Quote
To be honest, I don’t know what Jesus had in mind. But I do
know something about what this saying of his did to me. And what
it did led me to say what I said.
I take it as axiomatic that Jesus’s saying is not a static picture
upon which I ought to reflect. It is not (in any straightforward
way) a transparent representation or object of contemplation.
Rather, my assumption is that the text is itself an agent, an actor, a will—something more like a computer program than a still
cut from a movie reel. Jesus’s saying is meant to do something, to
make something happen, to change something. The text is an operation. It’s a bit of open-source code. It’s a plug-in that needs to
be run.
But, strangers in a strange world, we’ve got compatibility
problems, cross-platform issues that require the text to be translated and then creatively recompiled. If we want it to run—rather
than sit there like a museum piece—then we’re going to have to
port the text onto the kinds of platforms we’ve got available. We’re
going to have to render the text sufficiently pliable to cross that
gap.Share
Sign In to comment on this quote
