STRANGE GARDENER

It was forty days. It had to be. The “intervals” are always forty days. Forty days in the wilderness, from the baptism to the beginning of ministry’s work. For a long time, I’ve been looking at – and looking for – the shaping of Yeshua’s mind during the “lost years”, the years not mentioned in the Gospels, for him between the ages of 12 and 30. In spite of warnings from my beloved Joe Rat (Benedict XVI to you) and other Church spokespersons that we should not indulge our imaginations where the Bible is silent, nor compose in our minds a “Jesus novel”, I find myself unable to still my historian’s curiosity and my Christian desire to recapture – with my imagination since there is no other tool – wie es eigentlich gewesen, what really happened, what it was really like. 

            I tried to follow him through his young manhood, to see him in the Nazareth workshop with Ya’akov his brother, saying the blessings at Shabbat dinner with Mother Myriam, four brothers and two sisters, and then going off to join the baptism crowd around Cousin Yochanan the Dipper. I tried to follow him into the desert (Sinai?) and then to renting (or even buying) a small house in Capharnaum, near the Synagogue, from which he went out to be what he had known the Meshiach would be: an itinerant rabbi, walking around Galilee (a distant place, Israel’s Maine or Yorkshire), teaching, healing, and preaching the surprising idea that the basileia to theou, the Reign of God, had in fact come, and was right here and now.

            It is not impossible so to follow him, and we know where one ends up, so doing. One ends up on Golgotha, first, in the noise and heat and obscene unrolling of an execution; and then, after a day of stunned silence, on Easter morning with Myriam from Magdala, talking to a gardener. And from there on it becomes exponentially harder. Dare we try anyway?

 

            That gardener, then. Notice that, on a number of occasions during the forty days that follow, even those who had been closest to him do not recognise him: not Myriam, not the disciples in the fishing-boat coming to shore in the dawn, not the followers walking to Emmaus. So one thing we know is that his face was not the same. His body, though, was: he invites Thomas the Twin to touch his wounds. So how, in what details, was his face different? It could be, say, the difference between bearded and beardless; it could be that the unimaginable interval between death and resurrection had marked his features in some indelible but disguising way, like the sudden greying of hair or the carving of lines in the face. 

What is sure is that he was recognised when he spoke: his remarkable voice – remember he had addressed a large crowd from an offshore boat, without a microphone – had remained untouched. 

            Now let us go further. If we could imagine his thoughts and feelings while making scroll-cases and furniture for clients of the family business, can we imagine them in this strange between-time?

            First of all, why did he come back? He could have gone straight home to his Father, into whose hands he had commended his spirit. Instead, he comes back to spend forty days – very much off and on – with his friends and students. Why?

            Well, we know the answer. It was, in a sense, the whole point of everything. St Paul, in one of his vigorous letters, put it best: “If the Anointed One did not rise from the dead, everything we proclaim is nonsense.” Humans – his humans first, then all the others – had to know that he had conquered Death, and that Death, thenceforth, had no dominion other than an apparent one. And so he had to be there: not a ghost, not a spectre, but a human resurrected, a man who had tangible scars, a man who could make a fire and eat grilled fish. 

            What did it feel like, for him? How human was he still, in this time? Did he feel twinges of nostalgia for the old days of exchanging repartee with a foreign Samarian woman at a well, or of calming his fearful friends in a storm-tossed boat on Kinneret? Did he feel he was performing a duty, establishing the Resurrection in the minds of a core group who would then go out and proclaim it to the world? I think he felt a great wave of affection for this little group of friends who were so obviously suffering from their loss. Was he always meant to stay forty days, that Biblical interval, or did he persuade his Father to prolong it from a shorter original? He may have eaten fish, but he also walked through walls and disappeared at the dinner table. That must have felt peculiar, but doubtless in an odd way natural – a between-state in a between-time.

            I do think, though, that when Ascension Day arrived it was not a surprise to him. Interestingly, it seems to have been so for the disciples: clearly, they were not counting in forties, though they might have done. But he, I am sure, did know, if only by counting the days. We may assume that during this time, whenever he was not with them, he was in that Other Place, with the Father; and that when the moment came to go Home definitively part of him must have been deeply relieved. As he was whisked out of our dimension (they read it as “up”) he could honestly say that he had done all his duty, that he had accomplished the task the Father had set him. And the homecoming must have been joyful to a degree, and in ways, truly beyond our imagination.

Image: Rembrandt van Rijn, "Mary Magdalene and Christ as gardener" (1638)

 

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"

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

For those who, despite the coming of the Paraclete, feel obscurely bereft after the Lord’s Ascension because He is no longer with us in the flesh:

Perhaps He has left it up to us to be Him in the flesh.

In compassion for the widow whose only son died;

In the forgiveness of the woman about to be stoned;

In the thought that produced those memorable images we call the Parables;

In the constant, unceasing prayer to the Father;

In the patience with the well-intentioned who act like idiots;

In the occasional flash of real anger at those who blaspheme the sacred;

and in the readiness to go the whole way if the world insists and it cannot be avoided;

Perhaps He has left it up to us to be Him, here, in the flesh.

OMG.

IN THESE EMPTY DAYS

I think I've posted this before, but I'm always struck by the moments between the Ascension and 

Whitsun (Pentecost) - rather like Holy Saturday, when the statues are still veiled and the Tabernacle 

on the altar open and empty. A brief time of - well, almost fright, a sudden chill of aloneness. We 

know better, but even so. I had been reading the glorious Latin hymns and their haunting tetrameters, 

and found myself writing something that sounded like the translation of one. So here it is: a translation without an original:

PATRIS AEDEM REDIENS

Returning to his Father's house,

The rising Son our sunset wrought:

leaving us grey and comfortless

to face the day, survive the night

Before he came we had the Law,

harsh, but secure: fulfilling it

he took away our rod and staff

and gave the fearful gift of Love

No rules, no simple precepts now:

decision dwells deep in the heart;

how shall we live with such a weight,

being our own Law, every day?

Peace: for the Father's deathless love

remembers us when we forget;

the Son who sits at his right hand

is mindful of our loneliness

Third Person of the Trinity,

the Holy Spirit, Paraclete,

prepares himself to come to us,

and plunges to our careless world

Welcome among us, Comforter,

strengthen us now from deep within, 

pray in us, rule our hands and lives,

illuminate our wakeful mind

Breathe in our breath, see through our eyes,

speak with our tongue, and let the world

stare at our newness every day,

and praise thy presence in our love.

ABSENCE MAKES THE HEART

The Church year has two moments of dolorous absence: Holy Saturday and the ten days between Ascension Day and Whit Sunday. I heard a brief recorded homily recently by a Carthusian on the former: he enjoined his brothers not to slide over Holy Saturday but to live it to the full: ‘we must be dead with the God who is dead,’ he said. I remember, when I frequented St Mary Magdalen in Toronto, the powerful impact not just of the shrouded statues and the parishioners’ uninterrupted prayer vigil, but especially the empty tabernacle with its door open. It gave me a sense of complete desolation, worse even than a disaffected church being bulldozed.

The time between the Ascension and Whitsun is in some ways similar. The risen Lord was there: he was there in upper rooms, on the beach, at the dinner table of an inn. He wasn’t a ghost: he was flesh and blood and could be touched. (He did walk through walls, though.)  He explained things to the lads: to a couple of them, on the road, he explained the whole of the Scriptures and their pointing to him as the new Scripture, the new Torah, the new Temple. Their joy must have been a little tempered by uncanniness, but so intense. And then he left, whisked off to heaven, not ‘up there’ as we now know, but ‘out there’ (which from a spherical planet always looks like ‘up’, anyway).

Of course, he had explained to them, patiently, that this had to happen: he had to go back to his (and our) Father, and he had to make room for the Third Person of the Trinity to come and join them, for all time (until the End of Time and his return). But the Paraclete did not come until Whitsun, and for those ten days I imagine them feeling desolate in the extreme. No time-scale had been told them. They had little idea what the Holy Spirit would be like. It must all have seemed vague beside the acute and definite loss.

What can we do with this time of in-between, these days of absence? First, realise that the absence is liturgical, and thus both symbolic and recurring: literally, we live in the time of His (the Spirit’s) presence. Secondly, learn from the desolation we feel what a world without God would be like. ‘The fool has said in his heart, There is no God.’ An increasing number of otherwise intelligent people are saying the same thing; which to them means Good riddance:  we can now do as we please. We can at last have world without God. And, as Ratzinger says in Jesus of Nazareth: when we look around us, we are beginning to see what that looks like . . .

Third, we can prepare for Whitsun by pondering the Third Person of the Trinity. What – who – is the Holy Spirit? I’m always surprised by the mentions of him in the book of Acts, for example, where he is shown as a very definite, almost physical, event: he can come in an instant and have very obvious manifestations: speaking in tongues, for one. Nowadays, in mainstream churches, one gets taught about him differently if at all. As I have written before, he is now often defined as the relation of love between the Father and the Son; but can a relation be a Person?

We are told he is the Paraclete, the Defender, the Advocate. He is, in other words, on our side. Against whom? The obvious thought is, He will stick up for us when we stand as little guilty children before the stern-browed, loving but terrifying Father. But we could expand that. Against whom do we need defending, really? Mmmmm, right. Let’s not name him, but we know whom we mean. Several authors say that ‘Lead us not into temptation’ means ‘Do not test us beyond what we can bear’, and the kind of test they have in mind is the one inflicted on Job, with the Father’s agreement. If such testing were contemplated again, the Advocate would speak up for us on the one hand, and help us bear any subsequent test on the other.

He is also the Spirit of the divine love. Not himself a relationship, but perhaps the One who incarnates and thus creates the love that circulates eternally within the Trinity. God the Father, we imagine, may be Love but has other attributes also, such as Creation and Justice. God the Son, we imagine, may be Love but also has the experience of being (having been? being?) human as well as divine, with all that that implies of difficulty and suffering. Perhaps the Third Person is pure Love, with no other attributes: the fons et origo, the wellspring of heavenly love, that overflows, first within the Triune Godhead, and then down to us pauvres pécheurs, to help and sustain us, to defend us and deliver us, to be always within our reach, to never let us go: to give us the joy that begins on Whitsun. Pondering this might be a very good way to live the ten days of strange, uncanny, unheimlich absence.

LIFT-OFF, LONELINESS AND LOVE

"The Ascension" by Giotto (1266--1337)

“O GOD the King of glory, who hast exalted thine only Son Jesus Christ with great triumph unto thy kingdom in heaven; We beseech thee, leave us not comfortless; but send to us thine Holy Ghost to comfort us, and exalt us unto the same place whither our Saviour Christ is gone before, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end.” This is the Collect for the Sunday After Ascension Day, and there is great pathos is the “leave us not comfortless”.

            Before I write about that, I wanted to say something about the Ascension, a feast Thomas Cranmer intended to be major but which is much neglected today, probably because of vague embarrassment about its verticality.

1) "And when he had said these things, as they were looking, he was taken up; and a cloud received him out of their sight." (Acts 1:9)

2) "And he led them out until [they were] over against Bethany: and he lifted up his hands, and blessed them. And it came to pass, while he blessed them, he parted from them, and was carried up into heaven." (Luke 24:50-1)

3) "[Jesus,] after he had spoken unto them, was received up into heaven, and sat down at the right hand of God." (Mark 16:19)

I’ve put the three accounts of the Ascension in this order because of the point of view. In Acts, we are seeing it through the disciples’ eyes: they are looking at him, he rises and disappears into a cloud. That’s all they see and know. Luke goes further and says where he went, though still implicitly seeing it from below: he is “carried up into heaven”. And Mark goes right to the end, as if he was present in Heaven at Jesus’ arrival: he was “received up into Heaven, and sat down at the right hand of God.”

We, in our modern knowledge, however imperfect, of what is “up there”, could of course sneer at that vertical take-off into the cloud. And yet, does knowing that “up there” is really “out there” change anything, really? We know there was what they saw as some kind of lift-off, and that he went from them into what we might call another dimension. Each generation describes it in terms in understands. He sits at the right hand of the Father. We need not inquire upon what kind of armchair. We know what is meant. If we pretend otherwise, we are being disingenuous.

More or less from the start of his resurrected period, he had warned them that it was going to be limited. He had, after all, come from Heaven; he had walked on earth, he had died, been buried, and risen again; but back to Heaven at some point he had to go. And in these passages, the moment has come. Notice their reaction: they do not mourn. As Luke says, they worshipped him, and went back to Jerusalem with great joy.

Nevertheless, as the days went by, it must have been hard. They’d had him back, eating grilled fish and honeycomb with them, joking with Thomas, explaining to them the infinite goodness that had overcome death; and now he’d gone away for good.

It’s out of that feeling that today’s Collect comes. “Leave us not comfortless.” Yes, he had said something about sending someone else to help them; but it had never been very clear and was now perfectly fuzzy in their minds. There was still a lot of hostility about; they were still the weirdos who maintained that Yeshuah Ben-Yousuf, a provincial carpenter, born suspiciously early in his parents’ marriage and eventually executed as a troublemaker, had been the centuries-long-awaited Meschiach; and now they were starting to feel exceedingly alone.

The rest of the Collect refers to Whitsun, which happens next week. For the moment, let’s think about his departure and the ensuing loneliness. The Catholic Church,  nowadays, places into today’s Gospel reading the High-Priestly Prayer from John 17; and I find that both entirely right and deeply moving. This text, which my parents loved above almost all Bible texts, is Jesus’ testament before his crucifixion. It can stand also as his prayer just before being “received up into Heaven”. So I will end with it, in the KJV.

These words spake Jesus, and lifted up his eyes to heaven, and said, “Father, the hour is come; glorify thy Son, that thy Son also may glorify thee: as thou hast given him power over all flesh, that he should give eternal life to as many as thou hast given him. And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.  I have glorified thee on the earth: I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do. And now, O Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was.

I have manifested thy name unto the men which thou gavest me out of the world: thine they were, and thou gavest them me; and they have kept thy word. Now they have known that all things whatsoever thou hast given me are of thee. For I have given unto them the words which thou gavest me; and they have received them, and have known surely that I came out from thee, and they have believed that thou didst send me. I pray for them: I pray not for the world, but for them which thou hast given me; for they are thine. And all mine are thine, and thine are mine; and I am glorified in them.

And now I am no more in the world, but these are in the world, and I come to thee. Holy Father, keep through thine own name those whom thou hast given me, that they may be one, as we are. While I was with them in the world, I kept them in thy name: those that thou gavest me I have kept, and none of them is lost, but the son of perdition; that the scripture might be fulfilled.

And now come I to thee; and these things I speak in the world, that they might have my joy fulfilled in themselves. I have given them thy word; and the world hath hated them, because they are not of the world, even as I am not of the world. I pray not that thou shouldest take them out of the world, but that thou shouldest keep them from the evil. They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world. Sanctify them through thy truth: thy word is truth. As thou hast sent me into the world, even so have I also sent them into the world.  And for their sakes I sanctify myself, that they also might be sanctified through the truth.

 Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall believe on me through their word;  that they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me.  And the glory which thou gavest me I have given them; that they may be one, even as we are one: I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one; and that the world may know that thou hast sent me, and hast loved them, as thou hast loved me.

Father, I will that they also, whom thou hast given me, be with me where I am; that they may behold my glory, which thou hast given me: for thou lovedst me before the foundation of the world.  O righteous Father, the world hath not known thee: but I have known thee, and these have known that thou hast sent me. And I have declared unto them thy name, and will declare it: that the love wherewith thou hast loved me may be in them, and I in them.”