Month: April 2020

Peace and forgiveness and love

Peace and forgiveness flow out of the Resurrection. Such is the love which reconstitutes us out of the chaos of sin and betrayal, out of the malaise of suffering and sorrow. Like all of us, the disciples were huddled in fear behind closed doors. “Then Jesus came and stood in the midst.” It is a wonderful phrase which goes to the heart of the Passion and the Resurrection. God is in the midst of our suffering world, a world broken and in disarray, in fear and uncertainty.

Christ appears behind closed doors twice in John’s Gospel; once on the evening of Easter Day, and then eight days later when Thomas, whom we have come to call “doubting Thomas” was also there. He had heard about the first appearance of the Risen Christ but said that he wouldn’t believe until he could not only see but touch the wounds of the Crucified. Seeing and believing, reaching out and touching, and so believing. The point is that those are important though not the only forms of knowing.

And three times Jesus says “peace be unto you.” He bestows the power of absolution, of forgiveness upon the disciples whom he sends in his name even as the Father has sent him. And he tells Thomas to reach out and touch, to be not faithless but believing. As another Thomas remarks some thirteen centuries later, Thomas’s doubting provides for us the greater certainty of faith (Aquinas).

But the greater marvel, perhaps, is that these scenes belong to the same chapter as the encounter between Christ and Mary Magdalene where he tells her not to touch him while also sending her on a mission, a mission to the other brethren that is grounded in the eternal mission of his going to “my Father and your Father, my God and your God,” wonderful words which complement Thomas’ exclamation upon encountering the Risen Christ, “My Lord, and my God.” To the one, do not touch; to the other touch and see. Both are gathered into the love which restores and redeems, the love which is resurrection.

One of the great literary and philosophical works of our humanity was written behind closed doors, in a prison, Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy (6th century). He was awaiting execution on trumped-up charges of treason. He was in grief and sorrow, in fear and dismay. Lady Philosophy appears to him and, like Christ the Good Shepherd, undertakes to return him to his true self, banishing like so many false comforters, all the appeals to emotion and self-pity in which he has buried himself. She recalls him to learning, to the things which abide and are eternal. A remarkable treatise, the work has shaped the imaginary of the intellectual culture of Europe and beyond. It was mirabile dictu translated by Alfred the Great in the ninth century, by Chaucer in the fourteenth, and by Queen Elizabeth the First in the sixteenth, to give some sense of its range and importance.

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“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil”

“April is the cruellest month,” T.S. Eliot says at the beginning of his poem, The Waste Land. He is playing on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales which invokes April as a time of pilgrimage, of rebirth and renewal.

We find ourselves, I am afraid, in a wasteland here in Nova Scotia after the rampage of madness in the mass shooting that has killed so many people in one of the rural parts of our province. It is heart-breaking and shocking, a reminder of the radical nature of evil. We confront dark and difficult things. How do we face them?

By being recalled to who we are in the sight of God. “The deepest longing of the soul is for that which is greater than itself,” the great Neoplatonic philosopher Plotinus teaches (3rd. cent. AD). Such an idea has its roots in the teachings of Plato and Aristotle and carries over into the spiritual imaginary of the Jewish, Christian and Islamic traditions of the Mediterranean cultures and from there into Europe and beyond. God “governs us as masters of ourselves,” Aquinas observes a thousand years later. It is when we forget or deny such ideas that we become empty. Such is nihilism out of which comes such mindless madness, desolation, death and destruction that has turned Nova Scotia into a wasteland.

Yet providentially, it seems, the lessons in Chapel this week speak to these dark and difficult times. Psalm 23, the so-called Shepherd’s Psalm, begins with the idea of God as Shepherd. “The Lord is my shepherd.” Jerome who translated the Hebrew Scriptures and the Greek New Testament into Latin (4th/5th cent. AD), actually provided two translations of the Psalms into Latin, one based on the Hebrew, the other on the Greek Septuagint resulting in “The Lord rules me” or “the Lord shepherds me.” Aquinas wisely notes that “He who shepherds, rules,” a profound image about the true exercise of power that is not about domination and destruction but about building up and caring for those whom you “rule” or better “shepherd.” A lesson for leaders everywhere.

The two Latin versions vary in another respect. One speaks about walking in the midst of the shadow of death, the other in the valley of death. Miles Coverdale’s 1535 translation of the Psalms became an English classic and has remained embedded in the classical Books of Common Prayer. With a wonderful poetic sensibility, Coverdale joined together valley and shadow to produce the memorable phrase, “the valley of the shadow of death.” We all walk through “the valley of the shadow of death,” to be sure. But the psalmist says “I will fear no evil.” Why? Because “thou art with me.” Who? God. The Lord. And that makes all the difference.

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They ran both together

Just as we buried ourselves in the Passion of Christ during Holy Week, so now we run in the Resurrection of Christ. The classic Easter Gospel is all about running. Mary Magdalene coming to the tomb in the early morning finds the stone taken away from the sepulchre and runs to Simon Peter and John. “They ran both together,” John tells us in his Gospel, to the tomb. The Resurrections sets us in motion.

The Resurrection is the fruit of the Passion, we might say, but there is the paradox that, in a way, the Passion comes out of the Resurrection. How? It is only in the light of the Resurrection that the Passion accounts come to be written. “Herein is love,” we must say about both the Passion and the Resurrection. “Never that which is shall die,” as Euripides says. Such is the love of God which now moves in us. Such is the radical nature of the Resurrection. It changes our perspectives. It changes our thinking about death and suffering; just, perhaps, it can speak to us in our current fears and worries.

I cannot think this Easter Gospel except in its juxtaposition with Mark’s account of the Marys coming to the empty tomb and encountering “a young man,” an angel, whose words to them and to us belong to the joy of the Easter Proclamation. “Be not afraid,” they are told. “Ye seek Jesus of Nazareth which was crucified: he is risen.” Christ is Risen. Alleluia! Alleluia! The Lord is Risen indeed. Alleluia! Alleluia! This is the ancient Christian greeting. Something has changed. Death is no longer the end of the road, the terminus ad quem of human life; it has become a means to an end, a transitus. Death itself is changed. Such is the great dynamic of the Resurrection. But in what is known as the shorter end of Mark’s Gospel, he says that “they fled from the tomb… for they were afraid.” Are we running away in fear or are we running in the path of learning and joy?

The stories of the Resurrection show the dawning awareness on the part of the disciples about the Resurrection. It is a process of learning, of seeing things in a new way, a way that does not deny the past of suffering, sorrow, sin, and death but instead shows us a way of thinking through those realities. We are learning the lessons of love. Love sets us in motion towards one another because it is the motion of God’s love in us. God’s love runs in us. That connects us even when we seem separate and isolated from one another. There is the greater connection of prayer and thought. It happens when we are running in the path of learning. Such is the real purpose and meaning of a school as a place of learning, of care and compassion, of love and service.

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