by CCW | 3 June 2021 14:00
This would have been the week of ‘last Chapels’, a time of reflection and an attempt to gather up, in my own poor fashion, the meaning of Chapel in the educational life of the School. I want to think about an extraordinary scene in John’s Gospel about Jesus’ engagement with our humanity at times of death; his encounter with us as mourners.
It is the scene of the raising of Lazarus (John 11.38-43). It is the last of three occasions in the Gospels where Jesus meets us as mourners. There is, first, the story of Jesus’ raising the daughter of Jairus who has just died. Talitha cumi, “Little girl, I say to you, arise,” Jesus says in the face of the sceptical ridicule of the attendants (Mark 5. 35-43). It is one of the few Aramaisms, words in Aramaic in the Gospels but then translated into Greek.
There is, secondly, the wonderful story of his encounter with the Widow of Nain on her way in grief to bury her only son. We are meant to feel her grief, her loss, and the way in which the community grieves with her. Yet “do not weep,” Jesus says to her and then to the young man, he says, “arise.” He sat up, we are told, “and began to speak.” And in a marvelous touch, Luke tells us, Jesus “gave him to his mother” (Luke 7.1-17). The story identifies the active principle that moves in all these encounters. “When the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her.” It is only on that basis that Jesus can say to her, “do not weep,” meaning, ‘don’t always be weeping’. The divine compassion shown through the humanity of Christ grounds our life in God’s life and as such we are not simply defined by suffering and death, by grief and sorrow. Instead through suffering and death we participate in God’s own life. Such is the meaning of these encounters.
The raising of Lazarus takes place in the context of Jesus with Mary and Martha, the sisters of Lazarus. An intriguing story, it names the divine reality of the triumph of life over death for us as resurrection. Jesus says explicitly to Martha, “I am the resurrection and the life,” radical words which belong to the deep insight of the religious and philosophical traditions in their Christian form. God is life and that life is made known in all of its wonder and mystery in Christ. Lazarus has been dead four days, as Martha points out, saying that “by this time there will be an odor” (or as the King James Version more graphically puts it, “Lord, by this time he stinketh”!). All of these encounters are emphatic about the reality of the body and death. All of them show Jesus not just as another mourner. He is with us in our griefs – they are not denied any more than death is denied – but death is overcome. The Resurrection of Christ testifies to the radical nature of human individuality in and through suffering and death. These stories show us the truth and dignity of our humanity as found in the love of God. That alone changes everything and sets us in motion towards one another in knowledge and love.
Education, too, is about a kind of dying to ourselves and living to God through the principles that dignify and enoble our lives. To be sure, human care and compassion is finite and limited; our words and deeds are incomplete and partial, yet we participate in what is greater than ourselves and in which we find the true worth of ourselves and one another; the divine compassion is life and resurrection.
The School’s mottoes are about our faithfulness (fideliter) to ideas and principles that set us in motion towards one another in the various forms of public service and life, Deo Legi Regi Gregi, “For God, for the Law, for the King, for the People.” Together they signal an education that recalls us to the interplay of responsibilities in and through the diversities of activity. In contrast to the conflict narratives and the political and social polarizations of our contemporary culture, these mottoes call us out of ourselves and into life with one another. The struggle of our times is to reclaim the principles and ideals that animate our institutions without which they are deadly and destructive.
The principles and ideals that belong to our institutions cannot be taken for granted. That is part of our betrayal and forgetfulness of their truth and meaning. Such is the sad and deeply distressing spectacles of institutions in contradiction with themselves which contributes to injustice and indignity, such as in the recent news about the unmarked and concealed graves of many children in the native residential schools system, the neglect of care and compassion by those to whom their lives were entrusted. For the native peoples, it is yet another blow to their quest for respect and dignity. Yet respect and dignity is what has been so powerfully shown by those who placed the shoes of children on the steps of the churches. It is a call for remembrance and recalls what belongs to truth and dignity. We are quick to judge the past; meanwhile many of our native communities continue to lack clean drinking water, much to our shame and discredit.
Principles and ideals call us to account and provide a necessary and constant self-critique. Such is repentance, for example, metanoia, a thinking after, which presupposes a prior truth to which we return, redire ad principia, a circling back to God. In short, we are recalled to the primacy of the ethical even in the face of our betrayals of its truth. Education can only happen when we learn from our failings and shortcomings rather than remaining trapped in our self-righteous assertions and fixated on our self-obsessions. To learn assumes that there are things to be learned. That in turn underlies the idea of teaching.
Can we be taught to be good? It is Meno’s question to Socrates in Plato’s famous dialogue by that name. Meno is a kind of adolescent sophist; the question is whether or not he is actually teachable. Socrates famously responds to Meno by saying, “how can I know whether virtue (being good) can be taught if I don’t know what virtue is?” We can, perhaps, be taught to think about what virtue (being good) is but whether that will make us good is another question. That will depend on each of us taking a hold of the teaching and making it our own in our thoughts and actions. In that sense education never ends and belongs to our life as living beings in community with one another.
The story of the raising of Lazarus calls us out of the prisons of our self-determinations. It calls us into the presence of truth and to the life of truth in us. To be called out of ourselves is our freedom and our dignity. It is the challenge and purpose of education, literally being led out of ourselves in our ignorance and our illusions and being led into the way of life and truth. It has been the purpose of Chapel to call us out of ourselves and into the radical dignity of our humanity, especially in the ups and downs of this unusual year. The challenge has been to think the ethical in the hopes that perhaps, just perhaps, we might begin to learn to be ethical.
(Rev’d) David Curry
Chaplain, English & ToK teacher
Chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2021/06/03/kes-chapel-reflection-week-of-3-june/
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