THE NAMELESS, THEN AND NOW

 

Reading, and listening to, the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches’ exhortations to the faithful in recent years, I have been struck by an anomaly, if not a contradiction. On the one hand one sees, around one in ‘live’ church or on one’s screen in a service attended online or on television, fairly large crowds of faithful parishioners. They are mostly middle-aged or older, but in many churches there are also families with parents in their thirties and forties, and children from babyhood to pre-adolescence. They look interested, fairly reverent, and quite awake: it is rare nowadays to see someone nodding off during a sermon, perhaps because sermons are now very short. They are people with busy lives who have taken the time to attend Mass or Evensong, and who clearly find there they spiritual food they need to resume life’s daily challenges. 

On the other hand there are in many cases (not all) the clergy, who appear not only to be addressing quite a different audience but to have quite a diffferent goal in mind. To read or hear them, one could easily imagine the pews filled with plump, self-satisfied burghers, Philistines to a man or woman, and thinking only of the Sunday lunch or dinner awaiting them after the blessing. And what are they hearing, these ghostly rentiers? To what are they being called? To wake up to constant challenge, to be aware that they must at all costs leave their comfort-zone, to go out and evangelise the world around them, to realise that their baptism has made them priests (but without powers or authority), kings (but without a realm) and prophets: in other words, to be disciples, all of them. 

Curiously, few or none of the people I know appear to sense the discrepancy here. The folks in the pews hear the message respectfully, and then go out and fight their daily battles; the clergy go back to their overburdened weekday lives; and no one seems to be bothered by the anomaly.

And yet, the question that sits like an invisible elephant in the room is: what is the ordinary Christian believer supposed to be and to do? What if we are not all meant to be disciples? After all, the Meshiach only had twelve (and one of them was a black sheep), and He sent out seventy. What about the others? The faces that haunt me in the pages of the Gospels are, first, those of the people He healed. The formerly blind man; the formerly lame man; the woman with the issue of blood; the father of the demon-haunted epileptic boy. Then, the faces of those who had been part of the crowd listening to His teaching. Those – not very many – who had been near and overheard Him addressing His disciples in what we call the Sermon on the Mount. Those – many more – who had heard His teaching in the synagogues around the Sea of Galilee. Those – vastly more – who had been fed by the disciples after hearing Him teach at the end of the day near the Jordan. 

Of the people He had healed, most were told to keep quiet about it. (Some theologians think that this was so that it would not be misunderstood.) Only the man from whom the demons had come out (Luke 8:35), and who had begged Jesus to let him stay with him (presumablly as a disciple) was told instead to go home ‘and tell people what great things God has done for you.’ (Rieu 140) One assumes that the others, in spite of His injunction, also told friends and neighbours; but that, in their new and healed form, they went on with their lives. 

Those who had heard Him teach, whether around the disciples on the Mount or in the Galilean synagogues, would have tried to apply what they had learned in their lives – lives that were certainly changed, whether minutely or hugely. And those who were fed in the large crowd (one does suspect that 4,000 or 5,000 was an exaggeration, especially without a microphone) would remember not only His teaching of that day but the miraculous meal or snack. And then? They might have gone home with the teachings still in their heads, and trying to apply those; or they might have mainly remembered the bread and the fish and been impressed by the miracle-worker.

The point I am trying to make is that most people who come to church have at some point been touched by His teaching and (thus, or also) by His presence. They come because there they feel healed and restored, because there they receive waybread for life’s journey, which will allow them to go home and try to apply the teachings to their daily battles. They are thus like all those nameless people in the Gospels: they believe, but pray to the Lord to help their unbelief. And if the corners of their difficult days hold some small comfort-zones, who is to blame them?

To enjoin every member of a city our country congregation to become a disciple, I contend, is unfair and unkind. As a Catholic Bible scholar recently explained, there are indeed those who are called to be disciples: to give up everything and follow Him. But the many other believers, good people with doubts but who love God and their church, should be spared the guilt that such a demand, which they cannot meet, lays upon them. As an old Dutch lady said to Noel Coward, ‘One should never ask more of people than they are able to give.’ God may sometimes ask, and enable, us to perform miracles far beyond what we thought was our ability; but I dare to think that old Mrs Hubrecht’s rule is, on the whole, His also.   

"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

NOT A PARABLE

The present pandemic has taught us some things about viruses, and about infection, that are perhaps not without pertinence to the life of the soul. It gives us, not so much a parable as a controlling metaphor of great power. 

            Let us imagine (this is how great metaphors begin) that humanity suffers from a slow but certain viral pandemic. We nowadays but rarely believe that it began with one man; and yet we have learnt that a whole planet can be halted in its activities because one man ate an undercooked and dubious pangolin. The pandemic of our metaphor we will call SIN. And if we think we know all about it, we are as wrong as we were with the coronavirus. Its varieties; its mutations; its rate and direction of spread; the pattern of its victims; about all these, if we consider it in this new manner and context, we will have learnt a vast new humility. But since this pandemic has been with us for a very long time and is currently in its nth wave, there are things we know about its behaviour and about ways to combat it.

            Of its earliest attacks we know very little, because few notes were kept, and it is possible that a kind of rough herd immunity was attained. There was as yet no treatment, and of course no vaccine; but by trial and error a sort of method was produced that made it possible to avoid or to contain infection. If you acted in certain ways, by yourself or toward others; if you more or less avoided certain types of behaviour; if your group or clan or tribe abstained from some doings; you, or most of you, would probably escape infection.

            Gradually, though, the virus became both more virulent and more specific, and concentrated its spread on one dozen tribes, who formed one people, Israel. But as the crisis increased, research also became more focused, and at one point a treatment was discovered. The treatment was called TRH (LAW in English) and was quickly made available throughout the infection area. As often happens, those making it available considered it to have complete efficacy – as long as it was made mandatory. And so it was. 

            Like all such treatments, it was not perfect. Its main failing was that it was complex and demanding: its efficacy depended on an intricate pattern of actions and avoidances that took little notice of human fallibility and even, on occasion, produced a problematic side-effect known as Pride. But it was a treatment; nobody had a better one; and it was on the whole seen to work. How much at its best it was appreciated can be seen from a famous text that was written in its honour, which is still extant under the title Psalm 119. 

            For a long time, then, that was the situation. The virus continued to circulate; the treatment was applied with varying degrees of strictness and success. The various bodies of Doctors did what they could to refine and popularise the treatment. However, there were always those who were unsatisfied, who thought the authorities were too lax and who argued stridently for stricter application and even for modification of the theoretical base (usually in the direction of something simpler but more profoundly invasive). These last were known as Prophets and, as usual, got most of the publicity while often unsuccessful in achieving their specific aims. 

            And then came the huge breakthrough. At an unlooked-for moment, from an absolutely unexpected corner, a provincial backwater, there appeared a vaccine. Not a treatment: a vaccine. Its coming had been predicted, but with no certainty whatever as to its nature, time or place; people knew what its name was – Meshiach – but nobody knew for sure if, or how, it would work. And when it arrived it surprised everybody. Most – not all – of the treatment specialists didn’t like it: it seemed too simple. The public, however, went for it in a big way. In part, this was because its basics were so simple. Unlike TRH, it involved just one complete immersion and a simple series of formulas and concentrations. (The complete theory and practice was not fully understood till later, but essentially consisted of an absolute love on one side that depended for its efficacy on an absolute transfer of trust and power on the other. The synthesis, the union, of those two elements created a vaccine that at its best blocked the virus completely.) Once one had gone through that, the vaccine began working and could be stimulated and perfected with relative simplicity by the patients themselves. 

            Meshiach was extraordinary. Not only did it attract crowds from the start, it began to spread beyond the borders and was seen, surprisingly, to block similar viruses in other places as well. Mind you, the Establishment of treatment specialists felt threatened by it and opposed it tooth and nail; and a number of people who felt either blithely unthreatened or too sophisticated and/or too suspicious for the necessary transfer of trust formed, then as since, a hard core of incurable anti-vaccinators. And when the Establishment managed to get the original and sole deployer (the son of the creator) of the vaccine assassinated, it seemed that the virus was henceforth and forever out of control. 

            However, it soon appeared that both the vaccine and its originator were indestructible. Both came back, and now in a form that could no longer be suppressed. Moreover, a Standing Meshiach Committee for virus control had been created that had been given the originator’s licence to dispense and apply it everywhere. 

            And since then? you may ask. Since then the virus has not, alas, been suppressed entirely, and in recent centuries the anti-vaccinators have, like many of their anti-reasonable kind, been in the ascendant. But they have not been able to suppress the vaccine, and it remains available just about everywhere, though not, in some hideous and war-torn lands, always as easily as it should be. Like the coronavirus, the SIN-virus is spread by the deniers, the self-righteous, the irresponsible, and the morally foolish. But the Standing Meshiach Committee is still active worldwide, and neither the Xi nor the Trump has been able to stop it. 

P.S. The image is of course not a virus, but a praying mantis looking unusually diabolic. Added as a reminder that the SIN virus, we are told, did not happen by accident. 

 

NOT FISH HOOKS

When we pray, we ask for something (see my last). And in many cases, we end our prayers, often mechanically, with ‘through Jesus Christ our Lord’.  It comes from the age-old Latin per Jesum Christum Dominum nostrum. But what does it mean? The origin of the phrase is in John 14:13-14: ‘And whatsoever ye shall ask in my name, that will I do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If ye shall ask any thing in my name, I will do it.’

What do these two expressions mean? To ask A (who is in authority, and can therefore refuse the request) for something in the name of B implies that B has more influence with A than we have; to ask for something in B’s name means that we ask it as if B were asking it, hoping thereby to give the request more weight in A’s eyes. If B is someone to whom A has an obligation; or someone of whom A is exceptionally fond, and to whom A can, as we say, ‘refuse nothing’, then our putting our request in B’s name (with B’s permission, obviously) clothes that request with something of B’s special relationship with A.

The Latin expression per is not quite the same. To ask A for something through B is to persuade B to do the asking for us – again, because B’s requests carry more weight with A than ours. In court, we plead through our lawyer, our advocate. And, as John puts it elsewhere (ep. John 2:1), ‘if any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father: Jesus Christ the righteous.’ In Greek, the ‘advocate’ is a paraklètos, someone who appears on your behalf to plead for you. And we have heard that the Holy Spirit is also referred to as the Paraclete. So when we ask for something through Jesus Christ, it is as if we are putting a request via our lawyer.

Either way, such an expression is not and should not be a simple tag. It has enormous implications. In the first place, we are engaging Jesus to plead for us. This is not nothing: we are presuming to implicate the Meshiach, the Saviour, the Son of God, to carry our little requests to the Throne of the Father. And we can do so only because he has said that we may: and in saying so, he has appointed himself our paraklètos. One does sort of feel like removing one’s shoes before asking for things in those conditions; and one doesn’t easily ask for fish hooks. Moreover, John has told us that he is our advocate if (well, when) we sin – when we screw up, when we act as if we were refusing love, when we briefly think we know better. So in the moments when we bugger things up most, when we feel least proud of ourselves, we don’t get some junior from the Public Defender’s Office: we get the top man himself to plead for us.

Secondly, we are encouraged to go beyond the courtroom, and to ask in his name. This means that he is offering us the mantle of his status, his influence, to ask for things from the Father as if he himself were asking them. Again, this makes you think twice before asking for stupid things. What sort of mantle is it he is offering us? A mantle that has been torn by Roman soldiers. A mantle stained with his blood. A mantle he put off only when he was nailed to the cross. The more you think about this, the more sheer awe you feel, and the more humility.

Thirdly, what both these expressions do, at least potentially when experienced to the full, is to give us a way into the immense and secret intimacy of the Triune God. Remember, we are told to ask in his name ‘that the Father may be glorified in the Son’. We are entering into very high and deep mysteries here; and yet he has allowed us in, he has invited us in. Into the relationship between the Father and the Son: into the highest love of which the universe is capable. We are allowed to put our requests in his name to the Father, as if he himself were doing the asking. This really is holy ground.

‘Grant, we beseech thee,

merciful Lord,

to thy faithful people

pardon and peace:

that they may be cleansed from all their sins,

and serve thee with a quiet mind.

Through Jesus Christ our Lord.’

ON THE ROAD

Yesterday’s reading was the story about Cleopas and his friend walking to Emmaus from Jerusalem. The Hebrew name of Emmaus was Hammat, which means Warm Springs; it lay about 7 miles NW of the city, 2-3 hours on foot. The two are referred to as “disciples” of Jesus, which reminds us that the Twelve were not the only ones to be known as such. Deeply depressed, they can’t stop talking about the horrors of the last few days.

Then, as happens on foot journeys in a pre-mechanized world, another traveller joins them, and they walk on together. He wants to know what they are so depressed about. “Hey,” they say, “Where have you been, man? Are you the only one who hasn’t heard?” “No, what?” he replies. And they tell him. “There was this great prophet, Jesus of Nazareth. He was awesome: all he said and did, you wouldn’t believe. A real prophet, and a major one. We all thought he was going to liberate Israel. And then the chief priests and co. had him crucified!”

“Really?” says their new companion. “Yes; and this is where it goes from horrible to weird. Some of the women in our crowd went to the tomb; they found it open and empty, with a couple of angels sitting on the stone. And the angels told them He was alive. So some of our men went there to check up on this women’s tale; and they found it just as the women had said, minus the angels: tomb open, tomb empty, no Jesus.”

“OK,” says the newcomer. “I know how you feel; but you guys have it all wrong.” So he starts talking, like a good learned Jew, beginning with Moses, and doubtless spending a good deal of time on Isaiah; and for an hour or more he explains how the Meshiach was supposed to go through all this, and suffer, and die, precisely in order to liberate, not only Israel but everyone.

Boy, are they impressed. This man really knows his stuff; and when they hear it explained like that, they begin to have an inkling that maybe what happened was not simply the horror and the weirdness. Meanwhile, they’ve reached Warm Springs, and it’s getting dark. “Hey, stay and have dinner with us,” they say. Well, he demurs a bit, but in the end they persuade him. So they sit down, and as he is clearly a rabbi, they ask him to say the blessing. So he takes the bread and breaks it, and begins “Baruch atta Adonai Eloheinu melech ha'olam hamotzi lehem min ha'aretz.....”

OMG. (Literally.) They have heard that voice before. And suddenly they see him with new eyes, and realize it’s Him. And ---- and then He vanishes, and there are just the two of them at table, with the bread and the wine and the rest of the meal. And they look at each other the way people do, and say “I knew it. I knew it. Remember how thrilling it was when He explained it all? Didn’t our hearts burn within us?”

Dr Luke does not relate what happened to Cleopas and his friend afterwards; but I can think of few ordinary blokes in history I’m more inclined to be jealous of.

The images are by Rembrandt.

CROWDSOURCING

What to make of Palm Sunday? I’ve always found it difficult to deal with. On the one hand it’s a relief from bloody Lent: all those happy crowds and we can wave palms get a palm cross in church and exhibit it at home and at least have one good moment. On the other hand, where’s it going?

Thinking of it now, I’m struck by the fact that, first of all as I’ve said before, there were all these people stunned by Jesus whom we never think about. Not the Disciples, not the ones who gave up everything to follow him about; just ordinary folk whose cousin got healed by this amazing Galilean (read: Yorkshireman or Vermonter) and who’d heard him preach and just got carried away and were hoping he was the Real Thing.

There was Talk going around. Is he going to come to Jerusalem for Passover? You’ve got to be kidding. He’s not crazy. He could get dead doing that. You know how the Man has it in for him. He’s gonna stay a loooooong way away. Caesarea Philippi, say, or Tiberias.

No. No! My cousin’s boyfriend told me he’s coming to Jerusalem! For Passover! Really? Really! He’s nuts. But what guts. You have to admire it. It takes a lot of mojo to do that, this year. OK, let’s go see him. Yes: I heard he’s going to come in like ---- who is it, remind me? the character from Isaiah? the Messiah as poor suffering bugger? riding on a donkey? Where? Well, at the North Gate, tomorrow afternoon. Yes, my son-in-law tweeted me. Ok, let’s all go there and cheer him on. He really has a nerve.

And so the crowd goes. And so he rides in. And so they rip off palm branches (where I live there are palms, but not enough to rip branches off – not like Florida, say), and throw them on the ground like a red carpet. And Jesus, for a moment, is the Star. Coming down the steps at Cannes, having his star on the sidewalk in LA, paparazzi clicking and whirring away, this is the Messiah the way we’d like him: overwhelming, exciting, an Event. PROPHET HAILED ON ENTRY TO CITY. TRAFFIC HALTED ON ALL MAJOR ARTERIES. POLICE DISPUTE FIGURE OF 50,000. “NO VIOLENCE,” SAYS COMMISSIONER, SURPRISED.

Of course, it all goes South. Media hero today, hounded tomorrow. Those palms have a bitter taste. Yeah, I went, and it was great, but I heard that it’s not going anywhere, the Temple police are looking for him, he’s accused of blasphemy and that is not a joke, they’re going to get him. OK guys, joke over, I’m going home, my wife doesn’t want me involved with scary stuff, and I can’t blame her.

And where are all these crowds, five days later?

And where would I have been?



Image: Giotto, "Entry into Jerusalem", fresco, Arena Chapel, Padua, ca. 1305