What comes to the world through Jesus – 1.11.13

Contemplative life and prayer for Christian believers, part of which is what we call Christian Meditation, is very much a matter of finding anew each day, and living, what comes to the world through Jesus.  Although we may sing Tell me the old, old story…, and although there may be something more in that hymn than sentimental nostalgia, the truth is that what comes to the world through Jesus has to be seen afresh and reinterpreted in every age and generation.  What one generation saw is not the same as the following generation sees.   Indeed, some teachers would say that you can’t assume simply on waking up each morning that you know already what it’s about, that your accumulated experience of Jesus and discipleship are going to be just the same today.  Fr Laurence Freeman is one teacher who makes much of Jesus’ question to his disciples, who do you say I am…? 

The truth about Jesus, about God, about faith, hope and love, has to be appropriated afresh, with what St Paul calls the eye of the heart.  This is unsettling to those who need to believe that truth is defined, packaged, sewn up in doctrines – or for that matter, in an inspired Bible.  It shakes the foundations of their secure world.  He comes to us as one unknown, wrote Albert Schweitzer.  Obviously both the church and the Bible bear witness to Jesus – but often as not, that witness is blurred and distorted by centuries of cultural interests and what people at different times find comfortable, as also by plain human error and perversity.  In my lifetime the church has realized that the call of Jesus is equally to women, and changed itself accordingly.  Only two hundred years ago it was the matter of slavery -- some devout Christians were coming to the view that slavery was a sin.  Jesus teaches us as we move along the road.  We discover, crucially, the perils of idolatry – how easy it is to fashion God in our own image.

The contemplative spirit, then, is open by its nature to be taught, unthreatened by change, or by difference.  We expect Jesus to guide us in new ways, to challenge our wrong assumptions, to calm our fears about the storms we encounter.  Jesus reminded Nicodemus, a Pharisee, we are told, a leader of the Jews, yet who was clearly rethinking and changing, and who came to Jesus by night:  The wind blows where it wills.  You hear the sound of it, but don’t know where it has come from or where it is going.  So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit [John 3:8]

One of the corollaries of this spiritual life is that we are happy to meet contemplative people wherever they are, in other Christian denominations, in other religions or in none.  This is not so much any kind of friendly, generous disposition – it is, as the Psalmist puts it, deep calling to deep [Psalm 42:7].  We recognize someone else living not by the need for safety and security, as by the wind that blows on us – both inside and outside the paddocks, said James K Baxter -- the spirit we are finding daily reaffirmed and renewed in Christ, in our hearts and thoughts, and in our stillness and silence.