Resurrection…2 – The world can change

The first dimension of resurrection truth in the 21^st century, according to Rowan Williams, is that humans and humanity matter.  We visited that theme last week.  The second (and these themes certainly overlap) is that the world really can change.  One of the fascinating features of secular philosophy is the apparent commitment to not changing.  We have all met the person who takes pride in not changing.  There are people who claim that “some people”, especially certain offenders, “will never change” – and therefore should be locked away permanently or eliminated.  Human history up to the present day, it may seem in our gloomier moods, scarcely fills us with confidence that the world will ever change…

Jesus says otherwise.  Jesus’s resurrection is to say that God can turn human inevitability and human mortality and human history on its pivot (to borrow words from Rowan Williams) – it is to see that in all sorts of human situations it is possible for things to be different. 

Rowan Williams, who can be a little bit mischievous, then goes on to point out that this is why Christians so often turn out to be a nuisance – as Dr Williams himself was more than once, from his episcopal chair – a nuisance to people who want a tidy world.  The Roman Empire was a very efficient administration – so much so that it couldn’t find room for another vision of humanity which called for difference and a re-valuation of human dignity.  Christianity was a terrible nuisance also to Hitler and the Third Reich, as it was to Stalin, is now in China where the church is acceptable and permitted only as the state can control it.  Even in the UK or the USA the Christian prophetic resurrection voice is scarcely what the powerful want to hear or find comfortable.

It is because of the resurrection that Christians insist that things can be different.  In many cases this is because the believers have found that they themselves have been changed.  It is reinforced in many cases by the difference in values and attitudes they may see in their own families and tribal gatherings, between some who are resurrection people and some who are not, never think about it, ridicule it, or find it incomprehensible.  Indeed, there are some people who can’t and won’t change because of brain damage or psychological trauma of some kind – we assume then that we care for them, as and if we can, but certainly not traumatise them further. 

Yes, the world can change.  The Spirit of God, whom Jesus said would come, whom Jesus described memorably as the wind, blows through the ruins, creating, re-creating, enlivening, making all things new.  Resurrection people can see the signs of that.  The most powerful and movingly understated story of resurrection I ever encountered is[1] in German.  Nine-year-old Jürgen, in the rubble of Berlin, June 1945, is determinedly guarding the body of his 4-year-old brother.  “Why?” says a stranger who appears.  “Because of the rats,” says the little boy.  “But rats sleep at night,” says the stranger.  It’s a lie, as we know, but the stranger is able to persuade the boy to share some rabbit meat he has got, and some edible leaves growing up in the rubble.  And so they set off, towards the rising morning sun.

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[1] Wolfgang Borchert: Nachts schlafen die Ratten doch.

Resurrection…1 – Human beings matter

During Lent I returned to one of my best teachers, Rowan Williams,[1] and in particular his recent book, The Sign and the Sacrifice, the Meaning of the Cross and Resurrection.[2]  In the final chapter he lists five ways in which the resurrection of Jesus has deep meaning for our 21^st century lives. My hope is to take one of these on each of the next five Fridays, the first one today.

First, he says …if Jesus is risen, there is a human destiny.  That is to say, there is a human worth and dignity, a purpose and an identity way beyond that assumed by the state or the secular culture.  The creator of our life proves to be also re-creator, making all things new.  Jesus is our sign that the dehumanising tyrannies of our day are not God’s last word on any person God has made.  The human race may have, and does have, a capacity for destructiveness and cruelty and for reducing this world to chaos and pain – Jesus tells another narrative.  In the lovely poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins:  There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.[3] 

And then, still struggling how to think, let alone write or teach clearly, or sensibly about resurrection, I was sent, on the 50^th anniversary of his murder, this prophetic quote of Dr Martin Luther King.  I think it is from one of his sermons: When our days become dreary with low-hovering clouds of despair, and when our nights become darker than a thousand midnights, let us remember that there is a creative force in this universe, working to pull down the gigantic mountains of evil, a power that is able to make a way out of no way and transform dark yesterdays into bright tomorrows. Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.

The lectionary for these Sundays in Easter provides epistle readings from the First Letter of John.  These are almost the last writings to make it into the canon of Christian scripture.  God is light, we read there, and in him is no darkness at all.[4]  If we are walking in the darkness, says John, we cannot claim to be in company with Jesus – we cannot be resurrection people.  But if we are walking in the light of resurrection, as Jesus is, we are in company with all others doing the same.  This is the new humanity.  We know who we are, and to whom we belong, in life and in death.

Another teacher, this one long ago and I have mentioned him before, was Dr Helmut Rex.  As Dr Helmut Rehbein, refugee pastor from Nazi Germany, he was received by the NZ church and obliged to change his name to Rex to avoid abuse and discrimination.  Dr Rex taught us Church History for 3 years.  His health had been broken by malnutrition and by Nazi abuse.  A brilliant scholar and a true disciple.  And one day he said in class (I am quoting from memory):  In prison, you know, it’s not very happy.  I was allowed a Bible, and that was good of course.  But the main thing at that time was my trust in resurrection.  Jesus lives.  Nazism cannot.  That is God’s signal to us.

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[1] Former Archbishop of Canterbury, now Master of Magdalen College, Cambridge.

[2] Westminster John Knox Press, 2017.

[3] G M Hopkins: God’s Grandeur.

[4] I John 1:5ff

He speaks her name…Easter 2018

Jesus said to her, “Mary!” She turned and said to him in Hebrew, “Rabbouni!” (which means Teacher).  Jesus said to her, “Do not hold on to me… (John 20:16-17)

It is tantalising how little we know about Mary Magdalene.  One of the three Marys… Mary his mother, Mary of Bethany (sister of Martha and Lazarus), and Mary of Magdala.  The idea that Mary Magdalene was a reformed prostitute is probably a silly libel – there is no primary source that says that about her.  What does seem sure is that she was one of Jesus’s disciples, just as were James and John, Peter or Andrew.  On the Easter morning, early it says, and still dark, she is at the tomb, sunk in grief, all the more because the tomb is empty.  Mary knows Jesus is dead.  She saw him die, she saw him buried.  Someone has stolen the body.  How will she ever cope with that?

Jesus says to her, “Mary”.  That is the first kairos in Mary’s Easter.[1]  He interrupts her grief and pain.  He calls her by name.  In her darkness and loss, she is addressed from the heart of God’s love, which is greater than death.  Such a kairos may happen to any of us in any of a myriad of ways, usually just as unobtrusive, through the events of life.  Dag Hammarskjöld[2] wrote in his journal at Pentecost 1961: I don't know Who, or what, put the question, I don't know when it was put.  I don't even remember answering.  But at some moment I did answer Yes to Someone, or Something, and from that hour I was certain that existence is meaningful and that, therefore, my life, in self-surrender, had a goal.  He knew himself addressed, by name, by risen love.

The second kairos is her response.  She turned and said to him “Rabbouni!” (which means Teacher).  That is the way she knew him – as her Teacher.  It may not seem to us like full-blown Easter faith, but it is perfectly fine that she sees Jesus in her own way, according to her own encounter, and in her own time.  In time to come the church would prescribe all manner of titles for Jesus, and exalted ways of responding to him, complete with incense.  I am content to be with Mary of Magdala, for whom he was, at least initially, Rabbi, Teacher.

The third kairos is when, understandably, she moves to keep him, embrace him.  The Greek verb used here means to take hold, possess.  But he is not available now to be enlisted, used, possessed, by the church or anyone.  Mary receives, accompanies the risen Jesus in the same way we do now – not by intellect or dogma or the most inspiring creed, but by the heart’s quiet response.  Her yes to Jesus is an answer of love.  She will learn to recognise his summons in time to come, in the varied circumstances of life and of death.  And he will call her through her own death.  She has encountered the love over which, as Paul put it, death has no dominion – neither death nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else.[3]

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[1] Remember our Greek word kairos… it is the biblical word meaning a special moment, the moment that changes things, God’s moment, the moment of newness.

[2] Dag Hammarskjöld, Swedish Lutheran diplomat, Secretary-General of the United Nations, 1953-1961.

[3] Romans 8:38-39

Passion Sunday, 23 March 2018 – Obedient to death

…he humbled himself and became obedient to death. (Philippians 2:8)

The usual way, in the church, of dealing with the next week or so is to follow the drama.   It begins with Palm Sunday and the children singing Hosanna… all the events of Holy Week leading up to the Last Supper… the cruel horror of Good Friday… the empty abyss of Saturday… the lighting of the Easter flame, and the Good News of Easter morning.  People involve themselves in the drama – and in the human realities of cruelty and pain -- as much or as little as they choose.  Some make sure to remain securely within their comfort zones.

Not having to preside at these things any more as I once did, there is space to look at it in other ways.  I was struck by Paul’s phrase about Jesus, in the middle of the lyrical passage in Philippians 2… he became obedient to death.  We have encountered that word obedient before.  The Greek word Paul uses here is formed from the verb meaning to listen.  The only difference is a prefix which intensifies it – so it means to listen intently, constantly, to devote attention.[1]  “Obedient” certainly does not mean that Jesus doggedly obeyed an imperious divine will that decreed death for him.  Obedient to death, rather, means that he trusted the mutual bond of love with the Father, even down the path which led where it did.  It is such a shame that the words obey and obedience denote in our day mainly some slavish adherence to authority or to some law.  The biblical word by contrast implies a life of listening and consent, in love.  Jesus knew, I think, that that bond, enlivened by prayer, continues through and beyond death.

Approaching Easter 2018, then, what I seem to see is a civilisation (if it can be called that), at any rate a generation marked increasingly by death, swamped almost everywhere by guns and other ways of killing.  State-sponsored assassination is the latest, nothing new in history admittedly, but it has become more blatant.  I see a western culture terrified of ageing and of vulnerability – and more recently for some reason, the growing phenomenon of senility, like a premature extended goodbye…  But whoever we are, as we know, we are walking that same trail of mortality. 

Chris Nichol, who runs the Sunday morning hymn session on channel 1, last Sunday described Jesus’s path to the cross evocatively as “Me Too”.  Jesus identifies in his own life and body the path we follow… which for many, often, becomes bloody, painful, pointless or humiliating.  “Me Too”, the phrase that has emerged for women to identify with the abuse of women, serves quite well to describe Jesus going to Jerusalem and Calvary.  But the point is deeper than that.  Jesus walked that path not as some grim inevitability, but in loving obedience, in the bond of abiding.  It was no less terrible for him, no less frightening, and I think the gospel narratives reflect that.  But he was hearing a call of love, as we might.  When Pilate cynically asked “What is truth?” Jesus was in touch with light and truth, and the love that rules sovereign over life and death.  Moreover, arraigned before Pilate, bound, flogged and humiliated, he witnessed to it, you may recall, by silence.

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[1] ὑπηκοος  (hupēkoos) = hearkening, listening to.

Lent V, 16 March 2018 – I will write it on their hearts

The lectionary Hebrew scriptures reading for next Sunday takes us to the Prophet Jeremiah:

But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.  No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, “Know the Lord,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.  (Jeremiah 31:33-34)

Jesus would have been familiar with these ancient words, read in the synagogue, taught and studied.  And indeed, there is a certain maturity of faith in which “the law” – we would be more inclined to say God’s Word, perhaps – becomes inscribed on our hearts.  Remember, a couple of weeks ago, we were thinking about Jesus and compassion, and how the ancient world assumed that our deepest thoughts and emotions are seated in the inner parts, and they use the Hebrew words meaning bowel or heart… well, here it is in Jeremiah: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. 

Inscribed on our hearts, however, does not mean that our minds are therefore closed.  In Christian terms it means that the way of Jesus has become the focal part of us, deeply affecting our choices and decisions, and the ways we react to events.  Perhaps in computer terms it is our default position.  It may be that we derive a deep inner satisfaction (what the Bible sometimes calls joy) from our awareness that this the way we choose, the path less travelled, with all its implications.  But at the same time we are not afraid of newness, of hearing or learning other things.  The way of Jesus opens our minds.  Truth is not fenced in to keep it safe and unsullied.  We don’t have to protect God’s Word.

And moreover, we are not engaged in some nervous continuing conflict with God.  Jesus teaches and shows a stable, confident relationship of love.  We do not live in fear, then, of offending God, having to ask, “Where did we go wrong? why is God punishing us?”  Jesus frequently taught, “Don’t be afraid… why are you fearful…?”  Jesus counsels living without fear of God, of life, or of tomorrow.

The relationship is within.  We encourage each other, of course, and always should, but this inner bond is at another level than discussion groups or trendy spirituality.  The writer of the 1^st Letter of Peter counsels:  Let your adornment be the inner self with the lasting beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit.[1] 

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[1] I Peter 3:4

Lent IV, 9 March 2018 – A Jewish teacher

Jesus lived and died a devout and practising Jew, a teacher, a young rabbi.  Christians need to be reminded of this, even more so in our day.  Jesus never heard of the Christian Church or the New Testament.  To 1^st century Jewish ears, his teaching was fresh, startling, often radical.  A lot of it exists for us in the form of sayings, aphorisms, and of course parables.  Blessed are the poor in spirit… those who mourn… the meek… You see how it is relentlessly counter-cultural and counter-intuitive.  Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness… the merciful… the pure in heart… the peacemakers…[1]  In large sectors of American and other faith communities today, to be blessed is to be comfortably off, to be happy, and safe – more or less the opposite of what Jesus taught. 

You shall not kill, said the Law of Moses…  Well, said Jesus, if you’re angry you are already in peril.  The point, he taught, is to be reconciled with your adversary.  You shall not commit adultery, says the Law...  Well, says Jesus, lust, greed and possessiveness condemn you, whether you commit adultery or not.   An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, decreed the Law…  No, says Jesus.  As Gandhi put it in our day, an eye for an eye simply makes the whole world blind -- which is more or less what is happening.  You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy, said the Law…  Love your enemy, said Jesus.  He stood conventional wisdom on its head.

When you give money… do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing…  When you pray, do not heap up empty words -- go into your room and shut the door…  Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth…  Life is more than food, and the body more than clothing…  Do not judge; first take the log out of your own eye…  If you forgive others, your heavenly Father will forgive you… as though the unforgiving are simply unforgiven.  Of course all this is hard, and complicated, in practice.  It is a lifetime of effort – made simpler for us, many have found, in a discipline of prayer and silence in which we are open and consenting to these changes being built in us by God’s Spirit, the same Spirit who empowered, motivated and taught Jesus.   He said, My yoke is easy, my burden is light.[2]  But it is not that we are trying our best to imitate him – that would indeed be a heavy burden -- it is that we are learning to receive the spiritual power and inspiration he knew.  We are learning to set ego aside, to take ourselves less seriously. 

I think the Spirit can use the experiences we have accumulated by our senior years, and the lessons we have learned along the way.  We can be alert to this.  We have, if we’re halfway sensible, developed a sense of what matters and what doesn’t and perhaps never did.  The many ways in which human frailty and error surface, in cruelty and stupidity, selfishness and blindness… there are few surprises for us now.  The way of the Jewish Jesus makes profound sense, especially in the context of the prayer of silence and stillness he himself used. 

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[1] The “Sermon on the Mount” is in Matthew chapters 5-7, and in parts of Luke.

[2] Matthew 11:30

Lent III, 2 March 2018 – Using a whip

Making a whip of cords, he drove all of them out of the temple, the sheep and the cattle. He also poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables.  He told those who were selling doves, “Take these things out of here! (John 2:15-16)

I wonder if there exists, in some church in Italy or Spain, a tattered grubby bunch of cords claiming to be a holy relic, Jesus’s whip.  Given the state of religion, it might even have special powers attributed to it, such as repelling tax inspectors.  This is one of those irritating times when the lectionary gives us a major event in the gospel story, something attested in all four gospels… and it’s an embarrassment.  Jesus furiously charged through the temple precinct, overturning tables, scattering money, chasing traders and their wares out.  And I can assure you, if you consult 100 different preachers and commentators on the numerous websites available, there is nervousness and an inability to come to terms with the fact that Jesus raged, shouted and hit people.

During Lent we are looking at the pre-Easter Jesus, various pictures provided by the gospel records – and we are asking what we find there for our grown-up faith and our senior years.  One writer I came across this week was remembering his childhood and youth, and how, on entering church he would be reminded at the door to be quiet and still.  Yes, we were expected to compose ourselves.  The writer’s point is that he mourns the loss of reverent stillness in worship and in the sanctuary.

But this story is not about how to behave in church.  Jesus found the house of God given over to a racket.  You have to imagine the sacrificial animals waiting to be sold and slaughtered, their vendors calling out the prices and herding the animals, the racket in more than one sense of the money changers – because you had to buy your animal with the temple currency, not Roman.  Ordinary folk coming to Jerusalem to fulfil their religious obligations were being royally ripped off, exploited by the powerful of the temple cult.  So Jesus was angry.  My Father’s house, he quoted[1], shall be called a house of prayer for all nations, but you have made it a den of thieves.

Jesus taught and practised a very different response to God.  In returning and rest you will be saved, in quietness and trust will be your strength, said the prophet Isaiah.[2]  Prayer is not trying to impress God with how busy or sacrificial we are, but entails the opening of the heart in stillness and silence, in love and trust.  It is a matter of being fully present to God – which is often difficult amid liturgical busyness and chatter.   The church doesn’t always make it easy.  Jesus intervened on behalf of ordinary folk, and in the interests of peace and simplicity.  The temple had got between God and the people, and was making money out of it.  Yes, I think he was very angry.

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[1] Isaiah 56:7; Jeremiah 7:11

[2] Isaiah 30:15