😇 Holy Week 1 (Easter)

Readings: Jeremiah 31:1-6; Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24; Acts 10:34-43; Matthew 28:1-10

From the TRNG Room:

• How to Read Scripture Like You’re Still in the Field

Central Thesis/Theme:

Easter isn't just about an empty tomb — it's about geography. The resurrection lands in Galilee, the district of the nations, the place of shame and military defeat, the region the southern establishment tried to forget. I'm arguing that the resurrection is announced first to the margins, to the people who lost, to the places written off. The north got bulldozed first and the risen Lord shows up there first. That's not coincidence. That's the whole argument.

Key Textual/Historical Insights:

My rendering of Elohim as "Gods" and Yahweh Elohim as "Lord of Gods" follows the actual Hebrew construction — plural noun, singular verb — pointing back to El Elyon, the highest God acknowledged even by the pre-Israelite priest-king Melchizedek in Genesis 14. Jeremiah splits this construction deliberately mid-lament. Meanwhile, the name Joshua (Yeshua) is the passive participle of yasha, salvation — God saves, baked right into the name. And martus in Acts 10 is a legal term: a witness who testifies, not necessarily one who dies.

Theological Argument:

The resurrection witness in Acts 10 is mediated through Cornelius — a soldier, an outsider — unlocking Peter's vision and dismantling the dietary laws that kept Jews from table fellowship with Gentiles. Luke almost certainly knows what he's doing when he notes the risen Christ appeared to selected witnesses who ate and drank with him, carving out space for Paul while keeping the record honest. The outsider with great faith keeps showing up as the one who shows insiders how faith works. That's not a peripheral point. That's the engine of the whole gospel.

Contemporary Application:

I've been sitting with Jeremiah's audacity — watching everything fall apart and still telling people to pick up their instruments and march out in joyful assembly. If you feel like you're living in a time of lamentation, read Jeremiah. You won't feel better, but the world will make more sense. The resurrection story isn't sanitized triumph; it's hope announced from the places of shame and defeat. My paraphrase project — rendering "Sabbath" as "the restful day" and "Jesus" as "Joshua" — is an attempt to get back to what the text was doing before centuries of editorial drift buried it.

Questions Raised:

• What does it mean theologically that the resurrection is announced first in Galilee — the region of military defeat and ethnic shame — rather than Jerusalem?

• If martus (martyr/witness) is fundamentally a legal term, how does that reframe what it means to bear witness to the resurrection in ordinary life?

• Luke's careful hedging around Paul's Damascus road experience — is that literary tact, theological caution, or something else?

• Does rendering "Sabbath" as "the restful day" recover something lost, or does it risk erasing the freight that word carries for Jewish readers?

• How does the Cornelius episode function as a military hermeneutic — what does it tell us that the key to unlocking Peter's vision came through a soldier?

Reflection

Good morning, or welcome to Fighting Words. This is Brother Logan Isaac, broadcasting from the Chapter House in Albany, Oregon.

Our readings for the first week of Easter — Easter Season, Eastertide, Resurrection Sunday — come from Jeremiah 31, Psalm 118, Acts 10, and Matthew 28. I deliberately avoided all the vigils and the Holy Saturday material. This is straight resurrection Sunday.

Easter is really important, but I think Good Friday and Holy Saturday are just as important. Until I'm personally prepared to do the Triduum more fully, I'm going to focus on the Sundays — not necessarily on feasts, but at least the Sundays. Even though in most Christian traditions, Easter is basically the highest holy day you get. That's actually where the word "holiday" comes from: holy day.

Jeremiah 31

Let me talk about how I've rendered this text. "Gods" in parentheses is how I render Elohim, which is the plural form of the Canaanite word El, meaning God. It literally means "gods," but the Hebrew uses a plural noun with singular verbs and conjugation — so "Gods" becomes a proper name. When I render Yahweh Elohim elsewhere, I translate it as "Lord of Gods," because Yahweh is Adonai — Lord in the Greek is Kyrios — a title for the one above you in rank. The "Lord God" of most English translations becomes "Lord of Gods."

Whatever the greatest power is — in Genesis 14, the God worshipped in Jerusalem by Melchizedek, who is a priest and king of Jerusalem — that's the God Abraham first hears of: El Elyon, the Highest God, the God of Gods. "Gods" becomes this title, and here in Jeremiah, right in the middle of the destruction of the first Temple, Jeremiah splits that construction and says, "at that time, says Yahweh, I will be Gods — Elohim — to all the families of Israel." I want to make sure that registers in English translation.

One of the things I noticed across all these readings is the focus on a place that has been in darkness: Galilee. Ha-Galil, which means "district" in Hebrew — the Galilee of the nations, the district of the non-Jews.

In Jeremiah 31, verse 2: Thus says the Lord — I found a welcoming place in the wilderness — not welcoming, very scary and chaotic — with them, the people who fell by the sword. Jeremiah is a southerner, from the Kingdom of Judah. The people who fell by the sword of the northern ten tribes, of Ha-Galil — the home of our military tribes Zebulun and Naphtali — were totally decimated. The place of shame up north. The place that is in darkness according to Isaiah 9 and Matthew 4.

Do you see what's happening? The north — the place made ashamed both by its own failure and by the south's refusal to reckon with it — is where Jeremiah is rebuilding from rubble. He's already looking at Samaria, representative of destruction and embarrassment, but also of military might. Think Vietnam and Korea. Think Iraq, depending on where you sit. The holy and the profane kissing each other in the north. And Jeremiah is watching it happen again in the south, in Jerusalem, and asking why. We were supposed to be so mighty. We've fallen. Clearly we did something wrong.

And yet he still has the audacity to say, take your instruments and go forth in joyful assembly. Jeremiah is doing something incredible. He's one of my favorite prophets lately — not because he's a prophet, but because of what he does in his own despair. Lamentations is historically attributed to Jeremiah, and if you feel like we live in a time of lamentation, read some Jeremiah. You won't feel better, but the world will make more sense.

Psalm 118

I've talked about this in a prior episode. Verse 14 — the Lord is my strength and my song, and he has become my salvation — is straight out of Exodus 15, the Song of the Sea, one of the oldest songs in Israel. They've watched a violent, good God utterly destroy the forces of evil, alienation, and oppression, and their response is: we didn't do that. We let it happen. The God of nature destroyed our enemies, and it wasn't because we were entitled or hoarding — it was because we were the better people, and nature prevailed.

The name of Christ — Joshua — is right there in the Hebrew: Yeshua. That's the passive participle of yasha, salvation. Joshua means "God saves." From the Semitic root yasha plus the theophoric Ya — it becomes "God's salvation," the thing we cannot control. Call it nature, call it the cosmos, call it El, call it Yahweh — it has prevailed.

In verse 23, I deliberately used "marvelous" because I want you to recall the centurion of great faith, who I call Captain Marvel. The Greek is thaumazō — Jesus marveled at this outsider who showed more faith than the insiders. And "marvelous" in verse 23 of the psalm uses a thaumazō derivative in the Greek of the Septuagint. I want you to see all these connections between the military and the reorientation of what scripture tells us a military is for.

Acts 10

This is one of my favorite passages. It's about Cornelius, one of the centurions — and it lands right here in the Easter readings. After Cornelius explains his vision to Peter, Peter has a breakthrough. Through Cornelius, Peter has the keys to unlock something he didn't understand. Aha: an outsider of great faith is showing us how to do faith better than the insiders. Clearly, God shows no favoritism.

Later, in Acts 11, this becomes the deconstruction of the dietary taboos that made it nearly impossible for first-century Jews — including Joshua and his followers — to eat with outsiders. As a direct result of a vision unlocked by a soldier — an outsider — those walls come down.

Luke, who is a friend of Paul's, is doing something I can't help but read as a backhanded compliment. He says God raised Joshua on the third day and offered him visibly — not to all the people (laos, the crowds) — but to witnesses selected by God, specifically those of us who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead. Paul did not do that. Paul never eats and drinks with the risen Lord on the road to Damascus. He hears from Christ. So Luke, I have to believe, knows exactly what he's doing: you're in the fold, Paul, but let's be really clear that God mostly selected people who knew Christ before he died — though he may also select people outside that inner circle.

He commands us to preach to the people — the same laos — and to testify. The Greek here is martus or martyreo: a legal term, a witness subpoenaed to testify on behalf of the defense or the prosecution. When you think "martyr," please let go of the idea that it always means death. Many martyrs did not die. They testified with their living lives. They were called before the court of public opinion and they testified to the power of the Hebrew God without being killed for it. Francis of Assisi. Martin of Tours. Two of my favorites. Get the death-imagery out of martyrdom. There are all different kinds.

Matthew 28

"Sabbath" is a Hebrew term — Shabbat — which takes rest and makes it a proper noun. I've rendered it "the restful day" instead, because the word has carried weight for thousands of years that I think a day of rest probably shouldn't carry. It's supposed to be the opposite of heavy.

The rest is the boilerplate resurrection story, which I didn't do too much with. You'll notice I changed Jesus to Joshua — undoing Jerome's editorial decision in the Vulgate that I think has led English speakers and Romance language speakers astray. And instead of "death," I just wrote "the big sleep," because I think that's what the Hebrew symbolism is doing. To shake up our meaning-making systems, we have to get back to the intent and the original audience of this stuff.

The oldest copies we have are in Greek — the Septuagint — which is an outsider text organizing Hebrew meaning in a way that expanded it like gas on a fire. The LXX predates the Masoretic text by roughly a millennium: the oldest Masoretic manuscripts date to around 900 CE, while we have good reason to believe the Septuagint dates at least to the second century BCE. I might be accused of antisemitism for preferring it, but I'm just an outsider reading this incredible text that is grounded in Hebrew but has been popularized through Greek for an inseparably Hellenistic cultural genealogy. As a quote-unquote Westerner, the Septuagint is more native to my tradition than the ninth-century Masoretic text anyway.

That's Easter for grunts — or at least the Easter Sunday reading. I appreciate you listening. I know I didn't post this on the date listed; I'm recording this on the 23rd of April, so it's been a while. But this is a project I want to do publicly. I want to explain why I'm paraphrasing these texts the way I am, because after three years — once I have the whole lectionary cycle done — I'm going to try to make it into my own full paraphrase. I'll have another half of the Bible still to go through.

But the more I dig into this, the more I wrestle with the Word and fight with it — nonviolently — the more amazed I am at this faith I hadn't seen in twenty or thirty years of searching. I first became religiously interested after I was arrested for shoplifting. You can read about it in Reborn on the Fourth of July, my first book. I recognized then that the systems we've inherited, especially as English speakers, are failing. The more I hold on to the heel of Torah and the prophets, the more grounded and anchored I feel in reality.

I hope you feel that too — not because of me, but because this text has incredible power. There's just no other way around it. Thanks for listening, and thanks for holding me accountable.