Here is the solution to the puzzle we set you on the fifth day of Christmas.
Let us know how you got on!
There are thirty books of the Bible in this paragraph. Can you find them? This is A MOSt reMARKable puzzle. It was found by a gentleman in an airplane seat pocket, on a flight from Los Angeles to HonoluLU, KEeping him occupied for hours. He enjoyed it so much, that he passed it on to some friends. One friend from Illinois worked on this while fishing from his JOHN-boat. Another friend studied it while playing his banJO. ELaine Taylor, a columnist friend, was so intrigued by it she mentioned it in her weekly newspaper column. Another friend JUDGES the JOB of solving this puzzle so involving, that sHE BREWS a cup of tea to help her nervES. THERe will be some names that are really easy to spot. That's a fACT. Some people, however, will soon find themselves in a JAM, ESpecially since the books are not necessarily capitalized. TRUTHfully, fROM ANSwers we get, we are forced to admiT IT USually takes a priest or scholar to see some of theM AT THE Worst. Research has shown that something in our GENES IS responsible for the difficulty we have in seeing the books in this paragraph. During a recent fund-raising event, which featured this puzzle, the Alpha Delta PHI-LEMONade booth set a new sales record. The local paper, The CHRONICLE, Surveyed over 200 patrons who reported that this puzzle was one of the most difficult they had ever seen. As DANIEL HumaNA HUMbly puts it, 'the books are all right here in plain view hidden from sight'. THOSE Able to find all of them will hear great LAMENTATIONS from those who have to be shown. One REVELATION that may help is that books called TIMOTHY and SAMUEL may occur without their NUMBERS. Also, keep in mind, that punctuation and spaces in the middle are norMAL. A CHIpper attitude will help you comPETE Really well against those who claim to know the answers. Remember, there is no need for a mad EXODUS, there really are 30 books of the Bible lurKING Somewhere in this paragraph waiting to be found.
The Bible is full of interesting caricatures. In the first book of the bible, Guinessis, Adam and Eve were created from an apple tree. One of their children, Cain, asked, 'am I my brother's son?''
God asked Abraham to sacrifice Isaac on Mount Montezuma. Jacob, son of Isaac, stole his brother's birthmark. Jacob was a patriarch who brought up his 12 sons to be patriarchs, but they did not take to it. One of Jacob's sons, Joseph, gave refuse to the Israelites.
Lot's wife was a pillar of salt during the day but a ball of fire during the night.
Moses led the people to the Red Sea where they made unleavened bread which is bread without any ingredients.
David was a Hebrew king skilled at playing the liar. He fought with the Finkelsteins, a race of people who lived in Biblical times. Solomon, one of David's sons, had 300 wives and 700 porcupines.
When Mary heard she was the mother of Jesus she sang the Magna Carta.
The epistels were the wives of the apostles one of whom was St Matthew who was also a taximan.
The Greeks were a highly sculptured people, and without them we wouldn't have history. The Greeks invented three kinds of columns - corinthian, ironic, and dorc - and built the Apocolypse. They also had myths. A myth is a female moth.
One myth says that the mother of Achilles dipped him in the River Stynx until he became intolerable. Achilles appears in The Iliad, by Homer. Homer also wrote The Oddity, in which Penelope was the last hardship that Ulysses endured on his journey.
Socrates was a famous Greek teacher who went around giving people advice. They killed him. Socrates died from an overdose of wedlock.
In the Olympic Games, Greeks ran races, jumped, hurled the biscuits, and threw the java. The reward to the victor was a coral wreath.
On each day after Christmas we will open a Christmas Cracker until they have all run out. As you know, anything and everything can be found inside such crackers, the useless and the beautiful, the banal and the inspiring, the trite and the cor blimey, the amusing and the irritating. Let's hope our hoard of goodies will be worth the effort of pulling apart those resistant bits of paper ...
The moon contributes significantly to a peaceful nightscape but it cannot itself be described as a peaceful place. This is because there is no life on the moon. Where there is no life there is no struggle or anxiety, there is no need or threat or fear. If the moon is peaceful then it is the peace of the graveyard, the kind of peace found in dead places and not the full, rich, reconciled, healed, and justice-based peace that the Bible calls shalom.
The earth is not at all like the moon. Here there is life, many kinds of living things, and so there is much struggle and anxiety, there is need and threat and fear. Where there is life there is the possibility of it being damaged, wounded, and even lost. Living things are aware of their surroundings and must keep watch and be attentive. Living things are always anxious or at least alert and they are always needy, for food, for shelter, for a mate. Where there is life there is also threat and fear, even (perhaps especially) from other living things of the same kind.
So the earth, in particular the human world, is a place that needs justice, some kind of management and balancing of struggle and anxiety, of need and threat and fear. Inevitably, we contend with each other. We jostle with each other for food and influence. We are aware of each other as potential partners and friends and collaborators but also as different, as rivals, as perhaps not fully trustworthy, not really ‘on my side’.
The human world remains a place where we must strive for justice although it often seems to be beyond us. Where people take action to restore or introduce justice they often end up doing some fresh injustice. Where one kind of exclusion, discrimination or inequality is removed, fresh kinds of exclusion, discrimination or inequality appear in their place.
Jesus was born and lived in Palestine, the place where Europe, Africa and Asia meet. It was a key province of the Roman Empire, guarding the great trade routes to the East and to the South. For centuries it had been fought over by Egyptians, Assyrians, Persians, Greeks, and Romans. Even today ‘Palestine’ represents the knottiest of human problems. It is the place where Jews, Christians and Muslims struggle to live together in justice and in peace. There are many other places where cultures, languages, races, and religions meet and where they must find out how to live together. But ‘Palestine’ is symbolic of them all.
Jesus was born into this knot in the world’s history and geography. We believe him to be the promised Messiah, the one who would initiate God’s reign of shalom. The word means peace but not just in the sense of no fighting. It means a rich, reconciled, healed, justice-based peace, the peace that comes with the Messiah, a peace that is won, as it turns out, through His rejection, death and resurrection. Many biblical texts speak about the Messiah as one who would bring a definitive reign of peace. In fact ‘he himself will be peace’ (Micah 5.4) and ‘in his days justice will flourish and peace till the moon fails’ (Psalm 72).
The Greek philosopher Aristotle wrote the first book to be called Politics and in it he says that human community and civilization are built on communication. It is by talking and listening that we recognize and establish justice. Thomas Aquinas liked the idea: ‘communication builds the city’, he says, commenting on Aristotle’s text. It is part of human greatness that we understand the need for justice and can work together to try to build it. And we build it through listening and talking together.
The Word became flesh in Palestine. Into the knot of human struggle and anxiety, of need and threat and fear, God entered to speak His Word. Jesus is God’s final contribution to the human conversation about justice and peace. We will find peace, he says, by following him in loving our enemies. Learn from me, he says, for I am gentle and humble of heart, and you will find rest for your souls. ‘You must love one another as I have loved you.’ People may feel, and sometimes say, that it is impractical and naïve, this law of love to which Jesus calls us. In this world, with its tensions and anxieties, its needs and threats and fears, it is easy to see why people would feel and say that. But Jesus has overcome the world and has started a new creation in which love is the only law. Those who live by that law already experience the peace he promises, a peace beyond human understanding, a peace this world cannot give.
There are thirty books of the Bible in this paragraph. Can you find them? This is A MOSt reMARKable puzzle. It was found by a gentleman in an airplane seat pocket, on a flight from Los Angeles to HonoluLU, KEeping him occupied for hours. He enjoyed it so much, that he passed it on to some friends. One friend from Illinois worked on this while fishing from his JOHN-boat. Another friend studied it while playing his banJO. ELaine Taylor, a columnist friend, was so intrigued by it she mentioned it in her weekly newspaper column. Another friend JUDGES the JOB of solving this puzzle so involving, that sHE BREWS a cup of tea to help her nervES. THERe will be some names that are really easy to spot. That's a fACT. Some people, however, will soon find themselves in a JAM, ESpecially since the books are not necessarily capitalized. TRUTHfully, fROM ANSwers we get, we are forced to admiT IT USually takes a priest or scholar to see some of theM AT THE Worst. Research has shown that something in our GENES IS responsible for the difficulty we have in seeing the books in this paragraph. During a recent fund-raising event, which featured this puzzle, the Alpha Delta PHI-LEMONade booth set a new sales record. The local paper, The CHRONICLE, Surveyed over 200 patrons who reported that this puzzle was one of the most difficult they had ever seen. As DANIEL HumaNA HUMbly puts it, 'the books are all right here in plain view hidden from sight'. THOSE Able to find all of them will hear great LAMENTATIONS from those who have to be shown. One REVELATION that may help is that books called TIMOTHY and SAMUEL may occur without their NUMBERS. Also, keep in mind, that punctuation and spaces in the middle are norMAL. A CHIpper attitude will help you comPETE Really well against those who claim to know the answers. Remember, there is no need for a mad EXODUS, there really are 30 books of the Bible lurKING Somewhere in this paragraph waiting to be found.
