The Island Parson

St George & the Good Shepherd

Posted on April 22, 2024 by Bruce Bryant-Scott

A Sermon Preached on The Fourth Sunday of Easter (commonly known as Good Shepherd Sunday), which is also the Sunday before St George’s Day (23 April), at
The Anglican Church of St. Thomas the Apostle, Kefalas, Crete
on the 21st of April 2024.

The readings were Acts 4:5-12, Psalm 23 , and John 10:11-18, and we sang two paraphrases of Psalm 23 (“The Lord’s My Shepherd” and “The King of Love My Shepherd Is”) and two patriotic hymns (“I Vow to Thee, My Country” and “And Did Those Feet in Ancient Times”).

This morning I am doing what the kids call a “mashup” where you take two things that are not necessarily related and see what happens when you put them together – in this case, Good Shepherd Sunday and the Festival of St George, Patron Saint of England. I feel obliged to talk a bit about St George after having had a brief presentation about St David of Wales around March 1st, and a discussion of St Patrick of Ireland around March 17th; at this rate I will have to preach about St Andrew come November 30th. In any case, I have never preached about St George before, so i may as well now, eh?

There are many things we can say with certainty about St George and his patronage of England.

He was not English (I know, shocking).
His name is Greek, Γεώργιος.
The first documented mention of him was in the late 5^th century, where he is in a list of martyrs whose names are known but who actions are otherwise known only unto God.
Despite his story being unknown in Rome, a century later, in the early 6^th century, his relics are associated with a church in Lydda, now called Lod, near where the modern Ben Gurion airport is in Israel.
A story of his life was written in the late 6^th century or early 7^th century. It suggested that he was a Roman soldier from Cappadocia in Anatolia, and that he was put to death for his faith around the year 304 on April 23^rd in the Diocletian persecutions. However, as this was written 200-300 years after his supposed death, these facts may be more imaginative than rooted in historical fact.
He did not kill a dragon. That only became part of the story in the 12^th century. Powerful image, though, eh?
As a soldier saint he was associated with a St Theodore Toro, who was depicted killing a dragon, representing evil. The two soldier saints were often depicted together, and George was illustrated killing human enemies of God. In time Theodore and the human foes dropped out, leaving just George lancing the snakey one.
Because he was a soldier, he became a patron saint of soldiers, especially those in the Crusades. The plain red on white cross was the flag and shield of the crusaders, and this became associated with St George.
The Golden Legend of 1260 told an elaborate story of George killing a dragon in Libya. A town there was besieged by dragon, and the townspeople bought it off by feeding it two sheep a day. They eventually went through all their livestock, and so had to start offering children. Finally the king’s own daughter was obliged to offer herself (you cannot have a story about a dragon without a princess, right?). Just as the princess was about to be eaten, George shows up, woulds the dragon with his lance, and then chops off its head. In some versions of the story the town then converts to Christianity, and George marries the princess. This story gave rise to all kinds of paintings and etchings.
When Edward III of England founded the Order of the Garter in 1348, he made George its patron saint, and built the Chapel of St George in Windsor Castle as the home of the order. They adopted the design of the red cross on the white background, whether on shield or flag, as the symbol of the English king, and hence of the English realm. This red on white design began to be used to represent England.
Shakespeare immortalized St George in Henry V: “Cry ‘God for Harry, England, and Saint George!” Of course, fans of the Bard know that he was supposed to be born on April 23.
George is immensely popular throughout Europe and beyond. In Georgia there are supposedly 365 churches named in his honour, one for every day of the year; most Georgians think the country was named after St George (although the country’s name probably comes from Persian). Malta, Portugal, Bosnia, Aragon, Austria, Catalonia, as well as Brazil and Ethiopia, all have a special devotion to the saint.
In Great Britain/the UK and Canada we have had six kings named George, and if you live long enough you might see Prince George of Wales ascend the throne as King George VII.
Greece, of course, has had two King Georges, the first one of which was assassinated, and the second of which was deposed, restored by a dictatorship, exiled after the Nazi invasion, and then restored by the Allies.
To sum up, there is very little we can really say with any certainty, except that he probably existed, and was remembered because he was put to death for his faith. He is like hundreds of thousands of martyrs through the centuries – a name.

If this is so, we can say further that St George is like Jesus. Like Jesus, he laid down his life. By what power or by what name did he do this? He stood before his persecutors by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, who had been crucified, but whom God raised from the dead. George, like all martyrs, witnessed to the hope of the resurrection in Jesus Christ – indeed, the term “martyr” means “witness”. He hoped that, as Jesus was, he would be also. He would have known Jesus as the stone that was rejected but had become the cornerstone of the whole building of God, and his place as a stone within it.

This is an era of martyrs.

Here is a random list of some recent ones.

The bodies of the 21 Coptic Martyrs return to Egypt from Libya.

2004 Kim Sun-il, a South Korean translator and Christian murdered by the terrorist group Jama’at in Iraq.
2005 Ghorban Tourani was murdered in Iran for having converted to Christianity and having started a church in
2008 Son Jong-nam, North Korea, murdered for bringing Bibles into the country.
2008 Gayle Williams, or British and South African citizenship, was killed by the Taliban in Kabul as she worked for a Christian social service agency.
2015 Twenty Egyptian Coptic Christians killed by the Islamic State, as well as a Ghanian man named Matthew Ayariga.
On Easter Sunday 2019 three Christian churches in Colombo, Sri Lanka , were bombed. Over 238 people were killed, including dozens of children.

There are many more, so many that their names barely register when reported in the media. And yet, their faith and actions are known to God.

And us?

We who do not live with the fear of persecution are called upon to defend the dignity of all peoples. For whatever religion they are persecuted, they are still people made in the image of God and are the children of God for whom Christ died, and alongside whom Christ died. Inasmuch as Christ was vindicated by being raised from the dead, so will they be honoured for their faithfulness. All religions seem to have had violent extremes, and terrorists have often used their radicalized faith to justify killing others. Whatever the extremes, the mainstream leaders of all the great religions have always emphasised the protection of the vulnerable and respect for others.

We pray that God will work through politicians and diplomats, armed forces and the United Nations, non-governmental agencies and people of good will, to end violence and war against people on account of their faith. We know that all of these people and institutions are fragile vessels and often are compromised, yet they are the means we have to achieve peace. May we remember all those whose faith is known only unto God, and may we, empowered by the faith of the resurrection, work to save those who continue to be challenged and persecuted, as Γεώργιος was, as our Good Shepherd, Jesus of Nazareth, was. May all the witnesses of God rest in peace, and at Christ’s coming, hear his voice, and rise in glory.

Posted in Sermons | Tagged 21st Century Martrs, Christianity, Martyrs, Patron saint of England, Sood Shepherd Sunday, St George, St George and the Good Shepherd, St George of England, The Good Shepherd, Twenty-First Century Martyrs | Leave a comment

Indigenous Justice & Theology: An Eclectic, Annotated Bibliography

Posted on April 20, 2024 by Bruce Bryant-Scott

I was asked at a Racial Justice conference in November 2023 if I would put together a bibliography on Indigenous Justice and theology, and so here it is. Rather than just give the bare references, I have included annotations.

This list is derived from the bibliography created for my dissertation Unsettling Theology: The Theological Legacy of the Indian Residential Schools of Canada 1880-1970, which was submitted in an amended form to the University of London in April 2021. These are the documents, articles, and books that, in the second part of the dissertation, allowed me to draw an outline of theological ideas that justified colonization, slavery, and genocide. It includes works on anthropology, sociology, pedagogy, research methods, as well as discussions of racism, slavery, decolonization, and post-colonial theory. The bibliography also includes some works of Indigenous theology and those allied with Indigenous justice activists which I used in the third part of my dissertation. I have removed the texts on other matters that my dissertation dealt with, such as the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) (that was the focus of the first part) and kenotic theology (which was the theme of the third part). I think most of the hyperlinks are active, but let me know if one becomes dead.

Alexander VI, Intera caetera from https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Inter_Caetera, accessed January 17, 2017. This is the famous bull from Pope Alexander VI in which he draws a line between Portugal and Spain as they discover and conquer new lands.

Alfred, Taiaiake, Peace, Power, Righteousness: An Indigenous Manifesto, Second Edition (Don Mills/Toronto ON: Oxford University Press, 2009).

Anglican Video, https://www.anglican.ca/primate/tfc/drj/doctrineofdiscovery/ (Toronto ON: The Anglican Church of Canada, 2019). This is a good video about the Doctrine of Discovery.

Aristotle, Politics 1254b-1255a translated by Benjamin Jowett (Oxford UK: Clarendon Press, 1885). This is the passage in which Aristotle justifies slavery.

Atwood, Margaret, Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (Toronto: House of Anansi, 1972). An old but still relevant review of Canadian literature, largely adhering to the “garrison mentality” of Canadians, in which authors typically viewed the land and indigenous peoples as threatening and unforgiving.

Barrera, Jorge, “Author Joseph Boyden’s shape-shifting Indigenous identity”, at https://aptnnews.ca/ 2016/12/23/author-joseph-boydens-shape-shifting-Indigenous-identity/ accessed April 23, 2021. Joseph Boyden is a prize-winning Canadian author who falsely claimed to have an indigenous background.

Battiste, Marie, Decolonizing Education: Nourishing the Learning Spirit (Saskatoon SK: Purich Publishing Limited, 2013).

Beaudoin, Gérald A. , & Michelle Filice, “Delgamuukw Case”, The Canadian Encyclopedia, https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/ delgamuukw-case, accessed December 9, 2018. Delgamuukw is the key case establishing “aboriginal title”.

Berger, Thomas W., A Long and Terrible Shadow: White Values, Native Rights in the Americas since 1492 (Vancouver: Douglas & MacIntyre, 1999).

Bevans, Stephen, “From Edinburgh to Edinburgh: Toward a Missiology for a World Church” in Mission after Christendom: Emergent Themes in Contemporary Issues (Louisville KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), pp. 1-11. I include a number of books from and about the 1911 World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh because it is a snapshot of the state of mind of missionaries at that time.

Biggar, Nigel, Ethics and Empire, http://www.mcdonaldcentre.org.uk/ethics-and-empire, accessed January 31, 2018. Biggar is a Church of England priest and theologian who is trying to defend Britain’s colonial history.

——————, “Don’t feel guilty about our colonial history” The Times, November 30, 2017 https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/don-t-feel-guilty-about-our-colonial-history-ghvstdhmj, accessed January 31, 2018.

Blackburn, Carole, Harvest of Souls: The Jesuit Mission and Colonialism in North America 1632-1650 (Montreal QC & Kingston ON: McGill-Queens University Press, 2000). This is a brilliant book.

Brean, Joseph, “Cultural genocide’ of Canada’s indigenous peoples is a ‘mourning label,’ former war crimes prosecutor says”, National Post, January 15, 2016, http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/cultural-genocide-of-canadas-indigenous-people-is-a-mourning-label-former-war-crimes-prosecutor-says, accessed May 22, 2017.

Brébeuf, Jean de, “‘Twas in the Moon of Wintertime” translated by Jesse Edgar Middleton, Hymn 146 in Common Praise: Anglican Church of Canada (Toronto ON: Anglican Book Centre, 1998). For Wyandot/Huron original see “Huron Carol Translation With Pronunciation Guide” at https://penguinpoweredpiano.wordpress.com/2013/05/03/song-translation-huron-carol-by-heather-dale-huronwendat-and-canadian-french/ accessed 26 April 2021. Every Canadian child probably learned this hymn.

Brett, Mark G., Decolonizing God: The Bible in the Tides of Empire (Sheffield UK: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2009).

Brown, Stewart J., Providence and Empire, 1815-1914 (London: Routledge, 2013).

Canada’s Missionary Congress: Addresses Delivered at the Canadian National Missionary Congress, Held in Toronto, March 31 to April 4, 1909, with Reports of Committees (Toronto ON: Canadian Council, Laymen’s Missionary Movement, 1909).

CBC News (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation), “A timeline of residential schools, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission”, http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/a-timeline-of-residential-schools-the-truth-and-reconciliation-commission-1.724434, accessed October 23, 2017.

Carleton, John, “John A. Macdonald was the real architect of residential schools” The Toronto Star, July 9, 2017, from https://www.thestar.com/opinion/commentary/2017/07/09/john-a-macdonald-was-the-real-architect-of-residential-schools.html, accessed April 22, 2021. John A. Macdonald was the founding Prime Minister of Canada.

Carlson, Keith Thor, The Power of Place, The Problem of Time: Aboriginal Identity and Historical Consciousness in the cauldron of Colonialism (Toronto ON: University of Toronto Press, 2010).

Carruthers, Amy, Kevin O’Callaghan, and Madison Grist, “Canada: Federal Government Introduces UNDRIP Legislation” 16 December 2020, at https://www.mondaq.com/canada/indigenous-peoples/1016528/federal-government-introduces-undrip-legislation%20accessed%20April%2022, accessed April 22, 2021. UNDRIP is the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007).

Castro, Daniel , Another Face of Empire: Bartolomé de Las Casas, Indigenous Rights, and Ecclesiastical Imperialism (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2007). Bartolomé de las Casas (1484-1556) was a Dominican Friar and Roman Catholic Bishop who was the first person to effectively object to the Spanish Crown that the Spanish Conquest of Mexico and other parts of the “New World” was problematic and injurious to indigenous peoples and the truth of the gospel. He famously engaged in a debate with Juan Ginés Sepúlveda in 1550 on Indigenous rights, colonization, and evangelism.

Charles, Mark and Soong-Chan Rah, Unsettling Truths: The Ongoing Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery (Downers Grove IL: InterVarsity Press, 2019). This is co-written by Mark Charles, a Navaho man who comes from an Evangelical perspective.

Christophers, Brett, Positioning the Missionary: John Booth Good and the Confluence of Culture in Nineteenth-Century British Columbia (Vancouver BC: University of British Columbia Press, 1998). John Booth Good was an Anglican priest who established a mission to the Nlha7kápmx on the Fraser River near what is now Lytton.

Coates, Ken, “McLachlin said what many have long known”, The Globe and ail, May 29, 2015 https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/mclachlin-said-what-many-have-long-known/article24704812/, accessed May 22, 2017. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada calls the “Indian Residential Schools” a kind of genocide.

Cone, James, “Whose Earth Is It Anyway?” in Earth Habitat: Eco-Justice and the Church’s Response, eds. Dieter Hessel and Larry Rasmussen (Minneapolis MN: Fortress Press, 2001). James Cone (1938-2018) was an American theologian who created the discipline of Black Theology.

——————, “God and Black Suffering: Calling the Oppressors to Account”, The Anglican Theological Review, Volume 90:4 (Fall 2008), pp. 701-712.

——————, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Maryknoll NY: Orbis Books, 2011).

Cooper, James Fennimore, The Last of the Mohicans, A Narrative of 1757 (originally published in 1826) in James Fenimore Cooper: The Leatherstocking Tales Vol. 1 (LOA #26) (New York NY: The Library of America, 1985). One of the myths in the 19^th century is that the Indigenous peoples where disappearing because of illness, war, and assimilation. This novel is an example of the myth. Some 3000 Mohicans are still very much in existence in upstate New York and western Massachusetts.

Culhane, Dara, The Pleasure of the Crown Anthropology, Law and First Nations (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 1998).

Darymple, William, The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company (London UK: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019). This history clarifies how the East India Company ravaged India in search of profits.

Daschuk, James, Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Aboriginal Life (Regina SK: University of Regina Press, 2013). A somewhat controversial history laying out how epidemics in 19^th century western Canada resulted in the movement of various First Nations and the ease of British colonists in taking the land.

Deloria, Jr, Vine, God is Red: A Native View of Religion, Second Edition (Golden CO: North American Press, 1992). An eccentric pioneering work. Deloria was the son and grandson of Lakotan Episcopalian priests and himself studied with Lutherans in Chicago. While given to sweeping essentialist claims about both Christianity and “Native American Religion”, he was among the first to identify the destructive effects of Christian evangelism among Indigenous peoples in what became the USA and Canada.

Diamond, Jared, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 1997). Why did the Europeans “discover” and “conquer” the world, and not Asians, Africans, pre-Columbian Indigenous peoples in the Americas, or Pacific islanders? This book examines the influence of geography and the availability of domesticated species on history.

Diocese of New Westminster, Monthly Record 1889, 1890, 1893, 1894, 1895. Archives of the Diocese of New Westminster, Vancouver BC. I used the archives to verify some theses arising out of secondary literature.

Dixon, David, Never Come to Peace Again: Pontiac’s Uprising and the Fate of the British Empire in North America (Norman OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2005).

Dodds Pennock, Caroline, “Mass Murder or Religious Homicide? Rethinking Human Sacrifice and Interpersonal Violence in Aztec Society”, Historical Social Research / Historische Sozialforschung, Vol. 37, No. 3 (141), Controversies around the Digital Humanities (2012), pp. 276-302. One of Sepulveda’s arguments against Bartolomé de las Casas was that the practice of human sacrifice by the Aztecs required an intervention by the Spanish Crown. This sociological work re-casts human sacrifice as a more common practice than is often admitted, and formulates a theory that it reinforces structures in society.

Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne, Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment (San Francisco CA: City Lights Books, 2018). This book makes the argument that the Second Amendment of the US Constitution, the right to bear arms, is an endorsement of the right of “white” persons to organise and “defend” themselves against African-American slave uprisings and Indigenous peoples’ attacks.

Dussel, Enrique, A History of the Church in Latin America, Colonialism to Liberation (1492-1979) translated and revised by Alan Neely (Grand Rapids MI: William B, Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1981).

Edmondson, Mika, The Power of Unearned Suffering: The Roots and Implications of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Theodicy (Lanham MD: Lexington Books, 2017).

Ellis, Ian M., A Century of Mission and Unity: A Centenary Perspective on the 1910 Edinburgh World Missionary Conference (Dublin IE: The Columba Press, 2010).

Fanon, Frantz, The Wretched of the Earth translated by Cobstance Farrington (Harmondsworth UK: Penguin Books, 1967). This is one of the classics of Decolonial texts.

Ferguson, Niall, Civilization: The West and the Rest (New York NY: Penguin Books, 2011). Ferguson writes a biased history justifying the pre-eminence of the West.

Fernandez, Manuel Giménez “Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas: A Biographical Sketch” in Bartolomé de Las Casas in History: Toward an Understanding of the Man and His Work edited by Juan Friede and Benjamin Keen, (DeKalb IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1971), pp. 67-126.

Fisher, Robin, “Review of Tom Swanky, The True Story of Canada’s “War” of Extermination on the Pacific plus the Tsilhqot’ in and Other First Nations Resistance” in BC Studies 182 (Summer 2014), pp. 217-218.

François 1er (France), Commission à Jacques Cartier pour l’établissement du Canada, 17 octobre 1540, from https://biblio.republiquelibre.org/Commission_de_Fran%C3%A7ois_1er_%C3%A0_Jacques_Cartier_pour_l’%C3%A9tablissement_du_Canada,_17_octobre_1540, accessed February 14, 2016.

Gagnon, Lysiane, “McLachlin’s comments a disservice to her court, and to aboriginals”, The Globe and Mail, Jun. 10, 2015 https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/mclachlins-comments-a-disservice-to-her-court-and-to-aboriginals/article24879482/, accessed May 22, 2017.

Geddes, Gary, Medicine Unbundled: A Journey Through the Minefields of Indigenous Health Care (Victoria BC: Heritage House Publishing Company Limited, 2017).

Gilley, Bruce, “The Case For Colonialism”, Third World Quarterly, 2017 at https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2017.1369037 (accessed January 31, 2018). A notorious article justifying 500 years of European colonialism.

Gottschalk, Peter, Religion, Science, and Empire: Classifying Hinduism and Islam in British India (Oxford UK: Oxford University Press, 2013).

Grant, John Webster, Moon of Wintertime: Missionaries and the Indians of Canada in Encounter since 1534 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984).

Grau, Marion, Rethinking Mission in the Postcolony: Salvation, Society and Subversion (London UK: T&T Clark, 2011).

Gray, Robert, A Good Speed to Virginia (London England: William Welbie, 1609), quoted in John Parker, “Religion and the Virginia Colony 1609-10” in The Westward Enterprise: English Activities in Ireland, the Atlantic, and America 1480-1650 edited by K. R. Andrews, N. P. Canny, and P. E. N. Hair (Liverpool UK: Liverpool University Press, 1978), pp. 245-270.

Guyatt, Nicholas, Providence and the Invention of the United States, 1607–1876 (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

Hanke, Lewis, All Mankind is One: A Study of the Disputation Between Bartolomé de Las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda in 1550 on the Intellectual and Religious Capacity of the American Indians (DeKalb IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1974).

Heinrichs, Steve, editor, Buffalo Shout, Salmon Cry: Conversations on Creation, Land Justice, and Life Together (Waterloo ON: Herald Press, 2013).

——————, editor Unsettling the Word: Biblical Experiments in Decolonization (Maryknoll NY: Orbis Books, 2018).

Henry VII (England), Letters Patent to John Cabot , 5 March 1496 from http://www.bris.ac.uk/Depts/History/Maritime/Sources/1496cabotpatent.htm, accessed January 20, 2017.

Higham, Carol L., Noble, Wretched, & Redeemable: Protestant Missionaries to the Indians in Canada and the United States, 1820-1900 (Albuquerque NM: University of New Mexico Press & Calgary AB: University of Calgary Press, 2000). A brilliant study.

Hills, George (1st Bishop of British Columbia), Columbia Mission Special Fund (London, 1860), Archives of the Diocese of New Westminster, Vancouver BC.

Idle No More website. http://www.idlenomore.ca/, accessed October 29, 2018.

Indigenous Reporters Program of Journalists for Human Rights, Style Guide for Reporting on Indigenous People (December 2017), 1-8, http://icht.ca/style-guide-for-reporting-on-indigenous-people/, accessed January 10, 2018.

Jones, Evan T., and Margaret M. Condon, Cabot and Bristol’s Age of Discovery: The Bristol Discovery Voyages 1480-1508 (Bristol UK: University of Bristol, 2016),

Joseph, Bob, 21 Things You May Not Know About the Indian Act: Helping Canadians Make Reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples a Reality (Port Coquitlam BC: Indigenous Relations Press, 2018).

Kampen, Melanie, Unsettling Theology: Decolonizing Western Interpretations of Original Sin, Unpublished MTS thesis (Waterloo ON: Conrad Grebel College in the University of Waterloo, 2014).

Kan, Sergei, Memory Eternal (Seattle WA: University of Washington Press, 1999). This is a fascinating history of the Russian Orthodox mission to the Tlingit people of what is now the Alaskan panhandle, and how the Tlingit became more Orthodox when Russia transferred Alaska to the United States.

Keddie, Grant, Songhees Pictorial: A History of the Songhees People as seen by Outsiders 1790 – 1912 (Victoria: Royal BC Museum, 2003). The Songhees were the people who inhabited (and continue to live in) what became Victoria, British Columbia, where most of my dissertation was written.

Khan, Sahar, “The Case Against “The Case for Colonialism”” (at https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/case-against-case-colonialism, accessed January 31, 2018).

King, Thomas, The Truth About Stories (Toronto ON: House of Anansi Press, 2003). Tom King is one of the funniest commentators on the situation of Indigenous peoples in North America. A good introduction if one is new to the topic.

——————, The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America (Toronto ON: Doubleday Canada, 2012).

Klassen, Pamela E., The Story of Radio Mind: A Missionary’s Journey on Indigenous Land (Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press, 2018). The story of the eccentric Frederick Du Vernet, Archbishop of Caledonia in northeastern British Columbia, among the Ts’msyen, Nisga’a, and Haida.

Lagace, Naithan and Niigaanwewidam James Sinclair, “The White Paper, 1969”,

The Canadian Encylopedia, https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/ en/article/the-white-paper-1969, accessed December 9, 2018. The White Paper of 1969 argued for the abolition of the Indian Act and the full assimilation of Indigenous peoples into the majority settler population of Canada. The opposition to this marks the rise of Indigenous rights in Canada.

Lalemant, S.J., Jérôme in Jesuit Relations 20:71, in Carole Blackburn, Harvest of Souls: The Jesuit Mission and Colonialism in North America 1632-1650 (Montreal QC & Kingston ON: McGill-Queens University Press, 2000).

Las Casas, Bartolomé de, In Defense of the Indians translated and edited by Stafford Poole (DeKalb IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1974), quoted in Lewis Hanke, All Mankind is One: A Study of the Disputation Between Bartolomé de Las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda in 1550 on the Intellectual and Religious Capacity of the American Indians (DeKalb IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1974).

Le Jeune SJ, Paul. Jesuit Relations 5:177 in Carole Blackburn, Harvest of Souls: The Jesuit Mission and Colonialism in North America 1632-1650 (Montreal QC & Kingston ON: McGill-Queens University Press, 2000).

Lemkin, Raphael, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation – Analysis of Government – Proposals for Redress (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944), p. 79, quoted in Haifa Rashed & Damien Short “Genocide and settler colonialism: can a Lemkin-inspired genocide perspective aid our understanding of the Palestinian situation?”, The International Journal of Human Rights, 16:8, (2012), 1142-1169; p. 1143. This was the book that first used the term “genocide”.

Losada, Ángel, “The Controversy between Sepúlveda and Las Casas in the Junta of Valladolid” in Bartolomé de Las Casas in History: Toward an Understanding of the Man and His Work, edited by Juan Friede and Benjamin Keen (DeKalb IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1971), pp. 279-308.

MacDonald, David B. & Graham Hudson, “The Genocide Question and Indian Residential Schools in Canada” in Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique 45:2 (June/juin 2012), 427-449; p. 433.

MacDonald, Jake, “How a B.C. native band went from poverty to prosperity”, The Globe and Mail, Report on Business Magazine, May 29, 2014, updated June 19, 2017, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/rob-magazine/clarence-louie-feature/article18913980/, accessed July 28, 2018.

McEachern, Allan, Delgamuukw v British Columbia quoted in in Delgamuukw v. BC, Supreme Court of Appeal, June 25, 1993 [210] https://www.courts.gov.bc.ca/jdb-txt/ca/93/04/1993bcca0400.html, accessed November 21, 2018.

Mackey, Eve, “Unsettled Expectations: Uncertainty, Land and Settler Decolonization (Black Point NS: Fernwood Publishing, 2016).

McInnis, Edgar, Canada: A Political and Social History, Third Edition (Toronto ON: Holt, Rinehart and Winston of Canada, Limited, 1969). This was a classic textbook that hewed to the “disappearing Indian” mythology, barely mentioning Indigenous peoples after the middle of the 19^th century.

McMillan, Allan D. Native Peoples and Cultures of Canada, 2nd ed. (Vancouver BC: Douglas & McIntyre, 1995).

Mann, Charles C., 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, 2^nd Edition (New York NY: Vintage Books/Random House, 2011). This is a brilliant summary of archaeology, sociology, anthropology, and other fields of work done on the Americas before 1492. Another good introduction.

Manuel, Arthur & Ron Derrickson, Unsettling Canada: A National Wake-Up Call (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2015).

Marshall, John, Johnson v. M’Intosh 21 U.S. (8 Wheat.) 543 (1823) at https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/21/543/#tab-opinion-1922743 accessed July 29, 2020. The cornerstone of US property law, this case was the first in American jurisprudence to identify “The Doctrine of Discovery”.

M’baye, Babacar “The Economic, Political, and Social Impact of the Atlantic Slave Trade on Africa” European Legacy (2006), 11:6, pp. 607-622.

Menocal, María Rosa, The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain (New York NY: Back Bay Books/Little, Brown and Company, 2002). A bit of an idealised history, it nevertheless demonstrates the greater degree of multiculturalism and tolerance that was in existence in Spain before the Reconquista.

Michalopoulos, Stelios and Elias Papaioannou, “The Long-Run Effects of the Scramble for Africa”, The American Economic Review, July 2016, Vol. 106, No. 7, pp. 1802-1848.

Miller, J. R., Shinguak’s Vision: A History of Native Residential Schools (Toronto ON: University of Toronto Press, 1996).

——————, Skyscrapers Hide The Heavens: A History of Native-Newcomer Relations in Canada, 4^th Edition (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018).

Milloy, John S., A National Crime: The Canadian Government and the Residential School System 1879-1986 (Winnipeg MB: The University of Manitoba Press, 1999).

Monchalin, Lisa, The Colonial Problem: An Indigenous Perspective on Crime and Justice in Canada (Toronto ON: University of Toronto Press, 2016). Like many lands where the settlers outnumber the Indigenous population, the incarcerated population of Indigenous is out of proportion to their part in the nation’s population; this argues that the criminal justice system is structurally biased against them.

Moore, Dene, “B.C. First Nations mark small pox anniversary” published in Metro News/Canadian Press, August 06 2012, http://www.metronews.ca/news/canada/2012/08/06/b-c-first-nations-mark-small-pox-anniversary.html, accessed January 16, 2017.

Morton, Desmond, A Short History of Canada, Fifth Edition (Toronto ON: McClelland & Stewart Ltd., 2001). Another very-euro-centric history of Canada.

Mott, John H., The Decisive Hour of Christian Missions (Toronto ON: The Missionary Society of the Methodist Church, The Young People’s Forward Movement Department, 1910). John Mott was the moving force behind the 1910 World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh.

Newcomb, Steven T., Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery (Golden CO: Fulcrum Publishing, 2008). Newcomb, a Shawnee/Lenape legal scholar, deconstructs the Christian origins of the Doctrine of Discovery.

Nicholas V, Dum Diversas from http://unamsanctamcatholicam. blogspot.ca/2011/02/dum-diversas-english-translation.html, accessed January 17, 2017.

——————, Romanus Pontifex, from http://www.nativeweb.org/pages/legal/indig-romanus-pontifex.html, accessed January 17, 2017.

Niezen, Ronald, Truth and Indignation: Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools, Second Edition (Toronto ON: University of Toronto, 2017). The first major work examining the effects of the Canada’s Truth & Reconciliation Commission on Residential Schools.

Nunn, Nathan, ‘The Long-term Effects of Africa’s Slave Trades’’ The Quarterly Journal of Economics (2008) 123, pp. 139–76.

Parkinson, Robert G., The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill NC: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press, 2016). This is a brilliant work rooted in the newspapers of the era surrounding the US War of Independence. Parkinson demonstrates that persistent ideas of “white”, “Indian”, and “black” were created in the context of the British Crown encouraging Indigenous allies and slave uprisings during the war.

Peers, Michael, Apology to Native People: A message from the Primate, Archbishop Michael Peers, to the National Native Convocation, Minaki, Ontario, Friday, August 6, 1993, from https://www.anglican.ca/tr/apology/, accessed November 21, 2018.

Pennington, Loren E., “The Amerindian in English Promotional Literature 1575-1625” in The Westward Enterprise: English Activities in Ireland, the Atlantic, and America 1480-1650 edited by K. R. Andrews, N. P. Canny, and P. E. N. Hair (Liverpool UK: Liverpool University Press, 1978), pp. 175-194. Pretty much every aspect of English and British colonization in North America was tried first in the plantations of Ireland in the 16^th century.

Proceedings of the Church Missionary Society Annual Sermons and Reports from North-West Canada Missions and British Columbia Missions in 1869, 1894, 1897, 1903, 1915. Archives of the Diocese of New Westminster, Vancouver BC.

Ranger, Terrence , “Christianity and the First Peoples” in Indigenous Peoples and Religious Change (Studies in Christian Mission) edited by Peggy Brock (Leiden NL: Brill, 2005), pp. 15-32.

Ray, Arthur J., An Illustrated History of Canada’s Native Peoples: I Have Lived Here Since the World Began, 2^nd Edition (Toronto ON: Key Porter Books, 2005).

Regan, Paulette, Unsettling the Settler Within (Vancouver BC: University of British Columbia Press, 2010). A settler researcher for the Canadian Truth & Reconciliation Commission reflects on the need to rewrite history.

Report of the Executive Committee to the Synod of the Diocese of New Westminster, 1901. Archives of the Diocese of New Westminster, Vancouver BC..

Robertson, Leslie A., with the Kwagut’ł Gixsam Clan, Standing Up with Ga’axsta’las: Jane Constance Cook and the Politics of Memory, Church (Vancouver BC: University of British Columbia Press, 2012).

Robinson, Andrew, Lost Languages: The Enigma of the World’s Undeciphered Scripts (New York NY: Thames & Hudson, 2009). More interested in scripts than Indigenous justice, the book has chapters of Mayan writing and the Inca string records.

Royal Proclamation 1763, https://www.aadnc-aandc.gc.ca/eng/1370355181092/1370355203645, accessed November 13, 2017. The Royal Proclamation is the foundation of Indigenous rights in British/Canadian law.

Said, Edward W., Orientalism (25^th Anniversary Edition) (New York NY: Vintage Books, 1994). Another classic in post-colonialism.

——————, Culture and Imperialism (New York NY: Vintage Books, 1994).

Scotland, Nigel, “John Bird Sumner in Parliament”, Anvil Vol. 7, No. 2, 1990. John Bird Sumner was an evangelical Archbishop of Canterbury in the middle of the 19^th century, and among other things was an advocate of laissez faire political policies. Thus, he considered poverty and famine (including the Great Famine in Ireland) as part of the natural order.

Scott, Duncan Campbell, National Archives of Canada, Record Group 10, volume 6810, file 470-2-3, volume 7, pp. 55 (L-3) and 63 (N-3). Scott used to be best known as a poet, but he is now better known as the deputy superintendent of the Department of Indian Affairs in the first half of the 20^th century, and the administrator of its racist policies.

Sepúlveda, Juan Ginés de, Demócrates, Segundo o las justas causas de la guerra contra los indios edited by Angel Losada (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientifícas, Institutio Francisco de Vittoria, 1951), quoted and translated in Lewis Hanke, All Mankind is One: A Study of the Disputation Between Bartolomé de Las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda in 1550 on the Intellectual and Religious Capacity of the American Indians (DeKalb IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1974).

Slattery, Brian, “Paper Empires: The Legal Dimensions of French and English Ventures in North America” in John McLaren, A. R. Buck, and Nancy E. Wright, Despotic Dominion: Property Rights in British Settler Societies (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2005). This article clarifies how the Doctrine of Discovery actually played out.

Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, The Mission Field 1862, 1863, 1870. Archives of the Diocese of New Westminster, Vancouver BC.

Special Fund Obtained During a Ten Months’ Appeal by the Bishop of Columbia since his Consecration in Westminster Abbey on the Twenty-Fourth of February, 1859, with a Statement of the Urgent Need Which Exists For Sympathy and Support in Aid of The Columbia Mission (London UK: R. Clay, 1860), from the Archives of the Ecclesiastical Province of British Columbia & Yukon.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, “Can the Subaltern Speak”, Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, edited by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York NY: Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. 66-111. Yet another classic text in the post-colonial canon.

Stanley, Brian, The World Missionary Conference 1910 (Grand Rapids MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2009).

Sumner, John Bird, Treatise on Creation, Vol. II, quoted in Nigel Scotland, “John Bird Sumner in Parliament”, Anvil Vol. 7, No. 2, 1990.

Swanky, Tom, The True Story of Canada’s “War” of Extermination on the Pacific plus The Tsilhqot’in and Other First Nations Resistance (Burnaby BC: Dragon Heart, 2012). The article documents what was, at best, a reckless disregard by British colonial authorities for spreading disease among Indigenous communities, and at worst, was a deliberate policy of germ warfare.

Tharoor, Shashi, Inglorious Empire – What the British Did to India (London UK: Hurst Publishers, 2017). An expanded argument made at the Oxford Union on the devastating legacy of colonialism in India.

The Bishop’s Address to the Synod of the Diocese of New Westminster, 1902., Archives of the Diocese of New Westminster, Vancouver BC.

The Mission Field Vol. VII, April 1, 1862 from the Archives of the Ecclesiastical Province of British Columbia & Yukon.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. Volume One: Summary. Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future (Toronto ON: James Lorimer & Company, Ltd: 2015).

Thielen-Wilson, Leslie, “Troubling the Path to Decolonization: Indian Residential School Case law, Genocide, and Settler Illegitimacy” in Canadian Journal of Law and Society/Revue Canadienne Droit et Société Volume 29, no. 2, pp. 181-197.

Tinker, George, “The Full Circle of Liberation: An American-Indian Theology of Place” in Ecotheology: Voices North and South edited by D. C. Hallman (Geneva CH: WCC Publications, 1994), 218-226. Tinker is an Indigenous theologian.

——————, “Towards an American Indian Indigenous Theology”, The Ecumenical Review (12/2010, Volume 62, Issue 4), pp. 340-351.

——————, “Decolonizing the Language of Lutheran Theology: Confessions, Mission, Indians, and the Globalization of Hybridity”, Dialog, 2011, Volume 50, Issue 2.

Travis, Sarah, Decolonizing Preaching The Pulpit as Postcolonial Space (Eugene OR: Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2014).

Tucker, L. Norman, Handbooks of English Church Expansion: Western Canada (Toronto ON: The Musson Book Company Limited and London UK & Oxford UK: A.R. Mowbray & Co. Ltd., 1908).

Tuhiwai Smith, Linda, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, Second Edition (London UK: Zed Books, 2012 and Dunedin NZ: Otago University Press, 2012). Mostly concerned with how Indigenous scholars, activists, and communities can decolonize, it also has significance for settler peoples and those trying to deal with the legacy of imperialism.

Twells, Alison, The Civilizing Mission and the English Middle Class, 1792-1850: The “Heathen” at Home and Overseas (Basingstoke UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

Twiss, Richard , Rescuing the Gospel from the Cowboys: A Native American Expression of the Jesus Way, edited by Ray Martell and Sue Martell(Downers Grove IL: InterVarsity Press, 2015). Another Indigenous Theology.

UN Convention on Genocide (1947), http://www.hrweb.org/legal/ genocide.html, accessed on May 22, 2017.

University of Victoria, Faculty of Law, https://www.uvic.ca/law/admissions/jidadmissions/index.php, accessed April 20, 2024. The Faculty of Law at UVic now offers a Joint Degree Program in Canadian Common Law and Indigenous Legal Orders, the first of its kind.

Urton, Gary, Inka History in Knots: Reading Khipus as Primary Sources (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2017). The definitive text in the Incan record system.

Varacalli, Thomas Francis Xavier, “The Thomism of Bartolomé de Las Casas and the Indians of the New World” (2016). Louisiana State University Doctoral Dissertations. 1664. http://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/1664

Vickers, Patricia, Ayaawx (Ts’mseyn ancestral law): the power of Transformation unpublished doctoral dissertation (Victoria BC: University of Victoria, 2008).

Vowel, Chelsea , Indigenous Writes: A Guide to First Nations, Métis, and Inuit issues in Canada (Winnipeg MB: HighWater Press, 2016). A great introduction.

——————, “A rose by any other name is a mihkokwaniy” <http://apihtawikosisan.com/2012/01/a-rose-by-any-other-name-is-a-mihkokwaniy/ >, accessed January 10, 2018.

Watson, Blake A., “The Impact of the American Doctrine of Discovery on Native Land Rights in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand”, Seattle University Law Review, Vol. 34, pp. 507-551

Watts, Joseph, Oliver Sheehan, Quentin D. Atkinson, Joseph Bulbulia, and Russell D. Gray, “”Ritual human sacrifice promoted and sustained the evolution of stratified societies”, Nature Vol. 532 (Apr. 14, 2016) pp. 228-231.

West, Gerald O., “Review of Grau, Marian, 2011. Rethinking Mission in the Postcolony: Salvation, Society and Subversion,” Journal of Theology for Southern Africa 146 (July 2013), pp. 170-171.

——————, “White Theology in a Black Frame: Betraying the Logic of Social Location”, Living on the Edge: Essays in Honour of Steve De Gruchy, Activist and Theologian, edited by James R. Cochrane, Elias Bongmba, Isabel A. Phiri and Desmond P. van der Water (Pietermaritzburg: Cluster Publications, 2012).

Williams, Jr., Robert A., The American Indian in Western Legal Thought: The Discourse of Conquest (New York NY: Oxford University Press, 1990). This landmark book was the first to root American law in Christian political theology of the Medieval era.

Winthrop, John, General Observations (1629),p. 113, quoted in Nicholas Guyatt, Providence and the Invention of the United States, 1607–1876 (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

Wiseman, Travis, “Slavery, Economic Freedom, and Income Levels in the Former Slave-exporting States of Africa” Public Finance Review 2018, Vol. 46(2) pp. 224-248.

Woodley, Randy S., Shalom and the Community of Creation: An Indigenous Vision (Grand Rapids MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2012). Another Indigenous theology.

Woolford, Andrew ,“The Next Generation: Criminology, Genocide Studies and Settler Colonialism” in Revista Critica Penal y Poder 2013, No. 5 (September), 163-185.

World Missionary Conference, 1910: Reports of Commissions I-VIII and vol. IX The History and Records of the Conference together with Addresses Delivered at the Evening Meetings (Edinburgh & London: Oliphant, Anderson, and Ferrier; and New York, Chicago, and Toronto: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1910). Yellow Bird, Michael, Indigenous Social Work (Aldershot UK: Ash

Posted in Anglican Church of Canada, Canadian Issues, Unsettling Theology | Tagged Anglican, Anglican Church of Canada, Christian Justic Bibliography, Christianity, Idigenous Justice Bibliography, Indigenous Theology Bibliography, Justice, Unsettling Theology Bibliography | 2 Comments

The Organization of the Book of Psalms

Posted on April 12, 2024 by Bruce Bryant-Scott

I did the above graphic over twenty years ago, back in the day when I used WordPerfect on my Apple computer. I think it holds up pretty well, and so I have uploaded it for general consumption here on the blog.

A few comments to explain things.

The Book of Psalms was written in Biblical Hebrew. Some of the psalms show evidence of being older than most (Psalm 68 exhibits some archaic features of the language, mainly rare words), and others display evidence of being later than others (Psalm 119).
The critical text that is used for translations from the original Hebrew is that of the Biblica Hebraica Stuttgardensia (“BHS”), which is based on the Leningrad Codex, a manuscript of the entire Hebrew Bible (also known as the Tanach or Old Testament) made in Cairo in 1090 CE. The critical text also draws on other Masoretic texts and the Dead Sea Scrolls and compares it with the Greek translation of the Second Century BCE known as the Septuagint, and other ancient translations.
The Book of Psalms is a collection of collections. While the psalms were written individually, at some point editors began putting them together in groups. These groups appear to include “The Psalms of David” which ends at Psalm 72.10, the psalms of Asaph (73-83), and the Songs of Ascent (120-134). These groups or collections were then put together in larger groups. The evidence for this is the replication (with slight variations) of a couple of psalms – Psalm 14 shows up as Psalm 53, and part of Psalm 40 reappears as Psalm 70. This suggests that later editors, even if they saw the repetition, were loathe to challenge the integrity of the earlier collections.
At some point, perhaps building upon earlier arrangements of collections, an editor organised the psalms into five books. This undoubtedly is an echo of the Five Books of the Torah, and is a correspondingly late construct. This organization underlines the use of the psalms as Torah, or instruction, prophecy, and law. Each of the books, except the last, has a doxology at the end that begins, “Blessed be . . .” The books are not all the same length – an indication of their relative lengths is suggested by the hight of the columns in the graphic.
We do not know exactly how the psalms were sung, or the original context for their singing – we have neither the tunes nor their place of use. Any suggestion otherwise is just speculation, although there is evidence to suggest that many were originally used in the worship of the Jerusalem Temple.
That said, it does appear that the psalms used refrains, and that there was a call and response between a cantor and a choir, or perhaps two choirs.
The psalms in the original Hebrew do not have metre as such, as we associate with hymns and songs, but rather, they emphasise parallelism, where a thought is expressed and then re-expressed in different words or in a new way in the second half of a verse. This is sometimes expanded upon a third time.
At least some of the psalms appear to have been accompanied by lyres, psalteries, trumpets. ram’s horns, tambourines, and other percussion instruments.
Biblical Hebrew distinguishes between prose and poetry by the verb forms used. Whereas in prose Hebrew will use the waw/vav consecutive in narrating past events, this is absent in poetry. While it is still usually pretty clear what is untended, this occasionally introduces a degree of ambiguity that the author might be deliberately playing with.
An important issue is that originally the psalms would have be sung, and so the primary experience for Israelites would have been of “hearing” the psalms, not reading them, as we do. The person singing the psalm may have worked off of a text, but there may have been the freedom for the cantor or choir to engage in “composition in performance.” This term was devised by Milman Perry and Albert Lord to describe how illiterate Serbian poets created long epic sung poems, and that ancient Greek epics such as the Iliad and the Odyssey were composed the same way. Thus, the psalms originated in a culture that was primarily oral. Thus, the later writing down of the psalms and their collection and editing suggests a shift in how the psalms were experienced, and the increase in the authority of a set text over that of the cantor. The use of the Book of Psalms as a source of Torah and prophecy is the end result of this process.
Many of the psalms have ascriptions in the Masoretic text, sometimes as simple as “Of David” but sometimes suggesting the tune, or explaining the context of the psalm with reference to an historical incident elsewhere in the Bible. In the first three books of the Psalms over 90% have such ascriptions, but the latter two books have far fewer. Most scholars believe theascritions were added as part of the editorial process.
A couple of the psalms appear to have been divided in their transmission, namely psalms 9 and 10, and psalms 42 and 43. Neither 10 or 43 have ascriptions, and they carry on the style and thought of the previous psalm.
Psalm 1 and 2 do not have ascriptions – Stanley Walters, my Old Testament as Scripture professor, suggested that these function as an introduction to the Book of Psalms.
In Book One the name of God is consistently “Yahweh” (the personal name of God, Yahweh, almost always replaced with LORD in English translations), whereas in Book Two it is consistently “Elohim” (usually simply translated “God”). It has been suggested that an editor may have gone through the collections to make sure the address to God was the same throughout. Other scholars have suggested that some psalms may have originally been addressed to Baal or other Canaanite gods, and that they were adapted for Israelite use by replacing the name of the God.
Among the Dead Sea Scrolls the most common biblical texts were the psalms. Owing to the fragmentary nature of the psalm scrolls recovered from the caves in the Judean desert it is not clear whether these were scrolls that were the actual Book of Psalms, or selections from the psalms made for liturgical use or study. The order of the psalms in the scrolls usually follows that found in the Masoretic text, especially in Books One through Three, but in the latter two books the order varies significantly, and psalms that are not in the canonical text are included. This instability of the text towards the end suggests that the Book of Psalms was, at the time the Dead Sea Scrolls were hand-written, still a work in progress. Psalms might have been added, and others removed, and the actual text might have changed.
The academic books that I use the most in reading the psalms are: William L. Holladay, The Psalms through Three Thousand Years: Prayerbook of a Cloud of Witnesses (Minneapolis MN: Augsburg Fortress Press, 1993) and Peter W. Flint, The Dead Sea Psalm Scrolls & the Book of Psalms (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 1997).

Posted in Bible | Tagged Psalms, Structure of the Book of Psalms, The Book of Psalms, The Organisation of the Book of Psalms, The Organization of the Book of Psalms, The Psalter | Leave a comment

Why is There No Resurrection Appearance at the End of The Gospel According to Mark?

Posted on April 2, 2024 by Bruce Bryant-Scott

A sermon preached on Easter Sunday: The Sunday of the Resurrection at
The Anglican Church of St. Thomas the Apostle, Kefalas, Crete
on 31 March 2024, 11:00 am.

The readings were: Isaiah 25:6-9; Psalm 118.1-2, 14-24; 1 Corinthians 15:1-11; and Mark 16:1-8.

Gustave Dore, *Angel showing Mary Magdalene and the other Mary Christs empty tomb* (1865-1866).

Why does Mark not have a resurrection appearance?

The passage just read today for our gospel ends rather abruptly. The women go to the tomb, find it empty, see and hear the angel, and are commanded to go and tell Peter and the disciples that Jesus is risen, and that they will see him in Galilee. And yet we read,

So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.
Mark 16.8

It is a bit unusual. We have been conditioned to expect a resurrection appearance by the endings of the other gospels. And not just that, the women are afraid, and silenced by their fear. Of course, they must have eventually overcome their fear and told the disciples, and the author of the gospel¹ knows there were appearances, and yet he makes no mention of this. It seems a bit of a downer, kind of incomplete. Is this any way to conclude a gospel?

The other gospels in the New Testament do not have this reticence, and neither did Paul.

In the Gospel according to Matthew Jesus appears to Mary Magdalene and “the other Mary”, and then to the disciples on a hill in Galilee.
In the Gospel according to Luke on Easter Sunday Jesus appears to Simon Peter, the two disciples on the road to Emmaus, and then to the disciples in the Upper Room in Jerusalem.
In the Gospel according to John Jesus appears to Mary Magdalene, then the disciples in the Upper Room, first with Thomas absent, then again a week later in the Upper Room with Thomas present, and then again to seven disciples in Galilee beside the Sea of Galilee.
In the Acts of the Apostles we read that he appeared to the disciples repeatedly over forty days.
In our second reading today, from Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, Chapter 15, we heard that:
- Jesus appeared to Cephas (i. e. Peter),
- then to the Twelve,
- then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom were still alive when Paul was writing, though some had died,
- and then he appeared to James (the brother of Jesus, and later the leader of the church in Jerusalem after Peter left),
- then to all the apostle,
- and, finally, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to Paul.

The passage from First Corinthians predates the Gospel according to Mark by some two or three decades, so even if it is the earliest gospel of the four, as scholars scholars believe, and even if it created the genre of “gospel” (i.e. a narrative of Jesus’s life with sayings, miracles, with an inauguration of ministry near the beginning and a conclusion with the suffering and death of Jesus), there was precedent for mentioning the appearances. Indeed, it was an original and basic part of the good news, as Paul indicates: “I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received” as Paul says, it predates him. Assuming 16.8 is the ending of the gospel, the author of the gospel was intentionally going against what the informed listener might expect.

Of course, some scholars, acknowledging the problem, have suggested that there was a resurrection appearance to conclude the gospel, but that it was somehow lost in the very early transmission of the manuscripts – maybe it got torn off the scroll soon after the author or his scribe put stylus to papyrus. If you read the King James Version (“KJV”) (also known as the Authorised Version (“AV”)) (1611) the gospel does indeed carry on until 16.20, because the printed Greek text that the translators used did have an ending. The printed Greek text that they used was known as the Textus Receptus, and it was based on the Greek text in common use in the Greek Orthodox Church; furthermore, none of the source manuscripts were older than the eleventh century. However, in the 19th century scholars began to believe that 6.9-20 was never part of the original text, but was added by a later copyist. We can be reasonably certain that this ending was not written by the author of the gospel, as is evidenced by its absence in the best and oldest manuscripts (from the fourth century and earlier papyrus fragments), and the difference in style and language from the gospel proper.

In fact, the abrupt ending seems to have resulted in the creation of no fewer than three different endings written by later manuscript scribes or copyists – the “shorter ending”, the “longer ending”, and the “even longer ending”; these are typically reproduced in any modern translation of the Bible. These endings were attempts to fix scripture, to right what appeared to the copyists to be a defect. There are some very conservative scholars who try valiantly to prove that 16.9-20 was the original ending, but this appears to be driven more by a theological concern to endorse the textual integrity of the “Byzantine text/Textus Receptus” over the Nestle-Aland/UBS 5 critical edition that conforms more closely to the “Alexandrian text” of the New Testament, which is supposedly closer to the original text than other families of texts.²

So, again, why does Mark not have a resurrection appearance? Why does it appear to end with the downbeat ending, where the angel tells them:

But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.

Why do we hear:

So, they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.

Conclusion of the Gospel of Mark at 16.8 in the Codex Vaticanus (4th century).

Let’s think this through. The first hearers of the gospel would not have read it, but would have heard it, just as you just did. Typically a reading would have been done by someone who had prepared themselves to do so, and, of course, they would have used a manuscript, not a printed page – not an easy thing, for as you can see from the picture to the left, the text had no spaces between words and no punctuation, and words behgan on one line and continues on the next one with no warning. The reader would have had to repeatedly read the text and practice it. Once they did gt to know it, I imagine they gave it a dramatic aspect.

Now, the first century was a fundamentally oral culture, whereas we are a very text-driven society. We live in the shadow of the invention of the printing press and its adoption in Europe in the 15th century, and the proliferation of cheap books printed on paper, and now via electronic media. In the time of the apostles people did not so much read texts as they listened to people read them. Furthermore, if Mark is indeed the earliest of the four gospels, as the scholarly consensus believes, when interpreting Mark one needs to forget what one knows about the other gospels – for the first hearers of Mark’s gospel they haven’t been written yet. Maybe they know about Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, perhaps the collection of Jesus’s saying known as “Q” and embedded in Matthew and Luke, but even if any of this had been read in their church it would not yet have acquired the status of being inspired scripture – that was still reserved for the Old Testament.

So, the gospel was fundamentally oral, and the experience of the gospel before Mark was written down was that people would have heard the good news proclaimed, and the people would have experienced it as an immediate invitation to confess aloud their faith. Even when someone read aloud from a written text such as the Gospel of Mark, it would have been heard aurally. There was no reading a proposition in a text, mulling it over, and giving it intellectual assent on one’s own – rather, one heard the good news proclaimed by someone, most likely in a small group, perhaps by someone personally known or by someone whom others regarded highly, and the person addressed was put in the situation of figuring out how to respond. It was highly personal, very immediate, and not an abstract text removed from personal relations. The authority was not in the text, but is the person proclaiming.³

The Gospel of Mark is known for what has been called the Messianic Secret. The secret is not a secret to the reader or hearer of the gospel – the true title of the gospel is announced in 1.1: “the good news of Jesus Christ.” The hearers already know that Jesus is the Messiah, which is the Hebrew word for “the anointed one” of God, or in Greek, “Χριστός”. In the Hebrew Bible priest, kings, and prophets were anointed as they began their work. The Messiah was the person expected to restore the kingdom of God, the kingdom of Israel. However, whenever Jesus did a miracle of healing, or driving out a demon, he would solemnly tell the person just healed not to tell anyone about what he had done. Repeatedly people in the gospel try to announce that Jesus is the Messiah, the Christ, but Jesus just as repeatedly tells them not to publish it abroad. The twelve disciples also just as repeatedly misunderstand who Jesus is. Peter confesses him as Messiah, but when Jesus reveals that he is to be betrayed into the hands of the chief priests and scribes, and suffer death, and after three days be raised from the dead, Peter tries to persuade him that this cannot be, and Jesus says to him, “Get behind me Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things” (Mark 8.33). Jesus in the gospel of Mark is the Messiah who suffers, so in addition to being the Christ, and the Son of God, and the Son of Man, he is the Suffering Servant of Isaiah (Isaiah 42:1–4; Isaiah 49 :1–6; Isaiah 50:4–11; and Isaiah 52:13–53:12.). Instead of understanding this, that he was sent to serve and not to be served, the disciples jockey for exalted positions in the kingdom of heaven (Mark 9:33-37). In the end, all the male disciples fail him. At his arrest one betrays him, another denies him, and the rest fly away. Only the female disciples, the women who served the needs of Jesus and his followers (Mark 15.41), get any kind of commendation. They observe his death and they watch where he is buried. Where they men failed, they remained faithful.

Only with the end of the gospel text do we hear the full gospel proclaimed by the angel: Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified, has been raised – so go and tell Simon Peter and the other disciples about it and go to Galilee to see him. The story of the suffering servant who is also the Son of Man, who is the Messiah and the Son of God, has been proclaimed in your hearing. Now go and tell others. But the women hesitate, perhaps in shock at this unexpected news, perhaps not believing what they heard, but perhaps also hesitant to tell the others this unbelievable instruction.

Why were they hesitant? Perhaps they were still in shock at the unexpected news. After all, people do not normally rise from the dead. As well, while there was in the First Century among many Jews an expectation that there would be a general resurrection of the dead, some to eternal life and others to judgement, there was no expectation that one person would somehow be raised on his own before others (what Paul in 1 Corinthians called being “the firstborn of the dead”). Perhaps they were just freaked out by the angel, who are usually portrayed as being frightening. Or, perhaps, reading into them a kind of modern sensibility, they were fearful and silent because they were afraid no one wold believe them.⁴

Today, my friends, you are in the same position as the women at the tomb. You have heard the good news proclaimed to you. What will you do now? Do you join in the proclamation of Christ’s death and resurrection? Do you hesitate? Do you celebrate the one who dies in solidarity with all who suffer oppression, and the victory revealed in resurrection? Are you fearful? Do you rejoice at the beginning of a new creation in Jesus Christ, the firstborn from the dead?

My friends, today is not a time for hesitation and holding back. Proclaim the good news with abandon! Behold, now is the accepted time! Behold, now is the day of salvation! Alleluia! Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia!

I consider Mark to be an anonymous gospel that later tradition attributed to John Mark, an associate of Paul. Indeed, none of the four gospels claim an author, but are anonymous. ↩︎
This is a separate issue from whether Mark 16.9-20 (and the other variant endings) should be read as scripture. Fundamentally, something is considered to be in the canon of Christian scriptures because the church has said it is, and traditionally Mark 6.-20 has been part of the canon, just as John 7:53–8:11, which while undoubtedly not by the author of the Fourth Gospel, is still considered to be scripture. When it comes to textual issues the Western Church typically defers to scholars, whereas the Eastern Orthodox affirms the Greek translation of the Old Testament and the late Byzantine of the New Testament as the inspired, authoritative scriptures. Of course, people and churches disagree about what books should be in the canon, just as scholars will disagree about which is the most likely version of the original text. It would be most helpful if there was a test by which one could discern whether a particular text or verse or translation was inspired, but, unfortunately, that is often more a matter of opinion than fact; thus I rely on the authority and tradition of the church to say what should be in the Bible. ↩︎
This paragraph has been influenced by my reading of Werner H. Kleber, The Oral and the Written Gospel: The Hermeneutics of Speaking and Writing in the Synoptic Tradition, Mark, Paul, and Q (Bloomington & Indianapolis IN: Indiana University Press, 1997 (originally published 1983). I hope to write a summary of this important book and offer some reflections in a future post. ↩︎
This paragraph and the next are derived from Thomas Boomershine’s critique of English Bishop and New Testament scholar J. B. Lightfoot’s (1828-18) interpretation of Mark 16.1-8. See Thomas E. Boomershine, “Mark 16.8 and the Apostolic Commission”, Journal of Biblical Literature Vol. 100, No. 2 (1981), pp. 225-239. Don’t you wish you had a surname like Boomershine or Lightfoot?
↩︎

Posted in Easter, Gospel of Mark, Sermons | Tagged and they said nothing to anyone, Easter Day Year B, Easter Gospel Year B, Easter Sermon, Endings of the gospel of Mark, for they were afraid, J. B. Lightfoot and Mark 16:8, Mark 16:1-8, Mark 16:8, So they went out and fled from the tomb for terror and amazement had seized them and they said nothing to anyone for they were afraid, The absence of a resurrection appearance in Mark, Thomas Boomershine and Mark 16:8, Werner Kleber and Mark 16 | 2 Comments

Pontius Pilate: A Monologue

Posted on March 31, 2024 by Bruce Bryant-Scott

A sermon preached on Good Friday, 29 March 2024,
at the Anglican Church of St Thomas, Kefalas, Crete

The readings were: Isaiah 52:13-53:12 (the Fourth Servant Song); Psalm 22; and John 18:1-19:42 (the Passion according to St John).

Willem Dafoe as Jesus and David Bowie as Pontus Pilate in Martin Scorcese’s *The Last Temptation of Christ* (1988).

Centurion: what is next on the docket?

Ah, right. That Galilean. Bring him in.

So, you are . . . Jesus of Nazareth. It says here that you have just been condemned by an extraordinary meeting of the Sanhedrin, and they request that I, Pontius Pilate, governor of Judea, put you to death.

Ah, I see. You claim that you are the King of the Jews. Well, that is a problem. You see, there’s really only one ruler here, and that is Rome, and we cannot have anyone setting themselves up against us. We might have kings under us – Herod the Great was one of ours, you know, nasty piece of work he was. We’ve got one of his family up your way, a tetrarch, although everybody calls him king to his face. You probably know about him, also named Herod. Well, whatever they call themselves, they only rule because we say so. Same with the Sanhedrin. We use them to govern Judea, but we appoint the high priest, and if on the council give us any trouble, out they go.

So, are you the King of the Jews? Tell me, because I am not a Jew. Your own nation and the chief priests have handed you over to me, so you must have done something to really upset them. So tell, me, what have you done?

What’s that? You are a king? Your kingdom is not of this world? Well, that’s rather airy-fairy, isn’t it? I must say, it’s pretty gutsy of you to call yourself King of the Jews when you haven’t any followers, much less an army. What do you expect, that your god will somehow come down from heaven and install you on the throne, and defeat the legions of Rome? If you think that, you’re crazy.

Well, you just might be crazy. It says here that you said that you would tear down the Temple and then after three days build it up again. Yeah, like that’s going to happen.

Sorry, speak up. What’s that you say? Truth? What is truth? I’ll tell you what truth is – it’s whatever Rome says it is. And at the moment, I am Rome in this place, so I am truth.

Where are you from, Galilee, right? You could beg for mercy. After all, you’re probably harmless. You never had that many following you, and those that did have scattered like sheep. I was told one of your followers turned you in, right? What, do you refuse to speak to me? Too proud to ask for mercy from Imperial Rome? Do you not know that I have power to release you, and power to crucify you?

Alright, look, today might be your lucky day. So, there’s this thing I do on this feast of yours where I release a prisoner. It shows that we are merciful, not all that bad. But there’s this other guy, a bandit, a revolutionary, that some people think I should free, too. Let’s see if the crowd wants you or him.

Behold the man!

Oh, bad luck, old chap, they wanted the other guy. So, it’s off to Golgotha with you. We do need to set an example that Rome cannot be trifled with, and crucifixion is so very good for that. Useful to teach a lesson to slaves and other conquered peoples. Must keep order.

So, you’ve lost. You do understand that, right? Whatever you were trying to do has utterly failed.

You’re not very talkative, are you? Well, you won’t be talking at all in a few hours. Soon you will be silent forever. You’ll be forgotten and just a pile of bones, end of story. Just another troublesome religious rebel, like that John the Baptist that your King Herod took care of. Meanwhile Rome and the Emperor and our gods will go on and on and on.

Although, I must say, the way you’re bearing up and the way you look at me almost makes me believe it could be otherwise. But, of course, that would mean that I am in the wrong. But that never happens, I’m usually right. Might makes right, you know. So, off you go. Pray to your god, and die, just like those innocent lambs they are sacrificing all day long, right?

Well, that’s over and done with. All right, centurion, what’s next?

Posted in Lent, Sermons | Tagged Good Friday, Pontius Pilate, Pontius Pilate Monolog, Pontius Pilate Monologue | Leave a comment

The Power of the Powerless is the Glory of God

Posted on February 11, 2024 by Bruce Bryant-Scott

A sermon preached on The Sunday Next Before Lent,
at The Anglican Church of St. Thomas the Apostle, Kefalas, Crete,
11 February 2024.

The readings were 2 Kings 2:1-12, Psalm 50:1-6, 2 Corinthians 4:3-6 and Mark 9:2-9

The Transfigured Trio

What do Elijah, Moses, and Jesus have in common?

In addition to being Israelites and prophets, and being present in the glory of the Transfiguration, they had this in common: they all experienced oppression by and persecution by the powers of the time.

Moses, even in birth, was persecuted, because he was supposed to be put to death in infancy. He fled into exile in Sinai after killing an overseer who was abusing an Israelite slave. He was then sent by God back to Egypt, to Pharaoh, King of Egypt, to demand that he free the people of Israel from slavery. He relented only after the ten plagues, and even then, after letting them go, he changed his mind and pursued them with chariots and horses. Moses also suffered for the failings of the people of Israel in the desert, and he himself never entered the Promised Land, but only saw it from a distance.
Elijah, in the 9^th Century before Jesus, spoke truth to power. He lived in the northern kingdom of Israel and called to account King Ahab and his wife Queen Jezebel, and the way they followed the Canaanite god Baal instead of the Israelite god Yahweh. Elijah flees from Ahab to Beersheba in southern Judah, and prays for death, but an angel tells him to eat and drink, because he has work to do. Later he challenges Ahab for having committed murder to get Naboth’s vineyard.
Jesus, of course, challenged both Roman power and their collaborators among the Jewish leadership. He simultaneously called the people to repentance and a higher righteousness while at the same time proclaimed God’s mercy on Israel. To the vast majority of Israel and beyond Jesus’s words were indeed good news. To the Romans and their friends among the powerful priests and teachers in Jerusalem, it was judgement. And so he, too, was persecuted. In his case, his obedience to his father was such that he suffered death, even death on the cross.

So what kind of glory is being shown in the Transfiguration? It is described as a “transfiguration”, and in the Greek the word is Μεταμόρφωση, or metamorphosis. May I suggest to you that in Christ, as in Moses and Elijah, we see revealed the true nature of glory – not power over overs, not a kind of raw unrestrained dominion, but rather the paradoxical power of those who, in following the ways of God, suffer for it. It is the power of those who are powerless, or who advocate for the powerless – the widows and orphans, the enslaved, those who are murdered for their property, those possessed by what appear to be demons, the strangers in our midst, those marginalized by illness and death, the poor who are still taxed by the rich and violent, those imposing the false ideology of Empire and Emperor.

Modern Transfigurations

The statue of Martin Luther King, Jr., from the from of Westminster Abbey, one of the Ten Martyrs of the 20th Century depicted there.

This is still relevant today. Many people suffer, and many of them have suffered unjustly. What is one to do with such unearned suffering? Some people just try to avoid it, or deaden themselves to it through alcohol, drugs, or other addictive things. However, some people have decided that if they are going to suffer, they should try and make it meaningful.

This is where two heroes of the past century illuminate this. Martin Luther King famously used civil disobedience as a means of showing up the violent structures of the United States in the 1950s and ‘60s. He thought this through carefully, drawing not only on the tactics of Mohandas Gandhi, but also the liberal protestant theology of the first half of the twentieth century, and the theology of the historic Black churches, best found in their music and preaching. As a Black man in the southern US he knew that he would be discriminated and abused as a matter of course, and he resolved to make use of that to change things.

Another man who understood this is Vaclav Havel, the Czech playwright and dissident, who challenged the Soviet-era oppression in Czechoslovakia. He was repeatedly imprisoned for not falling in line and being silent. In 1978 he wrote the extended paper, “The Power of the Powerless” which indicated just how ordinary people can dethrone the high and mighty in the conceits of their hearts and send them empty away. The paper, passed around in mimeographed copies and translated into various East Bloc languages, was considered a theoretical basis for the Solidarity movement in Poland.

Ultimately both King and Havel succeeded. The Voting Rights Act was passed in the mid-1960s, and a generation later a Black man was in the White House as President. Martin Luther King received glory in the form of the Nobel Peace Prize, and his birthday is today a national celebration in the USA. His life was cut short by his assignation, but his campaign for civil rights and justice continue. Likewise, after the miraculous, peaceful fall of communism in the Soviet Bloc, Havel was unanimously elected President of Czechoslovakia by the Federal Assembly, and then after the dissolution of the country, became President of the Czech Republic for two terms. His awards are too many to recount, but among others he was given a knighthood in the Order of the Bath and the Order of Canada.

Both segregation in the United States and communism in eastern Europe seemed permanent, and many people could imagine that only violent revolution would bring about change. And yet, as we know, these apparently marginal figures led movements of the seemingly powerless to transform society. In the same way Moses sought to transform the situation of the Israelites, Elijah to reorient the northern kingdom of Israel, and Jesus the hearts of Jews and Gentiles. They each suffered for it, but their suffering led to change into something better. If Jesus were to be transfigured today, perhaps it would be King and Havel meeting him on the mountain top.

The power of the powerless is the glory of God. It is what is revealed in the Transfiguration. As we enter into Lent, how shall we be transfigured? Where will we find our power, our meaning, and our glory? As the collect for today prays:

Almighty Father,
whose Son was revealed in majesty
before he suffered death upon the cross:
give us grace to perceive his glory,
that we may be strengthened to suffer with him
and be changed into his likeness, from glory to glory;
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen

Posted in Sermons | Tagged Μεταμόρφωση, Last Sunday after Epiphany, Martin Luther King, Modern Transfigurations, Mose & Elijah, Sunday Next Before Lent, The Power of the Powerless, Transfiguration, Vaclav Havel | Leave a comment

Through Advent with the Apocalypse: A Summary of Posts from 2020

Posted on February 2, 2024 by Bruce Bryant-Scott

Back in Advent 2020, when we were in lockdown, I wrote no fewer than twenty-four posts on the Book of Revelation. I had sort of forgotten I had written so many, but I had a look today, as one of the Bible Studies at the Anglican Church of St Thomas, Crete, is reading and discussing its way through the book. To get all these posts in an easily accessible place, here are the links and titles. It is more of a topical set of posts than a consecutive reading. Enjoy.

29/11 – (1) The Title
30/11 – (2) The Author
01/12 – (3) The Other Author
02/12 – (4) Structures
03/12 – (5) Seven Churches
04/12 – (6) A Very Jewish Text
05/12 – (7) Beasts
06/12 – (8) The New Jerusalem
07/12 – (9) Time
08/12 – (10) “What Year Is This?”
09/12 – (11) The Second Beast, with Horns Like a Lamb
10/12 – (12) Babylon
11/12 – (13) “What Have the Romans Ever Done For Us?”
12/12 – (14) The Idea of Justice
13/12 – (15) Judgement and Justice
14/12 – (16) The Lake of Fire
15/12 – (17) Who’s in the Book?
16/12 – (18) Radical Left-Wing Apocalyptic Christians
17/12 – (19) Praise and Triumph in Messiah
18/12 – (20) Paul and John, Eschatological Freaks
19/12 – (21) Apocalyptic Literature and Hope
20/12 – (22) A Timetable For The End?
21/12 – (23) The Meaning of What John Sees In The New Jerusalem
22/12 – (24) Living through an Apocalypse
23/12 – (25) My Own, Personal, Apocalypse
24/12 – (26) Behold, The Lamb of God

Posted in Advent, Revelation | Tagged Book of Revelation, Series on Revelation, The Apocalypse, The Apocalypse of John, The Revelation to St John the Divine | Leave a comment

Who is This King of Glory? A Close Reading of Psalm 24

Posted on February 2, 2024 by Bruce Bryant-Scott

A Sermon Preached on the Presentation of Christ in the Temple
(also known as Candlemas) (transferred from February 2)
at The Anglican Church of St. Thomas the Apostle, Kefalas, Crete
on Sunday, 28 January 2024.

The readings were Malachi 3:1-4, Psalm 24, Hebrews 2:14-18, and Luke 2:22-40.

This morning I want to think about the psalm, Psalm 24, so you may want to pull out your psalter and have a look.

Some General Comments about the Psalms

They were sung, usually accompanied. We have no good idea what the tunes were, or how they were composed, or in what circumstances they were sung.
We do know that there were choirs and instrumentalists in the Temple in Jerusalem. It appears that perhaps they used double choirs, calling and responding, or perhaps with a soloist and a choir.
We read in 2 Samuel 6:16: David and all the house of Israel were dancing before the Lord with all their might, with songs and lyres and harps and tambourines and castanets and cymbals. There are also references elsewhere to ram’s horns and trumpets.
The style of singing the psalms was probably more ecstatic and less meditative – not so much Gregorian Chant and Anglican Chant, and so perhaps not King’s College Chapel style, but more like popular music.
The psalms come from an oral culture – and so the psalms may have been composed freely, on the spot, and shaped by repeated performance, and only later written down. Imagine Lennon and McCartney composing a song nose to nose, or a song being created in a sound check.
The original language is Hebrew, and it is identifiable as Hebrew from the way it constructs verbs (technically, the waw/vav-consecutive formation used in narrative prose is absent). Because Hebrew is inflected by prefixes and suffixes, more can be said in fewer words than in English. Hebrew is typically a very concrete language, with fewer abstractions than Greek, Latin, French, or English.
The verses have no set length, they do not rhyme, and the beats or emphases in the lines vary. The way in which they were sung somehow accommodated all this.
The name of God, YHWH, is used, wherever you see LORD.
After composition and use in the Temple, the psalms were later collected, and the book as we have it appears to be a collection of collections, perhaps edited 700 years after most of the individual psalms were written. Some of the later psalms – Psalm 119 and 146 – are probably later and are the product of a culture where writing was more common.
In the Second Temple era the Jews read the psalms as a poetic form of the Torah, or instruction. Hence, there are five divisions within the Book of Psalms, just like the five books of the Torah.
Christians, following on the use of the psalms in the New Testament, read the book as a witness or a testimony to Jesus, and it is in this context that we use it today.

A Reading of Psalm 24

Psalm 24 from the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, the standard critical edition of the Hebrew Scriptures.

The first section of two verses affirms the ownership and sovereignty of Yahweh over the earth and all that is in it.
The next section of four verses asks a question and then answers it.
- Who can ascend the hill of YHWH? The hill of YHWH is Zion in Jerusalem, and the holy place is the Temple.
- And the answer is that it is the pure, those who do not worship idols, or swear falsely. It refers to the company of those who seek God – perhaps the very people singing and listening to this psalm, who are the children of Jacob.
- There is a sense of movement here – beginning with the whole world, then ascending into the mountain, and entering into the holy place, just like that passage I quoted from 2 Samuel 6.
The last section is well known as a chorus from Part II of Handel’s Messiah. The libretto was supplied to George Handel by Charles Jennens, who extensively used the psalms.
- The gates and doors of Jerusalem and of the Temple are personified – they have heads to be lifted up.
- The question and answer comes back, repeated. Probably soloist and choir.
- YHWH is identified as a warrior king, strong and mighty in battle, YHWH of hosts.
Scholars speculate that this is a psalm used when the Ark of the Covenant was taken out to battle.

What might Psalm 24 have to do with the Presentation of Christ in the Temple?

Mary and Joseph can be seen as being pure of heart and clean of hands.
Simeon and Anna are also clean and pure, and offer the blessing on behalf of YHWH.
Jesus, then, is the King of Glory. Jesus is the warrior, fighting not against Canaanites or Syrians, but against, as the Letter to the Hebrews puts it, the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death.
In Malachi, Jesus is seen as the one who has suddenly come to his Temple, and the day of his coming is challenging, but will purify and refine. He will come again, as an adult, to offer himself as a sacrifice in his death and resurrection.

So let us present ourselves to God, ourselves, our souls and bodies, as a whole and acceptable offering in Jesus. May we be purified and refined, so that we might be Christ in the world. May we challenge all that is evil and free those who are enslaved. May we lift up our heads and see the King of Glory!

Posted in Epiphany, Sermons | Tagged Candlemas, Lifet up your heads o ye gates, Presentation of Christ in the Temple, Psalm 24, Psalm 24 and the Presentation, The Prurification of the BVM, The Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary | Leave a comment

What’s The Right Thing To Do (For Christians)?

Posted on January 30, 2024 by Bruce Bryant-Scott

Adapted from a sermon preached on
The Second Sunday after Epiphany
at The Anglican Church of St. Thomas the Apostle, Kefalas, Crete
17 January 2024

The readings used were 1 Corinthians 6:12-20, Psalm 139:1-9, and John 1:43-51. See the note at the end of this post to see why the selection of readings differed slightly from what the Common Worship suggested.

Introduction

I am a member of the General Synod of the Church of England. One of the issues that we have spent much time on is what we can do pastorally for people who are in same-sex relationships. For some the answer is that we should advise them to get married, and, either in the service of Holy Matrimony or in a service of following a civil marriage, receive God’s blessing. Others see homosexual relations as sinful and counter to God’s written word and the teaching of the church, and so such proposals for blessing are unacceptable. Given this division within the Church of England the House of Bishops has proposed a compromise, in which the individuals in the couple are blessed, but not as a sexually active couple as such. The proposed blessings bless all that is good in the relationship, but there are no vows, no rings, no pronouncement that they are married. The proposals are silent about whether the couple are in a platonic relationship or sexually active, and whether they are married, in a civil union, or “just good friends”. These proposals are very optional, and no cleric is obliged to use them.

For some in the church this is still too much, a defining moment as to whether we follow scripture or whether we abandon it in favour of the mores of a depraved world. For others it is the most pastoral thing to do, given the circumstances of a divided church where no change to the marriage liturgy would be approved by the necessary 2/3rds super-majority of the three houses of General Synod. For many it is too little, too late. Of course, many people do not have a strong opinion one way or another, and would rather focus on other issues.

I do have an opinion. Personally I am in favour of such blessings, and while in Canada as a part of the Diocese of British Columbia, before moving to the Diocese in Europe and the Church of England, I blessed two same-sex marriages. Why do I feel this way? My reasons for doing so are, contrary to what some conservative Evangelicals or conservative Anglo-Catholics might believe, grounded in scripture, and especially in today’s first reading, 1 Corinthians 6:12-20. So let me give you my understanding of Christian ethics – how we make decisions about what the right thing to do is.

Paul’s Ethic of Freedom

My understanding of Christian ethics is specifically Pauline, and arises out of a problem he had with the members of the church in Corinth. We read in today’s first reading,

A mid-Twentieth Century depiction of Paul dictating one of his letters.

‘All things are lawful for me’, but not all things are beneficial. ‘All things are lawful for me’, but I will not be dominated by anything.
1 Corinthians 6.12 (NRSV)

Now, in most modern translations, “‘All things are lawful for me’” is in quotation marks, because Paul appears to be quoting something he had said to the church in Corinth, and had written in a previous letter to them, a letter which he refers to but is no longer extant.

‘All things are lawful for me’ is a powerful principle, and is rooted in the idea that in Christ believers are freed from the dictates of the Torah, and inspired by the Holy Spirit to do what God wants. In the gospel Jesus’s Jewish disciples are not portrayed as particularly observant, and in the Acts of the Apostles chapter 15 we read how Gentile converts are not required to be circumcised, how they need not follow the dietary rules, but just to avoid food sacrificed to idols, to avoid eating things strangled and food made out of blood, and avoid what in Greek is called τῆς πορνείας.

Well, some of the Corinthians appear to have been at least confused, and perhaps thought that anything goes. So Paul comes back in the First Letter to the Corinthians, and says, “not all things are beneficial” and “I will not be dominated by anything.”

This, then, appears to set the criteria by which Christians act – does it build up? Is a particular habit or behaviour create a form of domination over the Christian believer? The criteria are rooted in a sense that the Christian houses the Holy Spirit like the Temple in Jerusalem housed the Presence of God. Therefore the body is holy, and one should act in ways that glorify God.

So what rules must one follow? Obviously the ones which glorify God, which build up the individual and the church and the community, and those in which God is central, and something worldly does not take precedence. For the first Christians, for example, this meant that military service in the armies and navies of the Roman Empire was not acceptable, because its object was to glorify Rome, the Emperor, and his selfish, pagan goals. As well, the Empire was violent, and violence does not build up but is destructive. After all, it executed Jesus.

The Canadian Biblical scholar Peter Richardson wrote:

It is essential to note that primitive Christian communities did not adopt a laissez-faire attitude toward ethics. Behaviour was extremely important. Improper behaviour was condemned and good behaviour praised. It was not enough for Paul simply to leave them on their own with the Holy Spirit. Important as the Spirit was in directing the morality and conduct of Christians, advice, exhortation, and encouragement from those more mature was still necessary because of the struggle between flesh and Spirit, between law and license. Consistently maturing behaviour was most important. Basically the goal was to be an imitator of Paul, an imitator of Christ, filled with the fruit of the Spirit.
Peter Richardson, Paul’s Ethic of Freedom (Philadelphia PA: The Westminster Press, 1979), p. 82

First Corinthians deals with a variety of ethical issues, including: lawsuits between Christians before pagan judges; divisions in the church rooted in charismatic leaders; whether to eat food offered to idols or accept dinner invitations from pagan friends; a kind of sexual immorality that Paul does not name but may have involved incest; and whether to get married. He also deals with more doctrinal issues, such as the resurrection of the dead, gifts of the Holy Spirit, and how to manage the Lord’s Supper. In all of these cases he seems to apply the ethical principles suggested above, warning and admonishing the congregation in Corinth as they struggle with the flesh and the Spirit.

We can see this in chapter 7 of First Corinthians. In that previous letter to the Corinthians he appears to have written “It is good for a man not to touch a woman.” They must have written back with some confusion, asking if he was serious that they should not marry. Thus he replies that “because of cases of sexual immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband.” He encourages them to give themselves to each other equally in an egalitarian description of sexual relations. He then goes on to say, “To the unmarried and the widows I say that it is good for them to remain unmarried as I am. But if they are not practicing self-control, they should marry. For it is better to marry than to be aflame with passion.” Here we see Paul giving advice, but then almost immediately qualifying it. Even while advising the congregation, he is respectful of the free choice of the members. He then notes situations where one of the couple is an unbeliever. He advises that if both are Christian they should not separate and remarry others, but live chastely and work on reconciliation. However, if an unbelieving spouse divorces the believing one, then the Christian ex-spouse is free to remarry. One gets the impression that Paul is working this out as he dictates the letter to his amanuensis.

A reconstruction of Corinth during the Roman Empire, circa 11 CE.

So what about other sexual relations? Τῆς πορνείας, one of the things forbidden in Acts 15, can be translated as fornication, but I suggest, based on a careful reading of related passages in the New Testament, that we need to read that in the context of slavery and patriarchy. In the Greek and Roman establishment slaves had no rights, and the owners of slaves, particularly the male ones, used them for sexual gratification, regardless of what the slaves themselves thought. Likewise, women had no rights, and were potentially subject to the whims of their paterfamilias – who they would marry, how often they would have sex, whether the new-born children would be kept or exposed, and so forth. In contrast Paul and Jesus transgresses the lines separating male and female, slave and free, not to abuse or separate oneself from them, but to treat them as equals and work collectively to God’s glory. Thus, Paul’s concerns might be that Christian men might, if frustrated sexually with their wives, might take advantage of their slaves, or rape their wives; as well, most sex workers in that time were enslaved, and trafficked by their owners. According to the pagan mores of the times a male having sex with a slave or forcing his wife to have sex was just fine. So, In First Corinthians 7 Paul responds with an emphasis upon partners freely giving themselves to each other, coming to agreements about when not to have sex, and staying faithful within the marriage. Likewise, the prohibition in Acts 15 against τῆς πορνείας may have had a similar connotation. There Christian attitudes would have struck pagan outsiders as very peculiar.

Note that Paul does not quote legal passages from the scriptures and then develop an application for the rule. Paul does quote scripture, often, but he does it in support of the Christian ethic of freedom described above. An example of this is his use of Psalm 24.1 in 1 Corinthians 10.26. Christian ethics, then, is not the simple following of rules derived from passages extracted from the Bible, treating scripture as if it were a civil and criminal code, but rather it is based on the holy understanding of the centrality of honouring the divine, of building up the body of Christ, and extending the kingdom. It is rooted in an understanding of who Jesus is and how we are transformed by his example – a self-sacrificing person who is non-violent and loving, critical of those who are in power and lifting up the poor and hungry, who pours himself out for others. We are called to be imitators of him, and by God’s grace we are becoming what he already is.

No Easy Answers

Now, the challenging thing about this ethic of freedom is that it means we need to work out our salvation and what we will do. It is not just blindly following rules. Interestingly, the church has moved on in issues that in the early church were considered non-negotiable.

Thus, going back to the expectation of early Christians that one could not serve in the armed forces of the Roman Empire, what do you do if the empire has become led by Christians, as it did with Constantine the Great and his successors in the Fourth Century CE? Is it permissible for Christians to engage in a defensive war? Can the sovereign engage in an offensive war for defensive purposes? Is violence justified in the name of evangelism? It was questions like this that led Augustine of Hippo in the early Fifth Century to develop his “just war theory” which continues to influence international conflict to this day. Of course, some, like Quakers and Mennonites, affirm that pacifism is the only true Christian way, and that the Fifth Commandment “You shall not kill” is absolute; I wish I had the radical courage to be a pacifist, but the truth is that I do believe people do have the right to defend themselves and that killing enemies may in some cases be justified.
For centuries Christians were forbidden to lend money at interest; both the Roman Catholic Church and the churches of the Reformation believed that a loan any interest rate other than 0% was unacceptable. In the Middle Ages with the rise of banks in Italian city states this prohibition was defined so that what was forbidden was usury, or lending money at extortionate rates. In the early modern era, with the establishment of private banks and national banks, the prohibition was viewed as naive and not informed by modern economics. Most Christians today would say that earning interest and giving loans at interest is just part of the economy.
Slavery is another issue where the Christian consensus has moved. The Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, for the most part, accept slavery as a universal institution. There are exceptions – Israel’s slavery in Egypt is unacceptable, and God commands Moses to help free his people from Pharaoh’s yoke. Paul does advise slaves to avail themselves of gaining their freedom if they can, and in the Letter to Philemon he more or less orders the recipient to free Onesimus, a slave who had run away. That said, freedom from slavery in Christian history was all too often spiritualised into freedom from sin and death – important enough, but a severe minimization of the oppression of slavery and the benefits of actual freedom. Only in the Nineteenth Century did radical Christians – often Quakers and Unitarians – begin to advocate not only for the freedom of some slaves, but for the abolition of it as an institution. Under the influence of leaders such as William Wilberforce in England and William Lloyd Garrison in the United States abolitionism became mainstream. It is unthinkable now that any true Christian would justify slavery.

So, how do we decide what’s the right thing to do? Well, one thing that is obvious to me is that we do not just quote passages from scripture and then build up on argument on them. We engage with scripture, but in a critical way, beginning with the historico-critical methods available to us. We consider the context of when a particular passage was written, and what the words might have meant at that time. I know some people claim that they just follow the “pain meaning” of scripture, but too often I find the “plain meaning” rather elusive. It is indeed be the case that “all scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness” (2 Timothy 3.16), but that begs the question that we know how to read the scripture correctly. Certainly Paul is flexible in his use of the Old Testament, deriving Christological and ethical principles that are surprising and sometimes contrary to what some have read out of them. In the same way that he justified his ministry to the Gentiles and their freedom from the Torah, so the Church has felt free to change its mind on lending money, on taking up arms in defense of one’s country, and on slavery. Christ is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow, but the way the Body of Christ is in the world will change, devolve, and evolve.

In deciding what to do we may begin with scripture, but we do not stop there. We also engage with the Christian system of thought and prior theologies of good and evil, right and wrong. Thus, we look to the words of Jesus and the principles behind them, as well as those of the prophets and the apostles. We consider what previous theologians and ethicists have said, and enter into dialogue with them.

As well, we engage with various philosophies of ethics. Since before the time of Christ philosophers have advocated a variety of methodologies to determine what is right. Michael Sandel in his 2009 book Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? notes the major kinds of ethical systems popular in Western society today, among them utilitarianism, libertarianism, deontology (consistent following of rules derived from reason), consequencialism, “justice as fairness”, virtue ethics, and communitarian liberalism. The most developed Christian ethical system is probably that of Thomas Aquinas, which is based in Aristotle, scripture, Augustine, and some original thought, always but rooted in his particular understanding of an individual’s salvation from sin and death and sanctification in life. Aquinas is a typical Christian ethicist in that it has a strong metaphysical component. Lutheran and Calvinist ethics are likewise complicated in their dependence on scripture and tradition, their understandings of salvation, and the metaphysics inhering in all of that,

In truth, Christians rarely agree on what the right thing to do is. Thus, we disagree and differ. This is not necessarily a problem, unless it descends into violence and schism. It was in argument and disagreement that some of the best theology was formed. We should not be surprised that in our day there are disagreements, just as there were back in the days when slavery was considered part of the accepted order, when banks did not exist in Christian realms, and all Christians were pacifists.

It is on this basis that I have gone ahead and blessed same-sex two couples who were legally married by civil authorities. Just as it was allowed in my old Diocese of British Columbia, so I advocate that it should be allowed in the Church of England. I do not foresee this happening any time soon, but it may yet come to pass. I expect that some of you reading this may disagree with my opinion, but please do me the favour of not insulting me by saying that I am somehow being unbiblical or unfaithful to Christian tradition. I believe that my advocacy of same-sex marriage and same-sex blessings is very much rooted in the Bible, specifically a Pauline approach to ethics, and that my approach (and that of others) fits with many changes in teaching doctrine that were once considered unacceptably radical, but are now mainstream. If we disagree, let us remain in dialogue, and pray that the Holy Spirit unfolds the truth before us.

A note on the readings: I usually follow the Common Worship Lectionary, which is a modified version of the Revised Common Lectionary. Some Sundays I might omit the first reading from the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible or the second reading from Acts/Epistles/Revelation, leaving just two readings, always including the appointed gospel. Most of the time the Common Worship Lectionary and the Revised Common Lectionary are identical, but sometimes they differ a bit. This was one of those times! Had I properly followed the Common Worship Lectionary I would have chose two readings from 1 Samuel 3.1-10 (11-20); Psalm 139.1-5, 12-18 (139.1-9); Revelation 5.1-10; John 1.43-end; instead, I looked at an Episcopal Church website which had a different second reading, namely, 1 Corinthians 6:12-20. So, that is why our congregation wound up having a reading that day which probably no one else in the Church of England did. It was an honest mistake!

Posted in Epiphany, General Synod Church of England, Sermons | Tagged 1 Corinthians 6:12-20, Blessings of same-sex marriages, Blessions of same-sex unions, Changes in the Doctrine of the Church, Changes in the social teaching of the Church, Divisions over same-sex blessings, Paul's Ethic of Freedom, What's the Right Thing to Do (for Christians) | Leave a comment

On Tenting at Christmas

Posted on December 26, 2023 by Bruce Bryant-Scott

A Sermon Preached on Christmas Day 2023 at
The Anglican Church of St. Thomas the Apostle, Kefalas, Crete

The readings were Isaiah 9:2-7, Psalm 96, Titus 2:11-14, and John:1-18.

Do you like camping? I used to do a lot of it, often on shelters and cabins, but sometimes in tents. Groups from my school went camping for cadets and as hiking in the Green Mountains of Vermont. I knew a guy named John Mordhorst, who was one of my instructors when I did Outward Bound, canoeing for a month in Northern Ontario in 1979. A couple of years before this Outward Bound gig, he, along with three others, had travelled from the height of land in the Yukon to Hudson’s Bay, about 1500 miles (2400 km). It took them something like a year and a half, and involved canoes and dog-sleds. While on the trip he discovered a downed Russian satellite, which interrupted their trip as they had to be flown to Edmonton to be checked out for radiation exposure, but otherwise they were in the wilderness constantly. He was a real outdoorsman, living mostly in tents. I remember he told us that he had not slept indoors in a bed for years. He said that when he did once, he was so uncomfortable that he had to pull out his sleeping bag.

Jesus: A Big Fan of Tenting

This is what happens when you ask AI to give you a picture of Jesus in a tent.

Someone else who liked tents was Jesus. Verse 14 in our gospel this morning reads in the original Greek: Καὶ ὁ λόγος σὰρξ ἐγένετο καὶ ἐσκήνωσεν ἐν ἡμῖν – and our translation and most other English versions translate this as “the Word became flesh and dwelled among us.”

The Greek verb ἐσκήνωσεν is usually translated as “dwelled” but the word literally means “put up a tent” or “tented” – and in modern Greek the word is σκηνή. This is the same word that is used in the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible (our Old Testament) for the Tabernacle, the tent where God met Moses. A large chunk of the Book of Exodus describes how it was to be constructed. This tabernacle is the place before which sacrifices were made, offerings of incense and freshly baked bread were offered inside. Inside the tent was the Ark of the Covenant, in which were the tablets of the Ten Commandments. When the people journeyed from Mount Sinai to the the Promised Land the Israelites would deconstruct it and carry it along, and then reconstruct it wherever they camped. King David, we are told in the Books of Samuel, brought this holy tent and its contents to Jerusalem. Solomon constructed the Temple, which was a stone version of the Tabernacle, only about twice the size.

One reconstruction of what the Tabernacle looked like. See Exodus 25–31 and 35–40.

This is probably why the gospel author used this phrasing. The Word of God pitching a tent among us represents a living, breathing Temple – the presence of God, the shekinah among us. What the sacred Temple was to Israelites, Jesus is for us – the place of sacrifice, the place of meeting God, the place of reconciliation, the place of glory. What the psalms say about the Temple we can now say about Jesus. As the Letter to the Hebrews explains, Jesus is both the great High Priest and the sacrificial victim, offering himself once for all in heaven and on earth. Jesus explicitly identifies himself with the Temple when he says in John 2.19-21 “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up” and the gospel then explains “. . . he was speaking of the temple of his body.”

The Tabernacle in Kefalas. Not as fancy as the one God commanded the Israelites to fabricate.

Let’s draw out a couple of more implications. Here, in this place, this church in Kefalas, we meet in the name of Jesus. Jesus promised us that whenever two or three gathered in his name, he is present. Now, this could happen anywhere, but we have set aside for this purpose this tent-like structure which we call “The Tabernacle.” This is where, in the Liturgy of the Lord’s Supper, in the hearing of scripture and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, we meet Jesus, and in Jesus we know the Father. So it is good and right that we call this The Tabernacle, not that it is any more special than any other building or tent, but because it is here that we become mindful of God’s presence among us.

But it is also here that we become the Body of Christ. As Christ dwells within us we become that Tabernacle, too, not made of canvas and metal and wiring, but of our selves, our souls and bodies. In offering up to God all that we are and all that we have we allow ourselves to be transformed into the image of God, so that we can look into the eyes of our neighbour here and encounter the divine. It is like the ancient Celtic hymn from St Patrick’s Breastplate:

Christ be with me, Christ within me,
Christ behind me, Christ before me,
Christ beside me, Christ to win me,
Christ to comfort and restore me,
Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ in quiet, Christ in danger,
Christ in hearts of all that love me,
Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.

So, on this day of Christ’s mass, in which we celebrate his birth, may we once again allow him to be born is us, as individuals, and as a church, as a communion around the world, as this body of saints that is now twenty centuries long and some seven billion souls, living and dead. Let us become, like him a tent for the dwelling of the divine. Come, Lord Jesus, and the renew the face of the earth.

Posted in Christmas, Sermons | Tagged Christmas Day Sermon, Jesus and Tents, Jesus as a tent, Jesus as the meeting place of god and humanity, Jesus as the Tabernacle, Jesus as the Temple, Tenting and Jesus, The Tabernacle | Leave a comment

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