they marvelled

With the start of the new school year, I've been thinking about student/teacher dynamics, and about academic genealogies, and how we become like our teachers in some regards. Recently one of my friends submitted an essay of hers to an academic journal, and in the report she got back, the reader recommended she check out the work of another scholar, who is in fact her dissertation director. The student's worked pointed back to the instructor's. I think these signs of influence are in all of us. We absorb the thought patterns and expressions and mannerisms of our instructors, and I'm sure this happens for better and for worse at times. But in reading Acts this morning, I came across this kind of interesting foil to the other forms of influence I'm considering here:

Now when they [the priests, the captain of the temple, and the Sadducees] saw the boldness of Peter and John, and perceived that they were unlearned and ignorant men, they marvelled; and they took knowledge of them, that they had been with Jesus.

I like how their boldness and message are so clearly not of them that they point to the supernatural influence of Jesus, which is different from other kinds of influence. It's not that he has educated them in the conventional sense. They are unlearned and ignorant. But they have a wisdom that is not of them. And their boldness is startling too. This is all happening just a few weeks after Peter denied Jesus before pretty much the same group of people. But Jesus has changed them and is changing them, making them more like him in a way that doesn't have to do with their abilities or knowledge. Pretty exciting stuff.

Also, apropos of being like Jesus, I watched the movie "Of Gods and Men," last weekend, which is about Trappist monks in Algeria, who have to decide how to respond when terrorists start taking over the area. Also pretty great. I recommend it. Another instance of behavior that I think can only come from being with Jesus.

Astonied

I ran across this great archaic word--astonied, past tense of astony--this morning in Ezra 9, twice in as many verses. In my ear I at first heard the [o] vowel as long, as in stone, but it turns out to be an [a], as in astonished. The definition I liked the best was "briefly deprived of the power to act." When was the last time anything made me sit astonied all day? And then Ezra's prayer of contrition at the time of the evening sacrifice. It makes me sit astonied, for a full five minutes, and long for God to stir me, us, with His reality...

Not even Solomon

Reading 1 Kings 4-6 this morning, which describes the tremendous prosperity Solomon enjoyed at the beginning of his reign. It gives new meaning to Jesus' words in Matthew 6 about how the lilies are arrayed in greater glory than he. I love the priorities here.

And I liked 4:25: "And Judah and Israel dwelt safely, every man under his vine and under his fig tree, from Dan even to Beersheba, all the days of Solomon." Not even Wendell Barry, in all his glory, can write an agrarian dream like that.