The disciples approach Jesus with a request: “Lord, teach us to pray.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in his wonderful little book on the Psalms, says that we find the disciples request odd. Why would anyone need to be taught how to pray? Don’t we all naturally know how to do that? It’s a common assumption, but it is also a dangerous one. Why? The reason, Bonhoeffer says, is that we so easily confuse our own wishes, hopes, and frustrations with true prayer.

“Prayer does not simply mean pouring out your heart to God. True prayer is finding the way to God and speaking with him. Your heart can’t do that on its own” (Bonhoeffer).

To “find the way to God” is another way of naming Jesus, who is the way, truth, and life. He is the way to God that God has given to us. Your heart can’t find its way on its own, it needs Jesus to be its way to God. And this is preserved in the way most of us have learned how to finish our prayers: “In Jesus’ name. Amen.”

Only if Jesus takes us with him in his own prayer, only if he invites us into his own prayer to pray along with him, can we truly pray.

The Psalms are the prayerbook of Israel and so they are the prayerbook of Jesus. To learn to pray with Jesus is to let him give us the Psalms as his own prayers. In Jesus’ mouth these very human words of the psalms become the word of God for us.

Bonhoeffer’s wonderful insight is that it is Jesus’ voice that truly prays the Psalms. So, when we pray them we are praying them with him and in him.

The Psalms are filled with harsh words about enemies, prayers of repentance, prayers about the wicked receiving judgment. How can all these be Jesus’ words? Jesus does not need to pray for forgiveness. Jesus teaches us to pray for our enemies, to love them, and bless them when they curse us.

This is where the Psalms can be dangerous (like all of Scripture). The key is to realize that you either pray the Psalms in your own name or you pray them in Jesus’ name. When we pray them with and in Jesus the Psalms are brought into their fullness. Our intentions when praying them are healed, cleansed, and redeemed.

Jesus does not want to be the only one who prays the Psalms. “Jesus wants to pray with us and to have us pray with him” (Bonhoeffer).

And this is precisely how David prayed the Psalms. The reason David’s prayers were true and remain true is that Christ was in him! “David prayed out of the Christ who dwelled in him. In and through David it is Christ who prays” (Bonhoeffer).

This is how Jesus heals his father David. By taking up his father’s words and filling them with himself. And this is precisely what Jesus is doing with all creation, filling all things up with himself and so fulfilling all things. He is the deep truth of David. He is the deep truth of all things.

Or as Chris Green has it:

When all is said and done, David’s prayers are more faithful than David himself. The Psalms are truer than the Psalmist.

Further resources:

* Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Psalms: The Prayer Book of the Bible

* Dietrich Bonhoeffer lecture, “Christ in the Psalms” in Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Volume 14.

* Chris E.W. Green The Fire and the Cloud: A Biblical Christology

Last week we ended by saying that Jesus redeems his mother Mary (and all creation) by relying on her. Jesus grew in wisdom and stature. God learned. He learned from his mother. Perhaps the most important thing he learned from her was how to pray. Specifically to pray like this: “Not my will, but yours be done.”

This is Mary’s prayer upon receiving the news that she will conceive and give birth to Jesus: “Let it be unto me according to your word.” Not my will, but your will be done. Jesus learned that prayer from his Mother and repeats it in the garden of Gethsemane.

But where did Mary learn to pray like this? The short answer is from the Psalms. “Not my will, but your will” is what Israel’s scriptures say on every page. Especially the Psalms. 

In other words, Mary’s faithful prayer that she teaches her son is the prayer she learned from the psalmist David.

To see more clearly the uniqueness of the Psalms we spent some time looking at an essay by German philosopher Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy entitled “Hitler and Israel, or on Prayer.” Rosenstock-Huessy compares Hitler’s speech-making with the speech that Israel canonizes in the Psalms.

Hitler’s will and his God’s will are nauseatingly one. The great art of speech has made Hitler crazy. Since he has the privilege of speaking, of inflaming the masses, he spellbinds. And so he hovers as a ghost from the abyss of paganism, a ghost of the days before God touched Israel’s lips with his fiery coal: My will, O mortal, not thine, be done.

[The Psalms are] the white heat of speech, during which man’s will is separated from God’s will, and men come to know God’s will as differing from their own wishes and from their leader’s will. 

The Psalms teach us that true prayer recognizes God’s divine “No.” This is what Hitler’s speeches cannot allow. Hitler is a spellbinder precisely in that he collapses God’s will with his own will; God’s desires with the desires of the masses. Hitler cannot say “Not my will, but yours be done.” That is the spell that he casts and it is a spell that everywhere surrounds us today.

The only way for that spell to be broken in us is if we go to school with Israel and learn to truly pray. Or as Rosenstock-Huessy puts it:

True prayer breaks spells.

This is what David the psalmist teaches us and the entire world: how to hear God’s “No.” This is the white-hot heat of true prayer embodied in the Psalms and ultimately in Jesus of Nazareth.

Chris Green interacts with Rosenstock-Huessy’s essay in his newest book The Fire and the Cloud, which I highly recommend! You can also listen to one of Chris’s podcast episodes on Rosenstock-Huessy’s essay here: “True Prayer Breaks Spells”

You can read the full essay by Rosenstock-Huessy here:

Jesus is the healing of David and David’s story. To see the depth of wisdom in the David story we have to see David in Christ and Christ in David. A deep union. A marriage.

The way Jesus heals David’s life and the life of the whole world is precisely by becoming flesh, becoming David’s son.

We need to think of David the way we should think of Mary: both carry Jesus in their bodies. Think not only of the deep intimacy he has with them but also his reliance on them. That's precisely how he saves them.

Jesus heals by the incarnation; filling up all things with the very life of God. He fills up the life of David with himself. Heals David–and all creation–from the inside out.

James B. Torrance writes:

“Christ does not heal us by standing over against us, diagnosing our sickness, prescribing medicine for us to take, and then going away, to leave us to get better by obeying his instructions—as an ordinary doctor might. No, He becomes the patient! He assumes that very humanity which is in need of redemption, and by being anointed by the Spirit in our humanity, by a life of perfect obedience for us, by dying and rising again, our humanity is healed in him.”

The witness of the prophets and the New Testament show us that Jesus is both the root of David and the branch of David. He comes before David, but he also comes after David. He is prior, and yet he is later. Jesus is David’s Lord, but he is also his son (Matt. 22:41—46).

It’s no different with Jesus’ mother, Mary. Maximus the Confessor puts it like this:

“Just as the Word, who, as God, is by nature creator of His mother who gave birth to Him according to the flesh, and made her His mother out of love for mankind, and accepted to be born from her as man, so too the Word first creates faith within us, and then becomes the son of that faith, from which He is embodied through the practice of the virtues.”

He takes all of us into himself as our “root” and yet he is also the fruit born from the branch. His life gives us life so that the life we now live—the fruit that we now produce—is nothing other than himself.

The alpha and the omega. The first and the last. Our root and our branch. He’s bracketed us in himself!

David is in Christ and Christ is in David. David’s Lord heals him by becoming his son. And he is doing the same for us.

I relied on Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s lecture notes, “King David” in The Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works volume 14.

Flat readings of the David story often turn him into a sort of John Wayne character. A gunslinger, a good-bad guy that has to do what no one is willing to do in order to get the job done so that everyone lives happily ever after.

The western is sort of the quintessential American myth. These are the stories we tell ourselves to understand who we are. They are told to characterize something essentially American. Historian Kristen Kobes du Mez recently wrote a book called Jesus and John Wayne in which she chronicles ways that American evangelicals have sort of reimagined Jesus in the image of John Wayne. The result is that these evangelicals see John Wayne as the perfect image of Christian masculinity, which is pretty obviously problematic.

But these flat readings of David that identify him as a John Wayne character are not only bad readings of the David story (as I hope we’ve already seen), but they are equally bad readings of the John Wayne movies.

Chris Green makes just this argument in his book All Things Beautiful. Not only are we not careful readers of Scripture, but we don’t even pay much attention to the stories Americans tell about themselves.

Neither the “David” nor the “John Wayne” of popular imagination bear much resemblance to the actual characters we meet in the telling of the stories. Both are deeply tragic figures whose lives end tragically; torn apart from the community, in exile, not able to participate in the communities they’ve built.

As Green points out, the problem is with the way we’ve been conditioned to read anything and everything. The result is that we end up not only reading Scripture in a superficial way, but we even end up reading our own stories superficially. And if this is true of us, we will have almost no chance of understanding the world around us faithfully.

Here are the two movie clips we watched in class. You can see in both the often tragic endings to the “hunter-hero” stories.

If you want to think more about this take on “Jesus and John Wayne” I highly recommend you read Chris Green’s book All Things Beautiful and watch this great interview (both are the key resources I used for the class):

The David of 1 & 2 Samuel is a divided character from the beginning. Is he a little boy or is a valiant warrior? Is he pure-hearted or self-serving and ambitious? Does he do battle with the harp or with the sword?

But the key through-line in the dividedness of David is this: is he a shepherd or a king?

The prophet Samuel warned the Israelites against having a king like all the other nations. Samuel tells the people that the king will take and take and take from you. He will not stop. A king is self-seeking. He uses his people to enrich himself and to make his name great. Shepherds are a different story. A shepherd is a servant. As Jesus says that a good shepherd even lays his life down for the sake of his sheep while a hired hand deserts them.

The competing roles of king and shepherd run right down the middle of the story of David. And the text of 1 & 2 Samuel forces the reader to ask this question: Why does God love David?

Is it because he knows this small, insignificant shepherd boy will grow up to be a mighty king? Or is it the little shepherd boy that God loves? If we read the story through the lens of the latter, then perhaps it is the case that as David’s story progresses he is losing touch with his true self as he grows up into this mighty king.

The story can be read this way: the more powerful David gets, the more difficult it gets for David to access his shepherd’s heart. Read this way, we can see that David is very rarely in touch with the tender heart God loves.

Chris Green, in his book The Fire and the Cloud, draws attention to an African slave spiritual about David:

Little David was a shepherd boy,

Notice the “David” the slaves identify with: little David; not King David. Allen Dwight Callahan says that for the African slave-poets, “Once ‘Little David’ is no longer little, he is no longer worth singing about.”

The rest of David’s life, as 1 & 2 Samuel narrates it for us, is a struggle between “little David” and “King David.” Only one of the two “Davids” has the capacity to hear the voice of the Lord.

Don’t forget that David’s Lord identifies himself as the Good Shepherd.

Chris Green argues that Scripture is written with “pitch” or “spin.” In baseball a pitcher puts spin on the ball he throws to the batter and depending on who the batter is—how they swing, whether they are left-handed or right-handed—the same pitch will come off their bats in two totally different direction. Scripture is written with “pitch” in much the same way. Depending on whose reading it, where they are at in life, their social position, etc., Scripture hits us differently.

This isn’t a flaw in the Scriptures. The Spirit gives the words to us this way, causing us to wrestle with them, so that we come to know the Word.

You can read many of the stories of David in two completely different—sometimes opposite—ways. Part of growing in wisdom means that you are able to recognize the various readings Scripture makes available.

No story in David’s life has more “pitch” on it than the story of David bringing the Ark of the Covenant into the City of David, dancing with all his might. If we don’t recognize the “spin” that this story has on it we will end up reading it simplistically. David is the good guy who is just trying his best to worship God with everything he has. Michal is the harsh, bitter woman who is too stuck-up to recognize David’s authentic worship.

But things are never that simple. Not in life; not in Scripture. And the Scriptures know this best. This is why Scripture is true.

In his book David’s Truth in Israel’s Imagination and Memory Walter Brueggemann makes this point:

“[Scripture knows that] the power of the truth always comes with scars…”

The truth is painful. David’s truth is painful precisely because he is human. And the closer we attend to David’s truth—especially when it hurts—the better we will see the truth of ourselves.

I think the poet W.H. Auden has his finger on it in this stanza (emphasis added):

Though the heart like a clever

“Whose son is this?” (1 Sam. 17:55)

Saul’s question at the end of the David/Goliath story is perhaps the key theme of the whole story of David: Whose son is David? Who exactly is this man? Is he the son of Jesse the Bethlehemite? Will he turn out to be a son to Saul? Can he possibly be the son of God?

But Saul’s question should strike us as strange. Saul has not only just spoken to David before he defeated Goliath, but David has long been been playing the harp for Saul in his palace. But there’s more that makes Saul’s question so strange. After all, kings might easily forget the names of their servants. What makes Saul’s question about the identity of David so odd is that we have been told just the chapter before that Saul loved David.

Is Saul losing his mind? Perhaps. But the narrator of 1 Samuel is doing something deeper. David as a character in the narrative is elusive. He’s hard to pin down. Saul’s question becomes our question as readers: Whose son is this? Who exactly is this man?

David is complex. He is filled with contradiction. He contains multitudes. David is a man after God’s own heart and he is calculating, self-serving, and ambitious. More often than not he is both simultaneously.

Many if not most of us have been given flattened and simplistic readings of the David story. we’ve been given a story that is more manageable. But these flat readings deny the complexity and the messiness (i.e. the humanness!) of the life of David.

I don’t think it’s an accident that precisely because we read scripture in this flat, simplistic way, we so often find it difficult to appreciate the complexity, the messiness, and the beauty of our own lives and the lives of our neighbors.

the storytellers of Israel have something to teach us if we will give them our full attention instead of writing them off as ancient, simple narrators.

Kurt Vonnegut diagrams: “The Shape of Stories”

(from A Man Without a Country)

* “Man in Hole”

* “Boy Meets Girl”

* Cinderella

* Kafka

* Hamlet

In 1 Corinthians 15 Paul addresses the fourth and final major issue in the Corinthian church: some of them are denying the resurrection of the body. (In Greek, literally “the rising of the corpses.”)

What’s fascinating is that in all the issues he addresses in the letter this is the only time he does not directly correct their behavior. In chapter 15 he is correcting their theology. But can beliefs and behaviors be so easily separated?

In his commentary Richard Hays suggests that the Corinthians’ denial of the resurrection may be at the heart of all their behavioral problems:

The many moral failings of the Corinthians may in fact all be surface symptoms of their underlying misapprehension of the heart of the gospel: the death and resurrection of Jesus.

The resurrection of the body is the heart of the gospel. First for Jesus, then for us. Our future is an embodied future because he is embodied—and we are that body.

But in order for something to be risen it must first die. Paul concludes with the comparison between the first Adam—who is an animated being, enlivened with breath—and the second Adam, Jesus—who is vivified by the eternal Spirit. The first Adam is a living soul. The second Adam is a life-giving Spirit.

To bear the image of the first Adam is to breathe only for yourself, to be concerned with preserving your own breath for as long as possible. To bear the image of the second Adam you must give up your attempts to hold on to your own breath. You must lay it down. Lose your breath and you will find it.

Christ does not desire to hold on to his breath for his own sake. He lets go of his breath for the sake of others. He is a life-giving spirit. When he breathes he gives life to others, he doesn’t suck the oxygen out of the room.

Christ breathes for others even when he is punched in the gut. When the wind is knocked out of him he does not fight to hold on to it but prays, “Father, forgive them.”

And because he is the Spirit-bearer he is the Spirit-baptizer.

At the cross when Jesus breathed out his last breath the Gospel of John tells us that “He handed over the Spirit.” (Not, as many English translations have it, “he handed over his spirit.”) Jesus is the life-giving Spirit.

Psalm 104:29-30 tells us about this great mystery:

You take away their breath, they die and return to the dust. You send forth your Spirit and they are created.

If we meet Christ in his death—at the cross—he will take our breath away. We die with him. But here’s the promise: he will send forth his Spirit so that we can finally be created.

All the saints know this in their bones. Hannah knew it. That’s why she sings: “The Lord kills and he makes alive. He brings down to the grave and he raises up” (1 Samuel 2:6).

The order is the key. Grace must first kill. Only then can it make us alive.

Throughout the teaching I am heavily relying on John Behr’s reading of 1 Corinthians 15:44-45 and Chris Green’s reading of Psalm 23.

This week we tackle 1 Corinthians 14 which brings a couple of difficult textual problems. Foremost among them being 1 Cor. 14:34-35

Women should be silent in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak but should be subordinate, as the law also says. 35 If there is something they want to learn, let them ask their husbands at home. For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church.

Then we move to the topic of tongues and prophecy within the church gathering. Love is to guide the use of all the gifts in church (1 Cor. 13). Put differently—Jesus is the canon or ruler for how the gifts are practiced.

In short, because the gifts are about love (Jesus!) and the upbuilding of the whole body, the gifts are for your neighbors not primarily for yourself. (This is Paul’s problem with how the Corinthians are practicing the gift of tongues.) As Revelation 19:10 puts it, “The testimony (martyria) of Jesus is the Spirit of prophecy.”

And, I might, add it is the Spirit of tongues as well. The Spirit draws us out (ec-static) of our old, cramped ways of being in the world and into the vast, open space of reality constituted in the person of Jesus.

The spiritual gifts can never be an escape from reality. Rather, they lead us to Jesus who is himself reality. As Bonhoeffer never tires of reminding us:

Whoever sees Jesus Christ does indeed see God and the world in one. He can henceforward no longer see God without the world or the world without God.

In Jesus Christ the reality of God entered into the reality of this world… God and the world are comprised in his name.

Tongues and prophecy should lead us into the heart of reality because they lead us into the life of Jesus. Which means they lead us to those around us in their suffering, sin, guilt, and shame. That’s where Jesus is. God and the world at one in his face. He is the heart of reality.

* The illustration of tongues breaking us out of our boxes comes from this sermon from Chris Green. I hope you’ll listen to it.

In Acts 8 Stephen comes upon an Ethiopian eunuch seated in his chariot studying Isaiah 53. Stephen asks him, “Do you understand what you are reading?” The eunuch replies, “How can I unless someone guides me?” The eunuch’s question about the passage in Isaiah is a good one: “Who is this about?” Not “What is this about?” but “Who?”

Isaiah 53 is a well-beloved passage that most Christians are very familiar with. The same is true for the “love chapter,” 1 Corinthians 13.

This week we let Dietrich Bonhoeffer guide us through a passage that we are, perhaps, overly familiar with. Bonhoeffer is the perfect guide for this text because his primary question in all his theology is the same as the eunuch’s “Who is this about?”

Bonhoeffer guides us through 1 Corinthians 13 by way of four sermons he preached to his German Lutheran congregation in London in 1934. You can find the sermons attached below.