Tag: Bible

Relating to Jonah

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Earlier this summer, Tyler and I realized we wouldn’t be able to take a vacation this year, so we planned a weekend getaway to Atlanta instead for this past weekend.

On Saturday, after checking into our hotel, we went to a Braves game. It was really fun. We had great seats, and Tyler caught a practice ball thrown into the stands by a Marlins player. However, it was also hot as Hades. I sweated through every single thing I was wearing. I’m sure all of us in the outfield smelled heavenly. I was immensely thankful for my hat and sunglasses and sunscreen, but they could only do so much in the face of hours in that relentless, direct sunlight.

A baby at his first baseball game in the row behind us cried or fussed much of the game, and no one got upset with him. He was the voice of the people. Sing it, kid, I thought more than once, as well as, Take him home, people! He’s miserable and he doesn’t understand why. At least the rest of us chose to be there.

Twice during the 3-hour game we were blessed by the cover of a cloud that cast us all in shade. Spontaneous applause broke out in the stands around us in these moments, along with calls of “thank you” to the sky and more than one relieved, “Yes” and “Thank God.” By the time the second, larger cloud arrived, Tyler and I had already drank three bottles of water and ate two frozen lemonades between us. We enjoyed the game, but in the shade of that cloud we could focus on the game so much better, enjoy ourselves so much more, and be more generous with the people around us. 

It reminded me of the story of Jonah—not the large fish story, the plant one. After the fish situation, after Jonah went to Nineveh and preached God’s message as God has instructed, Jonah, who hated the people of Nineveh, withdrew from the city to see if God would save them from destruction or not. The people had repented in response to Jonah’s very short sermon on the matter, and Jonah was thoroughly unhappy about it. He hated the Ninevites. 

As Jonah sat in the sand waiting to see what would happen, it got hot. Miserably hot. And Jonah was miserable. A plant’s leaf opened up, giving Jonah shade and relief. He was so grateful for that leaf. And when it died overnight, Jonah was so angry and miserable again that he wanted to die all over again (4:8). God asked him if he was right to be angry about the leaf. After all, he hadn’t done anything to grow the leaf. And it’s a leaf, which Jonah knows doesn’t last. Jonah replied that he is right to be angry, thank-you-very-much. He’s even angry enough to want die (4:9).

I related to Jonah in that cloud’s shade in a way I never had before. I got his anger, his petulance. It was almost comical how much relief that one cloud brought, how used to it I became as I watched the action on the field, waiting for a homer that may or may not ever come our way. I felt affection for that cloud. I knew it’d go away eventually, but I hoped (unreasonably) that it would outlast my need to stay in my seat. It brought spontaneous expressions of gratitude from the miserable people around me, many of them half-drunk, plus that baby in his wide-brimmed hat whose his parents were trying to create a good memory. This might have been the first normal-feeling thing they’d done in months, and they worked hard with ice packs and hand-held fans and frozen treats and a cartoon to keep their baby content. 

A friend who recently visited Israel told me she better understood the Israelites’ desire to return to slavery in Egypt rather than stay in the desert. After she’d walked in a desert in that region for 45 minutes, she was ready to accept just about any terms to get out of that oppressive heat and sun. Imagining days and weeks of that, she assured me she’d be ready to return to Egypt, too. 

When the larger cloud passed on and revealed us to the sun for the final time, we still had a couple of innings to go. The sun seemed more oppressive than it had before the cloud shielded us for that hour or so. I was tired, feeling gross, and increasingly unable to concentrate on the game. All I had to do was sit there and make sure I didn’t get hit with by a ball. I just had to wait for it to be over and to try not to complain and so dampen the good experience for Tyler. He too was miserably hot, of course, but he loves baseball and this was a treat for both of us, but primarily for him. Still, I wondered if I’d make it. And in the back of my mind I knew that the bathroom was air conditioned.

Okay, God, I thought, eying the standings and trying estimate how much longer the game would last, I was judgey about Jonah before. But I get it now. I’m sorry. Jonah had a lot of problems, including being racist, but the combination of his stressful travel (the ship in the storm, then fish travel, then walking), being among people he considered his enemies, and sitting in the desert heat and sun probably tore down his walls really effectively. I knew the Georgia heat was tearing down mine.

God used the shading leaf, and specifically its absence, to show Jonah how out of proportion his angry and hatred toward the people of Nineveh was. Jonah grieved the loss of a leaf but not the potential loss of hundreds of thousands of people. He felt affinity for a leaf, as I had for the cloud, and it’s okay to be spontaneously grateful for part of God’s creation. But that affection should never overshadow (ahem) feelings of sympathy and caring for actual people. Every person, even those you consider to be enemies, are made in the image of God. And since Jonah couldn’t muster that baseline level of human compassion, God reminded Jonah that there were “also many animals” in Nineveh (4:11). Life should be valued, and how much more valuable should animals be to plants, and people to animals? God seemed to be saying, “If you can’t care about the people, can you at least care about their livestock? Think of the cows, Jonah!”

That night, after the game ended and we each took a long shower in the hotel room, we were back out to the Battery to find a restaurant for dinner. When I finally got my catfish fajitas after a long but worthwhile wait at El Felix, I felt miserable all over again. This fish had died so I could eat it, but I had stuffed myself too full of chips and queso. And because we were staying the night in a hotel, we didn’t have the means or opportunity to save the 2/3 of the delicious filet I couldn’t eat. Many hands had worked to get this incredible fish to me, but my urgency to satiate my hunger with chips and queso had resulted in waste. Waste for the life of that fish, and the work of so many people. Yes we paid money for our dinner, but those efforts and the life of this fish couldn’t be bought back. 

I thought again about God’s entreaty for Jonah to care for the animals and the 120,000 people in Nineveh who God wished to save. I’m sure I’m stretching things a bit, but it all worked together in my head that night and I have yet to shake it: Jonah with the people, the leaf, the cows; me with the people at the game, the cloud, the fish. 

The Mac and Cheese of the Bible

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The psalms are good. A bit simplistic at times. A bit vengeful at times. The world does not exist exactly the way the psalms present it. But it’s full of genuine emotions, familiar phrases, provoking images, and a bit of cheese. It’s comfort food. The psalms work as the main course or as a side. They’re nutritious, especially when paired with good theology and spiced with a sermon series or study. But they aren’t the most nutritious food. And they’re not something you should eat every day, or that you’d really want to eat daily, no matter what your six-year-old self might have professed.

I recently finished reading all 150 psalms, one per day, in order, for 150 days. (Okay, I might not have read every single day, but I stayed consistent and didn’t skip ahead. And I admit to breaking up Psalm 119 over several days. So let’s say it took me 170 days.) It was wonderful. It’d been so long since I’d delved into that book. At times I used resources to aid my reading. At times I paired my daily psalm with other spiritual disciplines. At times, I just read and asked questions of God. For two months or so, I wrote down a single verse every day which confused me and I prayed and meditated on it for the rest of the day.

The book of Psalms is great for establishing discipline. Some parts are hard to understand, but the predominant emotions tend to be pretty obvious and relatable. Some verses are familiar to churchgoers because of songs, hymns, and sheer saturation in church culture. Few psalms are long. Some are downright diminutive.

In high school and my first year or so of college, I read a chapter in Proverbs and a chapter in Psalms every day. And I learned a lot from them. But I kept to this routine for something like five years. I did little reading in other areas of the Bible unless it was part of a formal study or class I had joined. When I felt I needed a challenge, I read more psalms each day. I read the first chapter of Proverbs on the first day of the month, the second chapter on the second, and so on until the last day of the month. If it was the 31st, I would be reading the last chapter of the book. If it was the 28th or 30th, I read all the remaining chapters at once.

I felt like I was ingesting regular, good nutrition, but my leaves were browning in other areas. Not every part of me was thriving. Eventually I learned that even staples can grow stale. Anything can if you eat it every day. Worse still, I had grown so familiar with the verses that I no longer knew how to let them reach me. I felt bored and boring. I haven’t been back to either book in a disciplined way since then.

In the fall, feeling spiritually drained but needing food so I could continue to minister to others, I went back to my old comfort book of the Psalms. I fell in and out of love several times, but I maintained the discipline of daily reading and was back in love with the book as I worked through the final chapters. And once I was done, I felt sad. Adrift. A lost. Where should I go next? I reread a couple of favorite psalms as the month of May approached. On May 1, I read Proverbs 1.

Proverbs, I’ve decided, is like a robust Lucky Charms—sort of like if Honey Nut Cheerios came with marshmallows. The cereal is good. It’s nourishing. But the marshmallows are why you eat it. Sometimes you get a piece of cereal that you know isn’t a marshmallow, but it’s so covered in sugary goodness that you can almost believe it’s one of the pre-shaped gems. You see new value in it. And yet, the more Lucky Charms you eat, the less appealing the cereal tastes. After a while, even when you do get a spoonful with a marshmallow, you’re disappointed by how stale it’s grown. Especially after you’ve had Job and Ecclesiastes, the book’s more complex cousins, it’s hard to feel satisfied with Proverbs.

Over the past several weeks, I’ve been praying about what I’ll read next. I’ve kept writing down a verse a day, mostly to help me stay invested and focused as I read.

I’m chosing Isaiah. It’s a long book, which doesn’t particularly appeal to me in this year of transitions, but it’s also one I don’t ever remember reading all the way through. And maybe those 66 chapters will be good for me, will tug me through these busy next few months and provide consistency when my circumstances do not.

I can’t know for sure, of course, what food matches Isaiah. However, when think of the book and its passages that I’m familiar with, I think of a mousse or a pudding. Something seamless that flows and fills. Maybe a huge bowl of yogurt threaded through with bites of fruit. Something half-secret and surprisingly nourishing.

In 66-70 days, I hope I’ll be as in love with the book as I was with Psalms at the end of April.

[If you’re interested in some bacon for your mac and cheese, I highly recommend Sessions with Psalms. Disclaimer: I work for the company that published this study, and I got to work on it during the editorial process. It’s still the best study of Psalms that I’ve ever read.]

Faith in Santa

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***SPOILERS for a long-standing Western Christmas tradition***

In the 1994 movie The Santa Clause, Laura and her second husband Neil are worried because their son Charlie not only believes in Santa, but believes his father Scott (played by Tim Allen) is Santa. The audience knows that, within the confines of this fictional world, Santa and the North Pole and elves and all the mythology is real, but this concerned couple doesn’t know that. Nor do they believe that Laura’s first husband Scott is Santa. As they see his habits and appearance change as Christmas approaches, they assume he’s trying to play into Charlie’s fantasy and take legal action to have Scott’s visitation rights terminated. In the waiting room while the judge and Charlie talk, Laura and Paul recount to each other the occasions when they stopped believing in Santa.

Around the same age her son is now, Laura desperately wanted a certain board game for Christmas. She received “dozens” of other presents on Christmas morning, but not the game she’d wanted. Neil, at the ripe age of three, stopped believing because he, too, didn’t receive a whistle that he’d wanted.

It’s a heart-felt scene, meant to allow the audience to step back into themselves long enough to relate to these parents who, despite playing the villains in this fiction, want to protect their son. They acknowledge that belief in Santa isn’t bad in itself, and Laura questions whether they’ve been too hasty in condemning Scott’s encouragement of Charlie’s belief. This conversation also sets up the final scene, when Scott, as Santa Claus, gives them each the gift that they stopped believing because of. He’s literally flying in his reindeer-drawn flying sleigh over their heads, after having spoken to them in the house a few minutes before, then parachutes down the game and the whistle to Laura and Neil, as well as other toys to other people in the crowd.

You’d think they’d have let go of this already. You’d think, as adults if not as children, they would have appreciated their other presents enough that the absence of one wouldn’t have mattered so much. True, Laura declares that Scott really is Santa in the previous scene, but there’s still a sense of Santa making things right by giving these gifts. And that infuriates me because we don’t have to receive everything we want in order to have a good relationship with our parents, friends, significant others, bosses, or anyone else. Why Santa?

You’d think Laura and Neil would have had more faith.

The first time I saw the movie, around age 7 or 8, I thought, “They stopped believing when they didn’t get one present they wanted? Where’s their faith. It’s one present out of dozens! It’s one year out of their whole lives!” And even as a child, I knew the same could be said of people’s belief in God.

Santa doesn’t have to get you every single thing you want in order for him to be everything that children believe he is: good, generous, kind, magical, real. But Santa does give children gifts. Good gifts, unless your people belong to the coal-giving persuasion of Western society. And God gives good gifts, too. There are the obvious ones like life and people to love and a planet that provides for our needs, but also ones like a breeze when you’re indescribably hot and a call from a friend when you’re ready to break apart and the awareness of a gorgeous sunset you would have otherwise missed. So if you sinful people know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give good gifts to those who ask him (Matt 7:11, NLT).

God is not Santa. You don’t ask God for whatever you want and God provides, predictably and lavishly, risking your disbelief if God dares to deny you anything. God does not always provide what you want, and that doesn’t make God less good, less generous, less kind, less supernatural, or less real. Much like a parent not making you fried chicken every single day, even though it’s what you want more than anything else in the entire world, we often don’t want what we need or what would be good for us. And, sometimes, we just don’t get to have the good things we want even though it seems that everyone else does. When a storm comes, literally or figuratively, God has promised to be a parent and to be good to us, but we might still lose a loved one, a home, our health, our sense of security, and more.

This has happened before. It happened to Job. And God didn’t come right away to account for Job’s loss or to answer his questions. God didn’t even answer Job’s questions when God did come. Neither did Jesus appear to Thomas right away when Thomas expressed his famous doubt. Job waited an entire book. Thomas waited 8 days. And I think you’ll agree that these people experienced genuine, painful loss. Job lost his children, home, livelihood, and health. Thomas lost his friend and mentor, his lifestyle, his hope for the future and his country’s well-being.

Santa Claus’s ex-wife not getting the board game that she wanted at age 8, something she wanted more than the dozens of other presents she did get, that’s not genuine loss. That’s entitlement. That’s pettiness. That’s a small view of Santa. How little faith! How unsubstantial a belief if you can lose it so easily over something so slight.

It would be easy to shake my fist at people for not having more faith than Laura did in The Santa Claus, but life is not so easy. If you’ve survived on the planet long enough to read this, you’ve suffered. Your suffering is not insignificant. Your suffering isn’t dismissible just because it doesn’t look like someone else’s.

December holidays, when the world and everyone you encounter seems to be screaming at you to be happy, is a painful time for those who have lost. A person, a pet, a hope, a dream, a self of self, a livelihood, a home, an ability. Maybe it was recently. Maybe it was during this time of year. Maybe your loss just hits you differently when “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” is stuck in your head and the trees have shaken off all their leaves and red bows on green boughs drape the doorways you must pass through.

If you had faith before your loss, I hope you kept it. I hope your view of God was big enough to include the possibility of pain. I hope you have never thought of God as a celestial Santa Claus, existing only to give you good things. I hope you don’t see God as a Krumpus, either. If you didn’t have faith in God before, I pray that you will search for God. The Bible assures us “Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you” (Matthew 7:7). Search for God, and God will draw near to you.

God is good, but God is also so much more than we are. God doesn’t give us all that we want. God doesn’t “only give us what we can handle.” God doesn’t reward the wealthy with wealth and punish the poor with poverty. God demands we help one another, protect one another, seek justice for one another. God offers hope to all who suffer. God is very good and God wants to give God’s children good gifts.

Remember, “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. Indeed, by faith our ancestors received approval. By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was made from things that are not visible” (Hebrews 11:1-3). By faith, by faith, by faith.

Lord, we believe. Help our unbelief.

Jesus the Killjoy

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As he came out of the temple, one of his disciples said to him, “Look, Teacher, what large stones and what large buildings!” Then Jesus asked him, “Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.” —Mark 13:1-2

Sometimes I get to a point in Scripture when I just want to laugh. This poor disciple! I can see him leaving a fantastic worship experience and being so overjoyed by God’s greatness that he sees it reflected in the structures around them. He wants to share it with someone, and surely Jesus will understand! Big mistake.

“Jesus, look how big and magnificent everything is! Isn’t it wonderful? I love Jerusalem.”

To which Jesus answers, “All these buildings? They’ll be torn down soon, stone by stone.” Which, to me, sounds a lot like Solomon shouting “All is vanity” every two seconds or a cartoon character intoning “Doomed, doomed, doomed!”

I imagine the disciple getting frustrated and answering, “Dang it, Jesus! Can’t you just enjoy this with me for like five seconds?” Or buddying up to James and saying, “Should have known better than to try to point something nice out to Jesus.” Maybe he follows it up with, “Christ is such a killjoy.” After which he grabs Peter by the shirt and mutters, “Forget I said that. Don’t go blabbing this to that John Mark kid who’s always writing stuff down.” And then there’s a tussle. James walks faster to get beside John, who is definitely staying out of it. Jesus is rolling his eyes. Andrew ends up being the one to break it up.

Jesus is right, though. Even if we assume the best of this disciple, that he isn’t impressed by the size of the walls and the buildings and doesn’t see them as representative of Israel’s greatness or humanity’s ingenuity or anything to do with the worldly at all. Even if we pretend that this disciple definitely saw the temple and its surroundings as a reflection of God’s greatness, provision, protection, and presence on Earth (as the temple was generally viewed in Scripture prior to this event) the disciple does miss the point: “The Most High does not dwell in houses made with human hands” (Acts 7:48).

Jesus 1, Disciple 0.

But yeah, sometimes Jesus can really sound like a killjoy.

Looking for Women in the Bible

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I’ve always been really fond of Anna. And Jehoshabeath. And Jephthah’s daughter. Women who are barely mentioned in the Bible but who made for themselves full, devoted lives and incredible strength.

Some of these women are remembered in various traditions. One has a festival in her honor, and a bestselling novel and miniseries has been based on another’s experiences. But I didn’t know about any of this when I was growing up. I’d read and read the Bible, and come across a few lines or maybe a chapter or two featuring a woman I’d never heard of: Tamar, Dinah, Deborah, another Tamar, Philip’s daughters, Shallum’s daughters, Abigail, Lydia. For many of these women, they are only recorded at the worst moments of their lives, like when some man raped or murdered her, when a husband’s foolishness threatened to get everyone killed, when they struggled for the opportunity to use the skills their society and family ignored. There are plenty of women who made bad choices, too—Jezebel and Delilah come to mind—but there are far more women who responded well to their difficult, dangerous circumstances. And remember, so many men in the Bible made bad choices, too.

So as I grew up, I read and I studied, and what did I learn? That the best I can hope for is a footnote in history. Because I am female, if I am remembered at all, it will be for what happened in the worst moments of my life. If I’m lucky, I’ll live and get married. If I’m unlucky, I’ll die or be vilified for the rest of the ages. Which is crap. Crap options, crap ideas of both the best and worst case scenarios, crap societal views on women that led me to believe this. But I did believe it, even though my mother and many others, I’m sure, never wanted me to.

At some point, I got fed up with this idea that I can never accomplish enough to build a legacy that my child self would have craved to read. I wasn’t convinced that no women deserve or have earned significant places in history, but I was convinced that women wouldn’t be remembered in the same depth or breadth. So I started really searching.

I would come home from church and read a dozen or more chapters, often in the the Old Testament, in a day. And I read throughout the week, too. The more I read, the more interesting women I found. Outside the books of Esther and Ruth, very few accounts were comparable in depth or length to the accounts of men located nearby. But I found so, so many women. They all had lives as full as mine, and they had not been completely forgotten. Their stories, fears, hopes, loved ones are seldom and sparsely recorded, but of the details we have, these women sound so interesting. And they had roles to play: saving kings, hiding spies, guiding prophets, being prophets, bargaining with God, rebuilding walls. We don’t even have all their names, but they made lasting marks during a culture and time when women’s contributions were little-noted.

I found these women in the Bible, so surely history holds many more. I began with the women dismissed as beautiful (Nefertiti, Helen of Troy, Sisi of Austria, Cleopatra, Marie Antoinette) to examine what their lives might really have been like and what they may have valued. Then I looked for women who barely or never show up in lessons, like Hatshepsut, Jahanara, Empress Myeongseong, Elizabeth Marsh, Noor Inayat Khan, Ida B. Wells, Anne Bradstreet, Genghis Khan’s daughters, Keumalahayati, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and Fatima Al-Fihri. As a preteen, my mother bought me literally every book in the Royal Diaries series (like the more popular My America series, both of which consisted of fictionalized diaries of women living throughout history). Today, I follow the #BygoneBadassBroads hashtag. And every day I fight to make my life more than a footnote, and where I can’t (which is most places), I try to elevate other women out of the footnotes.

Honestly, the vast majority of people, both women and men, are known only to their families and friends before they pass away. They are only remembered so long as those who knew them live. But it is incredibly more like that men’s work and contributions will be remembered and celebrated than women’s. It is infinitely more so for white people than…literally anyone else. That’s part of my concern in helping to elevate other women. There are some stages on which I just don’t need to stand because I’m white and we white folk are pretty crappy human beings by and large. I don’t want to add to that and I don’t want to take up space that would otherwise go to a person of color, particularly a woman of color. People of color have been central players in history and their stories should be remembered and honored in far more than footnotes. As do women’s stories. Thank you to all those who listen and search and elevate.

P.S. I’m always on the lookout for more interesting women in history and the Bible!

When Saul Became Paul

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Lately at work, I’ve had the occasion to read about Paul. A number of projects have involved the first-century builder of the church, and one thing has bugged me. I grew up thinking that Saul was renamed Paul on the Damascus road, at his conversion. I thought that God had verbally said to him “You, Saul, shall be named Paul” or something similar, as with Simon/Peter and Jacob/Israel. But I have been editing a book of sermons on Acts, and “Saul” continues to be used long after that story. And God isn’t recorded to have openly said anything about Saul’s name changing.

In fact, the first time Paul’s name is used as Paul is in Acts 13, four chapters and several years after Paul’s conversion. Specifically, he’s “Saul” in verse 7, “Saul, also known as Paul” in verse 9, and “Paul” alone from that point forward. Which makes me wonder what was happening in those verses of Acts 13.

Review time! I keep mentioned the Damascus road, which was a literal road from Jerusalem to the town of Damascus, and which Saul was traveling on when he saw a vision of Jesus that temporarily blinded him and changed his life. There were some more details in the few days after that, but most people refer to the Damascus road as being the point at which Saul’s life changed irrevocably, the point at which he became a Christian. He had been a proper religious Jewish boy, a scholar and leader, young but highly ambitious and highly esteemed by the who’s who of Israel’s religious elites. He had been actively involved in the murder of the Stephen for his faith in Jesus, and Saul is recorded as having “approved” (Acts 8:1) of the mob’s violence and Stephen’s death. In fact, Saul was going to Damascus in order to persecute Christians there (9:1-2). But he was interrupted. By a vision of Jesus. Who said to him, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” (Acts 9:4). And Saul basically said, “Who’s this?” And Jesus basically says “Jesus. The one you’re persecuting” (9:5). [Sass level: Jesus.]

So Saul spends some time with other Christians, learning and growing and meeting the who’s who of the early church, not being murderous, and probably confusing the heck out of all his old friends and mentors. And then he starts traveling and telling other people about Jesus and about what happened to him on the Damascus road and about everything he’s learned since that experience. And a few things he learned before that (which shows that your education can, actually, come in handy). Simon/Peter, who had been the leader of the apostles and one of the leaders of the early church, is thrown in prison in Acts 12, and now we’re at Acts 13.

Saul hasn’t sworn off preaching to Jews yet (though he will, despite not following through on it terribly well), but he and his good buddy Barnabas are traveling and preaching about Jesus to Gentiles (non-Jews). The Gentiles don’t have the cultural and religious basis that Saul and Barnabas have, and at this point in history there’s longstanding bad blood between the Jews and…everyone else. So these two good Jewish men preaching to and living among Gentiles was a bit of a stretch for them, a bit outside of their comfort zones, and there weren’t a ton of other early Jewish Christians preaching to Gentiles, either. Our pair of heroes get to Cyprus, and the governor invites them over to find out what all this Jesus hoopla is about.

Enter Bar-Jesus, a local mystic (called a sorcerer, actually). (Bar-Jesus means “son of Jesus”, and Jesus was a fairly common variant of “Joshua” at that time, so even without Da Vinci Code-esque conspiracies, we’re definitely talking about a different Jesus who fathered the Cyprian sorcerer than the Jesus who died on a cross outside of Jerusalem and rose 3 days later.) So Bar-Jesus shows up and tries “to steer the governor away from the faith” (13:8). And Saul gets ticked. Saul says some really choice words to Bar-Jesus, ending with, “You’ll be blind for a while, unable to even see the daylight” (13:11). And it happens. It happens immediately. Which probably prompts the governor to say a few choice words too. But the governor also believes Saul’s message and becomes a Christian.

Disability as punishment is a very gross concept. It reiterates ugly, hurtful stereotypes about disabled people. I know that in the Bible blindness is often used as a metaphor, etc. etc., but it’s still not okay. So I get a little ticked at Saul or God—not sure which was the chicken and which was the egg here, or if the answer is the same as the chicken-or-egg debate—for making Bar-Jesus temporarily blind in order to (a) teach him something, and (b) show God’s power to the governor of Cyprus. There’s a slim chance the blindness was metaphorical only, but those implications aren’t good either. I don’t have an answer for why blindness and other disabilities are treated the way they are in the Bible, so let’s acknowledge the not-okay-ness before we get back around to Saul’s name shifting to Paul.

Ready? Are you uncomfortable? Are you confused? You should be. If you aren’t, maybe reread that last paragraph and sit with it a bit more. Is blindness ever presented positively in the Bible, that you can remember? Tease out those implications.

Feeling uncomfortable now? Maybe even upset? Okay, good.

This Bar-Jesus situation is so similar to what happened to Saul on the Damascus road. Both men were doing what they felt so sure was right, but which was hurting other people. And they were both interrupted. They both became blind for a while, having to be led “by the hand” (9:8; 13:11). Maybe Saul remembers the positive changes in his life after he became blind on the Damascus road, so he says the same thing should happen in the governor’s palace to Bar-Jesus… and God agrees, or at least complies. Or maybe God was going to use the same method on Bar-Jesus that God used on Saul, so God told Saul, who explained this to Bar-Jesus. Maybe both happened simultaneously. We don’t know what happened to Bar-Jesus after Acts 13:11, but we are inclined to believe that his sight returned, just as as Saul said it would. I’d like to believe Bar-Jesus’s life also changed for the better but the Bible doesn’t tell us. What we do know is that Saul isn’t Saul anymore. He’s Paul. And the governor of Cyprus has become a Christian.

Saul cares so much for this stranger, this Roman governor, this Gentile, that Saul is willing to do about anything to make sure no one messes with him, no one tries to lead him astray. I’m thinking about Gandalf on the Bridge of Khazad-dum, in The Fellowship of the Ring, when he’s all, “YOU SHALL NOT PASS” at the Balrog, the monster of fire and smoke threatening Gandalf and his friends.

Saul was once a Jew who embodied everything that good religious folk in his culture ought to be. He must have internalized the hatred of Gentiles so prevalent in his culture at that time. But now he’s a Christian, and after a few years of being a Christian, he cares about this Gentile so much that he uses all his power and influence to ensure that the governor isn’t hindered by Bar-Jesus’s opposition. And from that moment on, Saul is only known by his Greek name of Paul.

The Damascus road. The Cyprian palace. I think Paul’s life radically changed more than once. The first time, he became a Christian. The second time, he embraced his purpose.

Or something. I don’t know, the Bible is complicated.