Hineni

'Are you in your office?', W. emails me. Hineni, I write back. – 'So you speak Hebrew now?' Hineni, here I am: that's what Abraham said in response to God's call of course.  Here I am, ready for my task. Here I am, and this is all I am, waiting in response. And it is what Adam refused to say, when he hid from God, and Jonah, who caught a ship to the far ends of the earth to escape the call.

What does it mean to be called?, we've mused a thousand times. What, as Israel responded to God's call in Exodus? To do before you understand. To respond before thinking. It's the opposite of philosophy, of course, W. says. The opposite of the Greeks, for whom it is more important to know oneself than to walk in God's way, to keep the commandments.

'Know yourself', Kierkegaard wrote, 'and look at yourself in the mirror of the Word in order to know yourself properly'. The mirror of the Word. It is only when we stand before the God who, revealed in Jesus the Messiah, came into the world, suffered, and died for the sake of the sinner, that our despair might become hope. Only then that I might will be to be myself, which means assenting to one's existence as the gift of God, and to the task God sets us. To know one's creaturehood and sinfulness, but to know, too, God as our creator, our judge and redeemer.

Jesus the Messiah, Jesus the Messiah … W. has never understood what it means to call yourself the Messiah and the son of God, as Jesus does in the gospels. Jesus becomes real to him at other moments – when he doubts his mission, for example. When, as Matthew recounts it, Jesus's soul becomes 'very sorrowful and very heavy' in the garden of Gethsemane, or when, on the cross, he cries 'My God, my God why has thou forsaken me?'

And Jesus becomes real to him in the parables, too – in fact, whenever Jesus speaks in ordinary words to ordinary people; whenever everyday speech is his medium, and he opens himself in dialogue to all comers, to anyone who wants to speak to him at all. Just as he, W., has to speak with great simplicity to me!, he says. Just as W. has to try and explain things so they can be understood by a simple person like me!