Hesed Words
Longer pastoral and theological writing — the questions that take more than a morning to work through.
A companion to An Interview with a Saint. My sister Ruth calls herself the black sheep of the family — and has quietly been the backbone of a church and a prison ministry for over a decade, without ever filing any of it under a category. On the two words we keep in our pockets for people, and the one Jesus refused to be embarrassed by.
Luke 15 · Norm Reed Download PDFThe word arrives already furnished — Francis, Teresa, held at a distance so the rest of us are let off. The New Testament's word for saint, hagioi, is almost always plural: not one figure but a room full of ordinary ones. A recorded conversation with the author's sister Jessica, about a week spent training to care for people with AIDS thirty years ago, and what it means that nobody is a saint alone.
Romans 1:7 · Philippians 1:1 · Norm Reed Download PDFA young man in Zechariah's second vision goes out to survey Jerusalem, and is stopped — the city will not hold still to be measured. What that reversal of the demolition-line has to do with a burned man in a prison visits room, a tablet with a poor signal, and the sentence that took fourteen years to get truer rather than easier: grace is not grace if you don't know the offence.
Zechariah 1–2 · Ephesians 3 · Norm Reed Download PDFMost vows to God are made in a car park or a waiting room, and they all have the same shape: if you get me out of this, I will — which assumes a trade. The obligation is real; what is misplaced is what the obligation is for. On what a neder was, why Ecclesiastes warns against making one lightly, and what Jesus was actually objecting to.
Psalm 61 · Ecclesiastes 5 · Matthew 5 · Norm Reed Download PDFPsalm 58 is a psalm most Christians have never heard read aloud. Read alongside Psalm 82 and Matthew 23, it turns out to be saying what the gospel says — that authority given to protect the vulnerable, turned and used against them, has a name. Not a text the gospel improved on. A text that says what the gospel says.
Psalm 58 · Matthew 23 · Norm Reed Download PDFThe Greek word the Septuagint reaches for when translating hesed never appears in John's Gospel — not once in twenty-one chapters. But grace and truth, said twice in four verses at the very start, are almost certainly hesed we'emet in Greek clothing. The word doesn't go missing. It gets spent, once, and then John makes us watch it for twenty chapters.
John 1:14–17 · Norm Reed Download PDFDaniel 11–12 has cost the church more peace than almost anything else in the Old Testament. Four broad readings, each guarding something real, and not one of them defending a date. The book itself says who reads it rightly — not the one with the best chronology, but the one being refined.
Daniel 11–12 · Norm Reed Download PDFNebuchadnezzar on the roof of his palace, Howard Hughes in a sealed hotel room, Naaman in the Jordan, and a preacher buried in a pine box built by prisoners. Pride does not announce itself — it sounds, from the inside, like accuracy. The only real test is whether anyone is still able to tell you the truth, and whether you would listen.
Daniel 4 · Norm Reed Download PDFPsalm 14 and Psalm 53 are almost the same psalm — same opening, same verdict, same ache at the end. Two lines have gone missing from the middle of Psalm 53: the company God is with, and the place the poor could hide. The same cry goes up out of Zion, with nowhere else to look.
Psalm 14 & Psalm 53 · Norm Reed Download PDFSong of Songs 1:2–4 traces desire as it learns to speak — from report, to address, to a request small enough to be answered. Mashak is not a delicate word: it is the word for drawing a bow taut, for hauling a body from a pit. She is not inventing a metaphor. She is asking, by name, for hesed.
Song of Songs 1:2–4 · Norm Reed Download PDFPsalm 45 and the strange word at its centre. A King rides out in majesty for truth and righteousness — and meekness, sitting between two words about power where it should not be. Not softness, but power that refuses to grasp.
Psalm 45 · Norm Reed Download PDFTwenty-six names sit in the middle of Nehemiah 8, and most of us read straight past them. They are not a pause before the action — they are the subject of the sentence that matters most.
Nehemiah 8 · Norm Reed Download PDFWe say the Psalms will teach us to pray. Then the ground gives way.
Psalm 83 · Norm Reed Download PDFWhy the greatest of all songs opens not with the kiss but with the wanting of it — a close reading of Song of Songs 1:1. The grammar that lurches from third person to second, the doubled kiss the Hebrew refuses to simplify, and the time the poem declines to fix.
Song of Songs 1:1 · Norm ReedWhat Job and David staked everything on before either of them had proof — and what it gives a pastor standing at a graveside. Six movements from the ash heap to the resurrection, and the one word both men reached for when pressed to the floor.
Job 19:25–27 · Psalm 17:15 · Norm Reed Download PDFWhat Jeremiah reveals about the God who interrupts his own judgment. The grief behind the oracle, the ancient paths of Jeremiah 6:16, and the sentence from Lamentations that changes everything about how we read the prophets.
Jeremiah · Lamentations 3:32–33 · Norm Reed Download PDFIf we take the gospels seriously as the description of how Jesus actually conducted his ministry, does the leadership he modelled map onto the formation the contemporary church offers its pastors? Five movements, two weekly calendars, and the questions that don't go away.
A Hesedwords Reflection · Norm Reed Download PDFThe arc of desire in the Song of Songs — from longing into belonging into open-handed offering — and what interrupts it. The warm bed, the idol as ordinary comfort, Paul's anatomy of the divided self in Romans 7, and the hesed that kindles what we cannot work up in ourselves.
Song of Songs 5 · Romans 7 · Norm ReedOn nasa and sabal — the difference between the idols we must carry and the God who carries us.
Isaiah 46:4