Abiding – Easter IV, 24 April 2015

All who obey his commandments abide in him, and he abides in them. And by this we know that he abides in us, by the Spirit that he has given us. [I John 3:24 – part of the Epistle for Easter IV]

These words are among the last of the teachings that made it into the New Testament.  These are the mature thoughts of people whose lives, changed long before by the resurrection of Jesus, have now been tested by a lifetime of witness and suffering.  These are things some of our earliest forebears in the faith want us to know.   It is John, both in his gospel and here, who gives us the Greek word which we translate “abide” – an English word which is not in very common use, to bear the meaning of the Greek verb μενειν.  “Abide” is richer and deeper than “stay”, or “remain”, or “dwell”, or various other attempts to find a more common English word.  Jesus said, Abide in me and I in you.  It is a bond and a relationship which is settled and no longer up for review.  It is “for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health”… as it were.  It is actually very close to the traditional and ancient Benedictine vow of Stability.  Abide means that the bond is set, in life and in death.  Moreover, it entails not only that I abide in him, but that he is abiding in me, with the same permanency, the same commitment, in all my unsatisfactoriness – in an act of unconditional loving grace. 

John teaches that we know this abiding by the Spirit that he has given us.  It is a quiet inner conviction, a deep knowing.  This bond exists in the part of us which motivates all the rest.  It is at a deeper level than debate and experiment and seeing if we like something, or if it’s a good fit, or if it works out.  It is nourished by silence and stillness – as though somehow the Spirit Jesus spoke of waits patiently until he has our attention, our agendas are being now set aside and our ego instructed to be still for a little while.  Mother Teresa, admired everywhere for her busy good works, nevertheless insisted that she and her sisters knew how to be still and wait, at appointed times each day. 

These days it has become hard to avoid the frequent reports of the continuing persecution and martyrdom of Christians.  It is not that these Christians have done anything aggressive.  In the main they are Christian believers going about their lives in peace.  They are being persecuted, alienated, expelled from their homes and livelihoods, and submitted to atrocity, simply because they are Christians – and the climate for Christian belief, like weather patterns, is changing and getting more difficult.  In numerous places, in Libya and Syria, in Nigeria and North Korea, in India and Indonesia, and elsewhere, the lives of Christian believers is becoming perilous.  There is a lot we can say about this, but I have been pondering the bond, the abiding, which Christian believers are increasingly needing to learn and know.  If our children and grandchildren are believers, they will need to know the pathways of silence and stillness, of contemplative life and prayer – a life, in St Paul’s words, that is hid with Christ in God.

Recognition – Easter III, 17 April 2015

When he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him; and he vanished from their sight. [Luke 24:30-31]

Last week the lesson showed how they recognised the risen Christ by his wounds.  Now it is as he breaks bread for them at the evening meal.  Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him. 

These resurrection narratives, in all four gospels, are wreathed in mystery.  They simply cannot be read as you might read the official police report of some event.  Something about him as he broke the bread at table at Emmaus seems to have echoed what they remembered from the Upper Room on the night before he died.  It dawns on them that their stranger-companion is Jesus.

But the very next sentence is… and he vanished from their sight.  He is there, and he is not there.  He is with them, but they can’t manage or control his presence with them.  They can’t hold on to him, parade him around or place him on show.  They really do now have to begin the serious business of following him by faith and trust – and finding out in their own lives how to do that. 

Jesus’s disciples now have to learn to live with mystery and unanswered questions.  They have now to grow up in faith, to use St Paul’s words.  In a sense, any follower who requires certainty and clarity, and a church assuming moral and spiritual authority which has only to be obeyed, is not living in the light of the resurrection.  That is infantile faith, which invariably shades off into superstition and a hankering after miracles. 

St John says, The light shines in the darkness…  The darkness is real.  Human pain and suffering are real.  The calamitous degradation of the natural environment is real and looming ever more critical.  Human injustice and cruelty are real, tyrants thrive, evil rides abroad.  This is the darkness in which the light may be discerned – in our hearts, in others, in the truths of faith – in the breaking of the bread.

Resurrection faith is when we know ourselves to be people of light and hope, whatever others may choose.  We choose the path of kindness, forgiveness, justice and mercy, because it is the path Jesus chose, to which he still calls us – and we know it in our hearts to be right.  Resurrection faith is when it dawns on us one day that there’s not much left we are afraid of.  We choose the vulnerability of love, over fear and defensiveness.  The sting of death is drawn.  We are not paralysed by what people may think of us.  Resurrection faith is freedom to be alive, to carry our wounds humbly, to love and understand others. 

Wounded – Easter II, 10 April 2015

Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you.” [John 20:19-21]

“Shalom aleichem” (שלום עליכם) is what he said, in Hebrew.  It is to this day the common Hebrew greeting.  Peace be upon you.  No doubt it’s often said routinely and without much thought – rather like “How are you…?” in our day (or in the supermarket, “How’s your day been so far…?”)  But on this occasion, when Jesus comes and stands among them, I would think that “Peace be with you” is very deeply meant.  Shalom, as we have often said, is much more than the absence of conflict, although that, to these people, would have been precious enough.  Shalom means health and well-being, justice and a sense of rightness. 

Then we learn that any doubt they may have had about whether this really is Jesus, who had been put to death, is resolved because his wounds remained.  They saw his wounds.  It could only be him.   It fascinates me that their recognition of him was not the usual way, the way we recognise anyone, from memory and their facial features and voice and so on.  John insists that it was primarily that they saw his wounds.  This is the same passage in which we then get the story of Thomas, who needed to be convinced in just that way – he was invited actually to touch Jesus’s wounds. 

So there is a meaning here, something important for us to understand about resurrection and new life.  I am reminded of the Ascension hymn, Crown Him With Many Crowns, which has the words: 

Rich wounds, yet visible above,

In beauty glorified…

But that seems to me an attempt to sugar-coat something important which John Is trying to teach us.  Jesus’s wounds remained.  They were not suddenly sweet-smelling and surrounded by flowers.  They were wounds and they hurt.   You simply can’t bring a literal mind to any of this, and require everything to be explained.  This is mystery.  Mystery is part of the deepest truth, and mystery becomes an old friend to contemplative people. 

What is clear here is that the Risen Lord is still wounded and hurting.  It is as though anyone who expects faith to make them safe and solve all their pains is out of luck.  Resurrection life is subtler and richer than that.  We bear our wounds, our memories, our failures, our injuries.  The difference is now that we have found there is no need to be afraid, we have encountered unconditional love and life.  The wounded Jesus, sharing and bearing our human brokenness, frailty, vulnerability and woundedness, comes and says, Shalom aleichem – Peace be with you! 

Three Marys – Good Friday, 3 April 2015

Standing near the cross of Jesus were his mother, and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. [John 19:25]

I am drawn to this group of three women, all named Mary.   They were there while Jesus died.  All the men, with one evident exception, had fled.  I am drawn to the fact that we know so little about these three.  The first Mary was Jesus’s mother.  And although very large sections of the Christian Church assume that they know her well, own her and worship her, I don’t.   The person Jesus knew as his mother has long since disappeared behind the immense devotional and doctrinal edifice the church has raised.  So we don’t know her, really, but she was there.

The second Mary is said to be the sister of Jesus’s mother, although it seems odd to have two sisters named Mary.  She is Mary the wife of Clopas.  That doesn’t help us much.  But she too was there with the others, as Jesus died.

The third is Mary of Magdala, Mary Magdalene.  In one sense we know quite a lot about her – but it’s still only enough to leave us with a lot of tantalisingly unanswered questions.  This Mary had certainly lived a colourful life.  She had been rescued from some personal abyss, it seems by Jesus.  Her devotion to him is complete, and she too is there as he dies.

Where they were, these three Marys, was where the Roman occupying government crucified criminals, those they didn’t like, anyone seen as a possible enemy of the state – it surely was a very dreadful place.  But doesn’t the whole scene around them, as they waited there, epitomise much that we hear and see daily now?  Golgothas are familiar now in Syria or Nigeria, in Ukraine or Yemen… and a dozen other places.  Jesus was sharing the totality of our 21^st century atrocity, mindless barbarism and utter cruelty.   He knew and shared the hideous treatment of 20 Coptic Christian men on a beach in Libya. The perpetrators of these things render themselves less than human.  Jesus knew all this intimately and personally. 

With him stood these three women, until it was possible for them to take him down and bear him away for burial.  They too bore the horror of the thing and its mindless injustice and inhumanity, to say nothing of their personal grief and helplessness.  But they stayed there.  They looked for no escape.  They bore reality.  Love and sorrow went hand in hand. 

On Good Friday we can say, because we know, that there is no way around human evil.  The only road is through it, knowing about it, bearing it, gathering up the children, understanding it or being utterly bewildered, trusting that one morning God will bring light and peace for all the wounded and broken-hearted. 

A waste – Passion Sunday, 27 March 2015

While he was at Bethany in the house of Simon the leper, as he sat at the table, a woman came with an alabaster jar of very costly ointment of nard, and she broke open the jar and poured the ointment on his head. But some were there who said to one another in anger, “Why was the ointment wasted in this way? For this ointment could have been sold for more than three hundred denarii, and the money given to the poor.” And they scolded her. [Mark 14:3-5]

A denarius was roughly one day’s wage for a common labourer.  This ointment, pure extract of spikenard, was worth more than 300 denarii.  And now it was running on the floor.  The alabaster jar also was broken.  We have no idea who this woman was, but it was not the first time a woman had intruded while the men were having dinner with Jesus, and had done something unexpected and socially embarrassing.  They scolded her…  They would have made much better use of 300 denarii.  But Jesus comes to her rescue with what must have sounded like a black joke:  She has done what she could; she has anointed my body beforehand for its burial. 

It is finally a matter of what is in the heart.  We can only speculate on what was in the hearts of Jesus’s companions at Simon’s house at Bethany.  Certainly anger – Mark tells us that some reacted in anger when this woman did what she did.  But also, it is close to the time when Jesus is arrested and put on trial.  They must have had fear and confusion in their hearts.  We know that – for all their criticism of this woman’s actions – they were not themselves busy raising money for the poor. 

In the heart of the woman, however, at that moment, was single-minded love.  She loved him, and she was already grieving for his loss.  Jesus knew what was in their hearts, he knew what was in the woman’s heart.  This is something that flows from quietness and spiritual depth – the freedom to perceive, to discern, what is happening in someone’s heart.  It is an aspect of mindfulness, and it entails the inner freedom, in contemplative life, to set one’s own feelings and reactions to one side. 

Most of us have known for years that both the Hebrew and the Christian scriptures teach that God “looketh on the heart”.  In a world obsessed with appearance, superficiality and triviality, our faith always reminds us that what God sees is very different, flowing from love and understanding, forgiveness and compassion.  A few years ago the guest speaker at the annual John Main Seminar, that year in Dublin, was the Dalai Lama.  He spoke about his Buddhist sense of the teaching of Jesus.  Much of this later appeared in a small book which he entitled, “The Good Heart”.  Buddhist teaching is just that – it is the heart always that needs to be healed, the broken heart. 

Jesus had healed the heart of the woman at Bethany.  She responds with a reckless extravagance of love, and Jesus says:  Leave her alone, she has done a beautiful thing.  When we extract some silence and stillness from our busy, committed lives, this itself is an extravagance of love.  We are content for our hearts to be open to God and to healing.

Some Greeks – Lent V, 20 March 2015

Now among those who went up to worship at the festival were some Greeks. They came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, and said to him, “Sir, we wish to see Jesus.” Philip went and told Andrew; then Andrew and Philip went and told Jesus.  [John 12:20-22] 

But what follows in this gospel reading for next Sunday is not a fascinating account of the meeting between Jesus and these Greeks.  We are not even told whether they actually got to meet him.  We are given instead a very complex series of statements from Jesus in which he voices his personal torment and his sense of imminent crisis – the seed falling into the ground and dying, then bearing fruit.  He talks about losing your life and saving it.  He says his soul is troubled.  There is a voice from heaven. There is something about darkness and light, and about the ruler of this world being driven out…

So let’s go back to the simpler beginning.  A party of Greeks is asking to be introduced to Jesus.  We are not told why, or who they were.  I did wonder whether they were Greek Jews – it says they had come to Jerusalem for the Passover – but most commentators assume they were Gentiles, perhaps Greek traders who knew there would be lots of business in Jerusalem at that time.  It certainly sounds as though it was a pretty inconvenient time for an interview anyway.  I am sure it has already occurred to you that the Epiphany story of the wise men who followed a star from the east to visit the infant Jesus, is another instance in which non-Jews are mysteriously attracted, sensing something significant.

Some Greeks…  Jesus was a Jew – something needing to be remembered by many lifelong Christians who assume he was an Anglican, a Catholic or an Honorary Presbyterian.  Jesus had never heard of Christianity.  In Jerusalem, Jesus was in the heartland of his own community and his faith, and confronting its issues.  The problem was that it was his fellow Jews who were out to get him, with the support of the Roman occupation government.  Jesus did not have what we would call a world view.  “Some Greeks” would have been alien, interesting but irrelevant and inconvenient right now.  John includes this in his gospel because he thinks it is a sign, of the eventual explosion of this faith far beyond Judaism to all the world. 

Many aspects of Christianity and the church reflect that explosion.  Among them is our Christian Meditation movement and practice.  The Greeks who were interested to see Jesus, if they were not Jews, were pagan idolaters in the terms of the day.  But they felt drawn.  In Christian Meditation we believe we reflect the mind of Christ in removing the fences, maintaining open doors.  The issue is not whether you qualify in some way, it is whether your heart needs to live and beat behind safe fences, or out in the wind of the Spirit, as John has Jesus saying to Nicodemus.  Christian Meditation around the world is being practised by – to borrow St Paul’s words – both Jews and Greeks, slave and free, rich and poor, male and female.  I would add, we include meditators who are not at all sure what precisely they believe, but who have found that this pathway brings them closer to truth and light.  When you think about it, we are “some Greeks” who have come to find Jesus.

Loving darkness – Lent IV, 13 March 2015

This is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light.  [John 3:19]

Light and darkness is a very grand theme, but this morning let’s keep it close to our humbler experience.  Life has acquainted us with both light and darkness, and still does.  We have also learned, in mindfulness along the way, that light and darkness are very closely related.  John’s Gospel tends to depict them rather as opposites.  But you can’t have the shadows without the light.  Our lives are stories of both light and darkness, shadows and hiding places. 

It is also our experience that the glare of sunlight, the full light of a summer day, can be blinding as much as revealing.  We all sometimes prefer the solace of darkness, some shadows and coolness, some differentiation of the light.  Perhaps I can insert here a commercial on behalf of serious introverts -- as my son-in-law once put it, in a world of chattering, of loudly motivated extroverts and activists, the introvert’s happiest place may be alone in a darkened room. 

So we ponder what Jesus was seeking to convey when he said, the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light.  He explains… because their deeds were evil.  But we need the shadows.  One of our media culture’s gross distortions happens when the full glare of publicity is turned on someone with something to hide, something private or profoundly embarrassing.  This rarely if ever discloses the truth.  The truth assumes not only that you get a sight of someone naked and humiliated before the world, but also that this is being seen and told with understanding and compassion.  The light distorts as much as the darkness conceals.  Any experienced photographer knows what too much light does to the image and to perception. 

If we have deeds that are evil, as Jesus put it, unredeemed aspects of our egos, or things in our past, or addictions, nothing whatever is gained by turning the glare of interrogation on them.  Wanting answers, is one favourite public cliché and illusion.  Rather, in a contemplative life, God’s Spirit is able to bring into the light of understanding and compassion what was formerly hidden, or kept in gloom, or in some back room.  I think this is a slow process, and gentle in the main.  The movement is always towards the light, and on the way there are many shadows and spectres and times of waiting. 

O God our Light, to thee we bow,

Within all shadows standest thou…

Or Paul Simon’s words from 40 years ago:  Hullo darkness my old friend, I’ve come to talk with you again…  I am unsure what Paul Simon meant, and I suspect he wasn’t sure either.  But Jesus saw how many people prefer the darkness.  And he delivers us from fear of the darkness in life.  St Benedict instructs his followers to prefer nothing whatever to Christ.  That is the choice by which we learn to make friends with both light and darkness.  It is the way by which we learn Christian maturity, how to discern subtlety in the truth, to distinguish truth from cant and dogmatism.  It is the way by which we learn how compassion and kindness are indispensable, how you cannot divide people into labelled categories, and how we heap up guilt if we do not protect the weak.  It teaches us to understand brokenness, and to love forgiveness.