In those days there was no King in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.

The social contract view of church is broken. The society so made with the name of ‘church’ will sell itself, and nothing will be left but dust and ashes.

Who interprets Scripture with authority? Well, the Christ, for he taught as one with authority, not like their scribes. Indeed, he’s been given all authority in heaven and on earth. The Church, being his Bride, exercises authority in his Name. But how is this exercised in more than nice suggestions and good advice, as the gospel with power?

What thing is neither suggestion nor violent coercion? How will it hear Scripture rightly?

Why is it that when we say literally, we really mean ‘physically and only physically’?

Maybe that’s one of the difficulties people have with sacraments: that only the physical act is literal, while anything spiritual must, in their minds, either be entirely separate or be figurative. I hope we can get past such an un-Christian understanding of the concept.

מְנֵא מְנֵא תְּקֵל וּפַרְסִין

[Possibly related: Peter Leithart on (non)referential meaning.]

‘One always dies too soon – or too late. And yet one’s whole life is complete at that moment, with a line drawn neatly under it, ready for the summing up. You are… your life, and nothing else.’ — Jean-Paul Sartre, Huis-Clos

I started doing something today according to a selfish inclination in which, by instinct, I thought only of my own part. I starting making food just for myself, though I must have known I wasn’t the only one who had to eat. Later, after starting, I remembered others’ parts as well and planned to finish the right way by making more food. So why did I feel so violated – why did I feel as if I were suffering an injustice – when my original selfish inclination was exposed? Was I not as much myself in how I had acted selfishly as I was myself in what I intended to do and what I was trying to be?

Yet I considered myself misjudged. Time had conspired against me to make everything look wrong. Of course I was what I was trying to be: within my mind, I’d already rejected the bad choice midway through. It’s-not-really-me —

For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree with the law, that it is good. So now it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me.

— timing, you say. If I’d been able to finish right without interruption, I could have gotten away with my own sinful self: the only thing visible would have been my doing rightly, not my starting wrongly, and the latter would have been concealed from everyone, even from myself. Instead, I was prevented from pushing my selfishness into the ‘past’ of my self. Not only had I been in the wrong, but I was caught in the act of being wrong.

I was exposed, and nothing could hide that I was not what I was trying to be, though I’d hoped that I already was what I wanted to be. And my heart chafed at such a thing.

But I learned another lesson. Avoiding bad appearances isn’t simply hypocrisy: by not disappointing people through bad appearances, you also spare them the pain of that disappointment. Cover your bases.

I wrote before of the high reliefs on the back of the choir stalls in Notre-Dame de Paris, a set of reliefs that together depicts the life of Christ. Today, as I noticed, the way in which the choir stall reliefs depict Jesus’ Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem (i.e. Palm Sunday) corroborates a reading that my college friend Jasmin Borja gives of a page of the St Albans Psalter, in her unpublished mini-thesis, of a man in a tree in that scene being Zacchæus.

Unfortunately, I can find no pictures of these choir stalls that show enough detail, but I can decribe the scene briefly. There are three people in the centre: Jesus, facing right, mounted on an ass; a man in the tree to Jesus’ right; and a man at the foot of the tree laying down an article of clothing upon the road before the ass. In the St Albans Psalter’s version of this scene, Jasmin identifies the man in the tree as Zacchæus; in the version in the Notre-Dame choir stalls, Jesus makes a speaking gesture with his left hand, which seems to be directed toward the man in the tree. The only such man mentioned in the Bible, a man in a tree to whom Jesus speaks, is indeed Zacchæus.

Furthermore, this scene in the choir stalls is flanked by a Cana miracle to the left and Last Supper to the right, both of whose depictions put battlements under the feet of the feasters (obviously intended to link those two scenes and perhaps also the one intervening scene). If this does anything to the interpretation of the Triumphal Entry scene, the effect is perhaps twofold: to suggest further that Zacchæus is the man in the tree (via the common thread of eating) and to put the viewer in the place of Zacchæus with respect to Jesus’ call:

And when Jesus reached the place, he looked up and said to him, ‘Zacchæus! Hurry down, for I must stay at your house today.’ So he hurried down and received him joyfully. And when the people saw it, they all grumbled, ‘He has gone in to be the guest of a man who is a sinner.’ And Zacchæus stood and said to the Lord, ‘Behold, Lord, half of my goods I am giving to the poor, and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I am restoring it fourfold.’ And Jesus said to him, ‘Today salvation is come to this house, because this man, too, is a son of Abraham: for the Son of Man is come to seek and to save the lost.’

Since this piece of evidence is something Jasmin has surely never seen before, it independently supports her reading.

Our help is in the Name of יהוה, who made heaven and earth.

But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the Assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God, the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the Mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel. […] Therefore let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, and thus let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire.

Acceptable worship, even in the New Testament, is a serious business. Though God is always gracious, that doesn’t make it a simple matter of good intentions (if we even know our own intentions!); though clean and unclean are no longer the basis of morality with the coming of Christ (because we are clean in him and he makes all things new), the story of Nadab and Abihu still speaks to us today, and not only by way of contrast. The Lord help us, that we may offer a pure and holy sacrifice of praise in our liturgy and our life.

Reverence and awe, says the writer of Hebrews, because God is a consuming fire. I’m sure some people still pay lip service to the idea that ‘it’s the attitude’ that matters (to which, in their view, nothing externally observable is correlated), but in my view, since יהוה isn’t an easygoing god, assuming the Bible has no relevant instructions except to come ‘with the right heart’ (taken to mean coming with a heart of the purest intentions, or making yourself have that heart) is exactly the wrong idea.

It is for the gospel itself, of Christ’s work fulfilled in his life and now in us, that I oppose the idea of waiting for pure intentions before coming before the great throne: God himself will purify our worship. If the purity of my heart matters to my approach to God, I’m totally undone. And renew a right spirit within me. This is where the form matters: for the Holy Spirit, amid the worship done in careful harmony with Scripture’s examples and instructions (in musical terms, think counterpoint, not homophony), to work among God’s people. Form will not be neutral: it will either be fashioned according to God’s word, or it will not; it will itself support the message proclaimed in words, or it will not.

But we’ll come, as we are – for can we make ourselves pure without God before approaching him? – to hear and behold again the promise by which he’ll make us new. Not in our vaporous fashions does God meet us, but in the depths of our hearts, before the dark mouth of the abyss, where all that matters is the true myth and the strength of the arm that holds our wrist and will not let go.

I take great pleasure in arranging the order of songs that glorify God and proclaim him to man. Et exultavit spiritus meus in Deo salutari meo.

Whenever Marc or Terrance has the occasional question for choosing songs or determining their order for Fridays, I’m totally there. I love teaching them what I know even as I try to learn more, which I know influences on a week-to-week basis how the fellowship relates to God. After all, what could be better than helping friends with regard to worship of our glorious God? Doing it over wine.

My dad asked me to do something similar for a Christmas Eve carolling thing, and I enjoyed it very much. The songs are ordered chiastically (pdf here). When I told Terrance, he said I must be very proud of myself. Oh, but I am, when it involves chiasms.

As a musician, I’m pretty mediocre at everything by now, and composing without having taken any music theory is hard, but weaving texts together is a satisfying activity when I know it’s to the edification of the Church. En plus, it’s related to my academic interests in literature. I ought to designate ‘composite libretti’ as one of my academic interests.

話說天下大勢，分久必合，合久必分。

Sometimes, in the midst of all the bad news, I forget that, for all our problems, I’m proud to be Chinese. Tied perhaps with the Jews and the Armenians, Chinese people are the most resilient nation in the world, and no conquest has ever extinguished our culture. Even when our language has undergone many changes, we’ve continued speaking our own language without it taking second place to Mongolian or Manchu. What Horace said about Greece is even truer, time and again, of China: Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit (‘captive Greece took captive her rude conqueror.’).

The Chinese ethos

The need Chinese people have is not for greatness to be demonstrated but for greatness to be vindicated. To put it in terms reflecting older thought, civilization (classically identified with the organism known as China) need not prove itself: it need only be affirmed by the favour of heaven and enfold the nations in its irresistible greatness, without assertion, without debate, without arms. Heaven and earth are themselves witnesses.

Chinese pride exceeds French pride by an order of magnitude.

This is why, knowing the genius – that is, the fertile nature – of our civilization and our people, we feel the injustice of the past two centuries. We feel the rude downward glances of Europe and Japan, not because we fear our inferiority but because we know that their attitude is groundless. We remember the poverty our parents and grandparents suffered, and we remember being torn by war and famine, and we hold it up next to the deep memory of our great cities, cities at which Marco Polo rightly marvelled, cities that were beautiful for their culture and their music and their learning. We feel the pain that an old people feels.

It is hope itself – for Chinese people are sure that China will always recover her glory – that makes us believe in China’s greatness. Our reservoir of culture is deep and vast, and our nation is numerous, and we know that not even centuries of subjugation can make us a conquered people. Chinese continues to be spoken, Chinese history goes on as it has, and Chinese literature continues to speak across the many centuries. Civilization itself will not be murdered no matter how strong the forces that conspire against it.

But this is also the origin of nostalgia: we know our assets come from the long history, and memory, of suffering and achievement. At the same time, this is a cycle. The traditional myth is not the Western Enlightenment myth of unimpeded progress whose ‘truth is marching on’ as time goes on and people become more advanced. Glory involves the resurrection of the thing that has died, the thing from the past, not the erection of a new and bigger monument.

God and glory

Yet it’s hope also that makes me believe that the Chinese nation can become stronger, more noble, more glorious than it ever has been before. With a history as long as China’s, with its ups and downs both long and deep, nostalgia can become hope for the future. My longing toward the past reaches far back, back to the two trees of Eden, and it brings me to the greater city of God, the heavenly Jerusalem. My hope is that China will rejoice in the glory of the Lord when her people have taken down their idols in exchange for fealty to the One whose Name is everlasting and true, the God who was never worshipped through creations of stone and metal.

It is in surrendering our figurative pride in circumcision and the Torah of Moses, in acknowledging the God of Abraham as the author of civilization and the Saviour of Man, that we will be taken up into the honour and majesty of 上帝 (the Emperor on High), who gave his Son, his holy Wisdom, his very likeness, to suffer ignominously for another’s dishonour and then to be raised to the head of a Kingdom that will have no end.

What a piece of work is man. Our sinfulness is beyond disgusting. Is there balm in Gilead?

Tristitia et anxietas
occupaverunt interiora mea.
Mœstum factum est cor meum in dolore,
et contenebrati sunt oculi mei.
Væ mihi, quia peccavi.

Sed tu, Domine,
qui non derelinquis sperantes in te,
consolare et adjuva me propter nomen sanctum tuum,
et miserere mei.

‘Sadness and anxiety
have overtaken my inmost being.
My heart is made sorrowful in mourning;
my eyes are become dim.
Woe is me, for I have sinned.

‘But thou, O Lord,
who dost not forsake those whose hope is in thee,
comfort and help me for thy holy Name’s sake,
and have mercy on me.’

Hamlet’s slowness is explained by his being an unhasty ent, as well as his being mythologically identified with Laura Ferris.

I’m speaking especially of preaching and of Bible study.

On the one hand, no man can live merely by knowing what Jesus has done if he doesn’t recognize Christ’s death and resurrection for his sake; on the other hand, the accusation of ‘all head knowledge’ quickly gets old when we consider what things Hebrews talks about in reference to spiritual maturity for chapters and chapters after it urges:

Therefore let us leave the elementary doctrine of Christ and go on to maturity, not laying again a foundation of repentance from dead works and of faith toward God, and of instruction about washings, the laying on of hands, the resurrection of the dead, and eternal judgement. And this we will do if God permits.

Maturity involves doctrine, doctrine that builds on the fundamental teachings of soteriology and baptism. Overemphasis on ‘application’ without explicit discussion of the thing being applied, i.e. the gospel, lends itself easily to legalism, plain and simple. Yet what we often hear is calls for arrested development doctrinally in favour of telling people – by any means, by human means left unquestioned – how to change their behaviour by trying harder to ‘have more faith’.

Yes, we must live. But to live, we who live by Christ and not by Adam must live by the Spirit and not by the flesh, by the maturity of sonship and not the tutelage of the law. To understand what to do, we must understand Christ’s love: we must learn to reason the logic and feel the words of Scripture. ‘Application’ without that is the real pedantic mess.

This is not Animal Farm: ‘I will work harder’ is not the motto of our faith.