MIRACLES

Fr Alexis Helg

 "Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! For if the miracles had been performed in Tyre and Sidon which occurred in you, they would have repented long ago, sitting in sackcloth and ashes. But it will be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon in the judgment than for you.…” (Luke 10:13-14)

This, today’s reading in the Catholic (and now Anglican also) Lectionary, received an excellent comment in the admirable Prions en Eglise booklet from Fr Alexis Helg, a Swiss religious in the Order of St John. He writes about reacting to miracles, which clearly the cities St Luke mentions got wrong. Do we, he wondered, get it right? Can we discern miracles when we see them?

This got me thinking. First: as we know, the Age of Miracles is over. What that means I doubt if anyone is quite sure. I suppose, in a way, they were (or were seen as, or were – as in Chorazin -- not seen as) a sort of Close Encounters of the First Kind: something overwhelming and against all we know of the laws of Nature. Six large amphorae of water suddenly turn into Chambolle-Musigny; a blind man suddenly becomes sighted; a paralytic takes up his camp-bed and dances down the road singing; a man several days dead comes lurchingly to life. And hundreds of ordinary bystanders see it happening, and the news goes viral. That was then; this is now. I don’t want to go into the 19^th-century style rationalist “explanations” of the miracles; if I can believe Christ rose from the dead I can believe the others. But that was then, this is now. Why did that Age end?

Perhaps a better question is: why did it happen in the first place? If, as we now believe, God does not suddenly appear on all the world’s video screens, overwhelming the planet, because He is love and that is not the way love works; if love can work only in freedom of response; then why bother with all those miracles back then?

One possible explanation is that they were a result of the Hypostatic Union, i.e. of the unique combination of divinity and humanity in Yeshua Bar-Yousuf, the carpenter from Nazareth alias Son of God. Imagine his very human burst of feeling upon seeing an exhausted paralytic begging in the dust and 110º heat, or upon  hearing that one of his best friends, still young, was dead. We can share that; what we can’t share is that in God, Will is Act: so when he feels it, something happens: the poor bugger gets up and walks, Lazarus stumbles forth, blinking.  

(One of the alarming but often likeable things about Jesus’ humanity is his fits of sheer temper: the passage from Luke above surely is one, as, I suspect, is the terrifying passage about bringing not peace but a sword, and the Great Whupping of the merchants in the Temple.)

This explanation of the miracles would explain why they ceased (though not why one or two generations of Apostles still managed them). Now, says Fr Helg astutely, we need to look more closely around us to see miracles, and when we do see them, we need to learn to connect them with God as we live in a world that does not do so naturally. But – I would ask Fr Helg – how should we so connect them? If we do not believe that God micromanages creation – and we need to not believe this in order to stay sane: does God allow Daech? does God allow the suffering of terminal Parkinsons patients? is sickness punishment for sin? --, then how should we connect the miracles we may observe with Him?

I don’t have an answer for this, or not a reasonable one at least. The one thing that occurs to me is that our unconscious sometimes understands things for which our (and I mean our collective) reason is not ready. When we see a miracle, something in us may connect it with God, and if that happens, we instinctively give thanks. That instinct may some day be justified by a new understanding that our minds can confirm; meanwhile, it may be a deep truth implanted in our human spirit by a Spirit rather more Divine. 

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. 

A GRAVE THOUGHT

Today’s lectionary gave us the story of the raising of Lazarus – one of the most moving of all the Gospel stories, and one that has given many people furiously to think. How did Lazarus look? How did he feel? What did the world look like, after four days in the tomb? Where had he been, those four days?

Two considerations may be relevant. The first is derived from our Algerian parish priest’s sermon, in which he said that the point for us is not only being touched by Jesus’ tears and at the sisters’ emotion, but that we should realize to what degree we too are buried, enclosed in a tomb, often of our own making, unable to rise and come out into the light and air of love. The Epistle was Paul’s letter to the Romans which reminds them that being ‘of the flesh’ hinders one’s approach to God, ‘but you,’ he goes on, ‘are not of the flesh, but of the Spirit’. We need imperatively, said Fr Jean-Kamel, to stop thinking that ‘the flesh’ is invariably linked to sex. Being of the flesh, he said, means being caught in the web of anger, contempt, fear, indignation, and a general rejection of others. I’d add to that that it also means the attitude that of course, for a modern thinking person, stories like the raising of Lazarus are either charming fictions or complex allegories, but that in no case can they be simply true. ‘Life’s a bitch; then you die.’

Jesus called to Lazarus in a loud voice, ‘Lazarus, come out!’ John Donne, praying in his Devotions, which he wrote when almost mortally ill, referred to this and said to God:

I have a grave of sin; senselessness of sin is a grave; and where Lazarus had been four days, I have been fifty years in putrefaction; why dost thou not call me, as thou didst him, with a loud voice, since my soul is as dead as his body was? I need thy thunder, O my God; thy music will not serve me.

This wonderful interpellation of God, as powerful as a Psalmist’s, may serve to start a meditation for this day.

The second consideration is that, as Fr Swain of New York’s Church of the Resurrection announced last week, this Sunday, the Fifth Sunday in Lent, is Passion Sunday. Now, like me, you might not have heard that term used; I looked it up. It is the beginning, traditionally, of Passiontide, which used to be longer than it tends to be today. Statues are veiled; vestments turn from violet to crimson. There is much to be said for ceremony, and I will come back to the subject. In this case, after more than four weeks of Lent, it represents an intensifying, a moving gradually into the meditative condition around the hugeness of Good Friday and Easter. It helps us to remember how huge those occurrences are. It helps us to forget chocolate bunnies and to approach immense and terrifying paradoxes. It helps remind us that had we been there and part of it, we should probably not have done better than, at the very least, Pilate (who intuited the truth but bowed to what he thought was political necessity) or the disciples (who, apart from Peter and perhaps John, took off for parts unknown the minute Jesus was arrested in Gethsemane). It reminds us that for all of us, there are things in our lives we are not proud of, things a great deal bigger than the small gluttonies we ‘give up for Lent’. Veil those statues. Wear the crimson. Hush the music. Face up to the biggies. Admit them, to God if not to a priest. We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts; and there is damn little health in us.

                        Almighty God, who hatest nothing that thou has made,

                        and dost forgive the sins of all them that are penitent;

                        create and make in us new and contrite hearts; that we,

                        worthily lamenting our sins and acknowledging our

                        wretchedness, may obtain of thee, the God of all mercy,

                        perfect remission and forgiveness. Through Jesus Christ

                        our Lord.

If we can recite this without rebellion and realize that, yes, without remission and forgiveness we would be and are fairly wretched; then we are in a fair way to getting ready to receive the immensity of God’s sacrifice and God’s gift (which are one and the same). Things get damn serious, this time of year. But remember: ‘Heaviness may endure for a night; but joy cometh in the morning.”(Psalm 30)

Image: Rembrandt, 'The Raising of Lazarus', Los Angeles County Museum