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Rarely are cemeteries as peaceful as they seem. My boyhood friends visited them by night to consult with spirits--86-proof spirits, as I recall. Sometimes we’d glimpse young couples having soulful, breathy talks among the tombstones.

The Mount of Olives, Jerusalem’s ancient cemetery, hummed with political conversation when Passover pilgrims spent the night there. The prophet Zechariah promised that one day it would get really busy. In a great "day of the Lord," God would kick the Mount of Olives up against Jerusalem, increasing Zion’s height and opening tombs as well. Saints would rise and enter the city (Zech. 14:1-5).

Unfinished business lingers in every graveyard--broken promises, betrayals, countless secrets left to perish with the departed. Sometimes visitors speak to the dead. They apologize, even plead for absolution, but none comes. Silence stands guard. The stone will never be rolled away.

The two Marys who visited Jesus’ tomb carried a burden. They had witnessed Golgotha’s horror and surely wanted to say something. But Matthew says they went to see the tomb. The verb doesn’t suggest mere looking. Rather, they studied it. They were determined to defy forgetfulness.

They couldn’t get close, however, because soldiers were guarding Jesus’ tomb lest anybody get in--or out. Frightened officials had dispatched them.

What were the officials afraid of? Body snatching and a phony resurrection story, said the official troop requisition. Maybe they were also afraid that the young teacher might reappear.

What if he did? Was he dangerous? Might he harm someone--the priests who had condemned him or the officials who had executed him, perhaps? What would he say if he rose from the dead?

What would others say? Are we certain we’d welcome back our loved ones, much less our enemies or someone we’ve mistreated?

When we die, most of our sins die with us. When someone else dies, so do the wrongs held in secret between us. Should a loved one return from the grave, memories of our failings as parents, spouses, and other shameful specters would once again walk the earth.

Maybe the officials feared reproach more than any vindication that Jesus might get if he came back. After all, they had lied about him, beaten him and lynched him. Would his reappearance forever indict them? Must they kill him again to hide their shame?

Jesus’ disciples had their own reasons for not wanting to see him again. They had fled, leaving him to face death alone. Would Jesus say, "Well, how nice to see you guys! Where have you been? Peter, do you know me this time?"

On this day, even heaven could not rest in peace. God shook with grief at the death of this beloved Son. Like lightning God’s messenger came, kicked aside the stone and sat on it. The soldiers fainted dead away.

"Fear not," the angel said to the Marys, "You won’t find him here. Go, tell his disciples and hurry to Galilee. There you’ll see him."

They left with great joy, Matthew says, but fearful too. Did they really want to see him? What would he say?

They soon find out. Jesus met them and immediately said, "Xairete!" This multipurpose word, like shalom or aloha, means, "Hello, good-bye," even, "What’s up?" At root, however, it means, "Rejoice!"

"Rejoice! Tell my brothers to meet me." My brothers! After all that transpired, we are still family! He hadn’t come back to get revenge or condemn anyone. No, he returned to gather his family.

Our sins and betrayals died with him. He took them to his grave and now he’s come back without them!

The universe is shaken. Nothing remains the same. And yet, like the two Marys, we still run off in fear and great joy, rejoicing one moment, fainting in terror the next. Amid freshly dug graves, we mourn, we grieve, we fear.

But we live in another realm as well, wrapped in the garments of our baptism, where, as Paul reminds us, our lives are hid with Christ in God. Our tombs, and those of our loved ones, prove only as secure as Christ’s.

For now, as we wander between fear and joy, things above and things below, we still gather in the graveyard. Every day we dump more sins and shameful secrets of our living and dying into that tomb the soldiers tried so hard to guard. Nothing we discard there ever comes back. But he does. Every day. Collecting his brothers and sisters. Including us, the two Marys’ joyful, frightened siblings.

Joy, by nature, is for sharing. It’s dangerous and insane to keep fear to oneself, and totally unnecessary. Indeed, with a single hymn we may strike out joyfully for Galilee--and leave fear behind in the graveyard. "The Lord is risen! Alleluia!" He is risen indeed.

Matthew’s gospel has blood spattered all over it. The story opens "in the time of King Herod" (2:1), the tyrant about whom even the Romans joked, "Better Herod’s hus than his huios" (luckier to be Herod’s pig than one of his sons). Of the latter, nearly all died by their father’s orders, lest any supplant him. The slaughter of Bethlehem’s innocents, which roused ancient mother Rachel’s mournful voice in Matthew’s telling, would have barely raised eyebrows in Herod’s Jerusalem.

The other end of Matthew’s story proves equally bloody. There, the Immanuel child who escaped Herod falls victim to a new cadre of frightened leaders. His lifeblood mingles in the dust with that of all the others who died amid screams of horror. This time, however, the bloodshed changes everything.

At both ends of the story we find recognizable patterns to the spilling of blood. Herod practiced deadly arts of power and perfidy already quite ancient by his time. In his mind, only he could save Israel from vanishing beneath Rome’s thumb, and the price of his gift to Jerusalem’s churning cauldron of factions included just enough innocent blood to keep everyone afraid.

The king of the Jews who emerges in Matthew’s final chapters uses his own lifeblood to save Israel. Here, too, ancient patterns appear. The ancient haggadah tells how lambs’ blood on the Israelites’ doorposts prompted the angel of death to pass by on the way to devastating some Egyptian home. Next morning, they walked.

This time, however, when Jesus shares the cup of Passover with friends, he says it holds his blood. Drink this, and my lifeblood becomes yours. Tomorrow I die, but you go free. Wherever you go, I am with you.

Matthew, alone among those who report Jesus’ words, says this blood works the forgiveness of sins. If we follow the trail of blood and the language of forgiveness, another ancient pattern becomes visible in Matthew. It begins with the angel’s message to Joseph. "Name the child Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins."

Jesus already means "salvation" in Hebrew, but in Matthew’s understanding, salvation in the time of King Herod must come for people who have done unspeakable things to one another. They need forgiveness and reconciliation, not merely freedom. Accordingly, at a crucial moment in Matthew, we find two Jesus figures. How odd to hear Pilate ask the crowds, "Which Jesus should I release for you, the one called Father’s Son (Bar-Abbas), or the one called Messiah?"

One Jesus goes free, while cruel, ritualized slaughter befalls the other. His blood gets on everything. The patterns Pilate sees in these events prompt him to wash his hands of this blood. Later, the priests will rid themselves of blood-stained shekels thrown back at them.

The crowds had come for Passover, but also for the Day of Atonement, when the priests brought forward two identical male goats. One they would send away, never to be seen or heard from again. The other they slaughtered, then they sprinkled its blood all over the place. This blood atones for the sin and uncleanness of the people (Lev. 16).

In the holy irony of the gospel, the blood of forgiveness lands on the crowds who had spoken, even screamed with bloodlust against the Son of Man. Such talk can and will be forgiven, Jesus promised (Matt. 12:31-32). Here we see how.

Presumably the reach of that atoning blood extends to the hiding place of Peter, who also spoke against the Son of Man, as would many others later on when asked if they followed Jesus.

What about the other friend who handed Jesus over to the priests who needed a victim? He’s lost to us now. We could have visited him, and with hard, patient talk handled the terrible fault line that now ran between us. Then two or three could have joined this conversation, and maybe the whole community. But not now, given the wrenching permanence that suicide piles atop betrayal.

What becomes of traitors, not only Judas but those in our congregations and communities, or the intimates who stab our families in the back? In what company do I rest in the dust after a lifetime of perpetrating large and small betrayals that have cost others, including those I love, their joy, their sanity, their ability to trust, even their lifeblood?

In the common burial plot, that’s where. In the Field of Blood, where to this day those who have no place, or who have forfeited every place among the living, rest in the promise of the shepherding God who never pauses until every lost one is found, even if the searching leads all the way to Sheol.

If you don’t trust me, says Matthew, listen to Jeremiah, a traitor whose calling to hand his own people over to Babylon cost him terribly. Ruin, then restoration, was Judah’s only hope, declared Jeremiah, and everyone despised him. He came to curse the day he was born (Jer. 20:8-18). But Jeremiah also bought a field in occupied territory, where Babylonian troops would soon spill the first river of blood that brought old Rachel wailing from her grave. It won’t remain forever a place of desolation, Jeremiah promised. It’s our field of hope (Jer. 32:1-15).

Remember these promises as you ponder the blood you’ve shed and the life you’ve wasted. We share life within the crowd whose faces are covered and whose clothing is soaked in the blood of atonement. We go free. Moreover, whatever plot of dust becomes our grave one day, we sleep among the hopeful strangers who rest in the Field of Blood.

A generation ago, Ernest Becker taught us that the fear of dying is the mainspring of all human activity, from our smallest efforts at survival to our loftiest cultural achievements. So far as I can tell, our species continues to confirm that thesis. Even if it bankrupts Social Security, takes down Medicare and leaves half the population requiring assisted living quarters, most of us want to live as long as possible, and we order our lives accordingly.

Never mind that we don’t know what we’d do with all the extra time we’d have if our lives stretched on for decades. As the late British novelist Susan Ertz observed, "Millions long for immortality who don’t know what to do on a rainy Sunday afternoon." Yet we exercise, pay for medical plans, support cancer research, enforce seat belt laws and work in countless other ways to stave off dying.

God gets drafted as an ally in this effort when we pray for our own and others’ health and healing and use God’s name to support any cause that preserves and prolongs life. Unwittingly, perhaps, we reduce God to the role of personal bodyguard one day and house doctor the next. When God falls short at these responsibilities and someone dies too soon, we complain, sue or even fire this failed guardian.

Mary and Martha knew the drill. Accordingly, they had harsh words for Jesus, who had lollygagged on his way to Bethany despite Lazarus’s grave illness and their desperation. Unwelcome as this explanation may prove in any generation, Jesus simply had a different agenda. When he heard their urgent plea, he said, "This illness does not lead to death; rather, it is for God’s glory, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it." Hence, the narrator explains, despite his love for this family, Jesus deliberately lingered for two more days before responding.

To understand Jesus’ behavior and the opportunity he sees in all this, we must recognize that in John’s Gospel, glory and glorified are code words for the crucifixion. In this Gospel, Jesus dies death by exaltation, and his crucifixion is the hour of his glorification (cf. John 12:31-33; 13:31). Lazarus’s illness will lead to death, all right; when Jesus finally does arrive, his friend’s corpse will stink to high heaven. But something much larger will have begun. Lazarus’s death will help to bring on Jesus’ crucifixion, aka his glorification--and not only his, but God’s.

In one way, what happens next makes the whole story look like a conventional miracle of the sort that healers of many nations and peoples have done over the centuries, including prophets such as Elijah and Elisha. Jesus finally comes to Lazarus’s tomb, calls the dead man out and restores him to his family. The larger view, however, includes the narrator’s note that the raising of Lazarus didn’t please everyone. Instead, it became the best reason yet for destroying not only Jesus, but also Lazarus (John 11:53; 12:9-11).

How odd that Jesus would raise his friend from death only to enroll him in a brief venture that would get them both killed. Jesus might as well have shouted into that tomb, "Ready or not, here I come! Get ready for some company, Lazarus." That’s precisely where Jesus was headed. In a few more days, Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus would lay Jesus in a tomb, dead as a doornail but at the same time glorified almost beyond recognition.

To all the rest of us, Jesus’ summons at the tomb where each of us will one day lie sounds something like this: "Come out of there, friend. Come with me. We’re going up to Jerusalem. So much for ordinary dying from disease, accidents or plain wearing out. So much for living with the sole agenda of not dying and desperately extending our days. Let’s go instead to where we can give our lives away. Come die with me."

This command comes, of course, not merely in some final moment in a grassy graveyard, but every day of our lives. We die every day, as each day wears us down, defeats us and brings us ever closer to the first tomb Lazarus knew. But we also die in the waters of baptism. Like Lazarus, we die with Christ.

Here John’s story of Jesus and Lazarus becomes another allegory about baptism. Like Lazarus, the baptized also rise and respond to the call to head out for some place in space and time where we can give away our lives. We find ourselves terribly hindered, however, by the grave clothes that still bind us. We can’t walk the walk of the resurrected when we’re still bound by the old habits that the fear of dying has taught us so well.

Thankfully, we find ourselves in a community to which Jesus can say, "Unbind him. Let her go." These verbs don’t merely refer to a way of undressing someone from an ancient burial dress in a baptismal rite. We find them as well in several of Jesus’ directives to go out and make the forgiveness of sins the new calling of the community (John 20:23; Matt. 18:18). Even as Jesus himself stuck around to help the blind man in John 9 adjust to a world of light and sight, so now the community to whom Christ entrusts the newly raised in baptism, that group we call the body of Christ, assists us daily in stripping off the binding remnants of the old life in death’s dominion.

Naked as jaybirds, we head off to get ourselves glorified. Ready or not, here we come!

In Richard Powers’s novel The Echo Maker, a young man suffers a brain injury in an auto accident and is afflicted with Capgras syndrome. When he wakes from a coma, he can see and even recognize family members and friends, but he takes them for impostors. As the delusional fellow tries to learn why he’s surrounded by phony doubles of everyone once familiar to him, and while his sister and a therapist try to help him see reality, readers find themselves sliding into the baffling blindness that affects everyone in the story and keeps them from ever seeing or knowing the truth of their own lives, much less anyone else’s.

John’s Gospel diagnoses just this sort of syndrome in its cast of characters, and in its audience. Understandably, layers of confusion afflict the man to whom Jesus gives sight. His neighbors, however, suffer an even worse disorientation. They no longer recognize the man when he is able to see on his return from washing in the pool of Siloam. "It looks like him," they say. "But no, it must be someone else."

Why the confusion? For one thing, such occurrences simply don’t happen. For another, they shouldn’t happen, especially on the Sabbath. Given the line of questioning that opens the story, a shameful but universal lie fingers in the air throughout its several scenes. Most of us assume that we deserve the ability to see, and somehow this blind man, and everyone else like him, must have forfeited sight through some error in judgment. We’ll surely see to it that we never make that mistake!

Along with the delusion that we can keep our lives and control our destinies through rectitude, we live in the steadfast but patently absurd conviction that we deserve all the gifts that have come to us, including sight, hearing, taste--even life itself and the love of all who care that any one of us has waked and walked upon the planet. The Pharisees in the story, like the Pharisee in each of us, prove stubbornly blind to the reckless dispensing of mercy that takes place. It has come on the wrong day, to an unworthy recipient, from a maverick agent whom the Pharisees can’t see for dust.

Even the newly sighted man’s parents put distance between themselves and him. They’ve acted and spoken on his behalf many times, but now that he can see what he shouldn’t see, they may look bad to the neighbors.

At a deeper level, John is offering us an allegory concerning life and death among the baptized. It not so subtly describes how and why the baptized got tossed from their synagogues in those early decades, and who would serve as a new community for them once they’d been cut loose from family and friends. In addition, John 9 tells the universal story of perfectly good eyes that can’t see the truth. Baptized readers of every age find themselves in the man born blind, buried and reshaped in the mud of the new creation, washed in the water of the sent One. Now we see as never before, but we scarcely recognize ourselves, much less those around us or even the One who healed us.

We knew the old ways in the world of darkness. We cowered. We begged. We had an excuse for everything we couldn’t or wouldn’t do. Now, however, we find ourselves blinded by the light. Like addicts ripped from bondage in the world of secrets and shadows, we move slowly, one day or even one moment at a time, which is exactly how baptism works. Daily we die and rise from the mud, washed and dispatched by the sent One into another day of confusing scenes and bad theology run amok. Every day’s challenges prove quite capable of killing us. That’s all right. As it turns out, starting over is what we do best.

We do none of this alone. The one whom the Father sent doesn’t abandon us in our confusion. Jesus seeks out the freshly ostracized fellow whose new eyes have caused so much trouble. Jesus speaks with him and teaches him. For a moment he even stays with the man.

Then he’s off to his own washing, the one in Bethany that will mark him for death. His closest friends will swear they never knew him, and in a muddy, earthen tomb he will join all who have ever slipped into the endless darkness. There he will lie, together with that nameless friend from the neighborhood near the pool of Siloam, the one who’s known several ways of seeing and every sort of blindness imaginable.

The baptismal story doesn’t end there, of course. The Father will raise up these two mud creatures, and all the pairs like them. Once more, they will look into each other’s eyes. This time also, only the One will fully recognize the other, who in turn will be stunned in the new light and think that he sees the gardener. Even then, in whatever scene comes after our return to the mud and the tomb, God’s steadfast faithfulness holds us close. No matter what or whom we think we see, the other looks into our startled eyes and says, "Ah, it’s you. Come with me.

"On second thought, go. Tell the others."

Choose your words carefully if you preach to the people back home. Those who knew you when remember things that make many messages seem odd. Prophetic moralizing, for example, would sound hypocritical coming from most folks in such circumstances.

In my case, P. T. Reppert would likely be out there in the congregation. P. T. once got an ugly black eye from a baseball bat I’d flung in anger across a playground. That pretty well knocks out the Sermon on the Mount as a possible text.

I spent whole summers with a group of guys, chopping cockleburs and button weeds in the cornfields and talking the way teenage boys talk when they’re off by themselves. Some of those "boys" would be in the congregation, so imagine the consequences should the day’s lessons include Ephesians 5, which says, "Let there be no filthiness, nor silly talk, nor levity, which are not fitting. Fornication and all impurity must not even be named among you."

Thankfully, our town has other churches, so Johnny Green’s dad would not be at ours. He was Sergeant Green of the Nebraska State Highway Patrol. I had a conversation with him one evening soon after my 16th birthday. He pulled me over after clocking my speed at 110 m.p.h. He asked if my dad knew I had the car, commented on the foolishness of what I’d done, and began to write a ticket. I glumly estimated the consequences of this transgression -- grounded for a month at least, maybe for the whole summer.

When Sergeant Green handed me the ticket, I saw that it was a warning. Unbelievable! My parents would never find out. That night I knew with absolute certainty that there was a God, a kind and gracious God who watched out for me in multiple ways. But I could hardly go back to that town and preach about how I’d come to such strong convictions.

I could never imagine going home to say, "Friends, I stand before you today as the fulfillment of God’s ancient promises. Here’s the program." Luke says, however, that Jesus did exactly that. Christians consider Jesus the sinless son of God but affirm also his full humanity. So back home in Nazareth there must have been topics even Jesus would avoid. If nothing else, some folks there had changed his diapers, knew him when he had zits, and watched him cope, as must we all, with adolescence.

Jesus had been gone for a while. What had he learned? Had he seen things that would change their world? Perhaps he could explain his 40 days in the wilderness wrestling with three great dreams for fixing the world -- prosperity, peace and immunity from premature death. Jesus determined he had an alternative mission. Could he explain it?

What is your program, Jesus? We sit in your congregation today. Tell us! Jesus stands to read, "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. . . to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor." He ends in the middle of a verse without reading, "and the day of vengeance of our God." Nor does Jesus read more of Isaiah’s oracle concerning comfort for mourners and cloaking the faint of spirit with praise, perhaps because further on Isaiah would repeat the claim that Israel shall have for itself the wealth of the nations, while all those others end up with nothing but God’s vengeance heaped upon them.

Such was -- and is -- the conventional messianic dream of oppressed people. When we take over, we will be on top. The creeps who have oppressed us will be on the first truck out.

Jesus wants no part of that. How, then, would he bring good news to the poor or freedom to the oppressed? He would do it, Luke shows, through persistent befriending of the poor, the outcasts, the little people of his day, including those who seemed his enemies. He listened to them and ate with them. Some he healed of maladies that diminished their lives. He simply kept on like that until he fell victim to the rich and the powerful.

Even then he responded not with vengeance, threats or self-interest. Rather, he went calmly toward death, stopping along the way to heal a slave’s ear, to comfort the women who wept for him, to ask forgiveness for his murderers and to encourage his fellow condemned. There we see Jesus’ messianic mission, the epiphany of God’s glory in action.

Jesus’ program continues today. The anointed one still walks the road that leads from Nazareth toward the borderline between time and eternity, working among the poor, the oppressed, the mourners, the murderers and the murdered in the only body he has right now, the one Paul calls the body of Christ.

Do you want to see the messianic rule emerging with its release for captives and freedom for the oppressed? By the power of the Spirit that anoints you, join others who do likewise for poor, lonely, hopeless human beings. Then you too shall be messiah. Each of us can boldly return to our hometowns, and no matter what they know about us there, say as Jesus did, "The Spirit of God has anointed me. I come to bring good news, to free the oppressed, to give sight to the blind. God’s ancient promises are fulfilled in your presence.

Few bytes of humor have logged more miles on the Internet than certain bloopers and gaffes collected by Richard Lederer (in Anguished English and More Anguished English), and those excerpts having to do with religion seem to circulate most widely. Consequently, most e-mail users have seen such Sunday school gems as "Noah’s wife was called Joan of Ark," "The seventh commandment is thou shalt not admit adultery" or "When Mary heard that she was the mother of Jesus, she sang the Magna Carta."

Teachers of biblical studies can match these examples of mangled scripture with our own private stashes of things discovered in exams and papers. College students have amazed and amused me over the years with descriptions of events such as Moses and the Israelites barely escaping the Pharisees -- who had pursued them through the wilderness. In one paper, a student explained that "when Moses went to the Sermon on the Mount where he died, the dream was worked out that loving everyone included our enemies." And the Book of Ruth, I’ve learned, tells the story of a "good woman who married Boas and eventually found out she was David’s grandmother." One can’t help but wonder if the Bible makes any sense whatsoever to a student who could write, "Jesus’ last words in Mark were, ‘My dear Lord, why have thou portrayed me?"’

The most disconcerting feature of these misunderstandings is that they appear after classroom study, not in the initial discussion. Moreover, it sometimes seems that attempts to teach the stories and provide their historical context confuses rather than clarifies. At the end of a unit on portions of scripture that involve the people of Israel’s time of exile, a student once wrote, "The temple was the home of God’s ‘name’ and ‘glory,’ although the exile allowed God to move around and be transcendent."

As a matter of principle, I never share the students’ bloopers with them. I have occasionally thought to amuse them, however, by reading from Lederer’s compendium of anguished theology. But when I do, I am struck by how few of the items get any reaction. As with exchange students from another culture, catching the humor in jokes takes longer than finding the restrooms or deciphering a menu.

Nearly all of the students in a typical undergraduate class at a church-related college consider themselves Christians and most come from families more or less active in a church. Nevertheless, the world of the Bible is a mostly foreign land.

Mixed in with these "resident aliens" are some who startle us with what they know. I recently asked a group of freshmen what the word "theology" means. A student astonished me by responding, "Faith seeking understanding." He had attended a Catholic high school, found mentors within the order that operated the institution, and read extensively in the writings of Thomas Merton. His familiarity with the discourse of theology approximated that of a first-year seminarian, not a garden-variety 18-year-old.

Some young people -- an increasingly small minority -- arrive at college with extensive knowledge of the Bible. They know its contents and even have a general grasp of biblical history. While these students seem more receptive to biblical study in an academic setting, they represent a curious mix. Some are steeped in a piety that employs the Bible as a vast, flat strip mine from which one picks and applies texts without giving any attention to problems of interpretation. Other students come with firmly fixed ideas and opinions that they feel bound to honor.

I’ve seen something like primal chaos descend during discussions of the creation accounts in Genesis: students have insisted that the earth initially had above or around it a physical firmament or dome that shielded animal life and vegetation until mature species and systems could thrive without protection. This assertion, apparently taught in the religion classes of some parochial high schools, comes from attempts to view all of Genesis "literally." Once a student told me that her pastor had included among confirmation vows the pledge that she and her classmates would never in their lives, under any circumstance, entertain a theory of evolution.

If we take familiarity with basic elements of Christian tradition as a reflection of how effectively "formation" happens in our homes and congregations, we must admit to remarkably mixed results. This is not to say, however, that the current student generation lacks common components of formation.

For several years I have asked students in introductory theology classes to make a list of the half dozen most important and foundational things they believe about them-selves, the universe and their place in it -- convictions that clearly affect the choices they make and the ways they choose to live. As one might expect from students at a church-related university, most cite things like "I know my parents love me" or "God loves me" or "I am a child of God." A goodly number list principles such as the Golden Rule or "Love your neighbor as yourself."

But the single most common item on this list is some version of the maxim "I can succeed at whatever I set my mind to do or become." Today’s youth seem to share that much formation -- a tribute, no doubt, to the efforts of Mr. Rogers, school guidance counselors, high school valedictorians and commencement speakers. A related bit of formation, although it often remains an implicit, unexamined corollary, is the belief that, since any one of us can truly succeed at whatever we choose, failure comes from a deficiency of will. Those who don’t live out their dreams have only themselves to blame. From there it’s a short step to asking why the successful have any reason to care for the poor or for others who have apparently chosen failure. This element of formation rubs uncomfortably at times against some parts of the Bible, like the oracles of Amos, many of the psalms or Jesus’ teachings in the Sermon on the Mount.

Another piece of nearly universal formation that generates confusion when it encounters the Bible is the Enlightenment legacy that says truth can reside only in science and history. For those who unwittingly assume this and also find truth in the Bible, all parts of the Bible necessarily represent science and history (including Genesis 1-11 and the story of Joshua’s long day in the sun). Conversely, those who can’t accept creation accounts, miracle stories or somewhat contradictory passion narratives as either science or history must therefore judge them to be lacking in truthfulness. The former group generally makes its opinions known in the classroom. Members of the latter sit back quietly, hoping not to look impious despite their skepticism, and confess misgivings or outright dismissal of scriptural material later, in the privacy of a paper that only the instructor sees.

Add to this mix a handful of international students, most likely from a Middle Eastern, Islamic culture or from an Asian society in which people deem it strange to share any religious conviction, and we have an assembly that we could address only if the miracle of Pentecost touched our tongues. Failing that, we have before us, each semester, a fugitive work crew straight from the tower of Babel.

A generation ago, when students entering church-related colleges seemed to have more in common and a greater familiarity with the Bible, biblical studies typically began with a textbook that surveyed biblical history and introduced the canon’s books and authors. Where it was safe to teach from a perspective informed by historical criticism, successive editions of Bernhard W. Anderson’s Understanding the Old Testament served as a standard introduction. Where historical criticism remained suspect or forbidden, works like Samuel J. Schultz’s The Old Testament Speaks played that role.

Today, biblical studies publishers offer similar introductions too numerous to mention, and many instructors still use them in a game attempt to introduce the whole Bible in one or two semesters. In my own experience, these forced marches too often result in scenarios that find Moses confronting the Pharisees, or pitiful essays about Job, "a faithful, God-fearing Christian into whose life Jesus brought sickness and sorrow, even killing his family members and friends, to see how much Job loved and cherished him."

One alternative is to concede the grand sweep, proceed more like a hedgehog than a fox, and concentrate on a few, limited portions of the canon. This approach allows introduction of the many approaches and tools biblical scholars use today, from older methods such as form and redaction criticism to rhetorical, literary and social-scientific study to reader-response, poststructuralist and feminist interpretation. A semester or two of such work leaves students familiar with the shape and texture of a few stories, poems and oracles, and hopefully whets their appetite for more. This approach also tends to put students on a more or less level playing field regardless of their familiarity with the Bible. All of them must learn to use new tools. Like the older alternative from which it deviates, however, this approach may also leave students overwhelmed, particularly with the magnitude of what it takes to become competent at biblical study. A student once commented that my course had convinced him no one could understand the Bible without a Ph.D.

Few of us, at least on our better days, consciously set out to scare students off our turf or protect the secrets of a biblical studies high priesthood. We teach for love, not for power. We try to engage others in studying scriptures because at some point we fell in love with these texts. We have become intimate with them. We wear them like a habitus. We cohabit with them. We lie down with them in the evening and wake up to them in the morning. We yearn to hear their familiar words and phrases, no matter how many times this loved one has repeated these same things to us before. We continually find new features and new avenues to probe, and we invite others into a similar relationship.

The kind of reading we practice approximates what Paul J. Griffiths has called "religious reading," as distinct from "consumerist reading," which makes us users, buyers and sellers of texts. Consumerist readers are interested primarily in moving quickly from one text to the next in search of things that will excite, titillate, entertain, empower and give them some advantage over others.

Religious readers, on the other hand, assume they have come into the presence of a text with inexhaustible depth. They read with reverence, humility, obedience and the presumption that difficulty in understanding reveals more about their limitations than the excellence or effectiveness of the text. Religious readers incorporate, internalize and memorize texts. They read slowly, hoping not to miss anything.

Many of us in the academic world would trade body parts for students able and willing to read anything, whether part of a sacred canon or not, with such care. Those who teach Dante and Dostoevsky, for example, read their works religiously and not as consumers, and they invite students to enter a similar discipline. How can we lure students into entering a kind of disciplined love affair with the texts we teach? Griffiths thinks monasteries have the last, best chance at keeping this ancient tradition alive. He despairs of teaching or practicing religious reading in universities because higher education in the U.S. has sold its soul to capitalism. Universities must justify everything they do by showing how these things help students to gain some advantage, become wealthy and develop bigger consumer appetites.

In addition, while colleges and universities teach critical thinking, truly religious readers strive to remain obedient to canonical sources, not to be critical of them. Griffiths likens a religious reader engaged in critical thinking to a balance-beam gymnast who keeps one eye on the floor as she does her somersaults. Athlete and scholar alike make a shambles of their practice when they attempt to do both, and those who teach students to focus on epiphenomena rather than on obedience to the texts drag others with them into the abyss of consumerism.

Moreover, teaching the Bible in a context that values critical thinking inevitably causes pain for some of the students and seems to disable for a time whatever religious reading they might have done prior to our classes. For those who come to this study in "first naïveté," a semester of biblical study resembles open-heart surgery without benefit of anesthesia. We dissect living things in our classes. Though we assure students that the outcomes, which they can’t yet imagine, will prove worth the pain and fear, we cannot protect them.

On top of all this, we give grades.

Still, we ask students to come along. We invite them into a dance that might lead to intimacy and religious reading. We don’t do so only because we need jobs, or because students who should learn close reading for future success might as well learn it from reading the Bible, Augustine or Kierkegaard as from anything else. Rather, we invite them to join us on a path toward a dwelling place with rich pastures where a table is set before us and our cup runs over.

Most of us have found that place somewhere on the far side of a shadowy valley that stretched from the wreck of our own first naïveté to the point where we finally gave up the need for sure answers to every question. We learned instead to trust that God’s hold on us would ultimately prove stronger than our tenuous grip on God. There we entered a second naïveté, and likely fell in love again.

To this grand affair we beckon students. Some of them come along, lured, I believe, not so much by the beauty of our methods, maps and tools as by the quiet contagion of our love for the material, the remarkable, inexhaustible "thing" we gather round. Our varied approaches to scripture, our theories about depth versus breadth of coverage, and our work and worry over students with vastly different degrees and kinds of formation don’t matter nearly so much as the ways we practice and embody the virtues of a faithful lover or a religious reader. These same virtues, Mark R. Schwehn reminds us, befit the whole of a scholar’s life and work: humility, faith, self-denial and charity.

We practice these virtues when we interact with students, both the tender and the recalcitrant. We also demonstrate and teach these qualities when we remain students ourselves. In that role we share the thrill of discovery, and model the courage and humility necessary for letting go an old assumption in order to receive something new. Ultimately, love or charity becomes our magnum opus, though it doesn’t show up in obvious ways on faculty service reports or résumés.

For better or worse, the flow of gaffes and bloopers remain a constant feature of our work. These curious sayings signify in part the size of the task we take on as teachers, and the distance between what we think we communicate and what students actually hear. Occasionally, however, a bit of pedagogical wisdom comes in these unlikely wrappers, like this from a student who concluded an essay on Matthew’s Gospel: "We must all follow Christ’s final command: ‘Go and make disciples of yourselves!

Early on, even Jeremiah could have located himself somewhere within Frederick Buechner’s pithy essay on vocation in Wishful Thinking. "The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet," says Buechner.

Jeremiah would later recall for God that initial gladness: "Your words were found, and I ate them; your words became to me a joy and the delight of my heart; for I am called by your name, O Lord God of Hosts."

Soon enough, however, the plucking-up and tearing-down words, along with the destroying and overthrowing words, sweet as they may have tasted coming off Jeremiah’s tongue, began to stick in the craws of his contemporaries. A steady diet of rejection and hatred served up by even his boyhood friends eventually plunged the sorry prophet into self-loathing. Jeremiah tried to swallow the words and stop their flow, but they consumed him like a blaze in the belly and he could not hold them back. His compatriots hated him all the more.

At length he blistered God with the charge of rape. "O Lord, you have seduced me, and I was seduced; you are stronger than me and you overpowered me." Perhaps Buechner had Jeremiah in mind when he noted that his grid for locating vocation served only as a general rule. Or maybe vocation for genuine prophets conforms to different governing principles. For them, deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger rarely intersect.

Jesus occasionally referred to himself as a prophet. Did this rule apply to him? The assembly that heard his gracious words in the hometown synagogue responded warmly, but before they could heap on too much praise, Jesus slipped a jeremiad -- a complaint reminiscent of Jeremiah himself -- into his talk. And his comments changed everything. Now he had betrayed the hometown people by aiding and abetting their enemies.

Jeremiah betrayed Judah and Jerusalem when he handed them over to Babylon with the message that this was God’s last hope for saving God’s people. Jesus’ treachery toward his contemporaries came from handing over their most cherished things, including hope for a messianic age, to the sometimes hostile peoples roundabout. He’d healed folks elsewhere, but not at home, even, he says, as in the age of Elijah and Elisha, when lots of people starved and lepers abounded but miracles from God came only in Sidon and Syria.

The words of Paul’s great "love chapter," I Corinthians 13, sound so charming that our culture commonly reduces them to greeting-card banality. Paul didn’t mean to be sappy. He wrote with great passion to a community of Christian people engaged in tearing itself apart with disputes. Who was right? Whose gifts were truly crucial? Which members could they live without if things got too rough? Many of us live and work in communities, families or congregations facing the same struggles. What if we risked a dose of literalism and listened again to these sweet words and their implications? Does godly agape love shape our actions and inform our motives?

No matter what other powers, talents, wisdom or understanding we might have, without love they count for nothing. (Nothing?)

Love is patient and kind (even toward people clearly misguided, ignorant and wrong?), not boastful, arrogant or rude. (Well of course, but some of these jerks need to learn a thing or two -- it’s the only language they understand.)

Love isn’t irritable, doesn’t insist on its own way. (Whoever wrote this doesn’t live with my kids, and surely wasn’t subjected to today’s karaoke church music.)

Love isn’t resentful. (When they take me for granted, use me and never, ever thank me? Get serious!)

Love doesn’t rejoice in wrongdoing. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. (No, no, no. Not after this year’s election! I hope those fools stumble all over themselves.)

Now the congregation is stirring restlessly. We’d better shoot this messenger, don’t you think?

Though Jesus eluded the angry worshipers that first time in Nazareth, he did not escape for good. When he’d finally let in too many outsiders, eaten with too many sinners and blurred the boundaries once too often, the crowds that had once shouted "Hosanna" eventually called out for Jesus’ blood. With cross and nails they finally shut him up, but not before he cried out, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."

Of all the prophets ever slain in Israel, America or anywhere else, God raised this one, this healer of gentiles and friend of sinners, so we might know that God has forgiven everything, and continues to do so even today. Despite everything, God is patient and kind toward us, not irritable or resentful. God laughs not at our weaknesses, but rejoices over the truth that we are all God’s children. For each and for all of us, God bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. That love never ends.

There we find the world’s deepest need, and our deepest gladness.

Most of us enjoy stories about naïve amateurs who make bizarre mistakes. We chuckle knowingly over the man who complained about the performance of his new powerboat, only to have the marina staff discover that he’d launched the boat without taking it off the trailer, or the woman who mistook the CD-ROM drive on her computer for a retractable cup holder. Such tales permit us to feel savvy and urbane by comparison.

The Galilean fishermen, hard at work on their nets, may have recalled stories like that when the teacher from Nazareth asked to use one of their boats as a podium. A bit later they had proof of his ignorance when he told them to cast their nets in the deep during broad daylight. Perhaps then folks joked, "Those that can, do; those that can’t, teach."

Though the men never knew for sure if the huge catch of fish that resulted was a miracle of God or just dumb luck, it altered the course of their lives. Soon they became the amateurs and rookies. "Catching people," that’s how Jesus described their new vocation. They had no training for this new line of work. Indeed, in his other volume, Luke described two of them, Peter and John, as "uneducated and ordinary men" (agrammatoi and idiotai in the Greek) even after their days under Jesus’ tutelage.

The success of a movement that will turn the world upside down by means of a message, a "gospel," would seem to require orators and wordsmiths, not a bunch of agrammatoi and idiotai who respond first by trying to beg off on account of their uncircumcised and unclean lips. How shall this new thing grow?

The secret lies in the net with which Jesus’ "fishers of people" will make their catch. It must be made partly of words. After all, the apostles and prophets did an awful lot of talking, and they left among their notes the principle that "faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God." Moreover, they came to believe that God provided the words to say, and those words had remarkable power.

Nevertheless, how many people either then or now become followers of Christ solely through hearing or seeing words? Important as words are, the net that God hauls through this world, using former fishermen’s hands, has other knots and strands as well.

Walter Wangerin Jr. touches on this truth about God’s dragnet in his new book, Paul: A Novel. Here we meet a feisty, diminutive, quick-tempered Paul that few of us would gladly welcome in the seat next to us on a long airplane flight. Paul talks continuously. He works as quickly and cleverly with words as he does with the needles and canvas of his day job, but rarely, if ever, do we see him convince another person to share his trust in the crucified Christ through words alone.

Through stories about bit players in the canonical material from and about Paul, Wangerin describes how people get caught up in Paul’s gospel. Among them we see Erastus, manager of the public markets in Corinth, and Apelles, a shoemaker who plies his trade in the markets where Paul sometimes works and where Erastus collects taxes. Neither Erastus nor Apelles has any patience with the prickly little tent-maker, and eventually situations arise in which each has reason to want to destroy Paul. Both times the apostle who’d had his own life hijacked while he was on a fire-breathing mission to halt the spread of the gospel responds by showing love to these enemies at precisely the moment when they are most unlovable to themselves as well as to Paul and his few associates.

Apelles has already split Paul’s head open and now has drawn a knife to finish him off when Paul looks his attacker in the eyes and says, "Apelles, don’t be afraid." A moment later he adds, "There’s no reason for you to be afraid of me, Apelles. Because I love you."

This is plainly ridiculous, of course. Paul has no reason whatever to love Apelles, and no one understands that more clearly than Apelles himself. Nevertheless, with his anger stayed, Apelles puts away his knife and will soon become Paul’s friend and a partner in sharing the gospel about Jesus -- but not before he begins to see that the love of God, embodied in Paul’s bizarre behavior and seemingly inappropriate words, means to claim him as God’s own.

The net that caught Apelles and Erastus was made of words, all right, but the love of God and the spirit of Christ that wove the words together and gave them strength proved the effective agents in this drama. That same net has hauled us, too, into the boat that Peter and the others learned to sail after that great catch in Galilee. Now our lives become part of the way God draws all humankind into the loving embrace that waits patiently while the boats work their way toward shore.

Here is a truth to cherish always: We don’t mend, tend or haul the net; rather, by God’s grace we become the net. God does the mending, the daily washing and the morning-by-morning encouragement and direction of would-be catchers who have fished all night and come home empty.

Finally, no night is completely lost that finds us washed up on shore, face to face with the Amateur who once borrowed Peter’s boat to use as a pulpit, the one who has no day job, really, except to love us.

At every wedding we wait for the moment when we witness a bride and groom vow faithfulness to each other "til death us do part." We think when we hear those words, or even more when we speak them ourselves, that death will come to visit much later, at some far distant boundary of a marital union begun today with such promise.

But death is already there. It comes to sit with us at the beginning, else there is no glory, no gravity to the marriages we make by giving ourselves to each other. We do a weighty thing when we commit to sharing most intimately with one partner the brief and precious life each of us gets on this earth. Few of us see the full truth of this, however, until we reach that inevitable moment we named in our vows.

Where is the climax of a couple’s life together? At what point can they see the glory of their union? It’s not likely to be found in the swooning that leads them to marry, nor even in the act we call consummation. Does glory come finally in the fulfillment of family? Or in the peace that comes when the nest empties?

I believe I have witnessed the moment when marital glory reveals itself. It appeared during the dark of night in a dining room converted temporarily into a hospice center. My father lay in a bed there, dying, while I spent nights on a couch nearby and kept watch. Several times in that last week I awakened to see my mother standing over Dad in the dim light. She hadn’t risen from sleep to perform some ministration. She simply stood for long minutes looking tenderly down at this sleeping man with whom she had shared more than half a century.

I closed my eyes and kept still. Children aren’t supposed to watch their parents’ most intimate moments. But I wondered.

What filled Mom’s mind and heart as she pondered the face, the body, the person with whom she had spent her life? The whole of their life together, I think. The full weight and glory of their marriage now became clear. All they would be together in time and space, the gift they could offer the world as one flesh, had grown to fullness and been offered up. All that remained was to let it rest in God’s hands.

John’s Gospel says that Jesus revealed his glory in the first of his signs at a wedding in Cana, and his disciples believed in him. The narrative doesn’t tell us just how much of that glory the disciples saw or understood at the time of the wedding, for as Jesus explained to his mother, his hour had not yet come.

In the parlance of John’s Gospel, his hour was the time of the crucifixion. In that hour Jesus would take his own bride and his glory would be fully revealed. For now, out in Cana, the disciples and Jesus’ mother saw and tasted a new, fine wine that would revive a failing feast. Glorious though it was, however, it was only the beginning.

Shortly after the wedding, John the Baptizer announced another wedding, one at which he would serve as best man, while the Messiah whom John proclaimed would have the bride and be the bridegroom (John 3:25-30). Soon after, Jesus arrived at a well at midday and met a woman (John 4). Many of his forbears had done the same (Genesis 24 and 29; Exodus 2:15-21), but each of them had left with both a drink and a wife. Jesus came away with neither.

Another day came when Jesus asked for a drink, again precisely at midday. This time he received it in the form of sour wine, and with it he took to himself his bride -- the whole world of us, whose sins he bore by uniting as one flesh with us. With his mother and the beloved disciple watching, Jesus’ glory was fulfilled even as he himself declared, "It is finished."

How fitting that Jesus’ glory should commence its epiphany at the wedding of an anonymous couple in out-of-the-way Cana. Like Jesus’ life and work, our marriages share in the same irony -- the full weight and glory of each appears only when death comes to part the bride and groom.

Outside space and time, the Lamb’s high feast takes on eternal proportions, as we see in the Revelation to St. John (21:1-11). Adorned in bridal, baptismal white, the new Jerusalem reunites with her groom and they rejoice forever. Death can come no more to part them.

Here in the realm where death still appears at every wedding and sits silently through our feasts, we continue sharing the wine that Cana’s guest brings to our table; Sometimes that wine is sweet and wondrous beyond all imagination. At other times the wine proves sour. We sip it from a sponge like those that the hospice people bring for times when the lips dry up and crack.

Both drinks, however, come from the same cup, the one we share with the Bridegroom who takes us as his own for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, and in whose arms we shall rest when death comes to close off all our other stories. Accordingly, we dress even now in wedding attire. We drink his wine and give our hearts away in the breathtaking risk of believing -- a form of falling in love, really.

Then others see his glory in us, a glory poured like new wine into old stone jars. Especially, I think, when we take our last sip from a sponge, the glory of Cana’s guest appears and, through the long night of waiting, shows a way toward hope.