Perhaps you remember the first instance when you understood a passage in the Bible with more than your own mind–when the words came to life and became incarnate in your imagination. For me, it was a passage I had heard all my life. I could have quoted it. But in that moment, the words spoke in a way that connected the pieces of my life with Scripture like a puzzle. I was hearing what I thought I knew for the first time. The last words became, in a sense, the first words.
“Thus it is written . . .” (Lk 24:46 ESV): Jesus begins and then he unfolds, in a sentence that can be spoken in a single breath, what it had taken an eternity to accomplish. First suffering, then resurrection, then the message of repentance and forgiveness preached to all the nations. It will all begin where it had just ended, in Jerusalem. And so he sends them back to the city to wait for the coming of the Spirit that will empower them from on high. . . . — Michael Card, Luke: The Gospel of Amazement (InterVarsity Press, 2011), 266.
Michael Card
“Your crooked heartâ€: Literary Study and Spiritual Formation (Scholar’s Call)
John Runciman, King Lear in the Storm, 1767
Act III of Shakespeare’s King Lear gets to me every time. Lear, spectacularly blinded by pride and bereft of power in his old age, having foolishly exiled one daughter and exposed himself to betrayal by the other two, retreats into a storm with his Fool and descends into madness, shaking his fist at nature, railing, “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow!†[Read more…] about “Your crooked heartâ€: Literary Study and Spiritual Formation (Scholar’s Call)