A waste – Passion Sunday, 27 March 2015

While he was at Bethany in the house of Simon the leper, as he sat at the table, a woman came with an alabaster jar of very costly ointment of nard, and she broke open the jar and poured the ointment on his head. But some were there who said to one another in anger, “Why was the ointment wasted in this way? For this ointment could have been sold for more than three hundred denarii, and the money given to the poor.” And they scolded her. [Mark 14:3-5]

A denarius was roughly one day’s wage for a common labourer.  This ointment, pure extract of spikenard, was worth more than 300 denarii.  And now it was running on the floor.  The alabaster jar also was broken.  We have no idea who this woman was, but it was not the first time a woman had intruded while the men were having dinner with Jesus, and had done something unexpected and socially embarrassing.  They scolded her…  They would have made much better use of 300 denarii.  But Jesus comes to her rescue with what must have sounded like a black joke:  She has done what she could; she has anointed my body beforehand for its burial. 

It is finally a matter of what is in the heart.  We can only speculate on what was in the hearts of Jesus’s companions at Simon’s house at Bethany.  Certainly anger – Mark tells us that some reacted in anger when this woman did what she did.  But also, it is close to the time when Jesus is arrested and put on trial.  They must have had fear and confusion in their hearts.  We know that – for all their criticism of this woman’s actions – they were not themselves busy raising money for the poor. 

In the heart of the woman, however, at that moment, was single-minded love.  She loved him, and she was already grieving for his loss.  Jesus knew what was in their hearts, he knew what was in the woman’s heart.  This is something that flows from quietness and spiritual depth – the freedom to perceive, to discern, what is happening in someone’s heart.  It is an aspect of mindfulness, and it entails the inner freedom, in contemplative life, to set one’s own feelings and reactions to one side. 

Most of us have known for years that both the Hebrew and the Christian scriptures teach that God “looketh on the heart”.  In a world obsessed with appearance, superficiality and triviality, our faith always reminds us that what God sees is very different, flowing from love and understanding, forgiveness and compassion.  A few years ago the guest speaker at the annual John Main Seminar, that year in Dublin, was the Dalai Lama.  He spoke about his Buddhist sense of the teaching of Jesus.  Much of this later appeared in a small book which he entitled, “The Good Heart”.  Buddhist teaching is just that – it is the heart always that needs to be healed, the broken heart. 

Jesus had healed the heart of the woman at Bethany.  She responds with a reckless extravagance of love, and Jesus says:  Leave her alone, she has done a beautiful thing.  When we extract some silence and stillness from our busy, committed lives, this itself is an extravagance of love.  We are content for our hearts to be open to God and to healing.

Some Greeks – Lent V, 20 March 2015

Now among those who went up to worship at the festival were some Greeks. They came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, and said to him, “Sir, we wish to see Jesus.” Philip went and told Andrew; then Andrew and Philip went and told Jesus.  [John 12:20-22] 

But what follows in this gospel reading for next Sunday is not a fascinating account of the meeting between Jesus and these Greeks.  We are not even told whether they actually got to meet him.  We are given instead a very complex series of statements from Jesus in which he voices his personal torment and his sense of imminent crisis – the seed falling into the ground and dying, then bearing fruit.  He talks about losing your life and saving it.  He says his soul is troubled.  There is a voice from heaven. There is something about darkness and light, and about the ruler of this world being driven out…

So let’s go back to the simpler beginning.  A party of Greeks is asking to be introduced to Jesus.  We are not told why, or who they were.  I did wonder whether they were Greek Jews – it says they had come to Jerusalem for the Passover – but most commentators assume they were Gentiles, perhaps Greek traders who knew there would be lots of business in Jerusalem at that time.  It certainly sounds as though it was a pretty inconvenient time for an interview anyway.  I am sure it has already occurred to you that the Epiphany story of the wise men who followed a star from the east to visit the infant Jesus, is another instance in which non-Jews are mysteriously attracted, sensing something significant.

Some Greeks…  Jesus was a Jew – something needing to be remembered by many lifelong Christians who assume he was an Anglican, a Catholic or an Honorary Presbyterian.  Jesus had never heard of Christianity.  In Jerusalem, Jesus was in the heartland of his own community and his faith, and confronting its issues.  The problem was that it was his fellow Jews who were out to get him, with the support of the Roman occupation government.  Jesus did not have what we would call a world view.  “Some Greeks” would have been alien, interesting but irrelevant and inconvenient right now.  John includes this in his gospel because he thinks it is a sign, of the eventual explosion of this faith far beyond Judaism to all the world. 

Many aspects of Christianity and the church reflect that explosion.  Among them is our Christian Meditation movement and practice.  The Greeks who were interested to see Jesus, if they were not Jews, were pagan idolaters in the terms of the day.  But they felt drawn.  In Christian Meditation we believe we reflect the mind of Christ in removing the fences, maintaining open doors.  The issue is not whether you qualify in some way, it is whether your heart needs to live and beat behind safe fences, or out in the wind of the Spirit, as John has Jesus saying to Nicodemus.  Christian Meditation around the world is being practised by – to borrow St Paul’s words – both Jews and Greeks, slave and free, rich and poor, male and female.  I would add, we include meditators who are not at all sure what precisely they believe, but who have found that this pathway brings them closer to truth and light.  When you think about it, we are “some Greeks” who have come to find Jesus.

Loving darkness – Lent IV, 13 March 2015

This is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light.  [John 3:19]

Light and darkness is a very grand theme, but this morning let’s keep it close to our humbler experience.  Life has acquainted us with both light and darkness, and still does.  We have also learned, in mindfulness along the way, that light and darkness are very closely related.  John’s Gospel tends to depict them rather as opposites.  But you can’t have the shadows without the light.  Our lives are stories of both light and darkness, shadows and hiding places. 

It is also our experience that the glare of sunlight, the full light of a summer day, can be blinding as much as revealing.  We all sometimes prefer the solace of darkness, some shadows and coolness, some differentiation of the light.  Perhaps I can insert here a commercial on behalf of serious introverts -- as my son-in-law once put it, in a world of chattering, of loudly motivated extroverts and activists, the introvert’s happiest place may be alone in a darkened room. 

So we ponder what Jesus was seeking to convey when he said, the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light.  He explains… because their deeds were evil.  But we need the shadows.  One of our media culture’s gross distortions happens when the full glare of publicity is turned on someone with something to hide, something private or profoundly embarrassing.  This rarely if ever discloses the truth.  The truth assumes not only that you get a sight of someone naked and humiliated before the world, but also that this is being seen and told with understanding and compassion.  The light distorts as much as the darkness conceals.  Any experienced photographer knows what too much light does to the image and to perception. 

If we have deeds that are evil, as Jesus put it, unredeemed aspects of our egos, or things in our past, or addictions, nothing whatever is gained by turning the glare of interrogation on them.  Wanting answers, is one favourite public cliché and illusion.  Rather, in a contemplative life, God’s Spirit is able to bring into the light of understanding and compassion what was formerly hidden, or kept in gloom, or in some back room.  I think this is a slow process, and gentle in the main.  The movement is always towards the light, and on the way there are many shadows and spectres and times of waiting. 

O God our Light, to thee we bow,

Within all shadows standest thou…

Or Paul Simon’s words from 40 years ago:  Hullo darkness my old friend, I’ve come to talk with you again…  I am unsure what Paul Simon meant, and I suspect he wasn’t sure either.  But Jesus saw how many people prefer the darkness.  And he delivers us from fear of the darkness in life.  St Benedict instructs his followers to prefer nothing whatever to Christ.  That is the choice by which we learn to make friends with both light and darkness.  It is the way by which we learn Christian maturity, how to discern subtlety in the truth, to distinguish truth from cant and dogmatism.  It is the way by which we learn how compassion and kindness are indispensable, how you cannot divide people into labelled categories, and how we heap up guilt if we do not protect the weak.  It teaches us to understand brokenness, and to love forgiveness. 

Jesus with a whip – Lent III, 6 March 2015

In the temple he found people selling cattle, sheep, and doves, and the money changers seated at their tables. Making a whip of cords, he drove all of them out…  [John 2:14-15]

A besetting sin of the church and of most of us in it at some time is what we can call the domestication of God, which is simply the making of idols.  And so in its extremes God may come to bear an uncanny resemblance to a British Tory, or a United States Republican, or to dear old Uncle Algernon, kind and gentle and mercifully remote.  Jesus turns out as portrayed in those Victorian coloured posters which once papered the walls of Sunday schools, walking through flowery fields in the sunshine, blessing children and little lambs, sitting on a rock teaching with uplifting words.  Even pictures of the crucifixion, which could only have been a hideous, filthy and bloody event, seem somehow sanitised.   And so we end up with a sort of benign idolatry, worshipping a God we create, to whom we make requests.  Of course that is in some respects a caricature... but it is not for nothing that Jewish faith insisted that you cannot see or image God, and the Second Commandment forbade idolatry utterly.  Jesus, writes St Paul, is the icon of God.  But I do not recall Jesus portrayed on the Sunday school wall, flailing a whip, tipping up the tables of the money-changers and scattering it all across the ground, chasing the animals out of the sacred precincts and opening the cages of doves.

You would have to be very angry to do that.  I hate to think what the Jerusalem Chamber of Commerce had to say about it – they would have been angry too.  The actual traders, dealers in currency, sellers of sacrificial animals, would scarcely have been amused.  The temple officials, the junior priests charged to see that it all happened as it should and that the temple got its share of the proceeds, would have had to face their superiors who would have been incandescent.  Whose anger was right?

Jesus did it moreover with a whip in his hand.  I remember back in student days long ago, one of my colleagues who later became distinguished saying, “Perhaps it was just a very little whip…”  He was already instinctively domesticating and sanitising and constructing idols. 

Jesus was in high indignation.  My Father’s house…  He had just come to Jerusalem.  This was the scene he saw in the temple.  Ordinary folk were being shut out by religious rules and by queues and protocols that favoured privilege, shut out by clamour, by commercial exploitation and rip-off, by a religious system more geared to its own survival than to caring for widows and orphans…  It was the incessant din of idolatry, shutting out true devotion and truth.

The silence and stillness we practise are the obverse of all that.  We are laying our idols aside, so far as we can.  And so far as we can’t, we are helped by the Spirit of Jesus.  Anger too…  I sometimes think that anger might be the last to go.  I want to retain anger, so long as I see people beheaded by religious fanatics, maimed and starved in the desert by warfare, kidnapped, raped and blown up…  Jesus had times when searing anger was appropriate, with a whip.   I carry that too into the silence.  It turns out to be something that doesn’t necessarily need healing at this time.