The promise of the mountaintop
It is a commonplace to say that, to climb a mountain you take it one step at a time. This is fine until the mountain looks very high, the steps are painful ones and it may just be possible to opt-out and pretend it is not there.
My early involvement in Christian Aid in the mid-1970s involved comparatively easy steps on this mountain. As Christians, we understood we were duty-bound to help out those less fortunate. Our view of these less fortunate invariably included pictures of women and children eking out a living, tilling a barren and unforgiving soil. We were helping them, and we felt good about doing so.
In the intervening decades, the world has become smaller. We have learned so much more about poverty, particularly in emerging nations. Whereas members of my family, who had worked in Colonial Administration in Africa or India in the 1950s would assure me that poverty was a result of indigenous listlessness and idleness, (based on their incomprehensible unwillingness to knock themselves out doing physical labour in the service of the British Crown), these days we know that the world’s economic systems are inequitable because they serve the interests of the world’s dominant nations who designed them. In discovering that our culture and our standard-of-living is a major factor contributing to emerging world poverty, makes that mountain suddenly appear considerably darker and steeper.
The story continues with the realisation that global climate change is the deferred consequence of the nations who underwent an industrial revolution. The very force which consolidated European colonial dominance in the nineteenth century, and the economic superiority of the developed world, is the very same one which carried the seed of what has become climate-change through greenhouse gases. Our culture is not only responsible for inequitable economic rules, we invented human-made climate-change, whose effects now make for catastrophic shifts in weather which disproportionately imperils the livelihoods of emerging nations.
With each successive Christian Aid campaign focus, in the last thirty years, our own cultural soul has become increasingly laid bare, that mountain has begun to look very dark indeed.
Most recently, as technology has enabled the movement of capital beyond the reach of national laws, so the phenomenon of tax avoidance has become a huge factor in our failure to manage the distribution of wealth. When the growing list of super-rich individuals possessing personal fortunes greater than the Gross Domestic Product of many emerging nations, then the morality of our own culture is laid bare and has nowhere to hide.
That mountain now appears to be immense and almost insurmountable, maybe we cannot climb it at all, so why bother? It was easy when charitable giving was about our own beneficence. These days we are being asked to resource the restoration of humans who suffer as a consequence of our own treasured lifestyle, we are being asked to face a truth too hard to bear.
There are always ways of avoiding the issue. In the United Kingdom, the tabloid press represents a whole industry dedicated to presenting us a world in which, all that is wrong is a result of someone else’s incompetence. Tabloids are popular because they will invariably locate the evils of the world somewhere else. The soul fed by a tabloid narrative need not worry about its complicity in anything dark or evil: there is no mountain, it is someone else’s mountain, or the mountain is an illusion.
Global poverty remains a spiritual issue because it makes us look within. It invites us not to be subject to our whim or our need to be indulged or desire to follow fashion. It raises a question about what needs determine our sense of what we can expect from life. Global poverty invites us to ask if we really are masters of our own destiny, with freedom to choose. Or whether we are part of a larger web of life, where everything connects.
Our affluence is not only a corrosive presence in the lives of the impoverished, it also diminishes our own lives, by reducing us to being spoilt, indulged and trivial, in other words, a good deal less than we could be, if only we took time each week to remember the world and our neighbour as gift; the health of the world and our neighbour as inseparable from our own.
Each successive Christian Aid campaign, in my lifetime, has made me more aware both of what I have to power to do, and what I have the potential to become if I heed its call.
Andrew Spurr is Vicar of Evesham in the diocese of Worcester
2 CommentsJesus is at the door
Let all guests who arrive be received like Christ, for he is going to say, “I came as a guest, and you received me”. And to all let due honour be shown, especially to the domestics of the faith and to pilgrims. In the salutation of all guests, whether arriving or departing, let all humility be shown. Let the head be bowed or the whole body prostrated on the ground in adoration of Christ, who indeed is received in their persons.
The monastery to which I go for my retreat has a custom that, when a ‘gentleman of the road’ calls in search of food and drink, the message, ‘Jesus is at the door’ is sent to the brother on kitchen duty. Very much in keeping with the 53rd chapter of the Rule of St Benedict (RB53), quoted above. But on one occasion, brother caterer, somewhat harassed by ‘one of those days’ syndrome, retorted, ‘Well, he’ll just have to wait: I’m busy!’
We are well used to Christian Aid’s moral appeal, to its unanswerable challenge to the way the world operates, and so on and so forth. John Fenton, of blessed memory, once commented on the Matthew 25 passage referenced in RB53, saying that those who point to the passage as the justification for Christian Aid have missed the point — Christian Aid needs no external justification. Its claims are beyond dispute.
However, what about the holiness of inconvenience as these messengers from the world outside our walls arrive at the doors of our organized, measured lives? There is something about the way in which we tend to interpret ‘charity’ which emphasises our control of the world, and our ability to normalise and universalise our world-view. We are (when we respond) the good guys, dispensing of our enlightened largesse to the importunate and the unfortunate before us.
It is so easy to turn Christian Aid (or Jubilee, or any one of dozens of Christian campaigns for social justice) into another 1960s style moral exercise which bolsters up our sense of being worthy, even superior members of the community. But to welcome the unexpected, potentially disturbing knock at the door? To allow ourselves and our outlook to be changed, to undergo the ‘conversio morum’ of the Benedictine tradition? To recognise the prophetic Christ, not just the needy one hidden in the stranger? We might better start to view Christian Aid not simply as a good cause, or a noble ideal, but as a necessary and jarring note from outside our warm Western cocoons.
The religious communities get this, by seeing in the person of the unexpected the presence of Christ knocking at the door, putting routines and default attitudes to the test. RB is particularly good at drawing attention to the prophetic voice of the outsider, the neophyte and the disregarded. The system in the monastery has to be sufficiently open to the promptings of the Spirit to be able not merely to deal with but also to absorb and welcome the new, even the uncomfortable, for in them Christ is received.
‘Well, he’ll just have to wait: I’m busy.’ As the European elections approach, the ‘Don’t bother me, I’m absorbed in myself’ seems to be an ever-more acceptable personal philosophy, and newspapers and politicians readily court the anti-Benedictine spirit. Sobering though it might be to consider how the Matthew 25 passage ends, chapter 53 of the Rule has something important to say to a complacent and narcissistic world as Christian Aid Week stands at the door amid a pile of electioneering leaflets designed to keep the inconvenient Christ at bay.
David Rowett
2 CommentsFocus on War
It is war that is the focus of this year’s Christian Aid week, that most preventable of disasters. Or rather it is its aftermath. The human misery that follows behind it. The misery that follows, not sometimes but always.
I am in a minority among Christians in being a pacifist. The Hebrew Scriptures have only small inklings that war is not going to solve anything. I think of the reconciliation of Jacob and Esau, and of Esau’s generosity to the brother who wronged him, and Jacob’s remarkable declaration that seeing his brother’s face is like seeing the face of his God. How hard it is to forgive those whom we have wronged. I think, too, of the remarkable little story of Elisha telling the King of Israel not to kill the Syrians who he has delivered into his hands.
It is only when we get to the New Testament that we find a radical demand that we suffer ourselves, rather than attack others, or even defend ourselves. Yet, as with so much that Jesus says, it is ambiguous enough that most Christians in most places have felt justified in ignoring it and making wars.
Embracing peace is a hard thing. I realised fairly young that it was bound to mean suffering in the short term. It was only as I grew older, learned more, thought more, prayed more, that I came think that however dear the short-term cost, the long term benefits were greater. As a girl I chose peace as a blind act of faith. Now I think that violence so inevitably leads to more violence and to greater wrongs, that it is almost never justified. Only in the most exceptional of circumstances is war the lesser evil, and I cannot think of an instance during my life time when it has led to anything but more misery and greater wrong.
Syria and the Democratic Republic of Congo are the focus of this year’s Christian Aid appeal. It is tempting to think the disasters are so huge than it is pointless taking action. Action, help, is never pointless. It is not however enough. We have a duty to the world to live peace and to speak peace. Love and forgiveness, however sorely we are tried, have to become our watch words. War is not the solution, whatever the problem. We have to absorb that fact so thoroughly that it becomes part of our immediate reaction.
This must be our reaction not just to international conflicts, but to personal loss and personal challenge. This of course is where it is hardest. We live in a society where a desire for revenge is still seen as right and proper, and it takes a lot of courage and often a lot of presence of mind not to get sucked into that way of thinking and acting. Yet if we are ever to change the world, if we are ever to see the Kingdom, we need to work at it, so that peace always becomes the right and the natural response, despite its high cost.
3 CommentsGlad and Generous Hearts
Joe Cassidy, Principal of St Chad’s College, Durham, writes the first of a number of comment pieces we will publish to mark this year’s Christian Aid Week in the UK.
This Sunday’s first reading, Acts 2.42—47, is perennially challenging. Are we to embrace a form of ‘primitive socialism’, holding all things in common, selling our ‘possessions and goods and [distributing] the proceeds to all, as any had need’? The text is particularly challenging during Christian Aid Week, when consciences are perhaps just that bit more sensitive.
The challenge to embrace such communitarian generosity is not uncomplicated. The practice of holding all in common seemed an almost spontaneous reaction to the ‘wonders and signs’ of those heady post-resurrection days. The communal joy experienced by these early Christians was not only thrilling but also transformative, expressed by a concrete commitment to the well-being of the whole community. With the expectation of an imminent second-coming, the need to make personal provision for the future was re-prioritised or relativised, being subordinated not just to the common good out-there-somewhere, but to a communitarian view, where those on the margins, those who had ‘any’ need, were welcomed to break bread at the same table. That said, as wonderful as it all was, the irony was that the common life model was not sustainable without the support of the newer less-communal churches — churches that subordinated their own good to the long-term good of the older community.
The communitarian impulse of Acts 2.44—45 could lead us to follow suit and so give Christian Aid and other charities a huge one-time boost. But that would be it: having sold everything, we would not have the financial wherewithal to give any more. The eschatological edge of such radical generosity sounds both reckless and wonderfully-compelling on one level, but it risks being ineffective, unsustainable and irresponsible. The need for longer-term sustainable models of mutual support points to other equally-radical models of communitarian living that include but potentially go well beyond financial sharing.
I wonder whether Christian Aid needs our one-off charity as much as it needs our ongoing commitment to a more communitarian lifestyle (which includes supporting them). This is arguably the goal of all long-term development work: so long as ‘they’ remain ‘not one of us’, they are potential ‘objects’ of our economic charity, and they are kept at arm’s length. But when barriers are broken by an awareness of being one in our shared humanity, the imperatives move from ‘giving’ to building long-term relationships, trying to shift the balance of wealth and power to make room for more sustainable ways of living together — alternative systems that do not require the economic marginalisation of a huge fraction of humanity not to mention the gradual consumption and destruction of our planet.
The eschatological witness of the early church’s common life (and of the common life still practised in some religious communities) can awaken in us exciting glimpses of new ways of being together. The exhilaration experienced by the early Church did just that. In our time, there are yet-to-be-discovered patterns of economic, ecological, cultural and religious interdependence that are within the grasp of our restless, ultimately communal, hearts. Development organisations such as Christian Aid do need our money, to be sure, but they also need our ‘glad and generous hearts’.
4 CommentsA better resurrection
I think that if I were inventing a resurrection story, I would have had him reappear as victor over death with gaping unsightly wounds healed up. I would not, I suspect, have thought to have him going around with a hole in his side big enough to put one’s hand into. I might, I suppose, have run to some discreet scars and a little bitterness over how he was treated.
The Jesus who bursts back into Thomas’s life is much better than anything I would have imagined. His wounds are still open, with one plenty large enough to put a finger into. His preoccupation, though, is not with the past, but the future. He is moving his disciples on to a new world, where they take up the role he has carried. Jesus’s old work of forgiving (or not) will become their responsibility, and they will struggle to make others believe what they can never see.
So we enter a world where we know something new about healing, which is that probably we will never really be healed, although we may well be resurrected. What we are offered is a new life, not a patched-up old life.
I struggle to get my mind fully around this, just as I struggle to imagine writing the story that John writes of Jesus’s resurrection. There are memories, and actions, which I would like to be able to wipe out, to fully expunge from the record. I would like the ‘forgiveness’ or which Jesus speaks to mean that these things cease to be. But I think that that is not what is on offer. I suspect, reading this story, that forgiveness actually means that I will carry these holes in me forward for ever. A hole in my side wrenched by a mercifully lance and cruel damage inflicted intentionally to hurt me. They are mine forever.
I am not offered that these things will vanish. Instead, what I am offered is that they will become for my good, and for the good of others. If, in some ways, they will always define me, they will also become creative. I think, and I say this very tentatively, I think this is true. I suspect that the more I try to turn my face towards all that is good and positive, the truer it becomes.
I think you deserve at least some example. For me, the insecurities of my childhood experiences of my peers lead me to a solitude which is not, perhaps, quite natural to me. I am not any good in social contexts, and I never will be. It has made me miss taking up careers which might otherwise have been a joy to me. But it has also led me to be a much more reflective person, and to become a writer. This has come to define me, to become the holes in my hands by which others recognise me. The future beckons me. Maybe the writer I can still become will indeed imagine a better resurrection than mere healing.
Rosemary Hannah is currently writing a Victorian Whodunnit using up characters researched but not used in her biography, ‘The Grand Designer’; she also writes religious fiction.
7 CommentsThe Day of Resurrection!
The day of resurrection!
Earth, tell it out abroad;
the Passover of gladness,
the Passover of God.
From death to life eternal,
from earth unto the sky,
our Christ hath brought us over,
with hymns of victory.
Today is the day that either makes fools of us believers or that reveals the reality of our life in God. Either the resurrection was, as Bishop David Jenkins famously said, ‘more than a conjuring trick with bones’ (he was, of course, infamously misquoted as saying ‘merely a conjuring trick with bones’), or it was just a resuscitation, not a resurrection?
People have been resuscitated before — think of Jairus’s daughter and Lazarus, both raised back to life by Jesus — and there are many more stories across the faiths and traditions of the dead being miraculously brought back to life. The persons so raised presumably lived out their earthly lives and then died a second time, for good.
The resurrection was something else, an unprecedented event that, if true, changed the basis of our relationship with God, with other people and with the rest of creation. It makes possible the seemingly fanciful teachings of Jesus, as when he states that if his followers had even a little faith they could move mountains and perform miracles greater than they have seen him perform.
If the resurrection is what we believe it to be, then the risen Christ ushers us into a new kind of existence, a positioning in eternity within the life of Trinity, with all the power of the Divine available to us now. This is what Saint Paul believed and what he attempted to express in his great charter of emancipation in Romans chapter 8: ‘If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit which dwells in you.’ Paul was so convinced of the transformative effect of the resurrection that he repeatedly insisted that those who were in Christ were tantamount to being a ‘new creation,’ people who would be able to express in their lives the very nature of God.
The resurrection blows out the walls, the floors and the ceilings of our understanding of our own spiritual identity. What we do with open access to the Holy Spirit is up to us. It becomes a question of how much truth can we bear? How much life can we live? How much love can we take? How much do we trust the God who explodes our limited perceptions of who we are and what life is all about?
This Easter my prayer is that we will all be given the courage to open ourselves more to the infinite God, whose love we know and whose face we have seen in the man who resolutely climbed the hill to Golgotha.
Now let the heavens be joyful!
Let earth the song begin!
Let the round world keep triumph,
and all that is therein!
Let all things seen and unseen
their notes in gladness blend,
for Christ the Lord hath risen,
our joy that hath no end.
Christina Rees
27 CommentsUnderstanding Good Friday
During Holy Week some 40 years ago, just as I was coming to the end of my teenage years, I first saw a concentration camp. It was a beautiful spring morning in the Austrian countryside, with signs everywhere of nature coming to life. Then we arrived at Mauthausen camp. I imagine the birds kept singing and the daffodils still danced in the breeze, but for us — a group of students nearing the end of our secondary school education — everything suddenly seemed totally still, as we entered a world that we had heard and read about but had never seen. Even as a cleaned up monument to this awful, cruel piece of history, the camp was terrifying.
It was Good Friday.
Back then, I was a committed atheist. The terrible appropriateness of the day was not in my mind as we approached the camp. And oddly enough, on the preceding evening, over a drink with my classmates, I had held forth on the impossibility that there could be a divine creator who would allow starvation, war and oppression.
Over the subsequent weeks, while reflecting on the experience, something occurred to me. The Via Dolorosa is not a sentimental journey. It is not the beautification of suffering, it is not the nobility of pain. God’s plan on Good Friday was not to invite us to contemplate a sense of cruelty redeemed, but rather of cruelty understood. We have to believe, and Jesus has allowed us to believe, that suffering can have a meaning. But suffering is not good, it is not beautiful, it is not destiny; it is not God’s will.
On that day, 40 years ago, I began, very slowly, on my own journey back to faith. Part of that faith is the belief that we cannot fully and properly live the Christian life until we have really, really understood Good Friday.
Ferdinand von Prondzynski is Principal and Vice-Chancellor of the Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen
9 CommentsPreparing the Feast
Traditionally, we celebrate the Last Supper with a blaze of glory, in total contrast to the austerity of the Lenten season. The Gloria is sung, the sackcloth is laid aside and white vestments are worn to celebrate the Feast. We give thanks for ‘this wonderful sacrament’. Yet in this joyous moment, there are uncomfortable reminders that even the holiest moments are not immune from attack.
After Jesus’s temptation in the wilderness, Luke warns us that this was no final defeat. He writes (Luke 4.13) ‘When the devil had finished every test, he departed from him until an opportune time.’ Tonight, on this most holy night, he returns in envy and spite to attempt to wreck the celebration.
Jesus came to the table knowing that one of the disciples would betray him (Matthew 25.23). Peter at first refused to have his feet washed, the disciple thinking he knew better than his teacher. Luke (22.24) tells us that ‘A dispute also arose among them as to which one of them was to be regarded as the greatest.’ Matthew (20.20-28) had described this kind of contest more delicately, in saying it was a request from the mother of James and John to grant her sons first place in the kingdom of heaven, but the rivalry clearly bubbled away under the surface, and broke out again tonight.
They were all out for themselves, and Jesus knew it, saying (Matthew 26.21) ‘You will all become deserters.’ We recall that Peter protested, and Jesus recognised how great the threat was, saying (Luke 22.31). ‘Simon, Simon, listen! Satan has demanded to sift all of you like wheat’.
Even in our holiest moments we remain a prey to pride, envy, jealousy and selfishness. We are so full of ourselves that we fail to see the glory that is before us. We fail to listen to the voice of God. The fact that we are engaged in the most holy enterprise grants us no immunity from temptation. But the heart of the gospel is that even when we are failing, Jesus is not failing us. At the very point where Jesus tells Peter that all of the disciples will desert him, he assures Peter (Luke 22.32) that ‘I have prayed for you that your own faith may not fail; and you, when once you have turned back, strengthen your brothers.’ He prays for us even as we are going wrong. He exhorts us to pray for ourselves when we are being tempted, as he did repeatedly in the Garden of Gethsemane. And the assurance is that though we will fail, he will accept us when we turn back. The father accepts the prodigal son back not with a reproach, but with a feast. The risen Christ welcomes Peter with a breakfast of fish by Galilee, and the repeat of that command to strengthen his brothers in the words ‘Feed my sheep.’(John 21). The fishermen had come empty handed to the meal, but Jesus supplies their want.
But then, we never did obey that command to ‘Do this in remembrance of me’ in our own strength. The initiative had to come from God. There was little left of faith in the two shattered disciples who left Jerusalem for Emmaus. But Jesus prayed for them. They recognised him as he blessed the bread, presiding at the first Christian Eucharist. It was not their remembrance of him, but a reunion with the risen Lord who remembered them and invited them.
Tonight, in this most holy night, Christ is preparing the feast. He prays for us that our pride, our envy and all our sinfulness will not prevail. He warns and teaches us of the dangers, as he did that night, and he assures us, whatever happens, that when we turn back to him, he will remember us. He has overcome the world. Tonight we can sing ‘Gloria in excelsis Deo’.
Tom Ambrose is a priest living in Cambridge.
3 CommentsEntry to Jerusalem
In the early Church there were people called ‘Gnostics’ who were eager to dilute the humanity of Jesus. For them it was far too vulgar a notion that the Son of God might actually have died on a cross. Some even claimed that angels did a last-minute switch so that it was really Simon of Cyrene who hung on the tree, presumably with a chorus of angelic sniggering. This is immoral nonsense.
The truth is that neither cutting Jesus down to size as a human being nor ‘pushing him upstairs’ as a glorified angel is any answer to the suffering of the world and our need of redemption. What eternal difference at all can the exemplary life of one pious Jew make to people being bombed and terrorized in Afghanistan, Syria, the Congo or South Sudan? Answer: precisely none. Jesus was made higher than any angel to be our flesh and blood Saviour. He came not primarily to show us how to lead moral lives. It is true that he did this; but much more important, he showed us once and for all how to die that we might live in eternity.
For Jesus, his entry into Jerusalem was not a triumph like that staged for a Roman emperor. It was the vindication of the truth of who he was. The scene is set for the drama of our salvation to be played out in the city where the holy name of God dwelt. Already the forces gathered against Jesus even as he is fêted by a crowd. Plenty of those who shouted ‘Hosanna to the Son of David’ later shouted, ‘Crucify him! Crucify him!’ Some just came to stand and stare, wanting to be entertained. But Jesus had not come for his moment of fame. The only way to understand and follow him is through the Cross. The Christ who gives meaning to our world today is the crucified Son of God who shares the humanity of every starving baby in South Sudan. We have hope not just of eternal life later, but hope in the struggles and challenges of today because we have no burden that he does not bear alongside us through his sacrifice. All the crucifying choices we may have to make as human beings are caught up in Jesus’s tears in the Garden of Gethsemane.
Nonetheless, the question persists and propels us into the mystery of suffering and apparent meaninglessness. Some Christians play a kind of roulette wheel of prayer whereby if you are really, really a Christian, you will be healed or set free. Of course it is God’s will to heal us; but sometimes that is the healing of a good death and, sometimes, mysteriously, the answer is ‘no’. I have no easy answer to the mystery of suffering; but I know that God has not abandoned us. All that we see in Christ broken and crucified reveals the love and the majesty of the Blessed Trinity who reaches out to each one of us.
The God worth believing in is the God whose Son enters Jerusalem knowing that he is going to suffer and die for the sins of the whole world. This is the God whose glory is so great that it is not diminished by being laid aside for our salvation. This is the God who is more loving than love, so that everything is poured out for the world with nothing ever held back. This is the Spirit who is closer than close, who faithfully remains with us even when sin brings darkness and freedom is abused by pride. This is the God who is greater than great, more loving than love, and closer than close. And if we are to be followers of Jesus and not just bystanders looking for cheap thrills and easy answers, a renewed commitment is invited from each of us this Holy Week to be martyrs.
The saints of Iona belonged to a tradition that looked for martyrdom even if not in the finality of death. They invented an extra kind of martyrdom: they left their homes and crossed the seas to carry the Gospel to unknown lands. They called this a ‘white’ as opposed to a ‘red’ martyrdom. We are invited to be white martyrs this Holy Week.
It is this little martyrdom, this pilgrim journey to the Cross with Jesus this week that will open us to the delight of forgiveness which carries Hosannas from our lips to our hearts. This little death will reveal life to us, even if we are suffering ourselves. These steps to Golgotha will enlarge our sympathies and open our eyes to see Jesus more clearly; not only in this holy sacrifice but also in the faces of the people we do not like or do not care to know. Only at the foot of the Cross will we find out who we truly are and what we most wonderfully might become. There we shall be taught again that every suffering can be redeemed even when it is not taken away.
Stephen Conway is the Bishop of Ely
7 CommentsGod’s gatekeepers
Somewhere buried beneath the readings pressed into the service of Mothering Sunday last week, are another set for the Fourth Sunday of Lent. In any given year these readings get obscured by the dust generated by the stampede to pay homage to a festival shaped more by the greetings card industry than the ways of God.
This year the Lent 4 gospel was the account of a blind man being healed in the fourth gospel. A blind man encounters Jesus. Typically, the man’s religious or faith credentials are not known, they are irrelevant. Jesus meets him at a point of need and heals him, although we are later told that this happened on the Sabbath, when religious law forbids any acts of work. God, Jesus says, is glorified when people are met at their point of need.
The man, having recovered his sight, is understandably jubilant and people marvel at his transformation. He is brought to the religious authorities. The man identifies his healer, but the authorities claim that this man could not have effected a healing, as he does not have the right religious credentials and in fact is a doubtful character. This is a more firmly held truth than the evidence of the man looking right back at them. Maybe he wasn’t born blind, but his parents are brought to witness that he was. The man is asked again, in order to have the opportunity to tell the story in a way that fits with religious authority, and he can’t. There is even a twist in the conversation when the man suggests that the religious authorities become Jesus’s followers.
For those of us who belong to formal religious organisations, and especially we who hold positions of leadership, there is a constant temptation to allow religious truth-claims to surround the place where we believe God to be, and we become the gatekeepers to this place. It sounds absurd if it is stated as baldly as that, yet it is one of the risks we run when we set up an organisation in the name of God: the interests of the organisation can quickly eclipse the interests of God.
Only recently, a colleague of mine, knowing that God is glorified when people are met at their point of need, wanted to transform the nave of their church into a night-shelter for the homeless. You can easily imagine the heated debates in their church council about the building as a heritage monument, about the risk of vandalism, about health and safety considerations and, of course, the very ready but unstated fear of being polluted by contact with the unclean.
When I was first taught the fourth gospel at university, our tutor insisted that it was written that way for the stage. Reading this story I can readily envisage the comic effect of a man clearly in receipt of the intervention of God, being denied by the authorities who claim that they alone are the ones to adjudicate authentic divine activity. The message is a salutary one for those of us running religious organisations. We need constantly to be brought back to the question of how we glorify the God we believe in. How is our organisation configured to do that? Is there anything we value more highly than doing this work of God, of meeting humanity at its point of need? If there is, whose glory is it serving?
Even in this late part of Lent, we are being asked the questions which will help root out what keeps us from doing what we claim we are called to do.
Andrew Spurr is Vicar of Evesham in the diocese of Worcester
1 CommentDo you catch clean?
Do you catch clean, or do you catch dirt? Any fule do no that you catch dirt. If you sit next to Mrs Streaming Cold on the bus, before you can blink, you feel that wretched tickle at the back of your throat. If a cockroach crawls over your bread, it has made it dirty.
It is very easy to catch germs, and it is very easy to become unclean. We have an entirely well-based fear of contagion. It has kept us safe from sickness and plague. No wonder we trust it. It has protected us from moral and social contagion too. You don’t believe in moral contagion? Um. Well done. Only, ask anybody who is trying to get their teenager out of a downward spiral of behaviour. It is the friends who are encouraging each other in ever more destructive behaviour that are the first targets for action. Consult the various proverbs and comic verses. If you sleep with dogs you catch fleas. You can tell a man who boozes by the company he chooses (at which, the pig got up and walked away).
Dirt works like the Second Law of Thermodynamics. You can’t pass heat from the cooler to the hotter (try it if you like but you far better notter). No amount of sitting next to Mr Sports Coach on the bus will let you catch a six pack.
So it is that the unclean are shunned, like cockroaches. In Samaria, a woman who knows what she is comes to the well in the burning heat of mid-day. She does not need it pointed out again that she is a cockroach. She does not need the skirts drawn aside, she does not need the comments. She makes the pure unclean, just by being there. Jesus meets her, speaks to her as though she were not a cockroach, to be shunned. He asks care from her, and offers her cool water. Water from a deep well of pure.
In a remarkable story, layered with sparkling meaning, Jesus does one more remarkable thing. He makes clean pass to dirty. They touch. He does not become unclean. She becomes clean. The normal course of life is reversed in a transformation as remarkable as a resurrection.
What we consider clean and unclean has changed in my generation, in more than one instance most remarkably so. The principle remains. It is possible. It is possible to move towards what you think is wrong and impure, and to transform it by love. As I have prayed for poor Fred Phelps this week, I have been acutely aware of that. To me, he represents all that is most unclean. Yet he is an old man, dying.
This illustrates what love cannot do. Love cannot compel. I do not imagine Fred Phelps will have a death-bed conversion. Nor is the contagion of love a matter of hanging around to sort out the problems of others. Jesus is not derailed from his mission, he is not still in Samaria a year later, sorting out the upbringing of those children in one family with five different fathers. In a period which had no word or concept for ‘clear boundaries’, Jesus had astonishingly appropriate boundaries.
None of this should detract from the challenge of this story. Love, the disinterested love of our fellows on this earth, is the ultimate clean, and it does not work like the Second Law of Thermodynamics after all. You can catch clean, and you can pass clean on. We really ought to try it. Because, if that is not true, our faith is in vain.
Rosemary Hannah is a writer and historian living near Glasgow.
9 CommentsOscar
Oscar is a small red-haired bundle of endearing energy who peers at the word through John Lennon glasses so thick that when you read a map you can see people waving. Terminally incapable of sitting still, his presence at a school assembly is likely to bring to naught the most carefully crafted presentation. Exactly what he feels about it all is hard to tell, since his speech is all but incomprehensible and he’s clearly got ‘a problem’, but whatever it is, he’s clearly finding life rewarding. Oscar would never, ever fit into a flow-chart on classroom (or Church) management, and rather would stand there injecting his subversive presence into the situation with his face-wide grin.
The encounter between Jesus and Nicodemus rather reminds me of Oscar. Nicodemus appears, grave, thoughtful, cautious, articulate, informed, to find out what this Jesus character might be about. What he gets has more in common with Oscar’s subversive smile than the Senior Common Room conversation that Nicodemus might have hoped for. Jesus’s enigmatic phrases — ‘being born from above’, ‘the wind blows where it chooses’ — leave Nicodemus’s formulæ in tatters, so much so that Jesus asks impishly, ‘Are you a teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things?’
The longing so clearly present in Nicodemus’s opening statement is to try and understand how Jesus, this God-sent teacher, fits into his, Nicodemus’s, world-picture. The succeeding sentences demolish any hope of making sense of Jesus through such a lens, much as Oscar demolishes assemblies, not by being disruptive but by refusing to fit the expected pattern. The talk is of mystery, of inexplicable, unprompted acts of God, of a universe which cannot be constrained, neither by Nicodemus’s interpretative matrix nor even by his hopes. Consequently, Nicodemus must either leave his old lexicon behind, or else never acknowledge the new reality he has glimpsed, a decision whose outcome we are left to imagine for ourselves.
This encounter between Nicodemus and Jesus is a rebuke to every dream of an all-embracing systematic theology, even to those vain attempts to come up with definitive explanations of how Calvary and Redemption interact. We approach Jesus with our painstakingly worked out hypotheses and theories, only to realise in the moment of encounter that they miss the point almost entirely, that our understanding is almost completely unlike the truth, and that we have to choose between returning to something we now know to be more idol than deity or accepting that our carefully-laid foundations have yet again proved inadequate. ‘Are you a teacher of ordinands, and yet you do not understand these things?’
There is something profoundly disorientating yet also profoundly liberating about Oscar so clearly rejoicing in something far more important than what we think we’re doing so worthily and well. He brings us up short against another reality which we’ve missed, despite our dogged preparation. Thus too the subversive Christ: we can either ignore him as an unfortunate impediment to our carefully calculated blueprint of God’s grace, or welcome his invitation to something far richer and greater. Whether our love affair is with the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation or the Enlightenment, perhaps a useful Lenten self-denial might be to allow Oscar’s Christ to amble around the over-ordered schoolroom of our souls — and surprise us.
David Rowett is vicar of Barton-on-Humber in the diocese of Lincoln.
3 CommentsWhere The Wild Things Might Be
Mention the word ’ wilderness’ these days, and the images which come to mind may well be filtered through the lens either of the Romantic movement, which began to find the wild places and the uninhabited lands not life-threatening but life-enhancing, or that of a more recent sensibility, a conservation movement which seeks to preserve some parts of the earth as (nearly) untouched by human intervention, and finds in that a powerful good. Our remaining wildernesses are no longer fear-filled, distant from all that is humane, encouraging, civilised, as they were for so many generations and are still for some cultures and in some parts of the world. They have largely lost their edge of danger; rather than places of threat, they are seen as places of a strange and powerful beauty. For us, the children of a comfortable, largely urbanised society, they have become the settings for adventure or recreation. If they are places of challenge, it is often a very carefully orchestrated challenge, a battle for survival created as a source of entertainment employing the enmeshed forces of media and celebrity.
So we still have stories of ventures into the wild, often solitary; expeditions into the rainforests of the Amazon, treks across the Antarctic, solo crossings of the oceans in small boats. These are our narratives of risk and heroism, these are the tales of individuals deliberately placing themselves where their very survival may be at stake. In these stories of our own time and culture we can still hear an echo of the story of Jesus’ time in the wilderness. They are stories of the testing of the human spirit, they involve separation from the norms of daily life, the conscious placing of the self in danger, the denial of comfort, the need for inner strength, for great reserves of courage. However, at the heart of most of these stories is (in the tradition of the Romantics) the individual him or herself, asserting or proving a practical, emotional, and even spiritual self-sufficiency – however fulsome the tributes to the back-up teams at the end.
When we listen to the accounts of Jesus’ time in the wilderness, especially those in the gospels of Matthew and Luke, we hear something different. We hear not about self-sufficiency, but about dependence: dependence on God as the source, sustainer, and shaper of life. If we move on a few centuries, to those other seekers-out of the wild places, the desert fathers and mothers, we learn not only about dependence on God, but dependence on each other. The physical and spiritual battles fought in the deserts of Egypt by those men and women of the 4th and 5th centuries are known to us because their struggles were so often resolved through conversation and exchange, through what was shared.
Whatever the wild places, of body, mind, or spirit, we find ourselves in this Lent, may we have the wisdom and the courage to recognise that we can’t flourish, or even survive on our own; may we allow ourselves to depend and trust on and in God’s sustaining presence, and to allow others to help make that presence known to us.
Canon Jane Freeman is Team Rector of Wickford and Runwell in the diocese of Chelmsford
2 CommentsLooking neither back nor forward
Christians come to Lent from one of two directions. Some of us approach from the past. We look to the season as a time for penitence. We reflect and repent from previous sin. We acknowledge our individual and corporate failings. We give up, even if only for a few weeks, things that have distracted us from our holiness, or have become idols. Some of us approach from the future. Lent is a time of preparation for Easter. We form spiritual disciplines which we hope might be landmarks on the lifelong journey we call sanctification. We commit ourselves to charitable works that might in time become habitual. We abstain from good things in order to appreciate them more richly later. Maybe, if we are experienced and sophisticated in our approach, we try to do a bit of each; to focus on both past and future.
These two approaches broadly reflect two metanarratives with which we approach life and faith: the myths of regress and of progress. To the regressive Christian, “Change and decay”, linked forever in the Hymn Abide with me, act as synonyms. The constant shortening of human lifespan recounted in the Book of Genesis is clear evidence that things only get worse. The first few chapters of Paul’s letter to Rome depict a process of degradation against which the Church of God must stand, rescuing whom it can, while it may. By contrast, to the progressive Christian, decay is the consequence of not changing enough, or not sufficiently quickly. Luke’s account in Acts of the gospel reaching out to begin its conquest of empire, offers a view of an ever advancing Kingdom. It’s a destiny towards which, like Paul’s athlete, we must run, and run at our fastest. If a traditional hymn is needed, let it be From Glory to Glory advancing.
Of course, these characterisations hugely simplify reality. We are all a mix of progressive and regressive. But the balance between the two can be very different in each of us. So here’s a challenge for Lent. Try to live it in the opposite myth to your natural preference. If you are a progressive, then let a backwards facing Lent be a way of broadening your sympathies, deepening your understanding of others, so as to grow in holiness. If you are naturally regressive then face forwards. Find something in the world to embrace and enjoy. Maybe force yourself to eat at least one piece of chocolate very day.
That’s a hard ask; for most of us hard enough if not too hard. But, for a minority who have the motivation and the strength, maybe there is, to quote St Paul again, a better way still. Live this Lent neither looking to the past or future. Live it deeply in the present moment. Fast not to improve yourself, nor to express regret; fast simply because Jesus did. Take up or give up such practices as you choose, not because they will help you to achieve some goal, but simply to mark out this season as distinct, as a time set apart. A time for God to use in whatever way God wants.
David Walker is Bishop of Manchester
8 CommentsThe Meeting: When Law encounters Spirit
Candlemas is a minor feast in Anglicanism, and usually commemorates the coming of Christ as the light of the world, a theme vividly prominent in the first chapter of the Gospel of John. Elsewhere in John’s Gospel, Jesus himself announces: “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life.” (John 8:12)
The ‘light’ that Jesus brings is both the gift of salvation, rescue from spiritual darkness, and the ability to ‘see’ the difference between good and evil — spiritual wisdom and discernment. Following the light carries a resonance of moral choice. In Jesus, truth and salvation may have come into the world, but it is a ‘light’ that can be denied and ignored.
It wasn’t until the 1890s that the Church of England made it legal to place two candles on the altar during services, and, a few years later, made it unlawful to carry candles in procession! Of course, both rulings were widely disregarded and the earlier Roman practice of using candles was generally adopted.
Even earlier, Candlemas was celebrated as the feast commemorating three ancient ceremonies: the purification of the mother, the redemption of the firstborn and the dedication of a child. Luke has all three ceremonies taking place at the same time in order to emphasise Jesus’s significance and his legitimacy as the longed-for Messiah.
The feast commemorating this understanding of Candlemas was practised by the early church in Jerusalem from about 350, and its practice spread when Emperor Justinian decreed at Constantinople in 542 that the feast be observed. In the East, Candlemas was simply called ‘The Meeting’, marking the encounter between Jesus and Simeon.
By presenting Jesus at the Temple, offering a sacrifice, and by submitting to the ritual purification for mothers after giving birth, Mary and Joseph were fulfilling their obligations under Jewish law. Simeon, who was known to be a devout and careful observer of the law, was convinced that he would not die until he had seen the promised Messiah. That day, as Luke describes it, Simeon was inspired by the Holy Spirit to go to the Temple.
In the midst of the archaic ceremonies of ritual sacrifice and the ritual purification of Mary, in the heart of the great seat of Jewish identity and authority, Simeon looks at Jesus and bursts out with a song of praise and thanksgiving to God, using words all the hearers would instantly have recognised as coming from the great prophet Isaiah, who had foretold a saviour who would bring honour and glory to the people of Israel and who would be a light to the Gentiles.
That encounter between the aged Simeon and the infant Jesus was a moment when time stood still, when all the panoply of the Law met the promise of the Spirit, when a lifelong faithful observer of the Law came face to face with the freedom and fulfilment of the future: the Light had truly come into the world.
Christina Rees
4 CommentsTribes
Why was Paul so upset that members of the church at Corinth were identifying themselves over and against one another in terms of who had baptised whom? Why, in John’s Gospel, do we read that unity is essential if the world is to know that Jesus was sent by the Father? And, in keeping with the justice theme of this series of Christmas reflections, what does a vision of Christian unity say about how we pursue justice?
Though there are many ways to frame the problem, I wonder whether one potential ‘opposite’ of unity is an excessive form of tribalism (not that tribal or shared identity is itself always bad). Tribal societies arguably emerged as practical ways of banding together as a shared form of survival – no bad thing. At its worst, though, tribalism can express itself in extreme forms of ethnocentrism, where the value of others is so denigrated that the ‘other’ is demonised and where ethno-cleansing (or other forms of ‘cleansing’) can become almost routine.
Tribalism builds on our having a claim (via kinship or shared interest) on local, familiar ‘others’; but Christian tribalism (if we can call it that) could start with something different: for there is an ‘Other’ who has a prior claim on me and on us all. Christian tribalism could be different from other tribalisms, for our shared identity should not come primarily from us. Rather, it depends on our realisation that God’s love, something we cannot earn or possess, graciously shifts the vortex of any self-referent tribalism away from ourselves. Indeed, one way of reading disputes in the early Church is to see a budding movement away from being a small tribal Jewish sub-sect, to realising that this movement is precisely not about us, certainly not about who baptised whom, and perhaps not even about who believes this or that potentially divisive ‘theological idea’.
The realisation that identity (and so unity) is a gift, a gift modelled on God’s ultimately trustworthy love, shifts the goalposts. We are defined by the claims made on us – both by the Other and also by every ‘other’, who are all loved by the same God; and living the truth of that claim impels us to love both our neighbour and our so-called enemies, for God ‘makes his sun to rise on the evil and good, and sends rain on the just and the unjust’ (Mt 5.45). Indeed it is love of our enemies, which is to say love of other tribes, that apparently ought to distinguish us. Christian unity is not for ‘our sake’, not for our tribe’s sake, but for the sake of others, whom we are to love audaciously and sacrificially. In these days, such love is expressed principally by yearning and striving for justice for others.
If we Christians can do that together, if internecine tribal instincts are trumped by effective concern for others, even for the most vilified, then we will be witnessing to the power of God’s love to provide a vision beyond intra- and extra-tribal differences, a vision beyond hatred, beyond ethnocentrism, beyond the tensions that lead to violence and war. Such was the vision of the Kingdom, where God’s love defined and subordinated all other relations, where our freedom to love others was to be the hallmark of our having received the Spirit, of our having dreamt the dream. But if we can’t do that even amongst ourselves, if we eschew unity, then we descend to idolatry, preferring the darkness, and trumpeting to the world that what divides us is fundamentally more important than what unites us, more important even than God.
Joe Cassidy is Principal of St Chad’s College, Durham
3 CommentsTime to Change
I have signed the Time to Change pledge to end the stigma attached to mental illness. I encourage you to join this campaign in the UK, or similar campaigns where you live. Like many of you, I have been close to a number of people who have struggled with poor mental health. I became my late father’s carer in the last years of his life. It was only then that I recognised how we had colluded as a family in not knowing about his mental state for years. He was relatively well supported; but this did not prevent his early death as a result of the physical consequences of his struggle with life.
Research reveals that nine out of ten people in Britain who live with some form of mental illness are stigmatised. As if the illness were not enough to cope with, they are penalised in the workplace and over welfare benefits. They are shunned and laughed at. Worse still, moral blame is still applied to those living with persistent mental illness. We are frightened of it because it is so close to us and any one of us call fall prone to it in some form. It is also scary that, while there can be periods of recovery in any illness, the condition itself may well be chronic and incurable.
Understandably, we all dread that prospect for ourselves or for our loved ones; but it does not follow that we should blame sufferers for reminding us of their need. The media do not help. Of course, it is a tragedy if a psychotic person becomes dangerous and does serious harm to another person. The way that this is often reported suggests that people with mental health needs are likely to be dangerous. The sad truth is that most of those who suffer psychosis, or clinical depression or severe bi-polar illness are only likely to be a danger to themselves as they feel they can no longer endure the isolation and pain.
The gospel record reveals that it was the wandering bedlamites of Judaea and Galilee who first recognised who Jesus really was. Like shepherds and tax collectors and other outsiders, they became his special care. People came to hear him preach because they had first heard or witnessed his power as the kind of healer who could bring peace to a person with multiple personalities called Legion. I often reflect on the person of Mary Magdalene who is set free from her prison of tormented illness to be the apostle to the apostles. A powerful sculpture of Mary as an old woman by Donatello reveals someone who bears the marks of her illness still, but is on the front foot ready to be a witness of the love which could reach even her lowest depths. Shakespeare was someone who obviously understood a good deal about mental illness. His portrayal of King Lear is an astonishing mapping of descent into mental illness and also of the arrival of new insight and reconciliation through it.
Not so long ago I confirmed someone who lives with severe mental illness who joked that, after being committed to hospital twenty-eight times, at last his religious delusions were being taken seriously. It behoves us as Christians to welcome those who come to our churches and to work directly for much better social inclusion, both for sufferers and for their carers. Research commissioned by the Department of Health concluded that faith, worship and fellowship can have a profound therapeutic impact upon the wellbeing of people living with mental illness. Isolation and despair are met by belonging and hope. We know of conspicuous examples of very talented people with a bi-polar condition who make and have made significant contributions to our history and culture. There are talented but poorly people worshipping with us who not only need our prayer and loving staying power but who also deserve our respect for their humanity and for what they offer as witnesses to God. They offer us insight into the Saviour who abides with us and knows us when all props are taken away and when even our identity is threatened.
“Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.
If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea,
even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast.
If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light around me become night,”
even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day, for darkness is as light to you.” (Psalm 139.7–12)
Stephen Conway is Bishop of Ely.
9 CommentsThe heavens are opened
So. We arrive at the Baptism of Christ. We leave behind angels and dreams, shepherds and wise men, stable and census, and with the Baptism of Christ we arrive at history in the life of Jesus. We can be sure, I suggest, of two things: that John the Baptist existed; and that Jesus came and was baptized by him.
The existence and mission of the Baptist is attested not just by the gospels, but also by the Jewish historian Josephus. And Jesus’s baptism is recorded in the gospel according to Mark and that of Matthew; Luke briefly mentions it, and though John manages to get away without any explicit statement, he does relate the build-up and the aftermath.
In the accounts in Mark and Matthew, after his baptism Jesus sees the heavens open and the Spirit descend on him. In Luke the vision becomes an event seen by all; in the fourth gospel the Baptist himself has this vision as a witness to Jesus as Messiah.
Presumably Jesus had heard report of the Baptist and, perhaps with others, travelled out to see and hear him. And having seen and heard he was immersed in the water, just like many of the others who saw and heard. The synoptic gospels tell us this was a moment of great spiritual significance for Jesus. With the vision of the descent of the Spirit, perhaps it is at this point that Jesus decides to abandon his former life as a carpenter in Nazareth. Presumably he becomes a disciple of the Baptist, retreating into the wilderness for reflection and self-examination, and joining John in baptizing in the river Jordan.
And then John is arrested and is incarcerated in Herod’s prison and will soon meet his death at Herod’s whim. He was not the first person to fall victim to the wrath of a tyrant, and nor was he the last. A roll call of victims and prisoners of conscience would number in the tens of millions in the twentieth century alone. The list of current news stories at Amnesty International includes not just all the usual suspects — our own proud western democracies are not always beyond reproach either. The image at the top of this piece shows a detail of the ‘prisoners of conscience’ window at the east end of Salisbury Cathedral, where every day prayers are said for those held around the world. Let us too hold these people in our prayers and work for their freedom and the improvement of their lot. Let the oppressed go free.
Jesus meanwhile ‘withdraws’ (Matthew 4.12) to Galilee — very probably it was no longer safe for anyone linked to the Baptist to be in Herod’s territory. Luke tells us that Jesus’s first public act on his return to Galilee is to read in the synagogue at Nazareth:
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.’
If this is historical, then is it too much to see it as an expectation by Jesus that in this year of the Lord’s favour the captive Baptist will be released — and that this is happening now? Not surprising that his message was not received favourably and he was driven out.
But with the arrest and decrease of the Baptist, it is time for Jesus to increase and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour, the imminence of the kingdom of God. A kingdom based not on austerity or retreat to the wilderness but on justice for the oppressed and life in all its fullness. Here we are invited to sit and feast, accepted and welcomed into fellowship with the divine. In the subsequent ministry of Jesus baptism does not seem to be a prerequisite to ritual purity and to acceptance into the society of the ritually pure. Instead Jesus tells people their sins are already forgiven, and he accepts them without further ritual into society with him, sitting at table together and breaking bread.
Is it any wonder that it was these remarkable meals of Jesus that his followers continued — and that they continued to recognize his presence at the breaking of the bread? In this ritual we sit and eat at God’s table, and we break bread with our fellows, forgiving them the wrongs they have done us and receiving their forgiveness for the wrongs we have done them; and as we break bread together we recognize still the presence of Jesus, the incarnate Word.
And this begins with the baptism of Christ: the year of the Lord’s favour is now.
Simon Kershaw is one of the founders of Thinking Anglicans
17 CommentsMoving to centre stage
When Jesus was born there was peace. Any recorded disturbance was no more than a half-forgotten slur on his mother, which surprisingly did not result in an ‘honour killing’ but, against the odds, a marriage. Even today, nobody is much threatened by Christmas. Not so much because it is unthreatening, but because its message can be missed so easily, as it is on so many cute Christmas cards, and in so many charming nativity plays.
Epiphany marks the move of that child from the shadows onto the centre stage. His glory begins to be manifest. On Sunday or Monday (depending on the congregation) we will all celebrate that glory. In some countries, for instance Mexico, Epiphany is still the main day of rejoicing and present giving. It makes sense. We are celebrating the moment when people first start to take notice of the child, the moment when somebody who matters in the eyes of the world senses his glory and begins to feel after who he is. It is no coincidence that at that very moment, when we first celebrate the glory of Christ openly, the trouble starts. Because at all times and in all places Christ is a threat to the established order.
The values of Epiphany are the values of the Magnificat, and, come to that, the values most consistently stressed in the Hebrew Scriptures, our Old Testament: justice for the poor, joy for the sorrowing, and repentance for the rich.
Some aspects of this challenge to the established order are easier for our world to swallow than others. It is politically expedient at the moment in our country to blame the ills of society on the poor, the sick, and the stranger. These are the very categories of person in whom, according to St Matthew, we meet Christ in all his glory. Those with the courage to point out that the blame does not lie where it is apportioned are (now as then) vilified. Christians singing hymns, or practising personal pieties, are welcome to their private devotions. Christians speaking openly about the growing numbers unable to feed themselves in one of the richest countries in the world? Not so much. It is inconvenient to direct attention to the truth that, so far from being work-shy loungers, many of the poor are in jobs, often the jobs others would not wish to undertake.
Many leap with delight on the idea of sending the rich empty away, and small blame to them. Only, this has never been a popular message to those in power — and in our age that includes the media. They may admire Pope Francis hugging those with disabilities, but they only admire the rest of his message if they can imagine it directed to countries far away.
The Epiphany gospel is drawn from Matthew, and a part of it is the idea of strangers coming to worship the Christ. Matthew will take up that idea later, where the suggestion is that when we invite in the stranger, we invite Christ himself, and all that is good with him. Today it seems strangers are only welcome when they are neither Romanian nor Bulgarian — oh, and as long as they are not also sick, because then we will only help if they can pay.
The work of Epiphany is to bring the private moments of Christmas into the public area. It is our work. The song which Mary sings to Elizabeth must now be sung out loud for all the world to hear, even when it tries to stop its ears. If the glory of Christ is to be seen and his values are to shine out, each of us must sing that song, and loudly, too.
Rosemary Hannah is the author of The Grand Designer.
3 CommentsKnown by Name
The power of naming needs no rehearsal.
As we celebrate the naming of Jesus, we encounter again the implications of a God who enters into the realities of human life. The day remembers that this Jewish child, like every other, would have his entrance into the world and into a family ritually marked. To name a child is to take part in one of the near-universal human experiences: with his or her naming a baby is recognised as an individual, a unique person with both present existence and potential future. A different kind of relationship is established from that with an unborn or even newly-born child: now we can identify the child as him or her self, not purely as the son, daughter, grandson, granddaughter, of someone else, and using the name we can address him or her directly. Not surprising, then, that among those disconnected from religious practice, naming ceremonies are gaining popularity.
Not surprising, either, that charity appeals, of which there are (rightly) so many at this time of year, recognise that we struggle to connect to the generic, to ‘babies’, ‘children’, ‘the homeless’. Each one, whether for London’s rough sleepers, the young victims of abuse in the country at large, those who suffer in war, or the hungry of the world’s struggling nations, seems to begin with a name: ‘let me tell you about …’ says the well-known voice fronting the appeal. And a particular, poignant, story unfolds. We seem to need that particularity to engage our sympathies; in the Christian tradition, believing ourselves known by name, we have all the more reason to connect in this way to the man, woman, or child in need, believing them also to be known to God.
Known to God. The phrase will have a distinctive resonance in this year, 2014, as governments and people mark the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War. ‘Known unto God’ are the words inscribed, at the suggestion of Rudyard Kipling, on the graves of the thousands of soldiers who remained unidentified on the battlefields. These were men whose names, given at the beginning of their lives, were lost at the end in the bloody business of war.
The words used on those graves speak of a trust in God’s care for each one as precious. They remain a challenge to our tribalism and localism, a challenge to hold together our own instinctive connection to the known and named individual with a wider sympathy, a wider compassion. If we are given the name of a hungry child, we need to make the link to current concerns over food security for the world – and then think through how we feed ourselves and those dear, familiar, named ones who share our tables. Just as, in the birth and naming of a child 2000 years ago, we see both the particular and the universal, so in our words, our prayers, our actions we are called to respond both to the one whose name we know and the multitude beyond, known and loved by God.
Canon Jane Freeman is Team Rector of Wickford and Runwell in the diocese of Chelmsford
8 Comments