Gut Instinct

Image: Ivanka Demchuk, The Road to Emmaus

I noted on Easter Day that the Resurrection (capital R) is an event – at least for the modern secular mind that lacks credible evidence. From the faith perspective, Christians have a variety of viewpoints and positions on the Resurrection of Jesus as the Christ. Still, despite hotly contended differences at the end of the day our response to the question of evidence is simply to appeal to mystery. Mystery is no longer mystery if it can be explained – toyed with in the mind – accepted or rejected according to the evidence. That’s not how mystery works. Mystery is the protection of awareness not susceptible to rational explanation.

The Resurrection of Jesus is a divine action within the timeline of human history. As 21st-century Christians we are living through the unfolding of that timeline – bookended between the Resurrection of Jesus and the resurrection or restoration of all of creation. We need to know only two things about the Resurrection of Jesus.

The first is that the Resurrection does not happen to Jesus alone. The Western artistic tradition portraying Jesus triumphantly emerging from the tomb like a superhero is incomplete and misleading because it presents the Resurrection as a Jesus-only event.  The Eastern Orthodox artistic tradition depicts Jesus emerging from the tomb with arms extended clasping the hands of Adam and Eve – physically pulling them from their tombs as he rises. The message here is that the Resurrection is a creation-wide event – a restoration not only of Jesus himself but of all of humanity at the head of creation. Another way to put this is that the Resurrection ushers in a new chapter in God’s involvement within the timeline of world history – a renewed invitation for the collaboration between human agency and the divine purpose.

The second thing we need to know is that our awareness of resurrection is a gut experience. We have several traditional sayings – I feel it in my bones, I sense it in my water, I know it in my bowels – to attest to somatic perceptions of a truth – body-centered – rather than intellectual – of the mind, or emotional – of the heart. As Sam Wells, Vicar of our illustrious namesake church – St Martin in the Fields at the eastern end of London’s Trafalgar Square puts it: Resurrection is a breathtaking mystery. It’s also the epicenter of the Christian faith. It’s something to be discovered believed and lived. It’s an idle tale if it simply remains a technical event – if it’s real, it’s a cosmic transformation. He continues: It’s not something to agree with in your head – it’s not even something to believe in your heart – it’s something to know in your gut.

Mark is the gospel appointed to be read in 2024. This poses a problem for the Sundays after Easter because Mark abruptly ends his gospel with the disciples standing frightened and perplexed at the empty tomb. Mark records neither resurrection nor post-resurrection appearances.

The empty tomb is an image we used for the Easter Day bulletin cover. During the Easter Season, we will continue to play on the image of the entrance stone to the tomb – rolled away to reveal the emptiness within. Roll away the stone, Lord – we ask – from all that impedes the collaboration of human agency with the divine purpose.

Because Mark provides neither resurrection nor post-resurrection encounters between Jesus and his followers – on the Sundays following Easter we need to rely on Luke and John’s accounts of the days following Jesus’ Resurrection event. In his final 24th chapter, Luke gives us two post-resurrection accounts. Earlier in the chapter we have the arresting story of the two disciples encountering Jesus on the road to Emmaus – a village about 5 miles outside Jerusalem. Today we have the second account of Jesus appearing to the gathered disciples. Both are accounts of resurrection as intuitive gut awareness.

Luke and John present the post-resurrection Jesus in a transformed body no longer limited by material obstacles. He appears and then disappears, having passed through walls and locked doors. Yet, Luke records that Jesus still eats – whether he needs to or not is not gone into. But he eats to communicate physicality – bodily-ness.  But it’s the marks of his crucifixion wounds that become the key identifier between Jesus’ human and post-resurrection bodies.

We might imagine that the post-resurrection Jesus has a body completely healed from the wounds of his crucifixion. If Luke was making this story up would he not have emphasized the glorious perfection of Jesus’ post-resurrection body? Instead, he is at pains to record that the wounds are still visible in an otherwise changed body. There is a raw gutsiness to this image – an intimate physicality.

The two post-resurrection stories in Luke must be read as consecutive incidents in the same story. The two disciples who had journeyed to Emmaus have just returned to the group – literally out of breath – such was their haste – with a report of an encounter on the Emmaus road. They pour out their story of an encounter with a stranger – who before they recognized him as Jesus – nevertheless made their hearts burn hot within them.

The Ukrainian artist Ivanka Demchuk in her work The Road to Emmaus – influenced by the techniques and aesthetics of iconography depicts Christ robed in white facing the two disciples in black. Demchuk has layered gold leaf flecked with white covering the disciples’ midsection – drawing the eye immediately to the torso region.

The two disciples returning from the Emmaus Road encounter were not attempting to be anatomically correct in describing experiencing hearts on fire. They were trying to articulate effects intuited in the gut. Before they cognitively recognized Jesus, they felt him. Intuiting him resonating deep in their gut they later exclaim: were our hearts not burning in us as he spoke to us? Demchuk’s depiction also depicts a possibility that they might as easily have cried out:  did not our guts roil – our stomachs lurch within us?

The gut is the seat of intuition. Intuition is knowing something without knowing how we know it. It’s knowing before the clarification of thinking. It’s knowing before the emergence of feeling. It’s perception beyond verification through the five senses. Knowing – as the intuition of the gut – is the realization of something intangible influencing and changing everything.

Resurrection remains a mystery to the rational mind. We can’t directly comprehend the Resurrection, yet like the 90.5% of dark matter and dark energy comprising the universe we know it’s there through observing its effects on the 0.5 percent of the universe we can see.

And like the effects of dark energy, dark matter on the visible universe Jesus’ Resurrection is known through its effects registered in the intuition of unstoppable change which the Prayer Book poetically refers to as the raising up of things cast down and the continual renewal of things grown old – because as Theresa of Avila reminds us – Christ has no body but ours. ….  no body now on earth but ours.

The Resurrection’s effects are felt in the gut where the collaboration between human agency and divine purpose is furthered by the choices we make, the actions we take, even the mistakes we make. Our human agency has the potential to align with and further the divine purpose for the creation through the stories we construct to tell ourselves about the world, and how these stories influence the way we are to live in it.

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The times they are a-changing: or it’s not just about Jesus!

The Time’s They Are-a-Changin – the Bob Dylan song iconic of a period of protest – a period when a new generation raged against old structures and attitudes – the relics of a less justice-conscious age. The period of protest for change that marked the 1960s and 70s was one of those periods of reckoning in the long arc of history.

Come gather ‘round people, wherever you roam/ and admit that the waters around you have grown/ and accept it that soon you'll be drenched to the bone/ if your time to you is worth saving/ you better start swimmin or you'll sink like a stone/ for the times, they are a changin.

The Time’s They Are-a-Changin has haunted me since Maundy Thursday morning -when X, my Spotify AI DJ spun me the Simon & Garfunkel cover version of the Dylan classic as part of a section X announced with: now I’m gonna take yer back to some of yer Classic Rock favorites. The voice used for the AI DJ X is that of Xavier Jernigan – one of Spotify’s in-house presenters. X is a bit of a hip dude – and I have to admit – although it took me a while to appreciate him AI Dj X has learned everything about my musical history and tastes over time. He can anticipate what I’m in the mood for in a particular moment. I think at times he gets bored with me and tries to broaden my musical tastes. AI DJ X is clever – I guess that’s why he gets to be an AI DJ.

If you’re not a Spotify Premium subscriber, you probably don’t know about AI DJ X and therefore haven’t the faintest idea what I’m on about. However, I’ve grown used to him as my regular, early-morning companion. Being in his company beats Alexa’s early morning news briefing and the endless digital catch-up on the latest dire news updates from home and abroad.

On the night following the assassination of JFK in 1963, Bob Dylan opened his concert with his new composition The Time’s They Are a-Changin. The next year Simon and Garfunkel recorded the song on their 1964 Wednesday morning: 3am album. The song evokes a powerful gut memory – now tinged with nostalgia – for a time when all lay before me in a world convulsed with hope – a world in which things could only get better. The Time’s They Are a-Changin – one of the greatest protest songs of all time – written for an age of political turmoil, societal instability, social unrest, and the intergenerational transition marked by the sometimes violent clash of hope and fear. The song belongs to a time gone by – yet its sentiments remain uncannily prescient and pertinent to the times we are living through. The world Dylan rails against is a hand and glove-fit with the world of contemporary experience – minus the hope. If the 60s and 70s were when hope won out over fear – the 2020s is when fear appears to have won the toss.

Dylan’s lyrics: Come senators and congressmen, please heed the call/ Don’t stand in the doorway, don’t block up the hall – was a reference to Alabama Governor George Wallace blocking the entrance to the University of Alabama in an attempt to prevent the first two black students, Vivian Malone, and James Hood, from enrolling. Again, Dylan’s words have that timeless prescience – standing as a contemporary rebuke to so many politicians today. In words punching with contemporary poignancy, Dylan sings: for he who gets hurt will be he who has stalled/ the battle outside ragin/ will soon shake your windows and rattle your walls/ for the times they are a-changin.  

Today, The Time’s They Are a-Changin is a clarion call to protest attempts by gerrymandered legislatures and reactionary courts across the land to roll back the clock on many of the political, racial, and gender inequalities so many marched against in the era of the Civil Rights Movement.

Like a modern-day Jeremiah, Dylan warns the news pundits in today’s endless 24/7 cycle of recycled hype – giving oxygen to endless conspiracy: come writers and critics who prophesize with your pen/ and keep your eyes wide, the chance won’t come again/ and don’t speak too soon, for the wheel’s still in spin/ and there’s no tellin who that it’s namin/ for the loser now will be later to win/ for the times, they are a changin.

Now I’m sure you have all been wondering what’s a Dylan song got to do with the Resurrection? So let me attempt to answer by coming at the question from a different direction.

The Resurrection is an event – at least for the modern secular mind that seems to be data deficient – lacking in credible evidence. That’s why it’s a mystery – we respond. Mystery is no longer mystery if it can be explained – toyed with in the mind – accepted or rejected according to the evidence. That’s not how mystery works.

Sam Wells, the vicar of our illustrious namesake church of Martin in the Fields in the heart of London’s West End has written: Resurrection is a breathtaking mystery. It’s also the epicenter of the Christian faith. It’s something to be discovered believed and lived. It’s an idle tale if it simply remains a technical event – if it’s real, it’s a cosmic transformation. He continues: It’s not something to agree with in your head – it’s not even something to believe in your heart – it’s something to know in your gut.

In the Christian Orthodox East – icons of the Resurrection show not a solitary Christ rising alone from the tomb as in the Western artistic tradition – but Christ emerging from the tomb with outstretched arms grasping the hands of Adam and Eve – pulling them out of their tombs along with his rising. The message of this depiction is that the Resurrection is not something that happens to Jesus alone – it’s something that happens through him. The Orthodox East has never lost sight of the Resurrrection of Jesus as something requiring the resurrection of the whole of creation. Resurrection’s effects unfold through the collaboration between human agency and the divine purpose.

The Resurrection of Jesus as the Christ – the longed-for one – is the fulfillment of the promised first fruits of what is still unfolding within the timeline of human history. The Resurrection remains a mystery. We can’t directly comprehend the Resurrection, yet like the 90.5% of dark matter and energy comprising the universe we know it’s there through observing its effects on the 0.5 percent of the universe we can see. The effects of the Resurrection are very discernable as the unstoppable process of change – which the Prayer Book poetically describes as the raising up of things cast down and the continual renewal of things grown old. The Resurrection’s effects are felt in the gut where the collaboration between human agency and divine purpose is furthered in the choices we make, even the decisions we fail to take, the stories we tell ourselves about the world, and how these stories influence how we are to live in it. Or in the words of Bob Dylan: your old road is rapidly agin/ please get out of the new one if you can’t lend a hand/ for the times, they are a-changin.

At least one thing’s certain – you’ll probably never think about the Resurrection again without hearing The Time’s They Are a-Changin. If that’s so – I rest my case.

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An Ending or a Beginning?

Palm Sunday commemorates Jesus’ triumphal entry into the Holy City of Jerusalem. I’ve italicized triumphal because it’s all a matter of perspective. Is it a triumph or the prelude to disaster? If it’s a triumph, then a triumph for whom – Jesus or the crowds?

At a luncheon given by the Lord Mayor of London in November 1942 in celebration of Field Marshall Montgomery’s victory at El Alamein, Prime Minister Winston Churchill was the star guest. For those of you who are not World War 2 history buffs, El Alamein is the small oasis town on the Egyptian-Libyan border where after a series of defeats and retreats British and Empire troops dealt the decisive blow in the North Africa Campaign – paving the way for an eventual Allied invasion of Italy.

Churchill – the consummate wordsmith captured the mood and significance of the moment when he told the assembled guests in the Mansion House:   This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

It’s interesting to hear in the archival recording of his speech the ripple of nervous laughter among those present. With hindsight, we hear Churchill’s words as prophetic. But to those present on this occasion they must have seemed tantalizingly enigmatic – hence the ripple of nervous laughter. For at the time – who could have with any certainty predicted the outcome of the war?

So, here’s another question. Is Palm Sunday the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning in Jesus’ campaign of non-violent resistance?

It’s important to explain the application of the term non-violent resistance to the Jesus movement – after all, it seems such a modern concept more associated for many of us with Gandhi and MLK Jn.

Some of us will be familiar with the book The Last Week by John Dominic Crossan and the late Marcus Borg – in which they chronicle events as recorded in Mark’s gospel of Jesus’ last week before the crucifixion. In God & Empire: Jesus against Rome, Then and Now, Dom Crossan explores the development of the Jesus movement as a movement of non-violent resistance.  In contrast to John the Baptist’s movement of expectation – of the inbreaking of God’s kingdom, Jesus’ is a movement of action in recognition that the kingdom is already here.

Crossan hypothesizes that with the Baptist’s execution at the hands of Herod Antipas, nothing changed – the kingdom did not come sweeping in – leading Jesus to conclude that God’s kingdom was already here and what was required was not humanity waiting for God to act but collaboration between God and human agency giving shape to the kingdom within human history. This collaborative kingdom unfolding in real time was a movement of non-violent resistance to the forces of empire – an expression of God’s opposition to the forces that impose and maintain peace through violence.

Jesus was led to the realization that the nature of the kingdom must be different from the one John expected and that non-violent resistance was its hallmark.

Jesus grew up in a world of unspeakable violence. His was a world in which the cycle of violent resistance to occupation provoked an even more devastating response from the forces of empire – a cycle all too reminiscent of the situation in present-day Gaza and the West Bank. Growing up in Nazareth, Jesus would have learned the painful lesson of the ultimate futility of violent resistance. His childhood would have been shaped by hearing the stories of the calamity of 4BC when after the death of Herod the Great the Jews’ fear of a full Roman annexation sparked a series of violent revolts across the Jewish homeland.

In response, Varus, the Roman governor in Syria, led the Roman Legions south. Sweeping through Galilee they burned towns and villages and slaughtered men of fighting age along with the elderly while enslaving women and children. Galilee’s capital Sephhoris was pillaged and burned. Sephhoris was only an hour’s walk away – just over the ridge from Nazareth.

Jesus did not experience the calamity of 4BC as it was only after Herod’s death that the Holy Family returned from exile in Egypt. But he would have grown up in a community that had. For the people of Nazareth 4BC was not a distant memory but a painfully visceral recent experience.

Passover seems to have been the catalyst for Jesus taking his movement of non-violent resistance to Jerusalem – moving to the heart of where the action was happening. Now non-violent resistance does not – it seems for Jesus to have meant non-provocative resistance. Quite what Jesus expected to happen, he nevertheless chose to enter Jerusalem in the most provocative of ways – that is – by acting out the prophet Zechariah’s messianic prophecy: Shout aloud, O Daughter of Jerusalem! Behold your king is coming to you ….. riding on a donkey, the colt of a foal.

We can’t know with any certainty what was in his mind. Certainly, we know the mind of the crowds who greeted him. Remember, Jesus had been several days in Bethany – a stone’s throw from Jerusalem – and news of him must have spread like wildfire among the pilgrims pushing the city’s population to three times its normal size. Overcrowding and a growing frenzy of rumor and expectation raised the mood in the city to a fever pitch.

The echo of collective memory gives color and meaning to actions in the present. The waving of palms was a gesture from Jewish collective memory and tells us something about the popular expectations for Jesus. Some 160 years before, the triumphant Judas Maccabeus, the last leader of a successful Jewish rebellion against foreign occupation, led his victorious partisans into a defiled Temple. Bearing palm branches they cleansed and rededicated the sanctuary after its defilement by the Syrian tyrant, Antiochus Epiphanies – an event commemorated today by Jews in the festival of Hannukah.

The waving of palm branches tells us something of the crowd’s expectations of Jesus as another national liberator, who in the mold of Judas Maccabeus had come to free them from the hated Roman occupation. What seems perplexing is how Jesus seems to play into this expectation only to turn jubilation into raging disappointment days later.

At the same time as Jesus was entering from the East, a real triumphal entry procession wound its way into the city from the West. At the head of his Roman Legion, the Roman Procurator, Pontius Pilate had also come up to Jerusalem for the Passover.

Pilate feared Jerusalem’s ancient warrens seething with civil and religious discontent with some justification. His Administration preferred the sea breezes and modern conveniences of Herod the Great’s former capital at Caesarea Maritima just south of modern-day Haifa. Pilate feared the crowds most during the Passover which required him to come up to the city with a show of preemptive force to forestall the ever-present potential for insurrection. Passover was an extremely dangerous time. It commemorated the Jewish collective memory of liberation from an earlier period of slavery. Pilate’s arrival was indeed a wise move, for the crowds that hailed Jesus, were in insurrection mood.

Returning to the earlier question – is Palm Sunday the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning in Jesus’ campaign of non-violent resistance?

What we do know is that in Holy Week the storyline of worldly oppression and political violence intersects with a storyline of populist resistance – of nationalist longing for liberation no matter the cost. Both are storylines of violence being confronted by a third storyline – that of non-violent resistance -the recognition that God’s kingdom has already arrived and is unfolding through the collaboration between human agency and the divine purpose. The collaboration between human agency and divine purpose is the theme we will return to on Easter Day.

We already know that Holy Week is not the beginning of the end but the end of the beginning for Jesus. Nevertheless, we journey with Jesus transported by the liturgies of Holy Week. For some of us, this will be an intensely personal experience as our own experiences of loss and suffering – our passion surfaces in identification with Jesus. For others, the nature of our Holy Week experience is less personal and more communal. We journey with Jesus as part of a community that journeys to the cross carrying and bearing witness to the violence, pain, and sufferings of the world of the 21st century.

Liturgy is a form of dramatic reenactment that transports a community through sacred time – a dimension of experience beyond chronological time. In sacred time the past and future conflate into the present, where through liturgical action we become more than passive bystanders. We become participants in the timeless events that shaped Jesus’ last days.

Historical associations in sacred time trigger memory in real-time giving voice and expression to our contemporary experiences. You see, human beings don’t change much over time. The tensions we see acted out in the events of Holy Week are the very tensions we continue to struggle with today.

And so, like the crowds praising Jesus as he entered the Holy City, we enthusiastically hail our next political savior -until that is – he or she no longer is. Like those accompanying Jesus in his last week, we long to do the brave thing – until that is, – the moment when we don’t.

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Seeing Things More Clearly

Today, the 5th Sunday in Lent is known as Passion Sunday – beginning the two weeks of Passiontide. The second week of Passiontide is Holy Week beginning next Sunday with Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. There is much more to unpack about the controversial nature of Jesus’ entry into the city – but you’ll have to tune in next week for more on that.

At the heart of our Holy Week and Easter observance lies the thorny question – is the Jewish-critical language – that is language highly critical of the Jews in the passion stories antisemitic? A response to this question requires us to know more specifically – how to read and hear Jewish-critical language in the passion story through the lens of historical context?

In common speech, we talk about the gospels – plural. But if we look at the title of each of the four gospels, we discover that there is only one gospel – the gospel of Jesus Christ according to –. The according to – reminds us that this is the gospel of Jesus Christ through the lens of this particular writer – who gives us his interpretation of the life and times of Jesus – shaped through the lens of his own history and context.

Matthew wrote for the emerging messianic Jewish community recently expelled by the Rabbinical reforms that had categorically rejected Jesus’s messiahship. Matthew’s messianic Jewish community and the fledgling Rabbinic movement struggled for the upper hand in a contested revisioning of Israel’s ancient story. 30 years later, John was writing for a Jewish broad-tent melting-pot community comprising open and closeted messianic Jews, the remnants of John the Baptist’s movement, a sizable Samaritan contingent, and as today’s gospel reveals – increasingly, curious gentiles. This patchwork of messianic remnants – often in tension with one another – faced fierce oppression by the anti-messianic Judean-Jerusalem religious establishment.

Thus the tone of Matthew and John’s Jewish-critical language represents the intense intra-Jewish factional conflict in their time and context. But is it antisemitic within the modern meaning of the term? This question evokes resonances with a similar question today. Is Israel-critical language – that is language critical of Israeli policy and action in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict antisemitic? These are both crucial questions as we prepare to commemorate the events of Holy Week and Easter in 2024 against the backdrop of the Israeli devastation of Gaza as our heightening awareness of the injustice and brutality of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank trigger a resurgence of antisemitism nation-wide and around the world.

It’s important at this stage to more closely define antisemitism as the hatred of Jews. Its roots lie not in the New Testament period but in later Christian acceptance of the doctrine of supercessionism or replacement theology – according to which God had rejected the covenant with Israel made through Moses in favor of a new covenant with the Church as the New Israel.

Despite St Paul’s vehement rejection of the doctrine, by the 4th-century, supercessionism or replacement theology had led to the scapegoating of the Jews as being collectively – and for all time -responsible for killing Jesus. Antisemitism was further strengthened by the peculiar position Jews were forced to occupy in Christian society from Late Antiquity to the Early Modern period.

Despite their cultural and religious exclusion and isolation, the Church’s prohibition against usury – Christians charging interest on loans – resulted in the Jews becoming the lenders of choice for Christian monarchs and merchants. Deprived of the right to own land, lending money was one of the few activities allowed for Jews. Thus Jewish money bankrolled European mercantile and political expansion in the Medieval and Early Modern periods.

Everyone hates bankers. What I mean is – we all resent those to whom we owe money – those to whom we are indebted. After all, what’s not to dislike in Shakespeare’s stereotype of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice? What’s not to resent in Victor Orban’s antisemitic stereotype of George Soros as the face of an international Jewish conspiracy controlling world affairs and pulling the strings behind international events in a gradual subversion of Christian civilization?

The belief in an international Jewish conspiracy dominated the 20th-century and led directly to the Holocaust. The aftermath of the catastrophe of the Holocaust compelled mainstream Christianity – Protestant and Catholic – to emphatically reject supercessionalism and reaffirm Paul who as the earliest Christian writer taught that despite the inauguration of the new covenant with the world through the death and resurrection of Jesus, God nevertheless remained faithful to the earlier covenant made with Israel. What’s not to like in the image of a god who does not renege on previous promises.

Two difficulties arise from the Jewish-critical language in the passion story as interpreted by Matthew and John. The primary difficulty is the projection of their political context back into the Jesus timeline – presenting their intra-Jewish conflict as Jesus’ conflict with the Jews of his day. The second difficulty is that later on, Christianity misinterpreted the gospel’s Jewish-critical bias as supporting fully-fledged Christian antisemitism.

On Good Friday -our encounter will require us to substitute John’s drum beat refrain the Jews, the Jews with alternatives. When John uses the phrase to refer to the incitement of the crowds we might substitute the people, the people for the Jews. When John uses the phrase to refer to the religious authorities spearheading Jesus’ journey to the cross, we can simply say the authorities to distinguish them from the people? In doing this we are not trying to exhonerate John of the accusation of antisemitism – quite the opposite. We are taking care not to project later antisemitic tropes back into the gospel text.

More importantly, however, substituting terms as I’m suggesting allows us to more clearly understand the nature of Jesus’ growing conflict in Holy Week. His was not a conflict with the Jews of his day despite his presentation by particular Evangelists. His was a much larger conflict – a confrontation with the agents of empire.

We need to understand Jesus’ final week leading him to the cross from both a historical and a cosmic perspective. On the historical level, we need to see in the events of Holy Week the culmination of Jesus’ nonviolent resistance to the forces of empire that establish and maintain peace through violence. On the cosmic level, we need to understand the events of Holy Week leading to the cross and resurrection as God’s struggle against the powers and principalities that take up lodging in the human heart – so to enlist us in their conspiracy against the coming of the Kingdom.

We enter Passiontide in 2024, particularly aware of the nature of so much suffering in the world around us. We find ourselves wriggling uncomfortably beneath the shadow of the cross where we are tempted to feel daunted and overwhelmed by the scale of the work God calls us to collaborate in. We are called to work tirelessly to dislodge evil from its inhabitation of our hearts through truth-telling, justice-making, and spiritual restoration – to disembody conspiracy and give it no place to hide by exposing it to the light one truth, one heart, one act of courage, and compassion at a time.

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In the Totem’s Shadow

On the fourth Sunday in Lent in year two of the Lectionary we encounter the very curious incident recorded in the book of Numbers  21:4-9. There’s a crisis unfolding among the Israelites. It seems that in response to their endless grumbling, God – whose patience seems to have been wearing thin -expresses his anger by sending an infestation of venomous snakes into their camp – resulting in many deaths from snakebite.

Seeing the distress and devastation, God relents – even possibly repents –  and instructs Moses to cast a serpent image in bronze and raise it up at the heart of the camp. Anyone with a snakebite has only to look up at the image to be healed and live. This story raises a key awkward question – it seems to be an infringement of the second commandment against casting graven images. But maybe it’s ok – it seems that God is allowed to contradict godself.

More helpfully, however, we might call Numbers 21:4-9 a story of spiritual homeopathy which sheds light on the processes underlying the human experience of healing.

Western, allopathic medicine effects a cure by introducing a substance that has been found to combat the condition. We are all immensely grateful for antibiotics.

Homeopathy treats conditions by introducing small amounts of the element, which in larger amounts is the cause of the condition – thus triggering the body’s defenses. Many Western medical practitioners remain skeptical of the homeopathic philosophy, yet aren’t we all deeply grateful for vaccines. Do not vaccines in contrast to antibiotics operate according to the homeopathic principle?

The toxin that kills is transformed into the agent that heals.

Numbers 21 is a story of totem power which triggers change through the power of a spiritual perception. A totem is a human-made or naturally occurring object – imbued with a spiritual significance capable of transforming perception.

The mention of a totem brings back memories for me. Christchurch, the N.Z. city in which I grew up is the logistics and personnel hub serving the US Antarctic Expedition Program. At the entrance to the base situated next to Christchurch airport stands a tall wooden totem pole – a gift from the Native American tribes of the Pacific Northwest to another Pacific people on the opposite side of a common Ocean. The American First Nations peoples of the Northwest perceive in the totem pole the spiritual power of their history and identity. In the perception of the Israelites, the bronze serpent – a symbol of death – became imbued with the spiritual perception of their healing.

There’s an old saying – perception is nine-tenths of reality. Healing is a mysterious process because it’s impossible to trace the linkages between cause and effect – which seems an anathema for the scientific mind. Yet, despite the inability to map the links of cause and effect – the effect produced in homeopathic healing is nevertheless real.

The bronze serpent is imbued with a totem spiritual significance. It is no mere coincidence that the caduceus – the double or sometimes single-headed serpent coiled around the Rod of Asclepius – a totem in Greek mythology – has become the symbol of the healing profession. Healing profession – a name that reveals the older homeopathic foundations for what today has become Western Medicine’s thorough allopathic discipline.

In the third chapter of the gospel according to John – Jesus in his conversation with a prominent Pharisee called Nicodemus evokes Numbers 21: 

Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.

Jesus’ mission will require him likewise to be lifted up over the world so that anyone who looks at him upon the cross will experience a transformation of death into life.

As Christians, whether we are consciously aware of it or not – we stand in the shadow of the cross. We imbue the cross with a spiritual significance – a perception that directly shapes our experience of reality. For us, the cross carries totem power.

To use a slightly different metaphor the cross becomes the lens through which our perception of the world comes into focus. Gazing on the cross means to stand in its shadow. Within its shadow, we perceive our worldview, which then dictates actions that shape and reshape the nature of our experience of reality. Remember, perception is nine-tenths of reality.

The shadow cast by the cross – brings into sharper focus the contours of our own shadow side – our hatreds, prejudices, and fears; our sorrows and loves – esp. the loves of a disordered, narcissistic, and selfish variety – all our afflictions that we try to conceal from scrutiny. Here, with greater clarity, we note the aspects of self we long to change, the aspects of self we tenaciously resist changing, and those aspects of personality we are powerless on our own to change.

Yet, none of this matters in an ultimate sense for to stand in the shadow of the cross is to be healed despite ourselves. For on the cross, God so loved the world. In other words, God changed the world through the power of self-sacrificial love.

The totem power of the cross is love. The love demonstrated on the cross is not a love that condemns but a love that challenges, and confronts; confirms, and strengthens. Love heals.

Standing in the shadow of the cross the late Irish poet John O’Donohue in his poem A Morning Offering – wrote of: minds come alive to the invisible geography that invites us to new frontiers, to break the dead shell of yesterdays, to risk being disturbed and changed.

Standing in the shadow of the cross the toxins of shame, guilt, pain, and failure become transformed through love’s action – shaping our perceptions and guiding our actions in the world.

God said to Moses, make a poisonous serpent, and set it on a pole; and everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live. Standing in the shadow of the cross death we are challenged to change by an experience of the source of new life – or as O’Donohue so eloquently puts it: to do at last what we came here for and waste our heart on fear no more.

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Refracted Hope

It’s Friday morning and after a hectic week I finally turn my thoughts to today’s readings for the second Sunday in Lent. Bereft of helpful insights – I scratch my heard as I read that Jesus tells us – his modern-day disciples – to deny ourselves, take up our cross, and follow him – that the cost of saving our lives lies in our willingness to risk losing them?

Nightly images numb me further into acquiescence and resignation as I watch in real time as the civilian population of Gaza is bombed into a stone age wasteland of wretchedness beyond belief.

News from Oklahoma of a young trans person’s death as a result of a bathroom incident between fellow students in a school – further evidences the unleashing of politically sanctioned persecution of trans and nonbinary persons in large parts of this country.

In States governed by legislatures no longer committed to the basic principles of representative democracy – where power is maintained through gerrymandered electorates – legislatures pursue their anti-liberal agendas – and the courts continue to hand down insane rulings that impose increasingly cruel and unusual punishments that further restrict the basic civic freedoms to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness enshrined in the Constitution. We’ve reached the ludicrous situation where the courts defend freedom of speech protections that allow the right to incite hatred but strictly policing student hairstyles.

I hear a voice in my head cautioning me to stop it! Stop what? Well stop funneling down the rabbit hole of rage and despair. Forty years of experience reminds me that this is no good way to begin a sermon reflection.

At the root of my despair is my rage that the world is not fair, that wrongs seem seldom righted. Everywhere I look the appearance of things leads me to conclude that despite my frequent protests to the contrary, might is often right and wealth is the primary influence on power. It’s into this slough of despond I hear Jesus speaking to Simon Peter: Get thee behind me Satan. The words of the King James Authorized Version – a translation I hardly ever read – remain indelibly imprinted on my mind as is probably true for most English-speaking Christians.

To fully appreciate the searing impact of Mark’s account of the encounter between Jesus and Simon Peter we need to go back to verse 27 of chapter 8 where Mark reports Jesus on his way to Caesarea Philippi. Along the way he asks his disciples what are people were saying about him? Reporting the general gossip – the disciples tell him: Well Rabbi, some say this, and some say that. To which Jesus asks: But you – who do you say I am? His question provokes Simon Peter to declare: We know who you are, you are the Messiah! But giving the correct answer doesn’t necessarily mean understanding what that answer means.

Today’s text picks up at verse 31 with: Then he began to teach them —. But what Jesus teaches them is not what they want to hear. Simon Peter – with his Jewish conditioned misunderstanding of messiahship confronts Jesus. Taking him aside he rebukes Jesus with what I imagine probably went like this:

What on earth are you talking about, Jesus. What nonsense are you spouting about suffering and death. You are the Messiah – the great king sent by God to get us out of this mess of Roman occupation and restore us to our status of a chosen nation. So, let’s hear no more of this defeatist nonsense about suffering and death. Can’t you see the undermining effect on our morale when you speak like this?

Jesus fixes Simon with a steely gaze and with a heart stopping authority commands: Get behind me Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.

This is a hard saying. Trapped within our human perspective we look out at the appearance of things – unable to see beyond our limited perceptions to the larger picture. So much of the divine action remains hidden from our view.

Can we with any honesty speak in a community like ours about Jesus’ prediction of suffering and death? Like Simon Peter, suffering and death as the cost of discipleship are not on our agenda – no matter how darkly at times we may view events in the world around us. Unlike Peter we don’t even have the courage to protest the point. We just tune out – preferring to think the choice is ours whether to follow Jesus or not. We may choose to follow Jesus, but always on our own terms – at little cost to ourselves.

Like Simon Peter and the Disciples we want to filter Jesus’ messiahship through the prism of our own desires and fears – the things of our human priorities.

Prisms. Now here’s an interesting fact. The thing about prisms is that they don’t filter light – they refract it. White light enters as a beam to become refracted into the seven-color constituents of the spectrum. Our desires and fears – our human priorities enter the prism of Jesus’ messiahship as a tight beam of white light and emerge refracted to reveal the divine priorities in a multi-stranded, Kodachrome cone of ever-widening dispersion.

An event of ultimate significance occurred this week – shedding some light on this incident in Mark. I refer to the death in suspicious circumstances of Alexei Navalny -the courageous Russian dissident and now martyr for the democratic cause. Many of us still find it incomprehensible that he chose to return to Russia knowing the fate that awaited him. It seems that in this action, with his mind no longer focused on his own concerns – Navalny understood the cost of discipleship as inseparable from fidelity to the path of discipleship – which for him was the cause of democratic freedoms.

I am not in any way conflating Alexei Navalny with Jesus. I don’t know whether Navalny was a Christian believer or not. My point is – Navalny emulates Jesus in action. They both knew that being faithful to their cause would cost them nothing less than their life. They both wielded the most powerful weapon in the confrontation with evil – that of nonviolent resistance.

Like Pontius Pilate before him, as the representative of empire, Vladimir Putin understands well the necessity of killing the leader of a movement for nonviolent resistance. Like Pilate and countless other brutes of history before him – Putin fails to understand that non-violence is an idea that only strengthened in killing its leading proponents. As with Jesus, the concentrated white light of Alexei Navalny’s life has now been refracted through the prism of his death into a broad Kodachrome spectrum of ever widening hope. But hope comes at a cost and when the cost is paid – hope strengthens.

What will it take for us to discover what the disciples eventually came to understand – that the fruit of discipleship is inseparable from its cost?

The cost of discipleship is paid in the currency of hope’s confrontation with evil. What will discipleship cost us? This is Jesus’ 21st century discipleship question to which the life and death of Alexei Navalny reveals one possible answer.

Discipleship is unlikely to cost us our lives. But it does require our death to self – a death to our self-preoccupation – a dying to our exclusive focus on merely human things that lead us to despair and acquiescence to helplessness.

As we enter upon the journey of another Lent – a season in which we are called to face-down the temptation to acquiesce in the face of the evil that holds such sway in the world around us. Lent is a season when the white light of despair is refracted through the prism of discipleship into the broad color spectrum of faith, courage, and love – to name but three stands in the spectrum of hope. But be under no illusion – the path of discipleship is a costly one – as Navalny’s death confirms. And the encounter between Peter and Jesus in Mark 8 is where for us the journey of discipleship begins. It’s from here we reset our compass needle towards the resurrection.

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Love’s Meat

In those days, Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my beloved Son, with you, I am well pleased.” Mark 1:9-15

And so, this is how it begins in Mark. In seven concise verses in his first chapter Mark covers the period from Jesus’ baptism by John to the momentous event of John’s arrest – a sequence that Matthew takes four chapters to relate. Similarly, Mark covers Jesus’ time in the wilderness in two sentences – And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. He was tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angles waited on him. Admittedly, reporting in much greater detail, nevertheless Matthew’s account of Jesus in the wilderness takes him eleven long verses to relate.

Mark is not only concise but he punctuates his accounts with dramatic images. For him at Jesus baptism, the heavens are torn apart – schizomai is the Greek word he uses – meaning to rip, to tear apart in a way that cannot be put back together again. Compare this to Matthew and Luke’s milk toast image of the heavens merely opening – of clouds lazily parting.

Mark reports that at Jesus’ baptism the voice from heaven thunders you are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased. Note here God’s direct address to Jesus – you– God declares – leading later commentators to wonder is Mark inferring that it’s only Jesus who hears God’s voice? By contrast, in Matthew and Luke, the curtain of heaven gently opens and the voice from above is of God addressing the bystanders – declaring to them that this this is my Son, the Beloved in whom I am well pleased. And following the baptism Mark tells us that immediately, the Spirit drove Jesus into the wilderness. Just as schizomai carries the strong meaning of tearing irreparably apart so here, Mark’s use of the Greek ekballei – as in the Spirit expelled Jesus into the wilderness conveying a strongly energetic action. Compare this striking image with Matthew and Luke’s use of anechthe – meaning to lead up, to bring up – and one gets the impression of Jesus, leisurely strolling at the Spirit’s direction into the wilderness – a much more sedate movement.

And so, it is with Mark. There’s no long and colorful description of Jesus’ birth as in Matthew and Luke. With Mark, Jesus emerges from obscurity onto the scene as a fully grown man – not born into his Sonship but adopted into it at baptism.  We shouldn’t miss the implication in Mark – as with Jesus so with us – like him we too are adopted by God through baptism.

It’s customary on the first Sunday in Lent for the preacher to focus on Jesus’ time of wilderness testing – after all isn’t that what Lent is supposed to be about for us – a time of testing -facing temptation and enduring privation? Yet, my attention is drawn to Mark’s assertion that before any testing takes place God proclaims Jesus as the Beloved. Being loved – now here’s a novel way to frame a theme for Lent.

Accepting unconditional love – love without strings – is in my experience a much harder thing to bear than having to pass the tests of temptation. I know objectively, that I am loved by God because I tend to believe what I am told – esp. if the Gospels are the vehicle for conveying this truth to me. Yet, knowing is one thing – actually experiencing is quite another. Do I experience myself being loved by God? My answer is mixed and equivocal – it’s yes but mostly, no.

For instance, I know that God loves me because looking back on my life I can see the loving hand of God guiding, sustaining, and blessing me through the ups and downs. Projecting forwards on the basis of past experience I know objectively, that God will continue to love me no matter what I do.  Yet, in the present moment, I often feel very detached from the direct experience of God’s love. I know I am loved but do I feel the love? I find that my shame interferes with the enjoyment of being unconditionally loved.

The real challenge of my spiritual journey has been – and remains – to experience the reality that God loves me with an unconditional love in the present moment. This requires me to see the unconditionality of God’s love through the thick veil of my shame. My spiritual struggle is not to be good – although I always believe I can do better than I’ve done. My spiritual struggle is to allow myself to be loved despite my shame.

The question boils down to how can I allow myself to experience God’s no-strings-attached-love when I feel the way I do – mired in my secret shame? My inability to love God as much as I feel I should reveals some pretty faulty logic here which goes – if I loved God more – I could reciprocate more – then might I not feel more of God’s love. In this context reciprocity is such a ridiculous notion. But the main source of my shame lies in my fear of being loved by God. Despite my longing to feel God’s love of me, the sorry truth is shame becomes a convenient excuse for avoiding – shying away from being loved. Shame is the disguise my fear adopts.

Being the one who does the loving – no matter how imperfectly – is easier than being the one who is loved – warts and all. My shame is actually, not that I am unworthy of God’s love – but that I am afraid of it. You see, while the lover chooses to love – the beloved has no control over being loved. The real source of my shame lies not in unworthiness but in the fear of being loved unconditionally. Being loved unconditionally exposes my fear of being the one who is no longer in control.

In his poem Love III, George Herbert describes our anguished experience of shying away from being loved. In response to God’s invitation to sit down and experience love, Herbert replies: I, the unkind the ungrateful? Ah, my dear, I cannot look on thee. Thank you, God, but no thank you! To be beloved of God is too intrusive and potentially demanding, too intimate an experience. I resonate with Herbert. Being loved exposes me to my shame – I am unworthy. But more to the point it exposes me to my vulnerability and fear of losing control. The lover chooses to love. But the beloved has no control over being loved. Between humility and humiliation – there lies the finest of lines.

We are in a continual negotiation around the shame of loving and being loved. God is no respecter of comfort zones. As the lover, God pursues us and has no intention of allowing us to set the comfort level for intimacy.

In his poem Love III, George Herbert in describing the struggle with fear and shame – our urgent need to shy away from surrendering to being loved – maps the process of surrender. Protesting his fear he cries out: I, the unkind the ungrateful? Ah, my dear, I cannot look on thee. Yet, Love outmaneuvers him by reminding him he need have no such fear:  Love takes my hand and smiling did reply, ‘Who made the eyes but I?’

But the struggle is not yet over. For Herbert complains: Truth Lord, but I have marred them, let my shame go where it doth deserve. And here Love delivers the suckerpunch for any good believing Calvinist. Love gently reminds him: And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame?

Cowered and cornered, Herbert feints surrender to Love’s insistence with:  Ah, my dear, then I will serve. He feints surrender with a ruse. As with the one who loves – the one who serves paradoxically maintains control. But Love is not fooled by Herbert’s feint of humility. You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat. With nowhere else to hide, Herbert surrenders – abandons all pretence of having the power of choice. Becoming the one who is served – the one who surrenders to being loved -he whispers: So I did sit and eat. 

In the end, the only choice we really have is to surrender in the face of God’s relentless pursuit to love us. I can speak about my struggle to surrender to being loved by God because I’m not alone in this. We all know that when it comes to God’s love, it is not about earning and deserving but believing and receiving. Yet, so much of our identity is predicated on being worthy – which is just a way of dressing up the fact that we are afraid to lose control. If we are deserving of God’s love, we tell ourselves, it can only be to the extent of having somehow, earned it. In our desire to reciprocate we evade the humiliation of being the undeserving party.

The truth is we are be-loved. We are all be-loved because God’s love is gifted to us without strings. Surrender to being loved is the only healthy response we can choose to make.

Lent’s call to a deeper self-reflection allows us to see more clearly into our struggle to be the ones who must surrender to love. In our resistance we want to use shame to distance ourselves from the experience of being loved by God. In the struggle to surrender to love we turn to Lent’s reminder of the disciplines of worship, prayer, and self-denial – the latter having little to do with privation and more to do with having the courage to listen beyond the cacophony of our self-preoccupations.

Mark ends his first chapter with Jesus returning from his time of preparation in the wilderness to find John has been arrested. The time he says is fulfilled, the Kingdom of God has come near, repent and believe the good news! Lent reminds us that the only time is now -that there’s no time to lose!

We will be familiar with Love III as part of a series of metaphysical poems written by the 17th-century Anglican divine, George Herbert. Less familiar to some may be that in 1911, the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams took Herbert’s poems – setting them as his Five Mystical Songs within which the poem Love III is the third in sequence. 

Love (III)
George Herbert - 1593-1633
Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,
            Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
            From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
            If I lacked anything.
"A guest," I answered, "worthy to be here":
            Love said, "You shall be he."
"I, the unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my dear,
            I cannot look on thee."
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
            "Who made the eyes but I?"
"Truth, Lord; but I have marred them; let my shame
            Go where it doth deserve."
"And know you not," says Love, "who bore the blame?"
            "My dear, then I will serve."
"You must sit down," says Love, "and taste my meat."
            So I did sit and eat.
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Self-Transcendence

At the heart of the transfiguration of Jesus on the mountaintop lies an experience of a transcendent reality normally hidden from ordinary perception. The disciples are shown Jesus irradiated with the glory of the divine nature flowing through him.

I want us to focus less on the nature of Jesus’ experience of transcendence – after all we get the message it’s meant to convey. The event of the transfiguration of Jesus is also a profound experience for the disciples. We see them struggling with an experience of self-transcendence. One moment they are infused with a glimpse of something that literally blows their minds. For a moment they are transported beyond the boundaries of normal imagination before falling back again into their self-preoccupation – expressed in their desire to capture and hold onto the experience.

Transcendence – a reality beyond rational perception – now here’s a tricky subject for the post-modern-21st-century imagination. We are prisoners of rationality that rejects the possibilities of transcendence. We have become mired in immanence -a state of ordinary perception limited to sensory experience. We find ourselves struggling with the cognitive dissonance of no longer believing in a transcendent reality beyond ordinary perception while desperately, hungering for it. We search frantically believing mistakenly, that we will find it through our pursuit of an ever-elusive state of happiness.

Margaret Wheatley highlights our predicament in contrasting the emotional experiences of happiness with those of joy and sorrow. In writing of joy as an experience of connection, communion, presence, and grace within the immanence – the ordinariness of our daily experience – she offers what I think is the clearest contemporary definition of self-transcendent experience.

In contrasting joy and sorrow with happiness – she notes how in both moments of joy and sorrow we find the qualities of self-transcendence – an encounter with a deeper and more expansive connection, communion, presence, and grace within the immanence of the boundaries of our daily lives.

She notes that joy and sadness are both states that embrace us with an energy that take us beyond a sense of our solitary selves. Whether laughing or crying – it doesn’t matter. Faced with a birth, a wedding, an anniversary – we are captivated by joy. In the face of a death, a disaster, a tragedy of personal or epic proportions, sorrow and sadness capture us as we suffer with, console, and love one another. Joy and sorrow are both experiences of self-transcendence –experiences not to be found in our pursuit of happiness.

It’s one of life’s great paradoxes that we crave self-transcendence through our pursuit of happiness which only further estranges us from the very transcendent experiences we crave. The pursuit of happiness rather than leading us to self-transcendence entraps us in an all-consuming preoccupation with ourselves.

The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor – to my mind one of the towering figures in contemporary philosophy – contrasts the year 1500 when it was impossible not to believe in God with the impossibility of such belief for many today. He charts the route of travel as the culture of the West moved from the impossibility of unbelief to the impossibility of belief.

In the long 400-year emergence of the secular Western mindset, Taylor notes the gradual transition from the age of enchantment to the age of disenchantment. By disenchantment he has in mind a state in which we experience our loss of connection to transcendent experience – that which Wheatley defines for the modern imagination as connection, communion, presence, and grace within the ordinariness of our daily lives.

When our connection to the transcendent is lost, all we are left with is our solitary selves – isolated beings center stage – as it were – a place of great loneliness and disenchantment.

Drawing on Taylor’s distinction between enchantment and disenchantment helps us to view the Biblical narratives as the product of an enchantment mindset. To the enchantment imagination, God is often frighteningly present in the physical structures of the material world. Divine power not only inhabits objects and places, but infiltrates and disturbs the relational spaces between us. The enchantment mindset understands God’s presence in spatial terms of up and down, in and out. Thus, God inhabits sacred mountaintops, fills sacred spaces.

On the mountaintop Peter, James, and John experience an epiphany of Jesus clothed in his divinity as the Christ. This is a fleeting experience, no sooner glimpsed than it is gone – forever eluding their desire to capture and contain it. Then the disciples must negotiate the even more perilous path down the mountain carrying an experience about which they cannot speak. They must carry the remembrance of what they have seen and yet, at the same time, practice a kind of forgetting.

As they were coming down the mountain Jesus ordered them, “tell no one about the vision until after the Son of Man has been raised from the dead”.

It seems that spiritual peak experience is only a means to, and not an end in itself. Events on the Mount of the Transfiguration are the midpoint – a final epiphany or revealing before taking the long journey towards the culmination of Jesus’ ministry.

Unlike our ancestors we no longer look for God – or the presence of the divine – in material space-time. The acceptance by past generations, whose enchanted expectations of encountering God in material objects and places is now firmly rejected by most of us as supernaturalism. Nevertheless, we remain unsettled. The question for us today is not does a separate spiritual dimension still exist – but where and how is it accessible to our modern disenchantment minds?

Spatial references to up and down don’t any longer work in the same way for us. For us, God no longer inhabits the mountaintop. Heaven is no longer imagined as up there, or hell being down there. When Martin Luther King Jr. said he’d been to the mountaintop, no one assumed he had physically climbed a mountain. The mountaintop now becomes the metaphor for the possibility of a different order of experience, one that challenges our resignation to the absence of the spiritual in lives dominated by preoccupation with the self. We may no longer find God in and through the material world in quite the same way as our Biblical and generational ancestors did, yet, despite this – our desire for God remains.

The paradox is that while we reject enchantment as superstition and supernaturalism, no generation craves with a greater intensity a desire for self-transcendence than we do. Magical realism abounds in popular literature. Heroic superhero sagas dominate Hollywood’s works. Opioids, marketed as a solution for physical pain promise a solution to the increasing levels of spiritual pain left by the loss of transcendent experience.

In writing of joy and sorrow as experiences of connection, communion, presence, and grace within the ordinariness of our daily life – Wheatley offers what I think is the clearest contemporary definition of transcendent experience -self-transcendence that takes us beyond the limitations of our preoccupation with self and our pursuit of promised fulfilment in the achievement of personal success and happiness.

As 21st century people trapped in immanence in a world that denies transcendent reality we especially need a sense of purpose to take us beyond ourselves. Wheatley turns to the great 19th-century Bengali poet and spiritual teacher, Rabindranath Tagore who movingly wrote:

I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted – and behold, service was joy.

Life dreamed as joy becomes real through service and it is in service that we are surprised by joy.

The Transfiguration story is a halfway point in Mark’s account of the life and times of Jesus of Nazareth. It marks the transition point from his preaching and teaching in the Galilean countryside to his arrival on the wider stage as he begins his eventful journey to Jerusalem.

The Visit of the Magi and the Transfiguration bookend the Christmas-Epiphany season. From here on, we move into a different phase of the spiritual journey. The landscape becomes rocky and desert-like as we journey down the mountain into the season of Lent.

Lent is the season in which we revisit and take up again the disciplines that will open us beyond mere self-preoccupation – infusing our experience of immanence – the ordinary everydayness of our lives with intimations of self-transcendence in the rediscovery of experiences of connection, communion, presence, and grace – of joy through worship, prayer, and  service.

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A Tough Sell for Modern Ears

Two weeks ago, as I reflected on the texts for the Second Sunday after Epiphany, I found my attention reluctantly returning to St Paul’s words in the epistle reading from 1st Corinthians 6:12-20. Today, on the Fourth Sunday after Epiphany I find my attention drawn yet again to the continuing argument Paul makes concerning freedom. The gist of his developing argument continually throws up examples in the life of the community that highlight the tension between the operation of grace and law. In chapter 8:1-13, his example concerns the hot button issue of eating meat sacrificed to idols. Context is everything – well almost. As I mentioned two weeks ago, unadulterated Paul is often a tough sell for 21st-century preachers, and listeners, alike.

The ancient Greek city of Corinth – like its modern-day counterpart – occupied a strategic position situated on the isthmus of Corinth – a narrow neck of land between the Aegean and Adriatic seas that provided a narrow land bridge connecting mainland Greece with the Peloponnese Peninsula. The significance of ancient Corinth lay in its equidistance between the two regional powers of Sparta and Athens. In counterbalancing both the political and military power of the two great rivals, Corinth played a key role within the organisation of Greek city states known as the Archean League.

Corinth controlled not only the east-west axis route between Sparta and Athens – but commanding harbors on Aegean and Adriatic sides of the isthmus is also controlled the passage of goods unloaded in one harbor and transported the short distance across the isthmus to be reloaded on ships moored in the other side – thus enabling ships to avoid the longer sea journey around the Peloponnese Peninsula.

During Rome’s conquest of the Greek city states, Corinth was destroyed by the Romans in 146 BC. It lay in ruins until a century later, when Julius Caesar began the rebuilding of Corinth as a Roman colony for the resettlement of Rome’s growing population of freed slaves originally captured in the many campaigns in the Eastern regions bordering the Mediterranean. A mixed population of Syrians, Egyptians, and of course many Jews – together with numbers of Rome’s poor transformed Corinth into an economically dynamic melting pot. With colonial status also came an infusion of Roman tax revenues – triggering a huge rebuilding program of ancient Corinth’s temples and civic buildings which had lain waste for over a century. 

It was into this bustling and cosmopolitan caldron that Paul arrived sometime around 50-51AD. Luke in Acts mentions that Paul travelled to Corinth where he was joined by Silas and Timothy. We know that Paul lodged with Aquila and his wife Priscilla, two Jewish refugees from the emperor Claudius’ expulsion of Rome’s Jews in previous decade. Like Paul they were tent makers. There was always considerable business from the need to constantly repair and weave new tents and awnings to protect the Corinthians from the effects of the hot sun. Perhaps it was noting the fevered building boom, that led Paul to fashion an image for himself in Cor:3 as a skilled master builder laying the foundations on which others will build.

As a result of Jewish hostility to Paul, he left his Jewish hosts to stay with one Titius Justus – a gentile God-fearer. God-fearer was a term the Jews used for newly converted but often still unconverted gentiles who participated in the life of the synagogue. In the face of growing Jewish resistance Paul switches his missionary focus to the gentile God fearers who because of their attraction to, and familiarity with Jewish faith and custom were already primed to respond to his preaching of the gospel. Among the God-fearers many wealthy women exercised power and influence. Paul’s letters reveal that it was often to such women that he turned for support in his fledgling communities.

During his first sojourn in Corinth, two significant events occurred. The first was his penning of two letters to the Thessalonians. The second was his arraignment before the Roman Consul, Gallio, brother of Seneca, at the instigation of Corinthian Jews on a change of blasphemy. Gallio dismissed the case because Paul was a Roman citizen and he declined to judge Paul on the basis of Jewish religious matters. Vindicated, Paul nevertheless must have felt that it was time to leave Corinth sometime in late 51 or early 52AD. Later in Ephesus, sometime between 53 and 54, Paul pens his two letters to the Corinthian church.

Reading Paul’s letters is like listening to one side of a cell phone conversation. We read his responses – but as to the questions he was posed – the text is largely silent. Yet from what Paul writes we can surmise that a number of serious divisions were emerging as a reflection of Corinth’s rowdy and permissive, cosmopolitan culture.

The Corinthian church struggled with the moral issues of the right use of sex, the right attitude toward wealth. Corinthians had a reputation for sexual permissiveness and the conspicuous display of wealth – the latter leading to the denigration of the poor within the worship and community life of the church – issues not unfamiliar to modern Christian communities – for human nature has not changed much in the passage of centuries.

The Corinthian church also struggled with the corruption of the notion of truth and the importance of shared values. Paul is concerned by the charismatic sway of some teachers who assailed their hearers with alternative truths, alternative facts, alternative values rooted in baser instincts – pouring scorn on shared values of mutual respect. Yet, he is particularly worried by the report of two developments in the Corinthian church.

Many, it seems, were becoming vulnerable to the subtle invitation of teachers giving a gnostic spin to the gospel message – inviting their hearers into the allure of secret knowledge. Paul has them in his sights when he writes that knowledge puffs up, whereas love builds up. Anyone who claims to know something is really admitting that they know nothing. It is through love in action not puffed-up claims to knowledge that we become known by God.

Others were becoming susceptible to the Judaizers who demanded gentile submission to the requirements of the law. The master builder of the gospel message – Paul was always deeply worried by others erecting the wrong kind of building upon the foundations he had labored so hard to lay.

As in chapter 6 when Paul employs sexual practice to highlight the tension between what may be lawful but not necessarily beneficial, in chapter 8 he grounds his wider development of Christian freedom in the issue of food sacrificed to idols. Not an issue for us – you might think. Yet, moving beyond the immediate 1st-century contextual details –that is – the status for Christians of the pagan temple sacrificial food offerings– can we not hear Paul addressing us today – we who live in a culture characterised by a scandalous misuse of food – from food deserts to food profligacy and waste of monumental proportions?

Remember, Paul is writing in a religious context – both pagan or Jewish – where food was an integral part of religious practice. It is here we begin to grasp the revolutionary import of his words – for Paul is doing something hitherto unimaginable. He is decoupling food from religious practice. Writing prior to the first gospel, did Paul know of Jesus teaching on the subject? In any case he affirms Jesus’ words that it’s not what goes into a person that defiles but what flows out from the heart. Paul tells his readers: Food will not bring us close to God. We are no worse off if we do not eat and no better off if we do.

At the heart of his first Corinthian letter is Paul’s development of a notion of Christian freedom that flows from the grace and not from the absence of prohibition. In chapter 6, he startled his hearers by proclaiming all things are lawful for him – but though lawful not necessarily beneficial for him or those with whom he’s in relationship. In chapter 8 he further spells out this revolutionary idea.

Christian freedom does not derive from the absence of prohibition. It flows from the acceptance of responsibility for the impact of one’s actions. The sin is not in eating the wrong food. The sin lies in the offence and confusion eating it gives to other members of the same community who being younger in faith are still struggling to internalize the break with their pagan past. The limits placed on freedom come not from the regulation of rules and laws – prohibitions – but from our acceptance of shared responsibility (shared value system) – demanding of us an assessment of the impact of our actions on others.

Christian freedom’s rule of thumb is not – have I the right to do this thing – but what will the impact be for others if I do so? Can there be no more urgent a question for our 21st-century ears. It’s the burning question in America today. Might I also suggest it’s a central question for the Sunday of the Annual Meeting – when we celebrate our community’s achievements in the previous year – and holding this question before us as we prepare to meet the challenges and grasp the opportunities ahead?

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A Prophet – A Disciple : But of What kind?

Image: Jonah and the whale

God calls us to be prophets, or in the more intimate language of the gospels, Jesus calls us to be his disciples. What is our response? What kind of prophet, what sort of disciple do we want to be and more importantly are prepared to become?

The OT reading for Epiphany 3 offers a brief extract from the book of Jonah. On its own the reading is somewhat opaque – jumping into the story almost at the end. In it we learn that Jonah is being addressed by the word of the Lord for the second time with the same request which Jonah continues to argue with God about.

The story of Jonah is well-known. This short book of four chapters is read by Jews every year on the afternoon of Yom Kippur – the Day of Atonement. The drama of the morning liturgy with its solemn chant of the Kol Nidre, the prayer of atonement – is past and the expanse of the afternoon opens before the fasting penitents whose hunger and thirst only increase as the day draws on. Reading Jonah reminds them of the fruitlessness of any attempt to evade the examination of unpalatable truths of one’s life through the lens of the last 12 months.

The story of Jonah and the whale is one of the more well-known bible stories among Christians and has risen in our collective memory to the level of a universal folk fable. Wikipedia describes a fable as a literary genre – a succinct fictional story, that features animals, legendary creatures, plants, inanimate objects, or forces of nature that are given human traits, emotions and intentions to illustrate or lead to a particular moral lesson. Therefore, in the days of my childhood when we were all taught bible stories – the story of Jonah exercised a special power over children’s imaginations. We all understood implicitly that if we were not good, we too might be swallowed up by a whale. The more enquiring among us came to understand the whale as a symbol for all kinds of other rather icky things that might befall the badly behaved.  

Technically, the writer of a fable is known as a fabulist. I note that in our modern disenchanted times the term fabulist carries a derogatory implication – for a fabulist is someone who makes things up and therefore is not to be trusted. In today’s world, have we not all become the unwilling but more often unwitting victims of the fabulist’s art?

The story of Jonah is of a man who receives a request from God to speak truth to power – to call the capital of the greatest Empire the world to that date had known to repent. The gist of the story is his attempt to evade the divine request before finally being cornered into complying though a conspiracy of tempestuous elements and a creature from the fishy deep. In his attempt to escape God, Jonah son of Amittai– incidentally whose name means dove-son-of-truth – boards a ship to take him in the opposite direction from the one God wishes him to take.

Of course, there’s no escape from divine writ and Jonah’s ship becomes imperiled by a violent storm. Jonah sleeps through the storm – I mean who does that? – making the sailors even more irate at him for they blame Jonah for the storm and toss him overboard to supplicate the divine wrath. Jonah is rescued – swallowed up by a passing whale. After three days of severe indigestion the whale spews Jonah up on the shore of the land God had originally directed Jonah to travel to.  

Pissed-off doesn’t do justice to Jonah’s feelings about being thwarted by divine conspiracy and so begrudgingly he trudges off in the direction of the great city of Nineveh –and finally does as God desires of him – to speak the truth to power and bring about a change through repentance. Jonah’s mood is hardly improved when he discovers that the Ninevites not only hear him, but from the greatest to the least don sackcloth and repent – thus averting God’s lust for destruction. Mission accomplished – so you might expect Jonah to be relieved and pleased. But not a bit of it.

Nineveh is one of those place names that carries huge symbolic significance in Jewish history. The book of Jonah purports to be set in an earlier century when the Assyrian Empire and its great city of Nineveh was at its height. Nineveh’s symbolism lies in later scholars looking back on the events of the 8th-century when in  721 the Assyrian armies swept down and destroyed the Northern kingdom of Israel – wiping it not only from the map but also from the pages of history.  

Rather than its 8th-century setting, the fable of Jonah belongs in 6th-century after the return of the Exiles from Babylon. Jonah is a story addressing the exilic community as it struggled to rebuild Jerusalem where apart from the difficulties posed in the physical reconstruction the burning issue concerned intermarriage of Jews with others of more dubious mixed-race heritage.

Knowing this context helps answer the double question: why did God dispatch Jonah, an Israelite prophet – to the non-Israelite Assyrians of Nineveh- and why was Jonah so unhappy with the successful outcome of his preaching?

From the outset, Jonah questions God’s intention to show mercy to non-Israelites. In his actions he shows the extent of his opposition to the project. When finally cornered by God he complies, but with bad grace. Fully expecting the Ninevites to reject his message to repent and prove him right with God, his very success – in his own eyes – calls his credibility as a prophet into question. He seems more concerned with his wounded credibility than that thousands of lives have been saved by God’s mercy because of him. Finally unable to argue with God further he sulks and pouts – telling God if that’s the way God want things then he would rather die than live with what is for him a contradiction – that the Lord God of Israel should extend his mercy to those outside the chosen race. The book ends with God decrying Jonah’s self-centered pettiness.

The issue of intermarriage in the post-exilic community is of burning significance. In the writings of this period, we have the book of Ezra in which Jews who had intermarried with foreigners are commanded to reject their wives and mixed-race children and return to the Lord – while in the book of Jonah God’s intention to include all races within his plan for salvation could not be clearer. However, the central issue at the heart of internal post-exilic discord is less about the dilution of Jewishness – though this is undoubtedly a concern. The main issue is theological and concerns the promise of salvation. Is God’s promise of salvation a universal promise inclusive of all nations or not?

Subsequent Rabbinic interpretation of the book of Jonah has gone back and forth on the theological issue. Some Rabbis argued that Jonah shows God’s clear and unequivocal intention to invite all of humanity into the plan of salvation hitherto declared only to Israel.  Others have argued that God only saved the Ninevites so that Assyria could be the instrument to fulfil God’s plan to punish Israel for its sins by wiping it off the map and out of history. At the end of the day – through its prescribed reading on the Day of Atonement – Jewish practice firmly established the message of Jonah as a rebuke to self-centeredness – personal and racial.

Following Jewish practice – we cannot find meaning or peace without an honest examination of how we, individually and communally, participate in attitudes and actions that seek to limit the extent of God’s mercy, compassion, and generosity to my or our tribe, my or our community, mercy offered only to those like me or us.

The Lectionary in placing a reading from Jonah alongside Mark’s depiction of Jesus calling his first disciples presents us with an uncomfortable challenge. God is not only more generous and loving – more than we might care for God to be -towards others who are different from us. As God expected Jonah to be a divine agent – in the call to discipleship Jesus expects us to be agents, voices, hands, and feet in the work of proclaiming the divine call for universal inclusion. Placing the two readings side-by-side reveals another striking comparison. Jonah thought he could qualify God’s desire for mercy – and when that failed he thought he could evade God’s call. The men who drop everything in response to Jesus’ call had no preconceived notion of what they were letting themselves in for – they simply felt compelled to respond.

God calls us to be prophets, or in the more intimate language of the gospels, Jesus calls us to be his disciples. What is our response – and more crucially – what sort of prophet, what kind of disciple are we prepared to become?

Notes on Nineveh

Philip Jenkins in a 2014 feature appearing in The Christian Century notes the ancient Christian history of the Middle east has become agonizingly relevant. Cities central to that history appear in headlines in the context of fanaticism and mass destruction. The State Department’s maps of the latest atrocities coincide with the most vulnerable landscapes of Eastern Christianity. Jenkins is writing about the fall of Iraq’s second city Mosul to the forces of the ISIS caliphate.

From Apostolic times Mosul remained a great center of Eastern Christianity. The ancient Christian culture of the Middle East thrived – surviving Persian, Arab and Ottoman conquest. During the First World War the Ottomans inflicted an Armenian-style genocide on Christian Mosul – leaving the city subjected to increasing attack and infiltration by the Kurds. The most recent chapter in the history of Mosul concerns its conquest by ISIS and reconquest by the Iraqi army so that today Mosul – ancient Nineveh is a largely Kurdish city with a sizable Arab minority. The once strong Christian community has largely fled – mostly to North America – where the patriarch of the Syrian Orthodox Church now reside in Chicago.

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