Danny Taylor: Skinny Guy Thinking it Through

You see it in the movies. The criminal on his last walk down death row to take his seat at the executioner’s table. On that lonely march, under his breath you hear him haphazardly mumble the 23rd Psalm;      The Lord is my Shepherd. I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures…. It’s an old Western, and the repentant train robber is being fitted to a hangman’s noose, calmly repeating the line from Psalm 30:5;      Weeping may endure for the night, but joy comes in the morning…. But it's not just the movies. We all have had friends or relatives on their death bed do the same thing. Cancer has reduced her to nothing, but she still has strength to pray the Lord’s Prayer;      Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name…. Alzheimer’s may have stolen his mind, but he has not forgotten Job 19:25;      For I know that my redeemer lives, and at last he will stand on the earth. Those who have long walked with God find a welc...

One of my favorite movies is Remember the Titans . It follows the story of a black football coach hired at a newly integrated high school in Virginia. The year is 1971 and racial tensions are high. Half of his team is black and the other white. There is enough hatred to go around. Caught in the middle is Coach Boone, hoping football can cross the racial divide and unite a high school, if not a community.  A key moment in that movie takes place during the team’s training camp where Coach Boone leads them on an early morning run to Gettysburg National Cemetery. Gettysburg.  Just that word alone evokes an emotional response. It takes the hearer back to Union and Confederate soldiers engaged in fraternal conflict. In an impassioned speech, Coach Boone makes the case that these young football players are still engaged in the same fight that happened there—Gettysburg—where fifty-thousand men killed their brothers with malice in their hearts. Something about that place, and Coach Boo...

Parents know the feeling. You’re in the department store, cautiously weaving your way through the aisles. The deafening crash of breaking glass stops you dead in your tracks. You turn around and see surprise—and guilt—on your child’s otherwise innocent-looking face. Obviously he didn’t mean to break that expensive vase. But he did break that expensive vase. You never intended to buy it, and now it’s your responsibility. You take it to the manager with words like, “I’m so sorry. My son broke it. It was an accident, but I’m willing to pay for it.” A good retail manager would refuse to let the customer do such a thing—“ Don’t worry about it. These sorts of things happen. I’m just glad your son wasn’t hurt! ” Phew! You are off the hook. But the matter of the vase is not over once you leave the store. Someone will pay for what your child broke, even if it isn’t you. Someone absorbs the loss, and for something that wasn’t their fault.  Think of the scene in Mark 14 where an unnamed woman...

On Tuesday of Holy Week, Mark has a lot going on. The end of chapter 11 and majority of chapter 12 show a series of rhetorical conflicts between Jesus and different groups who are not incredibly thrilled that he has come to town.  He spars with the chief priests and scribes who question his authority to do and say the things he does and says.  He spars with Pharisees and Herodians on the matter of taxes. He spars with Sadducees over resurrection.  Power, politics, and religious dogma. You can feel the tension mounting. All major social and political groups are accounted for in these scenes and all of them fail to quiet the growing problem of Jesus. In chapter 13, he spars against the physical Temple itself, representative of religious structures which have outlived their usefulness. If the fig-tree episode hinted at the Temple’s doom, today’s discourse makes it explicit. In due time, that building will be reduced to a pile of rocks.  Tucked in the center of it all is...

Among the more puzzling stories in the New Testament, Jesus cursing the fig tree ranked high on my list. To me, it always seemed random and out of place; and somewhat out of character for Jesus. I had imagined that perhaps in a moment of frustrated weakness, he lashed out at a poor innocent tree.  Had his mother been there, she might have called him “Hangry” and gave him a Snickers.  The reality is not even close to that. Our gospel writers are far more clever than we give them credit for. The fig-tree episode of Mark 11:12-14 and 20-26 is a deliberately placed event at the front end of Holy Week, framing another important event. In Mark 11:15-19, Jesus overturning tables in the Temple becomes a story within a story, one giving greater insight to the other. Jesus approached a tree, expecting to find fruit. Sadly, Jesus discovered none. The fig tree is not working properly, failing to do what it is designed to do. And so, Jesus marks it out for destruction.  Granted, as Ma...

During high school, the state of Ohio had a standardized writing portion of its “9th Grade Proficiency Test.” For about a month prior to the exam, my brother pored over a dictionary, trying to add maybe a dozen large and complex words to his personal lexicon. The idea was to impress whoever might be grading the exam, showing off his vast vocabulary (notice how I slipped “lexicon” into the previous sentence!). Somehow, he successfully shoehorned the word “octogenarian” into a 500-word essay on why dogs make good pets. And it worked; he passed on his first try with flying colors, thanks to what my dad would call “fancy hundred-dollar words!” Many have come to believe that if a word is more complex, has many syllables, and is somewhat hard to pronounce, that word must be important. No one does that better, by the way, than students of the Greek New Testament. Equipped with our “ BDAG ,” the Merriam-Webster’s equivalent of ancient Greek words, we love uncovering the mysteries of, for examp...