ON THE ROAD

Yesterday’s reading was the story about Cleopas and his friend walking to Emmaus from Jerusalem. The Hebrew name of Emmaus was Hammat, which means Warm Springs; it lay about 7 miles NW of the city, 2-3 hours on foot. The two are referred to as “disciples” of Jesus, which reminds us that the Twelve were not the only ones to be known as such. Deeply depressed, they can’t stop talking about the horrors of the last few days.

Then, as happens on foot journeys in a pre-mechanized world, another traveller joins them, and they walk on together. He wants to know what they are so depressed about. “Hey,” they say, “Where have you been, man? Are you the only one who hasn’t heard?” “No, what?” he replies. And they tell him. “There was this great prophet, Jesus of Nazareth. He was awesome: all he said and did, you wouldn’t believe. A real prophet, and a major one. We all thought he was going to liberate Israel. And then the chief priests and co. had him crucified!”

“Really?” says their new companion. “Yes; and this is where it goes from horrible to weird. Some of the women in our crowd went to the tomb; they found it open and empty, with a couple of angels sitting on the stone. And the angels told them He was alive. So some of our men went there to check up on this women’s tale; and they found it just as the women had said, minus the angels: tomb open, tomb empty, no Jesus.”

“OK,” says the newcomer. “I know how you feel; but you guys have it all wrong.” So he starts talking, like a good learned Jew, beginning with Moses, and doubtless spending a good deal of time on Isaiah; and for an hour or more he explains how the Meshiach was supposed to go through all this, and suffer, and die, precisely in order to liberate, not only Israel but everyone.

Boy, are they impressed. This man really knows his stuff; and when they hear it explained like that, they begin to have an inkling that maybe what happened was not simply the horror and the weirdness. Meanwhile, they’ve reached Warm Springs, and it’s getting dark. “Hey, stay and have dinner with us,” they say. Well, he demurs a bit, but in the end they persuade him. So they sit down, and as he is clearly a rabbi, they ask him to say the blessing. So he takes the bread and breaks it, and begins “Baruch atta Adonai Eloheinu melech ha'olam hamotzi lehem min ha'aretz.....”

OMG. (Literally.) They have heard that voice before. And suddenly they see him with new eyes, and realize it’s Him. And ---- and then He vanishes, and there are just the two of them at table, with the bread and the wine and the rest of the meal. And they look at each other the way people do, and say “I knew it. I knew it. Remember how thrilling it was when He explained it all? Didn’t our hearts burn within us?”

Dr Luke does not relate what happened to Cleopas and his friend afterwards; but I can think of few ordinary blokes in history I’m more inclined to be jealous of.

The images are by Rembrandt.

INCREDIBLE!

So what about the Resurrection? There can't be many people in our Western culture who haven't heard of it. Most, these days, don't think about it and would say, if pressed, they don't believe a word of it. Those of us who claim to be members of the Christian faith, however, can't get out of it. We have to face up it; and I sometimes wonder how many of us actually really and truly believe it happened -- not as a symbol, not as a myth, not as a legend, not as an archetype, but as a real happening in a world where two astonished, dumbfounded women get to touch, with their own hands, the hands and feet of the Risen One. A world where the fishermen, sad, defeated, but getting on with the job, come back from a night catch and see a little fire on the beach with fish grilling on it and a real, solid Person sitting next to it and saying "Come and have a bite of breakfast!"

How many of us, even as we say the words of the Creed, in our heart of hearts really believe that in that simple, vast, unimaginable way, it happened? And then, the corollary: how many of us, especially those not fundamentalist evangelicals, can genuinely get our minds around the idea that when we come to our last moment on this earth we will not just wink out? And that this is because of what happened during that one real and actual night in the year -- well, 33 or 29 or so?

I grew up in an atmosphere, a culture, where when religion was discussed this sort of question was avoided. Some people were ready to say that they thought there might be "something" after death, but most just didn't want to talk about it much. Later, in Canada, I belonged for a few years to an Anglican Church where the Rector, though a fine and buoyant man, I'm sure did not believe in the Resurrection.

And yet St Paul says, "If Christ did not rise [from the dead], what we preach is worthless and your faith is worthless."(1 Cor. 15:14) That is strong stuff. I'm not sure I know anyone who has no problem with this; if I did, that would be someone I'd worry about.

Today is the day we celebrate the Resurrection -- His, and ours. I think we ought to do it thoroughly. After all, one of the Inklings, C.S. Lewis or Tolkien, once wrote that if you act as if you believe long enough, you're likely to  end up believing. And if the little worm of doubt still raises its deformed snout in us, we can truly say -- as we go on celebrating -- "Lord, I believe: help thou mine unbelief."

UNDER THE PREPARATION, SILENCE. WOMEN.

Holy Saturday is a deeply strange day. In my youth, as a Dutch liberal Protestant, it wasn’t anything much: just the day between Bach’s St Matthew Passion on Good Friday and the sunny festivity of Easter morning, with painted eggs on the breakfast table, flowers everywhere, and church at 10 or 11. So Saturday was mainly the day you prepared Sunday.

The first time  I saw something different was in Toronto, where I had discovered the marvellously medieval Church of St Mary Magdalene, with its bare almost undecorated interior, its two superb choirs (it had been Healey Willan’s church), and its punctilious and quite beautiful liturgy, full of incense and austere plainchant.

They, I found, had something called an “Easter Vigil”. All news to me. So one year I went, and was astonished. What took my breath away was coming into the church on Saturday and finding, first of all, that ordinary parishioners had been kneeling and praying there uninterruptedly since the day before; and then all the statues veiled in purple and (the real shock) on the altar the Tabernacle, open and empty. Never had (or have) I felt so piercingly the sense of abandonment that the first followers must have felt on the day after the Crucifixion.

So Holy Saturday is a time of thinking about that, I find. Of course it’s also the preparations for Easter, cleaning the house, hiding the eggs for the children, ironing that new dress, etc. – a creeping joy. But at the same time that weird sense of emptiness, and thinking back to the way it must have been for them.

Was it a shock? Well, for the ones closest to Jesus it wasn’t as if they hadn’t been told what was going to happen. But that’s the way life works: you are told what’s going to happen, yet you can’t truly believe it and go on as if. (Look at climate change.) And then it happens. So what did they do? First, they took off. Two, we know, came back: Peter until the cock crowed, John to be there to the end, with Mary and the other women. The others we don’t hear of till well afterwards. Joseph of Arimathea was there, and took care of the burial, decent man. John took care of Mother Mary. But on the Saturday, the only people still there, sitting by the tomb, were women. Mary of Magdala, and Mary of Bethany, Lazarus’ sister.

What were their thoughts? Did they remember that He had spoken of resurrection? And if so, were they the only ones who did? All the same, they must have wondered. The death had been so awful: the He could die at all, first; that He had to die in the most beastly and humiliating manner; that He had suffered so excruciatingly; that He – He, the Meshiach! – had cried out that heart-rending opening of Psalm 22; that He had been laid to rest, an emaciated corpse, sadly shrouded in a freshly-hewn tomb; and then? Nothing. The Nothing of silence, while the world continued on its metalled ways of appetency.

It was always the women who laid out the dead, and mostly the women who did the mourning. And on Holy Saturday, it’s the women I think of: the women who, with John, were the closest human beings to Jesus the man. Three women called Miriam, or Mary. The one who had been there at that wedding and told the servants to do what He would tell them, to whom He had upon occasion been extremely rude, and who had had to watch her child die; the one who had attached herself to him as a follower and whose legendary past and voluptuous tresses we may or may not believe in; and that quiet listener, that silent intense friend who taken on board everything He had to say and may have been one of the very few who actually understood.

As we get ready the eggs, the flowers, the tablecloths, the leg of lamb or whatever takes its place; as we dress the house and ourselves; whether or not we go to an Easter Vigil tonight, with its silent meditation and then its sudden flame, its bright lights and its glorious music; let us keep in mind the emptiness of the Tabernacle, and the women. Just for today.

I owe the image of the two Marys to Mr T.V. Anthony Raj, aka Tvaraj, a photographer and a devout and curious layman who is my age and has a fine Gospel blog. The women remind me of Leonardo.

THE CENTRAL POINT OF SPACE

This is a reproduction of a historical crucifixion-cross, in Nazareth Village. The photograph is not good, but it is in a glass case and impossible to photograph well. It is much smaller than we usually imagine; the wood is rough and unfinished; the victim would carry only the cross-bar to the place of execution, where the post would already be fixed in place. 

The Cross: two bars of bitter wood

the image of our shame:

for when the Son of Light and Good

for our redemption came

and loved and healed us where we stood,

we savaged Him with blame.

The Cross, where all directions meet,

the central point of space:

we drove Him there, on bleeding feet,

with slow and stumbling pace

till, thorn-crowned, in the noonday heat

He lifted up His face.

The Cross, that raised Him up on high

to suffer through the hours,

to thirst, to bleed, to break, to die

abandoning His powers;

while we were marble to His cry

deliverance was ours.

The Cross, now central point of time,

meeting-place of our prayer

where, maculate with sin and grime

beyond what we can bear,

we meet Love’s harmony and rhyme

and brightness in the air.

The Cross: two bars of living wood,

the image of His grace:

it stands where our despair once stood,

it centres time and space,

and brings us to the Light and Good

to kneel before His face. 

I originally wrote this hymn for the Feast of the Holy Cross, but it seemed appropriate to Good Friday. The tune is Morwellham.

IT'S AMORE

As an elderly lawyer once said, “All this Love is a sad mistake.” I’ve had occasion to write before about being ordered to love, and the other day I cited Fr Jean-Kamel on pondering “with what love we are loved”. In English, and in French, these days it’s all quite simple. “Love. Love. All you need is Love.. Love is all you need.” From a rank enseamèd bed to New Age fluff, it’s a panacea if not a pangaea.

But if I take Fr Jean-Kamel’s enthusiastic cry as a real, not a rhetorical, question, I ask not De quel amour nous sommes aimés but De quel amour sommes-nous aimés? And I go to look at original texts, because the New Testament and the Old are full of love and charity but seem remarkably free of sentimentality.

“Charity” is now out of fashion except as a legal definition for tax purposes. In modern translations, it’s all “love”. But what is? In Koinè Greek (the sort of Greek spoken, often badly, all over the Mediterranean in Jesus’ time, like English today) there are three nouns for “love”: Eros, Agapè, and Philia. The writers of the New Testament tried hard not to let Eros into anything they wrote – well, they would, wouldn’t they? (We in our time know, to our cost, how hard it is to keep the little pest out of anything.) So they were left with Philia, a good Classical word for affection, as between spouses, really good friends, and parents & children (one hopes).  And they adopted a slightly less usual word derived from the verb “Agapao”, to which I’ll come back in a minute.

But most of these blokes were Jews and thought in Hebrew or Aramaic. So when they wrote about Philia and Agapè, what were they translating, if only in their minds?

Hebrew, bless it, has lots of words for love and affection. The most common are Ahab (which I’ve seen described as a love you feel, and feel spontaneously), Hesed (the love/loyalty belonging to a bond, a relationship: the love felt by God for Israel, and presumably the love referred to by Cordelia), and Racham (a compassionate love, one assumes the love felt by the Samaritan for the poor bloody victim of a mugging).

The thing we have to remember is that the authors of the Gospels were making up translations as they went along. So they used Philia for the love Jesus had for Lazarus – which was strong enough not only to have him resurrect Lazarus but to weep over his grave first. Jesus doesn’t weep a lot in the Gospels. So don’t knock Philia: it’s what you have for your three very closest friends, as well as for your 9-year-old and for your ageing parents whose lives you would trust them (the friends) with.

So what about Agapè? Well, the verb (agapao) is used in both the Great Commandments, for “loving” the Lord your God and “loving” your neighbour as yourself. But it also the verb used for Jesus’s relation to John: he was “the disciple that Jesus loved”. In the Church’s nervousness about avoiding Eros, it has often described “charity” (from caritas, the Latin translation of agapè) in rather bloodless and dutiful ways. Even “loving-kindness” doesn’t really cut it for most of us.

So I’ll share my own candidate, which seems to work in almost all cases, though still not easy in some (the First Commandment, for example). I would translate “agapao” as “to cherish”. Etymologically and intelligibly, it refers to something or someone (can work for both) that you “hold dear”, something or someone that you hug to you because you hold it/him/her dear beyond price. (“Dear” after all is the old word for “expensive, pricey”.) But “cherish” also has a massive feeling-content to it. “I cherish you” is something deep, rare, and fine to say to someone.

So de quel amour sommes-nous aimés, with what love are we loved, especially this Holy Thursday, tomorrow at the dreadful foot of the Cross, and on Sunday after the unimaginable? We are loved with a love that cherishes us. We are the ones – not just as a collectivity, like the Nation of Israel, but individually, like the wounded traveller, like the sad woman saved from stoning, like Lazarus trying to get used to daylight – we are ones the Maker of the Universe, our very own Father, cherishes.

To die for. 

PARADOX?

Cited by David Brooks on this day of Passover, the 20th-century philosopher Eliyahu Dessler wrote, “the ultimate aim of all our service is to graduate from freedom to compulsion.” As I read this, I thought of the Second Collect in the Anglican service of Morning Prayer: "Oh God, who art the author of peace and lover of concord, in knowledge of whom standeth our eternal life, whose service is perfect freedom . . ." The Latin original has cui servire regnare est, literally "to serve whom is to reign". It is, perhaps, in the end the same paradox. Brooks, distantly following Dessler, sees an education into obedience, into the multiple "sweet compulsions . . . of love, friendship, family, citizenship, faith, a profession or a people." The Collect sees only one. Rav Dessler would probably have said that they are ultimately all one. But the Collect goes straight to the heart of obedience: to serve God is perfect freedom. It is the only perfect freedom. Matthew 6:33: "But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you."

How and why is this? Our local Algerian priest, Fr Jean-Kamel, in his Palm Sunday sermon, said passionately that Holy Week, while it is in one sense an entry into mourning, is also the deepest sounding of joy: "Just think," he said, "de quel amour nous sommes aimés!" Think, ponder, with what love we are loved! This is the meditation of this time, whether one celebrates Passover or Easter. With what love we are loved. And the more deeply one enters into this, the more one wants to seek first the "kingdom of God", which is of course regnum Dei, the reign of God, the dispensation, the all-enveloping presence of that love.

Unlike the Nirvana of Buddhism, this is not something one can reach. Another paradox: you can seek it, but you cannot reach it, attain to it by any form of self-improvement. You can seek it, but the only way you can find it is by realizing that it is seeking you, and opening yourself to it. And when a few of the shutters on your windows start opening, you realize that indeed "all these things" -- the other things, like peace, happiness, love to and from other people -- are being added unto you, bit by blossoming bit. 

The whole thing, you dimly perceive -- because this is a long journey --, is a journey from false freedom, what you thought was freedom when you were 15, to real freedom, which, like the peace that accompanies it, passes all understanding.