EASTER WITHOUT MARKERS

For a variety of reasons, this Easter season has been very different. No church services, much busyness, absolutely nothing conducive to quiet, ritual, or contemplation. What to do in such a case?

What it has done is make me think more deeply about the Passion and the Resurrection, quite apart from ritual and in ways more individual than ecclesial. On Good Friday I awoke at 5 and spent two hours meditating on the day. I’ll share some of the thoughts.

      1.     The Anglican Communion service reads, in the Prayer of Consecration, “On the night that he was betrayed . . .” The new Catholic version says “On the night that he entered freely into his Passion . . .” At first I used to trip over this last version, but I have come to agree with it and like it (except rhythmically). It emphasises Yeshua’s willed accord with the Father’s will; his clear understanding that this death, grisly as it was, was the whole point of the Meshiach’s life and activity. Contrary to much Messianic thinking that wanted a new David to deliver Israel from its enemies, Yeshua’s interpretation was that of Isaiah. The Meshiach’s role went infinitely further than that of a political liberator: it aimed to liberate humanity from its Enemy – Satan, sin, and death. And this was possible only through the Meshiach himself becoming the Paschal sacrifice. So, human indeed, he quakes, he grieves, but he nevertheless goes forth. The Anglo-Saxon Dream of the Rood is doubtless factually wrong but also spiritually right in seeing Christ as a “young hero” voluntarily ascending the Cross.

      

      2.     I am always fascinated by the fact that his last words were two quotations from the Psalms. That shows, to cite Bonhoeffer, the degree to which the Psalter was Yeshua’s prayer-book. Having tried to say Morning and/or Evening Prayer regularly during Lent, I found reading through the Psalter one of the most moving parts of the experience. It is so wonderfully Jewish in its constant dialogue with the Creator: thankful, suffering, indignant (“Up, Lord!”), cursing, adoring and praising, it shows us how to relate to a sometimes distant and almost always (ostensibly) silent God.

      3.     The Crucifixion was necessary, because without it there could be no Resurrection. Perhaps what it teaches us is that our death too is necessary, and that we too follow him in a resurrection: not in the flesh – as his had to be, temporarily, to make people understand – but in the “body” of our post-mortem life, whatever that may look and feel like. No caterpillar, I suspect, has the faintest idea beforehand of what it feel like to be a butterfly.

      4.     Yochanan, St John the Evangelist, after whom I was named, thrills me, not only because of his mystical understanding and his poetic writing but because he was the only disciple not to have fled the Cross. He and the women stayed till the end. Perhaps that is one reason for the depth of his comprehension? It came to equal Miriam’s, which is why it was he who was detailed to look after her.

      5.     “Give us that peace which the world cannot give.” This impresses itself upon me more and more. The world can give suffering; the world can give comfort, and fun. But it cannot give true peace. When I look at those who live without faith, I mostly see a deep underlying sadness; those who live in faith are not exempt from pain and suffering, but they see meaning and coherence, and know that they are loved. 

      6.     The paradox of the Cross is inexhaustible. Its horror is bottomless, its joy is endless.

      7.     What, exactly, is the Good News that Yeshua preached? That you are not bound nor bounded by your self. That the Kingdom, the Reign, of God is here now. That it is the reign of Love, and that what you have to do, all you have to do, is relax and let it take you over. That you need to open the windows, doors and shutters of your soul and let the Ruach, Pneuma, Spiritus in. That if you live from day to day, hour to hour, by what it tells you, the Father, Son, and Spirit will come and live in you. That you are loved as you are, not as you might be if you were a better person. (That is really and truly hard to take on board!) That you can live day by day in subservience, in filial or servantlike devotion to something, Someone, greater than you are without losing your independence or your pride. On the contrary, it will increase your stature by making it irrelevant.  

JOY OF FORGIVENESS

Reading today’s Psalm, I was filled with joy as I always am when it turns up. Although I suspect most people who read this blog know it, I also think that in this time toward the end of Lent and in the midst of the usual grim news cycle, it may be worth rereading, both for its deep spiritual healing and for its sheer beauty. Could this be “the beauty of holiness”?

Psalm 103. Benedic, anima mea.

Praise the Lord, O my soul : and all that is within me praise his holy Name.
Praise the Lord, O my soul : and forget not all his benefits;
Who forgiveth all thy sin : and healeth all thine infirmities;
Who saveth thy life from destruction : and crowneth thee with mercy and loving-kindness;
Who satisfieth thy mouth with good things : making thee young and lusty as an eagle.
The Lord executeth righteousness and judgement : for all them that are oppressed with wrong.
He shewed his ways unto Moses : his works unto the children of Israel.
The Lord is full of compassion and mercy : long-suffering, and of great goodness.
He will not alway be chiding : neither keepeth he his anger for ever.
He hath not deal with us after our sins : nor rewarded us according to our wickednesses.
For look how high the heaven is in comparison of the earth : so great is his mercy also toward them that fear him.
Look how wide also the east is from the west : so far hath he set our sins from us. 
Yea, like as a father pitieth his own children : even so is the Lord merciful unto them that fear him.
For he knoweth whereof we are made : he remembereth that we are but dust.
The days of man are but as grass : for he flourisheth as a flower of the field.
For as soon as the wind goeth over it, it is gone : and the place thereof shall know it no more. 
But the merciful goodness of the Lord endureth for ever and ever upon them that fear him : and his righteousness upon children’s children;
Even upon such as keep his covenant : and think upon his commandments to do them.
The Lord hath prepared his seat in heaven : and his kingdom ruleth over all.
O praise the Lord, ye angels of his, ye that excel in strength : ye that fulfil his commandment, and hearken unto the voice of his words. 
O praise the Lord, all ye his hosts : ye servants of his that do his pleasure.
O speak good of the Lord, all ye works of his, in all places of his dominion ; praise thou the Lord, O my soul.

LAETARE: IT'S GRACE, STUPID.

The fourth Sunday in Lent is known as Laetare from the Psalm that begins "Rejoice". It is a pause, as it were, when we may breathe in the midst of our intense self-discipline -- yes, well. Most of us are not very good at intense self-discipline, and so we can feel mildly guilty at not having earned Laetare.
Which brings us to the whole topic of Lenten guilt. Somewhere around Ash Wednesday many of us fully intend this year to "do a good Lent", fasting, praying and giving alms with sincerity, assiduity and regularity. By the time of Laetare for many of us this lovely plan lies in ruins, and we feel guilty.

It is worth stopping to reflect on the similarity of this experience with that of New Year's Resolutions.  And with that of weight-loss plans. For these last, the permanent success rate, it has been proved, is between 2 and 5 per cent: the figures may be the same for New Year's and Lenten resolutions. Even if we consider slimming to be a form of vanity (which it is, health excuses notwithstanding) and Januarius to be a pagan idol (which he is), we are still left with the shards of our Lent.

 The key, of course, lies in the possessive pronoun. Our Lent. My Lent. Not selfishness: I wanted to bring God the offering of a "good Lent", because I love Him and want to do something for Him, as one does for a loved one. Uh, huh. Niet. Time and again, with a divine smile or a heavenly tear, God raps us over the knuckles and says "You've done it again! You've misunderstood me again! I don't want your immolated oxen, your roasted rams, nor do I want your good Lent!"

Right, Lord: what do you want, then? "I want you to realise, once and for all, that contrary to what you humans keep saying it is more blessed to receive than to give, and also a great deal more difficult. I have given you, and keep on giving you, my complete love. I have given you, and keep on giving you, my only-begotten son. I was under no illusion as to what you would do with him. But I knew that once you had done that, I could turn precisely that horror, that evil so typical of y'all, into the greatest good, for you. So look at what my Son said to Nicodemus, that intelligent believer. 'God did not send his Son into the world to condemn it, but so that it might be saved through him. He that believes in him is not condemned; he that does not is already judged. The world did not accept the Son because men of evil deeds prefer the dark to the light.'"

So we should work at doing good deeds? "Yes and no: what He went on to say was 'but whoever does truth comes into the light.'" Doing truth. Not doing good deeds. Doing truth. It sounds odd and illogical. Is truth something you do?

Here we are with the shards of our Lent. But Lent is still going on. And we have failed. Again. So we smile, say "Thank you, Lord, for the lesson," and get up and go on. Knowing that we can do absolutely nothing; that we have been given the gift of God's love free and without charge, and that it does not matter a tinker's fart whether we fast or eat, write cheques or save, and go to Church or not. God did not check up on all those things before deciding whether we were worthy of his love. What we do, being loved like that, is work at fully realising it, taking it in, letting ourselves be overwhelmed. That, I suspect, is what "doing truth" is. Being love, God's love is always the same as our love, which is why we can love him back. Being God's, it is always also different. Always a little unsettling. But not -- pace much modern church rhetoric of the "naught for your comfort" kind -- demanding. I'm not sure God ever demands. I think he gives, and waits for us to receive and accept. Learning to do that is "doing truth". And it results in rejoicing. Laetare, indeed.

THAT LITTLE WORD AGAIN

In my previous post I looked at the prayer that God’s will may be done on earth AS it is in Heaven; today we might glance at the prayer that we may be forgiven AS we forgive others.

It seems, at first, much simpler than the previous AS:  a simple case of do as you would be done by. If you want to be forgiven, the least you can do is do some forgiving yourself. Let’s start with what’s to be forgiven. In all Gospels except Luke it is “debts”;  but many scholars think that the word Jesus used was the Aramaic hoba, which means both debt and sin. If this sounds odd, remember that in both Dutch and German the same word, schuld, is used for a monetary debt and to mean ‘guilt’; and in Dutch, therefore, the relevant line of the Lord’s prayer says: forgive us our schuld as we forgive our schuldenaren – literally our debtors, but in fact those who have schuld toward us. And let’s remember also that only a little over a century ago debt was considered so serious that an inability to pay it sent you to gaol. (Those who borrow from the Mafia are even to this day reminded forcefully of the need to pay both debt and vig.)

Are we God’s debtors? It seems odd: if God is love, and our relation to him is one of love, is it decent to express that in terms of debt? In the Old Testament, God put it very clearly to Israel: if you (plural: y’all) will love and honour me and keep my commandments, you will be my people and I will be your God. If you will not, I will turn my back on you and nasty things will probably happen to you. So it’s in one sense a transaction; and a transaction, agreed to by both sides, creates a debt. If this sounds one-sided, you can still find traces of the other side in the Psalms, when the Psalmist cries “Up, Lord, and do something!” And in Judaism arguing, even indignantly, with God is not considered outrageous.

With the coming of Christ there is a subtle change. It is no longer merely a matter of keeping commandments, but of a relation of profound intimacy with God: with the Father, in the Son, through the Holy Spirit. This is still simple, but where keeping commandments is simple on this side of complexity, the new relationship is simple far, far beyond complexity.

So what does that do to debt and schuld? It transforms it, or is meant to. Just as between great lovers the very thought of “owing” is inconceivable, so in the new relation of love between God and the soul it is (meant to be) inconceivable. Right, says God: but if you accept this, and you also accept that “what you have done to the least of these, you have done to me”, then the thought of “owing” between you and your brother must also become inconceivable.

But. But we still live in a sublunar and greebly world. So in the meantime, in the mean time – the time in the middle between promise and Parousia, the mean and ungenerous time of Auden’s “low and dishonest decade” --, there is forgiveness. It is the way-station to inconceivability. And we learn the HOW of forgiving by looking at the way we hope God will forgive us. Not a mean forgiving, that will go on reminding the forgiven of their nasties and my virtue; not a forgiving accompanied by stern lectures, demanding promises never to do it again; no, joyful forgiving with open arms, with a clean soft garment and a feast of rich veal from the fatted calf.

This takes a bit of learning. Most of the time we don’t even pray for our enemies, let alone forgive them. When did you last hear prayers in church for ISIS and its members? Forgiving is hard; forgiving and forgetting even harder. But the joy it brings is so enormous that the learning is worth every effort. Another of the Joys of Lent? 

Image: Rembrandt van Rijn, "The Return of the Prodigal Son"   

A TWO-LETTER WORD

Thinking about the infinite depth and variety that is the Lord’s Prayer, I was struck by the two appearances in it of the word “as”.

‘Thy will be done, on earth AS it is in Heaven’ and ‘forgive us our trespasses (or: debts) AS we forgive them that trespass against us’.

Extraordinary. I’ve written earlier about the curious use of the optative in the Lord’s Prayer’s first three petitions; and the AS brings home the full mysteriousness. Let God’s will be done here on earth; let us help God’s will be done here on earth; let us do God’s will here on earth; but how? ‘AS it is [done] in Heaven.’

Thinking about this makes one realise that AS can have two different if related meanings: ‘to the same extent’ and ‘in the same manner’. Which is meant here? Possibly both; but it can surely never be done here, on grubby old Earth, to the extent that it is done in Heaven? So we are forced back to ‘in the same way’. And the question that arises at once is: how do we know the way God’s will is done in Heaven? We can only know this by various forms of extrapolation.

The first is by extrapolation from Earth, and us, in all our incompleteness, spoiltness (in every sense), and bloody mess. Without fantasising, we do I think rightly assume Heaven to be the opposite of those conditions. So when we look at the way God’s will tends to be ‘done’ at all here, we can look at that doing’s incompleteness, its spoiltness (in every sense) and its bloody mess, and weep. The bloody mess is that of those who assume God’s will to be the massacre of all they consider as His enemies. The spoiltness is that of those who assume God’s will to be their own comfort and prosperity, and/or those who spoil and deform other’s attempts to do God’s will out of anger, envy or cynicism. The incompleteness is that of all of us, who invariably ‘leave undone that which we ought to have done, and do those things which we ought not to have done.’

Battlefield of Verdun, 1916

The beauty is that God has given us the gift of imagination. Although we cannot reach perfection, we can imagine it. Although by our own efforts and on earth we cannot reach Heaven, we can imagine it. As Keats wrote in a letter: ‘I believe in . . . the truth of imagination. The imagination may be likened to Adam’s dream: he awoke and found it true.’ If the imagination is joined to the humility of prayer, it may help to save us.

So if – knowing that we cannot accomplish anything by our own efforts – we consider doing God’s will AS it is in Heaven, we know that such a doing is complete, unspoilt and clean. We also know that we can’t do that. Hence, perhaps, the optative, with its deliberate ambiguity and passive voice. ‘Let (or: may) thy will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven.’ By whom? Not by us, messy little sinners that we are. Not directly by God himself: he doesn’t work that way much as we’d like him to. No: if it gets done, it will be done only by him, through us. And if so, we should work at learning two things: opening our doors, windows and shutters to let the ruach, the pneuma, the spiritus sanctus in; and constantly imagining Heaven.

Heaven imagined: Carlo Carloni

There is of course another help we have: the one who taught us the prayer in the first place. He is the Law; we do God’s will by following him. The two ways are not contradictory; but following Yeshua Meshiach is full of contradictions, as anyone who has closely read the Gospels knows. WWJD never has an easy answer. So the first way I suggested may complement the second. Prayer is, in any case, the one constant essential.

I will write my next post on the second AS in the Lord’s Prayer. Stay tuned.

SOMETIMES YOU GET IT WRONG . . .

Partly because I have spent my professional life in the sixteenth century and its language, and partly because I became an Anglican by falling in love with the texts of Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer, I have always preferred to read the liturgy there and the Scriptural passages in the 1611 Authorised Version. Until yesterday, that is; when the lectionary proposed reading St Paul's Epistle to the Romans and when, reading it in the AV, I found my eyes glazing over and realised that I understood not three words together of a text that I thought I knew.

So I went to a website I have come to like a great deal: Bible Gateway, where one can look up any passage in the Bible in a vast number of different versions and in a number of languages. I typed in "Romans 1" and was faced with the choice of versions. There are modern translations I genuinely dislike for their chattiness, but I also thought that going to other older versions, like Douai or Geneva, would probably not be a help. For the Epistle to the Romans is a notoriously theoretical and difficult letter of Paul's -- Karl Barth's most famous work is a book-length study of it --, so a modern version was after all indicated.

Then I remembered that when I was a boy my father used to read us a passage of Scripture at Sunday breakfast, and that these often came from a volume called Letters to Young Churches, translated into modern English by J.B. Phillips. So within the list on Bible Gateway I looked for the name, and found the J.B. Phillips Bible. The result you can follow here: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Romans+1&version=PHILLIPS .

I started reading, and found I couldn't stop: it was fascinating, intelligent, challenging and wholly engrossing. My eyes glued to the screen, I read all 16 chapters. And at the end, I realised that there are moments when one's love for Renaissance English can be a hindrance rather than a help. A sobering thought, entirely suitable for Lent.

J.B. Phillips