SEEING ON A WINDY DAY

Fortunate are the clean in heart, because they shall see God.

Makarioi hoi katharoi tèi kardiai, hoti autoi ton theon opsontai.

 

This Beatitude seems simple. Katharos means, at bottom, simply ‘clean’ but goes on to a host of further kinds of cleanliness: ‘purified’ as in water or grain, ‘free of pollution’, ‘free of additions’. And it quickly goes on to the human, where it can mean ‘free of debt’, ‘free of defilement’, ‘honourable’ and even, as for a priest, ‘ceremonially pure’. Kardia is the heart, the seat of feelings and passions, but also the inclination, desire or purpose, and the kardia of wood is its core or pith. And opsontai is the future of horaō, which means ‘to see or behold’.

 

So just as those who are poor in spirit will inherit the earth, so those whose heart is clean, pure, free of pollution, honourable, will see God. Simple.

 

Yet the Gospel of Yochanan, John, says ‘No one has seen God at any time’. (John 1:18) Has there never been one who is pure in heart? If this were so, the Beatitude would not be a joyous promise but at worst a savage criticism and at best a Yeshuan hyperbole, like ‘If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you.’ Surely this is not what is meant here.

 

I suspect that we have to ponder and probe the seeing. We know that here on earth we see ‘as through a glass, darkly’, and that sin, the lack of love, can make us blind to many things. We also know that in such a condition grace may help us: ‘I once was lost, but now am found; was blind, but now I see.’ Note that we do not help ourselves: Christianity is not like Buddhism, a constant activity of scrupulous self-help to eliminate the dross, to make oneself pure. We are dependent, even for our daily bread. Only grace can make us pure, only the Spirit, the pneuma, the ruach, can make us katharoi. What we can do, what we need desperately to do, is to clear away the junk blocking the doors and windows, and to open them as wide as we can to let the pneuma (which is breath, wind, and spirit) in.

 

And when we do that, when He, that third person of the Trinity, does enter, when the wind blows where it listeth in our soul, then it brings with it the sun: the sun that is also the Son, and the glorious sun that is the emblem of the Father. And then we see God. Not with the eyes of our lurching, rebellious body, perhaps; but with the inward eye that is the bliss, not only of solitude but of faith.

 

 

 

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.  

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

 

“Fortunate are those who hunger and thirst for justice, for they will be fed.”

Makarioi hoi peinōntes kai dipsōntes tèn dikaiosunèn, hoti autoi chortasthèsontai.

 

In our time, in Western societies, those who ‘hunger and thirst for justice’ tend to be those we see on television demonstrating in the streets for a righteous cause, usually on behalf of some group of people less fortunate. But in simpler societies, the people indicated in this sentence are the downtrodden, the oppressed, the cheated themselves, hungering and thirsting for justice. And the ’justice’ referred to here is not ‘social justice’ but downright legal justice as meted out by a righteous judge. We get a picture of the situations meant when we read the Psalms. Time and again we meet references to false witnesses, to the poor being robbed of what little they have, of unjust judges and neighbourhood tyrants: the overall picture is more that of some Neapolitan slum with its slumlords and its judges in the pocket of the Mafia. Here it is the poor who are the victims and who hunger and thirst for equitable justice, for honest judges, for witnesses who will tell the truth. They do not ask for charity; all they want and need is for decent institutions manned by decent people who will award them what they are entitled to. And this need goes right to the bone. It is not something that it would be nice to have: it is as necessary as the most basic food and drink.

 

The victims are turned out of their meagre lodgings, they are impoverished by being forced – sometimes at sword- or gun-point – to pay the vig on a desperate loan, they are jailed for stealing food for their children. So, in the Psalms that are so often the background, the score, the text for Yeshua’s words and actions, they cry to the heavens: ‘Up, Lord, do something!’ ‘Lord, judge thou my cause: thou seest that I am innocent!’ And all too often, nothing happens, the heavens do not open, the oppressors are not struck by lightning.

 

This, I think, is the background to this Beatitude. In the Reign of God that is now beginning; under the new Torah, the new Law that will go further than the old because it is a Law of Inwardness; the poor who hungerand thirst for justice, for righteousness, for simple decency, will be fed. Again, this metaphor of feeding is so often met in the Psalms -- ‘my soul shall be satisfied as with marrow and fatness’ – and in the closely-related Isaiah: ‘And in this mountain shall the Lord of hosts make unto all people a feast of fat things, a feast of wines on the lees, of fat things full of marrow, of wines on the lees well refined.’ For those who often go hungry, in a world where the rich are fat and the poor mere skin and bones, the promise of being fed, well fed, richly fed, is a pleasure and a joy. 

 

Now: why and how ‘will’ this happen under the new Law? Is it a promise for some unimaginable time in the future, to be realised in one great sweep by a distant Saviour? Is Yeshua’s audience being promised ‘pie in the sky’? I think we should read it differently. The basileia tou Theou, the regnum Dei, the Kingship (not ‘Kingdom’!) of God is that of the Meshiach; the Meshiach in question is Yeshua; therefore, it is here and now. On the other hand, it has to be realised by humans. So the key is the new Torah of Inwardness. What will feed the hungry is the fact that a judge who believes in Yeshua and ‘follows his words’ cannot give unjust judgements; a man who believes in Yeshua, if he is called as a witness, cannot give false testimony; a landlord who believes in Yeshua cannot cheat or brutally evict a tenant family. Once again, what is spoken here is the description of a situation that has not hitherto been brought about but that will be – and in the English translation shall, must be – brought about. 

GENTLY NOW . . .

 

Makarioi hoi praeis, hoti autoi klèronomèsousin tèn gèn: ”Fortunate are the gentle, for they shall inherit the earth.”

 

In his television series (later a book) “Civilisation” Lord Clark wrote “We are so much accustomed to the humanitarian outlook that we forget how little it counted in earlier ages of civilisation. Ask any decent person in England or America what he thinks matters most in human conduct: five to one his answer will be "kindness." It's not a word that would have crossed the lips of any of the earlier heroes of this series. If you had asked St. Francis what mattered in life, he would, we know, have answered "chastity, obedience and poverty"; if you had asked Dante or Michelangelo, they might have answered "disdain of baseness and injustice"; if you had asked Goethe, he would have said "to live in the whole and the beautiful." But kindness, never. Our ancestors didn't use the word, and they did not greatly value the quality — except perhaps insofar as they valued compassion.”

 

I used to agree with this, and think that it was perhaps the Victorians who made the change; and broadly I still do. But there is a precedent, and I believe it is in the Third Beatitude. It is usually remembered, because of the Authorised Version, as saying that “Blessed are the meek”, and that translation has caused untold harm. “Meek” is not an adjective most people sense as positive or attractive: it conjures up images of a donkey bowing under a rain of blows from a cruel master’s stick; of oppressed or tyrannised people too passive to rebel; of Nietszche’s characterisation of Christianity as “slave morality”. But if we look at the Greek praos, the meanings given are subtly different. Of things, it is “soft, mild” as in a mild breeze; of animals, it is “gentle, tame” as of a horse not restive; of persons, it is “mild, gentle, meek” – in a case in Herodotus, of one who has been toweringly angry and subsides into being praos again. 

 

So I think it would be much better to translate its use in the Beatitude as “gentle” or “kind”, thus providing a precedent for that long-underrated value mentioned by Lord Clark. The praeis, then, are the “dear hearts and gentle people” that Bing Crosby sang (nostalgically) about as living in his home town in Idaho. And who, indeed, live everywhere, though they are only very rarely in the news. And being gentle, they are of course often taken advantage of, trodden upon, ignored, looked down on, sneered at, the butt of those (like Nietzsche) with “stronger, tougher” values. 

 

They also live, though, in all our memories. Almost all of us remember one or more truly gentle persons we knew when we were young. And we are certainly right in that, because the young have an unerring feeling for true gentleness in adults. And later we remember amusing posters calling for “random acts of kindness” which resonated because we had known such acts, and perhaps even from time to time performed them. 

 

Now, why are the gentle fortunate? Because, says Yeshua in a breathtaking sweep, “they shall inherit the earth”, no less. The planet, the whole kit and caboodle. Inherit it, as heirs; take possession of it, as the Children of Israel took possession of Canaan; be given it,  be left it, take possession of it, own it. And, my children, this is the new Law. This is the new Torah. The earth will no longer belong to the strong, the mighty, the superrich, the One Percent, the strongmen and dictators, the Führers and the corporations. It will belong to the gentle, the kind. In a way, this continues the First Beatitude, in its reversal of the values we take for granted. The basileia, the kingly rule, of Heaven will belong to the Beggars of the Spirit, while the earth will belong to the Gentle, the Kind. 

 

And while the Greek leaves it at that, the English translators added a twist that Yeshua himself might have approved: they changed “will” to “shall”. Now those of us old enough to remember prescriptive grammar recall that “shall” can mean a simple future only in the first person, singular or plural: in the third person, as here, “shall” combines future with imperative in a uniquely compact way. So, faced with the new Law, we should not simply wait for it to happen, but get on with making it so, in every small way we can. 

 

GOOD GRIEF

 Makarioi hoi penthountes, hoti autoi paraklèthèsontai. ”Fortunate are they that mourn: for they shall be consoled.”

            Very different from the first Beatitude, this one. It refers, not to the nature or character of the fortunate ones, but to a condition arising from a specific situation. 

 

            The situation involving the verb pentheō is usually death; and the root of the consoling verb is the same as that of the Paraclete: the Defender sent to help us when we are the prisoner at the bar: the Holy Spirit. This may help us understand what is meant. All of us are mortal; hence all of us except the loneliest will at some time be mourners. Mourning is not the same as grief: it is a reaction to grief. Psychologists speak of the “work of mourning” – a task that needs to be undertaken and accomplished before life can go on. And in traditional societies it is a very outwardly-evident work, undertaken collectively by family, friends and acquaintances; visible and audible in wearing black (or, in the Far East, white) and keening or wailing, in keeping vigil, in sitting Shiva: a work of the community of which the deceased was a part. This is added to, and partly absorbs, the individual grief of the nearest and dearest, thus already providing a level of consolation: a sorrow shared is a sorrow halved or at least reduced.

 

            Beyond this comes the Paraklètos. Why, here, a Defender? A friend summoned to help us in court? In the modern, psychological sense because guilt is always a part of mourning. We feel we could have, should have, been closer, more supporting, more positive, a better friend, lover, spouse to the deceased. In mourning, a part of us is always the prisoner at the bar. And the Judge is He ‘in whose sight no man living is justified’. As always, for now, He is silent, which only increases our apprehension. Someone once wrote that Hell is the confirmation of all our worst thoughts about ourselves as  definitively true.

 

            But here comes the Defender. As invisible to earthly eyes as the Judge, he wraps himself around us and brings to remembrance all that is good in us, and notably the fact that we have been bought back – at a high price. Bought back: “redeemed”, like a pledge, or a hostage. And bought back by that other Person of the Trinity: the Judge’s own Son. If we were worth buying back, redeeming, by him at the cost of his own life, and if we recognise and accept that, then surely, says the Defender, we are free? Free, and consoled. For moreover, those for whom we mourned are now in the direct presence and care of Him who loves them as He loves us. 

 

            “Blessed are they that mourn; for they shall be comforted” says the Authorised Version. And perhaps here that version of makarioi is truly a good one.

 

ADVENT AND BLESSEDNESS

In the Advent of this most peculiar calendar year, and thus in the beginning of a new liturgical year, it seemed to me that a few thoughts on the Sermon on the Mount might not be out of place. The Sermon, after all, is, we are told, the new Torah, the new Law; so that just as in Lent , before the celebration of the Redeemer we may usefully study the Law the obedience to which we invariably muck up enough to need redeeming. 

As in the New Testament, specifically Matthew's Gospel, I thought I would begin with what are usually known as the Beatitudes; of which the first is

BLESSED ARE THE POOR IN SPIRIT, FOR THEIRS IS THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN

We do not know what Yeshua said in Aramaic, but whoever translated the shorthand notes of ‘Matthew the Exciseman’ into clear if clumsy Greek said it thus: ‘Makarioi hoi ptōchoi tōi pneumati, hoti autōn hè basileia tōn ouranōn.’  Let’s try to parse this. Makarios (some us are old enough to remember a Greek political bishop of that name) means ‘fortunate, lucky’ more than religiously ‘blessed’: but St Jerome clearly thought this unworthy of both the speaker and the occasion and translated it as Beati; and all English translators from Wyclif on followed him. A ptōchos in ordinary Greek is a beggar: here, though, it is at once metaphorised by being followed by ‘in the spirit’ (spiritus/pneuma/ruach, the great noun of which the meaning runs from Him Who brooded over the primeval waters in Genesis to the breath that comes out of our nose or mouth.  So it does not necessarily limit itself to the beggar in rags at the gate: a rich man may well be ptōchos tōi pneumati.

            Considering that these people, whoever they are, are fortunate, because theirs is the rule of the heavens, it seems important to find out who and what they are. How is one poor in spirit? To start with the highest: one cannot imagine that the Heavens will be ruled by those who have little of the Holy Spirit. Poor, perhaps, in divine inspiration? In a year of Covid-19 there are of course many who are poor in breath and hooked up to respirators; but those surely also are not meant. (If I sound deliberately obtuse it is because I’m trying to recover the way this must have read to those original readers who were not already converted.) The consensus among theologians is that those who are meant are those who are spiritually poor, and especially who are so in their own estimation: those who know that they have few resources and that they are dependent on the Father for literally everything. It is those who have that kind of humility, and therefore that kind of instinctive trusting dependence on the Father, who – beggars as they feel themselves to be – are fortunate, He reassures them. Why? Because theirs is – to them rightfully belongs – the basileia, the kingship, the rule, of the heavens. (ouranos in daily Greek was the sky, the vault of heaven, but also the heaven of the deities, a heaven which in the Old Testament’s Psalm 96/7 had become plural.)

            Goodness. The last shall be first, indeed. At least, those who see themselves as the last, those who do not think much of their powers, those who are, in fact, ‘as little children’, utterly dependent on their parent and content to be so because living in complete unquestioned trust. Those who, as Yeshua puts it later on in the same discourse, do not take thought for the morrow, but take each day as the Father sends it. Those who, like the Samaritan trader, interrupt their business trip when they chance upon a bleeding robbery-victim, take him to the nearest pub, tell the landlord to see to him, promise to pay all costs on the return journey, and go on to their destination. Those who, working in a hospital, do not think much about being saintly but just do their job and say a prayer while doing it. Those who, without metaphysics or other philosophy, can see that ‘heaven and earth are full of Thy glory’ because they are so little occupied with their career plan that they have eyes to spot glory, divinity, in all the tiny nooks and crannies where it lodges. 

            They are makarioi. Already here on earth, because being what they are they are happier than others: not given to bitching, kvetching, grouching, glooming, weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth. And this happiness, this good fortune, this makaria, follows them to heaven. To heaven where, true to the ancient Athenian wisdom that governance should be given only to those who do not desire it, they will be placed in charge. It is a comfort to think that Heaven will be ruled by the simple, the einfach, the onefold, those for whom one Father, whose Will they happily do from day to day, is enough. 

            Now, who are they? Referred to here as a class, they might appear to us as people with a specific gift. Poverty of spirit: well, A has it, B doesn’t. Like blue eyes, or an inborn talent for mathematics. But the whole trend of the Sermon is not that way. The Sermon is the new Torah. The fulfilled, not the abolished, Torah. The Torah fulfilled in inwardness. So it is filled with what we should learn, learn to do, learn to understand, learn to become, as was the old Torah: see Psalm 119, which is a lingering love-song to that old Torah. Hence the ptōchoi tōi pneumati, those lucky, fortunate people, those makarioi, are Us. They are what we could be. What we should be. What we may be, if we learn not to be too clever or too ambitious or too rebellious for our own good.  

SO WHAT'S IT ALL ABOUT, THEN (AND NOW)?

a nasty dogma (cf Psalm 59)

A recent discussion with a friend about religion, church, and dogma set me thinking about such things, and trying to work them out. I post the result here in case it may be helpful to some. (NB: A None is not a canonical Hour, but someone who to the pollster’s question about one’s religion answers “None”. A Vaguist is, well, vague.)

 

A. What was the Eu-angelion, the content of Yeshua’s teaching?

 

1.     The Law is fulfilled.

2.     Yeshua bar Yosef from Nazareth is the Meshiach.

3.     Yeshua Meshiach is the (new) Law, and the new Temple.

4.     Our role is to be as children: in the innocence of trust, and the trust of innocence.

5.     Yeshua is present with us, in the Eucharist and in prayer.

6.     Our childlike life is to be governed (as He said to Nicodemus) by the two Great Commandments.

7.     The first we obey in prayer (and sometimes in fasting).

8.     The second is exemplified in the Samaritan: we obey it in giving (as he did).

 

 

B. How does one discuss faith with a 21C None? Very difficult. If the occasion arises, perhaps say “Let me tell you my faith, and then you tell me your reactions to those points.” And tell it more or less in the above form. 

 

The points the None will almost certainly make are 1) Auschwitz and 2) earthquakes or the equivalent.  Possible answers:

1) God is Love, and as such his omnipotence is limited (only) by the nature of Love itself, that cannot suspend freedom.

2) God does not micromanage nature. He has left Nature to us, to our care and our intelligence.

 

C. Now, how does one answer a 21C Vaguist? The Vaguist will say “I believe in a Higher Being [perhaps even God]; I am a very spiritual person; but my contact with the Higher Being happens in surroundings of natural beauty. Do NOT ask me to go to, still less to join, a church – they are full of DOGMAS [which, it is understood, are things that bark, bite and – as the Psalmist says -- grin and run about the city].” Again, very difficult.

 

I might start by saying that I too find surroundings of natural beauty congenial to contact with God: after all, He provided them, so addressing Him when in them seems natural, if only to give thanks. 

 

But then one does have to tackle the topic of the church. I might point out that while Creeds are in the singular, all the ancient Christian prayers, beginning with the one taught us by Yeshua, are couched in the first person plural. The early Christians lived their faith most strongly in a community. “Where two or three are gathered together, I will be in the midst of them.”

 

Yes, but what about those horrid DOGMAS? 

1.     Try to imagine what the first centuries of the Christian community were like. Not only were they persecuted, hunted down and killed, but they were trying to work out just what it all meant. What did the Resurrection mean? What is the God we worship like? Father? What kind of a father? And if Yeshua was the Son of God, what does that mean? And if he said, I will send you the Holy Spirit, who is that? They were totally absorbed in a terrible problem of definition: terrible, because their – eternal – lives depended on it. 

2.     So every time they managed to reach some sort of agreement on one bit of the enormous subject, they would file it with a sigh of relief, saying, OK, this one we can now see as settled, let’s go on to the next one. And so the settled one was filed as “something we are sure enough of to teach it”, the Greek word for which is dogma.

 

Of course the real trouble, for a Vaguist, is not with dogmas as such but with the idea of the Church as a spiritual authority. Which means, supposedly, that it can tell – order – you what to believe. No effing way!

 

This is of course nonsense. Only you know what you believe and whom you trust, unless you tell someone. And the Church – the community of the faithful – cannot tell you what to believe. However, it has (after many centuries and a very great deal of debate) set down the core of its faith, in the Creed – from credo, I believe. The Apostles’ Creed is the simplest: it says

 

I believe in God, the Father almighty, 
    maker of heaven and earth; 
And in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord; 
    who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, 
    born of the Virgin Mary, 
    suffered under Pontius Pilate, 
    was crucified, dead, and buried. 
    He descended into hell. 
    The third day he rose again from the dead.
    He ascended into heaven, 
    and sitteth on the right hand of God the Father almighty. 
    From thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead. 
I believe in the Holy Ghost, 
    the holy catholic Church, 
    the communion of saints, 
    the forgiveness of sins, 
    the resurrection of the body, 
    and the life everlasting. Amen.

 

This, of course, may need some explanation to those who are new to the material, which is why the various churches created catechisms. But simply speaking these are the essentials:

 

1) God exists. God is the Maker of everything and the Father of everyone. He is all-powerful. Jesus of Nazareth is His (only) Son. Together with the Holy Spirit (the old word was Ghost from Germanic Geist, spirit) they form the Trinity: three Persons, one God. (That one is notoriously difficult to get one’s mind around. But never mind.)

2) Jesus was conceived by the Spirit, he was born of (as the child of) Mary, who was virgin at the time. He was a real man, a real human being (not a disguised god): he suffered at a specific time and place in history: in Jerusalem, under the government of Marcus Pontius Pilatus (d. ca. 38AD). He was a real man, and so he died a real death: he was buried, and he went down (according to Jewish belief) to the “hell”, Sheol, the place of the dead. 

But on the third day after his burial, he was resurrected. After a brief return to earth and to his disciples, he went to heaven, where he recovered his place as God’s Son “at the right hand” of the Father. 

At the end of time, he will return, and there will be a final judgement of those then alive and the dead. 

3) The Holy Spirit exists – he is the third Person of the Trinity. He is the one who is always with us to defend us. 

·      The universal (“cath-holica”) ecclesia, church, community of believers, exists for all who believe. It has been entrusted with a communal (not individual) and historic (grown over the ages) knowledge of God, which gives it a certain authority, a certain claim to respect and attention.

·      All those who trust in God are part of one organism, and share their strengths: the living and the dead. (The “communion of saints”.) This means that we can benefit not only from each other’s spiritual experience and wisdom but also from that of those who have gone before and who are now close to God: I, now, can learn from St Theresa of Avila (1515-82), from St John of the Cross (1542-91), and from the late Michael Lonsdale (1931-2020).

·      Sins – offences against love, against God’s love – are grave but can and will be forgiven if that is sincerely asked for. 

·      We shall all die, but that death is not definitive. We too shall be resurrected, and with some sort of “body”, though we do not know where or with what kind of “body”.

·      And finally, if we truly want it, we will live in God’s presence (“Heaven”) where there is no such thing as time (“the life everlasting”).

 

This is not what the Church tells you to believe, but a complex of astounding truths it invites you to discover, to ponder, the pray about (on your mountain top, for instance), and eventually to take on board, with the extraordinary joy of knowing that you are loved: “Ransomed, Healed, Restored, Forgiven”. Every single day.