ARE WE HAVING FUN YET?

I have been looking up the ungodly. Not, initially, in the physical or social sense: they are all around us and we will get to them presently. No: in the linguistic sense. Since I have been reading the Psalms a good deal lately, I realise that there too they are everywhere. So I wanted to find out what the Hebrew term was, and then what was its Greek equivalent in the New Testament.

The Hebrew term, I find, is rasha, with the a’s pronounced as “ah”. And it’s a strong term, meaning ‘guilty’ or ‘wicked’. So ancient Israel did not beat about the bush, so to speak: the opposite of the chasid or godly person is not just somebody who doesn’t believe in the Deity but a guilty or wicked man.

If we read the Psalms, it is not hard – especially from Psalm 119 – to find out what a chasid is. He is someone who loves the Law and obeys it: the Law in all its glorious intricacies, the Law that provides the parched traveller, lost in the spiritual Negev or Nefud desert, with a path that if followed will inevitably lead him to a well and even to an oasis. The path was made and given by God: man’s job is to find it, follow it and learn it by heart. That is the way to God. The holy man is also the righteous man, who abstains from evil deeds and succours the defenceless; if he is so, then God’s favour will uphold and follow him. His granaries will be full, his wife and children will be as green olive trees, and he will not eat a morsel or drink a drop without giving thanks – Baruch atta Adonai Elohenu . . . .

His opposite is not the decent man who just doesn’t believe in God: his opposite is the evil man, the one who robs widows and children of their savings, who says “Tush, God will not see it” and cheerfully enriches himself without a smidgen of charity, and who, as the Psalm wonderfully says “grins like a dog and runs about the city”.

In the New Testament, where Greek takes the place of Hebrew, there is a significant change. The “ungodly” now is the asebès, the man who will not venerate, will not be respectful, will not “hallow” the holy. Not actively wicked, he is the one who shrugs. He reminds me of the Athenians who listened politely to Paul on the Unknown God and said, “Hmmm. Interesting. Come back some other time.” To the asebès, all gods are sort of equal, equally interesting, equally boring in the long run, equally irrational and thus quaint but unimportant.

Today’s ungodly are more like the Greeks. They tend to say, when asked, that yes they believe in some sort of higher power as long as they can think of feeling it on a mountaintop at sunrise; but above all never, never in a church; not in a church, not in any sort of group, not in the context of any kind of intellectual definition or spiritual rigour, not in a tradition of thinkers, not in any context that would bind or constrain them in any way at all.  Moreover, a number of them, reacting to militant Islam in a carefully non-discriminating way, proclaim the idea that all religion is not just slightly irritating but positively harmful.

While our very modern and rhetorically evangelising churches keep telling us that we must be active witnesses, encountering today’s ubiquitous ungodly is a challenge neither St Paul nor Luther ever had to face. Paul did better with Jews than with Athenians; Luther convinced many members of a degenerate Catholic Church. And we? We are often told (by our own churches) that as long as we live a life of clear and evident faith, that will interest and intrigue people enough to start a conversation. In my own experience this is mostly untrue: people note that Dwight is religious, in the same way that Beatrice does crosswords and Charles collects old absinthe bottles, and move on.

The not-very-satisfactory provisional solution is to keep a keen ear open for  the opportunities that do sometimes arise in conversation, and to keep one’s private feelings about today’s asebèsis firmly to oneself.  One point I have sometimes made is a modern version of Pascal’s Wager. “Look around you at the people you know,” I suggest: “Do you on the whole think those who do not believe in God are happier than those who do?” That sometimes makes people stop and think. But the problem is huge, and remains. How does one make inroads on a culture, not of anger or persecution but of complete indifference?

THE NIGHT VISITOR

Henry Ossawa Tanner, "Jesus talking with Nicodemus"

I have always been fascinated by Nicodemus. This Pharisee with the Greek name, who came and visited Jesus by night and discussed the faith with him, who was clearly if discreetly convinced and converted, who spoke up at the planned lynching of the adulterous woman, who may have watched the Crucifixion and who afterwards provided an astonishing quantity of costly spices for the funeral -- "a royal burial" as Pope Benedict XVI calls it --, is someone I should have liked to know.

What, I often wonder, was said that night? We know a little: a couple of gently ironic remarks, one by him and a reply by Jesus, about being born again, lead to a long and magnificent discourse by Jesus, which is often cited separately, without our remembering to whom it was said.  But I suspect it was a longer conversation, there on the roof of a house in Jerusalem. I think they talked for most of the night.  

Nicodemus was either a Judaized Greek (there were quite a few) or a Hellenized Jew, of the Pharisee persuasion, which was that of precise ritual and scrupulous devotion. Jesus calls him a "master of Israel", in other words a prominent man, learned and presumably wealthy. So what would Jesus have said to him, before the exchange noted by John? 

I imagine Jesus explaining the essence of his role, and of his relation to the Jewish scriptures. In the first place, Nicodemus, you know the prophet Isaiah, and you know that in the second part of his remarkable book he draws a gripping picture of someone we think of as the Suffering Servant, often seen as a poetic image of the people of Israel. Secondly, you know that we are living in one of those periods when people talk about the coming of a Meschiach, a royal personage who will save and deliver Israel, God's chosen nation, from all oppression: a descendant of David, who will be the new and possibly the eternal King. 

Now we come to the difficult part, Nicodemus. First, the Meschiach and the Suffering Servant are the same person. Second, he is already here and you are talking to him. He is not a king as you imagine one: he is in appearance, and in reality, a perfectly normal human being, one of millions, with a normal human name and place of origin. Yeshua bar-Yousuf from Nazareth [a real town, as real as Buffalo: my daughter got married there]. 

This means that the salvation of Israel now needs to be reinterpreted. The Meschiach is not going to sweep in on a mighty chariot and drive all Israel's enemies into the sea. Did anyone tell you, Nicodemus, about the image I used the other day to explain how all this is going to come about? I said it was like mustard-seed, one of those tiny, tiny seeds that invariably jump out of any pan in which you try to use them for cooking. You plant it, and you have the impression that you've planted nothing much. Yet it grows, and it grows. That's the way the regnum Dei is happening. Notice my tense: I didn't say it will happen, it is happening. It's here. Now. But it's happening quietly, quietly, in a corner of the Eastern Mediterranean. It will probably take long time -- but then, what is time to my Father?

And another thing, Nicodemus. Since this Meschiach is not politically involved with the nation of Israel, you may need to stretch the envelope of that concept very far. Because if "salvation" comes through a man, and one (incidentally) who is likely not long for this world -- dark clouds are gathering over the city down below --, then "Israel" also will be a new term, not limited to a nation or a people. The Israel the Meschiach saves is open, not only to born and circumcised Jews, but to anyone who recognizes Him and draws the consequences. The consequences include being born anew. 

And that is where John and his Gospel begin -- one assumes that Nicodemus had related the rest to him at or shortly after the burial, and that he omitted the first part because both John and most of his readers already knew that. 

I have known Michelangelo's Pieta since I was a teenager; but I never knew the standing figure (some say the sculptor's self-portrait) was Nicodemus. The thought is deeply pleasing. And that intelligent, discreet and generous man may, somewhere, be smiling.