Luke 17:1–10 and the Ancient World Behind Jesus’ Teaching

There are places where faith is relatively easy to discuss. It is easy to speak about trusting God when faith remains abstract. It becomes much harder when faith enters the complicated territory of relationships—when someone has wounded us, disappointed us, betrayed our trust, or repeated an offense we thought had already been settled. Luke 17 brings faith directly into that world. Jesus does not introduce the mustard seed while discussing abstract theology or even miraculous healing. Luke places the saying immediately after a difficult command concerning forgiveness. The apostles hear Jesus tell them that if a brother sins repeatedly, repents repeatedly, and returns repeatedly, they are to forgive repeatedly. Their response is remarkably honest: “Increase our faith” (Luke 17:5).

That literary connection matters. The disciples are not asking for greater faith so that they can accomplish impressive supernatural feats. They have just been told what life inside Jesus’ covenant community is supposed to look like, and they recognize that such a life demands something beyond ordinary human instinct. Jesus is asking them to become the kind of people who refuse to allow offense to become vengeance, who confront wrongdoing without being consumed by it, and who remain open to restoration when repentance occurs. It is in that setting that Jesus begins talking about mustard seeds and uprooted trees.

Luke 17, then, is not simply a lesson about believing God for impossible things. It is about what faithfulness looks like when the impossible thing is forgiveness.

When Offenses Come

Jesus begins with a sober observation: “It is impossible that no offenses should come” (Luke 17:1). The Greek noun skandalon refers to something that causes stumbling, entrapment, or ruin. Jesus is realistic about communal life. Wherever human beings live closely together, wounds will occur. Discipleship does not eliminate the possibility of offense; it changes what the community does when offense happens.

That is particularly important in the social world of the first century. Mediterranean society was deeply communal. Identity was formed through household, kinship, reputation, obligation, patronage, loyalty, honor, and shame far more than through the modern Western ideal of the autonomous individual. An offense could therefore extend far beyond a private disagreement. It could damage a household, fracture alliances, divide a community, and compromise the standing of those involved. Zeba Crook’s The Ancient Mediterranean Social World is especially helpful here, showing how honor, shame, kinship, patronage, reciprocity, friendship, and collective identity formed the social environment in which texts such as Luke were heard.¹

This makes Jesus’ warning in Luke 17:1–2 even more serious. The kingdom community is not to become a place where power is used carelessly against the vulnerable. Yet Jesus immediately turns the attention of the disciples toward their own response: “Pay attention to yourselves” (17:3). The disciple must guard against causing another person to stumble, but must also guard the heart when another person sins.

This has deep roots in Israel’s covenant ethic. Leviticus 19:17 tells Israel not to hate a brother “in your heart,” but instead to reprove the neighbor honestly. The next verse prohibits vengeance and bearing a grudge before giving the command, “you shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Lev. 19:18). In its Torah context, confrontation and love are not opposites. Rebuke actually stands between hidden hatred and vengeance. Jesus continues that same covenant logic when he says, “If your brother sins, rebuke him; and if he repents, forgive him.” Biblical forgiveness does not require pretending that nothing happened. It refuses both silent hatred and retaliatory vengeance.

Forgiveness in the Jewish World

Jesus’ teaching is demanding, but it is not disconnected from the Jewish moral world in which he taught. One of the clearest parallels appears in Ben Sira, written roughly two centuries before Jesus. Sirach 28 warns against vengeance and sustained anger, telling the hearer to forgive a neighbor’s injustice while remembering one’s own dependence upon the mercy of God. The underlying question is striking: how can someone ask God for mercy while refusing mercy to another human being?²

A related tradition appears in the Testament of Gad. The compositional history of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs is complicated, so it should not be treated as though Jesus were directly quoting it. Nevertheless, the moral world is remarkably similar. The text warns against hatred taking root within a person, encourages honest confrontation when a brother sins, speaks of forgiveness when confession and repentance occur, and ultimately urges the injured person to leave vengeance with God rather than carrying hatred within the heart.³

This wider Jewish context helps us see that forgiveness is not merely an interior therapeutic exercise. It belongs to covenant faithfulness. Jesus is forming a people whose relationships are governed by mercy because they themselves live by the mercy of God. The Torah had forbidden vengeance; Jewish wisdom had warned against harboring anger; Jesus now intensifies that tradition by making repeated forgiveness a defining practice of his disciples.

That is the force of the number seven in Luke 17. Jesus says that even if someone sins seven times in one day and returns seven times saying, “I repent,” forgiveness is still required. Seven is not functioning as a literal ceiling. As elsewhere in Scripture, it carries the sense of fullness or completion. Matthew preserves a similar exchange when Peter asks whether seven acts of forgiveness are enough and Jesus answers with “seventy-seven” or “seventy times seven” (Matt. 18:21–22). Peter wants a number he can count. Jesus gives him a way of life.

This does not erase repentance, accountability, consequences, or wise boundaries. Luke explicitly includes repentance in the saying. Forgiveness is also not identical with the immediate restoration of trust. A person may relinquish vengeance while recognizing that rebuilding trust requires time and demonstrated faithfulness. Jesus is not instructing a wounded person to pretend destructive behavior is harmless. He is teaching his disciples not to allow another person’s sin to transform them into people ruled by hatred.

“Increase Our Faith”

The apostles’ response now makes considerably more sense: “Increase our faith” (Luke 17:5). Read in context, this is not primarily a request for greater miracle-working power. Jesus has just described a kind of relational life that seems almost impossible. The disciples know how difficult it is to forgive someone once, much less repeatedly, and so their instinct is that they must not possess enough faith for what Jesus is asking.

Darrell Bock draws attention to this connection in his commentary on Luke. The request for increased faith follows directly from Jesus’ demanding instruction concerning interpersonal relationships and repeated forgiveness. The disciples sense that living this way requires dependence upon God.⁴ Yet Jesus’ answer is surprising because he does not simply grant their request for a larger quantity of faith. Instead, he tells them, “If you have faith like a mustard seed…”

The point is not that they must somehow grow enormous faith before obedience becomes possible. The mustard seed suggests almost the opposite. Faith may appear insignificant, unimpressive, or inadequate, and yet genuine faith is sufficient because its significance lies not in its size but in the one toward whom it is directed. Jesus does not tell them to wait until they feel spiritually powerful enough to forgive. He calls them to trust him with the faith they already possess.

This is also where modern discussions of pistis can sometimes be overly narrowed. In ordinary Christian speech, faith is often reduced to believing something strongly enough. In the biblical world, however, pistis regularly carries dimensions of trust, faithfulness, fidelity, and allegiance. In Luke 17, the disciples do not merely need greater intellectual certainty. They need enough trust in Jesus to follow him into an obedience that feels beyond them.

The Sycamine Tree and the Roots Beneath the Surface

Jesus then gives one of the strangest images in the passage: “If you had faith like a mustard seed, you could say to this sykaminos, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you” (Luke 17:6). English translations variously render sykaminos as “mulberry” or “sycamine.” The precise botanical identification is less certain than popular preaching sometimes suggests, and we should be cautious about attaching elaborate symbolic meanings to the species itself. Ancient terminology for mulberries, sycamines, and related trees does not map neatly onto modern botanical categories.⁵

What Luke emphasizes much more clearly is the verb: ekrizōō, “to uproot.” Jesus chooses the image of something established in the ground being torn out by the roots and then planted in the sea. The imagery is intentionally excessive. Trees do not naturally root themselves in the sea. Jesus combines the deeply established with the apparently impossible.

It is therefore unnecessary to claim that the mulberry tree was an established ancient symbol of bitterness. Luke never says that. But the literary placement of an uprooted tree immediately after a command concerning repeated forgiveness is nevertheless suggestive. Resentment can become deeply rooted. The memory of an offense can spread beneath the surface long after the visible conflict has ended. A wound can eventually become more than something that happened to us; it can become the lens through which we interpret other people, relationships, and even ourselves.

That is where Jesus’ language becomes especially powerful. Faith is capable of dealing not only with what appears above the surface but with what has taken root underneath it. The person may have moved on outwardly while resentment remains alive within. The conversation ended years ago, but the argument is still rehearsed internally. The relationship changed, but the need to be vindicated remains. Jesus speaks of uprooting.

Craig Keener’s work on the cultural background of the New Testament is valuable precisely because it reminds modern interpreters not to flatten sayings like this into abstract formulas. Jesus regularly taught through vivid exaggeration: camels passing through the eye of a needle, logs protruding from someone’s eye, mountains thrown into the sea. These images were meant to seize the imagination and expose the radical character of the kingdom.⁶ Luke 17 belongs in that same world.

The disciples have effectively said, “What you are asking is impossible.” Jesus’ answer is that genuine faith is precisely what allows the disciple to obey when obedience appears impossible.

The Servant and the Shape of Faithfulness

The saying about the mustard seed is immediately followed by a short parable about a servant returning from the field. After plowing or tending sheep, the servant does not ordinarily expect the master to reverse roles and begin serving him. The servant completes the responsibility entrusted to him. Jesus concludes, “So you also, when you have done everything you were commanded, should say, ‘We are unworthy servants; we have only done our duty’” (Luke 17:10).

The ancient social world behind this saying can sound uncomfortable to modern ears, and it should. Slavery and household servitude were embedded in Greco-Roman life, and Jesus’ use of that familiar social arrangement should not be mistaken for an endorsement of everything associated with it. His listeners nevertheless understood the basic relationship being invoked: service carried obligation. Completing what had been commanded did not place the master in the servant’s debt.

Mark Allan Powell’s discussion of the Roman social world is helpful here. Ancient Mediterranean life was structured through relationships of patronage, obligation, benefaction, loyalty, honor, and reciprocity.⁷ Jesus uses a recognizable social relationship to make a theological point: obedience does not create leverage over God.

That connects the entire passage. The disciples say, “Increase our faith.” Jesus responds that mustard-seed faith is enough, and then explains what faith looks like: do what the Master has asked. Forgiveness is not an act of spiritual heroism for which God now owes us something. It is simply what life under the lordship of Jesus looks like.

That may be the most important movement in the passage. Faith is not merely something the disciples possess internally. Faith becomes visible as faithfulness. Their allegiance to Jesus takes concrete form in the way they treat the people who have wounded them.

Forgiveness Without Pretending

This also gives us an important pastoral distinction. Forgiveness is not pretending evil is good. Jesus explicitly says, “rebuke him.” It is not pretending repentance is irrelevant; Jesus speaks of the offender returning and saying, “I repent.” Nor does forgiveness necessarily mean immediate restoration of relational access or trust. Scripture does not require foolishness in the name of mercy.

Forgiveness means that vengeance is surrendered. The disciple refuses to nurture hatred as though hatred were a form of justice. Truth may still need to be spoken, consequences may remain, and wisdom may require distance. But the disciple no longer gives the wound permission to determine the kind of person he or she will become.

Joel Green’s commentary on Luke repeatedly emphasizes that Luke’s theology takes concrete social form. Jesus is not merely producing people who hold correct ideas about God; he is forming a community whose relationships embody the character of God’s kingdom.⁸ Luke 17 is one of the clearest examples of that formation. The issue is not whether sin matters. It matters deeply enough to confront. But neither is sin permitted to have the final word over the community.

When the Tree Begins to Move

There is probably a reason the disciples immediately asked for more faith. They understood that Jesus was asking for something they could not manufacture through willpower. We understand that too. Some wounds run deep. Some names still produce an emotional response years later. Some conversations have been replayed so often that the hurt has become almost inseparable from the way we remember the relationship. Jesus is not asking us to pretend those things did not happen. He is not asking us to rename injustice, overlook abuse, or put ourselves back into dangerous relationships. He is asking whether we will trust him with what happened.

Sometimes that trust begins very small. It may begin with little more than, “Jesus, I do not know how to forgive this, but I trust you enough to begin.” That is mustard-seed faith. It does not feel heroic. It may not feel powerful at all. But it moves toward obedience. For some of us, obedience may mean having an honest conversation. For others it may mean receiving a sincere apology. Sometimes reconciliation will be possible, and sometimes wisdom will require boundaries. But in every circumstance, Jesus refuses to allow bitterness to become the permanent caretaker of our hearts. Perhaps that is the deepest image in Luke 17. We tend to deal with branches while Jesus keeps reaching for roots. We want God to remove the feeling, fix the other person, or rewrite what happened. Jesus begins somewhere deeper. He asks us to release vengeance, tell the truth, remain open to redemption, and entrust justice to God. The disciples thought they needed much greater faith before they could live this way. Jesus pointed to a seed.

You do not have to feel powerful enough to forgive. You do not have to convince yourself that the wound was insignificant. You simply begin by trusting Jesus enough to take the next faithful step. Sometimes the greatest evidence that God is moving something impossible is not a mountain disappearing into the sea. Sometimes it is an old root finally loosening its grip on the human heart.

And that is where mustard-seed faith becomes real.

Article written by Dr. Will Ryan and special guest, lifetime friend Pastor Mike Donahoe

Endnotes

1. Zeba A. Crook, ed., The Ancient Mediterranean Social World: A Sourcebook (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2020). Crook’s collection is particularly useful for reconstructing the relational world of the New Testament, including kinship, honor and shame, patronage, friendship, reciprocity, loyalty, and collectivism. These categories help explain why interpersonal offenses in the ancient Mediterranean world could threaten not simply private relationships but households and communities.
2. Sirach 27:30–28:7. This Second Temple Jewish wisdom text closely associates vengeance, anger, forgiveness, covenant faithfulness, and the expectation of divine mercy. Particularly striking is its insistence that the person seeking mercy from God cannot casually refuse mercy to a neighbor.
3. Testament of Gad 6. The text encourages honest confrontation rather than concealed hatred, forgiveness in response to repentance, and the surrender of vengeance to God. Because the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs underwent a complicated history of composition and transmission, the passage is best used as evidence for a related Jewish ethical tradition rather than as proof of literary dependence upon Jesus’ teaching.
4. Darrell L. Bock, Luke, IVP New Testament Commentary Series (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1994). Bock reads Luke 17:5–10 in connection with the relational demands of vv. 1–4, observing that the apostles’ request for increased faith arises naturally from the difficulty of living out Jesus’ teaching on repeated forgiveness.
5. I. Howard Marshall, The Gospel of Luke: A Commentary on the Greek Text, New International Greek Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1978). Marshall discusses the Greek sykaminos and the rhetorical character of Jesus’ saying. Because the exact botanical identification is less important than the image itself, the primary exegetical emphasis should fall upon the impossible act of uprooting and replanting rather than speculative symbolic properties of the tree.
6. Craig S. Keener, The IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament, 2nd ed. (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2014). Keener situates New Testament sayings within Jewish and Greco-Roman cultural conventions and is particularly helpful for recognizing the force of Jesus’ vivid rhetorical exaggerations without turning them into abstract formulas disconnected from their historical setting.
7. Mark Allan Powell, Introducing the New Testament: A Historical, Literary, and Theological Survey, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2018). Powell’s discussion of Mediterranean society highlights patronage, benefaction, social obligation, honor, shame, and reciprocity, categories that illuminate the servant imagery of Luke 17:7–10 and Jesus’ argument that faithful obedience does not place God in the disciple’s debt.
8. Joel B. Green, The Gospel of Luke, New International Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997). Green consistently reads Luke as a theological narrative in which salvation creates a distinctive social reality. Luke’s presentation of discipleship therefore cannot be reduced to inward belief; allegiance to Jesus becomes visible in concrete relationships, communal practices, and the reshaping of ordinary social life.

Marriage in the biblical world was never merely a private agreement between two individuals. It was the formation of a household, the joining of kinship lines, the reordering of inheritance, and the creation of new obligations within a village, clan, and covenant community. Modern Western marriage tends to begin with two individuals choosing one another and then informing their families. In the ancient world, the family and community were often already structurally involved in the union itself. This does not mean ancient marriage was more romantic, more just, or inherently more biblical. Ancient households could be patriarchal, economically coercive, and socially complex. But they did understand something that modern individualism often obscures: when two people married, an entire web of relationships was affected.

The basic social unit of ancient Israel was the בֵּית אָב — bêt ʾāb, the “father’s house.” This was not simply a father, mother, and children living beneath one roof. It could include several generations, married sons, unmarried daughters, servants, dependents, livestock, fields, tools, and inherited land. The household was simultaneously economic, agricultural, educational, religious, and social. Children learned covenant identity there. Land was passed through it. Elderly members were sustained by it. Agricultural labor was organized through it. Marriage therefore did not simply create a romantic partnership; it altered the structure of the household itself.¹

This helps explain why biblical marriage so often appears before witnesses. Ruth 4 is particularly revealing. Boaz goes to the city gate, where legal and economic matters were conducted, and gathers elders. The transaction regarding land, kinship responsibility, and Ruth cannot be separated into neat modern categories of “business” and “marriage.” They belong to the same household reality. When the elders say, “We are witnesses,” they are not merely confirming that Boaz and Ruth like one another. They are publicly recognizing the formation of a new household and its place within Israel’s ongoing story. Their blessing is equally significant: “May YHWH make the woman who is coming into your house like Rachel and Leah, who together built the house of Israel” (Ruth 4:11). Marriage is spoken of as the building of a house because in Israel a house was never merely a building. It was a lineage, an inheritance, a memory, and a future.²

One of the lesser-noticed features of the ancient marriage world is the degree to which economic exchange functioned as social obligation. Texts from Mesopotamia regularly describe marriage arrangements involving gifts, dowries, household property, and formal agreements. The biblical מֹהַר — mōhar, often translated “bride-price,” should not be imagined simply as purchasing a woman. In many ancient societies such payments functioned within a larger network of obligations between households. Exodus 22:16–17 assumes such a payment, while Genesis 24 depicts gifts exchanged around Rebekah’s marriage and Genesis 29 presents Jacob’s labor for Laban in a similar social world. Comparative law from Eshnunna, Nuzi, and the Laws of Hammurabi confirms that marriage belonged to the legal and economic structure of households, not simply to the emotions of a couple.³

Even the wedding celebration itself reflected this communal character. Judges 14 describes Samson’s wedding feast lasting seven days, and Genesis 29 assumes a week associated with the marriage celebration. Later Jewish sources preserve the idea of seven days of bridal rejoicing, although they should not simply be projected backward unchanged into early Israel. The important cultural point is that a wedding was not treated as a short ceremony inserted into an otherwise normal week. Marriage interrupted normal time. The community stopped, gathered, ate, exchanged gifts, witnessed, and celebrated. A household was being created, and this was considered worthy of prolonged communal attention.⁴

Deuteronomy 24:5 may be one of the clearest examples of how seriously Israel treated the establishment of that household. A newly married man was exempted from military service and certain public duties for one year so that he could “bring joy” to the wife he had married. The Hebrew verb comes from שׂמח — śmḥ, the language of rejoicing and gladness. The text is remarkable because it allows the demands of the larger society to yield temporarily to the needs of a new marriage. In an agrarian culture where labor mattered and military threats were real, this was not a sentimental provision. Israel was protecting the fragile first season of a newly formed household. The Torah appears to recognize that covenant requires cultivation before it can bear responsibility outwardly.

This becomes especially important when reading Song of Songs. The Song should not simply be called an Israelite wedding liturgy. Its exact setting remains debated, and its similarities with Egyptian and Mesopotamian love poetry suggest that it belongs within a wider ancient Near Eastern literary world. Egyptian love songs also speak of gardens, fruit, fragrance, brothers, mothers, longing, bodies, fields, and the intoxication of desire. Michael Fox, Othmar Keel, and others have shown that Song is best read with this comparative material in view.⁵ Yet that cultural background makes the Song more interesting, not less. Within a world where marriages could involve property, households, lineage, and negotiation, Song gives unusual space to the voices and desires of the lovers themselves.

The woman in Song is not a silent object transferred between households. She speaks repeatedly, initiates desire, searches for her beloved, praises his body, invites him into the countryside, and declares reciprocal belonging: דּוֹדִי לִי וַאֲנִי לוֹ — dôdî lî waʾănî lô, “My beloved is mine and I am his” (Song 2:16). Later the order reverses: “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine” (6:3), and again, “I am my beloved’s, and his desire is for me” (7:10). In an ancient environment where marriage carried strong household and economic dimensions, this repeated emphasis on mutual delight is significant. Song does not reject the social structure of marriage, but it refuses to let marriage be reduced to property, fertility, or family arrangement. Covenant belonging also includes desire, delight, and mutuality.⁶

The garden imagery of Song likewise belongs within the wider symbolic world of the ancient Near East. Gardens were associated with fertility, abundance, pleasure, royal space, and cultivated order. Yet for a biblical reader it is difficult not to hear echoes of Eden. Genesis begins with a man and woman together in a garden, naked and unashamed. Song repeatedly returns the lovers to orchards, vineyards, spices, fruit, springs, and enclosed gardens. The woman is called “a garden locked” and “a spring sealed” in Song 4:12, language of protected fertility and exclusive access. The imagery is erotic, but it is also ordered. Desire is not portrayed as inherently dangerous; rather, it is powerful enough that the Song repeatedly warns not to awaken love before its proper time. Biblical sexuality is therefore neither embarrassed nor unrestrained. It belongs within the ordered world of covenant.

The phrase “set me as a seal upon your heart” in Song 8:6 also carries more cultural weight than is often recognized. The חוֹתָם — ḥôtām, the seal, was an object of identity and authorization in the ancient world. Seals authenticated documents, marked property, and represented the person whose image or inscription they bore. To be placed “as a seal” upon the heart and arm is therefore more than romantic sentiment. It evokes identity, exclusivity, and permanent belonging. Love is described as something that marks the person. It becomes part of who one is.

The biblical prophets could later use marriage as a metaphor for covenant precisely because marriage already carried these ideas of belonging, faithfulness, exclusivity, and public obligation. Hosea portrays Israel’s idolatry as marital infidelity. Jeremiah remembers Israel’s “love as a bride” in the wilderness. Isaiah speaks of YHWH rejoicing over Zion as a bridegroom rejoices over a bride. Ezekiel 16 uses intentionally disturbing marriage imagery to describe covenant betrayal. These texts do not mean that every aspect of marriage directly corresponds to Israel’s covenant with YHWH, but they show that marriage had become one of Israel’s strongest social metaphors for allegiance. A covenant could be betrayed because a covenant created claims upon the participants.

It is also important to recognize that biblical narratives frequently show what happens when household formation becomes distorted. Jacob’s marriages generate rivalry. Elkanah’s household contains the pain produced by polygyny. David’s household becomes fractured by sexual exploitation, violence, and competing sons. Solomon’s marriages become extensions of political alliance and eventually religious compromise. Scripture describes these arrangements without presenting them as the creational ideal. The canonical movement repeatedly returns the reader to Genesis 2, where a man leaves father and mother, דבק — dābaq, “clings” to his wife, and the two become “one flesh.” The same verb dābaq later describes Israel clinging to YHWH. The linguistic connection does not make marriage and Sinai identical covenants, but it reveals a shared biblical vocabulary of durable attachment.

The overlooked social dimension may be the most useful one for the church today. Ancient marriage was surrounded by people because the household mattered to everyone. Families negotiated, elders witnessed, guests feasted, communities blessed, and society itself made space for the newly married. Our culture has often preserved the wedding while losing the communal responsibility that surrounded the marriage. We gather around a couple for one day, make promises about supporting them, and then largely leave them alone.

A discipleship culture shaped by the biblical world would take those promises more seriously. Older couples would not merely attend weddings; they would help younger couples learn how to live covenantally. Parents would bless without controlling. Friends would remain near after the celebration ends. Pastors and elders would know the households within their care well enough to recognize when strain is developing. Couples would understand that asking for help is not evidence that marriage has failed but part of belonging to a covenant community.

Perhaps Ruth 4 gives us the clearest image. Boaz and Ruth make the covenant, but the people around them say, “We are witnesses.” They bless the house before they know what that house will eventually produce. They cannot see Obed, Jesse, David, or the generations that will follow. They simply understand that this marriage matters beyond the two people standing before them.

That may be one of the most important things the ancient world can recover for us. Marriage is deeply personal, but it was never intended to be isolated. A household is formed through the promises of two people, but strong households are often sustained by a community that remembers those promises with them. The ancient village knew that a marriage could strengthen or wound an entire community. The church should probably know the same thing. Shepherding discipleship does not stand at a distance and applaud covenant; it walks close enough to help people keep it.

Selected References

1. Carol Meyers, “The Family in Early Israel,” in Families in Ancient Israel, ed. Leo G. Perdue et al. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1997)
2. Philip J. King and Lawrence E. Stager, Life in Biblical Israel (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2001); Victor H. Matthews, “Marriage and Family in the Ancient Near East,” in Marriage and Family in the Biblical World, ed. Ken M. Campbell (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2003).
3. Raymond Westbrook, Property and the Family in Biblical Law (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1991)
4. Daniel I. Block, “Marriage and Family in Ancient Israel,” in Marriage and Family in the Biblical World
5. Michael V. Fox, The Song of Songs and the Ancient Egyptian Love Songs (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985)
6. J. Cheryl Exum, Song of Songs: A Commentary (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2005)
7. Leo G. Perdue et al., Families in Ancient Israel (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1997).
8. Tikva Frymer-Kensky, Reading the Women of the Bible (New York: Schocken, 2002).
9. Ken M. Campbell, ed., Marriage and Family in the Biblical World (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2003).
10. David G. Hunter, ed., Marriage in the Early Church (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992).
11. Roland de Vaux, Ancient Israel: Its Life and Institutions (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997).
12. Karel van der Toorn, Family Religion in Babylonia, Syria and Israel (Leiden: Brill, 1996).
13. Victor H. Matthews and Don C. Benjamin, Social World of Ancient Israel 1250–587 BCE (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1993).
14. John H. Walton, Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2018).
15. Marten Stol, Women in the Ancient Near East (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016).

Job and the Problem of Suffering

There is an unusual moment near the beginning of Job in which his friends respond almost perfectly to his suffering. That observation is easily obscured because readers already know what follows. Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar eventually become associated with inadequate explanations of suffering and with attempts to defend a moral calculus that does not fit Job’s circumstances. Yet before they begin interpreting Job’s pain, they respond to it relationally. They hear what has happened, travel to him, grieve with him, sit beside him, and remain silent for seven days. Job 2:11–13 is therefore more than a narrative transition into the speeches that dominate the book. It presents an important biblical picture of what faithfulness can look like when suffering cannot be explained.

Job belongs within Israel’s wisdom tradition, but that tradition developed within the larger intellectual world of the ancient Near East. Mesopotamian and Egyptian wisdom texts regularly wrestled with questions of justice, divine activity, human limitation, and inexplicable suffering. Texts such as Ludlul bēl nēmeqi, sometimes called the “Babylonian Job,” and the Babylonian Theodicy demonstrate that the problem of righteous suffering was not unique to Israel. These works should not be treated as direct literary sources for Job without stronger evidence of dependence, but they provide important comparative material. They show that Job participates in a much wider ancient conversation concerning whether suffering can be reliably connected to guilt, whether prosperity necessarily indicates divine favor, and whether human beings can understand the moral structure of the world from their immediate circumstances.¹

Within that wider context, Job is distinctive because the reader is given information that the characters do not possess. The opening chapters explicitly reject the assumption that Job’s suffering is the consequence of hidden wickedness. This creates tension throughout the dialogues that follow. Job’s friends repeatedly appeal to recognizable wisdom principles, yet they apply them to a situation they do not actually understand. Their theology is not always false in its general form; rather, it becomes false in its application to Job. The book therefore presses beyond the abstract question of why good people suffer and confronts the deeper problem of whether human beings can confidently interpret divine justice from observable circumstances.²

Hearing and Coming

The scene begins with the words, וַיִּשְׁמְעוּ שְׁלֹשֶׁת רֵעֵי אִיּוֹב, wayyišmeʿû šĕlōšet rēʿê ʾiyyôb, “when Job’s three friends heard.” The use of שׁמע (šāmaʿ) is straightforward here, yet within the Hebrew Bible hearing frequently carries the expectation of response. Job’s suffering has become known beyond his household, and once his friends hear of it, they act. In an ancient social world where identity was embedded within family, kinship, village, and community, suffering was rarely conceived as an entirely private affair. The pain of one member created obligations for others.

The narrator explains that the friends arranged to come לָנוּד־לוֹ וּלְנַחֲמוֹ, lānûd-lô ûlĕnaḥămô, “to sympathize with him and comfort him.” The first verb, נוד (nûd), can carry the sense of showing sympathy, lamenting with another, or expressing grief toward someone in distress. The second, נחם (nāḥam) in the Piel, refers to comforting or consoling. Their stated purpose is therefore not investigation but companionship. Before any theological explanation is offered, their intention is to share Job’s grief and bring comfort through presence.

This beginning is important because it establishes a contrast with what follows later in the book. The friends are initially responsive to Job as a person rather than treating his suffering as a theological problem to be solved. Their first instinct is not to determine why this happened but to move toward him. Francis Andersen was right to resist reducing Job to a philosophical essay on suffering; the theology of the book emerges through encounter, lament, accusation, silence, and speech.³ The narrative is concerned not merely with ideas about suffering but with what happens when those ideas are brought into the presence of an actual sufferer.

The Embodied Language of Mourning

When Job’s friends arrive, they initially do not recognize him: וְלֹא הִכִּירֻהוּ, wĕlōʾ hikkîruhû. His suffering has altered him so profoundly that the familiar has become almost unrecognizable. Their response is immediate and embodied. They lift their voices and weep, tear their garments, and throw dust upon their heads toward heaven. These actions belonged to a recognizable vocabulary of mourning in the ancient world.

The expression “lift the voice and weep” appears elsewhere in biblical narratives where grief exceeds ordinary speech. Mourning was not expected to remain silent or emotionally restrained. Likewise, tearing one’s garments appears repeatedly in contexts of death, catastrophe, and devastating news. Jacob tears his clothing when he believes Joseph has died; Joshua and the elders do so after Israel’s defeat at Ai; David and his men tear their garments upon hearing of the deaths of Saul and Jonathan. The outward tearing gives physical expression to an inward rupture. Something in the social and relational world has been torn, and the body participates in acknowledging that reality.

The throwing of עָפָר (ʿāpār), “dust,” upon the head carries similar significance. Dust is closely associated in the Hebrew Bible with creatureliness, mortality, humiliation, and death. Humanity is formed from the dust in Genesis 2:7 and returns to dust in Genesis 3:19. In mourning contexts, placing dust upon the body symbolically lowers the mourner toward the earth and acknowledges the nearness of death. Comparable mourning practices are attested throughout the ancient Near East, where grief was expressed through altered clothing, ashes or dust, fasting, lament, bodily posture, and public acts of mourning.⁴

These practices expose a significant cultural difference between the world of Job and much of contemporary Western Christianity. Modern grief is often privatized. People are expected to “process” loss internally and eventually re-enter normal life. Ancient mourning customs made grief visible because loss had actually disrupted the social world. The mourner did not pretend that normal life remained intact. The friends’ torn garments and dust-covered bodies communicate that Job’s catastrophe has affected more than Job alone. They identify themselves with his sorrow.

Sitting with Job

The most striking action occurs in verse 13: וַיֵּשְׁבוּ אִתּוֹ לָאָרֶץ, wayyēšĕbû ʾittô lāʾāreṣ, “and they sat with him on the ground.” The phrase אִתּוֹ, “with him,” carries much of the theological force of the scene. Job is sitting in ashes, and his friends do not attempt to pull him immediately out of that place. They enter it with him.

This spatial movement matters. Ancient mourning was not simply an expression of sympathy from a distance; it involved identification. By sitting on the ground, Job’s friends assume the posture of mourners themselves. Their bodies communicate solidarity before their mouths offer interpretation. There is an important theological pattern here that appears elsewhere in Scripture. In Exodus, God’s response to Israel’s suffering is described through a sequence of hearing, remembering, seeing, knowing, and coming down. Divine compassion is not presented as remote awareness but as movement toward the afflicted. The biblical story repeatedly associates faithfulness with nearness.

This becomes particularly important for Christian theology because the same movement reaches its fullest expression in the incarnation. The gospel does not present God merely as one who explains human suffering from a distance. It announces that God has entered the human condition. The Word becomes flesh and dwells among us. Theologically, Job’s friends cannot be identified directly with the incarnation, but their movement toward Job reflects a wider biblical pattern in which genuine compassion closes distance rather than preserving it.

Seven Days of Silence

The narrator then tells us that the friends sat with Job שִׁבְעַת יָמִים וְשִׁבְעַת לֵילוֹת, “seven days and seven nights.” Seven-day periods of mourning appear elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible. Joseph observes seven days of mourning for Jacob in Genesis 50:10, and the people of Jabesh-gilead fast for seven days after the deaths of Saul and his sons in 1 Samuel 31:13. Ezekiel 3:15 also describes the prophet sitting overwhelmed among the exiles for seven days. Although the contexts differ, the recurring seven-day period reflects a recognizable span of complete or formalized mourning.

The significance is not simply numerical. The friends remain long enough for their presence to become costly. They do not make a brief appearance and then return immediately to ordinary life. Their grief is sustained because Job’s grief is sustained. In this respect, the passage exposes something that remains pastorally relevant. Communities often respond well to immediate crisis. People visit hospitals, bring food, attend funerals, and send messages. The more difficult task is remaining present after the visible crisis has passed and everyone else’s routines have resumed. Job 2 portrays compassion as something with duration.

The final clause is equally important: וְאֵין־דֹּבֵר אֵלָיו דָּבָר כִּי רָאוּ כִּי־גָדַל הַכְּאֵב מְאֹד, “and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his pain was very great.” Their silence is prompted by what they see. The magnitude of Job’s suffering places a restraint upon speech. There are moments in which words are inadequate, and the narrator does not portray that inadequacy as failure.

Indeed, one of the great ironies of the book is that the friends are arguably at their most faithful before they begin speaking. Once Job breaks the silence in chapter 3, the dialogues begin, and the friends increasingly attempt to fit his suffering within familiar theological categories. Their concern for divine justice gradually becomes an insistence that Job’s experience must correspond to their understanding of how divine justice operates. The result is that they move from sharing Job’s suffering to explaining it.

The Failure of Explanation

The theological mistake of Job’s friends is more subtle than merely saying “bad things.” Much of what they say resembles ideas found elsewhere in biblical wisdom literature. Scripture does affirm that choices have consequences, that righteousness matters, and that God is just. The problem arises when those truths are converted into a closed system capable of explaining every instance of suffering. The friends assume that if God is just and Job is suffering, some hidden guilt must account for his condition.

The reader already knows this conclusion is false.

This is one of Job’s most important contributions to biblical theology. Wisdom is not the possession of enough correct principles to make every circumstance transparent. John Walton has emphasized that Job challenges mechanical versions of the retribution principle and redirects the reader toward trust in divine wisdom rather than confidence in human ability to explain providence.⁵ Bartholomew and O’Dowd similarly identify the limits of human knowledge as central to Job’s contribution to the wisdom tradition.⁶

The pastoral implication follows naturally. A theological statement may be true in abstraction and still be misused in a particular circumstance. Truth requires wisdom in its application. The question is therefore not only whether a sentence is doctrinally defensible but whether speaking it is appropriate to the person and moment before us. Job’s friends eventually illustrate how easily theology can become harmful when it is used to manage another person’s pain rather than accompany that person through it.

Their original silence should therefore not be understood as the absence of ministry. It is part of their ministry. They have seen that Job’s suffering is “very great,” and rather than immediately attempting to interpret it, they remain with him.

Lament and Faith

One reason contemporary Christians often struggle with this kind of presence is that grief can be mistaken for a lack of faith. The biblical witness does not support that conclusion. Job laments openly. Jeremiah weeps. Lamentations gives sustained voice to the trauma of Jerusalem’s destruction. The Psalms repeatedly ask why God seems absent, how long suffering will continue, and why enemies appear to prosper. Biblical faith is capable of carrying protest, confusion, sorrow, and unanswered questions.

Lament does not necessarily indicate the collapse of faith. Often it reveals the persistence of relationship. The sufferer who asks God, “Where are you?” is still addressing God. The complaint assumes that divine presence matters and that God is expected to hear. Lindsay Wilson’s treatment of Job is particularly helpful here because he recognizes Job’s questioning not as simple unbelief but as part of the struggle of genuine faith under extreme pressure.⁷ The lament tradition more broadly confirms that grief can remain an act of faith even when it lacks immediate resolution.

This is also why the New Testament command to “weep with those who weep” in Romans 12:15 should be taken seriously. Paul does not instruct believers to suppress another person’s mourning with optimism. Shared grief itself becomes an expression of Christian fellowship. Similarly, Galatians 6:2 calls believers to “bear one another’s burdens,” language that assumes some burdens are too heavy to be carried alone. Christian community is therefore not merely a gathering of people who affirm common doctrines; it is a people willing to become involved in one another’s suffering.

The Ministry of Presence

Job 2:11–13 offers a remarkably simple theology of presence. The friends hear, come, lament, sit, and remain. None of these actions solves Job’s suffering. His children are still dead. His wealth is still gone. His body is still afflicted. The questions that dominate the remainder of the book remain unanswered. Yet for seven days Job is not alone.

That may be the point modern readers most need to recover. Ministry is often imagined primarily as something verbal. We teach, counsel, explain, encourage, and offer Scripture. All of these can be faithful acts. But Job reminds us that there are circumstances in which the most truthful form of ministry is presence itself. There are experiences so painful that attempting to improve the moment with words can diminish rather than honor what has happened.

This does not mean Christian hope is silent forever. Job itself does not end in silence. Scripture speaks meaningfully about suffering, resurrection, restoration, and the faithfulness of God. Yet timing matters. There is a difference between speaking hope and using hope to avoid grief. Jesus himself illustrates this distinction at the tomb of Lazarus. He knows resurrection is near and still weeps. The certainty of what God will ultimately do does not erase the reality of what death has presently done.

Conclusion

There are seasons when we find ourselves beside someone who is hurting and have no idea what to say. Job 2 suggests that this may not be the failure we imagine it to be. We do not always need to understand another person’s pain in order to love them faithfully. We do not need to explain every loss, defend God against every difficult question, or find language capable of making tragedy less tragic. Sometimes faithfulness means recognizing that another person’s pain is great and refusing to leave them alone in it.

There are also seasons when we are Job. We are the ones sitting in the dust, trying to reconcile what we believe about God with something in life that no longer makes sense. Those seasons require another kind of faithfulness: the willingness to allow others to sit with us. Many Christians are far more comfortable carrying another person’s burdens than allowing anyone else to carry theirs. We can speak beautifully about community while living remarkably isolated lives. Yet isolation makes us vulnerable precisely because the body of Christ cannot carry what we refuse to let the body see.

There is no failure of faith in saying that we are hurting. There is no contradiction between resurrection hope and mourning. Jesus stood before the tomb knowing that Lazarus would live again, and still he wept. Christian hope does not require us to pretend death, disappointment, betrayal, illness, or loss have not wounded us. It gives us permission to grieve without believing grief will have the final word.

Perhaps this is one of the more important ways a community becomes recognizably Christian. We learn how to remain near one another when there is nothing to fix. We become less anxious about silence. We learn to listen without preparing an answer. We continue showing up after everyone else has moved on. We make room for lament without treating it as spiritual failure. And when someone among us finds themselves sitting in the dust, they discover that they will not be sitting there alone.

The gospel itself gives us this pattern. God did not remain at a distance from the suffering of humanity. In Jesus, God came near. He entered the frailty of human existence, shared our grief, suffered violence, faced death, and carried human sorrow into himself. Immanuel is not merely the promise that God has an explanation. It is the promise that God is with us.

Perhaps faithfulness in suffering begins there. Not in having all the answers, but in learning how to be present.

Selected Sources

1. John H. Walton and Tremper Longman III, How to Read Job (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2015).
2. John H. Walton, Job, NIV Application Commentary (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2012).
3. Francis I. Andersen, Job: An Introduction and Commentary, Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic).
4. John H. Walton, Victor H. Matthews, and Mark W. Chavalas, The IVP Bible Background Commentary: Old Testament (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2000).
5. Craig G. Bartholomew and Ryan P. O’Dowd, Old Testament Wisdom Literature: A Theological Introduction (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2018).
6. Tremper Longman III and Peter Enns, eds., Dictionary of the Old Testament: Wisdom, Poetry & Writings (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2008).
7. Lindsay Wilson, Job (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015).
8. Michael C. Legaspi, Job, Commentaries for Christian Formation (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2026).
9. Derek Kidner, The Wisdom of Proverbs, Job and Ecclesiastes (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press).
10. David J. Atkinson, The Message of Job, Bible Speaks Today (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic).
11. John Goldingay, The Book of Lamentations, New International Commentary on the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2022).
12. Bruce K. Waltke, James M. Houston, and Erika Moore, The Psalms as Christian Lament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014).
13. Erhard S. Gerstenberger, Psalms, Part 2, and Lamentations, Forms of the Old Testament Literature XV (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001).
14. J. Gerald Janzen, At the Scent of Water: The Ground of Hope in the Book of Job (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans).
15. Katherine J. Dell, Eerdmans Commentary on the Bible: Job (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans).

I was deeply grateful to spend this morning at The Point in Seymour, Indiana. Matt did an incredible job preparing our hearts and minds for the morning, and Pastor Jon Gibson brought a timely and challenging message about something that sits near the center of genuine discipleship: God does not simply want to modify our behavior; he wants to transform the way we think.

Paul writes:

“You were taught… to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God.” (Eph 4:22–24)

There is something much deeper happening here than positive thinking or simply replacing bad thoughts with good ones. The Greek word Paul uses for “renewed,” ananeoō (ἀνανεόω), carries the sense of being made new or “divinely” renewed again. Even more striking is Paul’s phrase tō pneumati tou noos hymōn—“in the spirit of your mind.”¹ The transformation Christ brings reaches beneath outward behavior into the interior place from which our perceptions, desires, judgments, and actions emerge. Paul places this within the larger biblical movement of old humanity becoming new humanity. Ephesians 4 speaks of taking off the palaios anthrōpos, the “old person,” and putting on the kainos anthrōpos, the “new person.” This is almost clothing language: one identity is stripped away and another is put on. But Paul’s imagery reaches even deeper. The “new person” is created according to God (Eph 4:24). That language echoes Genesis. Humanity was created in the image and likeness of God; now, in Christ, humanity is being recreated toward what it was always intended to become. That makes transformation much more than “How can I become a better version of myself?”

The gospel asks a more radical question: What if Jesus intends to make me into someone new?

This is where Jon’s message connected beautifully with Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 2.

Paul contrasts the wisdom of the present age with the wisdom revealed through the Spirit. God’s wisdom cannot finally be reached merely through human intelligence, education, cultural assumptions, or inherited ways of seeing the world. The Spirit searches even “the depths of God” (1 Cor 2:10), and Paul concludes the chapter with an extraordinary declaration:

“But we have the mind of Christ.” (1 Cor 2:16)

The Greek is noun Christou—νοῦν Χριστοῦ.

The nous is more than the modern idea of the brain. It involves understanding, perception, judgment, disposition—the internal framework through which we interpret reality.² Paul is saying that through the Spirit we are learning to perceive reality through Christ. That is spiritual transformation.

The Hebrew Scriptures anticipate something similar. Biblical wisdom—ḥokmâ (חָכְמָה)—was never merely knowing information. Wisdom was knowing how to live faithfully within God’s world. “The fear of YHWH is the beginning of wisdom” (Prov 9:10). Wisdom begins when our perception of reality becomes reordered around God. Paul takes that ancient wisdom tradition and centers it upon Jesus. Christ becomes “the wisdom of God” (1 Cor 1:24). So encountering Christ necessarily challenges the ways we have learned to think without Christ. And perhaps that is where Jon’s message should stay with us beyond Sunday morning.

Before asking, “What do I need to do differently?”, perhaps we should ask: “What is keeping me from thinking like Jesus?”

Maybe it is fear.

Maybe pride.

Maybe resentment.

Maybe the need to control everything.

Maybe an old wound through which we interpret every new relationship.

Maybe success, money, sexuality, politics, reputation, addiction, insecurity, bitterness, or simply an identity we constructed long before we learned who we are in Christ.

Whatever it is, name it.

There is tremendous spiritual significance in identifying the thing that continues shaping our minds. We cannot easily surrender what we refuse to acknowledge.

Paul’s imagery in Ephesians is wonderfully practical: take it off.

Not because God is waiting for us to fix ourselves, but because Christ has already invited us into another way of being human.

Take off the old.

Be renewed in the mind.

Put on the new.

And increasingly discover what Paul could astonishingly say was already becoming a spiritual reality among God’s people:

“We have the mind of Christ.”

The invitation from this morning is therefore much larger than gaining a few new ideas. It is an invitation to encounter Jesus so completely that his Spirit begins reshaping the very way we see ourselves, other people, our circumstances, and ultimately God himself.

So perhaps the challenge for this week is simple:

What is one thing shaping your mind that needs to be surrendered to Christ?

Identify it. Name it. Bring it before Jesus. Give it up.

Then ask the Spirit to teach you to see that same place through the mind of Christ.

Because following Jesus isn’t merely about changing what we do.

It is allowing Christ to transform the place from which everything we do begins.

I’m thankful for Pastor Jon Gibson’s faithful challenge this morning and for the people at The Point who welcomed us so warmly. May we not simply hear the invitation to transformation, but encounter Christ deeply enough that our minds, desires, identities, and lives are continually made new in him.

Notes

1. Frederick William Danker, ed., A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), s.v. “ἀνανεόω”; cf. Eph 4:23.
2. Danker, Greek-English Lexicon, s.v. “νοῦς.” See also Rom 12:2, where Paul similarly connects transformation (metamorphoō) with the “renewal of the mind.”
3. On biblical wisdom as embodied skill and faithful orientation rather than merely intellectual knowledge, see Michael V. Fox, Proverbs 1–9: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, AB 18A (New York: Doubleday, 2000), 31–43.
4. See also Rom 12:1–2; Col 3:9–10; Phil 2:5; 1 Cor 1:18–31; 2 Cor 5:17.

A Review of Adriel Sanchez, Why We Worship: Experiencing Heaven on Earth at Church (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2026).

This image of ascent gives the book its structure and much of its theological coherence. The opening section considers the church as a people moving toward the mountain of God. The central chapters explore what happens at the summit through the call to worship, confession, song, preaching, Communion, and benediction. The final movement brings the congregation back into ordinary life and vocation. In this sense, Why We Worship is not so much a manual for constructing worship services as it is an accessible biblical theology of Christian liturgy. Sanchez wants the reader to recover a conviction that has often become thin within modern evangelicalism: Sunday worship is not merely a gathering Christians arrange for themselves, but a response to the initiative of God, who calls his people into his presence.

That point is worth emphasizing because it places the book against several habits that have become almost instinctive within contemporary church culture. Worship can easily become something evaluated primarily through the categories of experience, preference, production, or effectiveness. The question becomes whether people were engaged, whether the music connected emotionally, whether the sermon held attention, or whether visitors felt comfortable. Sanchez does not dismiss those pastoral concerns, but he relocates them within a much larger theological reality. Christian worship begins before human response. God summons; the people answer. God speaks; the congregation listens. God gives; the church receives. Worship, then, is fundamentally responsive rather than self-generated.

Sacred Space and the Ascent of Worship

One of the more compelling elements of the book is its use of temple and mountain imagery. The tabernacle and Jerusalem temple are not treated simply as ancient religious structures but as earthly representations of a heavenly reality, sacred spaces in which creation, divine presence, priesthood, sacrifice, and human vocation converge. Sanchez’s approach sits comfortably within a substantial stream of contemporary biblical theology represented by G. K. Beale, L. Michael Morales, T. Desmond Alexander, and others who have drawn attention to the Eden-tabernacle-temple trajectory that runs across the canon.¹

The importance of that trajectory becomes clearer when Eden, Sinai, Zion, Hebrews, and Revelation are allowed to speak together. Eden itself carries features later associated with sanctuary and sacred mountain imagery. Rivers flow outward from the divine dwelling place, humanity serves within the garden, and Ezekiel 28 can describe Eden in relation to the “holy mountain of God.” Sinai becomes another site of divine encounter, a place where God descends and Israel is summoned upward, although access is carefully guarded. Zion and the temple continue this theology of divine dwelling and ordered approach. Hebrews 12 then announces that believers have come not merely to an earthly mountain but “to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem” (Heb 12:22).

There is also a wider ancient Near Eastern texture beneath these images that helps illuminate their significance. Temples throughout the ancient world commonly represented cosmic centers, places where divine and earthly realms were understood to intersect. Mesopotamian temple complexes and ziggurats participated in a broader cultural imagination in which height, sacred geography, divine presence, and royal authority were interconnected. Israel participates in some of this shared symbolic world while simultaneously resisting its theology. Yahweh is not a deity who can be maintained, manipulated, or localized through human ritual. Solomon’s declaration that even “heaven and the highest heaven” cannot contain God (1 Kgs 8:27) becomes especially significant when read against cultures in which temples could function as houses constructed for localized divine presence.

This background adds depth to Sanchez’s argument because biblical worship does not make God manageable. Quite the opposite occurs. Sacred space confronts the worshiper with the holiness, otherness, and gracious nearness of a God who chooses to dwell among his people while remaining utterly beyond human control. That biblical tension offers an important corrective to forms of worship that unintentionally reduce God to an atmosphere that can be generated through music, lighting, emotional intensity, or carefully managed liturgical movement.

The language of ascent, however, should remain in conversation with an equally prominent biblical movement: God comes down. Yahweh descends upon Sinai (Exod 19:18–20); divine glory fills the tabernacle (Exod 40:34–38) and later the temple (1 Kgs 8:10–11); the incarnation itself is the supreme movement of divine presence toward humanity; and Revelation reaches its culmination not with humanity permanently escaping upward but with the New Jerusalem descending from heaven to earth (Rev 21:2). The biblical story therefore includes both ascent and descent. God comes near so that humanity may approach. Heaven and earth are not finally separated but reconciled within the renewed creation.

This does not weaken the controlling metaphor of Why We Worship. It gives it greater canonical texture. Christian worship participates in an extraordinary meeting of movements: God graciously draws near, and humanity, in Christ, is brought into divine fellowship.

Leviticus, Sacrifice, and the Logic of Approach

The book’s interaction with Leviticus is particularly fruitful. Sanchez draws attention to the Hebrew title of the book, wayyiqrāʾ, “and he called,” and uses that opening word to reinforce the claim that worship begins with divine initiative. Israel does not simply devise a way into God’s presence. God calls, orders, provides, and makes approach possible.

Leviticus is therefore about much more than a collection of sacrifices. At its theological center stands a difficult question: how can a holy God dwell among a people who are vulnerable to impurity, sin, and death? The sacrificial system belongs within that larger drama of divine presence. Approach requires purification, atonement, mediation, holiness, and ultimately a reordered communal life. Worship is not merely ritual performance but participation in a world in which God is present at the center.

Sanchez makes imaginative use of the burnt offering, Hebrew ʿōlâ, connecting the terminology with the concept of “going up.” Morales has developed this motif substantially in his own work on Leviticus, particularly in relation to humanity’s return to divine presence.² The connection works well within Sanchez’s broader mountain theology, especially when sacrificial smoke, priestly movement, sacred geography, and the ascent toward God are considered together.

At times, however, the lexical observation risks carrying slightly more theological freight than a word by itself can support. The verb ʿlh certainly conveys ascent, and the offering “goes up” before God, but the fuller theology of sacrificial ascent comes from the ritual, spatial, and canonical context rather than from etymology alone. This is not a serious problem in the book so much as an example of a tendency that appears occasionally throughout it: the larger theological pattern is often persuasive even when the exegetical bridge could have been developed with a little more precision.

Still, the larger insight remains valuable. The Levitical world reminds modern readers that access to God is never casual in the biblical imagination. Grace makes approach possible, but grace does not make divine holiness trivial.

Revelation and the Shape of Heavenly Worship

Another creative feature of the book is its treatment of Revelation as something resembling a worship order. Revelation 1 situates John’s vision on the Lord’s Day, chapters 2–3 call the churches toward repentance and faithfulness, chapters 4–5 open heaven and reveal the throne room, the scroll is opened, songs and proclamations erupt around the Lamb, and the Apocalypse eventually moves toward the marriage supper and final blessing.

There is real theological value in reading Revelation this way. The book is saturated with worship. Incense, prayers, hymns, elders, altars, robes, temple imagery, heavenly creatures, repeated acclamations, and liturgical responses fill John’s vision. The suffering churches of Asia Minor are invited to see their earthly circumstances from the perspective of the heavenly throne. Rome may appear sovereign, but Revelation repeatedly relocates sovereignty around God and the Lamb.

It is probably best, however, to understand the “worship bulletin” idea as a theological analogy rather than as the literary architecture of Revelation itself. John was not encoding a first-century order of service into the Apocalypse, and the marriage supper in Revelation 19 is first an eschatological image before it becomes a source of Eucharistic resonance. The distinction is important because typological connections are often most persuasive when they are allowed to remain typological rather than being pressed into claims about original literary structure.

Even so, Sanchez succeeds in recovering something that many modern readings of Revelation miss. The Apocalypse is not primarily a chart for decoding the end of history. It is a book that teaches churches how to see reality and whom to worship while empires claim their allegiance.

Confession and the Formation of Christian Desire

The chapter on confession is among the more pastorally useful portions of the book because it recognizes that liturgy does more than transfer theological information. Repeated practices shape the imagination of a congregation. They teach Christians what to notice, what to love, what to lament, and how to understand themselves before God.

This places Why We Worship in productive conversation with Simon Chan and James K. A. Smith, although Sanchez approaches the matter more pastorally than philosophically.³ A congregation that regularly confesses sin develops a theological vocabulary for repentance, mercy, forgiveness, and reconciliation. A church that never confesses corporately may eventually find that these categories become increasingly difficult to articulate because its liturgical habits have ceased to rehearse them.

Isaiah 6 provides a particularly rich biblical pattern. Isaiah encounters divine holiness, recognizes his own uncleanness, receives cleansing, and is then commissioned. The movement is neither self-loathing nor therapeutic affirmation. It is revelation, confession, grace, and vocation. Matthew 5:23–24 similarly refuses to separate worship from reconciliation, while Paul’s instruction surrounding the Lord’s Table in 1 Corinthians 11 demonstrates that communal sin cannot simply be ignored in sacred practice.

At the same time, a helpful distinction remains between biblical theology and liturgical prescription. The New Testament strongly supports confession as part of Christian life and communal worship, but it does not clearly prescribe an identical corporate confession at the same point in every Lord’s Day gathering. Historic liturgies have often embodied sound biblical theology through such practices, yet the theological wisdom of a practice should not always be described as though it were a direct apostolic rubric.

That nuance matters particularly for churches emerging from low-church evangelical traditions, where recovering historic practices can occasionally turn into an overcorrection in which later liturgical patterns are retroactively read into the New Testament.

Singing, Allegiance, and the Divine Warrior

Sanchez’s discussion of congregational singing moves in an interesting direction by drawing upon biblical warfare imagery. Exodus 15 is simultaneously a song of worship and a victory hymn. The Psalms frequently portray Yahweh as king and divine warrior. In 2 Chronicles 20, singers move before Jehoshaphat’s army, while Revelation repeatedly places songs of praise alongside the conquest of the Lamb.

This material has an important ANE setting as well. Divine-warrior language, royal hymns, temple praise, and victory songs were common throughout Israel’s cultural environment. Israel does not invent those categories in isolation, but the biblical writers radically redirect them. Yahweh’s kingship relativizes every earthly empire, and the New Testament ultimately reveals divine victory in the crucified and risen Messiah.

That Christological development is essential. Without it, language about “worship as warfare” can easily drift toward contemporary ideas in which music itself is treated almost mechanically, as if sufficient intensity, volume, or spiritual enthusiasm could displace demonic forces from geographic territory. The New Testament offers a more demanding picture. Revelation’s conquering Lion appears as a slaughtered Lamb. Christian victory is therefore cruciform. Praise becomes an act of spiritual resistance because it publicly names the true king, refuses rival allegiances, and forms a people around the Lamb rather than around the liturgies of empire.

Seen this way, congregational song is far more significant than emotional preparation for preaching. Songs teach theology, preserve memory, confess allegiance, and form the identity of the gathered people.

Preaching and the Voice of God

The chapter on preaching reflects Sanchez’s Reformed commitments and provides another needed corrective to contemporary worship culture. The sermon is not an informational interruption between more experiential elements of the service, nor is it simply a motivational talk shaped loosely around biblical themes. Preaching belongs within worship because the congregation gathers to hear the Word of God proclaimed.

His resistance to Christless moralism is particularly welcome. Scripture cannot finally be reduced to a series of character lessons in which David teaches courage, Daniel teaches conviction, and Joseph teaches perseverance. Those themes may be present, but the canonical witness continually draws the reader into the larger redemptive drama that culminates in Christ.

There is, nevertheless, an important theological safeguard when speaking about hearing “God’s voice” through preaching. The authority of a sermon is derivative rather than inherent. A preacher does not possess canonical authority by virtue of occupying a pulpit. The church hears the Word of God through preaching insofar as the preacher faithfully bears witness to the scriptural text. Acts 17 provides a healthy model because proclamation can be received eagerly while still being examined in light of Scripture.

This is not a diminishment of preaching but one of its most important protections. The authority of Christian proclamation should remain tethered to the text rather than to personality, office, charisma, or institutional power.

Communion, Participation, and the Coming Feast

The treatment of Communion may be the strongest theological contribution of the book, particularly for readers formed within low-church evangelical settings. Sanchez resists the thin memorialism that has sometimes reduced the Lord’s Supper to little more than a symbolic reminder of an absent Christ. Instead, he places Communion within the larger biblical worlds of covenant, sacrifice, remembrance, participation, eschatology, and the work of the Spirit.

His discussion of anamnēsis is especially helpful. “Do this in remembrance of me” need not be heard as though Jesus were simply asking disciples to engage in private mental recollection. Biblical memorial language carries covenantal depth. Memorials bring God’s saving acts into the worshiping present and place the community again within the story those acts created.

First Corinthians 10:16 provides an even stronger anchor. Paul describes the cup and bread as koinōnia in the blood and body of Christ. Christian traditions have disagreed sharply over how Christ is present at the Table, but Paul’s language is difficult to collapse into mere mental recollection. Something participatory is happening.

At this point the book enters fruitful conversation not only with Reformed sacramental theology but also with voices such as Alexander Schmemann and the broader Christian tradition, where Eucharistic worship has consistently been understood as participation in Christ and anticipation of the age to come.⁴ The recovery of the epiclesis is particularly noteworthy because it places sacramental life within dependence upon the Holy Spirit rather than within any mechanical understanding of the elements themselves.

The connection between Isaiah 25, eschatological banquet imagery, victory over the enemies of God, and the marriage supper of the Lamb also gives Communion an important forward-looking dimension. The Table remembers the cross, but it does not only look backward. It stands between resurrection and consummation. The church eats and drinks while announcing that the crucified Christ has been vindicated and that the final feast is still coming.

John 6 deserves some caution here. The language of eating Christ’s flesh and drinking his blood became deeply Eucharistic within the early Christian tradition, but exegetes continue to debate how directly the discourse should be identified with the Lord’s Supper. It may be better to allow the Johannine language to retain both its emphasis on receiving Christ by faith and its unmistakable sacramental resonance rather than forcing the passage into a single later theological category.

Even with that qualification, this chapter is one of the book’s most important correctives. It invites evangelical readers to recover a Table that is simultaneously remembrance, participation, proclamation, thanksgiving, communion, and anticipation.

Descending the Mountain: Worship and Vocation

The ascent motif becomes most useful when Sanchez refuses to leave the church on the mountain. Worship does not terminate in an encounter, however profound. The congregation descends into neighborhoods, workplaces, families, relationships, and ordinary responsibilities as a people whose lives have been reordered around God.

First Peter 2 provides much of the biblical framework for this movement. The church is a “holy priesthood” and a “royal priesthood,” language that joins worship and witness rather than separating them. Priestly identity involves sacrifice, holiness, mediation, proclamation, mercy, prayer, and service.

Isaiah 6 again offers a beautiful pattern: the prophet sees, confesses, is cleansed, and is sent. The movement toward God eventually becomes movement toward the world. Christian worship that never produces compassion, reconciliation, justice, patience, hospitality, witness, and sacrificial love has failed to carry the worshiper very far into the character of the God being worshiped.

This becomes especially important when worship is considered alongside political power. The church’s public vocation is not strengthened when Christian identity is reduced to the acquisition of cultural control. Revelation offers another way. The Lamb conquers through faithful witness, suffering love, and resurrection. The priestly people of God are sent into the nations not merely to secure influence but to embody the life of another kingdom.

In Conversation with Contemporary Worship Scholarship

Within the wider landscape of worship studies, Why We Worship occupies a useful middle ground. Simon Chan’s Liturgical Theology offers a more developed ecclesiology of worship. James K. A. Smith explores the formative power of liturgical practice through the language of desire, habit, and cultural formation. Lester Ruth and Lim Swee Hong provide the historical genealogy necessary for understanding how the term “worship” came to be associated so strongly with congregational music in many Protestant contexts.⁵ Beale and Morales provide much of the temple and sacred-space theology that supports Sanchez’s ascent imagery, while Schmemann offers a broader sacramental vision in which worship participates in the life of the coming kingdom.

Sanchez does not attempt to match the technical depth of all these works, nor does he need to. The value of Why We Worship lies partly in its ability to gather conversations that often remain separated—biblical theology, sacramental theology, liturgical history, ecclesiology, mission, and pastoral practice—and place them within reach of the ordinary church reader.

Those already familiar with this scholarship will occasionally wish for slower exegetical development at several points. The mountain imagery could have benefited from a fuller ANE context, the Revelation material needs careful qualification, and some of the sacramental connections might have been strengthened by sustained engagement with competing interpretations. Even so, the overall theological architecture is compelling and, importantly, pastorally usable.

Conclusion: Worship That Reorders a Life

Perhaps the most important contribution of Why We Worship is its resistance to a church culture in which worship has become increasingly easy to evaluate according to the categories of consumption. We ask whether the music was good, whether the sermon was interesting, whether the service flowed, whether we felt something, whether we were comfortable, or whether the whole experience was worth coming back for next week. None of those questions are entirely meaningless, but they become dangerously small if they are allowed to define Christian worship.

The biblical vision is far stranger and far more beautiful. The church gathers because God has called a people to himself. Christians come carrying gratitude and sin, faith and doubt, joy and grief, maturity and immaturity. They confess, listen, sing, eat, drink, pray, receive blessing, and then return to lives that may look externally much the same as they did before they arrived. Yet worship assumes that something has happened in the meantime. The imagination has been re-centered. Allegiance has been rehearsed. Grace has been announced. The story of the world has been told again, and Christ has been named as Lord within it.

This is where the mountain image becomes especially useful pastorally. The goal is not to spend the entire Christian life attempting to preserve a mountaintop experience. Scripture rarely allows its people to remain on the mountain. Moses descends. Elijah returns. The disciples come down after the transfiguration. Isaiah is sent. Even the glory of the resurrection drives the disciples toward Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and the nations.

The test of worship, therefore, is not whether we managed to feel close to God for ninety minutes. It is whether the encounter with God begins to shape the way we descend.

Do we become easier to reconcile with? Are we slower to anger? Do we become more attentive to the lonely person standing at the edge of the room? Does the Table teach us to stop dividing people whom Christ has welcomed? Does confession make us less defensive when someone exposes our failures? Does hearing the Word make us more willing to obey when obedience is costly? Does singing about the Lamb slowly detach our hearts from the smaller kingdoms competing for our allegiance?

These are not secondary consequences of worship. They are among its fruits.

Romans 12 makes the connection explicit when Paul moves from the mercies of God into the call to present our bodies as a living sacrifice. The sanctuary expands into ordinary life. Worship continues in the marriage, at the workplace, around the dinner table, in forgiveness, generosity, sexual faithfulness, care for the poor, hospitality toward strangers, and courageous witness to Jesus. The gathered liturgy trains the church for this scattered liturgy of everyday faithfulness.

That may ultimately be where Sanchez’s book is most helpful. Why We Worship does not merely ask churches to reconsider what they do on Sunday mornings. It invites them to reconsider what sort of people Sunday worship is forming.

Pastors and worship leaders should probably ask more than whether the congregation sang loudly or whether the service landed emotionally. We might ask whether our people are learning the story of Scripture, whether they know how to confess without despair, whether they know how to receive grace without entitlement, whether the Table is teaching reconciliation, whether preaching is forming allegiance to Christ, and whether benediction is actually sending them into the world as people of peace.

Perhaps that is what it finally means to ascend Zion. We do not climb toward God in order to escape the world. We are drawn into the presence of God so that we may return to the world carrying something of his character with us.

And if our worship never makes us more truthful, more merciful, more faithful, more forgiving, more hospitable, more courageous, and more deeply committed to the way of Jesus, we may need to ask whether we have actually understood what worship is for.

Sanchez has written a helpful invitation to ask that question again.

Notes

1. See G. K. Beale, The Temple and the Church’s Mission: A Biblical Theology of the Dwelling Place of God, New Studies in Biblical Theology 17 (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004); T. Desmond Alexander, From Eden to the New Jerusalem: An Introduction to Biblical Theology (Grand Rapids: Kregel Academic, 2008); and L. Michael Morales, Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord? A Biblical Theology of the Book of Leviticus, New Studies in Biblical Theology 37 (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2015).
2. Morales, Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord? Sanchez’s use of sacrificial ascent works particularly well alongside Morales’s larger reading of Leviticus as a movement toward restored access to divine presence.
3. Simon Chan, Liturgical Theology: The Church as Worshiping Community (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2006); James K. A. Smith, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2016).
4. Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1973); Michael Horton, People and Place: A Covenant Ecclesiology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2008).
5. Lester Ruth and Lim Swee Hong, A History of Contemporary Praise & Worship: Understanding the Ideas That Reshaped the Protestant Church (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021).
6. For the broader cosmic-temple trajectory from Eden through new creation, see Beale, Temple and the Church’s Mission.
7. Hebrews 12:22–24 is particularly important for Sanchez’s argument because the author does not merely describe Zion as a future destination. The perfect verb proselēlythate portrays believers as those who have already “come” to Mount Zion, the heavenly Jerusalem, and the festal assembly.
8. Chan’s account of ecclesial formation through worship provides an important conversation partner here because it resists treating liturgy as a secondary expression of an already fully constituted church. See Chan, Liturgical Theology, 41–66.
9. Paul’s use of koinōnia in 1 Cor 10:16 remains one of the stronger New Testament challenges to purely memorialist interpretations of the Lord’s Supper. The text does not resolve every later sacramental debate, but it clearly presents the meal in participatory terms.
10. For Revelation’s throne-room worship and temple imagery, see G. K. Beale, The Book of Revelation: A Commentary on the Greek Text, New International Greek Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999). Sanchez’s use of Revelation as a liturgical pattern is most convincing when treated as theological correspondence rather than as a claim about the formal literary structure of the Apocalypse.
11. Sanchez’s discussion of priesthood may also be placed alongside Hank Voss, The Priesthood of All Believers and the Missio Dei: A Canonical, Catholic, and Contextual Perspective, Princeton Theological Monograph Series 223 (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2016).
12. Romans 12:1 is especially important for bringing the book’s final movement into focus. Paul’s description of embodied Christian existence as logikē latreia prevents Christian theology from placing an artificial boundary between liturgical worship and the life that follows it.

Emma M. Austin. Landscapes of Memory: The Old Testament’s Sensory Engagement with Nature. Foreword by Paul H. Wright. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2026. 176 pp.

Austin develops this idea through the category of mnemonature, by which she describes the relationship between nature, sensory experience, and memory.¹ The terminology is her own, but the underlying argument stands within a substantial scholarly conversation. Walter Brueggemann famously demonstrated that “land” within Israel’s Scriptures is never simply territory but becomes gift, promise, inheritance, loss, exile, and hope. Ellen Davis has shown how profoundly agriculture and the rhythms of land shape Israel’s theological imagination, while Yael Avrahami’s study of sensory perception has helped recover the embodied character of biblical thought.² Austin’s work intersects with these conversations while pressing in a somewhat different direction. Her concern is not simply that nature means something, but that repeated encounters with the natural world may have helped biblical communities remember what God had said and done. A tree, a dry field, the stars, seasonal rain, a particular road, or even an animal could participate in a network of associations that extended well beyond a single literary image.

One of the strengths of Austin’s approach is that it pays attention to matters the biblical writers frequently leave unexplained because their audiences did not need them explained. Judges 6:11 offers a good example. Gideon is found threshing wheat in a winepress, a scene that can pass quickly in modern reading unless one understands that threshing normally required an exposed location where the wind could separate grain from chaff. A winepress was hardly the proper place for the task. Gideon’s behavior therefore communicates before he speaks. The Midianite threat has become so pervasive that ordinary agricultural life has been distorted, and Gideon is attempting to perform a public, wind-dependent activity in a concealed place. Cultural-background scholarship has long helped readers recover such information, but Austin’s method asks a further question: what would an audience accustomed to threshing floors and winepresses have sensed immediately upon hearing this description? Historical information explains the practice; sensory reconstruction helps recover the incongruity.

This distinction between knowing about the ancient world and imaginatively entering its physical texture becomes especially helpful in Austin’s treatment of Genesis. Her discussions of the rainbow in Genesis 9 and the stars in Genesis 15 provide some of the clearest examples of her central thesis. The rainbow is explicitly connected with covenant remembrance, while the stars become connected to God’s promise concerning Abram’s descendants. Readers naturally recognize the metaphor of innumerability in Genesis 15, but Austin encourages us to remain in the scene for a moment longer. Abram has already received the promise, yet the fulfillment appears increasingly improbable. Sarah remains barren, time is passing, and the promise is beginning to stand in tension with visible reality. God takes Abram outside and directs his attention toward the heavens. The stars are therefore not only an illustration of future descendants; they become attached to the promise itself. Abram will see them again. The natural world can continue to recall what was spoken after the divine speech has ended.³

That reading gains additional texture within the wider ancient Near Eastern environment. Celestial bodies throughout Mesopotamian cultures were associated with divine order, calendrical observation, omens, and the interpretation of human destiny. Austin is careful not to flatten Genesis into comparative mythology, but the broader background remains significant. In Genesis, the stars are not deities or autonomous powers determining Abram’s fate. They belong to the Creator who makes the promise. The heavens that surrounding cultures could read as sources of divine knowledge are relocated within Israel’s theology as creatures under YHWH’s authority and, in this particular narrative, as witnesses to his faithfulness.⁴ The theological point is strengthened rather than threatened by comparative study because Genesis participates in the symbolic world of the ancient Near East while simultaneously reconfiguring it.

Austin’s treatment of Abram’s movement through the land adds another dimension to this discussion. Genesis can make travel appear almost effortless because enormous distances are compressed into a few sentences: Abram departs, passes through a region, pitches a tent, builds an altar, moves again, goes down toward Egypt, and later returns. The reader turns a page more easily than Abram crossed the land. Austin slows the narrative down by asking what travel required in an ancient setting: water, animals, household movement, elevation changes, available roads, seasonal conditions, provisions, and exposure to danger. Her approach intersects naturally with historical geography and the work of scholars such as Yohanan Aharoni and David Dorsey, who have demonstrated how roads, routes, and terrain inform biblical narrative.⁵ Yet Austin is particularly interested in the bodily dimension of the journey. Abram’s response to God is not simply intellectual assent to a promise; obedience is expressed through movement. He leaves a known world and walks into an unknown one.

That observation fits well with Brueggemann’s work on the theological tension between landedness and landlessness.⁶ Abram is promised land long before he possesses it. In fact, much of the Abraham narrative is lived inside that tension. He travels through what has been promised without yet owning what has been promised, and the geography itself reinforces the theological shape of his life. Faith takes place between departure and possession. The roads, campsites, wells, and altars are not incidental to that story because the promise is being lived bodily before it is secured materially. Austin’s geographical sensitivity makes that familiar theological theme feel less abstract.

Her treatment of rain and drought develops the argument in another direction. Biblical readers know that Deuteronomy and the historical books associate rainfall with covenant blessing and drought with judgment, but modern readers in highly engineered environments can easily underestimate the immediacy of that language. In the ancient southern Levant, rain was not simply pleasant weather. Agricultural survival depended upon it. A failed rainy season could mean declining crops, empty cisterns, weakened animals, economic desperation, migration, famine, and death. When the biblical writers speak of the heavens being shut, therefore, the imagery is both theological and brutally practical.

This becomes particularly important in 1 Kings 17–18, where Elijah announces drought in a cultural environment in which Baal was associated with storm and fertility. The encounter on Mount Carmel is often remembered primarily as a contest involving fire from heaven, but the larger narrative has already turned the weather into a theological argument. The absence of rain raises the question of who truly governs the fertility of the land. Against the wider Canaanite world, YHWH’s sovereignty is demonstrated not through abstract theological claims alone but through the very natural processes over which Baal was believed to exercise authority. Austin’s emphasis on sensory and environmental experience allows the reader to feel more clearly what was at stake. The polemic is not simply about rival religious ideas. It concerns the conditions under which people survive.

Some of the richest exegetical material appears in Austin’s treatment of Jeremiah. The prophet repeatedly describes covenant judgment through the breakdown of creation: the land mourns, vegetation withers, birds disappear, the heavens darken, and the world begins to look increasingly uninhabitable. Jeremiah 4:23 is especially striking because the prophet looks upon the land and sees tohu wabohu, the same language used of the primordial earth in Genesis 1:2. The imagery is not simply one of destruction but of uncreation. Ordered creation is being reversed under the weight of covenantal collapse.

That pattern is well known within prophetic scholarship, yet Austin adds useful physical texture to it. Drought, dust, scorching winds, ruined fields, devastated landscapes, and darkened skies were not invented merely as poetic symbols. They belonged to the ecological world of the prophet and his audience. Robert Alter has consistently emphasized the concrete force of biblical imagery, and Austin’s work supports that literary instinct by reconnecting the imagery to lived environmental experience.⁷ Jeremiah’s language is powerful because it is both theological and recognizable. A land that once sustained life begins to look like a world moving backward toward chaos.

There is also an important theological implication here. The biblical writers do not generally imagine sin as a private interior problem disconnected from the rest of creation. Human faithlessness, social injustice, violence, failed leadership, idolatry, exile, and the condition of the land continually intersect. Modern readers often divide spiritual concerns from material ones far more sharply than the biblical text does. Jeremiah’s rhetoric resists that separation. Covenant disorder spreads outward, and the natural world becomes part of the prophetic witness against it.

Austin’s discussion of seasonal imagery makes a similar point on a smaller scale. Readers living in northern climates may instinctively associate summer with abundance and winter with barrenness, but those associations do not map neatly onto the ecology of the biblical world. Green vegetation follows the rains, while the intense heat of the dry season rapidly transforms the landscape. Biblical comparisons between human life and grass therefore emerge from an annually recurring visual experience. Grass flourishes and disappears. The image communicates transience because people repeatedly watched transience occur around them. The landscape provided its own vocabulary for mortality.

The treatment of animals works along the same lines. Lions, ravens, wild donkeys, ostriches, horses, and other creatures were not merely decorative additions to biblical poetry. Their behavior, danger, usefulness, unpredictability, or wildness could carry associations immediately recognizable to the audience. Austin is particularly effective when this insight reaches Job 38–41. The divine speeches in Job have long puzzled interpreters because Job’s questions concern justice, suffering, and the moral governance of the world, while YHWH responds by directing attention toward weather, stars, mountain goats, ravens, wild donkeys, ostriches, warhorses, Behemoth, and Leviathan. Scholars such as Carol Newsom and David Clines have explored how these speeches destabilize Job’s assumptions concerning the moral structure of creation.⁸ Austin’s method allows the creatures themselves to retain a greater degree of interpretive weight.

The world YHWH describes in Job is strikingly uninterested in organizing itself around human usefulness. Rain falls where no one lives. Wild animals inhabit places no one controls. Creatures reproduce without human supervision. Some animals are useful, some dangerous, some absurd, and some apparently impossible to domesticate. The point is not that human beings are insignificant, but that creation is larger than the human frame through which Job has understandably been interpreting his suffering. The world belongs to God before it belongs to us, and God’s delight in creation extends beyond what humans can control, explain, or exploit.

This is one of the areas where Landscapes of Memory becomes particularly valuable theologically. Western Christian interpretation can become highly anthropocentric, even when it intends to be biblical. We readily ask what a passage says about our identity, calling, suffering, salvation, or destiny. Job’s divine speeches resist that instinct by turning the reader outward. Austin’s sensory approach reinforces the same movement. Biblical interpretation occasionally requires us to stop asking what creation means for us long enough to recognize that the biblical writers also understood creation as belonging to God in its own right.

Within contemporary scholarship, Austin’s work sits naturally beside several related approaches without merely duplicating them. Brueggemann’s The Land remains a more expansive theological account of land as gift, promise, possession, loss, and hope. Ellen Davis’s Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture offers a more sustained agrarian and ethical reading, while Avrahami’s The Senses of Scripture provides a more technical treatment of sensory language and perception in the Hebrew Bible. Historical geographers provide greater topographical precision, and memory theorists such as Jan Assmann offer a denser conceptual framework for cultural remembrance. Austin’s strength lies in bringing several of these conversations together in a form that remains accessible to pastors, students, and serious readers who may not ordinarily enter all of those disciplines separately.⁹

There are, of course, limits to any attempt at sensory reconstruction. A modern reader standing in the Judean wilderness has not thereby entered Jeremiah’s consciousness, and contemporary travel through Israel, Palestine, or Jordan cannot reproduce ancient experience. Landscapes change, roads change, agricultural practices change, political realities change, and modern assumptions travel with us. The most responsible use of Austin’s method therefore comes when sensory observation is held together with textual work, archaeology, historical geography, ancient Near Eastern comparison, and careful exegesis. Austin generally handles that balance well. Mnemonature works best not as a substitute for historical interpretation but as a reminder that historical interpretation must include bodies, environments, and remembered experience.

Conclusion

What I appreciated most about Landscapes of Memory is that it gradually changes the way you read. I found myself slowing down at details I might previously have passed over: the condition of the ground, the direction of a journey, the absence of rain, the appearance of grass, the stars overhead, an animal mentioned almost casually in a poem. Austin has a way of reminding us that those details were often not casual at all. They belonged to a world people knew intimately, and God repeatedly met Israel within that world.

For pastors and teachers, I think there is something important here beyond a better method of interpretation. We spend a great deal of time teaching people to look for God in ideas, sermons, books, and explicitly religious moments, but Scripture often trains people to remember God through ordinary things. Abraham can look at the stars and remember a promise. Israel can see a rainbow and remember covenant. Rain can remind a community that life is received rather than manufactured. Withered grass can teach the brevity of human life. A wilderness can recall dependence. A road can become a testimony to obedience. Even the animals in Job can remind us that the world is much larger than the problems we are currently trying to solve.

There is something pastorally healthy about recovering that way of seeing. Most people will not spend their lives in seminar rooms, and very few will spend every day studying commentaries, but everyone lives somewhere. We wake beneath a sky, walk across ground, experience seasons, notice weather, hear birds, watch things grow and eventually die. The created world is still around us, even if modern life has made it easier to ignore. Austin’s book made me wonder whether part of discipleship involves learning to notice again.

That does not mean finding a hidden spiritual message in every sunset or turning nature into another form of divination. Scripture gives us something much more grounded than that. It teaches us that ordinary creation can become connected to remembered truth. Once God attached his promise to the stars for Abram, the stars could never be entirely ordinary again. Once Israel learned to associate wilderness with both testing and provision, wilderness carried memory. The natural world did not replace revelation; it helped people remember revelation.

Pastorally, that may be one of the most helpful implications of this book. There are seasons when people struggle to remember what God has said because their circumstances are telling them something different. Abram knew that experience. Jeremiah knew it. Israel knew it. Job certainly knew it. In those moments, faith often depends less upon discovering something new than upon remembering what has already been given. Scripture repeatedly ties that remembrance to things people can see, touch, walk through, and experience.

Perhaps we need more of that.

Perhaps the next time we stand beneath a clear night sky, feel the first rain after a long dry stretch, watch something green emerge from apparently dead ground, or walk through a season that feels more like wilderness than home, we might allow the world around us to remind us of truths we already know but have temporarily forgotten. God has been faithful before. We are creatures rather than masters. Life is received as gift. The world belongs to God. Promises sometimes require long journeys before they are fulfilled. And even when our own understanding becomes painfully small, God remains at work within a creation far larger than the part we can presently see.

Landscapes of Memory is ultimately valuable because it helps us read Scripture with more attention, but I think its deeper gift is that it may help us live with more attention as well. Austin reminds us that the biblical world was not merely a backdrop for encounters with God. It was one of the places where those encounters were remembered. That remains worth recovering.

Notes

1. Emma M. Austin, Landscapes of Memory: The Old Testament’s Sensory Engagement with Nature (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2026)
2. Walter Brueggemann, The Land: Place as Gift, Promise, and Challenge in Biblical Faith, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2002); Ellen F. Davis, Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Yael Avrahami, The Senses of Scripture: Sensory Perception in the Hebrew Bible, LHBOTS 545 (London: T&T Clark, 2012).
3. Austin, Landscapes of Memory, chap. 2. See also Emma M. Austin, “‘When I See . . . I Will Remember’: Exploring the Memorability of Rainbows and Stars in Genesis through Mnemonature,” Biblical Theology Bulletin 55 (2025): 184–98.
4. Jeffrey L. Cooley, Poetic Astronomy in the Ancient Near East: The Reflexes of Celestial Science in Ancient Mesopotamian, Ugaritic, and Israelite Narrative (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2013).
5. Yohanan Aharoni, The Land of the Bible: A Historical Geography, trans. Anson F. Rainey (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1979); David A. Dorsey, The Roads and Highways of Ancient Israel (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2018).
6. Brueggemann, Land.
7. Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Poetry (New York: Basic Books, 1985); Walter Brueggemann, A Commentary on Jeremiah: Exile and Homecoming (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998).
8. Carol A. Newsom, The Book of Job: A Contest of Moral Imaginations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); David J. A. Clines, Job 38–42, WBC 18B (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2011).
9. Jan Assmann, Religion and Cultural Memory: Ten Studies, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006); Jeannine Marie Hanger, Engaging Jesus with Our Senses: An Embodied Approach to the Gospels (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2024).

A Review of Jonathan R. Bailey, Dwelling in Christ: Discover the Threefold Path of Spiritual Transformation (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Formatio, 2026).

Bailey writes within a recognizable stream of contemporary spiritual formation associated especially with Dallas Willard, Richard Foster, Renovaré, and the retrieval of historic Christian disciplines. Yet Dwelling in Christ is more than a repackaging of Willardian formation. Its deeper conversation partners include Gregory of Nyssa, John Climacus, Benedict of Nursia, the Desert Fathers and Mothers, Teresa of Ávila, Thomas à Kempis, Evelyn Underhill, Kallistos Ware, Thomas Merton, George MacDonald, and several voices from Eastern Christian spirituality. Bailey therefore occupies an interesting middle ground. This is not an academic monograph on ascetical theology, patristic anthropology, or participation in Christ. It is instead a pastoral retrieval of those traditions for Christians who may never read The Ladder of Divine Ascent, The Life of Moses, or The Interior Castle themselves. That accessibility is one of the book’s principal strengths.

From Conversion as Moment to Conversion as Way

The autobiographical opening is particularly effective. Bailey remembers repeatedly “getting saved,” responding to invitations, praying conversion prayers, and expecting these moments to produce an immediate transformation that never quite materialized. His concern is not to demean evangelical conversion or deny the significance of decisive encounters with Christ. Rather, he exposes the inadequacy of a Christianity that knows how to invite someone across the threshold but possesses little theology for the long hallway beyond it.

Here Bailey touches a significant weakness within some expressions of modern evangelicalism. The New Testament certainly contains decisive moments of repentance, baptism, reception of the Spirit, and allegiance to Jesus, yet its dominant language of discipleship is strikingly developmental: walk, follow, abide, grow, bear fruit, put off, put on, be renewed, become mature, run the race, endure, and be transformed. Conversion may have a beginning, but discipleship resists reduction to a beginning.

Bailey’s threefold way gives conceptual shape to that biblical instinct. Purgation concerns the relinquishment of distorted desires and attachments. Illumination involves an increasing awareness of God, ourselves, and the life toward which grace is drawing us. Union describes an ever-deepening participation in the divine life in which the human will is increasingly harmonized with the character and purposes of God. Importantly, Bailey refuses to turn these into rigid sequential stages. Purgation, illumination, and union overlap, recur, and spiral through the Christian life. One does not graduate permanently from purgation; old attachments may surface even amid considerable spiritual maturity. Likewise, moments of profound communion with God may occur surprisingly early in the journey.

This prevents the threefold way from becoming precisely the kind of formula Bailey is attempting to replace.

The progression also gives the book its elegant architecture. Purgation moves from quick fixes toward training, from certainty toward the mystery encountered through affliction, and from perfectionism toward patient progress in temptation. Illumination moves toward a rule of life, prayer, and humility. Union then redirects the mature Christian away from the need to be seen and toward seeing others, away from control and toward charity, and finally away from the illusion of spiritual arrival toward what Gregory of Nyssa described as epektasis, the endless movement of the creature into the inexhaustible life of God.

That final refusal of arrival may be the book’s most important contribution. Christian maturity, for Bailey, is not the point at which one finally becomes impressive. It is the point at which one increasingly forgets the need to be impressive at all.

Image, Likeness, and the Human Vocation

One of Bailey’s most compelling theological moves appears in his discussion of Genesis 1:26. Drawing particularly upon Kallistos Ware and the Eastern tradition, Bailey distinguishes between the divine image as gift and divine likeness as vocation: humanity begins in the image and journeys toward likeness. The image is given; likeness is developed.

This is historically rich Christian theology, though a careful exegetical distinction is useful. The Hebrew terms ṣelem (“image”) and dĕmût (“likeness”) in Genesis 1:26 should probably not be pressed into two entirely distinct anthropological categories on grammatical grounds alone. Ancient Near Eastern studies have increasingly emphasized the royal background of “image” language. Kings could function as images or earthly representatives of a deity; Genesis astonishingly extends this representative vocation to humanity as humanity.¹ Humanity is therefore not merely given some invisible metaphysical quality called the imago Dei. Humans are commissioned to image the Creator within creation.

This ANE texture actually strengthens Bailey’s formative vision.

If imaging God is a vocation rather than merely a possession, then Christlikeness concerns more than private moral improvement. Human beings become increasingly faithful images by representing God’s character and wise rule within the world. The movement from image toward likeness can therefore be understood canonically as the restoration of humanity’s original vocation. Purgation removes those allegiances and desires that deform the image; illumination teaches us to perceive creation and neighbor through the light of God; union increasingly conforms human action and desire to the self-giving life revealed in Christ.

Bailey’s emphasis on becoming “fully human” belongs naturally within this framework. Salvation is not God rescuing humans from humanity but restoring humanity to what humanity was created to become.

Dwelling, Temple, and Divine Presence

The title itself invites another biblical-theological layer that remains somewhat underdeveloped in the book. Bailey primarily uses “dwelling in Christ” relationally and spiritually. Yet Scripture possesses an enormous theology of divine dwelling that stretches from Eden through tabernacle and temple, into the incarnation, the Spirit-filled church, and finally the new creation.

Within the ancient world, temples represented the earthly dwelling places of divine presence. Israel shared this broad cultural vocabulary while simultaneously transforming it: YHWH could not be contained within a human structure (1 Kgs 8:27), yet God graciously chose to place his presence among his covenant people. The tabernacle thus becomes a portable Eden-like sanctuary; the Jerusalem temple becomes the concentrated locus of divine presence; prophetic hope anticipates the restoration and expansion of that presence; John presents Jesus himself as the true temple (John 2:19–21); Paul describes both the gathered church and the believer as God’s temple (1 Cor 3:16; 6:19); and Revelation culminates not in humanity escaping earth for heaven but in God’s dwelling descending to humanity until creation itself becomes sanctuary (Rev 21:1–3, 22).²

Read against this canonical trajectory, Bailey’s language of dwelling becomes even richer. Spiritual formation is not merely the effort to become a better religious person. It is life lived within the presence of God and increasingly permeated by that presence. The biblical movement is not simply humanity trying to ascend toward God but God coming to dwell with humanity and humanity being transformed because God has made his dwelling among and within them.

This also guards ascetical spirituality against becoming anthropocentric. Purgation, illumination, and union are never techniques by which human beings climb successfully into the divine realm. They are responses to divine initiative. Grace precedes the journey, accompanies the journey, and finally constitutes its destination.

The distinction matters. Christian ascent is possible only because God has first descended.

Participation and Union with Christ

Bailey’s treatment of union also resonates fruitfully with contemporary New Testament scholarship. Pauline theology in particular has experienced renewed interest in the participatory dimensions of salvation. Constantine Campbell has demonstrated the pervasive character of Paul’s “in Christ,” “with Christ,” incorporation, participation, and identification language; Grant Macaskill has argued that New Testament union should be understood covenantally and christologically, mediated through Jesus the covenant Messiah; Michael Gorman has pressed further into the participatory and cruciform dimensions of Pauline soteriology.³ Macaskill describes New Testament union as covenantal participation in the life of God mediated through Christ. Bailey’s language sits comfortably within this recovery. Christianity is more than believing truths about Christ. It involves participation in Christ.

John 15 therefore becomes particularly significant. The vine and branches do not present discipleship principally as imitation at a distance. Branches bear fruit because they abide (menō) in the vine. Likewise, Paul can speak of believers being crucified with Christ (Gal 2:19–20), dying and rising with Christ (Rom 6:1–11), being incorporated into Christ’s body (1 Cor 12:12–27), and being transformed “from glory to glory” by the Spirit (2 Cor 3:18). Participation precedes transformation. The branch becomes fruitful because it shares the life of the vine. This provides perhaps the strongest exegetical foundation for Bailey’s rejection of performance-based Christianity. Christian obedience is not an attempt to manufacture the life of Christ independently. It is the embodied manifestation of a life already being received from Christ.

Perfection, Teleios, and the Shape of Love

Bailey’s treatment of Matthew 5:48 is also pastorally valuable: “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” He rightly resists the common assumption that Jesus demands neurotic moral flawlessness. The immediate context is enemy-love: the Father gives sun and rain indiscriminately, and the disciples are called to embody that same boundary-breaking generosity.

A small exegetical qualification actually sharpens Bailey’s point. The Greek teleios should not be defined merely through an etymological relationship to telos, as though its lexical meaning were simply “fulfilling one’s purpose.” In context it carries the sense of completeness, maturity, or wholeness. Yet this makes Bailey’s theological conclusion stronger rather than weaker. Jesus is calling his followers toward an undivided love—a love that does not love friends while withholding itself from enemies. “Perfection” in Matthew 5 is the wholeness of a person whose love increasingly resembles the indiscriminate generosity of the Father. Formation, then, is not perfectionism. Perfectionism obsessively watches the self. Christlike maturity increasingly liberates the self to love the other.

This distinction runs throughout Dwelling in Christ and gives the book considerable pastoral power. The Christian who is constantly measuring his or her spiritual performance may appear serious about holiness while remaining profoundly self-absorbed. Bailey instead asks what would happen if holiness were measured less by spiritual self-consciousness and more by the increasing capacity to love. The question is worth lingering over.

Ancient Wisdom Without Antiquarianism

Bailey is particularly successful when introducing ancient Christian voices without treating antiquity as automatically authoritative. Gregory of Nyssa, Climacus, Benedict, the Desert Fathers and Mothers, à Kempis, Teresa, Fénelon, and Underhill appear as companions rather than museum exhibits. Bailey retrieves practices and categories because they help illuminate the journey toward Christlikeness.

In this respect, Dwelling in Christ belongs beside Richard Foster’s Celebration of Discipline and Dallas Willard’s The Spirit of the Disciplines and The Divine Conspiracy, though Bailey’s explicit threefold structure distinguishes his contribution. Evelyn Underhill’s Mysticism provides an obvious historical analogue, while Gregory’s Life of Moses and Climacus’s Ladder represent much older accounts of the soul’s ascent. Bailey himself acknowledges this lineage, including Dante and Bunyan among the spiritual itineraries that portray Christian existence as pilgrimage rather than static possession.

Yet his book remains thoroughly contemporary. Personal stories, failures, family life, suffering, prayer, ambition, the need for recognition, and ordinary relationships prevent the ancient vocabulary from drifting toward abstraction. This is important because Christian formation literature can sometimes make spiritual maturity sound strangely disembodied. Bailey repeatedly pulls it back toward the ordinary: listening to another person, becoming interruptible, relinquishing recognition, learning patience, establishing rhythms of prayer, loving the people immediately before us. The saint is not necessarily the spectacular Christian. The saint may simply be the person whose presence has become safe for others.

Pastoral Shepherding: From Producing Decisions to Forming People

For pastors and ministry leaders, this may be where Dwelling in Christ becomes most consequential. Much of modern ministry has been organized around moments: the salvation decision, the altar call, the baptism, the conference, the sermon series, the retreat, the emotional breakthrough, the new program. None of these things are inherently wrong. Scripture itself contains decisive moments. The danger comes when shepherds become skilled at producing moments but remain poorly equipped to accompany people through years.

Shepherding is necessarily slower. A shepherd cannot shout a sheep into maturity. A pastor cannot preach someone instantly through purgation, illumination, and union. Formation takes place through Scripture, Spirit, suffering, community, table, confession, correction, imitation, prayer, forgiveness, repeated obedience, and time. Bailey’s treatment of spiritual direction becomes particularly important here. Mature believers eventually become people capable of attending to others. The movement toward union is therefore not an escape into private mystical experience. Its fruit is relational. Those who dwell deeply in Christ become people capable of making space for another person’s life before God. This may offer a needed corrective to contemporary conceptions of pastoral leadership.

The New Testament shepherd is not primarily a religious entrepreneur, content producer, organizational executive, or platform personality. The shepherd knows the sheep (John 10). Elders live among the flock as examples capable of imitation (1 Pet 5:1–4). Paul can therefore tell communities not merely to believe what he teaches but to imitate the pattern of life they have witnessed in him (1 Cor 11:1; Phil 3:17; 4:9). Formation travels relationally.

Bailey’s discussion of mimēsis makes this point particularly well. People learn Christianity partly by inhabiting life beside people who have themselves learned Christ. The pastor’s life therefore inevitably becomes part of the congregation’s curriculum. That should both humble and sober anyone entrusted with shepherding. The question is no longer merely, Did I preach the correct sermon? It becomes:

What kind of people are we becoming together? Are our churches producing people who need to be noticed, or people capable of noticing others? Are we creating increasingly anxious religious performers, or men and women learning to rest in the life of Christ? Are we measuring maturity by biblical information, institutional loyalty, gifting, visibility, and activity—or by patience, courage, humility, reconciliation, generosity, enemy-love, faithfulness, and increasing freedom from the tyranny of self? And perhaps most searchingly: Would living closely beside the leaders of our churches actually help someone become like Jesus? That is the pastoral weight of Bailey’s project.

Conclusion

Dwelling in Christ is ultimately a hopeful book because it removes transformation from the frantic timetable of religious performance. Bailey reminds readers that Christian maturity is neither instantaneous nor mechanical. We are being formed within a relationship that precedes us, sustains us, and will finally outlast death itself. Purgation, illumination, and union are not techniques for becoming spiritually impressive; they describe the long schooling of desire through which grace teaches human beings how to love. There are places where the biblical theology could be developed further. The ANE and canonical background of divine dwelling could deepen the book’s central metaphor. Genesis 1’s image-language could be connected more explicitly to humanity’s representative vocation. Pauline participation could give the category of union a fuller exegetical scaffolding. Yet these are less deficiencies than openings created by a book that succeeds in making ancient Christian formation accessible again. Bailey has not written a technical theology of union with Christ, nor an exhaustive history of Christian spirituality. He has done something more pastoral. He has placed an old path back in front of ordinary Christians and invited them to walk it. For shepherds, that invitation may be especially timely.

The church does not merely need pastors capable of gathering crowds, explaining texts, defending doctrines, or leading organizations. It needs men and women who have remained with Christ long enough that his life has begun to become visible in theirs. It needs shepherds who understand that sanctification cannot be hurried, that suffering cannot always be explained, that people cannot be reduced to projects, and that maturity frequently looks less like certainty and more like patient, self-giving love.

Perhaps the great pastoral task, then, is not simply convincing people to come to Christ. It is teaching them how to dwell there. And then remaining beside them long enough that, together, we begin to look like the One in whom we dwell.

Notes

1. John H. Walton, Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament: Introducing the Conceptual World of the Hebrew Bible, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2018).
2. On the canonical development of the divine-dwelling motif, see G. K. Beale, The Temple and the Church’s Mission: A Biblical Theology of the Dwelling Place of God, NSBT 17 (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004);
3. Constantine R. Campbell, Paul and Union with Christ: An Exegetical and Theological Study (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2012)
4. Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses, trans. Abraham J. Malherbe and Everett Ferguson, Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1978).
5. John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent, trans. Colm Luibheid and Norman Russell, Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1982).
6. Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness (London: Methuen, 1911).
7. Dallas Willard, The Spirit of the Disciplines: Understanding How God Changes Lives (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988)
8. The threefold language of purgation, illumination, and union has a complex history and should not be imagined as a single rigid developmental scheme. Within the Christian mystical tradition, the three movements have often been understood as overlapping or mutually implicating rather than as strictly successive spiritual ranks. Bailey’s refusal to make them mechanically sequential is therefore one of the strengths of his retrieval.

The parable commonly called “the Good Samaritan” is so familiar that it is easy to reduce it to a general encouragement to be kind. Jesus certainly calls His followers to compassion, but the story is sharper, more disruptive, and more deeply rooted in Israel’s Scriptures than a simple lesson in kindness. It confronts the human desire to define the limits of love. It asks whether we will recognize the image of God in the wounded person before us, and whether we are willing to receive or shepherd an enemy as an example of covenant faithfulness.

A legal expert stands up to test Jesus and asks, “Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” (Luke 10:25). The expression “eternal life” refers not merely to going to heaven after death, but to sharing in the life of the age to come—the life of God’s restored kingdom. His question is therefore substantial: What does faithfulness to God look like for someone who hopes to participate in His coming world? Jesus responds in thoroughly Jewish fashion, answering a question with questions: “What is written in the Law? How do you read it?” (10:26). Jesus does not dismiss Torah. He directs the lawyer back to it and asks him to interpret it.

The lawyer joins two texts: Deuteronomy 6:5, the command to love God with one’s whole being, and Leviticus 19:18, the command to “love your neighbor as yourself.” This combination is not a random collection of religious duties. Love of God and love of neighbor summarize a life ordered around covenant faithfulness. Jesus affirms the answer: “You have answered correctly. Do this and you will live” (10:28), language that likely echoes Leviticus 18:5.

Question for the group: Why do you think Jesus asks, “How do you read it?” rather than simply giving the lawyer an answer? What is the difference between knowing the correct text and allowing that text to examine us?

The Desire to Justify Ourselves

Luke then reveals the deeper issue: “But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, ‘And who is my neighbor?’” (10:29). The problem is not that the lawyer lacks biblical knowledge. He gives the right answer. The problem is what he wants the answer to permit him to avoid. “Who is my neighbor?” can sound like a sincere theological question, but in context it is a request for a boundary. If the command says that I must love my neighbor, I may naturally want to know who qualifies—and, more revealingly, who does not. How far does my obligation extend? Where may my mercy reasonably stop?

Leviticus 19:18 originally speaks of “the sons of your own people,” which could be read narrowly. Yet the same chapter commands Israel to love the resident foreigner as oneself: “The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself” (Lev. 19:34). The Torah itself was already pressing Israel beyond tribal self-interest by grounding compassion in memory: “for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.” The lawyer asks Jesus to identify the proper object of neighbor-love. Jesus will instead describe the person who became a neighbor.

Question for the group: Where are we tempted to turn God’s commands into discussions about minimum obligation? Are there people we find easier to classify, criticize, or avoid than to love?

The Road Down from Jerusalem

Jesus places the story on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho. Jerusalem sits high in the Judean hills, while Jericho lies far below sea level. The traveler was literally “going down,” descending through rugged and exposed terrain known as dangerous country. Robbers attack him, strip him, beat him, and leave him “half dead” (Luke 10:30). He is deprived not only of health but also of the ordinary markers by which others might identify him. Without clothing and perhaps unable to speak, his social status, occupation, and even ethnicity cannot easily be determined. Before he can be categorized, he must simply be seen as a wounded human being.

A priest comes down the road, sees the man, and passes by on the opposite side. A Levite does the same. Interpreters often assume they avoided the victim because touching a corpse could produce ritual impurity. That possibility may add tension to the scene, especially because the man appears nearly dead, but the text never provides this explanation. It does not say that either man was traveling to perform temple service, and the priestly corpse regulations do not offer a blanket excuse for refusing mercy. Jesus gives us no access to their private reasoning. What Luke emphasizes is simpler and more troubling: they saw him and moved away.

The failure is not primarily that they lacked religious knowledge. They represent people associated with Israel’s worship and Scriptures. Their danger is one that remains painfully contemporary: it is possible to organize one’s life around sacred things and still step around the suffering person whom God has placed in one’s path.

Question for the group: What explanations might the priest and Levite have given for passing by? Which of those explanations sound like excuses we still use—fear, schedule, uncertainty, personal safety, emotional exhaustion, or the assumption that someone else will help?

The Scandal of the Samaritan

Jesus then introduces a Samaritan. To modern ears, “Samaritan” nearly means “helpful stranger,” but that association exists because this parable transformed the word. For Jesus’ Jewish audience, the Samaritan was not a sentimental hero. Jews and Samaritans carried centuries of religious, ethnic, and political hostility. They disagreed about sacred history, the legitimate place of worship, and the identity of the faithful covenant community. Luke has already shown this tension: in the previous chapter, a Samaritan village refused hospitality to Jesus because He was traveling toward Jerusalem (Luke 9:51–56). Jesus does not choose a neutral outsider. He makes the despised religious rival the moral center of the story.

When the Samaritan sees the wounded man, he is “moved with compassion” (Luke 10:33). The Greek verb splagchnizomai describes a deep, visceral movement of mercy. Luke uses such language elsewhere for the compassion of Jesus and for the father who runs to welcome his lost son (Luke 7:13; 15:20). The Samaritan does not merely feel sympathy; his compassion takes bodily and costly form.

He approaches the man others avoided. He bandages the wounds. He applies oil and wine, common resources used for soothing and cleansing injuries. He puts the victim on his own animal, brings him to an inn, and personally cares for him. The next day he gives the innkeeper two denarii and promises to cover any additional expense when he returns. His mercy costs him supplies, money, time, comfort, transportation, and the acceptance of continuing responsibility.

This is neighbor-love in the biblical sense. It is not an emotion entertained at a safe distance. It crosses the road.

Question for the group: Notice each action the Samaritan takes in verses 33–35. Which forms of cost does he accept? Which costs—time, inconvenience, money, emotional energy, reputation, or risk—are hardest for you to accept when someone needs care?

Jesus Reverses the Question

At the conclusion, Jesus does not ask, “Which of these three encountered his neighbor?” He asks, “Which of these three, do you think, became a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” (Luke 10:36, reflecting the force of the Greek). The lawyer wanted Jesus to define the category of people he was required to love. Jesus refuses the category and turns the question back upon him. The important question is no longer, Who qualifies as my neighbor? It is, Will I become a neighbor to the person whose suffering I can see?

The lawyer answers, “The one who showed him mercy” (10:37). Strikingly, he does not say, “the Samaritan.” Perhaps the identity remains difficult even to speak aloud. Yet he correctly identifies the heart of the story: mercy. Jesus replies, “Go and do likewise.” The parable does not end with admiration for the Samaritan, but with imitation of him.

There is also a profound Christ-shaped dimension to the story. We should not erase the parable’s ethical force by turning every character into an allegorical symbol. Nevertheless, the mercy Jesus commands reflects the mercy He embodies. Christ comes near to wounded humanity, crosses boundaries of estrangement, bears our burden, pays the cost, and promises to return. We do not show mercy in order to make God merciful toward us. We become merciful because, in Christ, God has come near to us.

Question for the group: Why is it easier to admire mercy than to practice it? Who is the person—or what is the kind of person—you find most difficult to imagine Jesus placing in the center of this story?

A Neighbor-Shaped Community

This parable speaks directly to the kind of community TOV desires to become. A church can gather around good teaching, worship faithfully, share meals, and still miss the wounded person at the edge of the room. The priest and Levite warn us that proximity to holy things does not automatically produce a merciful life. The Samaritan reminds us that God may reveal covenant faithfulness through someone whom our religious instincts have taught us to distrust.

Neighbor-love does not require pretending that wisdom, boundaries, or safety never matter. Nor does mercy mean enabling destructive behavior. The Samaritan’s response is concrete and ordered: he addresses the immediate wound, brings the man to a place of continuing care, recruits another person, provides resources, and establishes future responsibility. Biblical compassion is neither detached sentiment nor reckless rescuing. It is love that truthfully asks, What would genuinely serve this person’s good?

For a community, “go and do likewise” may mean noticing the person others overlook, listening before making assumptions, sharing the burden of care rather than leaving it to one person, providing food or transportation, making room at the table, protecting someone who is vulnerable, or remaining present after the initial crisis has passed. Mercy is often ordinary. Its holiness lies in refusing to pass by.

Question for the group: If TOV fully embodied this parable, what would become more visible in our life together? Who might feel safer, more welcomed, or more genuinely cared for?

The Question We Carry Home

Jesus never supplies the lawyer with a manageable list of neighbors. He gives him a wounded man, an unexpected hero, and a command: “Go and do likewise.” The kingdom of God is not formed in us merely by correctly identifying the command to love. It becomes visible when compassion moves us toward the person lying in the road.

The parable leaves each of us with a better question than the one with which the lawyer began. Not, How far does my responsibility extend? Not, Does this person belong to my group? Not even, What is the least that faithfulness requires? The question is: Because God has shown mercy to me, to whom am I now being called to become a neighbor?

Closing Reflection

Take a quiet moment and bring one person before God—not an abstract category, but a name and a face. Ask: What would it mean for me to move toward this person in wise, truthful, and costly mercy? Then identify one action that can move compassion from intention into practice this week.

Closing Prayer

Jesus, You did not love us from a distance. You saw us in our woundedness, came near, and showed us mercy at great cost. Forgive us for the times we have used busyness, fear, religious certainty, or social boundaries as reasons to pass by. Give us eyes that truly see, hearts that are moved with compassion, and courage to cross the road. Form TOV into a people among whom the wounded are noticed, the outsider is welcomed, and mercy becomes visible. Teach us to go and do likewise. Amen.

References and Further Reading

• Joel B. Green, The Gospel of Luke, New International Commentary on the New Testament (Eerdmans, 1997), especially the discussion of Luke 10:25–37.
• Kenneth E. Bailey, Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes: Cultural Studies in the Gospels (IVP Academic, 2008), chapter 13, “The Good Samaritan.”
• Amy-Jill Levine, Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi (HarperOne, 2014), chapter 3, “The Good Samaritan.”
• Darrell L. Bock, Luke 9:51–24:53, Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament (Baker Academic, 1996), on Luke 10:25–37.
• For related biblical texts, read Leviticus 19:9–18, 33–34; Deuteronomy 6:4–5; 2 Chronicles 28:8–15; Hosea 6:6; Micah 6:8; Luke 6:27–36; and James 2:8–17.

That is what I appreciated most about the book. Glahn is not merely making an argument for greater inclusion by locating a few forgotten women and adding them back into the conversation. She is asking a hermeneutical question: are we actually reading these stories according to the way they were written? That takes the conversation beyond the usual arguments over office, authority, ordination, or a handful of disputed Pauline texts. Before we decide what women may or may not do in the church, we probably ought to take a more careful look at what women are already doing in the biblical narrative and, just as importantly, how the narrators themselves evaluate them. In that respect, Glahn’s work feels at home alongside Robert Alter and Meir Sternberg, whose studies of Hebrew narrative have reminded us that characterization, repetition, dialogue, narrative gaps, irony, and literary placement are not decorative features surrounding theology; they are often the very means through which the theology of the story is communicated.²

Tamar in Genesis 38 is a particularly good example. I have heard that chapter treated for years as though it were something of an awkward interruption in the Joseph story, almost as if Genesis wandered off topic for a moment before returning to Egypt in chapter 39. But once we begin paying attention to literary placement, the chapter becomes considerably more interesting. Judah has just participated in the betrayal and sale of his brother, and then the narrative turns immediately toward Judah’s own moral failure with Tamar. He withholds from her what he owes, and she eventually forces the truth into the open. The turning point is Judah’s own acknowledgment that she is more righteous than he is. When Judah appears again later in Genesis, something has changed. The brother who participated in selling Joseph is eventually willing to offer himself in place of Benjamin. Genesis 38 therefore looks less like an interruption and more like one of the places where Judah is being transformed. Tamar is not incidental to that transformation; in a meaningful sense she becomes one of its catalysts.

The ancient Near Eastern texture adds another important layer. Tamar is not operating within a modern world of autonomous relationships and individualized economics. Her life is embedded in kinship, household continuity, inheritance, offspring, widowhood, and the responsibilities of the patriarchal household. John Walton has repeatedly cautioned modern interpreters against treating the ancient world as though its social institutions functioned like our own, and that warning is particularly important here.³ Tamar’s actions remain provocative, but the social world of Genesis makes it increasingly difficult to portray her merely as a sexually questionable woman. She is a widow whose future has become precarious because Judah has failed to carry out an obligation that bears directly upon her place in the household and upon the continuation of the family line. The narrator ultimately allows Judah himself to pronounce the moral judgment. In cases like this, historical context does not explain the text away; it often strips away assumptions that later readers have unconsciously added to it.

I found myself thinking similarly when Glahn turned to Exodus 1–2. We naturally remember Moses as the great human figure in the confrontation with Pharaoh, but the resistance to Pharaoh begins before Moses ever walks into the royal court. Shiphrah and Puah refuse the king’s genocidal command. Moses’ mother preserves her son. His sister watches over him. Pharaoh’s own daughter ultimately participates in undermining her father’s decree. The literary irony is hard to miss once someone points it out: Pharaoh decides that the Hebrew boys are the threat and allows the girls to live, yet women repeatedly become the agents through whom his attempt to destroy Israel is frustrated.

There is another subtle narrative texture here that I think Glahn rightly invites us to notice. Exodus begins with shemot, “names,” and yet Pharaoh remains unnamed while Shiphrah and Puah are explicitly remembered. In the ideological world of the ancient Near East, kings are normally the people whose names endure. Royal inscriptions, monuments, dynasties, military accomplishments, and building projects all worked toward the preservation of royal memory. Yet Exodus turns that world upside down. The most powerful man in Egypt becomes simply “Pharaoh,” while two apparently insignificant Hebrew midwives are preserved by name within Israel’s sacred memory. This is exactly where literary reading and ancient cultural background belong together. Walton’s work on the conceptual world of the Old Testament and the broader cultural-background approach associated with scholars such as Craig Keener remind us that biblical texts constantly converse with the assumptions of the worlds in which they were written.⁴ In Exodus, that conversation becomes wonderfully subversive: empire decides who matters, but Israel’s God remembers differently.

The daughters of Zelophehad brought me back to the same observation. Mahlah, Noa, Hoglah, Milcah, and Tirzah are five names that many readers of Scripture could probably not retrieve without looking them up, and yet Numbers goes out of its way to preserve them. Their request in Numbers 27 can sound to modern ears like an early dispute over property rights, but that description is probably too thin. Land in Israel is tied to household, tribe, inheritance, ancestral continuity, and participation in the future of the covenant community. Their concern that their father’s name might disappear because he has no son is therefore not merely economic. They are asking whether their household will continue to have a place in Israel’s inheritance. Moses brings the matter before YHWH, and the divine response vindicates their claim and contributes to the development of Israel’s inheritance law. In other words, the narrative does not portray these women as troublesome exceptions to the system but as people whose discernment helps Israel more faithfully understand covenantal justice.

This also places Glahn in an interesting conversation with several recent books on women and Scripture. Nijay Gupta’s Tell Her Story operates primarily in the world of the New Testament and early Christianity, recovering women such as Phoebe, Prisca, Junia, and others whose leadership and ministry can disappear when the early church is reconstructed primarily through male figures.⁵ Cynthia Long Westfall’s Paul and Gender approaches the question from Pauline theology, rhetoric, social context, and linguistic analysis, while Philip Payne’s The Bible vs. Biblical Womanhood works directly through many of the passages traditionally used to construct gender hierarchy.⁶ Glahn is doing something slightly different from all three. She is not primarily beginning with the disputed “women in ministry” texts and then defending a position. She is stepping farther back and asking whether our entire biblical imagination has been shaped by the way we have selected, characterized, and retold these stories. I think that makes her book especially useful pastorally because it reaches readers before the argument becomes a debate over positions.

That same methodology becomes particularly important when we reach the Samaritan woman in John 4. Christian retellings have often supplied an extraordinary amount of information that John himself never gives us. She is frequently described as promiscuous, socially ostracized, and forced to collect water at noon because the other women of the village reject her. Yet John never says any of those things. Jesus says she has had five husbands and that the man she presently has is not her husband, but the Gospel does not tell us how those marriages ended. In a first-century world in which women generally possessed considerably less social and legal power within marriage, widowhood, divorce, repudiation, infertility, and economic vulnerability all become relevant possibilities. Craig Keener’s cultural-background work is particularly helpful here because it reminds interpreters that the social world surrounding the text must constrain our reconstruction rather than our modern assumptions filling in the gaps.⁷ This does not prove that the woman was morally innocent in every respect; it simply asks us not to convict her of sins the narrator does not identify.

What becomes far more interesting to me is John’s literary placement of the encounter. John 3 gives us Nicodemus: male, Jewish, educated, respected, religiously credentialed, and approaching Jesus in darkness. John 4 then places before us a Samaritan woman who occupies almost every opposite social category. Yet she enters into an extended theological conversation with Jesus, recognizes progressively more about his identity, and becomes instrumental in bringing her village toward him. Read alongside Nicodemus, the effect is difficult to miss. John appears to enjoy overturning the categories by which readers decide in advance who is most likely to understand Jesus. Glahn’s larger argument works particularly well here because the woman’s significance does not need to be imported into the story from a contemporary gender agenda. It is already built into John’s narrative architecture.

This is where I think A Woman’s Place Is in the Story makes its most enduring contribution. It is certainly a book about women, but underneath that it is really a book about how we read Scripture. It asks us to slow down long enough to distinguish the biblical narrator from the interpretive traditions we have inherited. That does not mean tradition is always wrong, nor does it mean every neglected woman must become the secret hero of her story. Jezebel, after all, really is condemned. But even there the question matters: what does the biblical text actually condemn her for? Her sins in Kings are tied to idolatry, royal abuse, murder, and the seizure of Naboth’s ancestral inheritance. Later Christian imagination has sometimes transformed “Jezebel” into a vaguely sexualized accusation directed toward manipulative, assertive, or powerful women. The distance between those two things is a reminder that interpretation can accumulate traditions that eventually feel biblical simply because we have repeated them long enough.

Conclusion: Telling the Story More Faithfully

The longer I sat with Glahn’s work, the more I found myself thinking beyond questions of interpretation and toward the actual life of the church. Hermeneutics never really stays in the classroom. The way we read Scripture eventually becomes the way we preach, the way we lead, the way we recognize gifting, the way we form young people, and even the way we imagine who God is likely to use. If we repeatedly tell the biblical story in a way that highlights male courage while overlooking female courage, celebrates male leadership while treating women as peripheral, or assigns motives to women that the text itself never gives them, those patterns eventually become part of the spiritual imagination of a congregation.

That is why I think A Woman’s Place Is in the Story is worth reading beyond the academic conversation. Pastors should read it. Teachers should read it. Men who have spent years teaching Scripture should read it. Women who have sometimes wondered whether there is really room for their voice in the story should read it. Not because every reader will agree with every interpretive conclusion, but because Glahn forces us to ask a more fundamental question: have we been telling the whole story?

For me, that connects deeply with what we have tried to pursue through Expedition 44. Discipleship is not simply collecting correct propositions. It is learning to see the world through the story of God and then allowing that story to reshape the way we live. Jesus was constantly restoring people whom religious systems had learned not to see. He noticed the woman touching the edge of his garment when everyone else saw only the crowd. He allowed Mary to sit in the posture of a disciple. He received theological confession from Martha. He entrusted resurrection witness to women whose testimony carried little public weight in their surrounding culture. Again and again, the kingdom seems to arrive through people whom others have pushed toward the margins.

That should make us careful about whom we overlook in our own churches.

There may be a woman sitting quietly in the congregation who sees something in the text the rest of us have missed. There may be a young girl growing up in the church who needs to hear not merely that she is valuable, but that women have always been woven into the redemptive story as prophets, patrons, witnesses, teachers, disciples, leaders, mothers, theologians, and courageous agents of God’s purposes. There may also be men whose own discipleship becomes richer when they learn to receive wisdom and leadership from sisters in Christ rather than instinctively assuming that spiritual authority always arrives through a male voice.

That is where Glahn’s book becomes more than a corrective. It becomes an invitation. Return to the text. Read more slowly. Notice who is named. Notice who speaks. Notice who sees what others miss. Notice who acts faithfully when the expected heroes fail. Notice where the narrator places moral weight. And then ask whether our churches are making room for the same kinds of people God consistently makes room for in Scripture.

I would recommend A Woman’s Place Is in the Story especially to pastors, ministry leaders, Bible teachers, and anyone involved in spiritual formation. Read it with an open Bible. Read it in conversation with the ancient world. Read it alongside the larger body of scholarship on women and Scripture. But perhaps most importantly, read it with your own church in mind. The goal is not to manufacture a different biblical story. The goal is to recover the one that is already there and then have the courage to let that story form our communities more faithfully.

Notes

1. Sandra L. Glahn, A Woman’s Place Is in the Story (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2026).
2. Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative, rev. ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2011), esp. his discussions of repetition, characterization, dialogue, and narrative reticence; & Meir Sternberg, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative: Ideological Literature and the Drama of Reading (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985).
3. John H. Walton, Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament: Introducing the Conceptual World of the Hebrew Bible, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2018).
4. Craig S. Keener, The IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament, 2nd ed. (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2014).
5. Nijay K. Gupta, Tell Her Story: How Women Led, Taught, and Ministered in the Early Church (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2023).
6. Cynthia Long Westfall, Paul and Gender: Reclaiming the Apostle’s Vision for Men and Women in Christ (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2016)
7. Keener, IVP Bible Background Commentary

There are places in Caputo’s theological language where I would want to make distinctions or add qualifications, particularly when words such as faith and miracle are extended into the language of organizational development. Yet his central instincts about leadership intersect with several important biblical themes. Scripture does not prescribe modern democratic governance as the singular biblical model, but it repeatedly challenges forms of authority that accumulate power for their own sake. Jesus’ teaching on leadership is particularly important here. In Mark 10:42–45, after James and John seek privileged positions in the kingdom, Jesus points to the political structures familiar to the disciples: “those who are regarded as rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them.” The verbs are significant. Katakyrieuō carries the sense of exercising mastery or domination, while katexousiazō emphasizes the forceful exercise of authority. Jesus’ response is emphatic: ouch houtōs de estin en hymin, “but it is not so among you.”¹

Jesus does not abolish leadership in this passage; he radically alters its direction. Greatness is measured by service, and authority is directed toward the flourishing of the people under its care. Luke preserves the same teaching in the context of the Last Supper. While the disciples argue about which of them should be considered greatest, Jesus contrasts the rulers of the nations with his own kingdom and says, “I am among you as one who serves” (Luke 22:24–27). This is one of the clearest examples of what we often describe as the upside-down kingdom of Jesus. The kingdom does not simply replace one hierarchy with another hierarchy occupied by better people. Jesus questions the assumptions beneath hierarchy itself: greatness descends, authority serves, and the one who leads takes the posture normally assigned to the least important person in the room.

John 13 makes the same point narratively. Jesus knows that the Father has given “all things” into his hands, yet his response to that authority is to rise from the table, wrap himself in a towel, and wash his disciples’ feet. The action is striking precisely because Jesus is not relinquishing authority. He is showing what divine authority looks like when it becomes visible. The one who possesses genuine authority uses it to serve, cleanse, prepare, and dignify others. Caputo’s leadership model is not identical to Johannine Christology, of course, but his insistence that leaders can use authority to release the capacities of others belongs within the same broad moral world.

This becomes especially evident when Caputo describes the movement of decision-making closer to teachers and classrooms. He repeatedly emphasizes that leaders did not simply remove structure and walk away. Teachers were trained, supported, given resources, and then trusted to exercise responsibility. Freedom without formation can become chaos, but control without freedom can prevent maturity. The New Testament often holds the two together. Paul’s description of leadership in Ephesians 4 is a useful example. Apostles, prophets, evangelists, shepherds, and teachers are given “to equip the saints for the work of ministry” (Eph 4:11–12). The noun katartismos carries the idea of preparing, furnishing, or bringing something into proper working condition.² Leaders therefore do not exist primarily to perform the work while everyone else watches. Their work includes preparing the larger body to participate.

Paul’s argument reaches its climax in Ephesians 4:16, where the body grows as “each part does its work.” That is remarkably close to one of the best features of Caputo’s story. His teachers became more creative because leadership created space for them to exercise gifts already present among them. Parents discovered ways to contribute. Students encountered classrooms shaped by experimentation, art, nature, mathematics, technology, theater, and community participation. Caputo describes the school less as a machine executing a centralized program and more as an environment in which many people learned to contribute to a shared life.

First Corinthians 12 provides another important biblical parallel. Paul describes the church as one body composed of many differentiated members. The Spirit distributes charismata, gifts of grace, among the whole community. No single member possesses everything necessary for the body’s life. The eye needs the hand, the head needs the feet, and even the members that appear weaker are described as indispensable.³ The point is not democracy in the modern political sense, but interdependence. Healthy communities are structured in ways that recognize that meaningful contribution is distributed broadly rather than concentrated narrowly.

Caputo eventually uses the metaphor of a jazz ensemble to describe what happened at Key Largo. The school was not an orchestra controlled at every moment by one conductor. It had a common theme, but participants were given room to improvise within it. That metaphor is perhaps closer to Paul’s body language than Caputo himself intended. Biblical unity does not require sameness. In Paul’s communities, unity exists because people with different gifts remain coordinated around a common Lord, a common Spirit, and a common good.

The story of Moses and Jethro in Exodus 18 offers an older biblical example of the same leadership problem. Moses has become the single point through which the disputes of Israel must pass, and Jethro immediately sees that the arrangement is unsustainable: “What you are doing is not good” (Exod 18:17). The problem is not that Moses lacks authority but that authority has become unnecessarily concentrated. Jethro’s solution is to identify ʾanšê-ḥayil, capable and trustworthy people, and entrust genuine responsibility to them.⁴ Moses continues to lead, but leadership becomes distributed. The result is not the abandonment of authority but the multiplication of responsible leadership.

Caputo’s experience with school discipline reveals a similar movement. The faculty eventually concluded that student behavior could not simply be treated as a problem for the principal to solve. Discipline had to become part of the shared life of the community. Caputo writes that they began to understand discipline less as controlling children and more as creating a community in which teachers, parents, and students shared responsibility for how they lived and learned together. The biblical word paideia is useful here. Often translated “discipline,” it can refer more broadly to education, training, and the formation of character. Hebrews 12 and Ephesians 6:4 both use the term in a formative rather than merely punitive sense. Biblical discipline is ultimately concerned with what kind of person is being formed.

That concern with formation may be one of the strongest points of contact between Caputo’s educational philosophy and a Christian vision of leadership. Good leadership does not merely produce compliance. It develops people who can increasingly carry responsibility themselves. Paul can tell the Roman believers that they are “competent to instruct one another” (Rom 15:14), and in 1 Corinthians 14 he imagines a gathered community in which multiple people arrive prepared to contribute, while everything is ordered toward oikodomē, the building up of the whole body. The New Testament picture is neither authoritarian nor anarchic. It is ordered participation.

Caputo repeatedly argues that trust became a catalyst for this kind of maturity. Teachers who were entrusted with meaningful authority became more willing to assume responsibility, solve problems, and contribute creatively. This should not be confused with the idea that people are inherently trustworthy in every circumstance or that accountability is unnecessary. Scripture is far too realistic about human nature for that. Yet Christian leadership also cannot remain permanently suspicious of the people it claims to be forming. Eventually disciples must be permitted to act, decide, fail, learn, and mature.

Jesus himself demonstrates this pattern. He teaches the Twelve, corrects them repeatedly, gives them authority, sends them out, receives them back, and continues their formation. Luke 9–10 is particularly instructive because Jesus’ ministry begins to reproduce itself through others. They are entrusted with real participation in the mission before they fully understand everything they are doing. The kingdom advances through people whom Jesus is still forming.

This makes Caputo’s story more interesting than a simple argument for educational democracy. At its strongest, The Once and Future School is asking what authority is actually supposed to accomplish. If leadership exists primarily to preserve the leader’s control, Caputo’s experiment will always appear dangerous. If leadership exists to cultivate mature people capable of contributing to a shared mission, then distributed responsibility becomes not a threat to authority but one of its proper outcomes.

There is also something distinctly kingdom-shaped in Caputo’s insistence that the people closest to the work should be heard. The movement of Jesus consistently dignifies people whose voices were easily overlooked by conventional structures: children, women, the poor, the sick, Samaritans, tax collectors, and others located outside the centers of social prestige. This does not mean that every voice possesses equal wisdom in every matter. It does mean that proximity to status is not the same thing as proximity to truth. The kingdom repeatedly overturns assumptions about where wisdom, faithfulness, and significance will be found.

Perhaps that is one reason Caputo’s experience remains worth considering. The most important transformation at Key Largo was not architectural. It was relational and cultural. Teachers discovered greater confidence. Parents became participants. Students experienced a school that increasingly belonged to a community rather than simply being administered over one. Caputo remembers that trust began moving through the system: state leadership trusted districts, districts trusted schools, schools trusted teachers, and teachers increasingly trusted students and the communities they served.

That pattern is not a complete theology of leadership, but it is close enough to several kingdom instincts that Christian leaders should pay attention to it. Jesus consistently turns power outward. Paul understands leadership as equipping. The body of Christ depends upon the contribution of many members. Moses learns that responsible authority can be shared. Biblical freedom repeatedly becomes service rather than independence. Taken together, these themes provide a strong theological framework for appreciating what Caputo witnessed in one unusual school in the Florida Keys.

Conclusion

For the church, this may be the book’s most useful challenge. We can become very good at gathering people, teaching people, and organizing people while never actually forming them to carry responsibility in the kingdom. Jesus did something different. He called disciples close, formed them in community, entrusted them with real ministry, corrected them when they failed, and then sent them again. Discipleship was never simply the transfer of information. It was the formation of people who could increasingly participate in the life and mission of God.

That is why Caputo’s story has significance beyond Key Largo. Healthy leadership should eventually produce people who can lead, healthy teaching should produce people who can teach, and mature discipleship should produce disciples who can make disciples. A church that requires the constant presence of a few gifted leaders may be active and successful while still remaining spiritually immature. The New Testament imagines something much fuller: saints equipped for ministry, gifts released throughout the body, and ordinary people learning to carry extraordinary responsibility for the sake of others.

Perhaps the lasting gift of The Once and Future School is therefore not a particular educational model but a question every leader should be willing to ask: Are the people entrusted to us becoming more dependent upon our leadership, or are they becoming more capable of participating in the work God has given them?

The kingdom of God grows through formed people. The work of discipleship is to help form them.

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Endnotes

1. Walter Bauer, Frederick William Danker, William F. Arndt, and F. Wilbur Gingrich, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), s.vv. “κατακυριεύω” and “κατεξουσιάζω”; R. T. France, The Gospel of Mark, NIGTC (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 415
2. BDAG, s.v. “καταρτισμός”; Andrew T. Lincoln, Ephesians, WBC 42 (Dallas: Word, 1990), 252
3. Anthony C. Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians: A Commentary on the Greek Text, NIGTC (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), 918
4. Nahum M. Sarna, Exodus, JPS Torah Commentary (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1991), 128 & a slight reference to William H. C. Propp, Exodus 1–18, AB 2 (New York: Doubleday, 1999), 628
5. David A. deSilva, Perseverance in Gratitude: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary on the Epistle “to the Hebrews” (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), 436
6. Gordon D. Fee, Paul’s Letter to the Philippians, NICNT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 185
7. Edward Caputo, The Once and Future School: A Model for Democratic Leadership, Teacher Satisfaction and Student Success (Stuart, FL: Panthera Publishing, 2026).