THE EVE OF ALL THE HALLOWS

 Tomorrow is the glory of all the saints. The grand saints, who are known to millions: St Mary Magdalen, St Francis, St Augustine, St Thomas Aquinas, St Dominic, St Teresa of Avila, Ste Thérèse of Lisieux, and my beloved patron saint St John (Yochanan), the only disciple who didn’t skedaddle from Golgotha but stayed at the foot of the Cross.  But also the little saints whom nobody knows except their neighbours, their family members, or the customers of the store or restaurant or gas station where they serve, or the passengers of the taxi they drive. The people who are always there when you are ill and feeling down, who give you a smile on a grim day, who make you feel for a moment that life is not so bad after all. The people of whom you know that they feel your pain – and the knowing already calms it a little. 

            Tomorrow, then, is their feast. Worth celebrating hugely. Buy them a beer, or just lift your glass and think of them with love.

            But tonight: the Eve. What is the Eve? La veille, as the French say. And in that word is the verb veiller, to watch, to stay awake and alert. Because, said the ancients, on the Eve of such a feast, a feast of so much sheer goodness, the forces that cannot bear the goodness, that find it intolerable, will come out and torment. They will flly and slide and whisper around our houses; they will try to enter our minds and persuade us that the world is lost, that Evil has allready won, that there is no hope, and that we all are just killers without a gun. 

            And that – tell your children – that is why we carve pumpkins into grimaces, why we parody evil in silly costumes, why we celebrate goofy trick-or-treats, why we have drunken parties: to taunt the evil spirits, to show them that we are not afraid, because All the Saints are with us, and tomorrow we will celebrate them with dignity and style, and be thankful for their prayers and their protection. We are breadcrumbs on the skirt of the universe, but we are also children of God, and we are loved. We are never alone under a black sky; we are never delivered utterly unto hate; we are loved, and the Evil One cannot defeat our faith. 

Happy Hallowe’en!

A TOAST AT A FEAST

At the feast in the house of Levi, we know what Yeshua said to the Pharisees, but what did he say to Levi and the other guests? (Luke 5:27-32)

            Note that Levi had just been called, and had got up and followed Yeshua, giving up his job and his booth as a Mokhes (a tax-farmer). Note also that there is no sign that he is giving up his house and his money – yet. Instead, he is giving a party for his new teacher. So I imagine him, toward the end of the meal, standing up, raising his glass or goblet, and making a speech, more or less as follows:

            “Yeshua Ben-Yosef, it is an honour to me and my family to receive you in my house. I am aware that by coming here you risk being hounded by the religious: I’m sure they are already gnashing their teeth outside. So it was extraordinarily kind of you to come under my roof and to eat and drink with us outcasts. I believe that you are a good man and a fine rabbi, and I should be grateful if you would accept me as your disciple.” (Loud – but in some cases ironic -- applause from all the mokheses present.) Then Yeshua gets up, smiles, and waits for the noise to die down.

            “Levi Ben-Levi, I thank you for your kindness in inviting me – indeed, in having called together this party in my honour. You and your friends are very good company, even if you are not approved of by – er – certain people of unblemished reputation. Some of you may have heard, just now, the reproachful words of that Pharisee. If you did, you may also have heard my answer to him – and you may not have been best pleased. After all, I told him that it was not the healthy who needed the doctor but the sick; and that implied that you, my hosts, were not in the best of health. 

            “Those of you who, like Levi here, have already heard me speak in public know pretty much what I‘m about. You know that I say a lot of dour and dire things as well as nice ones, and that, rather like Yochanan the Dipper, I sometimes tell people that they are in a bad way and need to turn their lives around. So, are you sick, and am I the doctor? And if both are true, what’s my diagnosis, and what’s my cure? As you know, I’ve nothing to give or to spend, except my teaching; so any good I can do you will have to come from that.

            “So, to begin: all right, yes, I think that in spite of your good nature you are not the healthiest or the happiest of folk. Many of you are mokheses, which is not a job to make you loved. And quite a few of you have not done that job in the kindest or most righteous way. There are a few other faces here that I’ve seen in bad places and in bad company. You may have got used to it, but deep down I think most of you would like to be in harmony, in shalom, with the world and with Adonai.

            “And this is where Doctor Yeshua comes in. Believe it or not, it can be done. You can get your moral virginity back. Some people find it depressing that I tell them they have to be more righteous than the scribes and Pharisees; and when I tell them that this can be done without conforming to the 648 ordinances in Scripture they think I’m selling snake-oil. But it’s true. There are only two commanments that matter. One: Adonai loves you, he is the Father of Love. So the first commandment that matters is to love him back, with every fibre of you. Then: Adonai loves every one of his children equally. So commandment no. 2: you love your neighbour just as much as yourself. And who’s your neighbour? Anyone.Anyone in trouble, sorrow, sickness or misery. X. Be there for X whenever you meet him or her. 

            “And you can condense that still further: follow the two commandments by telescoping them into one: Follow Me. I’m the one Adonai sent to help his children clear up the mess they’ve made. And right now we – you and I – are here;  the place is Here and the time is Now. If you respond, as Levi has done today, then you will not only make tov, make shalom, you will be shalom. You can forget the 648 ordinances, because you will already be what they were written to make you. 

            “So if you take up your account-books and follow me, we can all drink a toast to the terrific man who got us all here: Levi Ben-Levi, l’chaim !” 

image: The Feast at the House of Levi, detail (1573) by Paolo Veronese

 

SO WHAT DO YOU GO HOME WITH?

 

 

Trying to sum up the Sermon on the Mount is like trying to put Paris into a bottle. Which doesn’t mean one might not try. The reason for undertaking it is that, however it was originally delivered, it has been passed on as a single if complex discourse, and it does sum up Yeshua’s teaching, the eu-angelion, the Good as well as the Authoritative Message, better than almost anything. And it matters.

 

So let us look back over it all and try to imagine what a good but not necessarily sophisticated listener, there on that truly lovely hill, full of flowers and overlooking Lake Kinneret, might have taken away on his or her way home, and remembered in the next few days. Remember it would have been part, not all, of their memory of the man: the healing he performed was in some ways more spectacular. But if the Meshiach’s task was to redeem Israel, and the ‘nations’, from the appalling condition of the systemic refusal of, or indifference to, the Father’s love – i.e. sin -- , then the two pillars of that task were Healing and Teaching, and the essence of the Teaching is in the Sermon. So what, finally, does it amount to?

 

A picture emerges. The new Torah shows the new Chosen as being not of a tribe but of a kind: not warlords, not brave fighters, not conquerors, not even prophets: they are simple in the best sense, one-fold, not multiple; their love for, and obedience to, the Father is uncomplicated and unquestioning; they care for and help the unfortunate, not sentimentally but effectively; they heal the wounds of conflict in their surroundings; and they avoid what, and whom, they know to be evil. Very simple, and un-glamorous. Yet as such, they will be – they are -- Ransomed, Healed, Restored, Forgiven; and they will see God, they will rule in Heaven. And when things go pear-shaped, when their loved ones die or when they are pursued, persecuted, prosecuted, and sometimes tortured and executed, they will be given consolation, they will receive a Paraclete, a Spirit to defend them, they will be granted joy and in turn astonish those who see them. And they pray, constantly, like the Meshiach Himself. 

 

Perhaps we can break it down into who we should try to BE and what we should try to DO. 

 

Who we should try to be is:

·      simple people, going about our lives, doing our work, kind, caring, with our heart clean and uncluttered. 

·      Feet on the ground, pragmatic, using our mind for discernment, fair and trustworthy. 

·      Not boring: we should be good company, amusing, interesting, but discreet – not showing off. 

What should we do? 

·      Know that we have been redeemed (bought back, ransomed) at a great price and so give thanks daily. 

·      Make shalom whenever and wherever we can, in small things as in large.

·       Avoid like the plague the Pandora’s boxes of ira (rage) and luxuria (lust), and avoid judging our neighbours’ faults before we have judged our own. 

·      Do unto others as we would have them do unto us. 

·      Keep Yeshua before our eyes all the time, integrate His teaching completely into our selves, get our priorities straight: seek FIRST the Kingdom, at all times. 

·      Don’t be fooled by wide and easy gates and spiritual snake-oil salesmen: build our house on His rock. 

·      Pray, inwardly, all the time, in any way we can, from the simplicity of Brother Lawrence to the sublimity of St Teresa of Ávila.  

 

An example of the simple, pragmatic, caring person is the Samaritan businessman. Levi the tax-collector, with whom Yeshua dined, was probably witty and amusing, even after his metanoia.

Notice that there are very few mystics here, and no sentimentalists. Even the glorious St Teresa was, as she herself relates, a simple, solid, hardworking nun, unimaginative by nature if given to fetching images from daily life. And she said that for people living in the world (not in a convent) simple and constant prayer without aspiration to mysticism is much the best way to salvation.

So finally: do your job, pray a lot, and make shalom. And find consolation, and joy, growing unobtrusively but gloriously, on your path.

THE SMILE OF FAITH

In his admirable television series “Civilisation”, Kenneth Clark titled the chapter on the eighteenth-century Enlightenment “The Smile of Reason”. Virtually all the portraits of the time, he claimed, wore a smile: neither gloom nor outright laughter, but a smile of intelligent amusement. 

Pondering this, it struck me how rarely one sees the smile of faith, and how surprising that is. We are not encouraged to think of Jesus as laughing or smiling, nor indeed of the saints as doing so. After all, the Gospels seem to deal mainly with the halt and the lame and the miserable, and their penultimate chapters deal in some detail with the gruesome horrors of crucifixion. As Stanley Holloway lamented, “Nuthin’ to laff at, at all”. 

And yet. Let’s try a different regard, Begin with the incredulous joy of Myriam, once she has understood what is happening to her. Go to the jubilation of the angels and the broad smiles of the shepherd folk who came to congratulate. Go to the attendrissement on the severe and thoughtful faces of the Magi. Fast forward to the wedding at Cana. “Yeshua, they’re running out of wine. Can’t you do something?” “Hush, Mother – my time has not yet come.” I see a faint smile there. And then, Myriam to the servants: “Do what he tells you”, again with a very maternal smile. 

Now take any of the countless episodes of his life from then on in Galilee. The formerly lame man, dancing with an idiotic grin on his face. The parents of a little girl, brought back from near death, embracing each other, and Yeshua, with huge smiles through their tears. Why do we forget that this man brought sheer blinding JOY wherever he went? Happiness. Amazed laughter. 

OK, there were exceptions. The owner of the herd of pigs at Gadara probably wished him to the devil. The people of Nazareth wondered who he, Josh, the son of the local builder, thought he was, preaching at them like a learned rabbi. And the religious professionals found him positively dangerous. But the ordinary folk who crowded him everywhere seem to have found true happiness in his company; and E.V.Rieu the Hellenist even found what he thought was the confused memory of a joke on Yeshua’s part: when he tells Peter to look in the mouth of the next fish he catches to find there a tribute-coin.

We Christians have as the symbol of our belief an instrument of torture. But the essence of our faith is Easter, is the Resurrection. Imagine the slowly dawning smile, wide as the horizon, of Myriam of Magdala once she recognises the man in the gardener’s hat. Imagine the incredulous laughter and embraces of the disciples eating grilled fish on the beach at dawn with the man they had seen slaughtered and buried only days before. 

In Lent we are asked to think seriously about our shortcomings in faith, in hope, and in love. To stop repressing them, and to beg that they may be forgiven. Perhaps one of those shortcomings may be our forgetting of the sheer, real happiness, the joy, of a faith “looks through death”. At best, the smile of reason and the smile of faith should be found on the same face. Ours.

Image: St Julie Billiart (1751-1816), founder of the order of the Sisters of Notre Dame.

RICH AS A SUNRISE, DEEP AS LIFE - TRINITY 12

I am shamefully late in discussing this magnificent piece of dense and glorious prose, but we still just in the twelfth week after Trinity, so I will allow myself to print his now.

Leonine>Gelasian Sacramentary

OMNIPOTENS sempiterne Deus, qui promptior es semper in audiendo quam nos in orando, et abundantia pietatis tuæ et merita supplicum excedis et vota; Effunde super nos misericordiam tuam; ut dimittas quæ conscientia metuit, et adjicias quod oration no præsumit nisi per merita Mediatoris nostri Jesu Christi Filii tui et Domini nostri. Amen.

1549

ALMIGHTIE and everlastyng God, |which art alwayes more ready to heare then we to praye,| and art wont to geve more than eyther we desyre or deserve; | Powre downe upon us the aboundance of thy mercy; | forgeving us those thynges wherof our conscience is afrayde, | and gevyng unto us that that our prayer dare not presume to aske,| through Jesus Christe our Lorde.

1662

ALMIGHTY and everlasting God, who art always more ready to hear than we to pray, and art wont to give more than either we desire, or deserve; Pour down upon us the abundance of thy mercy; forgiving us those things whereof our conscience is afraid, and giving us those good things which we are not worthy to ask, but through the merits and mediation of Jesus Christ, thy Son, our Lord. Amen.

Cranmer, as usual, translates closely and beautifully, even finding an English alliteration to reflect the Latin ‘et merita . . .et vota’; but he has difficulty with the compact Latin ‘quæ’, translating it first as ‘those things’ and second ‘that’ – which is awkward with the other ‘that’ that immediately follows (and which we would translate as ‘which’). However, he does get the strength of ‘præsumit’ by adding ‘dare’. Notice that what he leaves out entirely is God’s abundantia pietatis. Perhaps because for Englishmen piety was proper to men but not to God.

The 1662 revisers didn’t like the ‘that that’ either, and expanded it to ‘those good things which’; and expanded  the ‘dare not presume’ to the original's statement about our unworthiness and its palliation through the merits and mediation of Jesus. Nevertheless, as so often, I prefer Cranmer’s version, which (given the prose rhythms in the Latin) may reflect an earlier form of the original.. 

This is a favourite collect, and rightly so. People react to the parallelisms of rhythm and alliteration, and these bring us to consider the content. It is both joyful and humbling to know that our Father is readier to listen than we are to pray; and the same is true of his habit (the ‘wont’) of giving us not only more than we deserve but more than we thought we wanted! 

The psychology is profound all through. In the first place, we are reminded that even taking prayer in the very restricted sense of asking, we simply do not pray enough. As Wordsworth said, the world is too much with us: late and soon, getting and spending, we lay waste our powers. We ask too much of the world – prosperity, friendship, happiness – and not enough of God. Meanwhile, He is always ready to hear. One does not have to make an appointment, say on Sunday morning: He is always there, waiting, loving, listening. 

Secondly, God is “wont” – it is His custom, His habit – to give us not only more than we deserve, but more even that we desire. That’s a two-edged statement: it reminds me of the old saying that the only thing worse than not getting what you wished for is getting it. So in one sense, God’s giving us more than we desire may appear at first to be unwelcome: the lesson is that we have to learn to desire what, and how much, He gives us. In Huck Finn’s phrase, He doesn’t give us fishhooks, even though we asked for them.  He gives us something much bigger that we didn’t hink of asking for, and so magnificent that we couldn’t remotely deserve it. 

Now, since we are here in a prayer, what are we asking for now? We ask Him to pour down upon us– abundantly, streamingly, like a downpour – and what? His mercy. Such a wonderful word, mercy. It is – not the opposite but the pendant of justice, without which justice is cold and brutal. And since we are sinners who consistently fuck up in life and in our relation to God and man, mercy is what we desperately need: more mercy than even we think we need, and certainly more mercy than we, in justice, deserve. 

And if God does this – if we get the mercy we ask for – what will that accomplish? What is the goal of our prayer? First, to be forgiven for “those things whereof our conscience is afraid”. Oh yes, we have a conscience, and it talks to us; and what it so authoritatively says is all too often not pretty. It makes us afraid – afraid of justice: unlike the Psalmist, we do not long for justice because we know all too well where it would leave us. We long for mercy.

And since we know all too well who and what we are, there are so many Divine gifts – Divine love, mercy, the beauty of holiness, the joy of heaven – that we “dare not presume to ask”. Only after the downpour of mercy, after the forgiveness, can we ask them. And so this wonderful Collect, this “treasure-chest” as Barbee and Zahl call it, comes full circle, and in its end is its beginning. 


Frederick Barbee and Paul Zahl, The Collects of Thomas Cranmer (Eerdmans, 2007)

A VISITOR FROM EVERYWHERE

His visits are rare. Always wished-for, hoped-for, longed-for, asked-for; and when he comes, there is a sudden sense of more light in the air, of ambient sound becoming a harmony, of one’s own terrestrial weight lessening. How long he stays depends on his welcome, and on the lodging he is given. 

This morning he arrived, unannounced, at the moment I awoke, and in my mind there was the sudden image of the first half of a bridge, arriving from somewhere and touching down just in front of me. And a flooding sense of pure joy. Lightness of being. It had been such a long time since he was last here!

You will have guessed who he is. He has various names: Ruach HaKodesh, Pneuma Hagion, Spiritus Sanctus, the Holy Ghost. It feels impossibly presumptuous, imagining that one is receiving a personal visit from the Third Person of the Trinity; and I am quite prepared to be told, and to believe, that the one who came today is “merely” an angel sent by the Ruach. On the other hand, we are told that we may ask for his presence, and that that is one prayer almost certainly answered; and we even learn that if we manage to prepare a suitable dwelling, he and the other two Persons will come and live there full-time. 

Why is such a thought even possible? Because the God who is the collective name for the Trinity is (as the medieval Liber XXIV philosophorum puts it) “a circle whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere”. Because he is both intimate and ubiquitous, holding the Universe in the hollow of his hand and meeting me with absolute love wherever I am and go (Psalm 139). This is conceivable only by learning to unite one’s faith in a Creator with the experience of prayer in one’s inmost closet. It is perfectly and stupendously expressed in the Third Collect for Morning Prayer: “O Lord our heavenly Father, almighty and everlasting God, who has safely brought us to the beginning of this day . . .”

It is at such moments that Theology becomes experience, that Divinity becomes real. Up close and personal. Utterly surprising. Especially if one is not a seasoned mystic, a Benedictine hermit, a San Juan de la Cruz, but an ordinary homme moyen sensuel in a French farmhouse in the Age of Bannon. Surprising, and yet not: completely natural, just also completely festive. 

How to react? I think, by deep down letting go – for the time being, letting him occupy the driving-seat and getting on with the day in a quiet and attentive way, peacefully but minutely attuned to where he turns the wheel. And keeping alive the festivity with an astonished giving of thanks. 

THE JOY OF --- WHAT?

In the readings and general exhortations I encounter in my daily Prions en Eglise, there is constant mention of joy. “Shout and dance for joy, people of God!” “Quiver for joy!” For those of us living outside certain evangelical movements and outside Southern US black churches, this is a curious injunction. For Anglicans/Episcopalians, it is virtually unheard-of, the sort of thing to make us seriously uncomfortable. Why?

Well, we are not a culture given to loud displays of emotion, first of all. Secondly, when we assemble and meet together, we tend to do so either as a quiet, well-behaved group of friends and neighbours, with smiles and murmured greetings, or as individuals in search of reverence, silence, beauty in music and in ritual, and prayer. We may have joy in our hearts, but we remember Jesus’ injunction not to show off while performing our religious duties. 

There is another reason, I suspect. We do not glow with joy because we aren’t sure what we are supposed to feel so rapturous about. When we reach down inside us for the roots of our faith, we will probably come up with the Resurrection (cf 1 Cor. 15:14); but from there to quivering with joy on this Tuesday in June the way is not, for most of us, entirely clear. We are happy that Yeshua rose from the dead, for His sake; we know that it means something important for all Christians, and perhaps for others beyond; but let’s face it, the world seems in at least as big as mess as at any other time since, so shout and dance for joy? Is that a joke? Grim fortitude, in faith, hope and charity as among castaways on a large raft in mid-ocean might seem more appropriate.

The Psalmist, and St Paul, saw it differently. Yeshua Meshiach (“Jesus the Anointed”), in his sacrifice, death and resurrection, saved Israel and by (crucial) extension saved humanity. Saved from what? Saved from the consequences of our unbelief and our non-acceptance of God’s love for us. Not the proximate consequences, usually: shit keeps happening, the planet is in danger, and the bad guys often win. But from the ultimate consequences: from the destruction of our immortal souls, from the hell that awaits all those who have made themselves incapable of living eternally near the radiant source of all love. 

If that does not at least inwardly fill us with a certain trembling and incredulous happiness, it may be because we have trouble envisaging what we have been saved from. We need, perhaps, to pay more attention to Shaitan. Not just as an active shooter, drawing a bead on us at all times and in all places, but also as a terrifying example. He is what we will become like if we refuse the gift. Grim and greedy; eaten up with jealousy; racked with the rage and pain that contemplating beauty and love causes us. Incapable of any pleasure not guilty or corrupt. And yes, it lies in wait for all of us, not least because there is Someone always ready to convince us how much braver and more fun it is to walk the edge of the abyss, and even to dive in.

Nobody alive and breathing is beyond being saved from this, unless he refuses to. As a priest I heard the other day said, that is why the Sin against the Holy Spirit is the only one that cannot be forgiven: because it is the Spirit that saves us, that pulls us out of the deep well we fell into, that rescues us by the skin of our teeth. Refusing Him means you’ve left no chink open to be forgiven through, no pulley for the rope. So here we are, wobbling, doubting, lurching, ridiculous: but saved. Saved. SAVED.

In the light of that, a certain joy is in order. Pour the martinis. Light the candles. Sing a silly song. Dance a bit. Yup. Joy. Remember?

JOYS WE FORGET

Rereading an old hymn the other day – humming it, remembering boyhood chapel services – I was suddenly struck by one line that leapt out at me. As Henry Francis Lyte wrote: “Praise, my soul, the King of Heaven,/ To his feet thy tribute bring;/ Ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven,/ Who like me his praise should sing?”

And those past participle adjectives have been haunting me ever since.

            “Ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven.” How many of us manage to remember that, and/or live as if it were true? What, in any case, does it mean, exactly? 

            Let’s begin with “Ransomed”. It’s a simpler way of saying “redeemed”, and much more understandable. We humans are all sinners. True, when we’re 16 we resent that thought, but as we grow older we realise that it’s perfectly true. If we were not we should live daily in perfect union with God. Obviously, we don’t. Some people are close; but we all sin, in the sense that we do not perfectly return God’s love. In so far as we sin, we give IOUs to Old Nick, who loves lending us opportunities to sin, as he collects paper from all of us in return. But: what happened, one unique time in Israel? Meshiach came, and bought all our debts, making Old Nick an offer he couldn’t refuse (much as he wanted to). What did he buy them with? His life, no less. So he, the Anointed one, the Son of God, risen from the dead, tore up our IOUs – and still does so, for all who entrust themselves to him. Hence we are bought back: Ransomed.We were hostages; we are free.

            “Healed.” A character in a Charles Morgan novel says to another, “The world is very sick, Mr Flower, but you will not cure the patient by kicking him out of bed.” We are sick, many if not all of us: sick unto death. Some of us know it, and awake each morning with a little less vigor, a little less taste for life, a little more gray sadness. Some of us don’t, and live feverish lives “distracted from distraction by distraction”, as Eliot put it. But do we remember that we were baptized? Alternatively, do we realise that we can be baptized? And that that very process heals us, at least begins a cure? A cure that, admittedly, needs to be completed by a daily life of practical thanksgiving, but a cure nonetheless. We are, we really are, Healed.

            “Restored.” Restored to what? Well, if we are both ransomed and healed, we are restored to freedom and health. Anyone who has spent any considerable time deprived of either of these knows what it means to be restored to them. It is the day you walk out of prison and know you can go anywhere in the morning sunshine. It is the day you walk out of hospital, or your sick-room, take a deep breath, listen to the birds, and walk and walk, because you can. Restored indeed.

            And finally perhaps the greatest, or at least the most moving. “Forgiven.” The hardest to remember, because we have been taught that, sinning as we do constantly, we keep needing to ask for forgiveness. “Forgive us our trespasses.” It seems utterly presumptuous to behave as if we had beenforgiven. And yet. We have been told, have we not, that if we sincerely repent and pray wewillbe forgiven. So we need to remind ourselves that even if the process will likely reoccur, we have beenforgiven. And someone who has been forgiven feels as if a huge weight is removed from bowed and lacerated shoulders. Stretches, curls, sighs, smiles, and leaps. Forgiven. What joy. 

            If we could believe all this, really. If we could live, one, or two, or three days a week as if all four of those adjectives were true and applied to us; would there not be a noticeable change in our behavior? Surely there would. Who, we might say, like us His praise should sing? I we were young enough, we might tattoo on the four fingers of one hand, R H R F . As it is, let us tattoo it in our consciousness.                      

NOT KING DAVID?

On many occasions in the Gospels, we are told that Yeshua travelled the length and breadth of the country preaching the eu-angelion, which in Greek means “the good message” but which, as Joseph Ratzinger has reminded us, can also mean something like “the authoritative message”, being used for messages from the king. I wonder how often we stop to consider what the content of that message might have been. 

   For later writers, the authors of the Gospels and the Pauline epistles, the answer seems obvious: the evangelium is Christ Himself. But what, at the time, was the content of His preaching? A hint – a very large hint – is given in what we call the Sermon on the Mount, which may in fact be the conflation of several preachings. It has to do with His relation to the Old Testament commandments, which are not to be abandoned but ‘fulfilled’: internalized, as the Ten Commandments are fulfilled/internalized in the Two. 

   This ‘matter’ of the Sermon is profound and of the greatest possible importance; but is it ‘good news’? I can imagine hearers going home having heard it, in a reflective frame of mind as they apply what they have heard to what they had been taught and then to their own lives; but do they go home rejoicing or, as the modern French Psalm translation puts it ‘quivering with joy’?

   I was led to this meditation by reading all the Old Testament, and particularly the Psalms’, mentions of ‘rejoicing’, ‘shouting and dancing for joy’, and comparing them to the behavior of most believing Christians I know, who tend to live their faith with a profound happiness perhaps but on a daily basis tend to be sober, slightly austere, somewhat worried, and more apt to say ‘Lord, I believe: help thou mine unbelief’ than to quiver with joy.

   Yeshua, of course, wrought miracles of healing almost constantly; yet it often strikes me that he doesn’t seem to consider it central to what his does. He frequently tells those he has healed to keep quiet about it, which in anyone but him would seem disingenuous but which in him seems sincere; on several occasions he forgives the patient his sins and only when challenged about that does he heal him, as an outward and visible sign comprehensible even to the dolts who disputed him.  When Yochanan the Baptist sends to know if he is really the Meshiach, he lists the miracles as evidence – again, not as the core of meaning but as outward and visible signs comprehensible to anyone. 

   So if the healing is the outward and visible sign, what is the inward and spiritual grace? It can only, I think, be the message that the long-awaited Meshiach, the Anointed – both king and priest – has now come; that He is here, in the here and now; that the anxious, hopeful but occasionally almost despairing, waiting is over.

   This must itself have caused a great deal of confusion as well as joy. After all, the general view of the Meshiach was that he would be a new King David, a great political and military leader who would liberate Israel from Roman rule; and here was an itinerant preacher with a small band of disciples, who heals the blind and the lame and comes from Dogpatch, claiming to be Him! Where are his divisions? Where are his battalions? Yet that seems to have been the reaction mainly of the Establishment: the crowds that followed him around the Sea of Galilee appear to have taken this redefinition of Messiahship in their stride. We know that part of his teaching – as in the Nazareth synagogue – was an explanation of his actions in terms of the Book of the prophet Isaiah, which would have at least in part made clear to his hearers that this new and real Meshiach was a king of humility, come to serve rather than be served, and who would not confine liberation to freeing Israel from the Romans but extend it outward to include all nations and deepen it to free people not from political oppressors but from the tyranny of sin.

   Once that sinks in, we can see the healing for what it was: a by-product and an outward and visible sign. What matters is that the Meshiach, who is the new Torah, is here, and that anyone who believes and trusts in him is, as Henry Lyte’s hymn wonderfully puts it, ‘ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven’. That is a matter for quivering with joy – almost unimaginable for reasonable and worldly adults living in a world that oscillates between catastrophe and cynicism. That is what we should meditate upon and ponder. It is eu-angelion: good news from an authoritative source. The ultimate good news from the ultimately authoritative source. Blow your mind.

early image of Christ from the Nunziatella Catacomb, Rome

(?3rd century AD)

IT NEVER RAINS BUT IT POURS

“Now I live; yet not I, but Christ in me” (Galatians 2:20).  This text had long fascinated me, like its counterpart “Your life is hid with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3). And then, recently, I got an inkling of its meaning, or at least of one of its meanings. Life, in its daily round, had been weighting me down, and it was all beginning to feel like one of the grimmer bits from Ecclesiastes. I prayed, as usual, to be taught the Prayer of the Heart, the prayer that prays even when we are not praying; and then, in a few moments, I remembered what I had written about a long time ago: our doors and shutters.

In the Angelus, we pray that God may “pour Thy grace into our hearts”. I’ve always loved that verb and that image. And it occurred to me that in fact that pouring is going on all the time. We live in a perpetual monsoon of grace: pouring out grace upon those He loves is what God does. And when we feel deprived of it, it is usually we who are, with a complex system of shutters and barriers, keeping it out.

If, for once, you don’t, you wake up in the morning and, as a Carthusian put it, you savour the immense gift you are being given, at this precise moment: one whole day. A whole day, of life, of love, of work, of thanksgiving. You give thanks, and you pray that you may not in this day close off your heart and keep out the outpouring that is heading for you. And as you do so, you can hear the faint creak of shutters opening. Some of them are old, fairly massive and jammed shut: they need real effort to dislodge. Some are charming, and part of you opens them with regret: they let through just the tiniest ray of light, in which dust motes danced so prettily; but they too can and must be flung wide.

And as they open, the tide of grace flows in, and you are suddenly filled with a morning sunshine of joy – which will last you all day, if you keep strong winds from closing the shutters again. And as this happens and you revisit that joy from hour to hour, you realise that the less of “you” gets in the way of the flood, the happier the real you will be.

It is “I” that keeps God out all the time. So if I can get “I” out of the way, then grace, i.e. God, can come in. And the result will be, in at least one sense, like Galatians 2:20: “Now I live; yet not I, but Christ in me.” If I can empty the clutter and open the shutters, there will at last be room for Him.