The civil war into which Israel falls is not a consequence of this system but its very mechanism. When the state becomes a self-originating polity, and no longer the servant and heir of an law which came before it from something beyond it, all confidence in its own government falters. Every voice of opposition is interpreted as a voice of a rival. When the ideal king of Deuteronomy 17 rules having received and recorded the law from the Levites, dissent does not merit violence. The voice of dissent does not equal a contestation of the authority of the Law.

On Shavuot, grain, wine, wine, oil were brought-in and a feast was made. So also on Pentecost, the oil of the Spirit is poured-out, the wine of the Spirit if given, and the harvest of the Gospel is annually celebrated.

After the Fall Adam and Eve were told that Pain and household division, frustration and toil, futility and thistles, would be the fruit of their labors. Volpone’s answer, it seems, is to avoid labor altogether. The irony is that the more he seeks to avoid the thistles and futility of labor, the more deeply the thorns and frustration sting him.

Dialogue, biblically speaking, is glory. To be brought into speech with God and to share in communion with one another, this is glory.

Drawing himself up to his full height he speaks: “I invited you on board — but only on conditions. I am the only man allowed to carry arms on this ship. You are not in Haiti now.”

Greene writes “That phrase spoken with conviction really disconcerted the officer. It was like a magic spell — he felt unsafe. He looked around at all of us, he looked around at the cabin. '‘Pas a Haiti?’ he exclaimed…”

“Being real” is something of a cultural proverb, an uncontested truth. It is often set in juxtaposition into “being a hypocrite.” But perhaps these nice boundaries are mislaid, perhaps this dichotomy is not quite true, not quite the full picture. Perhaps this seemingly settled position needs to be unsettled —if only a bit— by the destabilizing force of the truth.

It sounds like a joke: “You know that film where Tom Hanks plays the ‘fixer’ for the Irish mafia in the Midwest? Never heard of it? Oh, it’s directed by the guy who directed the two Bond films,Skyfall (2012) and Spectre (2015) and features Paul Newman as the mobster, Daniel Craig as his spoiled son, and Jude law as a necro-pathic killer and photographer.”

During that first Holy Week everyone, it feels like, keeps asking Jesus “who are you?” “tell us plainly, are you the Christ?” "Who do you think you are?” An indeterminacy surrounds Jesus. In the brilliant obviousness of the mystery, we are indeterminate: who is he?

Why all this physical work? Isn’t it the case that what’s really important about Easter is the message of the simple Gospel? The idea? Has Easter become materialist? Didn’t Jesus come to liberate us from the crude trappings of the world and the flesh? Isn’t this the celebration of the victory of the spiritual over the physical?

The way we look at things matters just as much as, if not more than, the thing we are looking at. You can think of several anecdotal illustrations: the optical illusion (“is it a chalice or two people about to kiss?”); the Rorschach test (“what do you see in this inkblot?”); the fight between rivals (“he looked at me funny”); the offense between strangers on a bus (“hey, what are you lookin’ at?”).