STRANGE GARDENER

It was forty days. It had to be. The “intervals” are always forty days. Forty days in the wilderness, from the baptism to the beginning of ministry’s work. For a long time, I’ve been looking at – and looking for – the shaping of Yeshua’s mind during the “lost years”, the years not mentioned in the Gospels, for him between the ages of 12 and 30. In spite of warnings from my beloved Joe Rat (Benedict XVI to you) and other Church spokespersons that we should not indulge our imaginations where the Bible is silent, nor compose in our minds a “Jesus novel”, I find myself unable to still my historian’s curiosity and my Christian desire to recapture – with my imagination since there is no other tool – wie es eigentlich gewesen, what really happened, what it was really like. 

            I tried to follow him through his young manhood, to see him in the Nazareth workshop with Ya’akov his brother, saying the blessings at Shabbat dinner with Mother Myriam, four brothers and two sisters, and then going off to join the baptism crowd around Cousin Yochanan the Dipper. I tried to follow him into the desert (Sinai?) and then to renting (or even buying) a small house in Capharnaum, near the Synagogue, from which he went out to be what he had known the Meshiach would be: an itinerant rabbi, walking around Galilee (a distant place, Israel’s Maine or Yorkshire), teaching, healing, and preaching the surprising idea that the basileia to theou, the Reign of God, had in fact come, and was right here and now.

            It is not impossible so to follow him, and we know where one ends up, so doing. One ends up on Golgotha, first, in the noise and heat and obscene unrolling of an execution; and then, after a day of stunned silence, on Easter morning with Myriam from Magdala, talking to a gardener. And from there on it becomes exponentially harder. Dare we try anyway?

 

            That gardener, then. Notice that, on a number of occasions during the forty days that follow, even those who had been closest to him do not recognise him: not Myriam, not the disciples in the fishing-boat coming to shore in the dawn, not the followers walking to Emmaus. So one thing we know is that his face was not the same. His body, though, was: he invites Thomas the Twin to touch his wounds. So how, in what details, was his face different? It could be, say, the difference between bearded and beardless; it could be that the unimaginable interval between death and resurrection had marked his features in some indelible but disguising way, like the sudden greying of hair or the carving of lines in the face. 

What is sure is that he was recognised when he spoke: his remarkable voice – remember he had addressed a large crowd from an offshore boat, without a microphone – had remained untouched. 

            Now let us go further. If we could imagine his thoughts and feelings while making scroll-cases and furniture for clients of the family business, can we imagine them in this strange between-time?

            First of all, why did he come back? He could have gone straight home to his Father, into whose hands he had commended his spirit. Instead, he comes back to spend forty days – very much off and on – with his friends and students. Why?

            Well, we know the answer. It was, in a sense, the whole point of everything. St Paul, in one of his vigorous letters, put it best: “If the Anointed One did not rise from the dead, everything we proclaim is nonsense.” Humans – his humans first, then all the others – had to know that he had conquered Death, and that Death, thenceforth, had no dominion other than an apparent one. And so he had to be there: not a ghost, not a spectre, but a human resurrected, a man who had tangible scars, a man who could make a fire and eat grilled fish. 

            What did it feel like, for him? How human was he still, in this time? Did he feel twinges of nostalgia for the old days of exchanging repartee with a foreign Samarian woman at a well, or of calming his fearful friends in a storm-tossed boat on Kinneret? Did he feel he was performing a duty, establishing the Resurrection in the minds of a core group who would then go out and proclaim it to the world? I think he felt a great wave of affection for this little group of friends who were so obviously suffering from their loss. Was he always meant to stay forty days, that Biblical interval, or did he persuade his Father to prolong it from a shorter original? He may have eaten fish, but he also walked through walls and disappeared at the dinner table. That must have felt peculiar, but doubtless in an odd way natural – a between-state in a between-time.

            I do think, though, that when Ascension Day arrived it was not a surprise to him. Interestingly, it seems to have been so for the disciples: clearly, they were not counting in forties, though they might have done. But he, I am sure, did know, if only by counting the days. We may assume that during this time, whenever he was not with them, he was in that Other Place, with the Father; and that when the moment came to go Home definitively part of him must have been deeply relieved. As he was whisked out of our dimension (they read it as “up”) he could honestly say that he had done all his duty, that he had accomplished the task the Father had set him. And the homecoming must have been joyful to a degree, and in ways, truly beyond our imagination.

Image: Rembrandt van Rijn, "Mary Magdalene and Christ as gardener" (1638)

 

A SECRET IMMENSITY

“Your life is hid with Christ in God.” (Colossians 3:3)

 

This saying is of measureless profundity. We live several lives simultaneously. Our daily life with its tasks and pleasures and frustrations and pains; our emotional life with its joys and griefs; our intellectual life with its searches and discoveries; and our religious life, our life as a child of God. This last is too often neglected as it does not, like daily life, obtrude and trip us up. But it is our absolute life, the breath of ultimate life, love, sin and death. And as we grow, in age but also in the questioning of our place in the scheme of things, it is of this life that the importance swells and increases. And it is there that one day we confront this saying, telling us that our life is hid with Christ in God. 

            At first sight it seems absolutely mysterious and incomprehensible. So, to understand it, let us turn to that Doctor Ecclesiæ, Josef Ratzinger, alias Benedict XVI. In the second volume of his Jesus of Nazareth, he explains the necessity and the immensity of Jesus’ Passion and of the Cross. In the Cross, he says, God opens himself completely to man, makes himself definitively accessible in an act of ultimate love. And this complete and utter gift that took place once, in real historical time and in a real geographical place, is still taking place: it is repeated in each Mass and Communion. 

            This is stupendous and very nearly beyond understanding, if we take it seriously and try to get our mind and soul around it. It explains that other saying, “I am with you till the end of time” (Matthew 28:20). And if we keep it in mind when we reread that saying in Colossians, we realise that this truth is true in both directions: he is with us till the end of time, but we are also with him. 

            After the interim period of his appearances following the Resurrection, he leaves the disciples, and is ‘taken up to Heaven’ in the cloud that always signals the presence of the Deity. He rejoins the Father, and sends the Holy Spirit; but he is still with them, with us, till the end of time. What Paul tells us in the letter to the Colossians is that through the gift of the Meshiach, and through the action of the Holy Spirit, we are united to Him even unto his presence in the Trinity. This, I think, is what it means that our life is hid with Christ in God. If we entrust ourselves completely to him, he draws us up to him within the Trinity, within the presence of God. And that life, then, is our ‘eternal life’, as Ratzinger explains it: a life no longer subject to time and death.

            The more you ponder this in meditation, the more immense and moving it becomes. It turns everything around. That touching verse, ‘If anyone loves me, he will obey my teaching. My Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him’ (John 14) now glows in both directions: for we are now also invited to make our home with the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. 

            Finally, our life is hid – it is in the worldly sense a secret life, a hidden life. Although it may shine through our eyes, the world of humdrumlies mostly will not recognise it or comprehend it. So we should probably be ready at least to try to explain it, however difficult that may be. But in the meantime, let us taste and savour fully the mystery and the glory that is offered to us.

Image: the Holy Trinity, by Andrei Rublev (c. 1360 - c. 1430)

 

 

JUST THE FACTS, PLEASE, MA'AM

 Andrea Mantegna, "Crucifixion"

Rereading Josef Ratzinger’s (Benedict XVI’s) Jesus of Nazareth, vol. 2 (Holy Week) for Lent, I am struck all over again by his steadfast refusal to ask, or at least to insist upon, a historian’s questions. Those of us who were trained as historians, even literary historians, generally have a detective‘s mindset. We want to find out, as Leopold von Ranke famously put it in the nineteenth century, Wie es eigentlich gewesen, “what actually happened”. And since the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles are presented in the form of historiæ, (hi)stories, we want to know what actually happened, there in Galilee, there in Jerusalem. Moreover, we are encouraged in this viewpoint by the evangelists’, and St Paul’s, insistence that the Resurrection was a historical fact, something that “really” happened, just as the Ever Given’s beaching in the Suez Canal happened: “For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised either. 17 And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile.” I Cor. 15:16-17). 

 

And yet Ratzinger regularly refuses the attitude that looks for a “Jesus novel” and reminds us of all the theological and ecclesiastical dimensions of each incident in each of the Gospels: their interweaving of occurrences in Jesus’ life and career with passages from the Prophets and the Psalms, or the parallels between certain actions of the disciples and some of Isaiah’s prophecies. 

To take a particularly striking example: he points out the way in which the soldiers on duty at the crucifixion divide up Jesus’ garments and toss for the robe or tunic, which was woven as one piece and thus too good to split. This, he rightly says, corresponds exactly to Psalm 22:18: “They parted my garments among them, and cast lots upon my vesture.” Our historian’s question in such a case is: is this true? is this what happened? And if so, is the parallel happenstance, is it a conscious re-enactment of the psalm by the soldiers, one of whom might know the psalm, or is it the invention of the story’s author who thought of it as a detail that would increase the recounted event’s weight of Scriptural importance? 

Ratzinger refuses even to ask the question and accepts that it “fulfils the Scripture”. As far as I can tell, that means, Yes, it happened; No, they were not consciously re-enacting the psalm; God made it happen that way to “fulfil”, i.e. validate, the psalm as Scripture; and No, the soldiers did not know that. I, on the other hand, want to know how and why Yeshua at his crucifixion was wearing sufficient garments for a guard detail to think them worth dividing up, and what those were.

Another, and much more dramatic, case: upon Jesus’ death, the veil of the Temple split in two, from top to bottom. Ratzinger, completely convincingly, expounds the meaning of this: Jesus is himself the new Temple that replaces the old, and with his self-sacrifice the Temple sacrifices have become obsolete. Moreover, the veil that split was doubtless that which obscured the Holy of Holies and screened the Deity from profane eyes (only the High Priest could enter, once a year); and in Jesus, and even more in the Eucharist that continues his death and resurrection, God has made himself visible and available to men, “unveiled” himself. 

All this is not only true, but beautiful and profound. But something in me naggingly wants to know: all right, but did that great curtain spontaneously rip in two?  And if not, what went on in the author’s mind when he wrote Καὶ ἰδοὺ τὸ καταπέτασμα τοῦ ναοῦ ἐσχίσθη εἰς δύο ἀπ᾽ ἄνωθεν ἕως κάτω: “And at that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. “ (Mk 15:38) For the verb, eschisthè, he used the aorist tense, which parallels the French passé simple, indicating that such-and-such a thing happened. 

Now Mark wrote sometime between 30 and 70 AD, which means he was still able to talk to people who had been there. Is he then recounting a story that with retelling had become a legend, sprouting much extraneous detail, or did it actually happen? Ratzinger is surely right to say that the symbolism, not the actual torn fabric, is what matters; but that aorist bothers me. Later authors who created techniques of meditation, such as Ignatius of Loyola and François de Sales, encourage the devout to begin by vividly imagining the scene they will meditate upon, seeing themselves as being among the characters present and, as it were, seeing the events occur. To do so, we should like to know if the scene we are entering upon is a poiesis from a lovely tale or one that happened in the nitty-gritty. 

And yet, there is no answer. We have no way of checking most of the details. Moreover, we know that ancient historians often put into the mouths of historical characters words, reported in direct speech, which they felt the character should have said, or probably said, and may well have taken similar liberties with details of events. So, as the French say, “on reste sur notre faim”, we are left hungry, unfed. Perhaps the meditation masters have the best answer. For in our imagination we are allowed to reflect the details and even add to them; but only if they are succeeded, enriched, by interpretation – analyzing and learning the meaning of the scene – and resolution – figuring out what we, here and now, can, should, and will do about it. 

THE OTHER POPE

It is intriguing, in current Catholic Masses, to hear prayers for "le Pape François", and to see him everywhere referred to by his title AND his name. But that should remind us that there is, for the first time since the Avignon schism, another Pope, a "Pope emeritus", living in well-earned peace and quiet in a small ugly convent in the Vatican and occupied in prayer. Going through some old MSS on my computer I found this note I wrote on him at the time of his abdication, which I here repeat with pleasure and with deep affection for that saintly scholar.

BENEDICT XVI

Everyone remembers that he was known as ‘the Panzer Cardinal’, and almost everyone has been surprised at the Pope he turned out to be. This exquisitely sensitive man, with the spirit of a true scholar, met a turning-point in his life ca. 1968, when at his beloved University of Tübingen he saw fine scholars howled out of the classroom and physically molested for expressing facts and insights deemed politically incorrect by an army of ignorant and so-called progressive taliban. Having realised that certain ideologies, certain prejudices and certain ignorances are the enemies of reason as well as of true faith, he devoted the rest of his scholarly life until now to the convergence of those two human qualities, so often thought irreconcileable.

His famous “Regensburg address”, which the media and the “Arab street” – without, of course, bothering to read it -- interpreted as insulting Islam, was in fact a powerful meditation on the topic of reason and faith (which I read in German, translated into English, published on my old blog, and will now re-publish here). His short catecheses, given as mini-homilies in Rome, on the great minds of Christendom have now been published as Doctors of the Church, and may go some way to helping Christians close up the lamentable gulf that separates us from devout Jews and their knowledge of their faith’s great thinkers. And his three short books on Jesus – the life, the Passion, and the infancy narratives – are both distinguished and eminently readable.

As long as he has been Pope I, as a non-Catholic and a scholar, felt that here was a man I understood, respected, and liked. Yes, he was austere in his liturgical tastes, but there a lover of the Book of Common Prayer can follow him. Yes, he was strict in his traditional dogmas, and there we would differ. But I am as glad to differ as to agree with one whose mind I can not only respect but regard with admiration bordering on awe.

Moreover, there has been about him since he acceded to the Chair of Peter a kind of gentleness, a kindness, a sensitivity that many would not have expected. And this, I believe, comes from the fact that apart from being a scholar he is a man of prayer, genuinely and absolutely concerned with the things of the spirit and of the soul. It is this that seems to have allowed him to bring out the vulnerable young man he was, and to connect (in a way so very different from the ebullient John Paul II) with simple and humble people. When he speaks German it is a soft, intelligent, mostly kind murmur that reminds those of us whose childhood was marked by the Nazi bark, the Schnauze, of the German language’s other registers, of simple courtesy and of the poetry of deep feeling.

A religious boffin on French TV said that the negative side of his papacy would be remembered in his attempts to reconcile the Lefebvrists, which struck me as both one-sided and short-sighted. Few people care much about the Fraternity of Pius X; lovers of Latin liturgy feel a sneaking sympathy for them; and only those who dig a little deeper see the essential gloom of their grim and uncompromising nineteenth-century Catholicism. (I went to a Latin Mass in Venice where all was delicious until the elderly priest, biretta- and lace-clad, gave to the small elderly congregation a morose sermon on sexual purity.) The fact that one of their number was also a Holocaust denier just means that they have nuts just like all insitutions.

I suspect that in his heart of hearts Benedict XVI, like many devout Christians both Roman and other, is not a full-fledged enthusiast for Vatican II, its evangelical mateyness and its lamentable liturgical and aesthetic taste; but I am sure that he has also seen the way in which it has begun to renew the Church, to banish some of the gloom and doom, to make parishioners smile at one another during Mass, and to enthuse hundreds of thousands of young people to travel thousands of miles for the experience of the World Youth Days.

He is not a man easily understood by a 24/7 media culture (“What Made Benedict Conservative?” trumpeted an American journal, introducing its story with the words “according to the media . . .”). He is, I believe, private, profound, prayerful, bookish, and shy. His decision to abdicate is both innovative and personally courageous. He is now very frail, and eminently deserves to end his earthly life in the peace of a monastery. One can only hope that his successor will proclaim him, as he has been for many decades, a Doctor Ecclesiae, a Doctor of the Church.

CARPENTRY AND DANGEROUS READING

Benedict/Ratzinger cites 'liberal theology' as theorising that Jesus, having hitherto lived a perfectly normal life in Galilee, at his baptism by John underwent a shattering experience that began his ministry. He condemns this as being the attitude of a 'Jesus novel', and claims that Jesus is above our psychologising, that we should read the whole episode theologically.

He is doubtless right in the major sense. But I do not think that it is either irrelevant or reprehensible that we, as humans reacting to the story of a God who took full humanity upon him, should wonder how he came to the point where, ca. 30 years of age, he began his ministry. And if this is a 'Jesus novel', then so be it: a novel conceived, composed, and read in faith.

I have spent a number of years wondering about, and being fascinated by, the 'lost years' of Jesus, between 13 (in the Temple) and 30 (on the bank of the Jordan). The image that suggests itself to me pleases me but is not therefore necessarily wrong. 

It is of a young man much marked by his childhood, much marked by his mother's presence and stories, but otherwise a young carpenter (teenagers worked) of Nazareth; a young Jewish carpenter, i.e. one who not only learnt the trade but learnt to read and spent much of his spare time studying the Scriptures. A little later, say ca. 21 or 22, I suspect he is taking over the shop: he is the eldest son, and Joseph is either retired or already deceased. So he is a young professional craftsman, running a small business -- and reading, reading the scriptures at night, as well as conversing with his mother, who must have been a major presence.

During this time, partly because of the climate of the period, partly because of what Myriam may have told him about his birth, what he reads is especially the passages about the Messiah, and notably those of Deutero-Isaiah, that show a counterintuitive Messiah, a Messiah who is not a conquering king, not a supreme warlord, but a sacrificial lamb, a scapegoat almost, a Messiah who takes upon him, into himself, all the sheer awfulness of crapulous humanity and bears it into the mouth of Hell. And gradually, there must have come upon him as he read these scriptures an awful (in every sense) sense of recognition. My feeling is that the Revelation came upon him gradually, that it stole into his consciousness, that it crept in upon him, until one day, at the age of perhaps 29, he could no longer put it aside or ignore it -- much as he may well have wanted to. The recognition that 'OMG, it's me.' But also the day his regular and devout prayers open, open up a vast space in which at first he is lost, but which then surrounds him like cosmic skin, immeasurably vast and utterly close and intimate at the same time, where he is fully one with the Father he has been praying to and with the Ruach Qadosh who has been doing the praying, through him.

And then, having heard about John the Baptist, he realises that not only must he now go out and live this destiny in the world, but that being baptised by John is the only true and perfect beginning to such a road. He has always been God and man/boy; now he has truly become God and Man. And if Man, then he must, even if he is sinless, join with the sinners who are immersed in the water of the river overhung with trees and skimmed by kingfishers. John, remember, is his cousin; and John too has grown into his destiny. When it is Jesus' turn, he recognises him, both as Cousin Yeshua and as the Meschiach: briefly taken aback, he quickly sees the point. And the heavens open. Were they two the only ones who heard the Voice and saw the dove?

  Of course, this is novelistic, in a way. But it is also the cry of human historical inquiry since Ranke: Wie es eigentlich gewesen: What really happened? We want to know, about human events that occurred in this world, what really happened? We wish we could time-travel; we want to have been there. And it is very hard, if not impossible, for us not to think that the only alternative to 'this really happened' is 'this didn't happen, at least not in this way.' And that if we are told, as in the ancient Catalan beginning of tales, 'Aixa era y no era', 'this was and was not, that we are being told a fiction, something made up.

Perhaps this is one of the reasons so many modern people have turned away from religion: because we have lost the particular scale of reality it demands. A scale where what we are told is true, the form in which it is expressed is true, it is not fiction, yet it did not happen in the way that this morning's subway ride happened. It is this truth that Genmesis expresses; it is this truth that Revelations communicates; it is this truth that the story of Jesus' baptism offers us. 

Perhaps -- to continue the inquiry -- this is one of the reasons, if not the main one, that we are told to become as little children. A child at a certain age does not distinguish between truth and happoening: the stories you tell him make sense, that is all and that is enough. We all experience our children's or our grandchildren's first questioning of Father Christmas as somehow a fall from grace; and this, while inevitable, is also true. The child now begins to believe that there is a difference between truth and fiction, and that truth resides in happening. Only much later, if he is fortunate, does he relearn a sort of unity, when he is taught that fiction can contain important truths; but in that educated-adult universe, its fictionality remains. What Jesus teaches us is that what we need to be close to his, and our, Father is to regain the pre-factual sense of truth.

How to do this? That was Nicodemus's question. How can an adult become a child again? Isn't it against nature? No: it's against culture, not against nature. What we have to do is to allow ourselves to be children again. Nature will let us do this; culture disapproves. Rereading Genesis, we allow ourselves to be thrilled all over again, unquestioningly, by the image of the Spirit of God brooding over the waters. We react with absolute simplicity and enthusiasm to the story of Abraham making lunch for the angels. We see the three Children of Israel in the fiery furnace, and shiver at the fleeting vision of a fourth. And while we do so, the truth is silently building in our minds and hearts an edifice: a synagogue that can allow truth to be transmitted, a temple that can receive Emmanuel.

Benedict/Ratzinger says, and he is right, that the texts tell us nothing about Jesus's years between 13 and 30; he also says, and there I'm not sure he is right for everyone, that that means we should not try to go beyond the texts but read therm as they were intended to be read: as a young Church's attempt to make sense of the life, the death, and the resurrection of the Messiah. Again, I believe that ultimately he is right in this; but proximately I believe that a fragmentary 'Jesus novel', if conceived and received in faith, may have the virtue of helping us be, or become again, the children our daily lives and even our serious religion all too often disallow.

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"

MALKUT

(go to 1:25 in this video)

Re-reading Joseph Ratzinger’s magnificent Jesus of Nazareth, I am struck by his discussion of the Kingdom of God. I’d long worried about one aspect of it: the fact that in English it is called the Kingdom but in Latin regnum and in French règne, which means reign or kingship. It is not a place, not even in Heaven or in the hereafter. In Heaven, we may hope and trust, God’s kingship, His reign, will be complete, thus making Heaven His kingdom; but meanwhile, there is the regnum Dei, the kingship or reign of God.

Jesus talks about it in varied and often startling ways, of which (says JR) the common denominator is Christocentric: for Israel, and from Jesus on for everyone, the regnum Dei is: following him. In the Sermon on the Mount, which is the new Torah – the Messiah’s Torah --, he keeps saying “You have heard it said . . . but I say unto you . . .” He does not abrogate the law of Moses but “fulfils” it: in him it has reached its full range and weight. He is the embodiment of God’s Law, the incarnation of it.

What he has done is to internalise the Law. At one point he says, “The Kingdom of God has come upon you.” (Mt 12:28) In other words, it is present to his hearers, they can enter it at that moment. How? That depends. You have to fulfil the law and commandments with the inner identification with him that the Sermon suggests; and sometimes you have to do something more in your own individual case. The rich young man kept all the commandments, yet he felt shut out of that regnum. So Jesus said to him, “Go, sell everything you have, and then come and follow me.” Not, sell your stuff and go to Temple regularly, or, sell your stuff and pray more; no, sell it and “follow me”.

For us, JR suggests, the true regnum accessible in this life is described by Paul in his letter to the Galatians: “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me:.” (Gal. 2:20) In other words, we have a lot of baggage to get rid of. Which is sometimes a pleasure: many of us have moments of wishing we could see less of ourselves. We need to become hollow, like a water-pipe or a pen. Hollow in order to be filled with the Holy Spirit, like John the Baptist (Lk. 1:15) . And not just for the Spirit to fill us and remain in us: hollow at both ends, for the Spirit to flow through us to reach others. (What others? Any and all: see the Samaritan.)

Lent, as Sr Emmanuelle Billoteau wrote, means learning to stop taking the relative for the absolute, the partially important for the absolutely important. That’s what turning away from idols boils down to. When we do so – whether by fasting, or seeing our cell phone for what it is (and no more: see video, above), or discerning the relative importance of the next board meeting --, and then, set free, internalise not only the teaching of Christ but the person of Christ; then we are in the basileia, the malkut, the regnum, the kingdom, and it is in us.

After that, Heaven is simply a change of dimension, like going from caterpillar to butterfly.