At this point in Paul’s song of love in I Corinthians 13, he
seems to turn more directly to problems and confusion in his beloved Corinthian
church. He writes about “prophecies…
tongues… knowledge…” He wants to say, a lot
of things in the church are fleeting shadows, transitory. “Prophecies”, in our time, is more like
preaching, proclaiming, always a dangerous procedure, especially from people who
believe they know the answers, or that God has told them the answers. They know the signs, issue warnings, become
manipulative. “Tongues” refers to those
who need it always to be dramatic, ecstatic, at any rate they must never be
bored. Tongues… Paul says will cease,
stop, mercifully, as a noise ceases eventually – you can’t be entertained,
excited all the time. Prophecies may be
dramatic and timely, or seem so, but they become yesterday’s word – the Greek
verb[1]
means to be made useless, redundant. The
same word is used for what eventually may happen to gnōsis/knowledge – it is
always likely to be superseded, as we certainly discover in our time.
I think this is pastoral advice for the Corinthian
church. Paul doesn’t want to see them heading
down silly, energy-draining by-ways, looking for faith and reassurance in the
wrong places. It is agapē/love that is true, and remains (abides… see v.13), and is the test of the church. These other things, which can occupy
us and drain our energy… bothering about our kind of church, our kind of
worship, our understanding of faith, our achievements, our glorious history… all
is partial, ek merous (ἐκ μερους), fragmentary.
I can interpose here to say something specifically about Christian
Meditation. Since the initiation of the
World Community for Christian Meditation, one of the most frequent questions is,
perennially, what are its benefits?
What’s in it for me? …questions
arising from a culture of consumerism and egoism. And the answer from the outset has been: If we must measure the effects of a practice
of Christian Meditation, contemplative life and prayer… it is measured by
love. There may be all manner of health
benefits, and of course that is good. But
the work of the mantra, its simplicity (some like to say, its poverty) frees us
to receive and to give love. That is
healing, precisely because the ego is being removed from the priority that
belongs to God.
In a recent Mediatio Newsletter, Fr Laurence Freeman refers to the
diminishing Christian church in the west.
One of my former parish churches is now a mosque – I remember it packed
to the doors and beyond, one very late snowy Christmas Eve – and another is now
a Coptic Orthodox church, complete with an elaborate iconostasis. All good, I think… at any rate they are not
now up-market apartments or kick-boxing gymnasiums. Fr Laurence asks, Do we then need a massive PR campaign and advertising blitz to reignite
the transmission of the faith as some church leaders desperately think? That would be exactly what Paul
identifies, the reliance on dramatic prophecy, “tongues” and excitement, and on
gnōsis, knowledge. Fr Laurence continues: Or do those who are neither ambivalent nor embarrassed by their
Christian identity need to speak less, to deepen their silence. They then allow the Spirit to turn them, not
into salesmen of the gospel but into the gospel itself. In this tradition the disciple has always been
seen primarily not as a promoter but as an alter Christus, another Christ. To become agapē/love
is the point.
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