Jesus himself came near – 2 May 2014, Easter 3

Jesus himself came near and went with them, but their eyes were kept from recognizing him... [Luke 24:15-16]

This story of the encounter on the road to Emmaus is exclusive to Luke, and it remains one of the most tantalizing of the gospel narratives.  Two of the disciples were walking seven miles to Emmaus – that’s just over 11 km, about the distance from Algies Bay to Warkworth (if you don’t divert to Charlies).  Jesus comes and walks with them.  They don’t recognize him.  And yet one of the major points of this story is to convince Jews especially that the risen Jesus is really him, flesh and blood.  After some three years of ministry, they don’t recognize him…?  Then he seems not to know about all the drama of the last few days – Luke astonishingly portrays Jesus as totally disingenuous, pretending, it seems, that he hasn’t heard all this.  But he still takes trouble to explain the Hebrew prophecies to them.  Even when they arrive where they are to stay at Emmaus, the stranger Jesus makes to continue on, and they have to urge him to stay.  It is only when he breaks the bread at the meal that they recognize him.

I don’t know whether anyone at our schools or in this age of cyber-speak is teaching any more what my generation called literary criticism – how to read layered narratives like this, how to spot the different levels of meaning, how to discern what the writer was actually trying to do, to convey, how to assess a literary construction. Perhaps contemporary prose and verse tends to be so two-dimensional that literary criticism is like trying to fish in a puddle.  Luke is telling us here something vital for us to know about the risen Jesus and about resurrection life for all of us.  He comes to us, wrote Albert Schweitzer, as one unknown… 

We encounter Jesus on our journey in often mysterious, unexpected and oblique ways.  Sometimes it may be that, later, in looking back, in retrospect, we wonder if that had been him, in Luke’s words, coming near.  We encounter him along the way – not so much in standing around singing sentimental choruses or in inspiring studies designed to solve our problems, but in weekday life, moving along the road of our daily journey, experiencing life and other people.  He draws near, as Luke tells us.  Perhaps we don’t see it at the time.  Later, it may be in some holy moment such as at the sacrament, it may be many years later, it dawns on us what actually changed us and inspired us, strengthened and empowered us, at that moment. 

Contemplative people become generally slow and reluctant to make dogmatic statements about these things.  We feel very comfortable with reticence, a decent veil thrown over things we experienced and came eventually to understand.  In our kind of prayer, what we are most familiar with is the humble soul and the grateful heart, and all the mysteries that remain, rather more than the tales of triumph and victory. 

But whatever… each of us in our own ways becomes accustomed to the sense that Jesus has drawn near on our road, and made a few things clearer, and perhaps even broken bread with us. 

Anzac Day – 25 April 2014

Across the top of the cenotaph in Auckland Domain, as also in Whitehall and many other places, are the words chosen by David Lloyd George:  “The Glorious Dead”.  The words may seem noble and fitting, but they have deeply offended some people down the years.  Some poets have excoriated such sentiments as trying to dignify and justify the bloody realities of war.  One of the latest is the scorn and indignation expressed in a vile heavy metal pop recording.  I am not capable of listening to this, let alone quoting it. 

War, however, is as old as humanity (or in the case of war, inhumanity), but war remains to this day what it always was, a monstrous way of resolving differences.  It doesn’t work.  It trebles or quadruples the suffering.  It is blasphemous in its waste of human life, and in its laying waste of the earth and all our resources.  There was a heart-stopping moment in one of those TV costume dramas, when some upper class Londoners were all at a fashionable ball in 1914.  Young men were falling over each other to enlist.  Some older person expressed reservations about this, and one wifely matron in exquisite ballgown with tiara and fan says, “Oh, they’ll be alright, they’re young…”

I don’t know why it is that we eventually default to hatred, rage and violence, except that sometimes more powerful people than us make decisions which leave us with no choice.  But that’s not all of it.  The violence, which resolves nothing, comes from within us.  Violence pervades our society in peace as well as war, in our words as well as our deeds.  It finds massive expression in much of our sport, where it is often ennobled and admired, and considered valiant and manly.  There are plenty of sincere people who wonder what is the matter with you if you object to physical or verbal violence -- to abusive debate, for instance (If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen…), with stomping in football or with brain damaging your opponent in boxing, with keeping firearms and lovingly tending such things.  

The new person in Christ, risen (as St Paul puts it) with Christ, is new and risen not because they have somehow acquired an ethereal life which is different and peaceful, and means everything is going to be alright..  We are new and risen daily, when we daily choose the way of Christ rather than all our other possible choices.  We are new and risen when, in silence and stillness, we consent to God before we consent to anyone or anything else.  We are new and risen when one day it dawns on us that this is something we are not really doing ourselves – it is being done in us, by our consent.  We are new and risen when the possibility of adversity has not stopped us from choosing the path of love and justice, or from speaking the truth.  We are new and risen when we discover one day that we are no longer afraid, that love has cast out fear – when we discover that we do not have to run the world, and that personal image and lifestyle are not of great importance. 

We may know what is intended, we think, by a phrase such as The Glorious Dead, and we can honour that – but we have already admitted into our hearts a gift of peace which is not capable of war and violence.

Reconstituting the Temple – 11.4.2014, Passion Sunday

The temple which Jesus attacked, during that last week in Jerusalem, was once a sign of grace.  It was the place where God had chosen to make his name to dwell, say the ancient scriptures.  In the Psalms, you go up to Jerusalem to see the God of gods in Zion.  It is experienced as pain and humiliation to be cut off from this place by exile or by sickness (Psalms 42, 43, 84).  You might excuse me a Scottish paraphrase of Isaiah ch.2:

To this the joyful nations round,                     All tribes and tongues shall flow;

Up to the hill of God, they’ll say,                    And to his house we’ll go.

 

The beam that shines from Zion hill                Shall lighten every land

The king who reigns in Salem’s towers             Shall all the world command.

 

No strife shall rage, nor hostile feuds                Disturb those peaceful years;

To plowshares men shall beat their swords,        To pruning hooks their spears.

 

No longer hosts encount’ring hosts                   Shall crowds of slain deplore;

They hang the trumpet in the hall,                  And study war no more.

But now, when Jesus comes to Jerusalem, the temple has become something else.  The priests, the scribes and the pharisees are managing a system deeply compromised by its political relationship with Rome and with wealth.  There are now strict conditions of entry to the sacred precinct – what was once for all nations is now only for male Jews and for the ritually pure.  There is a vast stinking animal market and money exchange next door, with all the graft and corruption pertaining thereto,  and it was working at full pitch during these days of the Passover.

My Father’s house, says Jesus, is a house of prayer for all peoples, but you have made it a den of thieves.  What was originally given as a place of grace and peace has been subsumed into the culture of noise and violence, greed and privilege, gatekeepers and status.

And so in the Easter story that temple becomes as it were reconstituted – once again for all peoples, Jew and Greek, rich and poor, male and female, black and white, slave and free, Catholic and Protestant, saint and sinner, gay and straight – the temple is reconstituted for ever in our symbolism as the Body of Christ, crucified and risen.  The veil of the temple, we are told, was torn from top to bottom.  Judaism burst its legalistic bounds, to become what was always its best vision, to be a light to the nations, a way of peace.  The temple is reconstituted now no longer on Zion’s holy hill, but on a squalid and foetid dump outside the holy city, a place in which all human hopes may seem to have perished, but nevertheless the place where God now chooses his name to dwell. 

That now is this place.  It is anywhere we are.  It is especially where we stop and wait and choose silence and stillness.  It is the place where God’s healing creative stillness is very near, where our many unanswered questions tend to recede from centre stage, where life takes over from death, and all is well. 

Are these all just words, perhaps?  (Teaching spirituality can be a dangerous thing if you are good at words.)  But in fact we never know except in a discipline of stillness and silence, a relinquishing of power and control, and a peaceful ready consent to both life and death.  Raimon Panikkar, one of our great contemporary teachers, says that we can’t speak of God any more except from an interior silence.  And so, that is what we do. 

Lazarus, come forth – 4 April 2014, Lent V

The lectionary certainly does not spare us during these weeks of Lent.  For Lent V the Gospel is the long and puzzling story of Jesus raising Lazarus.  After all the years, the only way this story helps me now is to approach it as a paradigm, a picture, of Christian inner transformation.  The story comes to us from the Johannine traditions of the early church, and I am sure it was intended to be read not so much as an account of actual events, which would have seemed to say the least unlikely, but as a coded narrative conveying deep inner truths. 

The home at Bethany, near Jerusalem, was clearly a place of welcoming for Jesus.  The sisters Martha and Mary, and their brother Lazarus, lived there.  It was a loving and luminous circle.  And perhaps this home at Bethany serves to demonstrate something elemental about the church.  Martha comes to Jesus by willing and ready service, preparing food, ensuring hospitality, being available.  That is the way she responds and expresses her love.  Mary is different, she responds to Jesus by her presence and her keen attention, her mindfulness as we might say, and her love for this man.  It is another kind of response of the heart, every bit as authentic as Martha’s, but very different.  I think the reason Jesus said Mary’s response was the better part, was mainly that Martha had been critical of it and Mary needed to be defended.[1] 

But what about Lazarus?  In one of the two stories we have (Luke 10: 38-42), Lazarus is absent altogether.  Not mentioned.  Invisible.  In this other story he is there but he has died.   Jesus, after getting the news that his friend Lazarus was ill, deliberately delayed going to Bethany, and when he arrived he was four days too late.   

Well, in thinking about this I am helped by the Benedictine Cistercian, Fr Thomas Keating.  He sees Lazarus as exemplifying, in the understanding and teaching of the early church, yet another truth of spiritual growth.  Lazarus is one who comes to Jesus, not by the paths of Martha or Mary, but through a Dark Night which will seem like a death.  The night may be quite different, of course, and for different reasons, for different people, but it is always a dark time, a dark experience.  Finally, perhaps long delayed, it is Jesus who calls Lazarus out of it, as it were.  This is a very moving reality of some in the church. 

Of course this is intimately linked with resurrection.  It would be nice if we had a simple untroubled pathway through ever deepening and dignified enlightenment.  We don’t have that.  I don’t know anyone who does.  What we may get is a succession of dark nights and sunrises, mountains and plateaus.  We may follow the path of Martha or of Mary or of Lazarus – or even some variation on those themes.  But it is in the disciplines of silence and stillness that we are steadied, and brought back into the present where we can shed our fears of whatever change is happening.  It is the path Jesus walked, and I believe he knows it quite well.

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[1] The Greek, την αγαθην μεριδα, “the better part”, awkward in English, is actually not so judgmental.

Now I see – 28 March 2014, Lent IV

This Sunday the lectionary chooses another lengthy and complex story for us --  Jesus’ healing of the blind man, and all that followed.  The man was blind from birth.  The disciples ask Jesus whose fault it is.  Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents…?  Typically we have to know who to blame.  It is very convenient for some to blame God, a tyrant and an arbitrary God who declines to stop cruel things happening.  “He didn’t deserve that… an innocent child…” reactions we constantly hear when things go wrong.  Jesus says categorically, Neither this man sinned nor his parents…  Contemplative, mature understanding does include leaving behind these infantile and idolatrous concepts of God and the world.  It does entail making peace with our own frailty, vulnerability and mortality.

The story then throws up another infantilism in the church.  The man had been healed of his congenital blindness.  That, you would think, is something to be glad about.  But in the church it is seldom so simple – and this story, scholars think, in the way it is told, reflects quite serious problems in the early Christian Jewish and Gentile communities.  People were skeptical and critical of what the man was telling them, but when they demanded to know from him, How were your eyes opened…?  who did it…?  where is he…? the man tells them all, I do not know.  People want answers, explanations, perhaps a reason to show that it’s all a hoax.  The man has not become a disciple. Better people than him have not been healed.   All he knows, he says, is that he encountered the man called Jesus, and he doesn’t know where Jesus is now.  But the fact is, he can now see.

So the Pharisees take a hand in it – and believe me, that is not good news.  What interests them is not so much wonder and gratitude that a blind man can now see, as that it had been done on the Sabbath.  That is against the rules.  The rules must be reasserted and strengthened.  And what follows is a good old-fashioned religious melt-down, an inquiry, an inquisition.  The man himself is interrogated twice, his parents are interrogated, everyone gets exasperated and the Pharisees become pompous and indignant.  It is all set in contrast by the storyteller when the man once again encounters Jesus.  Jesus had heard that he was in trouble with the church, and had come looking for him.  Jesus makes this remarkable statement:  I came into the world… so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.  It was a straight confrontation between those who are sure they see but don’t – and those who may be unsure about many things, but who in their hearts actually see and know, perhaps in irregular or disapproved ways.  That sight, that knowledge – and it is contemplative knowledge – is always humble.  Those who really see are not worshipping law and observance, they are the least likely to assume the moral high ground, they are slow to condemn, and what they are most likely to dislike is judgementalism and lack of compassion.  The eyes of your heart being opened, wrote St Paul, that you may know…  That is contemplative, mature knowledge, the knowledge of the heart.

Living water – 21 March 2014, Lent III

If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, “Give me a drink”, you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water. [John 4: 10]

This complex story is the Gospel lesson for next Sunday.  Jesus is in Samaria, in transit as we would say these days, on his way back to Galilee.  At midday he asks a Samaritan woman at a well if she can give him a drink of water.  The woman is amazed, first because he has spoken to a woman in public at high noon, and also because she is a Samaritan and therefore to the Jew an outcast.  When she expresses her surprise, he enigmatically suggests that she should have asked him, and he would have given her living water – υδωρ ζως – the image is flowing, clear, sparkling, cool water, in contrast to a bucketful of doubtful water fetched up from this well. 

We find the image of living water again in chapter 7.  Jesus is in Jerusalem at the temple.  It is the Feast of Tabernacles, Succot, the harvest festival.  Jesus announces to the crowd, Come to me… and drink… Out of your heart will flow rivers of living water.  The Greek actually says, out of your belly.  I suppose the translators thought heart sounded nicer.  Belly is more earthy, it is what the writer wrote, and I prefer it. 

Rivers of living water, however, does sound a little like hyperbole. It is not the experience of most people, most of the time.  Our inward and deep response to Jesus is generally more hidden and subtle.  But teachers through the centuries have pointed to an inner place, which is there whether we know it or not.  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow calls it the Spirit’s secret cell.  Thomas Keating calls it the centre.  St Paul among many refers simply to the heart.  The French Benedictine, Henri le Saux, writes of the cave of the heart.  It is there and it is a place we enter.  It is not a place we build or develop, not something we improve or decorate like our lifestyle or our state-or-the-art kitchen, even with smart spiritual methods.  It is not a place we control. 

It is there.  And the point of contemplative prayer is choosing, consenting, to go to this place, or at least to turn towards it, through all the hesitations, fears and distractions.  It is a place of presence, God’s presence and ours.  And so it is a place of truth, love, simplicity, light – and like the picture given us in the Book of Revelation, far from being static, a river runs through it.  So there is change in this place, constant renewal, God making all things new.  Living water.

This is the polar opposite of the spirituality which places me at the centre, my requirements, my helpful holy thoughts, the saccharine, self-indulgent, spiritual messages which sell popular spirituality without pain to so many today.  The cave of the heart is not accessible to my public ego or to my years of devoted service.  We leave all  that stuff outside.  It is open to me, the person God already knows and invites, and loves. 

The wind blows on Nicodemus – 14.03.2014, Lent II

Nicodemus.  This story is one of the Gospel options for this Sunday, Lent II.  It is in John’s Gospel, so we need, more than ever, wonder and imagination.  We must make a humble space in which the story can begin to speak to us anew, however well we may think we know it from the past. 

Nicodemus was a teacher of Israel.  That is what Jesus called him.  It was respectful.  Nicodemus was moreover a Pharisee.  And yet he came to Jesus by night, after dark, and called him Rabbi, which means teacher.  Two teachers, offering each other total attention.  Nicodemus brings serious questions, and it’s important to note that these questions are not traps or anything clever.  He is asking the most basic things.  Jesus teaches him two things. 

First, that we must expect and be available to be born anew – the Greek ανωθεν can mean either born anew, or born from above.  Of course Nicodemus struggles to understand.  For him it is an entirely new concept.  Born anew of water and Spirit, says Jesus.  So Jesus explains.  There is life in the flesh and there is life in the Spirit.  They are not the same.  Baptism, water, signifies the entrance into a new life of the Spirit, and the Spirit, God, continually forms and energises this new life. 

One of the commitments of Benedictine life is what we call conversatio morum – it is receiving this new life each day, each morning, each time of prayer, each encounter with God’s world.  Being born anew does not happen just once, but constantly, steadily, gradually, gently for the most part, like a metamorphosis, an emergence, perhaps through many trials along the way, but getting there, as we say.

Secondly, says Jesus to Nicodemus, there is the wind.  In Greek, πνευμα means both wind and Spirit.  As Jesus says, and as we well know, the wind blows where and when it chooses, as hard or as gently as it likes, it can blow hot or cold – neither do we know where it is going.  That’s what it is like, teaches Jesus.  Life in the Spirit is not for those who require safety or predictability or security first.  So life in the Spirit entails having come to terms with our own frailty, vulnerability, fallibility and mortality.  It flows directly from love for God and for all God has made.  It is intimately linked to freedom.  To be born of God is to rise free from convention and addiction. 

We can say that to sit, as we do, here, in silence and stillness, with only our mantra, is to sit out in the wind.  It may be a gale at times.  Or it may be a gentle zephyr or nothing much at all.  Our task is to be present.  To consent to what the Spirit does.  And still, whatever, as they say, to be still…