BUYING, OR BOUGHT?

Today’s parable concerned a man who found a treasure buried in a field. He sold all he had to buy this field. This, said Jesus, is what the Kingdom of God is like.

Right.

He then covered the parable up with a few others – the pearl of great price, for one – to make sure the point got taken and the unlikely bits forgotten.

OK.

We take the point, we think: the Kingdom is a treasure worth all we possess. But what is it? What is it like?

Benedict XVI, in his admirable Jesus of Nazareth, suggests that the Kingdom, which is variousy described as being ‘at hand’ or even ‘here among us’ is in fact Christ Himself; and that the communion with him, the closeness to him, is the treasure worth all we possess and more.

Today, however, our overworked but indefatigable local priest, Fr Jean-Kamel (he calls himself that, his first name, as no one can remember his Algerian family name) made a startling and to me overwhelming suggestion. While basically agreeing with the above, he also said that each of us is the field with the treasure, and that it is God who wants it and has given all He possessed, all His treasure – His only, beloved, Son – to purchase it.

I found that a stunning thought, and still do. It is buzzing around in my head. I had never thought of that explanation for the parable. But it makes astonishing, and humbling, sense. O.M.G.

AND THEN THOU SHALT SOME MORE

So how about loving that blasted neighbour with his noisy dog, his pain-in-the-ass teenagers and his whiny habit of getting himself burgled and complaining to Bibi (Yours Truly, in French) about it? (I hasten to say I have no such neighbours in real life: the few I know are uniformly delightful – an artist, a 94-year old farmer, and a former spy.) I go back to agapao and its uses. It is not a verb about feeling. It is a verb about being-there for someone: the boring spectrum of emotion that you despise when you’re a teenager, tempest-tossed with hormones and Sincerity.

Let’s look at the Samaritan. In America, he’d be a Latino. His story tells us, as it was meant to, something about “Who is my neighbour?” but also something about “What is this thing called Love?” So we should pay scrupulous attention.

In the first place, what does he not do? He does not start an NGO called “Travellers’ Aid”. He does not call the police; he does not organise a demo in front of the nearest town hall or police station demanding more security for citizens and travellers.

He seems to have learnt some first aid, dresses the wounds with oil to ease the pain and with wine to cauterise the infection, puts the battered man on his donkey and walks it to the inn where he was planning to spend the night. The next morning he tells the innkeeper to look after the felllow, pays him something on account, tells him he’lll pay the balance on his way back – and goes about his business. Apart from the initial “taking pity on him”, it’s all wonderfully unemotional: brisk and businesslike.

The helper’s Samaritan-ness is important for the point about who stops and who doesn’t: it’s of no importance for identifying what that “love” means.

It doesn’t mean an emotion. It doesn’t refer to the way you feel, but only to what you do. If we temporarily ban this word “love” it may help us understand parts of the Bible better. I like “being-there-for”, but one could think of other terms. We are told to be there for God, entirely: with our heart, our breath or soul, and our intelligence. We are told to be there for our neighbour – and it’s explained to us that in this case our “neighbour” is anyone we run into by accident who is in clear need, a need we can do something about. And why? Because it grows out of being there for God. We love God because He first loved us, and goes on doing so. But He also loves the Anyone we run into and who’s in trouble; and He needs us to put His love into practice.

The Samaritan didn’t go out looking for attack victims. He was on a business trip, and interrupted it briefly to do a good deed in a naughty world. Then he went on with his business trip.

“Being-there-for” also helps us clarify the “as thyself”. If it’s about “loving”, well, many of us are not that crazy about ourselves. But in a pinch we will act on our survival instinct and look after ourselves. That’s what we’re asked to do for others, when the occasion arises: be there for the bloke, do what you can to help out, don’t make a fuss about it.

Micah puts it very well: “With what shall I come before the Lord and bow down before the exalted God? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousand rivers of oil? Shall I offer my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? He has showed you, O man, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.” There it is. Not complicated. Not emotional. Just do it.

The image, of course, is Rembrandt's. Who else? A pen and brush drawing of the Good Samaritan, done in 1644.

THOU BLOODY WELL SHALT

Ἀγαπήσεις κύριον τὸν θεόν σου ἐν ὅλῃ ^]τῇ καρδίᾳ σου καὶ ἐν ὅλῃ ^]τῇ ψυχῇ σου καὶ ἐν ὅλῃ τῇ διανοίᾳ σου

I was pondering love, and thinking of writing about it, when I remembered I had in fact already done so. So I dug into the blog's archives, and found a post that said at least the first part of what I was going to write, and said it in such a way I couldn't do better now. So for those who weren't around the first time, or who have forgotten it, here it is again. And there will be a sequel soon.

We all know the commandment “Love thy neighbour as thyself” and most of us have heard it explained by the parable of the Samaritan. But we tend to shy away from the fact that it’s the second commandment, because the first is, well, more bothering. I checked a few of the Greek words used in the passage from Matthew 22, and they are interesting. “Commandment” is entolè: an order or an instruction. So there is no getting away from it: we are ordered, or at least instructed, to love God. How, we ask (or we damn well should), can one be ordered to love anyone? Moreover, we are instructed to do so not in any half-hearted way, but with our kardia, our heart; our  psuchè, our breath, life, or soul; and our dianoia, our intelligence. What on earth (well, maybe not entirely on earth) are we to make of that?

Perhaps in the first place we’d do well to look at “love”. The Greek word used is agapao, which is used in the senses of “to have affection for, to care for” (for example, one’s children or one’s parents), “to honour” and very occasionally “to love” (a lover or a spouse). I remember reading a commentary on St Paul that interpreted the New Testament “love” as not so much an emotion as a being-there-for someone. The Samaritan, in that sense, “loved” the beaten traveller. So if we are told to “love” God it means we are to be there for Him, to care for Him as for a child or a parent, to be such that He can depend on us as they would. You can “love” a parent, or a sibling, you don’t much like on a daily basis: in a pinch you’d be there for them.

But why? Why would we do all that for someone whom we can’t even see, who half the time doesn’t answer our prayers, and who expects us to be “good” all the time? Because, when you get down to it and listen to the people who know Him better, in the first place He loved, and loves, us. (More about this in a minute.) Secondly, we can see Him: we can see Him in His Son, the celebration of Whose birth we are even now preparing. He sent His Son, part of Himself, not just to repair the broken toy we had made of the world, but to show us what He is like, in a form our tiny brains can handle. He couldn’t really have done more.

OK, that was then, a couple of thousand years back; but as the Carthusians I love to read (they are the guys who really spend time on this) tell me, He is still doing it, every hour of every day. Doesn’t much feel like it, we grouch. And the Carthusian says, “Don’t get Him wrong. Don’t confuse receiving His love with feeling His love. Sometimes you feel it, and that’s marvellous. But even when you don’t, you are still receiving it. And if you can get your kardia, your psuchè, and your dianoia round that, how can you not love Him back? He is giving you the example. However grouchy you are, however miserable you are, however much of a shit you are, He is there, loving you and hoping to God you will return His love.”

           

         So how about that entolè, that instruction? Perhaps it’s an instruction in a different sense. My father used to say that he thought moral laws were not so much like penal laws as like natural laws, showing the consequences of certain types of behaviour: if you stick your fingers into the candle-flame, you will get burnt and feel serious pain; if you jump off a cliff, you will fall until the rocks stop you and crack your spine, and you will die. Something like this perhaps applies also to the instruction to love God. It may be an instruction of the kind put in owner’s manuals: if you want your car to work properly, as the manufacturer intended, change the oil every 3,000 miles. If you want your life to work properly, as the Maker intended, accept Him as your parent and treat Him accordingly. Things will then tend to fall into place, often surprisingly. And who knows? You may even end up “loving” Him in the way we small humans normally understand it, as a vast feeling that lights our day.

LEVEL CROSSING?

 

I awoke with the peculiar sentence in my head, “There are trains everywhere – and they all go to the Cross”. Something to ponder, I thought as I dressed. It reminded me that indeed all our ways go to the Cross, and that the implications of that are rich enough to fill centuries of theology. Here are a few of the ones that came into my mind that morning.

1.        The Cross is our Cross. It is the death we cannot avoid, toward which we are headed, that may meet us on a highway or in a hospital room, but meet us it will.

2.        As such, it is our Cross in the sense that we can elect, at least in principle, how to meet it and undergo it. It may be with courage; that is admirable, but a purely pagan virtue. It may be with surrender to God’s Will: that is probably the best way. It may be in sacrifice, for another; before that is up to us, it depends on circumstances.

3.        The Cross is the symbol of our guilt: it is where we, as humanity, crucified the Son of God. It is unavoidable: all trains go there, whether we like it or not.

4.        The Cross is the symbol of our forgiveness: He died there to accomplish that. Is that, too, unavoidable? We can avoid it only by refusing it, which is the only absolute sin.

5.        The Cross, because it is our Cross and His Cross, is the meeting-place where we come together with Him, where our paths cross. Taking the train thither before we have to – in prayer, in meditation, in sacrifice -- is one of the finest ways to be united to Him.

6.        The Cross is a crossroads, a place of choice, a place of crisis in the original sense of the word. When we go to it, we cannot avoid difficult thoughts, and often hard options. Because it is real, it disallows or at least questions our comfortable fantasies.

7.        The Cross is peopled or not, a crucifix or empty, the Cross of Good Friday or the Cross of the Resurrection. Most Catholics are used to the former, most Protestants to the latter. The richest thought is that it is both, and so focuses both meditations.

8.        The Cross is both horizontal and vertical: as the Germans say, both waagerecht and senkrecht: both weighing-scale straight and plumbline-straight. As such it both weighs our soul and plumbs it: a magnificent image.

IMAGINE

If parson lost his senses,

And people came to theirs . . .

Thus began, in the early 20^th century, a moving poem by Ralph Hodgson in defence of mistreated animals. The opening played through my head in reading the news about the Middle East and new anti-terrorist defences. ‘If leaders lost their senses, And people came to theirs . . .’ I thought, what might happen? What might we construct? And in a John Lennon mood, I began to Imagine.

Imagine three great monotheist religions, living in mutual respect and affection. Imagine Muslims and Christians according Judaism the respect due to the Eldest Brother, the one who was first chosen by God, the one who received the Law, the one who, with the self-confidence of his seniority, is still the only one who dares argue with God. Imagine Jews and Muslims according to Christianity the affection due to the Second Brother, the one who dared go further than the Nation and the Law, to extend God’s love to all humanity and summarize the Law as absolute Love. Imagine Jews and Christians according to Islam the respect and affection due to the Youngest Brother, the one who lives a faith summed up in Obedience, who keeps his Ramadan and, with the fire of youth, dares to believe in unadulterated values.

Imagine the nations of a vast region on the planet, recognizing that they all contain these three faiths and their respective grandeurs, and that nevertheless they all have to live in a modern world where many could not care less about religion. The vast reserve of faith they contain acts as a leaven, of respect and affection toward neighbours, and of a consciousness that there is a vertical dimension to life as well as a horizontal one. The respect and affection will furnish one of their peoples’ permanent needs, security. Meanwhile, the vast reserve of ingenuity and honesty released by this peaceful coexistence turns bomb-inventors’ talent to creating clever irrigation schemes to make the desert flower, and sees small-scale financing help the poor into trades both decent and profitable. The peoples’ other great need, modest prosperity, becomes attainable also. The three religions’ values, which tie in quite well with the secular ones of a Bill Gates or a Warren Buffett, are now, combined, so powerful that beyond the borders of the Middle East they restrain the inordinate greed of stock trading and the corrosive political hatred that paralyzes polarized democracies. Bills for the common good get passed, elections take on the cheerful variety of football championships, prayer is no longer seen as a divisive group label but as an act of primary value, all faiths can wear their distinctive attributes openly and be respected for them, and boarding an aeroplane becomes as simple and agreeable as it was sixty years ago.

Imagine – since Christianity is the faith this blog is most concerned with – a Church that is one house with many mansions, that has healed its great schisms, between East and West, between Catholic and Protestant, and that attracts the intelligent young to serve in it. It would have many churches, and many different forms of worship to suit the various temperaments of the faithful. There would be cheerful family churches with guitars, and tall, still churches of awe and Latin beauty; churches that know the Bible by heart and churches that distil the finest points of liturgical symbolism; churches that live in permanent prayer and churches that help and defend the disadvantaged in their daily lives; churches that study the history of the faith and churches that find joy in daily conversation with synagogues and mosques, comparing ways of loving God.

None of this, says the Father we all worship, is impossible.

The image above is take from an article on the House of One, a joint place of worship for the three faiths being built in Berlin.