I’m new to the magazine business, but I have long been familiar with the concept of “burying the lede”: a journalistic error that occurs when a writer ought to start off an article with the most salient content but instead incorporates it later in the piece. Information that ought to be front and center, captivating readers in the introductory lede, is—usually by mistake—buried among secondary details.
It’s not just news writers who commit this foul. Anyone who wants to inform people about anything must consider how to effectively sequence their disclosures and descriptions. I’ve heard many a casual conversationalist (myself included) reprimanded for telling a life update in the wrong order: You really buried the lede there.
In my years as an evangelical Christian, preachers were some of the most prolific lede-buriers. And perhaps no passage’s lede was as hidden, obscured, or outright banished as that of this week’s reading from Luke. Even its genre was buried—we read this parable, or parable-like story, as a literal report of a historical event. Then whoever was preaching that week would get to work dissecting every detail about Hades. He’d puzzle over the fact that communication is apparently possible between the cosmic realms, but not travel. He would quote commentaries on “Abraham’s bosom” (a phrase that appears in the King James rendering of v. 22).
