth is not for every man’. 

Standing among the rocky ruins of Corinth, I could feel the weight of oppression: worship of a goddess who ensnared both men and women, physical enslavement enforced through force, sex used to further commerce, a sharp divide between wealthy owners and the miserable underclass, living only to serve the whim of the rich.

Paul, and those who joined him, proclaimed freedom: freedom from bondage to gods and goddesses who offered nothing and demanded constant sacrifice of wealth, wine, animals, captives, slaves, maybe even children (as when King Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia).

Freedom, as well, from a culture that used sex as currency and considered trade a value far higher than compassion or human dignity.

Freedom from participation in evil and the resulting condemnation.

Freedom from unrestrained self-indulgence.

Freedom for slaves?

Paul didn’t advocate immediate freeing of every slave, an impossibility in an economy where more than half the population was held in slavery and a large percent of non-slaves lived on the edge of starvation. He did, though, hold up a vision in which slave and free would be treated as equal, where generosity and kindness took priority over profit. In the short book of Philemon, he asked that the runaway slave Onesimus be treated as his own son, embraced as slave-owner Philemon’s brother, be given whatever privilege or hospitality Paul himself would receive. 

Costos led our group to an inscription set in stone near the ancient theater of Corinth:

"Erastus in return for his aedileship laid the pavement at his own expense.” 

The tradition was for wealthy citizens in prominent political positions to underwrite capital improvements during their time in office. This Erastus, as an “aedile,” would have been responsible for public buildings, festivals, and enforcement of public order, and the pavement would have been evidence of his time in office, his commitment to Corinth, as well as of his wealth.

Was he the same Erastus mentioned by Paul as a city treasurer (Romans 16:23), then coworker in the early church? (Actrs 19:22, 2 Timoty 4:20).  Costos quietly pointed out that if some of the church in Corinth were former temple prostitutes, now set free to pursue a new life, someone must have provided the funds to free them. Erastus, as a prominent citizen, would be a likely candidate to make that happen.

Certainly, the evidence trail on that possibility iscontested, yet it raises the question: in a society so deeply divided, with wealthy merchants living like kings, and others crowded into hovels, this good news Paul proclaimed would demand a radical shift on the part of the wealthy: to open their homes to the poor and enslaved, to sit beside those they had been trained to consider “andrapodon,” “one with the feet of a man,” as opposed to “tetrapodon” or "quadruped", the term used to designate animal livestock.

In his letters to the Corinthians, Paul made clear that a genuine understanding of the new "way" Jesus offered would require followers of Christ to become servants of each other, putting the needs of others first, choosing to do what would ensure the health and growth of the weakest, poorest member. Paul repeatedly asked the Corinthians to consider themselves slaves to each other: even to the least shonored. The one of no reputation.

As I track through the history of the church and of slavery, it seems to me that one gauge of the church’s health and witness is it’s willingness to embrace the cause of the slave and to stand against whatabolitionist William Wilberforce called “the mortal disease of all political communities”: the innate self-centeredness “that clouds our moral vision and blunts our moral sensitivity.”    

This week’s Time magazine (May 26, 2014) carries an article titled “Bring Back All Girls: What the 276 Girls Abducted from a Nigerian School Tell Us about Human Trafficking.”

What the article tells us: nearly 30 million people worldwide are exploited and treated like property.

4.5 million of those are subject to sexual exploitation.

A thriving market in prostitution and forced marriage enjoys enormous profits from the misery of uneducated, unprotected girls.

Human trafficking is now the second largest global criminal activity, second only to the drug trade.

I’ve written before about modern day slavery: Chocolate Dreams, Freedom is Indivisible, Seeking Justice. 

And yes, I buy fair trade chocolate, sign petitions, look for ways to support a more equitable economy.

But I’m haunted by a scene I watched in a rest stop outside New York City one evening. I was traveling home on I-95, the road that connects the northeastern cities, and saw a young teen girl and woman in the rest room. 

Something didn’t seem right: the girl’s clothes not quite what a girl traveling with her family would wear on a Saturday night, the woman watching a little too closely. As I headed out toward my parked car, they exited in the opposite direction, toward the lines and lines of trucks.

Sometimes we see but don’t see.

Know but choose not to know.

Double-guess ourselves.

Explain it away.

The Polaris Project, a national non-profit committed to ending human trafficking in the United States, offers a 24-7 hotline, for anonymous tips, calls for help, questions about how to spot traffickers.

Polaris Project Hotline Map

I’ve put the number on my cell phone: 1-888-373-7888.

The project publishes an interactive map showing trafficking hotspots.

That rest area?

In the heart of the biggest US hotspot.

It’s easy to grieve the slavery of Corinth, lament the evil of the cross-Atlantic slave trade.

Harder to acknowledge that more people are in slavery today that at any previous time in history. Some not far from my home, along the routes I travel.

Jesus said “proclaim freedom.”

I still wonder: How?

for more about the US hotline and anti-trafficking networks 

for international trafficking information 

This is the third in a series, Texts in Context, revisiting two weeks spent in Greece.
Earlier posts: 

Texts in Context: Yassas!

Mysteries

As always, your thoughts and comments are welcome. Just click on   __comments below to see the comment option.  

Mysteries

Reputedly Socrates prison; on Filapappos Hill, Athens

Beautiful Greece is a land of mysteries.

The land itself holds mysteries. There are caves everywhere, more than 10,000 charted caves, some so extensive they’ve never been fully explored. The Acropolis, in the heart of Athens, sits above a network of caves, and throughout the Greek hills and islands there are shallow caves used as homes, storage, animals sheds, prisons, even inns. In a nation where the sea is never more than 85 miles away, there are also thousands of underwater caves, caves carved into cliff face, caves that offer passage to underground lakes and rivers.

There are also springs – water welling up in caves, in rocks, high up on rocky crags. Some of the springs yield clear, clean, ice cold water – like the spring in the center of Berea, where I drank cold water spilling from a fountain in a rock wall. Some springs are the perfect temperature to bathe in; some too hot to enter. In some, the water bubbles, or steams, or smells of sulfur. Some taste sour, or salty. Many have been considered therapeutic, even curative, since long before Plato. 

During my time in Greece, I traveled by metro and bus to Vougliameni Lake, 15 miles south of Athens. It was formed when a cavern collapsed, and in several places low-ceillinged caves lead off into the rock below Mount Hymettos. The lake is fed by a mix of springs, some salty, others from somewhere deep underground. Its temperature is 75 Fahrenheit year round and like most springs in Greece, it’s slightly radioactive. Even today, Greek doctors prescribe time in Vouliagmeni for a wide mix of symptoms. The site is wheel-chair accessible and attendants are on hand to help lower visitors into the water.

Vougliameni Lake

In the 1970s, three divers exploring the chambers and tunnels of Vouliagmeni disappeared. A photographer searching for them years later also disappeared. 29 years later, the first three bodies were recovered; the photographer is still missing.

In some ways, that’s a recurring story in Greece: strange springs bringing water from the underworld; subterranean chambers providing passage between life and death.

On our first day of travel with Biblical Tours Greece, we took a bus through the busy streets of Athens, out toward the Peloponnesian peninsula. Costos Tsevas, our guide, directed our attention past the petrol refineries lining the coast to the hills of Elefsena, home of Demeter, Persephone, and  the Eleusinian mystery cult.

The story of Demeter and Persephone is one I thought I knew well. After all, I was Demeter in a third-grade play, my long dark hair draped over a carefully wrapped sheet. I stood on the Prospect Hill stage, grieving the disappearance of  my daughter into the underworld, where she was held captive by Hades. Eventually, Hades agreed to return her, but since she’d broken her hunger strike by eating several pomegranate seeds during her time in the underworld, she was forced to return there for an equal number of months each year  – yielding three or four months of wintry darkness.

Somehow, our third grade production had missed the cave connection, and the ongoing history of the Demeter story. For over a thousand years, the Eleusinian mystery cult drew initiates to a multi-day ritual that reenacted the drama of Demeter and Persephone and prepared participants to cross the boundaries of the supernatural. After procession along “the sacred way,’ the road from Athens to Eleusia, (now Elefsena), the path led through the gates of Hades, a cave in the face of the Eleusainian hillside, and into the Telesterion, at one time the largest construction in the world, where the most secret rites of initiation took place.

Reading more about the Eleusinian mysteries and the power they held for many hundreds of years in the region around Athens, I discovered theories about the influence of the “mysteries” on the early Christian church, conjecture about the secrets of the mysteries and the possible uses of hallucinogenic libations or incense. attempts to link the Apostle Paul to mystery rites of both Elueusia and Tarsus,

I found myself reading the places in his letters where Paul talks about mysteries. His use of that word sometimes puzzled me in the past, but in light of the Eleusinian mysteries, and the Mythraic mysteries of Paul’s own hometown, his choice of that word seems clearer.

The mystery religions of Paul’s day depended on esoteric knowledge, ecstatic experience, and complete secrecy. In Eleusis and Athens, speaking of “the mysteries” was punishable by death. Mithras may have been even more secretive; women were not admitted, and rituals were carried out in underground caverns.

But when Paul speaks of “mystery,” he does so in the context of revelation: that what was not known is now known. That what has been revealed should be shared with all.

In Colossians 2, Paul writes:

 I want you to know how hard I am contending for you and for those at Laodicea, and for all who have not met me personally. My goal is that they may be encouraged in heart and united in love, so that they may have the full riches of complete understanding, in order that they may know the mystery of God, namely, Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. 

As I read through Paul’s epistles, I see his sympathy with those who are fearful of death and hungry for understanding.

Paul offered access to a mystery more constant than a night of narcotic-induced euphoria, a communal experience more substantial and lasting than an annual participation in a series of prescribed enactments.

I know many contemporaries who would say "they’re all equal." The mystery cults, the Jewish tradition, the Christian faith are equally valid, or equally invalid. There’s no one “sacred way,” no one revelation that offers full understanding, no one “mystery” that resolves all others.

Reading Paul’s letters, researching the religions of his day, revisiting in my mind the rough terrain he traveled so tirelessly, I realize he wrestled with the same objections, the same arguments.

What he knew, and believed, he knew and believed from the inside out: God had revealed himself in a way that made sense of the laws, the stories, the traditions, the overlapping questions.

What he knew, and believed, was not from his own conjecture, his own imagination, his own mental manipulations.  It was given in a moment of surprising revelation, shattering all previous agendas, all tightly held convictions.

That’s the amazing mystery of the early church:  men and women shaken from prior certainty, compelled by a new understanding, set free on a path so different from any prior path that they startled their neighbors,

Paul in Prison, Rembrandt, 1627, Amsterdam

disrupted social patterns, outraged authority.

And shared it – consistently, creatively, courageously – even when threatened, beaten, imprisoned, exiled.

Martyred.

The mystery religions vanished, almost entirely, in 392 after an edict by Roman Emporer Theodocius.

Meanwhile the Christian faith continued, and continues, to spread, sometimes by misguided political force or conquest, but more often, and more consistently, by the continued awakening of men and women whose previous agendas and tightly held convictions have been shattered by an encounter with the living mystery, Christ himself.

Riding the tour bus from Athens to Corinth, reading and talking with Scripture Union friends, I found myself thinking of the ways the mystery of faith in Christ has shaken each of us, shaped us, set us on strange paths, refined our vision and refocused our agendas.

If we added the years devoted to the gospel by our small group, the total would be well into the centuries. And if we totaled the countries touched by the work of that one group, the reach would span the globe: clubs and camps for kids in hundreds of communities; training for pastors, youth workers, teachers; Bibles and books in countries where books are hard to come by.

I’m thankful for all. And all the others I know, and will never know, who celebrate with joy the greatest mystery.

To repeat Paul’s words in Colossians, rephrased by Eugene Peterson in The Message:

I want you to realize that I continue to work as hard as I know how for you. . . . Not many of you have met me face-to-face, but that doesn’t make any difference. Know that I’m on your side, right alongside you. You’re not in this alone.

I want you woven into a tapestry of love, in touch with everything there is to know of God. Then you will have minds confident and at rest, focused on Christ, God’s great mystery. All the richest treasures of wisdom and knowledge are embedded in that mystery and nowhere else. And we’ve been shown the mystery! I’m telling you this because I don’t want anyone leading you off on some wild-goose chase, after other so-called mysteries.

This is the second in a series, Texts in Context, revisiting two weeks spent in Greece.
The first: Texts in Context: Yassas!

As always, your thoughts and comments are welcome. Just click on   __comments below to see the comment option.  

Foolishness

Crucifixion, Jesus Mafa, Cameroon, 1970s 

For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written:

I will destroy the wisdom of the wise;

the intelligence of the intelligent

I will frustrate.

Where is the wise person? Where is the teacher of the law? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?  For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe. Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom,  but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles,  but to those whom God has called,both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.  For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength ((1 Corinthians 1:18-25).

Who decides what’s possible?

Reword that: What framework do we use for deciding what’s possible?

What are the boundaries of plausibility?

And what does it take to break through the invisible walls of our plausibility structures?

The term “plausibility structures” was first used by sociologist Peter Berger to describe the interplay between culture and understanding, the ways that the undefined assumptions of our culture shape and control our ability to interpret information. Each culture, even subculture, has its own plausibility structures, its own ways of deciding what could be considered true.

Last week I quoted Lesslie Newbigin, missionary to India for forty years. Newbigin found that the idea of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection challenged the plausibility structures of his Hindu friends, who were happy to hear stories of the supernatural, and very willing to see Jesus as one more deity in a tradition that recognizes three hundred and thirty million of them. Less plausible was the idea that one deity might supersede all others, that one religious story might hold the clue to all existence, or that the divine would value the lives of those the culture deemed untouchable: widows, Dalits, slaves. 

Returning to post-Christian London, Newbiggin found a different reigning plausabilty structure, the “central citadel of our culture":

the belief that the real world, the reality with which we have to do, is a world that is to be understood in terms of efficient causes and not of final causes, a  world that is not governed by an intelligible purpose, and thus a world in which the answer to the question of what is good has to be left to the private opinion of each individual and cannot be included in the body of accepted facts that control public life.(Foolishness to the Greeks, p 79).

 Like Paul in First Corinthians, Newbigin recognized that the cross and resurrection, rightly understood, would challenge every reigning plausibility structure, from the days of the Greeks and Romans, through the rationalism of enlightenment, to our own post-modern pluralism. 

It is obvious that the story of the empty tomb cannot be fitted into our contemporary worldview, or indeed into any worldview except one of which it is the starting point.  That is, indeed, the whole point.  What happened on that day is, according to the Christian tradition, only to be understood by analogy with what happened on the day the cosmos came into being.  It is a boundary event, at the point where (as cosmologists tell us) the laws of physics ceased to apply.  It is the beginning of a new creation – as mysterious to human reason as the creation itself.

 But, and this is the whole point, accepted in faith it becomes the starting point for a wholly new way of understanding our human experience, a way which – in the long run – makes more sense of human experience as a whole than does the reigning plausibility structure.  That the crucified Jesus was raised from death to be the firstfruit of creation is – in the proper sense – dogma.  It is something given, offered for acceptance in faith, providing the starting point for a new way of understanding which, instead of being finally defined by the impassable boundary of death (our personal deaths and the final death of the cosmos), moves from death outward to an open world of infinite possibilities beckoning us into ever fresh regions of joy. (The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, p. 12)

Newbigin’s own agnosticism was shattered in 1929 at the age of 19, when he spent a summer working at a Quaker service center in the economically depressed mining region of South Wales. Troubled at the hopelessness of the unemployed miners he encountered, he experienced a vision of the cross “as the one and only reality great enough to span the distance between heaven and hell, and to hold in one embrace all the variety of humankind, the one reality that could make sense of the human situation” (Journey into Joy).

St Paul:Conversion, Granger Collection, 19th C

His experience was one in a long, long line of such conversions: illumination shattering the plausibility Damascus was another. Once so committed to the structures of his own Jewish tradition, willing to stone those who threatened the authorities and beliefs he held dear, he experienced physical blindness in a way that shattered his spiritual blindness and opened his eyes to the good news of  resurrection. 

structures that make it hard to see the unexpected. The Apostle Paul’s conversion on the road to

For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures,  that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born. For I am the least of the apostles and do not even deserve to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me was not without effect. (1 Corinthians 15:3-10) 

As I celebrate resurrection, I find myself also wondering about the plausibility structures that obstruct my own sight, even now.

If the cross and resurrection demand a breaking down of walls between slave and free, Jew and Greek, male and female, Dalit and Brahmin, what does it demand of my own understanding of current categories: political, demoninational, economic, cultural?

If resurrection is the ultimate reality, and eternity the context of determining value, how should that reshape the contours of my day, or refine my daily priorities?

In a culture that demands evidence – now!

that wants results – today!

that judges every action, every person, by performance and appearance,

how do I live in a framework of grace, hope, endurance, compassion?

As both Newbigin and Paul made clear, the church – writ large or small – is no refuge from plausibility structures that enforce cultural norms and crowd out Christ’s good news. 

Even among Christians, it sometimes seems foolish to love those least loveable, to spend time on “lost causes,” to hope for change when change seems impossible, to insist on good news for those most in need of mercy. 

But if my life, if our corporate life, looks no different from those who doubt the resurrection, if my own plausability structures deny, or disregard, the power of the resurrection, surely I've missed the point?

Would that be the ultimate foolishness?

I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know him better. I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in his holy people,  and his incomparably great power for us who believe. That power is the same as the mighty strength he exerted when he raised Christ from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms, far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every name that is invoked, not only in the present age but also in the one to come. (Ephesians 1:17-21)