This text thus challenges us with its strangeness, its ambiguity of characterization, its resistance to an ending. In an era in which Christian apologetics flourishes, and accounts of the reasonableness and rationality of Christianity abound, this text reminds of what a long shot the faith really is, waiting as we are 2800 years later for the revivification of a country long dead. The experience of being confronted with the strangeness, however, is useful in that it reminds us that the text is not our own, that it addresses us, that we can’t control it in the way that we seek to control everything else in our lives. This is a text that won’t easily submit to being used for any of our agendas. Most may not receive this as “good news” at first in the traditional sense, but rather more along the lines of spinach and colonoscopies, things we need and which will improve us, but which we may not like.
BD