SEEING ON A WINDY DAY

Fortunate are the clean in heart, because they shall see God.

Makarioi hoi katharoi tèi kardiai, hoti autoi ton theon opsontai.

 

This Beatitude seems simple. Katharos means, at bottom, simply ‘clean’ but goes on to a host of further kinds of cleanliness: ‘purified’ as in water or grain, ‘free of pollution’, ‘free of additions’. And it quickly goes on to the human, where it can mean ‘free of debt’, ‘free of defilement’, ‘honourable’ and even, as for a priest, ‘ceremonially pure’. Kardia is the heart, the seat of feelings and passions, but also the inclination, desire or purpose, and the kardia of wood is its core or pith. And opsontai is the future of horaō, which means ‘to see or behold’.

 

So just as those who are poor in spirit will inherit the earth, so those whose heart is clean, pure, free of pollution, honourable, will see God. Simple.

 

Yet the Gospel of Yochanan, John, says ‘No one has seen God at any time’. (John 1:18) Has there never been one who is pure in heart? If this were so, the Beatitude would not be a joyous promise but at worst a savage criticism and at best a Yeshuan hyperbole, like ‘If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you.’ Surely this is not what is meant here.

 

I suspect that we have to ponder and probe the seeing. We know that here on earth we see ‘as through a glass, darkly’, and that sin, the lack of love, can make us blind to many things. We also know that in such a condition grace may help us: ‘I once was lost, but now am found; was blind, but now I see.’ Note that we do not help ourselves: Christianity is not like Buddhism, a constant activity of scrupulous self-help to eliminate the dross, to make oneself pure. We are dependent, even for our daily bread. Only grace can make us pure, only the Spirit, the pneuma, the ruach, can make us katharoi. What we can do, what we need desperately to do, is to clear away the junk blocking the doors and windows, and to open them as wide as we can to let the pneuma (which is breath, wind, and spirit) in.

 

And when we do that, when He, that third person of the Trinity, does enter, when the wind blows where it listeth in our soul, then it brings with it the sun: the sun that is also the Son, and the glorious sun that is the emblem of the Father. And then we see God. Not with the eyes of our lurching, rebellious body, perhaps; but with the inward eye that is the bliss, not only of solitude but of faith.

 

 

 

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.’

PASSOVER IN A TRICLINIUM

It didn't, probably, look like Leonardo's version.

It was not a seder – the Temple was still standing and in operation. So it was the traditional Passover meal, with sacrificial lamb, bitter herbs and unleavened bread. (The Children of Israel were told to sprinkle the lamb’s blood on their door-posts in Egypt, so that the Angel of Death would ‘pass over’ them: they, too, were ‘saved by the blood of the lamb’.) The lamb was likely served roast and cut, in or with a sauce. The set-up was probably the triclinium, with the diners reclining around a central space with tables and room for serving. Hence John’s position, reclining next to Jesus, in the place of honour. In such a position, a murmured word could be passed confidentially without attracting everyone’s notice.

Jesus’ mood is fascinating, and moving. This is the only time he admits out loud to his disciples that he is scared. There is a sadness, but also a faintly bitter irony – “All very well, and yes, you love me and support me; but I also know that one of you is going to give me up.” It makes me think of the Occupation during WW II. He loves them, he has chosen them, he is going to die for them, but he is under no illusion whatsoever.

I’d always wondered about John’s question and Jesus’ reply. The whole, murmured quietly. “Who is it?” “The one to whom I’m going to give the next piece of lamb.” (Which suggests that Judas was close physically also.) Why, I always wondered, did John then not instantly warn everyone and stop Judas? He appears to do nothing; he even lets Judas leave when Jesus has said, sadly: Go do what you have to do, do it now.

But I think I may have found an answer. If Jesus had murmured this to Peter, Peter would have jumped up, shouted “Traitor!”, and tied Judas up in an instant. But John, I suspect, was the only one (and this was in part why Jesus loved him) who had understood that this had to happen. It had to be played out all the way. After all, Jesus could have stopped it. Many times, say the Gospels, he had simply slid away when a crowd tried to hold him. But he knew it had to happen. And so, I think, did John.

Which accounts also for the fact that he left (‘fled’ say the Gospels unkindly) with the others at Jesus’ arrest, and (unlike Peter) does not appear again until the actual crucifixion, when he is the only one of the disciples present. 

Postscript: Was Yeshua gay, in his human form? It’s of no importance, but it’s not impossible: it might account for the fact that, though a nice well-brought-up Jewish boy, he reached the age of 30 without being married, which surely was unusual. And although in the Jewish religion it was a sin, it wasn’t in the surrounding Roman-Greek world, and one might very well have the bent without living it in practice. I don’t think his relation with John (Jochanan) was a gay one, any more than I think he married Mary Magdalene. He had neither time nor space for such relationships in his life. But I think he loved them both very much, as he loved Mary, Martha and Lazarus (Miryam, Marta, Eleazar).

TORAH TORAH, or, THE JOY OF JOY

This is a rambling post; but I was trying to think through some ideas, and react to some things I’d heard, and I thought I’d share the thoughts.

“Their delight in the Law is a delight in having touched firmness; like the pedestrian’s delight in feeling the hard road beneath his feet after a false short cut has long entangled him in muddy fields.” (C.S. Lewis on Psalm 119 in Reflections on the Psalms) It was Lewis who first made me realise that the Torah and the Old Alliance gave the people of Israel the joy of a clear way through a trackless desert – or a firm path through a muddy field or, worse, a bog of quicksand. It was a clear and firm guidance.

Now in his admirable Jesus of Nazareth, Pope Benedict XVI alias Joseph Ratzinger explains that in the New Alliance Jesus is himself the new Torah. So that on the one hand not a jot or tittle of the old Law will be annulled, because it is fulfilled in him; on the other hand the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath, and whoever believes in him – follows him -- will have eternal life.

If this is so (and it seems to me magnificently plausible), then this new Torah and this New Alliance should give the new Israel, the community of believers i.e. the Church, a similar joy: they are not told how to cross the desert, they are shown. Not a road map but a living guide.

So is this WWJD (What Would Jesus Do)? Up to point, yes: always a good start. But it’s not just a matter of imitating deeds: following him means going much further, and following him – for example – into the High Priestly Prayer, into the heart of God: it means the Transfiguration, it means the forty days in the desert. It means knowing the Old Alliance and its texts almost by heart. And it leads, we mustn’t forget, to the Cross. He is the King of Jews; he is the King of the world, says Ratzinger. But he reigns from the Cross: there is the paradox the Sanhedrin couldn’t accept and that intelligent but cowardly Roman Pontius Pilate could only recognise in irony. Tragedy, then? No: because the Cross, when not avoided but accepted, leads in turn to the Resurrection – “and death shall be no more: Death, thou shalt die” (John Donne).

This is a joy far greater even that the path through the desert. So the new Israel should be filled with incredulous happiness, a beacon of alegria throughout history. Its two chief elements have names that begin with the prefix “Good”:  eu-angelion (the authoritative Good Message) and  eu-charistia (the Good Thanksgiving). So why is the New Alliance so rarely communicated, and felt, as joy?

I was listening the other day on French radio to the delightful Cardinal Barbarin (archbishop of Lyon) explaining Pope Francis’ text Evangelii Gaudium (“the Joy of the Gospel”). And time and time again the emphasis – a rather gleeful emphasis – was on how uncomfortable the Faith ought to make us; how it should discombobulate us, shake us up, kick us in the fundament and yank us out of everything we are used to and love. But as Henry Rydal put it in Charles Morgan’s The Empty Room, “The world is very sick, Mr Flower, but you won’t cure the patient by kicking him out of bed.” It’s as if the only saying of Jesus we should treasure were “I come not to bring peace but a sword”.

If that had been so, I thought, would thousands have followed him, running, not walking around the whole of the Sea of Galilee to get to the other shore before his boat? Would they have flocked to his teaching? Would the two travellers to Emmaus have felt their hearts on fire within them as he explained the Torah? The five thousand did not come to be fed: they came to hear him speak – the bread and the fish were an afterthought. I’ve always been fascinated by those crowds, who are never mentioned again afterwards. Something must have remained in their very ordinary lives --  something sweeter than the honeycomb, as John Ruusbroec said, following the Psalms.

To hear some current church authorities, Jesus was understood only by twelve men, and that most imperfectly; and we must be like them, only better – eleven of them, after all, ducked Golgotha. We must this, we must that; we emphatically must not the other; doesn’t it sound like the Law all over again? Is this an eu-angelion? We are told we must be disciples, in order to be Christians. But there were only twelve of those, out of all the thousands. What about those who, He said, were saved by their faith but who did not spend the rest of their time following him around – the paralytic, the centurion, the woman with the issue of blood? Their lives, certainly, were changed; they walked in a fog of happiness for some days, then went on living normally, yet with a new sweetness that must have radiated in their little towns and neighbourhoods.

As Ratzinger says, the key to following him lies in the Beatitudes, especially the pure in heart. They shall see God. Like Abraham; like Moses. Perhaps those nameless ones I’m thinking of had their hearts made pure by seeing him, touching his garment, listening to his words. Perhaps they, as much as the Twelve (who, remember, could still argue, and in his presence, about rank and precedence in Heaven!), saw God. After all, they saw, and some of them really saw, Him: and “who has seen me, has seen the Father”.

Good deeds are important; they are humanly important. They come in many different forms, from the Boy Scout’s good deed to the NGO’s aid worker’s, but also from the church-music composer’s motet to the Carthusian monk’s prayer. As C.S. Lewis (him again) put it: “Not nice people, but new men”. Even the hearts of the best of us are pure only in spots, like the Curate’s Egg: our vision of God is blurry and occasional. But even blurry and occasional, it remains to haunt us.

What is it like? What was it like, for those people in Galilee? They saw a man, in some ways ordinary; but there was something. To me, the most convincing imaginary portrait of Jesus has always been Rembrandt’s: a youngish Jewish man with long dark hair – and those eyes. Because when they saw him, the ones who really saw him saw through him. They saw more – this, I suspect, is where the halo comes from.

Contrary to some sentimental portraits, they did not see someone down in the gutter, the Highest of the High having become the Lowest of the Low. Yeshua bar Yosef was at first a respectable Galilean artisan, running the family carpentry firm; then he became a noted itinerant rabbi admired for his learning and followed by crowds, who taught in synagogues and in the Temple. He wasn’t a little weakling because he walked and walked and walked, everywhere. So what they saw was, as E.V. Rieu put it in his Introduction to The Four Gospels, “tremendous power, rigidly controlled”. And the ones who saw through him saw, intermittently and blurred but frighteningly, God. “Depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” was Peter’s reaction (Luke 5:8). And John – the only disciple who didn’t duck Golgotha – thinking back as an old man, found the words: “The Word was with God; and the Word was God…. And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.”

Image: Rembrandt van Rijn, "Head of Christ"

SOMETHING FISHY

Extraordinary. In the three readings of the last few days, the three first occasions where Jesus appears outside the burial garden, the common denominator is food. Fish, to be precise. Grilled fish. OK, most of the inner circle seem to have been fishermen, and it’s all happening in Galilee, that Israeli Lake District where unsophisticated people talk funny and go night-fishing on the Sea of Galilee, alias Lake Tiberias, alias Lake Kinneret. But it still strikes me as unexpected in the story of a resurrected Man-God, mysteriously risen from the tomb during the night. Almost bathos, really. Look at the stories:

     1. The two blokes walking to Warm Springs. We don’t know what they were served at the inn when they got there with their new friend, but fish is not out of the question. In any case, it’s a meal, and it’s at the (very workaday) blessing over the bread that they recognize Him.

   2.Then, when they tell all that to the gang in Jerusalem, suddenly there He is again, among them in an ordinary way. Stupefaction all round. “Oh, come on,” He says, “It’s just me – not a ghost, the real me. Look at my hands and feet: touch them!” The hands and feet are both thoroughly solid and not a pretty sight, after those nails. And then, when they go on havering, he says, “Got anything to eat?” And guess what? Yup, grilled fish again. Oh, and honeycomb. An interesting combination, but it seems that that was what they were having for lunch. (Luke 24:33-47).

  3. Next appearance, up North. (Remember, he told the women that he would meet everyone up in Galilee?)  Simon and the boys have been night fishing and have had a rotten night. Zip. They weren’t biting. At dawn they get to the shore, tired and irritable, and there’s someone standing there who says “Hey! Try one more time, over to starboard, I bet they’ll bite there.” So, with a sigh, they chuck the net over one more time, and bingo! There’s a whole school in there, they can hardly land it. John, always quick on the uptake, says to Peter, “It’s Him!” And Peter, never one to dawdle, jumps overboard and swims to shore with a mighty splashing. And what does he find, and the others when they get there? A little fire of thornbushes and branches, and Jesus, peacefully grilling fish and saying “Come and have some breakfast!”

That image of the little beach-fire at dawn and the smell of grilling fish has stayed in my mind since the first time I heard it. So this is the Mighty Resurrection! Ayup. It could be a story from Vermont or Maine. It’s not grand, it’s not “divine”, it’s not especially moralizing, it’s not Spiritual. It’s food. It’s real.

Nothing is realer than grilled fish and bread, with maybe a bit of honeycomb for dessert. And I think that is probably the point. (The Gospels are rarely pointless.) The Risen Meshiach, Who has just changed history forever, is not a ghost. He is not a pure spirit. There is something very, very slightly strange about Him, as Rembrandt sensed (see below); He is not totally the man He had been; but man He is, real He is, flesh and blood He is. And He eats fish. Bon appétit!