KEEPING IT SIMPLE – 6. The mind of Christ

 (Lenten series VI, Friday 8 April 2022)

St Paul has an expression I have never heard any preacher or teacher deal with… “those who are mature”.  Paul certainly thinks that, in the church, there are those who are mature, and those who are… presumably immature?...  In a way it is what you would expect, but saying it won’t win you friends… our egalitarian Kiwiland is not keen on tall poppies…  and we have all met super-Christians, spiritual gold-card holders.  Paul observes that the community and fellowship of Jesus always includes some he unapologetically calls unspiritual[1] -- and of the unspiritual Paul writes: Those who are unspiritual do not receive the gifts of God’s Spirit, for they are foolishness[2] to them, and they are unable to understand them because they are spiritually discerned…^[3]  Martha and Mary, perhaps…?  Paul makes this uncomfortable distinction.  Alongside the psychichoi , the “unspiritual”, are the teleioi, the mature.  And of these he writes, somewhat unnervingly:  (The mature)…have the mind of Christ:  …among the mature we do speak wisdom, though it is not a wisdom of this age… we speak God’s wisdom, secret and hidden… none of the rulers of this age understood this… but as it is written, “What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the human heart conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him…” these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit…  Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit that is from God, so that we may understand the gifts bestowed on us by God.  And we speak of these things in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual things to those who are spiritual. 

Now, I don’t want to be talking about two types of people… because, of course, human society is more complex and nuanced than that… and in any case, Paul includes us all in the church, in Jesus’s company, just as Martha and Mary belonged equally in the home at Bethany with Jesus.  These days, the “mature” in Paul’s terms find it easier to think of ourselves as contemplative – because, for instance, we are less and less motivated, activated, by our variable feelings and emotions; we practise silence and stillness, contemplative prayer; we know how to wait and pay attention, we know what it is to live by faith, to live with mystery and unresolved questions; we consciously, each day, walk the next steps in the way of Christ… Contemplative is the way we are inclined to describe ourselves, knowing that anything we want to say about it, even by way of careful explanation, as Paul points out, is likely to seem foolishness to the ones he describes as unspiritual.

You may have been startled at Paul’s statement, that the mature “have the mind of Christ”… but it is not, and is never likely to be, any cause of spiritual elitism, or thinking grandly of ourselves as mystics or whatever.  In the silence and stillness of prayer, we distance ourselves daily from the ego’s occupation of our lives... this is the daily and lifelong process Jesus called leaving self behind -- a prospect that frightens the life out of those Paul calls unspiritual. Our teachers tell us there is in any case only one prayer in the universe – in prayer we are joining the eternal prayer of the Risen Jesus… a prayer reflected for instance in chapter 17 of John’s Gospel, a timeless prayer of love and unity, mercy and peace.  We are joining what Fr Richard Rohr sees as an immense River of Grace and Mercy.  To the Samaritan woman at the well Jesus described this as a spring of living water within.[4] 

So here we are… living and practising faith in a time of deepening global crisis… climate crisis, hideous warfare and mindless social violence, pandemic and its accompaniments of paranoia, assaults on truth and decency, corruption in politics, refugees by the million., and children being terrified, lost, starved, killed…  Here we are, just about helpless in any practical sense.  KEEPING IT SIMPLE, then , the title I gave this Lenten series, does mean recognising when we are at the limits of our personal resources and wisdom.  The mature however do know a way forward in this desperate space…  Whether or not we can save the planet, I will continue doing what I can, so far as it lies with me, to keep the planet’s temperature rise below 1.5°… but first and in any case I will go on practising, day by day, what St Paul called the hidden wisdom, doing justice, loving mercy, walking humbly… loving God, our neighbour, and ourselves… abiding in Christ.

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[1] Ψυχικός (psychikos).  It can mean “natural” – it is what we are when we are being driven, motivated by feelings and innate reactions… “It’s just the way I am…”

[2] Mōria (μωρία), foolishness. Nonsense…

[3] I Corinthians 2:6-16

[4] eg. John 4:10-15

KEEPING IT SIMPLE – 5. Not being afraid

(Lenten series V, Friday 1 April 2022)

We are thinking about life and faith in a time of crisis, and so we do have to talk about being afraid.  Jesus, in several instances, asks his disciples why were they afraid… as though they needn’t have been.  Have no fear… he says. And in the Sermon on the Mount we find the piece that causes nervous shuffling in the pews… where Jesus says:

Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear.  Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?  Look at the birds of the air… Can you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life… It is the gentiles who strive for all these things…  So do not worry about tomorrow. For tomorrow will bring worries of its own.  Today’s trouble is enough for today.^[1]

But we can’t help it.  Basil Fawlty is told, don’t panic, and he yells, What else is there to do…!  More seriously, to watch Ukrainians fleeing their homes, towards any western border, wherever the train they scramble on is going, women and children, parting from their menfolk who have to stay and fight… fear has occupied and dominates their lives. 

Sarah Bachelard makes a pretty obvious distinction between fear and anxiety… although the distinction can get a little blurred.  Fear tends to render us helpless and confused, even paralysed for action… like the disciples in the storm on the lake.  I freaked out, you have to tell the media… I was like, O my God!  When fear takes over, reason tends to go out the window.  Anxiety on the other hand is more when we find ourselves lying awake still more or less in our right minds… but our right minds are the problem, we’re seeing worst-case scenarios, dire possibilities, at 2 in the morning.

The Apostle John, as we know, says that love casts out fear… there is no fear in love, he writes.[2]   Well… tell that to countless mothers in history who have watched their sons go off to war.  But if we look at the text we can see what he means.  Fear, he says, has to do with punishment.  The fear cast out by love is the fear of an arbitrary God.  Ultimately it is a fear of life and death itself.  There is no fear in love, writes John, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love.  We love because he first loved us…  To be perfected in love, as John puts it, is to know the God Jesus called Father, of whom we have no need to be afraid, who punishes no one, who sends his rain, says Jesus, on good and bad alike.[3]  It is to live, to abide, in the love Jesus knew, in which he lived and died.

In contemplative life and prayer we do find ourselves, as time goes by, less frightened of life and all its risks.  We find ourselves more ready to accept life as fragile and precarious, unfair in many respects.  We are more in love each day with goodness and truth, with beauty and wonder, with mercy and justice.  It is not that pain and sorrow suddenly become somehow acceptable… or that adversity doesn’t matter any more… It is more that, as St Paul puts it, love never fails… love abides.[4]

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[1] Matthew 6:25ff

[2] I John 4:18

[3] Matthew 5:45

[4] I Corinthians 13:8, 13