WALKING THROUGH WALLS

          

 

Now, after Easter, we are in the Resurrection Time – a limited period between Easter and the Ascension. The time when Yeshua is back, for a specific task: to explain to the disciples and the expanding community what his ministry, passion and resurrection have all been about, so that they will understand it as a coherent whole, an act of the Father’s love for his human children; and to set the community on its future path of realising the New Alliance between God and the expanded Israel that is the whole human race. 

            It is a strange time. One of the things Benedict XVI points out in his Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week is the fact that when the disciples closest to Yeshua meet him after the Resurrection, they do not recognise him. This is extraordinary. They have lived with him every day for three years ; and yet when they land their boats and see a man grilling fish on the beach who says “Come and have breakfast!” they do not recognise him at first. Likewise the two less close disciples walking to Emmaus, who were clearly among those who had listened to him, seen him, admired him and followed him, and who now spend a couple of hours at his side, listening to him explain the Scriptural basis for the Passion: they only recognise him when, at table in the inn, he breaks the bread with the Baruch atta Adonai prayer – at which point he vanishes. 

            It makes you wonder what his resurrection-body looked like, what it was. Rembrandt painted it, and when you compare it to his paintings of the living Yeshua (probably after one of his Jewish neighbours in Amsterdam), you can in fact see a very uncanny difference. I’m not sure anyone else has imagined it so well. But would he have been unrecognisable? One may also wonder what this resurrection-body in fact was. Was it a temporary one, taken on only for this time between Easter and the Ascension? It did have the stigmata of the Passion, as the story of Thomas shows. Or was it his definitive eternity-body which he still has today, sitting at the right hand of the Father? That’s not something even the boldest theologian can answer.

            Also, this resurrection-body walks through walls. The disciples are together in an upper room; the doors are closed and locked; suddenly there he is among them. Not a ghost: feel my wounds. But suddenly, there. At table in Emmaus: whoosh, he is gone. Now this reminded me of something Benedict does not mention, although I’m sure others have – nothing that can be thought about the Gospels has not been thought and written, usually many times. When Yeshua returns to Nazareth and at first the people are thrilled by him and then turn against him, they want to throw him off a local cliff: “They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff. But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.”(Luke 4:29-30). I have always found that astonishing in its serene calmness. This is an angry mob, the kind that stoned Stephen and would have stoned the woman taken in adultery. Few things are more terrifying and more dangerous. But he passed through the midst of them. 

            In other words, even in his entirely human mortal body there was something uncanny. A touch of the resurrection-body, one might say, was always already there. This was not one of his “miracles”: it was not done for someone else, and no fuss is made about it. He just wasn’t there any more. 

            So now, in this Between-Time, this Resurrection-Time, we might wish that he would still suddenly appear among us and have a bite of fish; but that’s not going to happen. The Ascension is past, and he is now in Eternity-Time. But still patiently waiting for us, as he was on that beach at breakfast. Would we have recognised him? Do we now? He did tell us where to look: in the child holding out a trusting hand; in the lonely old woman whose children never phone or visit; in the retired psychiatrist whose days not longer make sense; and in the entirely unexpected smile of a total stranger. Perhaps, apart from the gestures such incarnations call forth in us, the thing for us to do at this time is to think and learn and discuss as we would have in that inn at Emmaus, and so come to understand the coherence of the life, calling, death and resurrection of this most unlikely Meshiach.

Images: Rembrandt, "Head of Christ" and "The Risen Christ"

THOUGHTS ON A PECULIAR LENT

“Why is this Lent different from all other Lents?” Different indeed. Even before isolation, confinement, or incabination began, the pandemic was well and truly under way at the time of Ash Wednesday and, to boot, I was sick with sinusitis and a racking cough that made it impossible to go and receive the ashes. And since incabination? Some paradoxical developments. 

            First of all it should be said that I have been most unfairly fortunate in the conditions of my confinement. A comfortable old French farmhouse on the edge of a tiny village; being together as a couple; children in the other half of the house who will occasionally take turns at the shopping; a friendly atmosphere all round; around the house a couple of acres of field and garden; and on top of that a singularly beautiful spring; conditions could hardly have been better. 

            As Mardi Gras approached, I had had the idea of, for once, trying a Lent entirely without meat, something I’d never done before. (When I was a child we always ate frugally but there was no thought of fasting: that was for Catholics, and we were liberal Protestants.) Perhaps because at the age of 3 I had been, though protected as much as possible, through a real famine – the result of German reprisals following the failure of Operation Market Garden – I had never managed fasting of any kind. But as, since my 70^th birthday, I had begun to take (my) religion more seriously, I found the current Catholic insistence on Lent as a tripedal experience of prayer, fasting, and giving attractive. More attractive than the old doctrine of repentance, repentance, and repentance. I liked the thought of Lent as a cheerful spring cleaning, the more since earlier I had always suffered from the imposed gloom at a time when Nature rejoices. Now, I was told, one can live Lent as a way to take all the parts of one’s faith more seriously: from “worthily lamenting our sins and acknowledging our wretchedness” to deepening prayer, sharing not only money but time and care with others, and – yes, well, fasting. 

            So I decided that “Carne, vale” would indeed be Goodbye to Meat, made a superb bœuf bourguignon for Mardi Gras, and have not touched meat or meat products since. Much to my own surprise, a combination of occasional fish and seafood (fishmongers are quite far away and rarely come to our market) with vegetarian dishes, often curries, worked very well indeed, and neither my wife (a natural almost-vegetarian) nor I missed meat. 

            As far as prayer was concerned, not only did I take to saying my morning prayers on my knees instead of in bed, but I decided to translate a book on prayer by a French Carthusian monk into English – not at the computer but with a fountain pen in a notebook. This helped me not only to pray more consciously but to think about prayer for part of the day as well, and to learn: Carthusians are prayer’s ultimate professionals and although their experiences and thoughts are as far beyond me as a Himalayan North face is beyond a weekend climber, many precious crumbs fall from their table. 

            As for giving, on the one hand the Internet has multiplied both the opportunities and the ease of giving, and on the other hand the new Catholic teaching reminds us frequently of the degree to which giving is, and can and should be, about more than money. Which in turn makes one think about what to give to whom how and when; and makes one realise how many small opportunities there are in a day and a week for giving time, thought and care to others’ needs, needs of every kind. Not that one manages to seize them all: laziness, selfishness and care-less-ness don’t give up and go away, more’s the pity. 

            So here we are on Holy (or Maundy) Thursday. Commemorating has had good reason to become more inward. I saw a pleasant Palm Sunday Mass on television, but reading and, as they say, praying the Psalms on a daily basis and occasionally saying Morning or Evening Prayer from the Book of Common Prayer brings me, I honestly believe, closer to God. I have been rereading volume II (”Holy Week”) of Pope Benedict’s magnificent Jesus of Nazareth, from which I learn more each time I read it. Tonight I may watch Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, of which I have always been a little nervous; tomorrow, Good Friday, I shall do what Dutch Protestants have done for at least a century: listen to the integral recording of Bach’s St Matthew Passion with the sublime Peter Pears as the Evangelist. Saturday will as always be perhaps the strangest day in the Christian year: the tabernacle open and empty; the statues, in one’s mind as in the church, shrouded; participation in the disciples’ sense of absolute loneliness, loss, abandon, and desolation. Everything holds its breath. And then . .