Category: Musings and Reflections

A Man’s Man

The purpose of history is less to explore the past than to illuminate the present. We value reading the Deuteronomic history – particularly 1st and 2nd Samuel, 1st and 2nd Kings for the way it casts a spotlight on issues of today.

The story so far. Having secretly anointed David as king, Samuel increasingly fades into the background as David emerges center stage. That David is now the real king remains a secret hiding in plain sight. Like most secrets hiding in plain sight, no one knows the secret while everyone recognizes that something has changed.

Last week’s OT lesson opened with David’s growing success on the battlefield. As David’s success grows – so Saul’s paranoia deepens. A moment of love at first sight threatens to complicate matters further.

Last week we heard that:

When David had finished speaking to Saul, the soul of Jonathan was bound to the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul. Jonathan stripped himself of the robe he was wearing, and gave it to David, and his armor, and even his sword and his bow and his belt.

The process of intrapsychic resonance explains how two people become irresistibly drawn to one another across a crowded room before ever a word is spoken. This is a private moment of mutual intoxication – private that is until one of the parties walks up to the other and starts taking his clothes off. That’s the moment when others might notice something’s up.

Until death do us part is a phrase from the wedding service familiar to us.  Even when used outside of the marriage ceremony it still implies a long-standing alliance or partnership between two people expected to last for their lifetime. The covenant between David and Jonathan is such a bond – forged between them until death will them part.

Today’s OT lesson opens with news of Jonathan and Saul’s deaths on Mt. Gilboa. As news reaches him, we witness the depths of David’s grief – as with the eloquence born only of grief’s devastation, David composes in the Song of the Bow – a love eulogy that he commands to be sung throughout Judah.

Your glory, O Israel, lies slain upon your high places! How the mighty have fallen. ….. Jonathan lies slain upon your high places. I am distressed for you, my brother Jonathan; greatly beloved were you to me; your love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women. How the mighty have fallen, and the weapons of war perished!

The synchronicity of reading the story of David and Jonathan as this year’s month-long international celebration of Pride winds down seems more than mere coincidence. For 21st-century ears, hearing the story of David and Jonathan spotlights two lines for contemporary inquiry.

The first line concerns issues of gender and sexual identity continuing to fuel our current culture wars raising the possibility of the question: was David and Jonathan’s love, homosexual?

In Pride month the temptation for some is to read the story of David and Jonathan in the vein of: ha, see, there were gay men in the Bible, after all. But being gay is not what this story is about. Homosexual identity – that is being homosexual is a modern concept that cannot be superimposed upon David and Jonathan who exist within their own psycho-cultural context. In other words, while there might have been a lot of sex between men in the ancient world – being gay was completely inconceivable.

By declaring that Jonathan’s love is a love beyond that of women – David is only acknowledging a cultural reality. While suitable as the bearers of children, women were inferior as persons because they were simply property. You don’t expect a piece of your property to be your soul companion. Consequently, in Israelite warrior culture, men sought one another to meet their emotional needs – whatever that may or may not have entailed in terms of sexual expression.

The second line of inquiry takes us in a different and more fruitful direction. Since the mid-20th century, anxiety about being homosexual has had a chilling effect on the dynamics of male friendship in Anglo-American culture. Before the 1950s we might be surprised to learn that despite the long history of anti-sodomy laws and periodic high-profile prosecutions, there was a wide latitude given for homosexual behavior because it remained simply an aberrant behavior largely hidden from the public eye.

From the late 1940s on – the older tolerance for homosexuality as a secretive and aberrant behavior among otherwise normal men is challenged by the promotion of homosexuality as a stable identity position along a continuum of human psycho-sexual development. The tragic paradox is that the growing recognition of a psychological theory of same-sex object choice – provoked a chilling effect on men’s capacity for emotional identification with one another within Anglo-American culture. It’s one thing to be a so-called normal person suspected of aberrant behavior. It’s quite another to be labeled as a homosexual.

The Church also jumped on the backlash bandwagon. In the new psychological explanation of homosexuality as a state of being, the Church found a new justification for the tradition’s ambivalence of being hostile to homosexual expression while at the same time remaining obsessed with it. What had always been regarded as aberrant (sinful) behavior subject to repentance, now becomes a state of disordered nature – giving rise to the invidious expression love the sinner but hate the sin.

The recent TV miniseries Fellow Travelers is a deeply moving serialization of the novel by Thomas Mallon – set at the height of the McCarthy witch-hunt for the practitioners of un-American activities. Alongside the rooting out of so-called communists in the Red Scare – in the Lavender Scare McCarthy aided by the infamous Roy Cohn – a closeted and repressed homosexual himself hunted persons who could be accused of being homosexual. Thousands of careers in government, academia, and entertainment were destroyed – driving many of the accused to suicide. In the spirit of the time being homosexual became an embodiment of the most un-American activity of all.

In men’s social formation just being emotionally sensitive became a source of considerable anxiety. Through injunctions such as boys don’t cry, don’t be a sissy, be a man – boys learned early on to equate emotional sensitivity with vulnerability. Who among men is the most vulnerable? The worst slur on the playground among boys became you’re a homo!

There’s a further paradox – that as societal acceptance of same-sexuality has greatly increased over the period from 1970 onwards – now resulting in the legal recognition and wider social acceptance of same-sex relations – men’s capacity for male friendship has continued to decline to the point today where many men report having few if any committed male friendships at all.

Equating male emotional sensitivity with signs of homosexuality has resulted not only in a chilling effect on men’s capacity to form male friendships but it’s also had knock-on effects on relations between the sexes.

By declaring that Jonathan’s love is a love beyond that of women – David is simply acknowledging that it is inconceivable that a woman could be an emotional partner equal to the degree that Jonathan was for him. This is in sharp contrast with the situation today – where the loss of men’s capacity to form male friendships has resulted in their wives becoming their primary and often exclusive source of emotional connection.

Avrum Weiss writing in the November 2021 Psychology Today notes the Saturday Night Live sketch titled “Man Park.” In the sketch, a young man waits anxiously for his partner to return from work. He has few if any friends and has had little social interaction all day. She listens, barely managing to feign interest in his data dump about the series of banal events of his day. As is often the case in heterosexual relationships, she reverts to the role of mommy, exhorting her partner to go outside and play with his friends. When he protests that he has no friends, she takes him by the hand as she would a little boy and walks him to the “Man Park” to play with the other men. The men approach each other awkwardly, unsure of how to make a friend, while the women patronizingly urge them on.

When I arrived in 2014, I observed the women of the parish easily creating experiences for mutual solidarity and support – enjoying the fruits of friendship with one another. Not so among the men. Except for a small selective group aptly named Band of Brothers, there was no wider-inclusive men’s group activity dedicated to the fostering of men’s friendship and emotional connection with one another.

This was a situation we have worked hard to change. With the aptly named Gander – as in the male goose – we have created an umbrella beneath which men’s lunch, writing, and reading-discussion groups now flourish – strengthening emotional solidarity between male group members. I recently noted with some satisfaction – that at a point of personal crisis, one man reached out for and received considerable emotional support from other group members. I see this as a fruit of men directly caring for one another – beyond the normal experience of men meeting only to talk about something other than the state of their emotional lives.

The story of David and Jonathan focuses a spotlight on contemporary men’s issues. Its message for us is not – ha, see, there were gay men in the Bible after all! The story of David and Jonathan highlights the contemporary problem of male isolation and loneliness – a problem with wider ramifications for the nature of relationships not only between men but between men and women in contemporary social life. It clarifies a need to create spaces for activities to facilitate men’s interests in one another. Spaces that facilitate men recognizing each other as emotional beings with emotional needs that can best be met in mutual friendship. At St Martin’s – among St Martin’s men, facing up to the tendency of men’s isolation is being thankfully, taken to heart.

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Fathers, Prophets, & Kings

Two weeks ago, Linda+ preached on the call of Samuel in which a key line reads – in those days the voice of the Lord was not often heard. This is a recognition by the Deuteronomist scribes – the collators and editors of the Samuel story – that in hearing God’s call Samuel becomes the first person since Moses to whom the Lord speaks directly. Samuel is a crucial transitional figure – presiding over an age of national transition in the Israelite evolution from a loose tribal confederation – where political power is highly devolved -towards a centralization of political power in a monarchical system.

Samuel is a figure linking the past but also prefiguring the future. He’s the priestly successor to Eli – custodian of the shrine at Shiloh. He is the last of the great Judges who since the days of Joshua had guided the Israelites in times of crisis. He is also the first of a new breed of prophets. After Samuel the office of prophet will become the significant counter – the Lord’s loyal opposition to the centralization of political power under the monarchy.

The story so far is -responding to the people’s clamor for a king, and with the Lord seemingly giving the green light to their request, Samuel has anointed Saul as the first king in Israel. But Saul is arrogant and easily gets above himself in the Lord’s eyes. On the pretext that Samuel had not arrived within the appointed time to perform an important sacrifice after a battle with the Philistines – Saul usurps the priestly role and offers the sacrifice himself. This is a serious trespass. Samuel arrives and in shock cries out to Saul – what have you done? The Lord is also not pleased and in rejecting Saul as unfit to continue to rule sends Samuel in search of a man after the Lord’s own heart to be king in Saul’s place.

Poor Samuel. Although originally opposed to the consecration of a king, he seems to have grown both fond of Saul and at the same time fearful of him. The OT reading for today finds Samuel moping. The Lord tells him to snap out of it and get on with the job.

Understandably, Samuel had been swayed in his original selection of Saul by Saul’s impressive warrior-like appearance – tall, handsome, dark-haired, and bearded, with shoulders and thighs of death. But Saul has a fragile ego. He’s a classic narcissist. Easily threatend and vindictive in response. Standing before the parade of Jesse’s sons – Samuel’s tastes in men have not changed as he ponders an acceptable Saul lookalike to replace him.

As Jesse’s sons’ parade before him – Samuel is constantly distracted by the Lord whispering in his ear – no, not this one, no not that one. After the seventh in the lineup had passed by and been rejected by the Lord, Samuel – somewhat at a loss turns to Jesse and asks if there is another son somewhere? Jesse says he has another son, but he is just a boy – out minding the sheep. David is brought before Samuel who finds the boy rather effeminate in appearance with a fresh, hairless, ruddy complexion, androgynously handsome with beautiful eyes – hardly king material in Samuel’s eyes.

But to Samuel’s astonishment, the Lord confirms this is the one. When Samuel takes a moment to make sure he has not misheard – the Lord becomes impatient. He commands Samuel to – rise and anoint him; for this is the one! Samuel takes the horn of oil and anoints David as king in the presence of his brothers. We are told the spirit of the Lord came mightily upon David from that day forward – which is propaganda code for the Deuteronomists’ approval of David – who in their eyes becomes the template for the good king -a man after the Lord’s own heart -. a template of kingship against which all subsequent kings will find approval but mostly be found wanting.

It’s a tricky situation that Samuel now finds himself in. No one outside David’s family knows that David has replaced Saul – certainly, Saul has no inkling and will not have for some time to come. Worried about blowback -Samuel thinks it wise to step out of the limelight for a while and retreats to his home at Ramah where he has founded a school for budding prophets.

There’s a deep irony running through Samuel’s story. He succeeds Eli as the priest at Shiloh because Eli‘s dynastic ambition has corrupted him to appoint his sons Hophni and Phineas – spoiled bad boys if ever there were. Here lies the tragic irony. Like Eli before him – Samuel – distracted by his own dynastic ambitions loses his moral compass in naming his own bad boy sons to succeed him. It’s important to note this in the mix of Samuel’s emotions when confronted with the people’s demand to sideline his sons and anoint a king instead to rule in their place.

Samuel is a good leader until he isn’t, which is how Nanette Sawyer puts it in writing in the recent edition of The Christian Century. She writes:

Samuel’s decision to appoint his sons as leaders and judges shines a light on his human fallibility. The people see it too, and they want out of this system of leadership based on judges who appoint their own greedy children to take over. When they got Samuel instead of Hophni and Phineas, maybe they thought they were done with that problem. But here it is, happening again.

Fatherhood is often a painful experience. For Samuel, his biological sons are not his only disappointment. As father to the nation, the people likewise disappoint him in wanting to replace the system he embodies with a king.

Oh, what a curse it is to be the son of a great father.  The saga of the great man and his disappointing sons still has the power to grip our contemporary attention – as attested to by the Hunter Biden tragedy.  As the sons of both the presidential contenders for 2024 demonstrate – though in very different ways – it’s a short trip from privilege to corruption for the children growing up in the shadow of the larger-than-life father.

Let we who have ears to hear listen closely! As in our own time, in the time of Samuel, the Israelites feel locked into a political system designed to resist change. Like us, they express a growing concern about the capacity of a devolved system of authority held together by a common rule of law to safeguard their future. Like us, in the face of multiple challenges to national life, they paradoxically demand to have a king who they fantasize will solve all their problems. The Israelites offer us a salutary warning against trading one set of problems for another – out of the frying pan into the fire as the old saying goes.

Samuel warns them of the cost of kingship to be paid in the indentured service of their sons and daughters; through the taxation of land and first fruits; in the arbitrary confiscation of land and the levying of a military draft. But the greatest cost will be paid in elevating a leader who like a contemporary Supreme Court Justice will enjoy complete unaccountability.

My throwaway comment about Supreme Court Justices’ unaccountability reminds us that the echoes of Samuel’s story and its political context reverberate through our own constitutional halls. And like the ancient Israelites, facing the challenges of uncertainty and change – we too seem to hanker for a strong charismatic leader – harboring the mistaken expectation that such a leader will care about us.  The Israelites cry give us a king to make us great again. But the story of kings is that they make only themselves and their sycophants great at the expense of those they are raised over to serve. The historian Timothy Snyder with a reference to Putin’s Russia notes that the people do not flourish under a king. Only the king and the king’s loyalists flourish, and then only as long as they also benefit the king and the king’s power. Let we who have ears to hear listen closely!

Samuel at first bitterly opposes the request and complains to the Lord about how the people disrespect the Lord in even wanting a king to rule over them. Perhaps realizing that Samuel is more anxious for his own authority than the Lord’s – the Lord simply tells Samuel to do as the people ask. It seems even the Lord is not always right.

At the end of her article, Sawyer wryly comments: God’s story, our story, is a long one, and we are only in the middle of it. Now is a time to heed Samuel’s warnings. Now is a time to utilize all of our resources—our energy, intelligence, imagination, and love—to work toward God’s dreams for our world. That will be a world in which wealth is shared, justice is done, accountability is maintained, and the abundance and beauty of God’s creation are honored. 

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Seeing and Being Seen!

Image: Ivanka Demchuk Trinity in the style of Andrei Rublev

Our unique personhood sits within a much larger set of characteristics that we share with every other human being. Yet there is a kernel at the heart of these shared characteristics that marks us out as uniquely ourselves – as in – like no one else. How is individuality discovered?

There’s a commonly held view that individuality is innate. We come to discover who we are through an internal process of growing self-awareness. In other words, the unique sense of self is something we are born with and develops in step with the process of cognitive maturation.

In contrast, a psychologically informed view holds that personal identity is not innate but interactional. Personal identity develops through our interactions with others – interactions shaped by social and physical environmental factors.

So, bear with me for a moment as I develop a couple of seemingly unrelated strands, I assure you they will come together in a moment.

There is that old chestnut question: does a tree falling in the forest make a sound if there is no one to hear it fall? The short answer is no – its fall makes no sound. The complex answer is the tree’s fall causes pressure waves in the air around it. But these are not sounds until picked up by and transformed into sounds by the human ear.

As many of you know I have a background in Object Relations psychology which is a particular British offshoot of classical Psychoanalysis. Object Relations theory views human beings as primarily object or relationship-seeking. The infant instinctively seeks connection with its mother who represents a reliable and constant object. The infant suckling at the breast or the bottle comes to its first awareness of self through being reflected in the mother’s loving gaze.

The human equivalent of the tree falling with no one to hear its fall is the infant deprived over time of the experience of being seen – that is -reflected in the gaze of the mother. Such an infant will eventually die and we have a name for this – it’s called failure to thrive.

My psychology-psychotherapy formation led me – as a childless man – to the realization of what every mother experientially knows – that the infant catches the first intimations of selfhood in the interactional field of the mother’s loving gaze. The mother gazes at the infant. The infant gazes back- catching the first hints of its separateness – individuality – reflected in the mother’s face. I know of a young mother who as her child awakes from sleep whispers – Hello little one, I’m glad you’re back. I’ve missed you.

On Trinity Sunday what happens when we take my initial reflections on human identity development and view them through a trinitarian lens?

When it comes to the Trinity – the doctrine of three persons in one God – there is only one thing we need to remember. The Trinity was an experience of God long before it became a doctrine about God. In fact, the doctrine emerged only as a protection for the unique Christian experience of God.

For the early Christians, the Trinity as an everyday experience of God emerges in this way. As Jews, they believed in God the Creator, the God of their ancestors, the God of Abraham, and Moses. As followers of Jesus, they experienced a life-changing encounter with God through his ministry, death, and resurrection. After his departure following his resurrection, they were inflated in present-time with an experience of transformation from a dejected and lost band of leaderless followers into a community empowered with a revolutionary purpose. Under the guidance of the Spirit – which they associated with the Spirit of Jesus – they took up the work Jesus had begun. In these three distinct ways, they experienced the presence and power of God in their lives.

In the spiritual life of faith and practice, we are caught between two opposing pressures. On the one hand, we are compelled to try to rationalize our faith experience – capturing the invisible and intangible nature of spiritual experience in stories and formulae we can easily understand and repeat. Yet, on the other hand, we have a strong motivation to protect the mystery at the heart of religious experience from being reduced to the limits of our impoverished human imagination.

This tension between these motivations came to a head in 325 CE when the bishops – as the successors to the Apostles met together in council at a place called Nicaea – now the modern-day Turkish city of Iznik situated 139 KM southeast of Istanbul – then Constantinople. The council was torn by opposing factions. There were those who wanted to rationalize the mystery of the threefold Christian experience of God – to make it sensible to ordinary human comprehension within the laws of the physical universe. There were others who defended the essential mystery at the heart of Christian experience. Using the philosophy of the day -they put in place a protection for the mystery of God lying at the heart of Christian experience. This protection has come down to us in the Nicene Creed which we proclaim as the historic faith of the Church believed in all places and at all times.

Thus the Nicene Creed speaks of Jesus being of one substance with the Father, and of the Holy Spirit as proceeding from the Father through the Son. Confounding our expectations – nothing is explained and the meaning of the essential mystery is left open-ended. Although the Trinity expressed an experience of God long before it became a doctrine about God – at Nicaea – experience came under the protection of a doctrine that proclaimed God as a relational community of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Today we hear these terms not as an attempt to gender the divine, but as an articulation of relationality at the heart of the divine nature. Following current sensitivities around gendered language some substitute Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer for the traditional gendered terms. While theologically correct nevertheless these are terms denoting function, not relationship. Lover, Beloved, and Love-sharer is a better solution – making the point that it is relationship not gender that lies at the heart of the divine nature.

In 1410, an obscure Russian monk named Andrei Rublev depicted an icon of the Holy Trinity drawn from the Genesis story recording the visit to Abraham at the Oaks of Mamre by two angels. Rublev’s icon of the Trinity articulates a step change – a massive leap forward in the human capacity to imagine God – presenting the three distinct Christian experiences of God as a relational community of three persons – distinctively clothed – yet in every other way identical – sharing the same face – the same gaze. Each member beholds the other two simultaneously in a mutually loving gaze.  

Rublev’s Trinity is more than a representation of the theology of God’s nature. It’s an expression of the Orthodox devotional tradition in which the Trinity lies at the heart of Christian devotion. Inspired and informed by this devotional tradition, Rublev presents God not as a solitary figure but God as a relational community.

We only come to truly see ourselves when we are caught in the experience of being seen. Coming to see through the experience of being seen is an essential characteristic of the infant-mother bond. Thus it should come as no surprise that seeing through the experience of being seen is an essential quality of the divine community. When we sit before the icon of the Trinity we are drawn into the mutuality of the divine gaze. It’s as if God seeing us says hello – welcome back, we’ve missed you.

Three folds of the cloth yet only one napkin is there,
Three joints in the finger, but still only one finger fair,
Three leaves of the shamrock, yet no more than one shamrock to wear,
Frost, snowflakes, and ice, all in water their origin share,
Three Persons in God: to one God alone we make our prayer.                                                                       An Irish Celtic prayer to the Trinity.

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It’s Blowin’ in the Wind

Image by Jennifer Allison

Everything is connected to everything else. The butterfly beats its wings in the New England woods provoking an invisible chain reaction resulting in a typhoon battering the Japanese coast. The magnitude of interconnection is truly mind-blowing. How so?

All that is ever seen is what Spirit causes, motivates, inspires, encourages, impels, triggers, stirs, provokes, stimulates, influences, or activates.

In his song Blowin’ in the Wind, the great Bob Dylan once more with a direct simplicity comes closest to articulating the mystery of Spirit: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpD26IoRLvA 1:27 -end)

Dylan asks

Yes, and how many years must a mountain exist
Before it is washed to the sea?
And how many years can some people exist
Before they're allowed to be free?
Yes, and how many times can a man turn his head
And pretend that he just doesn't see?

The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind
The answer is blowin' in the wind.

In this vein, let me try to give some descriptive theological shape to the Day of Pentecost – the arrival of which brings to a close the long biblical narrative that has been unfolding since Christmas, through Easter, ending here at Pentecost.

Pentecost – is Greek for the 50th day after Easter. On the Day of Pentecost the Spirit of the risen and ascended Christ – the Holy Spirit entered material time and space as a crucial participant in the on-going life of the creation.

John hints at Jesus’ gift of his spirit to his disciples in his farewell discourses – where in today’s gospel he tells them – If I do not go away, the Advocate will not come to you; but if I go, I will send it to you …. for when the Spirit of Truth comes, it will guide you into all truth.

It’s Luke, of course, who offers the graphic description of the event that overwhelmed Jesus’ followers on the Day of Pentecost. Luke’s chronological arrangement of the life and times of Jesus from birth to resurrection ends with his Ascension. In the sequel to his gospel, the Acts of the Apostles, Luke chronicles the life and times of the first followers of Jesus of Nazareth. Beginning with the event that transformed them from a dispirited rag-tag band of the dejected and the lost into an empowered, pneumatic community inflated by the power of the Spirit. Luke goes on to record in Acts how empowered by the Holy Spirit this pneumatic community begins to forge a distinctively revolutionary way of living. Pentecost marks the transfer of power from what had been the ministry of Jesus to the ministry of those who became initially known as the followers of The Way.

Being faithful Jews, these first followers of Jesus had gathered in Jerusalem for Shavuot – the other great pilgrim festival at which every Jew – especially those of the male variety was encouraged to come up to Jerusalem on the 50th day following Passover to commemorate the giving of the Torah by God to Moses. Luke paints a vivid technicolor picture of the events that overtook Jesus’ followers who were visited by a pyrotechnic eruption of wind, fire, and ecstatic utterance marking their pneumatic inflation with the Holy Spirit.

Among the multitude of pilgrims gathered for Shavuot from across the Jewish diaspora were Jews from Media, Elam, and as far away as Mesopotamia – from Cappadocia and a host of other cities in Asia Minor together with Egyptian, Libyan, and Arabian Jews, alongside local Judeans. All witnessed the clamor among a band of unruly Galilean peasants – hearing them shouting out in their own tongues while others of a more cynical mindset dismissed the rabble-rousers as drunk – not simply drunk, but drunk at nine o’clock in the morning. After all, what could you expect from a bunch of Galileans?

Last week I drew the metaphor of a conduit – a two-way traffic highway connecting the dimension of time and space with the spiritual dimension – each a dimension arranged in parallel. With the Ascension of Jesus, the direction of traffic moves from time and space to spiritual space as Jesus is received by God and reunited within the divine nature – not simply as a divine being but now clothed in the fulness of his humanity.

Following the reception of the humanity of Jesus- now perfected through suffering – into the divine nature, the traffic flow reverses as the divine spirit of Jesus is released to reenter time and space – becoming known as the Holy Spirit – who in the words of the Nicene Creed proceeds from the Father through the Son.

All that is ever seen is what Spirit causes, motivates, inspires, encourages, impels, triggers, stirs, provokes, stimulates, influences, or activates.

On the Day of Pentecost, the disciples of Jesus were set blaze – enraptured –hearts and minds ignited with passion. Drawing a more contemporary analogy, in his song, I’m on Fire Bruce Springsteen captures such a moment when he sings:  (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VxFS5-klfk 1.24 -end)

At night, I wake up with the sheets soakin’ wet and a freight train runnin’ through the middle of my head, only you - can cool my desire, oh,oh,oh, I’m on fire!

The Holy Spirit is the manifestation of God as the primal force animating from within and spanning between everything – an echo of the Genesis vision of the divine wind moving across the face of the void – calling structure and order out of chaos.

The Apostle Paul in chapter 8 of his letter to the Romans recaptures the grandeur of the Genesis vision – leading him to his arresting association of the Holy Spirit as the midwife of the Creation. He writes:

Know this, that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, as part of the redemption of Creation.

Paul offers this extraordinary image of the Spirit birthing us in our weakness; like pre-linguistic newborns, the Spirit speaks for us in sighs too deep for words.

St Martin’s is a Spirit-filled community. This is not the way we normally think of ourselves for we are shaped by a cooler Anglican ethos that has traditionally been highly suspicious of too much enthusiasm. Our Spirit-fullness is revealed through our synergy of traditional Anglican worship with radical theological and social messaging – allowing us to explore, fashion, and present fresh perspectives on traditional articulations of theology and faith practice. In this we capture the revolutionary effect of the Spirit – directly addressing head-on, the challenges faced by us in the lives we are actually living. This can be a testing experience and gives the lie to the accusation that our Anglican way is an easy religion.

Following this liturgy – we will celebrate our Spirit-filled, magnetic community – a community drawing others to us. We are an attractive, warm, and welcoming community. We express a quiet spiritual empowerment. We exhibit revolutionary courage – confronting challenges to faith in a modern context while also risking new opportunities – as together we reach out for God’s invitation to work tirelessly for the healing of the world.

All that is ever seen is what Spirit causes, motivates, inspires, encourages, impels, triggers, stirs, provokes, stimulates, influences, or activates.

Or as Bob Dylan tells it –The answer my friends – is blowing in the wind – the answer is blowing in the wind. The life of Spirit is not subject to our manipulation or control – it’s not comprehensible to our grasping minds. The Spirit makes itself known through us when we allow ourselves to become available to its prompting to act under the furtherance of the divine plan for creation which always begins with a revolutionary refusal to accept that the way things are in the world is the way things have to be.

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So What’s Next?

Picture: Chapel of the Ascension, Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, Norfolk, England

There is a rather ugly 1960s chapel at the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham – deep in the rural countryside of the county of Norfolk dedicated to the Ascension of our Lord. On entering the Chapel of the Ascension, one is greeted with a surreal experience. For in the center of the low ceiling is a gilded cloud ring plaster rosette from the center of which hang two bare feet – suspended in the air. Ostensibly belonging to Jesus with the rest of his body having already burst through the ceiling.

The celebration of the Ascension always occurs on a Thursday – the 40th day after the resurrection. Because Episcopalians rarely venture to church except on Sundays – the current custom is to celebrate the Ascension of the Lord on the Sunday following – which in 2024 also incongruously happens to be Mother’s Day.

Incidentally, I heard a funny quip recently referring to the Southern Baptist church calendar which comprises only four commemorations: Christmas, Easter, the 4th of July, and Mother’s Day. It goes without saying that while we shouldn’t pass up any opportunity to celebrate the importance of mothers and mothering in our lives, in the Episcopal Church, Mother’s Day is not part of the liturgical calendar.

Constructing stories and weaving narratives are the way we make sense of our experience of the world. The perennial question concerns the relationship between story and material experience – in other words, does weaving narratives – telling stories interpret and explain our material experience, or does the power of narrative –  in the words of the French deconstructionist philosopher Michel Foucault – construct our experience – as in language creating the objects and meaning of which it speaks.

This tension surrounding the function and power of language is especially pertinent when it comes to religious-spiritual stories. Narrative Theology asserts that spiritual meaning lies not in the literal veracity of the events depicted – did they happen or not – but in the function of story by itself to construct and convey purposeful meaning across time. The question is not whether or not Bible stories depict actual happenings – but how they construct meaning and purpose that can be trusted to shape our living?

Spiritual stories recycle human imaginative memory. Clearly, Luke’s graphic account of Jesus’ Ascension borrows extensively from Elijah’s ascension recorded in the 2nd book of Kings. In like manner – as the mantle of Elijah fell upon the shoulders of Elisha – giving him a double portion of his master’s spirit, the double portion of Jesus’ Spirit clothes the disciples. The resonance is unmistakable.  

In Luke’s chronology of events from Calvary to Pentecost, his story of the Ascension of Jesus forms a transition point bringing the earthly ministry of Jesus to a close to empower his followers with his spirit to become a community equipped to continue his work. The question underlying the Ascension event is not how, when, or if it happened, but what light does it shed on the question of what’s next?

The question of what’s next throws into sharp focus the choices to be made, the actions to be taken, and the directions to be followed.

In her sermon last week, Linda+ noted that love is not just about how we are to feel. It is about who we are called to be. Rather than asking: What does it mean to believe in God’s love – she posed the more significant question do we trust God’s love, do we surrender to it, will we let love transform us? 

So here’s a question. How can we trust the meaning inherent in the story of the Ascension of Jesus even though most of us believe it as an event to be simply a construction of imagination?

One response is to substitute the traditional spatial metaphor of up and down for heaven and earth with a metaphor more suited to contemporary imagination – that of heaven and earth as side by side. The Ascension becomes the conduit connecting parallel dimensions. Through this conduit a two-way traffic flows between what we might call our space and God space.

The image of the Ascension of Jesus as a conduit for two-way traffic communicates two important insights. In his return to the God space, Jesus does not jettison his humanity like a suit of worn-out clothes – but carries the fullness of his humanity – perfected through suffering -to be received by God into the divine community. The words of the first collect for the Ascension capture this: that as we believe your only begotten Son our Lord Jesus Christ to have ascended into heaven, so we may also in heart and mind there ascend, and with him continually dwell. The we here is not us individually, but the entirety of our humanity which now constitutes an element within the divine nature.  

In receiving the fullness of Jesus humanity into the divine nature, God releases the divine spirit of Jesus to make the return journey back into our space. This image is captured in the words of the second collect for the Ascension:  our Savior Jesus Christ ascended far above all heavens that he might fill all things and to abide in his church until the end of time. The Ascension is the point where we, Christ’s mystical body on earth are prepared to become empowered to continue the work Jesus began.

The Ascended Christ bearing our perfected humanity is received into the heart of God – so that – as the book of Revelation poetically phrases it – the home of God now dwells among mortals. Now we come to the most extraordinary assertion of Christian faith – that from henceforth to be most fully human is to be most like God.

The Ascension of Jesus opens us to contemplate our participation in the what’s next in God’s work of renewing the creation -throwing into sharp focus the choices to be made, the actions to be taken, and the directions to be followed – when we tire of gazing heavenwards – that is.

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That’s how the light gets in!

Jesus focused on relationships, not on religion. He certainly had little interest in forming a new religion with an institutional structure. Jesus’ understanding of the centrality of relationship was relatively simple. I am in a relationship with God and it looks like this. I mirror my relationship with God in my relationship with you. Likewise, you are to mirror my relationship with you in your relationships with one another. In other words, Jesus projected his experience of being in a relationship with God into the relationships he built with his followers. By extension, he taught them how to make their connection to him into relationships with one another.

In the 1st letter of John, written by John of Patmos sometime in the first half of the 2nd century CE, Jesus is recorded as saying:

No one has seen God, but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is perfected in us.

His teaching points to a way of life that seems simple enough – well at least clear enough – though not necessarily, always easy to follow.

Elsewhere, Jesus paints word pictures of what relationship with God looks like that draw their power from everyday and the familiar aspects of life. In last week’s gospel portion from John 10, Jesus uses the metaphor of the good shepherd whose love for the flock has a very intimate and self-sacrificing intensity. In today’s gospel portion from John 15 – Jesus draws another arresting picture of divine-human relationship – that of a vine and its branches – an image that speaks of the organic- interconnected life of relationship.

It seems to me that the future of the church in the 21st century will depend on a return to Christian communities defined as vision movements putting core spiritual values into concrete practice. Across university campuses this past week, we are witnessing the genZ Zoomer generation – the first generation since the early boomers propelled and convulsed by a vision movement. In his poem Anthem, Leonard Cohen captured the spirit of this protest moment:

I can’t run no more with that godless crowd while the killers in high places say their prayers out loud, but they’ve summoned, they’ve summoned up a thundercloud and they’re going to hear from me.

For many of us – the current student protest vision is seriously misinformed on the central rallying point of Palestine. They don’t really know the facts but they have an excess of righteous passion which unfortunately tarnishes their passion for justice for Palestine and Palestinians with a regrettable antisemitism. Palestine is the rallying cause for an expression of pent-up rage about many things experienced by this generation. But this is not to take anything away from the vision propelling a need to protest. It’s important to recognize the energy behind the protest without necessarily endorsing every element of the vision.

Vision movements – and this is a good description of the followers of Jesus – arise from an acceptance that existing structures are no longer fit for purpose. The institutional structure of the Church is a case in point. As we face into the headwinds of decline – we have an opportunity to allow the nature of our identity and sense of purpose to shift with -and not fight against – the cycle of decline. In other words, to take advantage of institutional decline to return to the centrality of the original vision – to mirror relationship to the risen Christ in our relationships with one another within the nurturance of a loving community.

This is a poignant theme on a baptism Sunday when we welcome a new member into relationship with Christ, by coming into relationship with us – the Christian people of God in this place. But why exactly are we welcoming the newly baptized? Are we welcoming them as the latest recruit into a failing institution? Or are we welcoming them into a set of relationships that will shape and support them within a community making a difference in the world? As the old African saying goes:

If you want to go fast – go alone; if you want to go far – go together.

Jesus was not interested in founding a new religion or creating a religious institution. Nevertheless, that’s what happened. In the natural cycle of things, original vision movements concretize into institutional structures. The history of the Church is one of a cycle of vision-led expansion followed by institutionalization leading to decline. A cycle repeated over and over again. We are fortunate to be living in a decline phase of the cycle. Now I guess, you didn’t expect to hear me say that!

St Martin’s is currently experiencing growth and revitalization. Amidst overall institutional decline – at the local level many parish communities are vital communities. Is it tempting to interpret our vitality as the poly-filler in an otherwise cracking facade of the institutional church? But to do so is to miss the essential source of our vitality. Cohen again:

Ring those bells, the bells that still can ring, forget your perfect offering, there is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in – that’s how the light get’s in, that’s how the light gets in.

Our Jesus-shaped relationships with one another are like the light that seeps through the cracks in an institutional church where belief was thought more important than belonging. Our vitality at St Martin’s is in no small measure due to the priority we place on belonging over believing. I don’t mean to suggest believing is not important – it’s just that believing emerges from belonging rather than the other way round.

Like most organizations, the church is good at explaining what it is and how it works. The question usually not addressed is why it exists.

Compare and contrast the following mission statements:

We have a beautiful church, and we are an active community. We marry progressive theology to traditional worship. We have fun and do good in the world – want to join us?

and..

Everything we do is to give an account of the faith within us – to become better equipped for God’s purpose. We are a community on a journey together in the belief that if you want to go fast journey alone but if you want to go far journey together. Your presence strengthens us. Will you join us?

Jesus said:

I am the vine; my father is the vinegrower. He removes every branch in me that bears no fruit. Every branch that bears fruit he prunes and makes it bear more fruit. … I am the vine; you are the branches … because apart from me you can do nothing.

Or as Leonard Cohen puts it:

there’s a crack in everything – that’s how the light gets in – that’s how the light gets in.

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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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