Lent V, 31.03.2017 – Life and death

In chapter 11, John tells us his story of the raising of Lazarus.  An unforgettable teacher I once had was a German pastor who had escaped Nazi Germany with his wife in the late 1930s.  The NZ Presbyterian Church took him in, made it possible for him to complete his studies, and then took him on the staff of the theological hall in Dunedin.  But Dr Rex’s treatment by the Nazis had rendered his health precarious.  He was at times alarmingly frail.  He never dwelt on these problems… but one day, in a seminar, when the many questions around resurrection had come to the fore, he said:  In prison I had nothing.  I had no power.  But I had the hope of resurrection.    

There are different ways by which people approach this Lazarus story.  I read it as an allegory.  The home at Bethany was clearly a place much loved by Jesus.  It was a refuge for him.  Two sisters and their brother lived there – Martha, Mary and Lazarus.  They perceived Jesus differently from each other.  I am using some speculation here, but it seems that, to Martha, Jesus was plainly Israel’s Messiah… as simple as that, as we say these days.  She says so.  She identifies him as the promised deliverer who could therefore do miraculous things.  But she still thought dead meant dead – Lord, if you had been here my brother would not have died.  And it is to Martha that Jesus makes his revelation: I am the resurrection and the life…  But Martha doesn’t get it, not yet.

Mary is quite different.  She waits in the house.  She does not run out to meet him, as Martha had, to tell him all about how she’s feeling.  She is content to await events.  And so she receives a message via Martha: The Teacher… is calling for you.  Martha had been calling for the Teacher – Mary waits to be called… and then she goes.  Martha is wanting Jesus to respond to her in her loss and need – Mary chooses rather to respond to Jesus -- and so she is able to see their common need.  Jesus is grief-stricken too.  Mary senses what Martha doesn’t, that (in the words of Dylan Thomas, quoting St Paul to the Romans) death shall have no dominion.

Now, Lazarus is dead.  This fact is hammered home for us by their grief, by the reminder that he has been in the tomb for four days…  The fact is reinforced for us by Jesus himself – he is not sleeping, he is dead – lest we think that what Jesus does here is some remote CPR.  So now we have to bring our literary imaginations to the service of truth.  John surely is not trying to have us understand that Jesus resuscitated a corpse.  What would be the point of that?  Lazarus would die again.  And it would take no account of grieving families through the centuries for whom God has not done anything of the kind.  John tells us a story, inviting us to the possibility that death is not God’s last word.  In him was life, writes John in Ch.1, and the life was the light of the world. 

Have you ever noticed, on hearing this story, the curious thing Jesus said when Lazarus emerged from the grave?  All Jesus said was: Unbind him, and let him go.  It is John’s clue to what resurrection means, what the scriptures call new life, what we crane to see, as we say, beyond the veil, beyond death… unbound, and free – Unbind him, and let him go.  We can see the addict, at last unbound and free.  The Alzheimers victim, or anyone lost to senility, unbound and free.  The slave to criminality, unbound and free.  The bigot, the racist, the tyrant, the bully, the lonely, the unloved, the frightened, the chronic pain-ridden, the outcast… unbound, and free.  It is beyond our sight, but open to the eye of faith, and it is the miracle of resurrection.

Lent IV, 24 March 2017 – Light and darkness

Perhaps now it’s time to return to the discipline, on Friday mornings, of looking at the Gospel lesson for the next Sunday.  So now I report that the lectionary gives us, for Lent IV, John chapter 9, and that is the long, somewhat confused story of Jesus and the man born blind.  I have a hard time making head or tail of it.  For instance, right at the beginning, the disciples ask Jesus, Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?  If the man had been born blind, his blindness could scarcely have been caused by his sin, I would have thought.

But what does seem clear is that John, the gospel writer, has used this event, whatever actually happened, and somewhat embellished it, to portray Jesus as light in the darkness.  All I know, says the man, is that I was blind and now I see [9:25].  Let’s remind ourselves that what we are reading here was compiled and written at least one, more likely two generations after the events of Jesus’s life and ministry.  These writings reflect the experience of Christian believers who are the adult children or grand-children of Jesus’s contemporaries– and so, by now, they have a store of wisdom about the realities of following Jesus.  One of the ways they see him is as light in the darkness.  The man born blind can now see.  He can’t explain it, he cheekily tells the pharisees, but he now knows the difference between darkness and light, even if they don’t.

In the year 2017 it might be easier if we were that assured.  People who live in darkness, or at least in murky twilight, typically don’t know it, and certainly don’t appreciate it being implied.  But if you maintain a list of enemies and threats, people you have to be on guard against… if you have to build protective walls around you… that is scarcely living in the light.  If we are living in unforgiveness… if we have turned ourselves into chronic victims of someone or some event… if our lives were changed by something someone did, and we are unable to let it go… if we are determined never to put aside something they said… we are at least in the shadows.  And I would say, if we need to seek happiness in drugs or alcohol, partying and promiscuity, speed or fleeting fame… it seems somewhat dim and gloomy.

The choice between light and darkness is very prominent in the Christian scriptures, and never more than in the writings of John.  These people experienced Jesus as light, bringing light – and then they can see the darkness to which they could return.  It is always a choice.  Right at the beginning of John’s Gospel:  In him was life, and the life was the light of all… and the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has never overcome it [1:4-5].  Later Jesus is depicted as saying: I am the light of the world; whoever follows me will not walk in darkness [8:12].   In the Sermon on the Mount he says enigmatically: If the light that is in you is darkness, how great is that darkness! [Matthew 6:23] -- which reminds me, at any rate, of how the church itself, in various ways, can shed darkness rather than light – and rather too often has.  St Paul too is very strong on this theme.  God who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, he writes, has shone in our hearts… [II Cor 4:6].  We are not of the night, nor of darkness, he wrote to the Thessalonian church [I Thess 5:5]. 

There appears to have been an ancient hymn, of which Paul quotes a fragment in Ephesians:  Awake, sleeper! Arise from the dead!  Christ will give you light! [Eph 5:14].   Each new day the choice is renewed, each time we are faced with complex decisions about what to do, or say… each time there is a choice between truth and half-truth… each time we return to prayer.  We choose the light.

Abiding…7 – Abiding in prayer

On one level, prayer is asking God for things.  And immediately, it seems to many, there is a problem.  It presupposes a God who won’t do something unless we ask, who then may or may not “grant” what we ask – and so can seem capricious.  A child dies despite the urgent and fervent prayers of many.  Then it may be that God is thought to have healed someone when everyone prayed, but to have let others die when they didn’t.  The Book of Psalms, I have to say, often implies this level of prayer – those Psalms reflect exactly the ways we all react at times.

When it was suggested to me that perhaps I didn’t know everything, at about the age of 17½, I began to learn to be more respectful – and in this case, more respectful of the desperation people can be thrown into by the realities of life and death, when human resources run out.  People defend these levels of prayer because life is cruel and unfair. 

And so we need to be respectful also of prayers for peace, for an end to violence… prayers we pray year after year, despite knowing that violence never ends.  I too have written thousands of words in prayers for every noble cause, some of them in very elegant prose.   In Fiddler On The Roof, someone asks the rabbi if there is a special prayer for the Tsar.  Certainly, says the rabbi… “God bless and keep the Tsar – far away from us”.  Then we have all the majestic prayers of funerals, of the Solemnising of Matrimony, of Ordination – always hoping, I have sometimes thought, that God is impressed with our use of language.  The church lives by its prayer – and all of its prayer assumes that God, out there, will turn his attention and hear the prayer… and, we hope, respond.

When Jesus’s disciples asked him to teach them to pray, he said, When you pray say, Our Father…  If you turn to John 17, which almost immediately follows the Abiding passages we have been mentioning in past weeks, you encounter Jesus’s own prayer when he knew what was about to happen.  And his first word is: Father…  Jesus himself abides in this bond of love.  In our abiding we join in this bond. 

There is really only one prayer in the universe, and that is the bond of love and unity we see when Jesus says Abba, Father.  We come to the threshold of that same bond of love when from our hearts we say, Father.  It is no longer asking God to do things.  It is joining the hymn of prayer which is always flowing in God’s creation, the ceaseless bond of love and re-creation between Father and Son and Spirit.  If you read John 17, you see how it is a constant call towards unity and peace, re-creation and renewal.  We select silence and stillness.  We stop our words.  We do what we can to set self aside and to be present, as God is always present.  We become part of the river of prayer of love and unity which is nothing less than creation itself.  Our deep inner consent means that we are content to be part of God’s renewal of all things. 

In her fourth talk to the NZCCM meditators in Hamilton, Sarah Bachelard told how Christian Meditation opened for her a prayer blessedly free of my agenda, demands and expectations.   As time went by, she learned how God does not have to be persuaded to be nice to us – God is already and irrevocably for us, for all of us.  This is what we now have to know and live, and at times, speak.  Far from making intercession redundant, she says, Intercession becomes the spirit that imbues our whole lives… all our prayer, our meditation… and all our action…  There is only one prayer…

Abiding…6 – The place of unknowing

Now we see in a mirror, in a riddle, but then we will see face to face.  Now I know in part; then I will know fully, even as I am fully known [I Cor. 13: 12].

The Greek word Paul uses is “enigma” (εν αινιγματι).  Faith in God, Christian allegiance, does not draw the veil aside to explain much at all.  If you are looking for your questions to be answered, your doubts resolved… if you want assurance about belief and about what’s right and what’s wrong… if you want to live in some safety zone where things don’t go wrong, where no one ever lets you down… then you’re seriously out of luck.  Yet people come to the church with those expectations, and in some ways the church has encouraged them.  St Paul says that life and faith remain cloaked in mystery.  What John’s Gospel calls abiding, what St Paul calls being “in Christ”, deepens our capacity to live fully in that place of unknowing, to live with uncertainty and unresolvedness – along with, as we well know, the continuing realities of pain and loss, unfairness, inequity… all the issues the Psalmist complained about – the income gap, the wicked thriving, the children suffering. 

Now abiding, as we have been hearing, is a mutual abiding.  I abide in him, he abides in me.  It finds expression most clearly in our form of prayer based on stillness and silence, in which we make space, we do what we can (which often isn’t much) to set self aside.  In this discipline, then, as weeks and years go by, we find our self-concern attenuating, weakening, assuming less prominence.  This is not something we could decide and do ourselves.  We are consenting to this change brought by the Spirit of the Risen Christ abiding in us.  This gentle process begins to modify our reactions and feelings widely, far beyond our actual prayer. 

One of the fruits of this, we have seen, is the process of discernment.  To the extent that self is no longer determining everything, we are (says Sarah Bachelard) deepening our capacity to dwell in the place of unknowing, we are more able to suspend premature judgement or solutions.  One surprise may be that we are not as afraid as we used to be of what could happen.  We have less need of fences, walls, battlements – rather, we are finding a better sense of spaciousness and possibility and the future.  We lose our fear of being wrong.   To the extent moreover that the church learns contemplative prayer and discernment, it becomes better able to be sensible and wise in Christian action in the secular world. 

Sarah Bachelard described the culture in which we find ourselves living the faith we have.  In her words… We live in highly opinionated and reactive times, in a culture that often exhibits arrogant certainty, impatience with waiting and with the vulnerability of real listening… (A culture of) winning and losing, listening for weakness and exploiting it… demand for instant results, readily measurable outcomes, manageable key performance indicators…  The committed practice of discernment is profoundly counter-cultural, she says.  Yet… if we are to act in our families, communities, businesses and nations truly responsive to the truth of things, to the will of God, then it’s this capacity for discernment above all that we need to strengthen and practise.  And this is a gift that contemplative persons and communities must model and make available.[1]

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[1] Quotations are from Sarah Bachelard: For Love of the World: Contemplation, Faith and the Active Life – Talks to the NZCCM retreat, Hamilton NZ, January 2017… Talk 3.

Abiding…5 – Of his Spirit

By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit. [I John 4:13]

Last week we were considering what Jesus calls the fruits of abiding.  He used the analogy of the vine.   If the branch does not “abide” in the vine it withers.  If the branch “abides” in the vine it is nourished and “bears much fruit”.  Sarah Bachelard says that one of the most important fruits of abiding is discernment.  Discernment is a quiet gift more than ever needing to be recovered and understood in our confusing and perilous world, and in our divided, disintegrating church. 

So what is discernment?  She makes a difference between, on the one hand, activism, good works… that is, seeing a need or an injustice and doing something about it if we can… what we do may be hands-on help, or protest, giving money, defying the law, or writing a report…  This is action.  It comes partly from our need to do something, when our sense of rightness is offended by what we see or hear.  But also, she says, we have discernment, and – this is the interesting thing -- she teaches that discernment has priority.  Discernment is to do with the quality and depth of our perception of things.  When we practise disciplines of silence and stillness, we are making space and freedom to be open to a better understanding, and to what is not us, what is not simply a product of our fears and needs and beliefs.   Discernment is to touch the fringes of God’s view of the matter, and in our world and our church it is up to contemplative believers to learn discernment.

We are free to learn discernment to the extent that, in prayer and in all of life, we are becoming more able to set self aside.  You see Jesus practising discernment in his response to the woman caught in adultery [John 8].  To the religious leaders this was a simple matter.  The woman had offended and was liable for punishment, and the penalty was stoning.  They see no problem in publicly parading and humiliating this guilty woman; they see no problem in not naming and shaming the man involved… Moses commanded us to stone such women…   I may point out that much of this attitude thrives in our day… public exposure and denial of dignity, the need people have to see punishment done and more suffering imposed – and we can even have stoning of women, not here admittedly, but in some lands, in the name of Allah the Compassionate, the Merciful.  Jesus doesn’t answer them immediately.  He crouches down and writes with his finger in the dust... it may be, disgusted by their cruel sanctimony, but needing to discern God’s view of this.  Alright, he says, let the one without sin throw the first stone.  The point about this response is that Jesus opens up a new space, a space for their discernment about themselves… a space for truth, inseparable from mercy, which supersedes the letter of the law… and a future for the woman.  It is typical of true discernment that it opens up space and the future.

Sarah Bachelard rushes to add:  Yes, but we are not Jesus.  We have a struggle to create this kind of space and discernment even in our own families at times, she says.  Yes… but it is a goal to which we are open in the silence and stillness of our prayer.  I think it is increasingly the prior requirement for any Christian action on justice and peace issues.  Our activism will be unsustainable without the fruit of the Spirit of the Risen Christ, encountered and welcomed in prayer – and without which we may be simply, in St Paul’s words, noisy gongs and clanging cymbals. 

(Next week: Learning to live then with uncertainty and unresolvedness…)