Jesus himself alone – 2 March 2014

...when they looked up, they saw no one except Jesus himself alone. [Matthew 17:8]

This is the puzzling, troubling account of what we call the Transfiguration.   I am one who thinks this passage bristles with difficulty – and yet at the same time we sense that it ought to be reassuring and enlightening.  I don’t have the courage to look back, even if I could, to see what I have said about this passage in years gone by, in sermons and studies.  Looking to see what others are saying about it, including some great names, tends to be scarcely edifying.

Jesus takes Peter, James and John, up a hill away from the others.  Those three disciples have there what Jesus later calls a vision.  Jesus is transfigured – the Greek word is μεταμορφωθη, there is a metamorphosis.  He becomes dazzling white and shining.  Moses and Elijah appear, talking with Jesus.  Peter thinks it’s so wonderful and appropriate – today he would say awesome -- that he wants to set up three shrines there, trying to capture the moment and preserve it.  But then it is all overshadowed by a cloud, and they hear a voice: This is my Son, the Beloved... listen to him.  The disciples are terrified, but Jesus touches them and says, Get up, don’t be afraid.  And when they look up, they see no one except Jesus himself alone.  The Greek is surprisingly emphatic at that point, three words, Jesus himself alone.

Of course it has become a subject for great art.  Every rendering I have seen features Jesus somehow blinding and glorious, as you might expect.  In Titian’s painting you can scarcely see the disciples at all for all the light around Jesus – they are shadowy figures cowering terrified at the bottom.  That approach to the event focuses on the vision, on Jesus remote in glory, conferring perhaps loftily, remotely, with Moses the Lawgiver and Elijah the Prophet.  It is taken typically to authenticate Jesus as Son of God.  And in the eastern Orthodox churches this event is seen as deeply important and meaningful, appearing in icons and in the liturgy. 

And yet, with all of that, we may find ourselves somehow still standing outside it all looking on, as it were.  The cloud which eventually hid it all may seem a merciful thing.  It’s like a stop-sign to our analytical brains, and to any attempt to use this strange story to prove anything about Jesus.  The event, says Matthew, disappears, it becomes enveloped in a fog, like Wellington airport, and all you know for sure is that you’re not flying right now.   All we know for sure when we have read about this Transfiguration is that, in the cloud, eventually, they encounter what Matthew emphatically calls Jesus himself alone.  And now it is not any vision.  He touches them.  He tells them to get up and not be afraid. 

This is the 21^st century.  The word spirituality has now come to mean almost anything.  Trying to hang on to Christian faith by dogmatic adherence to creeds and rules of behaviour or rules of worship, or by experiences of charismania, is a recipe for shipwreck.  It is necessary now that we make friends with mystery, with the cloud as it were, and as Jesus said, not to be afraid.  Our faith is not a set of answers – that is now seen as threadbare.  We now have to learn from the mystics and the wise men and women of the centuries who learned silence and stillness, and who were Christian because they shared this with Jesus, the risen Lord.  The prayer they prayed was ultimately his prayer, the prayer of the risen Lord – in the words of John Greenleaf Whittier: The silence of eternity, interpreted by love.  From there, from the cloud and the mystery, from the presence of Jesus himself alone, we go on to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with God.

Differing from the tax collectors – 21 February 2014

...(God) makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? [Matthew 5: 45-47]

You just have to hope there are no employees of the Tax Department in your congregation.  This is part of the Gospel for next Sunday, every phrase of which, if we listen, stops us in our tracks.  Jesus points out the obvious, that the sun rises each morning for good people and bad alike, the rain refreshes, or floods, both the righteous and the unrighteous.  The first thing I notice is that, according to Jesus, this indiscriminate provision is something God chooses.  We might arrange it differently.  But God provides the sunshine and the rain irrespective of anyone’s worthiness.  Much the same can be said about calamities in life – they also seem to fall on both the righteous and the unrighteous.  This puzzled the Psalmist very much.  It is as though God may not be as interested as we are in whether people have deserved things or not.   

So that’s not very satisfactory.  Once upon a time, you could rely on a simple moral and religious code approved by God and at least understood if not always observed by people.  If you were righteous, you prospered.  If you were not, you got punishment.  If someone damaged you in some way, you exacted an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.  It had the virtue of simplicity, but as the scriptures note from time to time, it wasn’t always very efficient.  Inexplicably, good people could often suffer while evil ones prospered.  The Psalms and the Book of Job and other writings all confront this difficulty. 

But nevertheless that simple reciprocity remains a morality deeply believed to our own day, because it seems to be fair and make sense.  It didn’t satisfy Jesus.  You get on well with friends and amiable colleagues?  You enjoy meeting with like-minded people, your own kind?  As one American preacher puts it, you want a medal or something?  Jesus says that’s the way the heathen live.   Anyone can live that way.  There’s no special merit in it.   He asks, do you have someone you’re avoiding?  Do you even have enemies?  Do you keep to your own kind?  You want a medal or something?  That’s the way the tax collectors live, he says.

It is not that we are now to go forth and round up all the folk we have been avoiding.  It is that, so far as it lies with us, we choose not to build fences.  Robert Frost’s poem on Mending the Wall...

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offence.

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,

That wants it down!

There are certainly no walls in our silence and stillness.  May that extend within us and around us, with all its risks, as the days and years go by.

 

Stillness – 14 February 2014

As we know, it is important for Christian Meditation that we are physically as still as possible.  And so we teach stillness… sitting upright but relaxed, feet flat on the floor, hands, arms and shoulders relaxed, our breathing comfortable and regular… and so on.  Having said that, we avoid the impression that this is any kind of law.  Some people are simply unable to be as still as that for 20 to 30 minutes, for various reasons.  There are some unable to sit upright comfortably.  So we do what we can, not what we can’t, and that is always part of the teaching too.  It is a gentle discipline.

The stillness matters because it mirrors and complements our inward stillness and silence.  It is an outward sign of a larger and deeper reality.  And so this week I found myself pondering stillness of the body.  A doctor I had to consult told me I should avoid sudden movements – that’s my kind of doctor.  Stillness is a challenge to all sorts of things in our world.  It certainly challenges the culture of busyness, not because it’s wrong to be busy, but because so much of our culture claims that personal worth, validation, recognition, depend on our doings and our achievements.  To be still for an extended period may indicate that, for now, we don’t need to watch, guard, change our environment – for this period we are accepting things as they are around us.  And that is simply too hard for many people.  First you must secure the environment, the furniture, the light, the temperature, the draughts, the surrounding noises – and then, that having been done, you may be able to consider being still (but still very watchful). 

So our stillness in meditation is, at a deeper level, our sign that we are not looking to control things.  For this period at any rate it is hands-off God’s world and other people.  For this brief period, time and space do not have to meet with my approval.  The stillness is a recognition that we are not omnipotent, nor seeking to control, and we may not even begin to occupy the place which belongs to God. 

Sometimes stillness is physically or mentally hard.  This is a practical issue.  Our nervous system is probably the last part of us that will ever be brought into submission to Christ, it often seems to me.  There are lovely stories about monks who experience problems with their digestive systems and other unmentionable matters.  St Teresa of Avila could make jokes about not very seemly discomforts which disturbed her in prayer.  Henri Nouwen tells of one occasion when he was in agony with his back, but tried to sit still through meditation – realizing eventually that he had made the wrong choice.  Thomas Merton had constant health problems, and he tells in his journal how this affected his stillness.  But God surely reads our longings and our motives and our difficulties, the things we tried to do as well as the things we triumphantly achieved.  The desire to pray is itself prayer.  Meditators very soon learn that nothing stays the same anyway – what is not possible at one time becomes possible at some other time. 

It is important to be still and to learn what we can of stillness.  It spreads into other aspects of our days and years.  Stillness becomes possible when everything and everyone else may seem in turmoil.  Just as Elijah sat at the mouth of the cave, still and waiting, through the earthquake, wind and fire, we may eventually hear what the literal Hebrew of that story calls enigmatically a small voice of stillness.

Resuming – 7 February 2014

Resuming is a rhythm we find ourselves quite regularly practising in the contemplative life.  And this reminder itself bears repetition.  In the classic story, when some tourist asks a monk, But what do you do there all day?  The monk replies, Well, we fall down and get up again, and fall down and get up again…  Just like life.  Another year happens, so we resume, after a bit of a breather.  The prodigal son gets home again after all his disasters, and he resumes , older and wiser, one would think, humbler and better.  I am certainly older in 2014… humbler and better or wiser is as maybe.  But we resume.

Another important repetitive teaching we have is what Rowan Williams and many others have stressed – that for the most part real faith is not heroic or dramatic or exciting.  Prosaic was the word Rowan Williams chose.  Ordinariness.  Faith is usually, in practice, a matter of simply deciding to take the next step, to put one foot in front of the other, when often the outcome and the risks are unclear.   That is where the pentecostalists and suchlike get it all wrong.  It is what you decide within yourself.  Doing something dramatic but mindless is not faith, any more than the opposite, being paralysed in indecision because we don’t know for sure what’s right.  Receiving direct spiritual inspiration and waving arms around is not faith, however impressive it may seem and therapeutic it may feel. 

Faith is being present in the present moment.  Faith is knowing how to live with the unanswered questions and great mysteries.  Faith is being able to distance oneself from the insatiable demands of the ego.  Faith is what I discover within me, day by day, quietly but surely, put there by God.

And so each day we resume faith.  That is what we do at any new beginning, such as getting up in the morning.  We resume.  Jesus meets us at this point.  After an interim, after a sorrow, after a lapse, after a rebellion, after a false love, a failed hope, a disappointment, even simply a distraction in our meditation, he is there, waiting on the beach, cooking fish [1]– was there ever, in all of spiritual literature, such an image?  Then we resume, one step in front of the other.  He sent them on their way.

But what will we do if there is no more excitement in the faith than that?  What we will do is continue our discipline of silence and stillness.   It has the same rhythm as life.  We are distracted, and we resume.  You could even say that meditation is a way of practising resuming.  It has the same prosaic features.  We are not looking for excitement or to be entertained, or for dramatic outcomes – we can find plenty of all that elsewhere.  The church has committees planning such things.  In Christian Meditation it is one step in front of the other, in simplicity, in stillness, in silence – and often as not, in solitude.  In the distance, it may seem, Jesus is on the beach. 

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[1]  John 21 4ff