Category: KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

Last Words

“How readest thou?” The last Chapel of the last Chapels (apart from Encaenia on Saturday, June 14th for the graduating class of 2025, though that is equally a beginning!). How wonderful that the last of the last Chapels was with the Junior School! How appropriate that the reading for the last Chapel was the Parable of the Good Samaritan, the most comprehensive expression of Christian ethical teaching and one which complements in many ways the ethical concerns of other religions and philosophies. At the very least, it challenges us about our actions towards and with one another.

“How readest thou?” Jesus asks, “What is written in the Law?” His questions are his response to the hostile question of the Lawyer who was seeking to test him. “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” he had asked. What is particularly wonderful is how Jesus’ questions draw out from the lawyer what he knows in some sense but doesn’t know that he knows. What is drawn out of him is an essential spiritual and intellectual insight that belongs to education and to ethical life. He gives us the Summary of the Law, something which Jesus also provides in the other Gospels: the love of God and the love of neighbour. “Thou hast answered right,” Jesus says, “Do this and thou shalt live.” Love is the answer.

Both laws derive from The Hebrew Scriptures, from Deuteronomy and Leviticus, and summarize the ethical teaching of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The Law is about far more than a list of duties; it is a comprehensive way of life. But the lawyer replies to Jesus’ response with the dismissive and cynical question, “and who is my neighbour?” He asks this, as Luke puts it, because he was “willing to justify himself,” as if the question relieves him from any real responsibility and agency. As if the love of neighbour could be separated from the love of God.

Yet this question launches the parable of the Good Samaritan which highlights the real significance of the Summary of the Law. The parable is told to convict our consciences about our actions. How we read is really about how we think and how we think shapes how we act.

The parable is a picture of our humanity at once fallen and in disarray, imaged as “a certain man,” lying half dead on the roadside between Jerusalem and Jericho, symbolically the heavenly and earthly cities respectively, but then restored and taken care of by the compassion of God imaged in the figure of “a certain Samaritan.” Unlike the Priest and Levite, who look and pass by, the Samaritan, as he journeyed on the same road, “came where he was,” and, most crucially, “when he saw him, he had compassion on him”. The key word is compassion, the deeper meaning of which we often fail to grasp. It occurs in this way of seeing and then acting with compassion several times in the Gospels, particularly in Luke’s Gospel. Other times are about Jesus seeing us for instance beholding the multitude in the wilderness or seeing the widow of Nain accompanied by her community in shared grief. Out of compassion he feeds the multitude; out of compassion he raises the widow’s son.

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Take with you words

“Take with you words and return unto the Lord,” the prophet Hosea tells us. “The way up and the way down are one and the same,” the philosopher Heraclitus states. “Repentance,” Lancelot Andrewes, one of the great Anglican preachers of the 17th century, says “is redire ad principia, ‘a kind of circling’,” a returning back to the one from whom we have turned away. These words complement one another and highlight the purpose of Chapel. It is all about a kind of circling around and into the mystery of God, the beginning and end of all created beings, especially rational creatures, as Thomas Aquinas reminds us.

Hosea is the great love-prophet of the Old Testament. But what kind of love? The love that is forgiveness and grace, the love that redeems and perfects all of the myriad forms of our imperfect loves. Our loves have no meaning apart from what they presuppose and seek but cannot achieve or attain on their own.

Take with you words? Last Chapels are special and poignant times, I think, because of what we have been through together in the long course of the School year, and, for that matter, over many years. All the diverse enterprises of our lives, all the various aspects of our life together as a School are gathered into the mystery of God in prayer and praise. And what is that gathering except the understanding? The struggle and challenge is to enter into the images of scripture and literature to discover something about what it means to be human. Intellectus is the gathering into understanding; in short, education.

Take with you words, Hosea says. For what purpose? Wisdom and understanding. Nothing less and nothing more. “Whosoever is wise, let him understand these things; whoever is discerning, let him know them; for the ways of the Lord are right.” The understanding is profoundly ethical. In every way it recalls the principle upon which our being and knowing radically depend, something which we have been exploring in the stories of the Resurrection seen in terms of the different ways of knowing through which we arrive at an understanding of our world and ourselves. It challenges us about the perennial questions of good and evil, of right and wrong, of the realities of suffering and death, and of how we face them.

Take with you words that connect with the great works of literature, words which are transformative. In and through the ups and downs, the tempests and storms of our world and day, there is, as Ariel in Shakespeare’s Tempest says, the possibilities of “a sea-change into something rich and strange.” Or like Caliban, embraced in the spirit of reconciliation and forgiveness, we too may learn to say “I’ll be wise hereafter and seek for grace.” Or in a Canadian register, we might note the advice of Lady Juliet d’Orsey in Timothy Findley’s novel The Wars, “to clarify who you are by your response to when you lived.”

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Lifted up and set in motion

This week in Chapel we had the first of two different but interrelated stories of the Resurrection from the 20th Chapter of John’s Gospel. One concerns the encounter between Mary Magdalene and the Risen Christ (John 20. 11-18); the other, to Jesus appearing behind close doors to the disciples and then again to Thomas (John 20.19-29). The two stories speak to the question of epistemology, to the ways of knowing that belong to our humanity.

The first story is quite moving and touching (if you will pardon the irony since in the encounter between Jesus and Mary Magdalene, she is told, “Touch me not”!). Mary Magdalene comes seeking the body of Christ only to discover, first, the empty tomb, and then Jesus himself whom she doesn’t recognise because she assumes he is dead. She has come not just in perplexity and confusion but in grief and sorrow. Yet she has come with a holy and humane purpose: to honour and respect the body of the deceased. There is something universal and profoundly human about that sensibility. It already suggests that we are more though not less than our bodies, a sense that death does not completely define our humanity.

In ancient Greece, Anaxagoras argued that it was not the material elements of earth, water, air, and fire in various combinations, material causality, as it were, that provide an ultimate understanding of reality but mind, what he called nous. As Aristotle famously said about him, “he was like a sober man in the company of drunks.” I often think of that remark in relation to these stories of the Resurrection in John’s Gospel. How does Mary come to know the Risen Christ? It happens through her encounter seeking one thing and finding another and being changed by that encounter. She mistakes Jesus for the gardener and asks him where you have laid him so that she can take him away and do the burial honours. Jesus simply says her name: “Mary”.

She turns and says, “Rabboni”, meaning master or teacher. Jesus first says to her: “Touch me not for I am not yet ascended to my Father.” But then he bids her “go to my brethren, and say unto them, I am ascending to my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God.”

Theology consorts with images to bring us to understanding and life. Our challenge is always to attend thoughtfully to the images in order to enter into their meaning and understanding. We are being awakened to a deeper understanding of what it means to be human through our being opened out to the truth and life of God, even in the face of our uncertainties and sorrows. So what does Jesus mean? By telling her not to touch, he is really saying don’t cling to me, don’t hold onto the things of the past or just to the things of the body. He is lifting her up into a greater understanding of who he truly is: the Son of the Father. Here Resurrection is immediately connected to the Ascension, to what the Fathers of the early Church called “the exaltation of our humanity”.

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Things heard and things seen

The second half of the Easter story of Christ on the Road to Emmaus was read in Chapel this week. The story is especially powerful and important with respect to epistemology, to ways of knowing or theories of knowledge. Last week, Jesus drew out of the disciples (or learners!) their perplexity and confusion about the Passion and the discovery of the empty tomb. They were running away from Jerusalem in their uncertainty and disappointment. Only when they acknowledge their confusion, can Jesus then “interpret to them in all of the Scriptures the things concerning himself.” Jesus the Word explains the words of Scripture about the Word, namely, himself! Beautiful. A way of learning by what is heard.

But only in the conclusion of the story do we see the effects of this teaching on these disciples. It happens only after the episode in which they learn through what Jesus does, namely through something seen. Sitting at table with them, “he took bread, and blessed it, and brake, and gave to them.” Something done and seen. The immediate consequence is astounding. “Their eyes were opened, and they knew him.” A way of learning by what is seen.

They had heard him but it is the visible word of action that brings them to an understanding of both what was heard and what was seen. Luke tells us that Jesus, “vanished out of their sight,” which is significant to the essential teaching of the Resurrection. Jesus is alive and present but not as reduced to the finite and material. He cannot be possessed and controlled by us. The body is affirmed and made the vehicle of a new and deeper spiritual truth; it is redeemed and restored to its ultimate truth as found in God who is by definition unseen.

What is done and seen by Jesus has awakened them and opened their eyes to the truth of the crucified and risen Christ. But it also leads them to affirm the experience of what had been opened to them in his opening the Scriptures about his Death and Resurrection. “Did not our heart burn within us, while he talked with us by the way, and while he opened to us the Scriptures?” All of that is affirmed through this break-through moment when Christ takes the bread, blesses it and gives thanks. His action immediately and inescapably recalls his words and actions at the Last Supper. His Word in action is the Word made visible. This is the logic of the Sacraments.

Thus the Road to Emmaus story reveals the Christian epistemology of Word and Sacrament, the Word audible and the Word visible. The Word heard and the Word seen transform us. The two disciples on the Road to Emmaus were running away from Jerusalem in their perplexity, fear, and confusion. But after this moment, they rise up and return to Jerusalem and find the others and tell them “what things were done in the way, and how he was known of them in the breaking of the bread.” Such a lovely phrase.

There is profound learning gained through the teaching of the Word audible and the Word visible, in short, Word and Sacrament. In the logic of the Resurrection, these are the principle vehicles of divine teaching that belong to the forms of our participation in that teaching. Such is the meaning of things heard and things seen that open our hearts and our minds. Such is education. It is very much about things heard and things seen that bring us to understanding. They transform us in remarkable ways, literally turning us around from our fears and uncertainties to joy and gladness and to our being with one another in care and support. And such is the radical meaning of Resurrection. It provides us with a deeper sense of human dignity and life and gives us strength and courage.

(Rev’d) David Curry
Chaplain, English & ToK teacher
Chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy

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Interpretation is all!

How do we learn anything? What does it mean to learn? In Latin, and subsequently in English, a learner is a disciple, one who follows a teaching in the sense of coming to know or discern meaning. It derives from discere, to learn. In Greek, a learner is mathetes, derived from mathein, to learn. It is from this that we get mathematics which is really a certain process or form of learning. In schools and universities we talk about different disciplines meaning different areas of learning. This suggests that discipline in its moral and social sense about behaviour really concerns habits of mind. In that sense discipline is more than a matter of external authority and regulatory compliance and more about self-control and responsibility. That is something worth learning for all of us!

The story of the encounter between two disciples and Jesus on the Road to Emmaus is a wonderful illustration about how we come to learn or to know certain ideas. In this case, the story belongs to the understanding of the Resurrection. The story shows how the learning happens through their engagement with Jesus. They are in perplexity and confusion about the events of the Passion and its aftermath. They are on the road to Emmaus, a little village about seven miles away from Jerusalem. While “they communed together and reasoned,” Jesus comes alongside them, unrecognized by them. That is part of their confusion. Thinking he was dead, they aren’t looking for him.

He enters into conversation with them and draws out of them their perplexity and confusion. They recount to him what had happened concerning Jesus in terms of his crucifixion and burial, the report from certain women about the empty tomb, about the vision of angels, and, subsequently, the confirmation of the fact of the empty tomb by some of the disciples. In other words, they acknowledge what they don’t understand and what perplexes them and confuses them. It is all contrary to what they expected.

It is only at that point of knowing our not-knowing that learning can begin. But how? In what way? The Chapel reading from Luke this week gives us the first form of learning in this story. Jesus names their unknowing: “O foolish ones and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken.” What the prophets have spoken is what is written in the scriptures. “And beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself.” What things? The things concerning the suffering and the glory of Christ.

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Crucified and Risen! Radical new life!

Death and Resurrection. They provide the basic and essential pattern for Christian spirituality and life. It is always about dying to ourselves and living for God and for one another. In a way, it is a profound critique of the notion of the autonomous self. The ethical point emphasized in Chapel over and over again is that we can only be ourselves in the truth of our individuality through our lives in community with one another. The deeper point is that it entirely depends on the total self-giving nature of divine love which is the meaning of the Trinity in the Christian understanding.

Christ is risen is the Easter proclamation. What does it mean? The doctrine of the Resurrection belongs to a wider consideration about what it means to be human. How do we understand ourselves as embodied beings? There is no disembodied self – that is a kind of philosophical absurdity or fantasy. How do we understand the relationship between soul and body? Does the body matter? Or is it simply something extraneous and endlessly malleable? We may not be ‘happy’ about our ‘body image’, quick to find fault with others and ourselves in our image obsessed ‘selfie’ culture. Nonetheless, it seems to me that we are more though not less than our bodies. They are an essential aspect of ourselves.

The Resurrection of Christ belongs to a reflection on the idea of the self in relation to our bodies. It is not the same as reincarnation in either the Hindu sense or in Plato’s imaginary, though both are wrestling with the same question: the relation of the soul to the body in a kind of necessary interrelation. The Resurrection – a concept found in late Judaism as well as in Islam – is, in its Christian form, the strongest affirmation of human individuality understood not as a gnostic flight from material reality and the body as somehow evil but rather as the redemption of creation and therefore of the embodied nature of our being. More importantly, the Resurrection is the radical affirmation of life as greater than sin and death, and as the underlying principle of our being and knowing. That life is what is presupposed in everything. “God is the beginning and end of all creatures, especially rational creatures,” Aquinas observes.

The Resurrection is not simply the ending of Holy Week. Rather it makes visible what is hidden yet present in all of the events of the Passion. The stories of the Resurrection show the process of the birth of the understanding of Christ’s Resurrection in us. It is mostly about making sense of what is seen and heard, of coming to grasp the radical teaching of Christ and doing so in no small manner through the Scriptures of the Old Testament. In Easter Week and throughout Eastertide, we follow the processes of thinking our way into the mystery of Christ whose Resurrection is not the eclipse of the past (and future!) of human sin and experience but its transformation. We are given to see how the idea becomes real in human thinking.

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Not knowing what we want or do?

Passiontide is the term for the last two weeks of Lent in the western Christian traditions. Quite often the cross is veiled, at once present and known yet obscured and not fully known. It symbolizes an important principle that belongs to the educational project. Knowing that we do not know impells the quest to know. Our knowing is at best partial and at worst misguided and erroneous.

In a remarkable scene in Matthew’s Gospel read this week in Chapel, the mother of Zebedee’s children comes to Jesus “desiring a certain thing of him.” He asks her “What do you want?” She says, “Grant that these my two sons may sit, the one on thy right hand, and the other on the left, in thy kingdom.” She seeks what she thinks is best for her children. No doubt all parents do and, no doubt, all of us seek what we think is best for ourselves. But do we always know what that is? What does her request mean? It means positions of privilege and power, of status and prestige for her sons. But that can only mean something for them at the expense of others. It is simply a desire for power for some over others.

There is a truth in her request but only insofar as it recognizes the power and truth of God in Jesus. But it is incomplete and misguided. How does Jesus respond? With the simple words, “ye know not what you ask.” It is at once gentle and devastating and a direct and clear statement about an important aspect of our humanity.

“There are known knowns,” Donald Rumsfeld famously observed in 2003 as the US Secretary of Defence. “These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know that we don’t know.” This was, as the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek pointed out, a piece of amateur philosophizing which leaves out what is most significant. What is that? The “unknown knowns,” the things that you know but don’t know that you know.

Socrates’ great insight was that “I know that I do not know.” This is the beginning of wisdom; the complement to the biblical idea that “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” Our not knowing belongs to our desire to know but in the recognition that there is always more to know and that the more we learn the more we realize how much more there is to know. This is not to suggest that knowledge is simply quantitative, a mere adding up of bits and bytes of data or information. There are also ethical implications.

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Striving with God

When we hear the word ‘Israel’, we probably think of a place or a country in the Middle East. We forget that it is actually, first and foremost, a name and one that belongs to religion and theology. “Your name shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with men and have prevailed” (Gen. 32.28). Jacob wrestling with God becomes Israel. All the promises of God to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob become the promises to Israel, the people of God who will be known as ‘Israelites’. Not the same thing as ‘Israelis’ which is a modern term for citizens of the state of Israel.

Jacob changes from being a figure of deceit and cunning – tricking his brother Esau out of his birthright and deceiving his father Isaac – to becoming the figure of faith and insight into the truth of God. His vision of angels ascending and descending a ladder extending from the earth to heaven is complemented with his wrestling with God and being renamed Israel, meaning “one who strives with God.”

This is more than simply a matter of tribalism. Through Israel – as with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob – all nations of the earth shall be blessed. God is not simply the property or possession of any one group or identity. Perhaps nowhere is that more profoundly seen than in the encounter between the Canaanite woman and Jesus in the lesson read this week in Chapel. As I like to say, we do not possess the truth, the truth possesses us.

The Canaanite woman is from outside Israel, a non-Israelite. Yet the encounter will reveal her as a true Israelite because she strives with God, not against God. She has a powerful hold on the truth which she perceives in Jesus which she will not let go. She comes seeking him and seeking from him the healing of her daughter, “grievously vexed with a devil.” Not a healing of the body but of the mind or soul. It may not be the language of the therapeutic culture in terms of mental health, but it speaks to the ways in which we in our minds can be obsessed, even possessed with thoughts that are destructive of human personality. She senses in Jesus the power of God that alone can heal her daughter; an insight into the nature of God himself as Creator and Redeemer, of Jesus as Lord and Saviour. One who knows us better than we do ourselves.

She will not be put off in her quest. She is the image of humble perseverance and faith. But the encounter is quite disturbing because the scene is equally a critique of Israel, meaning the people of Israel pictured here in the disciples. The dialogue with the Canaanite woman reveals a distorted or mistaken view of the vocation of Israel. To put it bluntly, the dialogue criticizes the idea that God can be owned by any one group or another. In other words, the insight of the Canaanite woman is that God is the God of all human beings, not just some. Her insight is about the universality of God.

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Be it unto me according to thy word

I know. You did not hear those words in the Scripture reading this week. You heard the parable of the prodigal son, the one who wasted his inheritance only to come to himself in a far-off country, poor and destitute, where he “comes to himself” and returns. It is a powerful story of homecoming.

It is captured in what is probably the last painting by Rembrandt called the Return of the Prodigal Son and which hangs in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, having been acquired almost a century later by Catherine the Great. The Return of the Prodigal Son is the title, too, of a wonderful meditation by Henri Nouwen about the painting and the parable as a story of homecoming. It is really all about the journey of our lives as embraced in God’s providential love.

You have all just returned from the March break. Some of you have, perhaps, gone to far-off places. I hope you weren’t left poor and destitute! You have now returned to the school, your alma mater or nursing mother with respect to intellectual and spiritual matters. We left just at the early beginnings of Lent and now return to find ourselves in mid-Lent in the patterns of spirituality and prayer that belong to the Christian understanding. In the Islamic world, this is the last week of Ramadan, equally a special time of prayer, fasting, reflection and responsibilities towards one’s community in the Islamic understanding. These religious themes contribute to our lives in community in our commitment to the ethical ideas of love and service.

But why this text, “be it unto me according to thy word”? Some of you will recognise that these are the words of Mary, the blessed Mother of our Lord, the theotokos or mother of God in the Christian teaching. What does it have to do with the idea of homecoming? What does homecoming mean? At the very least, it suggests a sense of purpose and connection about who we essentially are in our common humanity. But as the story of the prodigal son shows, homecoming belongs to who we are in the embrace of God’s love. The son who has rejected his father’s home and thus his father himself in going off to a distant country has forgotten who he is but “comes to himself” in a beautiful image of repentance.

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