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Hello, fellow wayfarers … Why Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey has captured the imagination of the world right now … What, if anything, Jesus and Paul would have known about the Odyssey … How to be a Christian in this crazy time without giving up on love of neighbor … An anonymous Desert Island Playlist from a recovery center in New England … This is this week’s Moore to the Point. |
Why Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey Haunts Us Right Now |
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One of the biggest cultural events this summer isn’t a superhero sequel or a streaming series. It’s a 3,000-year-old Greek poem. That The Odyssey would be a box office powerhouse is not all that unexpected—after all, filmmaker Christopher Nolan gave us The Dark Knight Rises and Oppenheimer. But this is more than that. Bookstores are moving copies of the epic at just the time most people would have expected the typical American to answer "Who is Homer?" with "Bart Simpson’s dad." People who had never before thought about Ithaca, Penelope, or the Cyclopes are arguing over which translation to buy. |
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I should have known something was afoot when I opened a movie theater app to buy tickets. The reserved seats weren’t marked by little red squares anymore; they appeared as tiny bronze helmets until the whole virtual auditorium looked like a Trojan battlefield. Our obsession with the story seems to be more than just opening-week hype. Something ancient suddenly looks urgent again. And some people—including some Christians—are asking why. |
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Some, Christian and otherwise, have argued that Nolan has made a film that is "kinda Christian," as one writer put it, softening Homer’s ancient heroism with mercy, guilt, and forgiveness. There’s truth to that observation. But I think the film’s deepest significance lies elsewhere—not in the answers it gives but in the longing it exposes. |
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The Odyssey—the original poetry and the modern film—is not really about adventure, although it has an abundance of it. It’s also not primarily about virtues in some abstract way, whether the kill-your-enemies or love-your-enemies type. The Odyssey is about home. Odysseus wants to return to his place but comes to see that his obstacle is not merely geographical. He must become a different kind of person, the kind of man who can receive home as gift rather than as trophy. And at almost every step of the path, those who imaginatively walk with him can feel the ache. |
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Some of us are pulled toward nostalgia, looking to something better in the past. And some of us are pulled toward discontentment, looking to something better in the future. Regardless of where we turn, we all recognize something is missing. And all kinds of people—politicians, marketers, tech lords—are there to say, "You want to get home, and I can get you there." |
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That’s because homesickness points in contradictory directions all at once. In "Homesick," songwriter Noah Kahan sings of being stuck in a Vermont hometown of winter "hibernation" that is so slow "I feel my organs failing," yet he is too disillusioned to find the will to leave. "Spend the rest of my life with what could have been," he sings. "And I will die in the house that I grew up in. / I’m homesick." Homer imagines a man desperate to get home. Noah Kahan imagines a man desperate to leave home. Those sound like opposite longings. They’re actually the same. |
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We’re either trying to get back to something (to re-live some place or situation where we once were happy) or trying to get away toward something (a new job, a new love, a new identity that will fill the void of the emptiness we feel). We become bored of what’s familiar and scared of what’s not. |
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For Paul at Mars Hill in Acts 17, the pagan poems demonstrated that, deep down, we already recognize that something’s missing in all our attempts to find and create meaning, whatever our rhetoric. |
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The ancient problem says "I can’t get home." The modern problem says "I got home—it isn’t home." One longs for return, and one longs for escape. These are not two problems but one. No matter which way we turn, we don’t know what home is. That’s why Homer still rings true, even in the era of IMAX and SpaceX. |
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And that’s what makes the Christian story stranger than the pagan ones. Odysseus spends 20 years trying to get back to Ithaca. Jesus has spent 2,000 years (so far) telling us to stop mistaking Ithaca for Eden. |
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The Bible is full of odysseys: Abraham leaves Ur. The Israelites leave Egypt. The apostles set out to "the ends of the earth" (Acts 13:47). When describing examples of faith, the Book of Hebrews says none of them "received the things promised" (11:13, ESV throughout). |
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These pilgrimages were not about answering the longing for home with a return to something past. We want a place prepared for us, a place to belong, a place to be known, a place to be loved. But our longing for that can sometimes leave us nostalgic for the wrong thing. The Israelites hungered in the wilderness. They responded to that with nostalgia for slavery: "We remember the fish we ate in Egypt that cost nothing, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic" (Num. 11:5). |
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The longing wasn’t wrong. As a matter of fact, God said the hunger was necessary. The emptiness was in order that "he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord" (Deut. 8:3). As C. S. Lewis reminded us, "Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water." |
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All of that should lead us to ponder: "If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world." Identifying the ache is not the end, but it’s a start. |
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The Odyssey, Homer’s and Nolan’s, assumes the greatest human tragedy is losing the home you once had. The Bible says Abraham was looking for a city he had never seen (Heb. 11:13–14). The Odyssey doesn’t answer the question; it reminds us how to ask it. And that’s not nothing. But once we start asking those questions, we might find a whole Trojan horse full of meanings about which we could never start to ask or even think (Eph. 3:20). Asking those questions just might lead us somewhere else, to a better story than even Homer or Hollywood can tell. |
Would Jesus or Paul Have Known the Odyssey? |
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While thinking about the Nolan film, someone recently asked me, "Since the Odyssey dates to way before the time of Christ, would Jesus or Paul have read or heard about it?" I found the question interesting even though, as with many like it, the short answer is "I don’t know." But the fact that it’s a question at all ought to spark something in our imaginations. |
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After all, if someone had asked, "Would Jesus or Paul have read or heard about War and Peace or The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn?" the answer would be quick and definitive: Of course not, since both long postdated their earthly ministries. But Homer is different. |
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Jesus spoke Aramaic and knew the Hebrew Scriptures, but he also inhabited a world far more Greek than we often think. Sepphoris, just a few miles from Nazareth, was a thoroughly Hellenized city in commerce and culture. Would Jesus, a craftsman’s son in a Galilean Jewish community, have heard about or read Homer? It’s possible. But Jesus never seemed to draw on the epics or myths of the pagan world, even when speaking to mixed audiences. |
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As we see in the Gospels, his imagination was saturated with Israel’s Scriptures—Moses and Isaiah and Zechariah and so on—and with observations on the cosmos, human nature, agriculture, and animal husbandry. Even if Jesus thought about Homer, he never seems to have been influenced by him. |
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On the other hand, I would argue Paul almost certainly knew the Homeric tales. He grew up in the intellectual urban environment of Tarsus; wrote polished Koine Greek; and, as we see in Acts 17, was thoroughly familiar with the pagan myths and poets. That doesn’t prove that he ever read Homer, but Homer was essential to educated youths learning Greek. For Paul not to have familiarity with Homer is akin to a 19th-century British schoolboy not knowing Shakespeare, or an early-20th-century American high school student not knowing anything about the King James Bible: possible but unlikely. |
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The most likely biblical writer to have known the Odyssey would be the writer of Hebrews. He wrote polished Greek, had sophisticated intellectual arguments, engaged with multiple levels of both textual analysis and philosophical reflection, and bears the marks of a highly and broadly educated first-century thinker at a time when Homer was a routine part of education. |
Lee Camp on the Politics of Loving Your Neighbor |
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This week’s episode is a little different: I’m the guest host, and the show isn’t mine. |
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My friend Lee Camp—theologian at Lipscomb University and host of the No Small Endeavor podcast—asked me to sit in for him and interview him about his book Scandalous Witness: A Little Political Manifesto for Christians, out this month in paperback. Since the conversation ranged over almost everything we talk about here—Christian nationalism, why the church has so often been a bad neighbor, and how Christian witness might recover some humility—it seemed right to share it with you too. |
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Lee argues Christianity is not a religion at all—at least not in the way we usually mean the word—but a politic. And he means something very different by that than what Jerry Falwell meant. We talked about a Bible on display in Washington, DC, that tells you what happens when Christian values get extracted from the Christian story. We talked about Charlemagne’s evangelism strategy, about whether Pope Leo is right that just war theory can’t survive the nuclear age, and about a question a rabbi friend of mine raised: How do you know whether you’re exercising prudence or just dressing up cowardice? |
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Lee also says in this book that nationalistic hope is a bastard—the first time that sentence has ever been uttered on this show. And what he means by it cuts against both the "golden age" nostalgists and the "rotten from the start" cynics. |
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Along the way: Kurt Vonnegut on the Ten Commandments, a Grammy winner’s four-word creed of hope, and the best answer I’ve heard in a while to "What is the good life?" |
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In this divided and exhausted time, this conversation asks what it would mean if Christians—along with everybody else—stopped despairing, stopped being held captive to our tribes and ideologies, and actually did the patient work of loving God and neighbor. |
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You can listen to it here. |
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Every other week, I share a playlist of songs one of you says you’d want to have on hand if you were stranded on a desert island. This week’s submission moved me. |
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If you remember, several weeks ago I received a note from a reader in Massachusetts who volunteers every week in a recovery program. She said one man in recovery there was a disc jockey for a radio station and has a wide and deep knowledge of music. The reader said she found in every other week’s Desert Island Playlist a way to connect with this man. "I wanted to share with you that that list every other week is touching a damaged and lovely soul here," she wrote at the time. "He brightens up every time we discuss the new list together." |
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Well, now the man himself has submitted his very own Desert Island Playlist. Here’s what he writes: |
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My initials are A.P. I am in a recovery program in Massachusetts. One of the volunteers in my program introduced me to the Desert Island Playlist. I was a disc jockey back in 1981–1983 and then again more recently from 2013 to 2023. Music, musicians, and their history have always been one of my favorite things to talk about and listen to. Some of my favorite interviews to come out of my shows include John Sebastian of The Lovin’ Spoonful, Boston Red Sox Hall of Famer Bill "Spaceman" Lee, and Colin Blunstone of The Zombies, among many others. |
- "Roadrunner" (The Modern Lovers, 1976) by The Modern Lovers: One of my all-time favorite driving songs by one of my favorite artists. Frontman and songwriter Jonathan Richman offers his personal valentine to the art of cruising with the "radio on!"
- "And Your Bird Can Sing" (Revolver, 1966) by The Beatles: One of John Lennon and The Beatles’ best from their best overall LP, 1966’s Revolver, in my humble opinion. I was disappointed when I read comments from John dismissing the song as fancy packaging containing nothing. Not true—it’s a real gem, John! Bears mentioning: There is an alternative version on Anthology 2 where John and Paul break down in
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