Excuse me this Easter morning for mixing Vincent van Gogh with the Sermon on the Mount but one thing leads to another.
For starters, I got text messages from friends Tom and Tim at 7:30 am. Old guys rise early, I’ve learned, maybe the spiritual ones especially. This sent me first for coffee rather than the Bible but, again, one thing leads to another.
I spotted “Patch of Grass,” on Facebook. The Gospel of Matthew, the Beatitudes and “Blessed are the peacemakers” came to mind as my Easter morning thoughts lined out.
A cloud passed over when I read Donald Trump’s Easter Sunday threat to bomb Iran into the Stone Age, saying in a Truth Social post, quoted in both The Washington Post and the New York Times, “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell — JUST WATCH! “
“The profane threat … landed Easter morning a few hours after Pope Leo XIV issued a call for nations to choose peace …” The Washington Post said.
History comes fast these days but it has taken a long time getting here. Human wisdom is a fairly small, familiar island, perennially wracked by storms of fearful parishioners and bad leaders.
I went back to my original research, finding that the “Gospel Triangle” where Jesus and disciple Matthew lived and worked around Capernaum in what now is Israel was slightly smaller than the incorporated area of Placitas, New Mexico, where I live today. The size of their village was 13 to 15 acres. The historic San Antonio de Las Huertas Land Grant near me is about 924 acres.
Twenty square miles on the north shore of the Galilee for Jesus and Matthew, 29 square miles for me in Sandoval County. The 1st Century population of Matthew’s hometown was smaller, too, around 1,200 people then, compared to the nearly 5,000 people around 21st Century Placitas.
All so close. I heard echos of social media in my neck of the woods this morning. The Capernaum folks could have heard Jesus.
Matthew on papyrus. Tom and Tim in digital text. The Iranians’ Persian ancestors had a culture 500 or 600 years before Jesus, even controlling that north shore of the Galilee 300 years or so before his birth. Trump’s threat to bomb the Iranians “back to the stone ages” refers, I guess, to whatever Persian culture existed several thousand years before Christ, even before the Iron Age, let alone the provocative, enriched uranium-nuclear weapons age of Iran today.
Along came the Gospel of Matthew in AD 50 to AD 85. Along came the Quran about the 7th Century. Along came Iran from Persia in 1935. Before that, the world’s “first Historical People” were Elamites, Kassites, Guitars, Urartians, Mannaeans. Along came the Iranian Revolution in 1979.
Along came World War II in 1939. Along came Israel from Palestine in 1948. Before that, Ottoman Empire, Canaan, Judea. Along came October 7 in 2023.
Two thousand years between Matthew and Trump. Two thousand five hundred years from the Persian Empire to today. Iran — “widely regarded as one of the world’s oldest and most enduring civilizations,” according to AI.
I was living in Turkey during the Six-Day War in 1967, reading in the international edition of Time about the courthouse raid in Tierra Amarilla, New Mexico, that June. Turkey, a republic since 1923, seemed pretty stable while the rest of the world was chaotic, including what I thought of as my home back in northern New Mexico. Of course, 300 miles up the coast from me, after a drive through what once was Troy, site of the legendary Trojan War, lay Constantinople or Istanbul, historically one of the busiest geopolitical centers of the world. It had been besieged 36 times in its 2,600-year history — meaning someone was often trying to take it over for its strategic location and wealth — and controlled by four different empires or states.
In spring, we watch the grass return and grow, rise up. We watch one thing lead to another. What do we learn? I don’t know. I think van Gogh’s painting is about color and the vibrancy of spring, but one thing leading to another, it makes me wonder.
dream ranch 