NO PEACE FOR THE FAITHFUL

In Luke 24:35, Yeshua appears to the disciples even as Cleopas and his friend finish recounting their experience at the inn in Emmaus. He is suddenly there, in the way he has now, after the Resurrection, but which he had also had from time to time before, of moving in ways not common to ordinary earthlings. He is there, we may imagine with a friendly smile, and he says “Shalom!”

            The commentators tend to make much of this pax vobiscum, this “peace be with you!”, this “Que la paix soit avec vous!” But it was, as it still is, also simply a way of saying Hello. Nevertheless, it does have the unemphasised but real weight of shalom, that vast and wonderful condition we translate, inadequately,  as “peace”. It is the almost cosmic peace that results from perfect harmony, from God being in His heaven and all being right with the world; of everything and everybody in the right place, doing what God intends them to do. The peace that results from that harmony being played in the key of Love. Every little peace we make makes us “peacemakers”, who are Blessed in the Beatitudes.

            It has been a long time since the need for inner peace was as urgent as it is now. Daily, we hear that the need is not only for more nurses and hospital workers, but for psychologists and psychiatrists. The pandemic is wearing us down and Christians are not immune. So I find it alarming to see devout commentators whom I have long admired now once again insisting that no, shalom does not mean well-being, it does not mean comfort, it means taking up your cross and suffering with the Meshiach like a true disciple, it means turning your life upside down. 

            Most people are not starving swineherds with boils. There are those – always too many – who live from day to day in precarious misery, and Christians should help them in every way they can. But to assume, as preachers and commentators regularly do, that the faithful are mainly comfortable rentiers who direly need their billowy parts booted is an error that especially now causes real pain. The churches, as we know, are emptying, and so far the pandemic does not, surprisingly, seem to have reversed that trend. Could it be, in part, because they are no longer offering comfort? They are not donors, purveyors, spreaders of shalom; instead they are unrepentant purveyors of unrest, challenging believers to get off their behinds and make shalom themselves in the world. 

            This is not in itself wrong: as St Teresa of Ávila said, the only hands God has in the world are ours. But when thousands are suffering inward misery, stress, depression, frustration and grief, it might not come amiss for those who bring the word to the faithful and beyond to remind everyone of those other words: “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest . . . for my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” (Mt 11:28-30) 

 

JUST THE FACTS, PLEASE, MA'AM

 Andrea Mantegna, "Crucifixion"

Rereading Josef Ratzinger’s (Benedict XVI’s) Jesus of Nazareth, vol. 2 (Holy Week) for Lent, I am struck all over again by his steadfast refusal to ask, or at least to insist upon, a historian’s questions. Those of us who were trained as historians, even literary historians, generally have a detective‘s mindset. We want to find out, as Leopold von Ranke famously put it in the nineteenth century, Wie es eigentlich gewesen, “what actually happened”. And since the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles are presented in the form of historiæ, (hi)stories, we want to know what actually happened, there in Galilee, there in Jerusalem. Moreover, we are encouraged in this viewpoint by the evangelists’, and St Paul’s, insistence that the Resurrection was a historical fact, something that “really” happened, just as the Ever Given’s beaching in the Suez Canal happened: “For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised either. 17 And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile.” I Cor. 15:16-17). 

 

And yet Ratzinger regularly refuses the attitude that looks for a “Jesus novel” and reminds us of all the theological and ecclesiastical dimensions of each incident in each of the Gospels: their interweaving of occurrences in Jesus’ life and career with passages from the Prophets and the Psalms, or the parallels between certain actions of the disciples and some of Isaiah’s prophecies. 

To take a particularly striking example: he points out the way in which the soldiers on duty at the crucifixion divide up Jesus’ garments and toss for the robe or tunic, which was woven as one piece and thus too good to split. This, he rightly says, corresponds exactly to Psalm 22:18: “They parted my garments among them, and cast lots upon my vesture.” Our historian’s question in such a case is: is this true? is this what happened? And if so, is the parallel happenstance, is it a conscious re-enactment of the psalm by the soldiers, one of whom might know the psalm, or is it the invention of the story’s author who thought of it as a detail that would increase the recounted event’s weight of Scriptural importance? 

Ratzinger refuses even to ask the question and accepts that it “fulfils the Scripture”. As far as I can tell, that means, Yes, it happened; No, they were not consciously re-enacting the psalm; God made it happen that way to “fulfil”, i.e. validate, the psalm as Scripture; and No, the soldiers did not know that. I, on the other hand, want to know how and why Yeshua at his crucifixion was wearing sufficient garments for a guard detail to think them worth dividing up, and what those were.

Another, and much more dramatic, case: upon Jesus’ death, the veil of the Temple split in two, from top to bottom. Ratzinger, completely convincingly, expounds the meaning of this: Jesus is himself the new Temple that replaces the old, and with his self-sacrifice the Temple sacrifices have become obsolete. Moreover, the veil that split was doubtless that which obscured the Holy of Holies and screened the Deity from profane eyes (only the High Priest could enter, once a year); and in Jesus, and even more in the Eucharist that continues his death and resurrection, God has made himself visible and available to men, “unveiled” himself. 

All this is not only true, but beautiful and profound. But something in me naggingly wants to know: all right, but did that great curtain spontaneously rip in two?  And if not, what went on in the author’s mind when he wrote Καὶ ἰδοὺ τὸ καταπέτασμα τοῦ ναοῦ ἐσχίσθη εἰς δύο ἀπ᾽ ἄνωθεν ἕως κάτω: “And at that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. “ (Mk 15:38) For the verb, eschisthè, he used the aorist tense, which parallels the French passé simple, indicating that such-and-such a thing happened. 

Now Mark wrote sometime between 30 and 70 AD, which means he was still able to talk to people who had been there. Is he then recounting a story that with retelling had become a legend, sprouting much extraneous detail, or did it actually happen? Ratzinger is surely right to say that the symbolism, not the actual torn fabric, is what matters; but that aorist bothers me. Later authors who created techniques of meditation, such as Ignatius of Loyola and François de Sales, encourage the devout to begin by vividly imagining the scene they will meditate upon, seeing themselves as being among the characters present and, as it were, seeing the events occur. To do so, we should like to know if the scene we are entering upon is a poiesis from a lovely tale or one that happened in the nitty-gritty. 

And yet, there is no answer. We have no way of checking most of the details. Moreover, we know that ancient historians often put into the mouths of historical characters words, reported in direct speech, which they felt the character should have said, or probably said, and may well have taken similar liberties with details of events. So, as the French say, “on reste sur notre faim”, we are left hungry, unfed. Perhaps the meditation masters have the best answer. For in our imagination we are allowed to reflect the details and even add to them; but only if they are succeeded, enriched, by interpretation – analyzing and learning the meaning of the scene – and resolution – figuring out what we, here and now, can, should, and will do about it. 

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.

STORM WARNINGS

 

 

¹³ `To go in, take the narrow gate, because wide [is] the gate, and broad the road that leads to loss, and many are those who go in through that;

¹⁴ how tight [is] the gate, and how narrow is the road that leads to life, and there are few that find it. 

 

¹⁵ `Be on your guard against false prophets, who come unto you in sheep's clothing, and inwardly are ravening wolves.

¹⁶ From their fruits you will know them; does one gather grapes from thorns? or figs from thistles?

¹⁷ so every good tree yields lovely fruit, but the rotten tree yields bad fruit.

¹⁸ A good tree is not able to yield bad fruit, nor a rotten tree to yield good fruit.

¹⁹ Every tree not yielding good fruit is cut down and thrown into fire:

²⁰ So, remember: from their fruits will you know them.

²¹ `Not every one who says to me “Lord, lord” will come into the kingdom of the heavens; but he who does the will of my Father who is in the heavens.

²² Many will say to me in that day, Lord, lord, have we not prophesied in your name? and cast out demons in your name? and done many mighty things in your name?

²³ and then I will confess to them, “I have not ever known you. Go away from me, you who work lawlessness.” 

 

²⁴ `Therefore, every one who hears these my words, and does them, will be compared to a wise man who built his house upon the rock;

²⁵ and the rain came down, and the rivers rose, and the winds blew, and they beat on that house, and it fell not, for it had been founded on the rock.

²⁶ `And every one who hears these my words, and does not do them, will be compared to a foolish man who built his house upon the sand;

²⁷ and the rain came down, and the rivers rose, and the winds blew, and they beat on that house, and it fell, and its calamity was great.'

 

Here, at the end of the Sermon on the Mount, there are three texts: related, but not just one passage. The first one is a warning. To “go in” (no place is mentioned, but we may assume the basileia en tois ouranois, the Kingdom of heaven(s) is intended), take the narrow, uncomfortable gate, because the wide one that is full of people leads to perdition (literally: loss). The gate and the road (beyond or leading up to it) that lead to “life” (zoè) are both narrow.

            This is curious, when one thinks how wide and inclusive Yeshua’s call and invitation have been. Nowhere in the Gospels is he seen to refuse anyone. True, a number of people are seen to be disqualifying themselves from the presence of the Father; but so far we have not heard that the way to that presence is narrow and hard. Might this, I wonder, reflect Yeshua’s thinking ahead to what might befall not only him but people who follow him? (And which of course proved amply true in the next couple of centuries.) Or is he thinking how few people there are who correspond to the Beatitudes? Either way, the conclusion we need to draw for ourselves, 2000 years later, is not to go and look for narrowness and difficulty but to listen to and follow His new, completed Torah, which is the “narrow gate”.

 

The following passages deals with the false prophets, who claim to offer salvation but instead are ravening wolves. And a little later on we see that those referred to are the ones who come in His name, which is unnerving. How are we to know? Well, says Yeshua, by their fruits. Not, we understand, the size of their profits, or even the size of their congregations. This passage is about Discernment, that quality indispensable to faith. We are to look, for their fruits, at their followers, and judge whether these people are closer to God; whether they are exhibiting the characteristics described in the Beatitudes; whether they have increased in love for God and for their neighbour. If not, they have been duped. If, in His name, they are angry, rancorous, self-satisfied, self-righteous, they have been duped. And those who duped them will find that the Lord whose Name they abused never knew them.

What I find interesting here is that He accuses them of working lawlessness. Why lawlessness? I think it’s because what He preaches is the completed Torah, hence the new Law, and that is precisely what they trample underfoot. 

 

Finally, there is the famous image of the houses, one built on solid rock, the other on shifting sands. We should accord this the importance of its position at the very end of the Sermon. It is, not a summing-up of Yeshua’s teaching, but a coda that states the consequences of our, his hearers’, possible reactions to it. 

            If we ignore it; if we go on our way thinking, Yes, sure, but hey, life goes on; if we react like the Athenians to St Paul, saying, Mmmmm, yes, interesting perhaps, but not now, come back another time; if we think, Come on now, let’s get real, I have my career to think of; then, says Yeshua, we will not be punished by God: life’s vicissitudes and disasters will do that. Because we will have nothing solid to face them with, they will destroy us, with burn-out, with depression, with bankruptcy, with sickness, with political oppression, with drugs, with crime and violence, with any or all of the things the world can throw at us.

            Whereas if we follow Him; if we recognise that He is Himself the narrow gate; if we do the things he has described and prescribed for us; if we become the kind of people he has shown to be fortunate or blessed; if our souls learn to live in Him as in our Father’s house; then our soul’s house is built upon rock, and whatever the world throws at us may hurt and harm us, but not definitively, not terminally: the house may be battered, but it will stand.

 

In my next post I will try to sum up the Sermon on the Mount, and the new and completed Torah, as far as my very limited and un-theological understanding can grasp it.

BREAD, STONE, FISH, SNAKE

Franz von Defregger (1835-1921)

 ⁷ `Ask, and it shall be given to you; seek, and you shall find; knock, and it shall be opened to you;

⁸ for every one who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it shall be opened.

⁹ Anyone among you, if his son asks for a loaf of bread, surely he will not give him a stone?

¹⁰ and if he asks for a fish, surely he will not give him a snake?

¹¹ if therefore you, being bad, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more shall your Father who [is] in the heavens give good things to those who ask him?

¹² `All those things, therefore, that you may want men to do to you, so also do to them; for this is the law and the prophets.

 

I am taking these passages together, because they seem to be linked in the text; but the links are not always completely evident.

            The opening two lines state a truth. As it stands, it is a comforting truth to be told. If we pray (which is what, in relation to our heavenly father, asking, seeking and knocking are), our prayer will be granted. Simple. 

            And moreover, it is reinforced, as is so often the case with Yeshua’s sayings, by two examples, which lead to an a fortiori emphasis. If we do not disappoint our children asking for food, why should we not trust God to do at least as much for us? Simple. 

            Except. Except that the majority of petitionary prayers are not granted, and Christians have spent two thousand years working out excuses for that fact. The usual explanation is that we can only ask for spiritual benefits (I have written a number of posts on the impropriety of praying, as Huck Finn did, for “fishhooks”), and some add that such prayer also needs to be intense and only for oneself.

            My recent posts on prayer discuss all this at greater length. I believe that intercessory prayer – prayer for, on behalf of, others – is valuable, for two reasons and on two conditions. First, such prayer helps the beneficiary whether or not its specific requests are granted. If I know that X is praying for me, my own healing powers will be strengthened, partly because I know it and partly because X’s prayers add to an energy field maintained by prayer. The conditions, I think, are that we must first pray for Y’s spiritual wellbeing, and only then, “if it be Thy will”, for Y’s physical, mental or social health; and secondly, that we do so with as much concentration and intensity as we can muster. 

            One is tempted to think that the only prayer we can really utter is “Thy will be done”. And yet that doesn’t chime with the image of the child asking for bread or with the “good things” our heavenly Father is said to have in store for us. I do think, though, that when one is going through a great trial the appropriate prayer is always for faith and strength to undergo it as God wills; and that applies also to those for whom we pray. And we need to remind ourselves that whatever enemies or Nature throw at us, our Father does, really and truly, love us.

 

            The final surprise of this passage is that it ends with the Golden Rule. The Golden Rule, than which nothing could be less exclusively Jewish and than which nothing could be less original to Yeshua. Not only that: he claims that that same Golden Rule “is the Law and the Prophets”, i.e. is the Torah. How? Why? 

            Because, I think, in this simple and rather banal way Yeshua is in fact saying something enormous: the essential, the necessary, symmetry of Love. What, after all, are the two Great Commandments? One: that we should love God with all our heart, all our mind, and all our strength – as He loves us. Two: that we should love our neighbour – as ourself. If you distil these two commandments, which really are “the Law and the Prophets”, you find a symmetry. Loving God on our part will simply return His existing love for us and thus complete the circle; loving our neighbour, both spiritually and also practically, as we love ourself – doing for him what I’d do for myself, no less – not only highlights one existential symmetry but provokes another: loving him may well make him love me and complete that circle too. 

            And finally, by putting this in the terms of the ubiquitous Golden Rule Yeshua reminds his hearers once again that his completed Torah is for everyone, for the goyim as well as for the Jews, for the Nations as well as for Israel.  

 

 

OUCH!

 

Mè dōte to hagion tois kusin mède balète tous margaritas humōn emprosthen tōn choirōn mèpote katapatèsousin autous en tois posin autōn, kai straphentes hrèxōsin humas.

 

 ⁶ `Do may not give [that which is] holy to the dogs, nor throw your pearls to /before the swine, or they may trample them among their feet, and turn and rip you.

 

A curious interlude in the Sermon on the Mount. It seems quite separate from the surrounding sayings, which is perhaps evidence that the Sermon was not noted down as one continuous sequence but compiled from scattered jottings. 

 

What is the point Yeshua is making here? Who are the dogs, who are the swine, and are they the same? If they are, the second saying is a restatement of the first, in a manner familiar to us from the Psalms. 

            One theory is that they are goyim, non-Jews, unbelievers: when the Samaritan woman appealed to Yeshua, his first response was to say that he was sent to help Israel, and that one does not give the children’s food to the dogs. The dogs, here, the kunes in the Greek, are of course not pets like ours: they are at best hounds for hunting, at worst semi-feral scavengers: the word, used of humans, was a term of clear opprobrium. The hagion, that which is holy, might be interpreted as a Temple offering of meat or other food, deposited upon an altar. To throw it to the dogs is an act of desecration.

            The swine here might be domestic pigs, but in view of the final verb which means “to wound grievously” I suspect it refers rather to a boar, as well as to the dogs.[1] Why one would be tempted to throw down pearls before a pig or a boar is not made clear, but the image is obviously constructed out of one element of something precious and another element of something unclean (all pigs were unclean) as well as dangerous. 

            The image, then, is clear and relatively uncomplicated. What about the tenor, though? The simplest explanation is an injunction not to give the Torah to infidels, who not only will not appreciate it and will not be able to be nourished by it but who, so far from thanking you, may in return gore and savage you. And yet the upshot of Yeshua’s teaching, both here in the Sermon and elsewhere, is that the Gentiles are part of the new Israel, and as such both merit and need the new, completed Torah. 

            This creates a real and pressing problem. One solution is perhaps the following: the dogs and the swine might not be known to be such beforehand, but might prove to be so by their reaction to the holy and the pearls. In which case the injunction is a call to discernment. Be careful, think carefully, about the persons to whom you may preach the new Torah that is the eu-angelion. Because if you misjudge them, not only will it not help them but it may put you in danger. And given the fact that Christianity is in our time the most persecuted religion in the world, such an injunction can be said still to be topical.

            

[The majority of commentaries I have read see no problem here at all, because they see it as a text for the modern world – example: do not open a boxing-match with prayers; do not hang a crucifix in a night-club. There may be something in that, but it does not interest me: I want to try to understand what Yeshua said and what his hearers (thought they) heard.]

Image: a drawing by Pieter Brueghel Jr (1564-1638), from a series on Flemish proverbs. The Flemish proverbial version is "Do not throw roses before swine".

              

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[1] Many commentaries see this as a Jewish inverted parallellism, reading it as “Do not give what is holy to dogs who will rend you; do not toss pearls before pigs who will trample them underfoot.”

CRUMBS!

This very peculiar painting of the unpaintable is by Domenico Fetti (1589-1623). Baroque, indeed.

7 Do not condemn, that you may not be condemned.

² for with the same judgement with which you judge, you shall be judged, and with the same measure you measure with, it shall be measured to you.

³ `And why you look at the crumb in your brother's eye, and the beam that [is] in your own eye you do not even notice?

⁴ or, how will you say to your brother, Let me take out the crumb from your eye, and look, the beam [is] in your own eye?

⁵ Hypocrite, first get rid of the beam out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly enough to get rid of the crumb out of your brother's eye.

The theme here, is of course a variant of “do as you would be done by”. It urges the hearers to look at themselves before looking – crossly, judgementally – at their brothers. [The usual translation of the opening verb is "judge", but "Matthew"'s Greek word would, for its first readers, have had a thoroughly negative overtone, and a connotation of taking to court and/or condemning.] It reminds us that we tend to see small faults in others more clearly than large ones in ourselves. As such, it is neither very original nor very complex. And yet. In the first place, it is much easier said than done. We do tend to be more indulgent with ourselves than with others, and expend great ingenuity in finding good excuses to do so. 

            Secondly, the injunction goes much deeper in its implications. To begin with, who is my brother? Well, that one was answered in the story of the traveller and the Samaritan. But then, of what part of the Torah is this an example? Well, it takes us, the hearers, back to “eye for eye and tooth for tooth”; and thus it takes us back also to the way that equitable rule was contested, or rather, “completed” by Yeshua. And thus, also, to the question of inwardness.

            We have seen inwardness to be the root of Yeshua’s completion of the Torah. If, then, we look here, we see not the spirit of observing a proper distinction and, if necessary, a proper sanction of a brother’s fault, but a self-questioning, a confrontation of self with self without illusions or excuses. In fact, an inwardness. And that inwardness, if it takes place, completes the Torah by fulfilling one of the Great Commandments: loving my brother as myself.