BE VERY CAREFUL

 

Fortunate are the merciful, for they shall experience mercy in return.

Makarioi hoi eleèmones, hoti autoi eleèthèsontai.

 

The Greek text translates with eleos the Hebrew chesèd (ch as in ‘loch’), one of the three words that could become English ‘mercy’. In one sense it can mean ‘kindness’, but not, like praios, as a character trait but rather as a form of action. Chesed is taking care of someone else’s need: Jonathan protects David from Saul in an act of chesed. It is always seen as reciprocal: someone who receives chesed from another is expected to return it. 

 

So this Beatitude does not really introduce something new or unexpected, but rather reminds the audience of the way conventional relationships ought to be. It is really a form of ‘do as you would be done by’. And yet it goes beyond that also. God shows chesed to his people, both collectively, as the people of Israel whom he feeds in the wilderness, and individually in persons such as Abraham, Jacob, David and Job. For human beings it is of course impossible to return this to the Father himself; but He expects them in return to show it to others. So there may well also in this Beatitude be a sense that those who are merciful to others may receive the mercy of the Father, just as in the Lord’s Prayer those who forgive others’ debts to them may receive the forgiveness of their own debts to the Father.

 

In Psalm 85/86:11, ‘Mercy and truth are met together’, it is chesed that is joined to emet; and the ‘truth’ that is also characteristic of the Father is not so much ‘truth’ in the sense of conformity to a factual norm as ‘truth’ in the sense of faithfulness, of being ‘true’ to a loved one, one’s lord, or one’s country. So if that is joined to chesed, it means that Fidelity is joined to Care. 

 

It is both interesting and useful to pursue these words a little, because the English word ‘mercy’ has a connotation of opposition to ‘justice’ which in this case is not present. Our ‘mercy’ is usually closer to ‘compassion’, which translates the Hebrew racham/rachamim. The latter is word that does not imply as much reciprocity as does chesed: its root is linked to the Hebrew word for ‘womb’, hence the otherwise curious English term ‘the bowels of compassion’. So in the case of the fifth Beatitude, one might almost translate the text as ‘Fortunate are those who care, for they shall experience care in return’. And one should always remember that this does not refer merely, or even especially, to human interactions only, but to the very real Care and aid we children receive from our Father in heaven, and which we must pass on.  

A POET AND A FRIEND

He has always been my favourite saint. Not only was he the poet among the disciples; Yeshua loved him particularly, doubtless for a reason. And – perhaps as a result of that – he was the only one who stuck around right to the very bloody end. He almost always pictured standing by, under, the Cross, together with Myriam. All the others had skedaddled, even Peter, who had been ashamed of denying Him and had wept bitterly. He had wept, but not remained. Only young Yochanan was still there. It was to him that Yeshua entrusted His mother, a (presumed) widow and thus to be cared for. He and his brother Ya’akov (James to us Anglophones) had in their teenage years been nicknamed Boanerges, or “Sons of Thunder”, presumably because of their fiery temperament. And he wrote his memoirs of his friend at the end of a long life, thinking back to those magical years and distilling from them, through the alembic of his memory, the finest and loveliest of all testimonies. He may or may not have written the apo-calypsa, the revelations or visions of the Last Things, but he may well have done --  he was a poet, after all, and as poetry the Bible’s last book is as vast, as fireful and as moving as the Northern Lights.

            What has John to teach us? How to think of him? What seems to unite all the things we know about him was that a) he was a man of heart, not a sophist or a calculator, and b) he was one who went all the way. The first should teach us that in dealing with Yeshua, as with the Father and the Spirit, we should first of all check the various locks and blocks and painted-shut windows of our hearts and open them. We tend to think of our duty as believers as being oriented to our neighbours, but the first Commandment has to do with loving God, all three of Him. Loving Him, not just respecting, fearing, being awed by: loving. Not always easy; but if we want help along that road, Yochanan is the one to go to. And he can help and teach us not only to love, but in that love to have the courage and the patience and the sticktoitiveness to go all the way. Not to run away when the big hairies come and things go pear-shaped. Not being Sons of Thunder, we may not have the sheer guts he did, but we can at least think of him when the going gets tough. 

            And also we can learn from him to express in words what our souls go through, if our talent runs that way. There is in the whole of the New Testament perhaps not a more poetic passage than the opening of Yochanan’s memoir. And then the extraordinarily moving declaration with which he begins his first letter, slightly breathless and incoherent because retrospectively overwhelmed:

That which was from the beginning -- which was from the beginning – and yet which we heard, which we saw with our eyes, which we beheld, and our hands touched -- the word of life; 

² and the life was shown. And we saw, and we witness, and we tell to you the everlasting life, that was with the Father, and appeared to us. 

³ And we tell you that thing that we saw and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us, and that our fellowship may be with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ. 

⁴ And we write this thing to you so that you may have joy, and that your joy may be full.

He still has trouble getting his mind around it: that the hugeness, the unimaginable brightness that is the Sun, the Son, that was, is, and will be with the Father, that that was here, in Galilee, in Yorkshire, in Picardy, in Connecticut, and appeared to us; that we actually saw him with our own dim eyes, that we touched him with our own hands that scale fish and cook dinner: and why are we going to tell you what we saw and touched? so that you can be part of it too, so that we may all of us together have “fellowship” with the Father and the Son, and so that that being the case you may have joy and our communal joy may be full.. 

I can think of no more attractive simply human person – Myriam excepted – in the New Testament. I feel privileged that my second Christian name is his.