The Unfinished Easter Morning

Comparing translations

How you render this one word determines the meaning of the whole paragraph. A translator has to decide, and the decision is already an interpretation. Readers deserve to know that a decision was made.（ゼパニヤ書 1:13）

Some people are consoled by this verse and others are wounded by it, often in the same room. The writer almost certainly did not anticipate that. It is left for readers to carry.

A note

Here is the conclusion, which is not an answer. I have decided to read this as a promise rather than a command, for the plain reason that I can live inside the first reading and not the second. Whether that is a legitimate reason I genuinely do not know.（バルク書 3:28-31）

8しかし、彼はみなぎる洪水であだを全く滅ぼし、 おのが敵を暗やみに追いやられる。

ナホム書 1:8（口語訳（日本語））

The text itself

Let me set the terms. This is not an argument about doctrinal correctness. It is one reader's account of what the text can be made to yield. I am going to leave the ending open on purpose.（歴代志上 2:18）

• Written out of a failed attempt to explain this passage to a child.
• No conclusions. The aim was only to get the shape of the question right.
• Written out of a failed attempt to explain this passage to a child.

Let me set the terms. This is not an argument about doctrinal correctness. It is one reader's account of what the text can be made to yield. I am going to leave the ending open on purpose.

• A by-product of sermon preparation, reworked into something readable.
• An attempt to read a famous passage all the way through without lifting it out of context.
• Written from the experience of being hurt by words drawn from this passage.
• One verse, read slowly, with one word held up to the light.

Anticipating the objection

Now set it back into its own century. What was the community that first heard this actually worried about? Simply imagining that changes the temperature of every line.（民数記 36:10-11）

31And the priests sit in their temples, having their clothes rent, and their heads and beards shaven, and nothing upon their heads.

エレミヤの手紙 1:31（Brenton 訳・七十人訳から（英語））

A word about ordinary life. I think about this passage in the kitchen and on the train, almost never in a pew. I have come to suspect that is not accidental.（Q資料 6:46）

64Wherefore it is neither to be supposed nor said that they are gods, seeing they are able neither to judge causes, nor to do good unto men.

エレミヤの手紙 1:64（Brenton 訳・七十人訳から（英語））

In an ordinary week

Finally, back to the text. No amount of commentary competes with the texture of the sentences themselves. Read it out loud once before you read anything else about it.

（ヨハネによる福音書 第4章）