Stones – Holy Week, 18 March 2016

Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, order your disciples to stop.” He answered, “I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out.”  (Luke 19:39-40)

I seem to remember commenting quite recently how anyone who has been to the Holy Land knows that it is a landscape of stones, dry stones and rubble lying around.  Stony ground, and I wondered how often the local medical clinics deal with turned ankles and the like – perhaps mostly with tourists.  Stones are prominent in the gospel records.  Peter’s name means a stone, and Jesus made it a metaphor for that special kind of faith.  Here in the gospel for Palm Sunday, the Pharisees are unnerved because the crowd hails Jesus as the promised Messiah, but he says if he stopped them doing that the stones would cry out.  On another day he had told the Pharisees and all the men clamouring around the woman caught in adultery, Let whoever is sinless among you throw the first stone.  His parable about the sowing of seed mentioned what they all knew about, the difficulty of seed falling in stony ground. 

It was a stone that was rolled across the tomb where they buried him – and was found rolled back on the Sunday morning.  An angel sitting on a stone said, He is not here, he is risen.  In Israel stones are a persistent problem, and in our day the Knesset has just legislated very serious penalties for anyone throwing stones at the police or the military.  But some orthodox Jews believe that throwing stones at enemies is a righteous act even on the Sabbath.

However, the point in all this is Jesus’s colourful way of saying that there is no way to stop the people’s excitement.  The Pharisees couldn’t stop them, and neither could he.  He never wanted to be called Messiah – he had made that quite clear.  It was dangerous, but more importantly, the Messiah they were expecting was not the sort Jesus would ever be.  The people are expressing a deep, clamant need, a need for hope… is that what it is?  Anyway, if that need, that cry is suppressed or denied, if anyone tries to clamp the lid down on it, the very stones will take it up, says Jesus.  It is something dictators, tyrants, oppressors, have discovered all through history.  The moment we start erecting fences, building walls, restricting freedoms, hiding truth, denying dignity, we simply trigger a counter-reaction… and any student of history can give 101 examples.  It applies equally to the life within.  Build fences around what we are allowed to believe and we confine and restrict life itself, the life God has given. 

When we choose to sit in prayerful silence and stillness, we are choosing the freedom of God’s Spirit – which, Jesus reminded Nicodemus, is like the wind – the wind which, James K Baxter wrote, blows both inside and outside the fences.  The people greeting Jesus were indeed unwise, they may have been in various ways mistaken, but they were giving voice to their spirit calling out for God’s Spirit.  And Jesus knows that God hears that – even the stones are listening.

A new thing – Lent V, 11 March 2016

Time for a taste of Hebrew poetry and prophecy.  This is from the Old Testament lesson for this Sunday:  Thus says the Lord… Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.  (Isaiah 43: 17-19)

One of our really effective teachers in contemplative spirituality is Cynthia Bourgeault, an American Episcopalian priest.  She teaches for instance -- and I think this is important – that the issue in this kind of prayer is not really focussing and paying attention.  Obviously it does matter to be still and silent, and to focus as best we can so that our monkey minds are not all over the place.  It does matter that we develop a discipline of paying attention, not only in prayer, but also just about everywhere else -- for instance in conversations we have.  These things and much more are all part of the discipline of the contemplative.  But there is a deeper issue.  Cynthia Bourgeault says it’s not so much attention as intention.  In the Cloud of Unknowing this is called our naked intent.  Our intention is God.  If it is not, then it is not prayer.  All else, for the time being, we set aside, and what she writes is:

The way this is done is through a simple inner agreement which I am perfectly happy to call a deal.  The deal is this:  If you catch yourself thinking, you let the thought go.  Promptly, quietly, without self-recrimination, you simply release the thought and start over…. It is a pathway of return, almost entirely so.  The effectiveness… is not measured by your ability to maintain your mind in a steady state of clarity, openness, or stillness.  It is measured by your willingness, when you find yourself caught out by a thought, to return again and again… to that state of open receptivity. (The Wisdom Jesus)

This intent for God, in our prayer, is a daily µετανοια, metanoia, what our English bibles call “repentance”-- but it is not a matter of how we feel, sorry or ashamed, but of what we do, turning around, returning daily to our true path. 

The Hebrew prophet saw that the footprints of God are seen not where the old and familiar is being restored, reconstituted, but where a new way is being opened.  Behold, I am doing a new thing… do you not perceive it?   The new way is the pathway God is always opening up ahead.  Sometimes it is a dark path, sometimes a vague and overgrown path, sometimes it may seem like a shining highway.  The prophet informs the Hebrew exiles in Babylon that there is a way ahead.  God is doing always a new thing.  Tens of thousands of Syrian and other exiles today could do with such a prophet and such poetry and such hope.  In our prayer, in our silence and stillness, we are always at the place in the road where it is a choice, restoring the old path and the familiar things, or turning on to the new way.

Ninety-nine righteous – Lent IV, 4 March 2016

Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance. (Luke 15:7)

So, in Jesus’s kingdom it’s counter-intuitive.  The most disadvantageous thing you can be is righteous -- even if you are in an overwhelming majority of people who see themselves that way.  Martin Luther realised that one day, in a burst of inspiration which radically changed his life, and changed western Christianity.  After years of trying his hardest to be righteous, sincerely striving to do what he believed God required -- and generally failing – it dawned on him, in the writings of St Paul, that God was not seeing Martin Luther in the way he was seeing himself. 

Jesus makes this remark about what gives pleasure in heaven, to explain the parable of the lost sheep, and the parable of the lost coin.  It is the one that is lost that is the issue, that is occupying God’s attention.  Then Jesus goes right on with the best-known parable of the lost son, the so-called prodigal son.  The boy’s older brother speaks eloquently for the 99 righteous:  All these years I have been working like a slave for you, and I have never disobeyed your command…  He believes he has earned his status, by what he has done and by who he is.  He is probably right.  Most righteous people are not self-righteous hypocrites.  The chances are they, or we, are genuinely good and sincere people, possibly also generous and hospitable.

The father however is preoccupied with the younger son who has turned around and come home, humbled and penniless.  The shepherd has carried the lost sheep home, on his back, rejoicing.  The woman has run out to her friends and neighbours to tell them, I have found the coin that I had lost. 

So there is something we need to understand about God.  It is not what we thought.  If recognising and rewarding virtue and achievement is what we expected, then we are out of luck.  God, whom Jesus called Father, is somehow absent from the prizegiving, watching instead for the one who has got lost, the one who has made stupid mistakes, all his own fault, getting what he deserves, the one who has been told 100 times…  It’s not the sins and errors and calamities that are counted, but the µετανοια, the turning around, choosing mercy and change.

Pope Francis has declared the Year of Mercy.  The title of his book is, The Name of God is Mercy.  Auckland minister Mike Riddell writes: Mercy is an incisive scalpel that divides religion from faith, piety from pity, judgement from compassion.  The song of the angels, Jesus informs us, is not so much about all the righteous – it is much more about the one who is turning around.