KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 26 January
Mine hour is not yet come
The weekend past marked the celebration of Mr. Kim Walsh’s many, many years of excellence in wrestling as he segues into retirement. Well done! The metaphor of wrestling complements the universal theme of pilgrimage, the idea of the journey of education, of learning. Both presuppose that there is something to be grasped and learned, something made manifest. In Chapel, morning after morning, we are engaged in wrestling with the images of Scripture in pursuit of wisdom and understanding. Epiphany is especially the season of ‘the pilgrimage of the understanding’ with respect to the things of God which ultimately belong to the good of our common humanity.
Such things as the concept of God’s infinite wisdom, infinite power, and infinite goodness are universal in some sense or another as refracted through a number of different philosophical and religious traditions. They require a journey, a pilgrimage into the concepts that belong to the structure of the reality of which we are a part. There is Arjuna wrestling, we might say, with Sri Krishna about his dharma, the sacred law of his being in the face of a great ethical dilemma in the Bhagavad Gita. There is the Buddha, Siddartha Gautama, stepping beyond the walls of his palaces to encounter and wrestle with a world of suffering, Dukka. There is Confucius wrestling in his Analects with the concepts of li and ren which cannot be reduced to simple means and methods of thinking what is good and right to do. There are, of course, the traditions of learning in the world of Plato and Aristotle and their successors about the eros, the passionate desire to know, that belongs somehow to the nature of everyone. And there are the teachings of Israel, of Christianity and Islam that draw upon such things each in their own distinctive ways.
One of the oldest works of literature, The Epic of Gilgamesh gives us the first wrestling contest in human history: Gilgamesh wrestling with Enkidu out of which comes their friendship; a friendship which ultimately will lead Gilgamesh on his quest for wisdom concerning life and death. In Genesis, Jacob wrestles with an Angel (or God?!) and in so doing is changed and becomes Israel, which means “one who strives with God.” Wrestles with God, we might say.
This week, one of the traditional and classical Epiphany stories, which has been read in the epiphany season for more than a millennium and a half, was read in Chapel. It was the story of the Wedding Feast at Cana of Galilee, a story told only in John’s Gospel. It is, as he says, “the beginning of signs.” And yet it points to the end or purpose of all the signs and wonders of the Gospel. Signs and wonders mean miracles. It is a miracle story where Jesus changes the water into wine. Why? For the good of our humanity, for our social joy which God seeks for us. Wow.
