Christ Church

Despising the suffering that brings death

Maccabees . Not certainly well known and yet The Books of Maccabees are profound and important works that belong to the intertestamental period; in other words, works that were written between the setting down of the Hebrew or Jewish Scriptures and the emergence of the Christian Scriptures. The Books of Maccabees are among a collection of writings that are sometimes called Deutero-canonical texts by Roman Catholics and Apocryphal texts by Protestants. They have different kinds of standing within the Protestant Churches and the Churches of Eastern Orthodoxy. For Anglicans they are read, if at all, not“to establish any doctrine” but “for example of life and instruction of manners.”

First and Second Maccabees deal with persecution, with the collision of cultures during the Hellenistic period. Maccabees itself means ‘hammer’ and refers to a family of heroes who stood up against Greek dominance. But more than simply belonging to the conflict narratives that bedevil so much of our own discourse, they open us out to important questions of a moral and an intellectual nature that, to some extent, transcend the divisions and oppositions that are the assumption and conclusion of all conflict narratives. As such, perhaps, they speak to some of our confusions and uncertainties about character and about what it means to be human, what it means to be a self.

In Chapel this week we read from 2nd Maccabees and from 4th Maccabees, the latter most likely completely unknown to most students and faculty and not found in most Bibles. The story in 2nd Maccabees was the powerful story of “the admirable mother” of the seven sons of Eleazar, all martyred because they stood up to the tyranny of Antiochus Epiphanes. The story reflects the conditions of Israel under Hellenism following the conquests of Alexander the Great. In a way, the story speaks to the question, the important question for all of us, about how we face adversity.

She is a strong woman who shows us something of the power of certain ideas and principles that allow us to withstand the forms of the abuse of power and domination. It shows as well the nature of the interaction between cultures and ideas that go beyond simply conflict. For here in this passage, in a work composed in Greek probably in the 2nd Century BC, we have the first mention of the most radical idea of creation imaginable, the idea of creatio ex nihilo, and the idea of resurrection. These teachings provide the ground for withstanding persecution and adversity.

The idea of creatio ex nihilo is the strongest possible affirmation of the all-sufficiency of an intellectual principle that is not dependent in any way upon any sort of pre-existing matter. This might seem to be in contrast to Aristotle but not necessarily since even matter in itself is at best mere potentiality and privation; in short, nothing in itself, too. The idea of resurrection, here, is also a strong affirmation about human identity. We are more not less than our bodies. Remarkable insights that belong to this unique moment in late Judaism and which resonate with later Christian and Islamic understandings.

This story reminds us that there is something more to our humanity than simply our actions or our experiences, something more than the things which just happen to us. It is in that sense a powerful testament to the integrity of human character and the basis for a consideration about the virtues or excellences of character that are part of a long tradition of moral philosophy which we forget and neglect at our peril. The lesson from 4th Maccabees is a philosophical treatise about the virtues of the soul and draws upon the example of the mother of the sons of Eleazar to illustrate the teaching that reason controls the emotions not by destroying them but by directing them to their proper end.

That idea of not being defined simply by our actions or by our experiences is an important life-lesson and one which speaks directly to the life of our School. The lesson is wonderfully conveyed, it seems to me, by the poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, in As Kingfishers Catch Fire. What does it mean to be a self? “Selves – What I do is me, for that I came” the poet notes.

Are we just what we do? Are we simply our actions? It seems to me that if we are simply our actions then we are condemned by ourselves. The poet responds to this idea. “I say more” meaning that we are more, though not less, than our actions. And he elaborates. “The just man justices”– a good but rare instance of a noun turned into a verb – means that the just man does justice, but justice here means something more and greater than the vagaries and follies of human justice. It is the justitia dei, the justice of God, which itself is a kind of grace. “The just man justices/ Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces.” Grace or charity is the greater justice of God in creation and in human lives. What moves in “the just man” is not self-righteousness but the justice of God and, as such, grace moves in all our doings and goings. Wonderful but even more, the just man “acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is.” Wow. We are who we are in the sight of God and in his knowing love.

What does that mean? In the Christian understanding that belongs to the insight of the poem, it means “Christ.”“For Christ plays in ten thousand places/ Lovely in limbs, lovely in eyes not his/ To the Father through the features of men’s faces.” We see God – Christ – in one another and come to know who we are in Christ. It means to know that we are more than the circumstances and accidents, more than even the actions and deeds, let alone thoughts and words, of our fallen lives. We are something more in God.

This gives us the strength and courage to withstand all and every adversity. It teaches us something about the real dignity and worth of our humanity.

(Rev’d) David Curry
Chaplain, English & ToK teacher
Chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy