KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 3 April
I have opened my mouth to the Lord
Discipline. It is a loaded word, one which is freighted with a lot of baggage, and largely viewed negatively. I am sure it makes Mr. Faucher cringe to be thought about as the disciplinarian! But that is to overlook the positive and stronger feature of discipline as something essential to education and maturity. Discipline is really about learning.
In the spiritual traditions of the world’s religions and philosophies, there are those special times which are about a recovery and a renewal of the mind and soul in the ethical principles that belong to ourselves as embodied beings capable of grasping meaning and truth. Such things are about spiritual discipline.
Lent is a time for“self-reflection and repentance”, for “prayer, fasting and self-denial”, for “reading and meditation upon God’s holy Word” (BCP, p. 615). To that end, we have embarked upon a series of reading from The Book of Judges, in part, because it provides a self-critique of human reason and presumption, a necessary check upon ourselves, somewhat akin to Sophocles’ play Oedipus Rex. It offers a critical view of our humanity in its adolescence, we might say. One of its recurring themes is “the people of Israel again did what was evil in the sight of the Lord.” The other recurring theme which also ends the work is the phrase “in those days there was no king in Israel and everyone did as was their wont.” There is the question about how the truth and order of the will of God in the Law are to be mediated to the people of Israel. In a way, The Book of Judges is a reminder, yet again, of the destructive folly of our humanity when left to our own devices. It reveals the necessity of the Law as the overarching set of ethical principles that shape individual and communal behaviour. Judges shows us what happens when we fail to attend to those principles. As such it recalls us to their necessity. It is a profound check on all and every form of humanism which thinks itself to be self-complete.
It is, to be sure, a pretty violent book with a number of pretty disturbing stories including the ugliest and most disturbing story in the whole of the Scriptures, the story of the Levite’s concubine (which we are not reading this year!). The Judges are motley collection of charismatic individuals raised up by God to try to return Israel to God. It is not about their personal qualities; they are all flawed and importantly so. Yet this awareness of the limitations of our humanity in itself is the important lesson. That awareness can only open us to the need for God’s will and grace in our lives.
