A MONARCH AND HIS AWKWARD SUBJECTS

The Church tells me that Stir-up Sunday is actually the feast of Christ the King of the Universe, and my unreconstructed mind wonders what to do with that concept. If He is King of the world, the world clearly is unaware of the fact, like South Sea Islanders in the 18th century ignorant of the fact that their island now belonged to King George III. Also, in such a case, He is having a hard time making his laws obeyed and encouraging His subjects to keep the kingdom in good order. If He is King of the Universe it becomes more comprehensible: so many trillions of planets to look after, maybe it’s been centuries since He looked at ours.   

The real point may be to remind us that we are idle if not actually rebellious subjects, and that we may not be able to get away with this for ever. We are, as St Teresa reminded us, the only arms, hands, legs and eyes God has on this planet. It may be, as astrophysicist Aurélien Barrau reminds us, that we are already too far gone in collective suicide for anything feasible to save us; it may be that our race’s evolution since 1600 has been a disastrous mistake; it may be that we really were meant to go on living as hunter-gatherers with a 35-year life expectancy. In that case, what should our reaction be as children of a loving God?

Given the unlikelihood of any government on the planet’s being ready to turn the clock back 500 years, we might simply concentrate on the two commandments to which our King reduced the 613 He inherited: to love our Father with all our heart, all our soul, all our mind and all our strength; and to love our neighbor as ourself.  

For the first, that means praying more which, as French bishop Olivier de Cagny reminded us recently, means listening more. Solomon, when God offered him whatever he pleased as a new king, asked for a listening heart. We listen to others, if we are wise; but do we listen to Him? More often, we bombard him with requests, as if we were children yelling to Santa. We might learn to shut up and listen more. 

The link between the two commandments is praying for others. Again, though, let’s not make it a wish-list: our loving Father knows perfectly well what we should like for those we love (and perhaps even for those we love less). What praying for others means is helping to place them in the trajectory of the Father’s love, commending them to His attention, and (thus) adding our strength to theirs in their need. 

So now we are in the second commandment which, the Gospel tells us, is “like unto” the first. Not the less for being second, in other words. And yet without the first to order and protect it, it turns the Ekklesia that is the Church into a humanitarian NGO that will eventually succumb to some form of original sin. So we should be as the good Samaritan – do what we can for the needs around us, privileging the hic et nunc, the here and now rather than the distant and mediatised – and then continue our journey, always praying.

For this Kingdom of the Universe, for this kingdom of a fevered planet, prayer is still the most important of all languages, of all sciences, of all music and of all poetry. Even as we work even as we play, even as we suffer, let us be His troubadours: artists and poets of prayer. That is what hope is made of. 

 

A TOAST AT A FEAST

At the feast in the house of Levi, we know what Yeshua said to the Pharisees, but what did he say to Levi and the other guests? (Luke 5:27-32)

            Note that Levi had just been called, and had got up and followed Yeshua, giving up his job and his booth as a Mokhes (a tax-farmer). Note also that there is no sign that he is giving up his house and his money – yet. Instead, he is giving a party for his new teacher. So I imagine him, toward the end of the meal, standing up, raising his glass or goblet, and making a speech, more or less as follows:

            “Yeshua Ben-Yosef, it is an honour to me and my family to receive you in my house. I am aware that by coming here you risk being hounded by the religious: I’m sure they are already gnashing their teeth outside. So it was extraordinarily kind of you to come under my roof and to eat and drink with us outcasts. I believe that you are a good man and a fine rabbi, and I should be grateful if you would accept me as your disciple.” (Loud – but in some cases ironic -- applause from all the mokheses present.) Then Yeshua gets up, smiles, and waits for the noise to die down.

            “Levi Ben-Levi, I thank you for your kindness in inviting me – indeed, in having called together this party in my honour. You and your friends are very good company, even if you are not approved of by – er – certain people of unblemished reputation. Some of you may have heard, just now, the reproachful words of that Pharisee. If you did, you may also have heard my answer to him – and you may not have been best pleased. After all, I told him that it was not the healthy who needed the doctor but the sick; and that implied that you, my hosts, were not in the best of health. 

            “Those of you who, like Levi here, have already heard me speak in public know pretty much what I‘m about. You know that I say a lot of dour and dire things as well as nice ones, and that, rather like Yochanan the Dipper, I sometimes tell people that they are in a bad way and need to turn their lives around. So, are you sick, and am I the doctor? And if both are true, what’s my diagnosis, and what’s my cure? As you know, I’ve nothing to give or to spend, except my teaching; so any good I can do you will have to come from that.

            “So, to begin: all right, yes, I think that in spite of your good nature you are not the healthiest or the happiest of folk. Many of you are mokheses, which is not a job to make you loved. And quite a few of you have not done that job in the kindest or most righteous way. There are a few other faces here that I’ve seen in bad places and in bad company. You may have got used to it, but deep down I think most of you would like to be in harmony, in shalom, with the world and with Adonai.

            “And this is where Doctor Yeshua comes in. Believe it or not, it can be done. You can get your moral virginity back. Some people find it depressing that I tell them they have to be more righteous than the scribes and Pharisees; and when I tell them that this can be done without conforming to the 648 ordinances in Scripture they think I’m selling snake-oil. But it’s true. There are only two commanments that matter. One: Adonai loves you, he is the Father of Love. So the first commandment that matters is to love him back, with every fibre of you. Then: Adonai loves every one of his children equally. So commandment no. 2: you love your neighbour just as much as yourself. And who’s your neighbour? Anyone.Anyone in trouble, sorrow, sickness or misery. X. Be there for X whenever you meet him or her. 

            “And you can condense that still further: follow the two commandments by telescoping them into one: Follow Me. I’m the one Adonai sent to help his children clear up the mess they’ve made. And right now we – you and I – are here;  the place is Here and the time is Now. If you respond, as Levi has done today, then you will not only make tov, make shalom, you will be shalom. You can forget the 648 ordinances, because you will already be what they were written to make you. 

            “So if you take up your account-books and follow me, we can all drink a toast to the terrific man who got us all here: Levi Ben-Levi, l’chaim !” 

image: The Feast at the House of Levi, detail (1573) by Paolo Veronese

 

BREAD, STONE, FISH, SNAKE

Franz von Defregger (1835-1921)

 ⁷ `Ask, and it shall be given to you; seek, and you shall find; knock, and it shall be opened to you;

⁸ for every one who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it shall be opened.

⁹ Anyone among you, if his son asks for a loaf of bread, surely he will not give him a stone?

¹⁰ and if he asks for a fish, surely he will not give him a snake?

¹¹ if therefore you, being bad, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more shall your Father who [is] in the heavens give good things to those who ask him?

¹² `All those things, therefore, that you may want men to do to you, so also do to them; for this is the law and the prophets.

 

I am taking these passages together, because they seem to be linked in the text; but the links are not always completely evident.

            The opening two lines state a truth. As it stands, it is a comforting truth to be told. If we pray (which is what, in relation to our heavenly father, asking, seeking and knocking are), our prayer will be granted. Simple. 

            And moreover, it is reinforced, as is so often the case with Yeshua’s sayings, by two examples, which lead to an a fortiori emphasis. If we do not disappoint our children asking for food, why should we not trust God to do at least as much for us? Simple. 

            Except. Except that the majority of petitionary prayers are not granted, and Christians have spent two thousand years working out excuses for that fact. The usual explanation is that we can only ask for spiritual benefits (I have written a number of posts on the impropriety of praying, as Huck Finn did, for “fishhooks”), and some add that such prayer also needs to be intense and only for oneself.

            My recent posts on prayer discuss all this at greater length. I believe that intercessory prayer – prayer for, on behalf of, others – is valuable, for two reasons and on two conditions. First, such prayer helps the beneficiary whether or not its specific requests are granted. If I know that X is praying for me, my own healing powers will be strengthened, partly because I know it and partly because X’s prayers add to an energy field maintained by prayer. The conditions, I think, are that we must first pray for Y’s spiritual wellbeing, and only then, “if it be Thy will”, for Y’s physical, mental or social health; and secondly, that we do so with as much concentration and intensity as we can muster. 

            One is tempted to think that the only prayer we can really utter is “Thy will be done”. And yet that doesn’t chime with the image of the child asking for bread or with the “good things” our heavenly Father is said to have in store for us. I do think, though, that when one is going through a great trial the appropriate prayer is always for faith and strength to undergo it as God wills; and that applies also to those for whom we pray. And we need to remind ourselves that whatever enemies or Nature throw at us, our Father does, really and truly, love us.

 

            The final surprise of this passage is that it ends with the Golden Rule. The Golden Rule, than which nothing could be less exclusively Jewish and than which nothing could be less original to Yeshua. Not only that: he claims that that same Golden Rule “is the Law and the Prophets”, i.e. is the Torah. How? Why? 

            Because, I think, in this simple and rather banal way Yeshua is in fact saying something enormous: the essential, the necessary, symmetry of Love. What, after all, are the two Great Commandments? One: that we should love God with all our heart, all our mind, and all our strength – as He loves us. Two: that we should love our neighbour – as ourself. If you distil these two commandments, which really are “the Law and the Prophets”, you find a symmetry. Loving God on our part will simply return His existing love for us and thus complete the circle; loving our neighbour, both spiritually and also practically, as we love ourself – doing for him what I’d do for myself, no less – not only highlights one existential symmetry but provokes another: loving him may well make him love me and complete that circle too. 

            And finally, by putting this in the terms of the ubiquitous Golden Rule Yeshua reminds his hearers once again that his completed Torah is for everyone, for the goyim as well as for the Jews, for the Nations as well as for Israel.  

 

 

"LOVE FULFILS THE LAW" (ROMANS 13:10)

This is the tightest condensation of Yeshua’s teaching yet. Remember, he said “I come not to abolish the Law but to fulfil it”? Well, now we know what that means. In Romans, it is linked to the love of neighbour – which, of course, is what we always gravitate to. But we ought to remember more often that that is the second Great Commandment: the First is that we must love the Lord our God with all our heart, all our soul, all our mind, and all our strength. 

 

            I have written about this before, wondering how we can be commanded to love, when the essence of love is precisely that it cannot be commanded, that it must be free. That, after all, is the reason that however appalling Man gets, he must still be allowed free will, because the God he offends is Love, and Love can do no other than accord freedom. How, then, can we be commanded to love God (or, indeed, our neighbour)?

 

            It occurred to me that perhaps the word “commandment” is, for our understanding, inaccurate. I remember my late father saying that to him the Ten Commandments were not so much laws in the juridical sense as natural laws, such as the Second Law of Thermodynamics, so memorably resumed by Flanders and Swann: “Heat can’t pass from a cooler to a hotter:/You can try if you like but you’d far better notta”. Or another image might be the points made in the User Manual of a complex machine. Is it a “commandment” to say “Do not attempt a gear change without depressing the clutch pedal”? What it means is “If you do X, something will go seriously wrong” (in this case in the harmony of your condition as a created and loved being).

 

            So if we are commanded to love God as described above, what does that mean? First of all, that “love” here probably does not mean a great wave of serotonin, a tsunami of emotion. Still, it does involve all our heart. It helps, perhaps, to remember that we are encouraged to be childlike. A small child does not reason its love for its parent: it jumps into a waiting lap and snuggles. Even a brief counting of blessings will produce a similar effect in us. Hearts do not reason. 

 

            What about all your soul? At first sight, that seems more abstract; and yet, my soul is, almost by definition, nearer to God than my heart is. Here, I think, we go to the core of the Meshiach’s teaching and action. “For God so loved the world/us/me, that he gave his only-begotten son” etc. “Ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven.” If we can really take this on board, how can we not love the Father who has given us such a gift?

 

            Now for all your mind. For many people, the mind is the seat of unbelief: how can you go on believing if you use your adult, aware, reasoning mind? Look at the Universe (on the one hand); look at Auschwitz (on the other): believe? you must be joking. And yet we are told to love God with all our mind. I think that this is where the User Manual comes in. If you love God with everything but your mind, either your faith is weak and vulnerable or you have abdicated your adult human judgement. The world, the universe, life, will be wholly without meaning. Yet, as Joseph Ratzinger has so often pointed out, if you love God with all your mind, everything falls into place, and even reason becomes both more rational and more reasonable. 

 

            Finally, all your strength. What strength? we sometimes ask. We feel puny, and weak, and tired, and worn out. Daily living is bad enough, and takes almost all of our strength: do we have any left for loving God? Well, again the User Manual chips in. If you put all your strength into loving God (in all the ways mentioned above), to your absolute surprise you find that you have more strength; that loving God produces an excess, an overplus of strength that allows you to fulfil all the other things that await you as well, and quite possibly better. 

 

           And as a consequence, fulfilling this first commandment itself helps you, gives you the discernment and the strength, needed for the second one. Which is why it’s the First. Q.E.D. 

Image: restored Torah scroll guaranteed kosher by a modern scribe, for sale on Amazon at $28,000

AS COMPACT AS YOUR GPS - TRINITY 14

Now imagine 40 years of this, with 80,000 people bitching...

Leonine sacramentary

OMNIPOTENS sempiterne Deus, da nobis fidei, spei, et charitatis augmentum ; et, ut assequamur quod promittis, fac nos amare quod praecipis ; per Jesum Christum Dominum nostrum. Amen. 

1549 / 1662

ALMIGHTYE and everlastyng God, geve unto us the increase of faythe, hope, and charitie; and that we may obteine that whiche thou doest promise; make us to love that whiche thou doest commaunde, through Jesus Christe our Lorde.

Cranmer translated this literally, and the revisers of 1662 wisely left the handsome parallellism alone.

Someone wrote that there could almost be no more compact expression of the Christian faith than this Collect. It is brief and shapely, and of an extreme simplicity. We ask God – the Almighty and Everlasting God, the Creator of the Universe – to give us the three qualities that St Paul described as “what remains”: the irreducible core of the Christian’s life, the most basic psychic waybread, that which we survive on as we travel from birth to death in the company of the others who make up the new Israel. We cannot produce them for ourselves, as the old Israel could not produce its own food in the Negev but had to be fed by the hand of God with manna and quails. We need faith, because without it we cannot recognise the God who loves us. We need hope, because without it we have no reason to go on when the going is hard. And we need charity because we are not alone in our journey, but in the company of others as frail and frightened as we ourselves. 

Yet there is more. God has given us promises. (Remember? Last week we ran to them.) The Collects, when they refer to these, do not spell them out, mainly because the form is too compact to allow this. It may be useful to pause and remember what they are. God has given us His love: that’s not a promise because we have it already – whether we are ready to receive it or not. What he has promised us is chayei olam, “eternal life”. The modern Church is embarrassed by this, and tends to insist that we should not (necessarily) think of this as something after death, but that what it really refers to is an eternal dimension of life, potentially present even in this terrestrial life. I don’t want to get into this now, because either way it is something not immediately present to almost all of us, and thus proper material for a promise. 

Either way, though, eternal life has certain characteristics. The chief one is the real, actual presence of God. In the chayei olam we are in the presence of God: of the primal light and joy that brought the Universe into being, but also of the living Father whose love (His very nature) embraces not only the dance of planets but every living human creature. Because imagination is part of our equipment we can, however dimly, imagine what it must be like not, as now, always to be divided from the one we pray to, from the one who loves us, not always to have to decode, to imagine, to piece together His answers: we would open like a flower to the morning sun. 

But how to get there? Such a promise is worth running to, but by what trail? Ah, says the Collect: here is the answer. To get to the promise, to obtain (and the Latin assequamur is even richer, since it also means “to understand”) what is promised, we need to obey God’s commands. But, since He is Love, since love is his very nature, the only way we can do so, the only way we can obey his commands in the spirit in which they were given, is to understand them; and the only way to understand them is in the spirit of love. That we need to love what we are ordered to do sounds at first hearing both odd and rebarbative: kiss the rod, you scum. Not a bit of it. God has given us orders because we are in a dire state and slow on the uptake: orders at least are clear. And since we are wandering through a desert, when we understand that the orders are what will see us through and beyond, we will undoubtedly love them. 

Finally, how do we obey them? What is it we are ordered to do? Like other Collects, this one describes a perfect circle. We obey God’s commands by using, by living, the faith, the hope, and the charity we pray Him to give us. And in all of this, the central figure, the model, the living “command” is Yeshua Ha-moshiach, Jesus the Anointed. If we keep our eyes on him, if we walk with him, if we stick to him like glue, if we – like seconds on a climbing rope – try to follow His moves in the rocks and ledges and gullies of the desert we are traversing, then – in whatever dimension, this side of the grave and/or beyond it, the light and the warmth of our Father’s love is there, open and waiting.

NOT THE WILL TO POWER

Orthodox icon: Christ and Moses

In his meditation on the perfect all-purpose prayer, I imagine Yeshua, having hallowed the Name (Baruch HaShem) and expressed hope for the coming of the malkut, the kingship, the Reign, now turning to the Divine Will. This flowed naturally from its predecessor: if a king reigns, his subjects do his will. What is God’s will? The Hebrew ratzon, when linked to the Deity, leads one directly to the Torah: God’s Will for Israel – and, eventually, for humanity – is that they keep his commandments, his statues, his testimonies. By itself the prayer that this be done is large and seems adequate for a Divine instruction; but Yeshua here added “on earth as it is in heaven” (ba’arets ka’asher na’asah vashamayim). In a sense this multiplies it: we pray that His will may be done on earth, not imperfectly in our usual sloppy human way, but the way it is done in Heaven, in His own presence, where the Reign is eternal and accomplished. There, we may imagine, His will is naturally done; and since His nature is Love, the natural doing of His will is a permanent activity of love, involving all the inhabitants of Heaven. Although we cannot equal this, we can strive for it.

Whether, when he composed the prayer, he already knew it or not, Yeshua was (to be) the new Torah: the divine commandments became two, then eventually one: first, to love the Lord our God with all our heart, mind and strength, and to love our neighbours as ourselves; then, simply, to love and follow Yeshua Meshiach in everything.

 For earthling humans, though, questions remain. If we are to help bring about that Reign where his Will is done, we nevertheless ask ourselves, on almost a daily basis, what God’s will is. In this or that situation, hypothetical, actual or urgent, what should A do? Similarly, and sometimes even more anguishingly, what, in all that happens, does so by God’s will? If we say to someone “I’ll see you next month, Deo volente”, what does that imply?

It is comforting for us to remember that Yeshua himself faced this problem. When, in Gethsemane, he prays that the bitter cup he faces may be taken from him, he ends, “Yet not as I will, but as Thou wilt”. In that case at least, the Father’s will was clear: the Son’s sacrifice had to be carried through to the end.

We are often, and rightly, taught not to confuse our desire with God’s will. Even in an apparently good cause, Deus vult is more often than not a projection and thus an error. Sometimes an attitude of suspicion, particularly toward ourselves, is salutary. On the other hand, neither should we fall into the trap of assuming the Divine will always to be the opposite of our own. It is independent of us, and of our desire. How to discern it, then?

I think that the best way is to remember the nature of the God who wills. His nature is Love. Whatever is congruent with Love at its highest may safely be considered congruent with His will. Which brings us back to the conflation of commandments in the new Alliance: 10 > 2 > 1. The eu-angelion, the authoritative good message, is precisely that: that doing God’s will is no longer a matter of memorising and following detailed rules, but of being definitively touched by the absolute, sacrificial Love of the Anointed One, and transforming one’s heart, mind and life accordingly. We are still stumbling earthlings, and will never do it as completely or as elegantly as the angels: but that, we may be assured, will be taken into account.

Once we have been touched by that Love, all we really need to do is (as I wrote before) to keep our shutters, our windows, and our doors wide open to the grace that is poured upon us unceasingly: Grace Abounding. It will fill us gradually, until perhaps one day, like Myriam Yeshua’s Mother, we will be gratia plena.

IT'S AMORE

As an elderly lawyer once said, “All this Love is a sad mistake.” I’ve had occasion to write before about being ordered to love, and the other day I cited Fr Jean-Kamel on pondering “with what love we are loved”. In English, and in French, these days it’s all quite simple. “Love. Love. All you need is Love.. Love is all you need.” From a rank enseamèd bed to New Age fluff, it’s a panacea if not a pangaea.

But if I take Fr Jean-Kamel’s enthusiastic cry as a real, not a rhetorical, question, I ask not De quel amour nous sommes aimés but De quel amour sommes-nous aimés? And I go to look at original texts, because the New Testament and the Old are full of love and charity but seem remarkably free of sentimentality.

“Charity” is now out of fashion except as a legal definition for tax purposes. In modern translations, it’s all “love”. But what is? In Koinè Greek (the sort of Greek spoken, often badly, all over the Mediterranean in Jesus’ time, like English today) there are three nouns for “love”: Eros, Agapè, and Philia. The writers of the New Testament tried hard not to let Eros into anything they wrote – well, they would, wouldn’t they? (We in our time know, to our cost, how hard it is to keep the little pest out of anything.) So they were left with Philia, a good Classical word for affection, as between spouses, really good friends, and parents & children (one hopes).  And they adopted a slightly less usual word derived from the verb “Agapao”, to which I’ll come back in a minute.

But most of these blokes were Jews and thought in Hebrew or Aramaic. So when they wrote about Philia and Agapè, what were they translating, if only in their minds?

Hebrew, bless it, has lots of words for love and affection. The most common are Ahab (which I’ve seen described as a love you feel, and feel spontaneously), Hesed (the love/loyalty belonging to a bond, a relationship: the love felt by God for Israel, and presumably the love referred to by Cordelia), and Racham (a compassionate love, one assumes the love felt by the Samaritan for the poor bloody victim of a mugging).

The thing we have to remember is that the authors of the Gospels were making up translations as they went along. So they used Philia for the love Jesus had for Lazarus – which was strong enough not only to have him resurrect Lazarus but to weep over his grave first. Jesus doesn’t weep a lot in the Gospels. So don’t knock Philia: it’s what you have for your three very closest friends, as well as for your 9-year-old and for your ageing parents whose lives you would trust them (the friends) with.

So what about Agapè? Well, the verb (agapao) is used in both the Great Commandments, for “loving” the Lord your God and “loving” your neighbour as yourself. But it also the verb used for Jesus’s relation to John: he was “the disciple that Jesus loved”. In the Church’s nervousness about avoiding Eros, it has often described “charity” (from caritas, the Latin translation of agapè) in rather bloodless and dutiful ways. Even “loving-kindness” doesn’t really cut it for most of us.

So I’ll share my own candidate, which seems to work in almost all cases, though still not easy in some (the First Commandment, for example). I would translate “agapao” as “to cherish”. Etymologically and intelligibly, it refers to something or someone (can work for both) that you “hold dear”, something or someone that you hug to you because you hold it/him/her dear beyond price. (“Dear” after all is the old word for “expensive, pricey”.) But “cherish” also has a massive feeling-content to it. “I cherish you” is something deep, rare, and fine to say to someone.

So de quel amour sommes-nous aimés, with what love are we loved, especially this Holy Thursday, tomorrow at the dreadful foot of the Cross, and on Sunday after the unimaginable? We are loved with a love that cherishes us. We are the ones – not just as a collectivity, like the Nation of Israel, but individually, like the wounded traveller, like the sad woman saved from stoning, like Lazarus trying to get used to daylight – we are ones the Maker of the Universe, our very own Father, cherishes.

To die for.