😇 Holy Week 2

Readings: Acts 2:14, 22-32; Psalm 16; 1 Peter 1:3-9; John 20:19-31

From the TRNG Room:

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

Central Thesis/Theme:

Seeing, hearing, and touching are not passive — they are the ancient technologies of belief. In this Holy Week 2 episode, I'm tracing how the lectionary readings push us to ask: what does it actually take to believe? From the indigenous Semitic practice of the Ro'eh (the Seer) to Thomas demanding to feel the nail marks, I'm arguing that real faith is sensory, embodied, and scar-marked. It doesn't float above the world — it presses its fingers into the wounds.

Key Textual/Historical Insights:

Before the Hebrew prophets were called Navi (spokespeople), they were called Ro'eh — Seers. That's an older, more indigenous term rooted in perception and diagnosis, not proclamation. The Greek tradition gave us "prophet" as a temple function, a job title. But the Semitic tradition said: first you see, then you interpret, then you speak. This is where hermeneutics comes from — Hermes, the divine herald who had to translate between Olympus and earth. And it's exactly what Pentecost collapses: all those layers of seeing, speaking, and hearing smashed together across cultures and languages.

Theological Argument:

Thomas — also called "the Twin" — isn't a failure of faith. He's the completion of it. He doesn't just want to hear the report or see the risen figure; he wants to feel the typos, the imprint, the mark. The same Greek word used for the Mark of Cain in Genesis 4. The same logic applies: scars don't erase, they identify. I draw on the Vita Martini here — when the devil appeared to St. Martin dressed as a gleaming Christ, Martin's test was simple: show me your scars. Believers are people who show their scars. Hypocrites are people who refuse to.

Contemporary Application:

The civilizing, Western, Hellenic imagination gave us gods who were impassable — immune to harm, beyond sensation, incapable of death. That imagination is still running in a lot of churches. We want a faith that doesn't bleed, a community that doesn't limp, leaders who can't be wounded. But the gospel of Joshua, Mary's son, is exactly the opposite. Mortality is passable, corruptible, spoilable — and that's the glory. Because what distinguishes animal life from plant life is the capacity to heal, to be renewed, to be resurrected from injury. Scars are not shameful. They're proof of life.

Questions Raised:

• What is lost when we inherit the Greek word "prophet" instead of the Hebrew Ro'eh — and does that word choice change how we understand biblical authority?

• Is there a meaningful phonetic or conceptual connection between the Hebrew tribe of Simeon and the Greek sēmeion (sign)? What would that linkage reveal?

• How does the Tower of Babel narrative function as the theological backstory to Pentecost — and does Pentecost reverse Babel or do something more complicated?

• What does Thomas's demand to touch the wounds tell us about the relationship between embodied experience and faith that purely verbal proclamation can't deliver?

• If showing your scars is the mark of a genuine believer, what are the structural features of religious communities that reward concealment instead?

Reflection

Welcome to Fighting Words. This is Brother Logan Isaac, broadcasting from the Chapter House in Albany, Oregon. The readings for Holy Week 2 include Acts 2, Psalm 16, 1 Peter 1, and the Gospel of John chapter 20. The theme — the thing I noticed — is seeing and believing. In Acts, they're hearing. But seeing is, anthropologically speaking, more highly valued than hearing in a certain way, and I'll say more about that.

Even in the Hebrew Bible, before the prophets were called Navi in Hebrew, they were called Ro'eh — Seers. That's a more indigenous term. When we say "prophet," we're inheriting a Greek word that's trying to put language to a Hebrew concept. That's a Hellenic, Western, quote-unquote civilized framework. But before civilization, before the Western mind got uppity, there were indigenous tribal folkways and lifeways. What a Hellenic imagination might call a "prophet" — a religious function adjacent to the temples of the various gods — wasn't quite that. It wasn't a priest. It was a healer, someone who diagnosed what they saw in another person or in society. In the Greek imaginarium, speaking wasn't always part of the job. In indigenous cultures, including the Hebrew Bible and Semitic proto-civilized cultures, the speaking was less important than the perceiving.

Perceiving comes first. You can't diagnose something you haven't already seen. Then once you see it, you interpret it — whether that's a dream, a real event, or a person's personality. First you receive it, you sense the thing external to you. Then you interpret it. This is where we get the word hermeneutic: interpretation, translation, coming from the Greek god Hermes, the herald of the gods. Hermes served as the spokesperson between humanity and Mount Olympus. He had to take messages between the divine realm and the human realm, and you'd need a hermeneutic — you'd need a Hermes figure — to translate divine perfection into human frailty. Without that translation, you'd go crazy. And so prophets were seen as crazy because they didn't adhere to social norms — that was the civilized world looking down on the ancient art of healing, sight, diagnosis, and prescription.

So Ro'eh, Seer, is the more ancient form. Navi, which predates the term or gives rise to it, means spokesperson for God. The Navi is a later iteration of the earlier Seer, the Ro'eh. So when seeing, speaking, and hearing all get wrapped up together — like in Acts, at Pentecost — what's going on is a smashing-together of things. A smashing-together of cultures. Language is the thing we all do to make sense of our world, and it's unique to our inherited culture.

In Psalm 16 — if you were reading the NIV — you would have heard the word "inheritance" over and over again. We inherit our culture. You begin speaking your native tongue before you even have memories. You can't build memories until you have language. That's why you can't remember being born: you didn't have any framework through which to understand it. You could not absorb or process the experience. And that's what's going on in Acts 2 — the connection between seeing and speaking and Psalm 16.

Keep that in mind — seeing, speaking, belief — as we go into 1 Peter 1 and John 20, because they're different. They're different authors, different communities. The Petrine literature is very different from the Johannine. And a gospel is different from a letter. But throughout both there are these links, these hyperlinks, these connection points between sight and belief, speech and belief, sensory input and belief.

In 1 Peter 1, it talks about the proof of faith — that faith may be found to result in something. What gets us to the point of belief, which in Greek is pistis? And pisteuō is the verb, "to believe." I was doing some wordplay in my mind — I don't know if it fully links up — but the Greek word for "sign" throughout the gospels, sēmeion, is very similar to the Hebrew tribe of Simeon. I haven't looked into that connection yet, but Simeon is a unique tribal group geographically because it is entirely enclosed by Judah. When the civil war happens, Simeon gets absorbed — diluted into Judah. It ceases to be. You might count it as one of the lost tribes, but it wasn't lost; it was assimilated. The Kingdom of Judah didn't differentiate between the tribes, which would have included Levi in Jerusalem and Hebron, a city of refuge that stopped existing under the Davidic southern kingship. Anyway, I'd be interested to explore whether there's a phonetic similarity between the Hebrew tribe of Simeon and the Greek sēmeion, which means "sign."

But there is a connection, I think, between 1 Peter and John 20 in how they both ask: how do we get to the place we call belief? How do we follow this Messiah figure without it devolving into just new dogma — which is what Paul is afraid of, just a new law — or into everybody doing whatever they want in their own dialects? Remember, the Tower of Babel is the paradigm, the parable in Genesis, for why we all speak different languages. The ancient Hebraic answer was: we all spoke one language, and we thought we could gang up on God. And God said, nope — you don't get to speak the same language anymore. That's the implied message. And then fast-forward to Pentecost, where suddenly we're back to the pre-Babel unification of signs and symbols — the study of semiotics, which also derives from sēmeion.

The Acts reading takes the place of the Old Testament reading. I think this happens every Holy Week — there's no Hebrew Bible reading other than the psalm. Anyway, we get to Thomas, who is also called "the Twin" or "the Double." He doesn't just want to hear, as happened in Acts. He doesn't just want to see, as in 1 Peter or elsewhere in John. He wants to feel. He wants to feel the scars. The text doesn't say "scars" — it says typos, which is the same Greek word used for the Mark of Cain in Genesis 4. Typos means a type, an imprint, a pattern pressed into something, so that everyone who sees Cain knows he is human, he is protected, but he is corruptible.

So the typos of the nail — the mark, the imprint, the pattern of the nail — Thomas wants to see it and put his finger in it. And in the side, it would have been the spear-mark from the soldier we know as Longinus, who looks up and declares, "Surely this is the Son of God," or "an innocent man," and stabs Jesus — Joshua — in the side. Water and blood splash out. Thomas wants to see both marks: the hands and the side.

I love this story because I didn't realize it until recently, but there's an episode from the Life of St. Martin — which you can find at christiansoldiers.org/vita, I believe. The Vita Martini is an old hagiography of St. Martin of Tours. In one episode, the devil — the great adversary — is dressed up as Jesus. The text clues you in: he's wearing a crown, he's bright and shiny. He comes to harass Martin, and Martin hesitates. He says, essentially: I'm not sure you are who you claim to be. Let me see your scars. It was in Latin, not Greek, but it is this beautiful recollection of the logic: Jesus has scars. If you can't show me your scars — if you're too proud — I don't believe you are Jesus. Because Jesus the Christ, the Messiah, was killed. And those scars didn't disappear. They're reminders. They're signs. They're patterns, typos, marks that help everyone see what kind of person this is.

The enemy — and I don't think there's any flesh-and-blood enemy; the enemy of believers is the forces of evil, the things we do in human society that isolate and alienate us from one another and undo the creative act of good togetherness — the enemy is not the type that shows scars. But believers are not the type of people who refuse to show their scars. If there's anything that makes you quote-unquote Christian, it is that you do not hide your scars. You do not hide your mistakes. You do not think you are incorruptible.

The pretenders, the hypocrites, are marked with a pattern of their own: they will not show you their wounds. These are the people who want to be gods who cannot suffer. Impassability is the classical term — the Greek gods were impassable. You could not hurt them by stabbing or shooting or slapping them. They had no sensory receptors, and you couldn't kill them. They lived forever. Meanwhile, mortality is what made humanity distinct. Mortality is passable. Mortality is corruptible and spoilable. But what makes animal life distinct from plant life is this: when you are hurt and decay threatens you, you can actually heal. You can be renewed. You can be resurrected and recover from your injury. Sensory input and harm are unique to humanity.

If you think you can be a believer without scars or faults — we may see them, but we won't hold them against you as fellow believers. And that's what I think this series of texts is helping us remember: to undo some of the civilizing, domesticating things that make us forget the great power and beauty we encounter when we see the good news embodied in someone like Joshua, Mary's son.