Jason Byassee > Quotes

“I am convinced that the Bible is a delight and that studying the Bible is about learning to see that delight.”
― Jason Byassee, Surprised by Jesus Again: Reading the Bible in Communion with the Saints

“Every Christian in every age has been tempted to paper over scripture’s cracks, explain away its oddities, show it’s no different or more demanding than what we hearers already think we know about God and the world. This is a mistake. Scripture is spectacularly odd.”
― Jason Byassee, Surprised by Jesus Again: Reading the Bible in Communion with the Saints

“God does not demand anything of us that God has not already done. In fact, God does not just ask us to do what God has done; God enables us to take that step.”
― Jason Byassee, Surprised by Jesus Again: Reading the Bible in Communion with the Saints

“The gospel he [St. Paul] received already had someone else’s fingerprints on it. And this is nothing to lament. Christianity is the sort of gift you cannot receive without giving it away. Our fingerprints add to the many layers of those already there. And here’s the most glorious thing of all—God has fingerprints. God is a Jew from first-century Palestine.”
― Jason Byassee, Surprised by Jesus Again: Reading the Bible in Communion with the Saints

“God, on Christian lights, isn’t just high, lofty, far away, distant, unsullied with us. God, in Christian thought, is Jewish. Human. Not just great and holy but little and lowly. ... God becomes our neighbour. ... If it takes a neighbour’s desire to set ours alight, then the one living and true God will become that flesh-and-blood neighbour.”
― Jason Byassee, Surprised by Jesus Again: Reading the Bible in Communion with the Saints

“God will stop at nothing to get through to us, overwhelming us with symbols, piling them up one on another without carefully codifying whether and how they all make sense. One thing they are not is tragically empty, distant, cold. They are humming, hot-blooded, and full of life.”
― Jason Byassee, Surprised by Jesus Again: Reading the Bible in Communion with the Saints

“One reason we misunderstand allegory is that we moderns think that reading is a matter of garnering information. For ancient Christians, reading scripture is a matter of being changed from one degree of glory to another, of being transformed (2 Cor. 3:18).”
― Jason Byassee, Surprised by Jesus Again: Reading the Bible in Communion with the Saints

“We are far past liberals’ suggestion that we take scripture ‘seriously but not literally,’ or conservatives’ that it all has to be one-dimensionally true, like a newspaper or science book. Here, Christ’s word has to become true in us. Origen’s acts of interpretation show that to be open to the words of scripture is to have one’s own soul laid bare, operated on, and returned to the wholeness. No wonder liberals, conservatives, ancients, and moderns alike are uncomfortable with Origen. He points out that Christ is wielding a scalpel. And we’re the ones under the knife.”
― Jason Byassee, Surprised by Jesus Again: Reading the Bible in Communion with the Saints

“All we can do is work on our own delight. And encourage others' delight. Teach with the sort of passion that marks the best teachers.”
― Jason Byassee, Surprised by Jesus Again: Reading the Bible in Communion with the Saints

“If you can read the Song of Songs without blushing a little, you’re doing it wrong, and Origen wants us to do more than blush.”
― Jason Byassee, Surprised by Jesus Again: Reading the Bible in Communion with the Saints

“Delight is a social phenomenon. It is imitative. We delight in what we see others delighting in—especially those we admire. ... All other projects of group enthusiasm are pale imitations of what the church is meant to be—a body of believers incandescent with Christ’s love.”
― Jason Byassee, Surprised by Jesus Again: Reading the Bible in Communion with the Saints

“Modern, technique-based ways of reading have their place, but reading scripture is not complete until the church loves God and neighbor more.”
― Jason Byassee, Surprised by Jesus Again: Reading the Bible in Communion with the Saints

“Rowan Williams analogizes between Mary and other believers. When any of us trusts, things get born. New life comes. Things that were not there before are now there, nearly miraculously. Mary trusts so much she gets pregnant.”
― Jason Byassee, Surprised by Jesus Again: Reading the Bible in Communion with the Saints

“With an eye trained for finding this God, an ear tuned to his voice, we learn to find him again and again. Every beloved loves her lover in his specificity—his face, his hands, his voice— and love leads her to “act in all respect and regulate her every movement in a manner designed to please the man she loves”.”
― Jason Byassee, Surprised by Jesus Again: Reading the Bible in Communion with the Saints

“Christians throughout the ages have sought the wisdom of our earliest teachers, those who were closer in space and time to Jesus. They are heroes we have in common among denominations, unlike later saints who are treasured by one or the other church but not by all. For the sake of this book, the church’s earliest teachers are like odd and strange aunts and uncles in an extended family. They are embarassing at family gatherings. It’s harder to figure out what to talk to them about than it is with someone whom you would choose voluntarily as a friend. And yet these unchosen cranks make you you. And if you can overcome that initial awkwardness, there is wisdom there, and even love.”
― Jason Byassee, Surprised by Jesus Again: Reading the Bible in Communion with the Saints

“One of the first things we learn from our earliest teachers in the church is that the bible has a purpose, a point, a goal, a telos. It wants to save us. Or rather God wants to save us, and the whole world that God created in the first place, and all who bear the gospel to us leave their fingerprints on it as they transmit goodness to us.”
― Jason Byassee, Surprised by Jesus Again: Reading the Bible in Communion with the Saints

“Desire is what makes us human. No wonder—God planted it in us to lure us back to God’s self.”
― Jason Byassee, Surprised by Jesus Again: Reading the Bible in Communion with the Saints

“When we read the Bible christologically, we are not smuggling Jesus in -- we are discovering him there, to our and others' delight. To say otherwise is to fail to read Paul or Luke well. It's to miss that all creation hollers praise. It is to leave the world ungraced, uncharged by the grandeur of God, with no witness to the One who creates and redeems it in Christ.”
― Jason Byassee, Surprised by Jesus Again: Reading the Bible in Communion with the Saints

“The desire to become a different sort of person is precious. It rarely happens to us. But one way it can happen is if someone we admire sees in us a better sort of person than we presently are. And praise it, until it comes into being. This is finally what church is for. It is what reading the Bible is for: becoming a different sort of a person. The sort of person the church calls a saint.”
― Jason Byassee, Surprised by Jesus Again: Reading the Bible in Communion with the Saints

“But Jesus is stubbornly, ferociously committed to his church. ... he'll be there. That's the batch of people through whom he is redeeming the world, impossible as that seems.”
― Jason Byassee, Surprised by Jesus Again: Reading the Bible in Communion with the Saints

“The key to interpretation, as Augustine once told Deogratias, is your delight as an interpreter. Your delight is what your listeners will notice. It is what will return you to the text for more. It is what has a chance to draw in your hearers. It is the tether God has left in your soul with which to draw you to God’s self, and others through you.”
― Jason Byassee, Surprised by Jesus Again: Reading the Bible in Communion with the Saints

“The only way that apple trees, lilies, marriage and sex, gender and procreation, or even Bibles or language can reveal to us so much about the nature of God is that they’re good gifts that bear the imprint of their divine Maker.”
― Jason Byassee, Surprised by Jesus Again: Reading the Bible in Communion with the Saints

“If you want to know where God is, look where God is unendingly sharing the divine presence. The space between us and the bible isn’t a tragically empty vacuum. It is a resplendent party, full of angels and saints and not a few rogues, and there’s a place for you and me. The host is Jesus alone.”
― Jason Byassee, Surprised by Jesus Again: Reading the Bible in Communion with the Saints

“A puzzle is something you figure out and you’re done with—a crossword, sudoku, a Rubik’s cube. A mystery is more like the face of someone you love. The more you know, the more there is to be known, and the more you want to know. ... a mystery has no bottom.”
― Jason Byassee, Surprised by Jesus Again: Reading the Bible in Communion with the Saints

“St. Augustine imagines standing on tiptoes, trying to catch a glimpse of a God who is unbound by time and space, who knows all, is all-powerful, and is entirely unbearably good. We can’t imagine such a God. All our thoughts are bounded by time, space, weakness, our own sinfulness. But we can just brush up against the underside of such thoughts as we reach reach reach . . . and then we trip over the crucified slave who is washing our feet.”
― Jason Byassee, Surprised by Jesus Again: Reading the Bible in Communion with the Saints

“This [the Lord’s Supper] is a strange meal indeed, in which Jesus is the host and also the guest and also the food.”
― Jason Byassee, Surprised by Jesus Again: Reading the Bible in Communion with the Saints

“... the nature of desire is the same. We notice others’ desire. It shapes ours. ... Desire is what makes us human. No wonder—God planted it in us to lure us back to God’s self.”
― Jason Byassee, Surprised by Jesus Again: Reading the Bible in Communion with the Saints

“Reading the Bible, for Christians, is a matter of expecting to be surprised by Jesus again.”
― Jason Byassee, Surprised by Jesus Again: Reading the Bible in Communion with the Saints

“The point of the Bible isn't to learn what it says. The point of going to church isn't to be more religious. The point of both is to be made into nothing but love of God and neighbor.”
― Jason Byassee, Surprised by Jesus Again: Reading the Bible in Communion with the Saints

“Our delight is tickled as we see Christ concealed in the Old and revealed in the New.”
― Jason Byassee, Surprised by Jesus Again: Reading the Bible in Communion with the Saints