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.

March 30, 2024 0

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.

March 23, 2024 0

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 4^th-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 20^th-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.

March 16, 2024 0

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.

March 9, 2024 0