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.   

NO PEACE FOR THE FAITHFUL

In Luke 24:35, Yeshua appears to the disciples even as Cleopas and his friend finish recounting their experience at the inn in Emmaus. He is suddenly there, in the way he has now, after the Resurrection, but which he had also had from time to time before, of moving in ways not common to ordinary earthlings. He is there, we may imagine with a friendly smile, and he says “Shalom!”

            The commentators tend to make much of this pax vobiscum, this “peace be with you!”, this “Que la paix soit avec vous!” But it was, as it still is, also simply a way of saying Hello. Nevertheless, it does have the unemphasised but real weight of shalom, that vast and wonderful condition we translate, inadequately,  as “peace”. It is the almost cosmic peace that results from perfect harmony, from God being in His heaven and all being right with the world; of everything and everybody in the right place, doing what God intends them to do. The peace that results from that harmony being played in the key of Love. Every little peace we make makes us “peacemakers”, who are Blessed in the Beatitudes.

            It has been a long time since the need for inner peace was as urgent as it is now. Daily, we hear that the need is not only for more nurses and hospital workers, but for psychologists and psychiatrists. The pandemic is wearing us down and Christians are not immune. So I find it alarming to see devout commentators whom I have long admired now once again insisting that no, shalom does not mean well-being, it does not mean comfort, it means taking up your cross and suffering with the Meshiach like a true disciple, it means turning your life upside down. 

            Most people are not starving swineherds with boils. There are those – always too many – who live from day to day in precarious misery, and Christians should help them in every way they can. But to assume, as preachers and commentators regularly do, that the faithful are mainly comfortable rentiers who direly need their billowy parts booted is an error that especially now causes real pain. The churches, as we know, are emptying, and so far the pandemic does not, surprisingly, seem to have reversed that trend. Could it be, in part, because they are no longer offering comfort? They are not donors, purveyors, spreaders of shalom; instead they are unrepentant purveyors of unrest, challenging believers to get off their behinds and make shalom themselves in the world. 

            This is not in itself wrong: as St Teresa of Ávila said, the only hands God has in the world are ours. But when thousands are suffering inward misery, stress, depression, frustration and grief, it might not come amiss for those who bring the word to the faithful and beyond to remind everyone of those other words: “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest . . . for my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” (Mt 11:28-30) 

 

GOOD GRIEF

 Makarioi hoi penthountes, hoti autoi paraklèthèsontai. ”Fortunate are they that mourn: for they shall be consoled.”

            Very different from the first Beatitude, this one. It refers, not to the nature or character of the fortunate ones, but to a condition arising from a specific situation. 

 

            The situation involving the verb pentheō is usually death; and the root of the consoling verb is the same as that of the Paraclete: the Defender sent to help us when we are the prisoner at the bar: the Holy Spirit. This may help us understand what is meant. All of us are mortal; hence all of us except the loneliest will at some time be mourners. Mourning is not the same as grief: it is a reaction to grief. Psychologists speak of the “work of mourning” – a task that needs to be undertaken and accomplished before life can go on. And in traditional societies it is a very outwardly-evident work, undertaken collectively by family, friends and acquaintances; visible and audible in wearing black (or, in the Far East, white) and keening or wailing, in keeping vigil, in sitting Shiva: a work of the community of which the deceased was a part. This is added to, and partly absorbs, the individual grief of the nearest and dearest, thus already providing a level of consolation: a sorrow shared is a sorrow halved or at least reduced.

 

            Beyond this comes the Paraklètos. Why, here, a Defender? A friend summoned to help us in court? In the modern, psychological sense because guilt is always a part of mourning. We feel we could have, should have, been closer, more supporting, more positive, a better friend, lover, spouse to the deceased. In mourning, a part of us is always the prisoner at the bar. And the Judge is He ‘in whose sight no man living is justified’. As always, for now, He is silent, which only increases our apprehension. Someone once wrote that Hell is the confirmation of all our worst thoughts about ourselves as  definitively true.

 

            But here comes the Defender. As invisible to earthly eyes as the Judge, he wraps himself around us and brings to remembrance all that is good in us, and notably the fact that we have been bought back – at a high price. Bought back: “redeemed”, like a pledge, or a hostage. And bought back by that other Person of the Trinity: the Judge’s own Son. If we were worth buying back, redeeming, by him at the cost of his own life, and if we recognise and accept that, then surely, says the Defender, we are free? Free, and consoled. For moreover, those for whom we mourned are now in the direct presence and care of Him who loves them as He loves us. 

 

            “Blessed are they that mourn; for they shall be comforted” says the Authorised Version. And perhaps here that version of makarioi is truly a good one.