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

OH DEAR

Most of us know the story of the Pharisee and the publican in Luke 18. Well, up to a point. We know that there was this self-righteous hypocrite extremely pleased with himself and sure that God felt the same way about him; and then there was this poor sod who just felt like hell and hoped God would have mercy on him. Now, let's look at this a little more closely. 

The Pharisee was a Pharisee: the word comes from Hebrew perushim, meaning those who are set apart or sanctified; they were the adversaries of the Sadducees, who were classy if Scriptural, while the Pharisees were more democratic but believed that there was also an oral Law and that salvation depended on observance and moral purity. 

However, when you read the story carefully and if you are also in the habit of reading the Psalms, a different angle starts to show. For what is the Pharisee doing? He is doing what we not only are all told to do at all times but in our better moments want to do: he is giving thanks. His prayer is a prayer of thanksgiving. And what is more, it's not just a thanksgiving of the kind 'Gee, Lord, thanks for not making me a shit like Joey there'. It's a serious, lawful, indeed laudable thanksgiving. Let's look at the text.

Two men went up into the temple to pray; the one a Pharisee, and the other a publican.

The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, God, I thank thee, that I am not as other men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican. I fast twice in the week, I give tithes of all that I possess.

Now look at this passage from Psalm 18:20-24:

The Lord rewarded me according to my righteousness; according to the cleanness of my hands hath he recompensed me.

For I have kept the ways of the Lord, and have not wickedly departed from my God.

For all his judgments were before me, and I did not put away his statutes from me.

I was also upright before him, and I kept myself from mine iniquity.

Therefore hath the Lord recompensed me according to my righteousness, according to the cleanness of my hands in his eyesight.

The Pharisee, in other words, is giving thanks in perfect accordance with the Psalmist. His one error, of course, is his mention of 'this publican': that gets it a little close to the bone. Still, it would have been forgiven him by his fellow 'sanctified ones'; and we know that the Psalmist has it in for the ungodly and the wicked at all times, in no uncertain terms. Moreover, the 'publican' is a known collaborator, a stooge of the pagan oppressors: someone to be socially and religiously avoided like the plague. 

So what does this mean for us, in the fifth week of Lent? Suppose you were giving up X, Y and Z for Lent. And by now, in Passiontide, you are led to look back, and you say to yourself 'Hey, so far so good, I've managed it this year: yea!' It could of course refer to something bigger than giving up Scotch or chocolate: any training you have set yourself for this year's Lent. And, unlike previous years, it's working. Now you know that it would be both wrong and, worse, foolish to pat yourself on the back. So what do you do? You give thanks to God for helping you to make it work. And Boom! Ouch! there you run bang into our friend the Pharisee. 

Ok, now, let us avoid our first reaction, i.e. 'Well dammit, I give up. Whatever I do, it's never enough, I'm supposed to feel guilty all the time, what kind of a religion is this anyway?' No. Not. Look at it differently. The Pharisee is not exactly sacrificing a bull, but within the later dispensation he is doing that same thing: he is acting according to God's rules, as laid down by Moses and updated by the Proper Authorities. But he has forgotten two other Psalms, 50 and 51:

I will take no bullock out of thy house, nor he goats out of thy folds. For every beast of the forest is mine, and the cattle upon a thousand hills. I know all the fowls of the mountains: and the wild beasts of the field are mine. If I were hungry, I would not tell thee: for the world is mine, and the fulness thereof. Will I eat the flesh of bulls, or drink the blood of goats? . . . For thou desirest not sacrifice; else would I give it: thou delightest not in burnt offering. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.

No bullocks; no rules; no laws. What Jesus means by the story is that what matters is the heart. And however well our Lent has gone, we are still a bunch of messed-up collaborators with the enemy, and we know it. 'Deus propitius esto mihi peccatori'. Amen.

A GRAVE THOUGHT

Today’s lectionary gave us the story of the raising of Lazarus – one of the most moving of all the Gospel stories, and one that has given many people furiously to think. How did Lazarus look? How did he feel? What did the world look like, after four days in the tomb? Where had he been, those four days?

Two considerations may be relevant. The first is derived from our Algerian parish priest’s sermon, in which he said that the point for us is not only being touched by Jesus’ tears and at the sisters’ emotion, but that we should realize to what degree we too are buried, enclosed in a tomb, often of our own making, unable to rise and come out into the light and air of love. The Epistle was Paul’s letter to the Romans which reminds them that being ‘of the flesh’ hinders one’s approach to God, ‘but you,’ he goes on, ‘are not of the flesh, but of the Spirit’. We need imperatively, said Fr Jean-Kamel, to stop thinking that ‘the flesh’ is invariably linked to sex. Being of the flesh, he said, means being caught in the web of anger, contempt, fear, indignation, and a general rejection of others. I’d add to that that it also means the attitude that of course, for a modern thinking person, stories like the raising of Lazarus are either charming fictions or complex allegories, but that in no case can they be simply true. ‘Life’s a bitch; then you die.’

Jesus called to Lazarus in a loud voice, ‘Lazarus, come out!’ John Donne, praying in his Devotions, which he wrote when almost mortally ill, referred to this and said to God:

I have a grave of sin; senselessness of sin is a grave; and where Lazarus had been four days, I have been fifty years in putrefaction; why dost thou not call me, as thou didst him, with a loud voice, since my soul is as dead as his body was? I need thy thunder, O my God; thy music will not serve me.

This wonderful interpellation of God, as powerful as a Psalmist’s, may serve to start a meditation for this day.

The second consideration is that, as Fr Swain of New York’s Church of the Resurrection announced last week, this Sunday, the Fifth Sunday in Lent, is Passion Sunday. Now, like me, you might not have heard that term used; I looked it up. It is the beginning, traditionally, of Passiontide, which used to be longer than it tends to be today. Statues are veiled; vestments turn from violet to crimson. There is much to be said for ceremony, and I will come back to the subject. In this case, after more than four weeks of Lent, it represents an intensifying, a moving gradually into the meditative condition around the hugeness of Good Friday and Easter. It helps us to remember how huge those occurrences are. It helps us to forget chocolate bunnies and to approach immense and terrifying paradoxes. It helps remind us that had we been there and part of it, we should probably not have done better than, at the very least, Pilate (who intuited the truth but bowed to what he thought was political necessity) or the disciples (who, apart from Peter and perhaps John, took off for parts unknown the minute Jesus was arrested in Gethsemane). It reminds us that for all of us, there are things in our lives we are not proud of, things a great deal bigger than the small gluttonies we ‘give up for Lent’. Veil those statues. Wear the crimson. Hush the music. Face up to the biggies. Admit them, to God if not to a priest. We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts; and there is damn little health in us.

                        Almighty God, who hatest nothing that thou has made,

                        and dost forgive the sins of all them that are penitent;

                        create and make in us new and contrite hearts; that we,

                        worthily lamenting our sins and acknowledging our

                        wretchedness, may obtain of thee, the God of all mercy,

                        perfect remission and forgiveness. Through Jesus Christ

                        our Lord.

If we can recite this without rebellion and realize that, yes, without remission and forgiveness we would be and are fairly wretched; then we are in a fair way to getting ready to receive the immensity of God’s sacrifice and God’s gift (which are one and the same). Things get damn serious, this time of year. But remember: ‘Heaviness may endure for a night; but joy cometh in the morning.”(Psalm 30)

Image: Rembrandt, 'The Raising of Lazarus', Los Angeles County Museum

HAPPY LENT?

For much of my life, Lent has found me feeling rebellious. The fruit trees are in bloom, the forsythia glows golden, the Japanese quinces are patches of Oriental red, you wake to a dawn chorus of newly-joyful birds. You feel like Swinburne’s chorus:

For winter's rains and ruins are over,

And all the season of snows and sins; 

The days dividing lover and lover,

The light that loses, the night that wins;

And time remember'd is grief forgotten,

And frosts are slain and flowers begotten, 

And in green underwood and cover

Blossom by blossom the spring begins. 

And then you are put to school to grief and repentance, you are told to remember what a general misery you are and to acknowledge and bewail your manifold sins and wickedness, in flagrant contradiction of the season. So you half-heartedly try to give up chocolate, occasionally feel, and fight, a twinge of guilt, and roll on Easter.

            It is only since, at 70, I decided that it was time for a new adventure and that the one befitting my age was faith, that I have begun (and only begun) to understand the meaning, and the richness of Lent. As a French clergyman put it recently, one might look at it as an athlete’s training period. Or, to quote an American Benedictine, see it as an annual opportunity to concentrate on what needs doing to become a better recipient of all the grace that stands ready to be poured into one.

            Does anyone still do spring cleaning? I remember it from my youth. The house gets turned upside down, one room at a time, and cleaned to within an inch of its life. (And no one thought that contradicted the season.)

            You are not meant to go around feeling guilt and gloom. But on the other hand, you are encouraged to face up to yourself. Like alcoholics in AA, you are meant to take this opportunity of looking your whole self in the face, including those things that weigh upon you in the night time, those things you wish you had or hadn’t done or said or even thought, those things you’d much rather ignore but which, as any psychologist will tell you, come back through the kitchen door after being chased out the front.

            Faith isn’t psychology, and – again as in AA – you are not expected to deal with all this by yourself. The house to be cleaned is yours, but not only yours; and the Master of the house is ready to lend a hand. So where to begin?

            Like many good things, I learned, Lent is divided into three parts: prayer, fasting, and giving. The big difference with the old days of giving up chocolate is prayer. It’s the joyful basis of the whole thing. Because in conversation with a loving Father, you can look at yourself with complete honesty and see what needs changing and what needs forgiving.

            Fasting I am terrible at, perhaps because we went through a period of famine near the end of WW II when I was 3. Explanation, not excuse. But perhaps there are ways, even for a 21^st-century far-from-monk, to learn. In the first place, it helps to know what it’s for. I only learnt how to give up smoking when there was something I wanted more – rock-climbing – that was incompatible with 16 cigarettes a day. Fasting, or in any case selective abstinence, helps to remind you on a daily basis of the spring cleaning that is going on. As when cleaning house, you are reminded of all the stuff you don’t really need. And it also shows you how much you still have to learn. Christian fasting isn’t Ramadan; but when I see Muslims keeping Ramadan faithfully even in the scorching days of summer, I feel a kind of rueful respect for them, and I’m not proud of myself or most of my supposed co-religionists.

            So to learn fasting, you turn to prayer, again. Prayer is the basis of Lent, I’m finding. Prayer, and reading. This Lent, I’m reading the Psalms in Coverdale’s Prayer Book version (often inaccurate, but delightful: ‘Why hop ye so, ye high hills?”) as the BCP prescribes, morning and evening daily. Also the brief daily readings in a little French Lent booklet; and occasional forays into some Benedictine and Carthusian texts. For one usually more given to James Lee Burke, Robert Harris or Reginald Hill, this is refreshing, and provides far more profound insights into this Lenten business than one would normally have.

            The third pillar of Lent is almsgiving. The etymology of “alms” is from Greek eleos, meaning mercy or compassion. Alms are the material aspect of mercy and compassion, of a fellow-feeling with those who lack. Apart from the fact that it is always good to show solidarity with the needy, you can see how this fits into the Lenten process of spring cleaning. Prayer and reading connect us to God, thus helping us fulfil the First Commandment; almsgiving connects us to our neighbour, thus helping us with the Second.

           And both remind us that Lent is not just about Me, about Becoming a Better Person, like New Year’s resolutions: it is about something far deeper. A Carthusian letter about God’s nature as Love puts the whole thing in a vertiginous perspective: God is Love, and thus has only one desire: to give. To give Himself completely, to us. Too often he finds our houses closed: doors shut, shutters tight. So he knocks. Do we hear? Only if we have taken off our skull candy headphones. Only if we aren’t texting. Only if we are in a condition to hear, and to open ourselves. That’s what Lent is about: getting into condition to be helpless, humble, receptive, and open. So that we can receive the huge joy He can’t wait to give.