DIFFICULT QUESTIONS. PRAY FOR DISCERNMENT . . .

I have been reading the second volume of Pope Benedict XVI’s Jesus of Nazareth, on Holy Week, the Passion and the Resurrection, and find it staggering in its intelligence and understanding. I will be putting up a few quotations here from time to time,  but for now I’m just trying to come to terms with what it has made me understand, or understand better.

For example, the Last Supper. While Mark, Matthew and Luke see it as a Passover meal, John does not. Benedict, I think intelligently, agrees with John, as the Jewish authorities themselves at one point say, “We can’t arrest and kill him on the feast” (of Passover) as they were afraid it would cause riots and might in any case be seen as blasphemous. However, as one scholar B cites puts it, Jesus knows he is going to die, and as he is now himself both priest and sacrificial victim, he institutes a new Passover on the night before the old official one. The Last Supper is the institution of the new Passover. And the early Church understood the intense link between the Last Supper and the Resurrection in instituting the “breaking of bread”, i.e. the first Eucharist, on the morning of the Resurrection, i.e. the “first day of the week”, Sunday.

Jesus as “priest and victim both” of a new Passover leads to another thought. Our local parish priest Jean-Kamel regularly insists on the fact that "at your baptism you were made a priest, a prophet, and a king!” He is referring, of course, to 1 Peter 2:9, as well as  Exodus 19:5–6, First Peter 2:4–8, Book of Revelation 1:4–6, 5:6–10, and the Epistle to the Hebrews. He uses this mainly to encourage the congregation to witness and evangelisation (as I said earlier, he is a convert, and an enthusiastic and somewhat charismatic one). It does, though, raise the old question, more urgent in and since Luther, of the “priesthood of all believers”. This is mainly a Protestant concept, yet the Catholic church accepts it also – as long as it doesn’t interfere with the ordained priesthood.

It leads me to two questions. First: if Jesus is priest and victim in his Passover, i.e. his crucifixion and resurrection, is the “priest” that I am also priest and victim in my own little Passover? After all, I shall die, and as a believer I am promised a resurrection. Is that process my own Passover, and part of my imitatio Christi? If so, to be true my Passover, like his, must be in some way and measure for others. Second, if I am by my baptism a priest, does that allow me – for example, in an extreme situation where no ordained priest is present – to consecrate bread and wine and forgive sins? If so, my faith has just taken on a huge new dimension of seriousness and responsibility.

But if the answer to both those questions is No, then what Jean-Kamel tells us is simply a figure of speech, an edifying image. A priest? Well, no. A prophet? Not really. A king? You’re kidding.

This links up with all sorts of other difficult questions, like the ones developed in Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory; but those will have to wait for another time.

USEFUL ADVICE FROM THE 4TH CENTURY

"He who only prays when he is on his knees, prays little. But he who, on his knees, yields to every distraction, does not pray at all. So, before prayer, we must enter into the frame of mind we wish to have during prayer; for it is an inescapable law that the dispositions of the soul depend on the state that preceded it; and we will see it either rise to the heights of heaven or sink to the earth, following its previous thoughts."

St John Cassian, quoted in The Wound of Love (Leominster: Gracewing, 2006), 209.

YONGE HAELETH, OR, A YOUNG HERO

In a further pondering on the Passion, I was suddenly struck by a curious doubleness. On the one hand, of course, Yeshua suffers: he undergoes, he is the victim. Yet on the other hand, I’m fascinated by the way he commands the situation. At every point, the initiative, the essential action, is his. Admittedly, it doesn’t, at first, seem so; yet once you regard the whole event as something he had foreseen, and foreseen as necessary, the whole perspective changes.

First of all, he initiates the event himself. He knows that in declaring himself to be the new Temple (which, if destroyed, he will rebuild in three days), and in declaring himself to be (the son of) God, he will push the Jewish authorities over the edge. So we have to assume that when he does this, he has chosen his moment, in full consciousness of the consequences. He acts: they re-act.

Next, he stands before Pilate. the Roman governor, doubtless with some irony, asks him if he is the King of the Jews. He stands there, silent. Finally, he replies, also with some irony, “It’s you who says it.”

Next, he is crucified. Apart from the excruciating pain, it’s demeaning: the death penalty for runaway slaves. Yet no slave he. ‘He nothing common did or mean/Upon that memorable scene [i.e. stage].’ He utters two quotations from the Psalms, his lifelong prayer-book. ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ (Ps. 22) is a cry of grief and pain, but not one of despair: the Psalm ends in praise, and in trust that future generations will serve the Lord. ‘Into your hands I commit my spirit’ (Ps. 31) moves beyond the pain and grief to the completion of what his whole life has been: a returning of the Father’s gift into the Father’s hands. And finally: ‘It is finished’: in the Gospel’s Greek tetelestai, which was used in accounting to mean ‘complete, paid in full’.

Throughout, in spite of the pain, he is command of the situation. This is what he knew had to be done, and he is doing it. He is the Meshiach, in the Isaian sense: he is saving Israel and the world by being the Paschal sacrifice.

It is not just courage: it’s authority.

Looked at this way, the Passion becomes even more awesome. Yes, the Dream of the Rood was right: he is the ‘young hero’, and in the deepest sense: the hero is one whose acts go well beyond what the ordinary person is capable of, and whose acts, moreover, are always done for the sake of, for the delivery of, ordinary people.   

FOR ALL YOU DOUBTING THOMASES

Worcester College

On this First Sunday After Easter, alias Mercy Sunday, I can do no better than repost, with her permission and my gratitude, today's sermon by my priestly daughter, now Chaplain of Worcester College, Oxford. Read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest.

Thomas

TESS KUIN LAWTON·SUNDAY, 8 APRIL 2018

On this Sunday after Easter, we are offered some remarkable stories about discipleship and it seems like a good opportunity to use them to reflect on our own journeys of faith.

The first, and most obvious story is that of Thomas. There is a method of spiritual reading of the Bible which encourages us to imagine ourselves as one of the characters in the narrative and really live the event from their point of view. During Holy Week and Easter, it is almost impossible not to do this. The characters are so full of life and the narrative is so vivid that we are drawn inexorably into the way of the cross as we tread the path with Jesus. Sometimes we are Mary, watching and waiting as the event unfolds. Sometimes Peter, denying we are followers of Jesus at all. Sometimes the accuser, sometimes the soldiers, sometimes the women laying his precious body to rest.

The beauty of the narrative is that it invites this kind of reading. The author of the Gospel of John is explicit when he says that he has written everything ‘so that we might believe.’ There is a profound interplay here between the written word and the way it speaks to our faith in God. John is writing the Gospel so that everyone who reads it and hears it might believe that Jesus is the Son of God. If you believe that this is the case, John is convinced of two things: that you will have found a way to have, as Jesus puts it ‘life in all its fullness’ and that this abundance of life will not end with death. ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.’ (John 3.16)

When I was a school Chaplain, I was lucky enough to meet a man from the Gideons who told me about his mission to prisoners. He would take the small red New Testaments into prison and distribute them with words of encouragement. One day a man came to tell him that the thin pages were the perfect size for cigarette paper and he had indeed smoked his way through Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. By the time he got to Acts, he felt that perhaps he should read the pages before smoking them. He was converted by Peter’s speech on the resurrection of Jesus and had come to ask my friend for a new copy of the Bible.

These words on cigarette-thin paper were written ‘so that you might believe’. They are words to comfort and to heal. Words to challenge and to inspire. Words which echo across centuries and reach into your heart today.

The story of doubting Thomas plays its part in this conversation between us and God. The resurrected Jesus meets his friends for the first time and knowing exactly the level of their fear and anxiety, his first words to them are ‘peace be with you.’ He says it twice. He understands.

Peace. We know what it feels like. The sunshine reminds us of it. A feeling of calm. Of beauty. Of ease. Those times in life when we are aligned with the world, in tune with the basso continuo of life. No worries to niggle us. No stress to unsettle us. No sadness to drag us down.

Imagine how deeply sad the disciples must have been. Imagine the weight of their grief. Not only their beloved friend, but their longest running snap-chat streak, the one they spoke to every day and who settled them and made sense of life; not only this but also the leader of their community, their purpose, their reason to live. All this died in them when he died. The locked doors are not only factual in John’s story. They are symbolic. In the face of grief, we lock down.

And into this, the risen life of Christ walks. Through the locked doors, breathing peace into the fear. ‘Peace be with you.’

Thomas was not part of it and the disciples are not good at explaining. They don’t really know what has happened and they are not making a lot of sense to Thomas. He needs to see, feel, hold, touch the man who made sense of his life.

And Jesus gets this. He holds out his hands and he invites Thomas to touch. This is no ghost, no apparition or wish fulfilment. This is real. Thomas gets it.

‘My Lord and My God.’

Our readings today have important things to teach us about the practical life of a follower of Jesus. John’s Gospel reminds us that we have the power of forgiveness, each one of us and there is enough in a single verse of the Gospel to give us food for prayer for the rest of the week as we reflect on our own ability to forgive. Jesus considers forgiveness to be the gift of the Holy Spirit, and it is so central to his message about how we should live that it has a central role in the prayer we say every day: ‘forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.’

The book of Acts, the one which converted our smoking friend in prison, gives us a really remarkable reading in chapter 4 about how we should live as a community: sharing and giving up our own wealth so that our neighbours in Christ might be cared for, ‘there was not a needy person among them.’ (4.34) This earliest group of Christians were characterised by two things, we are told. Verse 32 says ‘now the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul.’ And the following verse tells us that ‘great grace was upon them all.’

This is a powerful image of the possibilities of living the resurrection life and the church should hold on to it with joy and hope. But today’s readings highlight the contrast between this and the immediate aftermath of the crucifixion. This transformed, grace-filled life begins behind the locked doors of the upper room. And it takes doubt as its starting point.

It is not hard to inhabit the character of Thomas, because doubt is part of the journey of faith: particularly in the empiricist world in which we now live. And what our readings tell us this morning is that God knows. God knows that doubt is part of the human condition and God responds to it at the level we need: ‘reach our your hand and put it into my wounds’ (John 20.27).

God does not love us less, if we doubt. God is always reaching out to us. Continually. But at some point, we have to reach back towards God and we must trust that it is true. ‘My Lord and My God.’