This is a rambling
post; but I was trying to think through some ideas, and react to some things I’d
heard, and I thought I’d share the thoughts.
“Their delight in the Law is a delight in having touched
firmness; like the pedestrian’s delight in feeling the hard road beneath his
feet after a false short cut has long entangled him in muddy fields.” (C.S.
Lewis on Psalm 119 in Reflections on the
Psalms) It was Lewis who first made me realise that the Torah and the Old
Alliance gave the people of Israel the joy of a clear way through a trackless
desert – or a firm path through a muddy field or, worse, a bog of quicksand. It
was a clear and firm guidance.
Now in his admirable Jesus of Nazareth, Pope Benedict XVI alias Joseph Ratzinger explains that in
the New Alliance Jesus is himself the new
Torah. So that on the one hand not a jot or tittle of the old Law will be
annulled, because it is fulfilled in him; on the other hand the Son of Man is
Lord of the Sabbath, and whoever believes in him – follows him -- will have
eternal life.
If this is so (and it seems to me
magnificently plausible), then this new Torah and this New Alliance should give
the new Israel, the community of believers i.e. the Church, a similar joy: they
are not told how to cross the desert,
they are shown. Not a road map but a
living guide.
So is this WWJD (What Would Jesus
Do)? Up to point, yes: always a good start. But it’s not just a matter of
imitating deeds: following him means going much further, and following him –
for example – into the High Priestly Prayer, into the heart of God: it means
the Transfiguration, it means the forty days in the desert. It means knowing
the Old Alliance and its texts almost by heart. And it leads, we mustn’t
forget, to the Cross. He is the King of Jews; he is the King of the world, says
Ratzinger. But he reigns from the Cross: there is the paradox the Sanhedrin
couldn’t accept and that intelligent but cowardly Roman Pontius Pilate could
only recognise in irony. Tragedy, then? No: because the Cross, when not avoided
but accepted, leads in turn to the Resurrection – “and death shall be no more:
Death, thou shalt die” (John Donne).
This is a joy far greater even that
the path through the desert. So the new Israel should be filled with
incredulous happiness, a beacon of alegria
throughout history. Its two chief elements have names that begin with the
prefix “Good”: eu-angelion (the authoritative Good
Message) and eu-charistia (the Good Thanksgiving). So
why is the New Alliance so rarely communicated, and felt, as joy?
I was listening the other day on
French radio to the delightful Cardinal Barbarin (archbishop of Lyon) explaining
Pope Francis’ text Evangelii Gaudium
(“the Joy of the Gospel”). And time and time again the emphasis – a rather
gleeful emphasis – was on how uncomfortable the Faith ought to make us; how it
should discombobulate us, shake us up, kick us in the fundament and yank us out
of everything we are used to and love. But as
Henry Rydal put it in Charles Morgan’s The
Empty Room, “The world is very sick, Mr Flower, but you won’t cure the
patient by kicking him out of bed.” It’s as if the only saying of Jesus we should
treasure were “I come not to bring peace but a sword”.
If that had been so, I thought,
would thousands have followed him, running,
not walking around the whole of the Sea of Galilee to get to the other shore
before his boat? Would they have flocked to his teaching? Would the two
travellers to Emmaus have felt their hearts on fire within them as he explained
the Torah? The five thousand did not come to be fed: they came to hear him
speak – the bread and the fish were an afterthought. I’ve always been fascinated
by those crowds, who are never mentioned again afterwards. Something must have
remained in their very ordinary lives --
something sweeter than the honeycomb, as John Ruusbroec said, following
the Psalms.
To hear some current church
authorities, Jesus was understood only by twelve men, and that most
imperfectly; and we must be like them, only better – eleven of them, after all,
ducked Golgotha. We must this, we must that; we emphatically must not the
other; doesn’t it sound like the Law all over again? Is this an eu-angelion? We are told we must be
disciples, in order to be Christians. But there were only twelve of those, out
of all the thousands. What about those who, He said, were saved by their faith
but who did not spend the rest of their time following him around – the
paralytic, the centurion, the woman with the issue of blood? Their lives,
certainly, were changed; they walked in a fog of happiness for some days, then
went on living normally, yet with a new sweetness that must have radiated in their
little towns and neighbourhoods.
As Ratzinger says, the key to
following him lies in the Beatitudes, especially the pure in heart. They shall see
God. Like Abraham; like Moses. Perhaps those nameless ones I’m thinking of
had their hearts made pure by seeing him, touching his garment, listening to
his words. Perhaps they, as much as the Twelve (who, remember, could still
argue, and in his presence, about rank and precedence in Heaven!), saw God.
After all, they saw, and some of them really
saw, Him: and “who has seen me, has seen the Father”.
Good deeds are important; they are
humanly important. They come in many different forms, from the Boy Scout’s good
deed to the NGO’s aid worker’s, but also from the church-music composer’s motet
to the Carthusian monk’s prayer. As C.S. Lewis (him again) put it: “Not nice
people, but new men”. Even the hearts of the best of us are pure only in spots,
like the Curate’s Egg: our vision of God is blurry and occasional. But even
blurry and occasional, it remains to haunt us.
What is it like? What was it like,
for those people in Galilee? They saw a man, in some ways ordinary; but there
was something. To me, the most convincing imaginary portrait of Jesus has
always been Rembrandt’s: a youngish Jewish man with long dark hair – and those
eyes. Because when they saw him, the ones who really saw him saw through him. They saw more – this, I
suspect, is where the halo comes from.
Contrary to some sentimental
portraits, they did not see someone down in the gutter, the Highest of the High
having become the Lowest of the Low. Yeshua bar Yosef was at first a
respectable Galilean artisan, running the family carpentry firm; then he became
a noted itinerant rabbi admired for his learning and followed by crowds, who
taught in synagogues and in the Temple. He wasn’t a little weakling because he
walked and walked and walked, everywhere. So what they saw was, as E.V. Rieu
put it in his Introduction to The Four
Gospels, “tremendous power, rigidly controlled”. And the ones who saw
through him saw, intermittently and blurred but frighteningly, God. “Depart
from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” was Peter’s reaction (Luke 5:8). And
John – the only disciple who didn’t duck Golgotha – thinking back as an old
man, found the words: “The Word was with God; and the Word was God…. And the Word
was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of
the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.”
Image: Rembrandt van Rijn, "Head of Christ"
