Why stand ye gazing up into heaven?
The question raises a certain contemporary attitude towards religion. Isn’t religion, after all, utterly useless and of no earthly good? “Don’t just stand there, do something?” Isn’t that the familiar mantra of the culture of busyness? This presupposes the fatal separation between doing and thinking. It might be better and truer to say, “don’t just do something but sit and think”!
It is, to be sure, a post-Christian world and one in which there appears to be no end of suspicion and disdain for all forms of religion. But the triumph of secularism is itself an illusion. Our post-Christian culture is also a “post-secular age,” a point which has been well known for several decades, notably expressed by the self-described metaphysical atheist, Jurgen Habermas. He pointed out the demise of ‘secularisation theory’ in the phenomenon of the modern return of religion. That return is ‘the good, the bad and the ugly,’ perhaps, but it means, at the very least, that religion has to be thought about seriously. The gaping hole in our systems of public education is the place (or non-place) of religion.
There is no area of knowledge, no subject or discipline in the academic world, that does not have some sort of connection to religion as philosophy. The terms ‘science’ and ‘religion’ are themselves very modern constructs which presuppose a conflict narrative perpetuated on both sides. The term, scientia, knowledge, was for more than two millennia about an inner disposition of the mind, about the discipline of thinking ethically with respect to any number of different areas of knowledge and interest. It was only in the 19th century that the term was reduced to a body of knowledge and a way of thinking, mostly empirical, about the natural world and, sadly, without a sense of the ethical. Ironically, it is easily conflated with a body of knowledge at the expense of us as knowers. The term, religio, religion, too, is at once ambiguous and uncertain and does not easily map onto the earlier forms of philosophical discourse. Religion, historically, was more about philosophy as a way of life; our knowing as knowing and living ethically.
These observations simply go to the important question about how we read and think, speak and act, something which often gets addressed in Chapel. This week brought us to the Christian mystery of the Ascension of Christ. The question about gazing up into heaven is not about the uselessness of all things religious and spiritual but more about how Christ’s Ascension is the fullest possible affirmation of our humanity, soul and body, and of human individuality. The Ascension celebrates the homecoming of the Son to the Father. At once cosmic in scope, it says something profound about the dignity of our humanity; “the exultation of our humanity,” as the Fathers spoke about it. It highlights the spiritual insight that our bodies and the world of nature are not nothing; they belong and have their place and truth with God. The Ascension is the culmination of the Resurrection. It points us to a profound view about our humanity, about who we are in the sight of God.
The Story of Susanna which we concluded this week is a wonderful moral tale that awakens us to the virtues of character that depend upon the principles which define us. The elders in the story have betrayed their office and the Law. Susanna stands her ground, trusting in the truth and righteousness of God regardless of the impossible situation, humanly speaking, in which she is placed. She is condemned because the people trusted the authorities and so she is condemned to death by stoning. This suggests the problem of trusting authorities blindly and unthinkingly.
The story provides a reflective and critical commentary on the Law, looking back to Leviticus and Deuteronomy and to the laws governing sexual relations, specifically, adultery, for which the penalty was being stoned to death, literally (not cannabistically, if I may coin a term). This seems harsh and barbaric to us and, certainly in our contemporary world, I think it is utterly barbaric. But the proscriptions against adultery and its penalty in the Torah are for both men and women and have to do with the ordering of close-knit communities, where the options which we assume are not in play.
It often seems that women more than men, past and present, have been on the receiving end of this particular law, yet The Story of Susanna and the later story in John’s Gospel about “the woman taken in adultery” offer important correctives to such abuses. The Story of Susanna ends with Daniel’s intervention on her behalf resulting in the elders being caught out in their lies. They are caught through Daniel’s questioning questioning – “under what tree do you see them?” – which uses in the Greek some humorous plays on words that are hard to capture in English without taking liberties with the text. The result, though, is that elders are put to death by stoning instead of Susanna. “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her,” Jesus says, to the accusers of himself and the woman, highlighting the further ethical issue about human hypocrisy and the limits of human judgement. These stories remind us of the conviction of conscience and of being called to account, to truth.
Far from being a flight from religious philosophy and from the world, it is an affirmation of the fundamental insights of these traditions about the primacy of the ethical and the ways in which our consciences are awakened to truth. Along with the story of the healing of a leper within Israel and the healing of the Centurion’s servant from outside of Israel, healings by word and touch and by word alone, we discover a larger sensibility about our humanity, about who we are in the sight of God. In such things we discover a real freedom precisely in and through our engagements and encounters with one another and precisely in and through the well-ordered structures of our communal lives. They require our conscious embrace of matters of principle, of truths held sacred. Such things are neither a flight from the world nor a looking away from the world and one another but rather about seeing one another in the light of truth.
(Rev’d) David Curry
Chaplain, English & ToK teacher
Chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy