Category: KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

We preach Christ crucified.

Paul’s words go to the heart of the Christian religion. Like it or not, the Christian Faith is religio crucis, the religion of the cross. What does that mean? It means that the mystery of the Cross is the mystery of love. We easily forget this and even reject it. The great English mystery writer, P.D. James, in her rather unusual novel, The Children of Men, acutely observes that the contemporary churches at the end of the last century had “moved from the theology of sin and redemption to a less uncompromising doctrine: corporate social responsibility coupled with a sentimental humanism” which leads in turn to the virtual abolition of “the Second Person of the Trinity together with His cross.” To some, if not many, “the cross, stigma of the barbarism of officialdom and of man’s ineluctable cruelty, has never been a comfortable symbol.”

Yet the Cross for all of its disturbing qualities is the essential symbol of the Christian religion. It sets Christianity apart from other world religions and yet, more importantly, connects with them in terms of the realities of the human experience. This is especially true with respect to suffering. The Cross symbolizes redemptive suffering. It is crucial to how we think about suffering and to the forms of our engagement with other world religions including the culture and religion of secular atheism. The Cross speaks to our present distresses, to our fears and worries about all the forms of suffering in our global world, not the least of which are our current and continuing concerns about covid-19.

Preaching Christ crucified has always been central to Christian witness and practice. The traditions of Lent, of Holy Week and Easter belong to a deep and profound reflection upon the Passion of Christ and to the ways in which the Christian Faith is represented artistically and aesthetically. The practice of preaching or meditating upon the Seven Last Words of Christ, something deeply embedded in the modern Protestant and Catholic imaginary since the eighteenth century, was actually a service devised in the Americas, in Lima, Peru, by the Jesuit missionary, Fr. Alonso Messia Bedoya, just after the devastation of the terrible earthquakes of 1678 and 1687. The devotion inspired eighteenth century composers such as Haydn in Europe.

The Seven Last Words of Christ from the Cross complement the seven petitions of the Lord’s Prayer, though not in any systematic sense. The words from the Cross begin and end with the prayer of the Son to the Father. Both the Our Father and the Cross are essential to the Christian understanding. Simone Weil, the 20th century passionate philosopher of attention and an activist devoted to the poor and the suffering, says that “the Our Father contains all possible petitions; we cannot conceive of any prayer which is not already contained in it. It is to prayer what Christ is to humanity. It is impossible to say it once through, giving the fullest possible attention to each word, without a change … taking place in the soul.” The theologian Anthony Boers observes the intimate connection between the Our Father and the Seven Last Words of Christ. Both “ably condense and collapse into one set of short passages the essentials of our faith.”

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You are the man.

Such a simple statement and yet so profound. We have been considering the story of David in Chapel throughout Lent. Last week we had before us the story of the sin of David. His sin(s) are our sins really, a wonderful and dynamic way of helping us think about the devious ways into sin which define us all as persons of sin. But are we to be left with simply the bleak picture of our sin and evil?

This week we have pondered the remarkable way in which David faces the contradictions of his behaviour. It is about how he is brought to account. The story is told in the form of understatement which presupposes a degree of intelligence on the hearer. Once again, the heart of David is opened to view but not just as hero but as sinner. Yet now, even more, as penitent, as one who confronts himself in his sin and evil.

It is a remarkable and touching story. It is about the true role of prophecy which should always be about an insight into two things: the human heart and God. God would not be God if we could somehow hide from him. We may try to hide from ourselves and one another. We may try, like David, to hide or conceal that which we have done which we should not have done. Such is our folly in relation to God “unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid” (BCP, p. 67). Nathan stands, in contrast to Samuel, as one who has an insight into human character and into the will of God. Such is the nature of prophecy; it has a grasp of the whole of reality of which we are but a part.

How does this confrontation with ourselves in our sin and folly happen? Through the telling of a story. The story shows something of the prophetic wisdom of Nathan. He tells a story to David which moves David to condemn the evil in the story. It is all rather touching. The rich man with many lambs and sheep takes the one little ewe lamb, which is loved like a daughter by the poor man, in order to provide the rites of hospitality for the wayfarer. We sense the injustice in the story and rightly so. The deeper point is about David’s reaction to the story. He immediately sees the injustice and unkindness of the rich man in the story, and, even more, the lack of pity or mercy. Nathan simply says, that is you. “You are the man.” This is exactly what you have done. The story works because David has a conscience which can be moved. He confronts himself in the story which Nathan tells and in its application to himself.

The lessons are clear, I think, for us. Chapel sets before you various Scriptural stories, ethically and philosophically considered, which awaken us to who we are in the sight of God. It is about coming to terms with ourselves. David does not make excuses. He does not try to deny or to diminish his own actions. He does not say ‘that is your truth and this is my truth’, the contemporary sophistic betrayal of all truth. He does not engage in the whine of the poor-me’s, in the litany of trying to justify the unjustifiable. No. He acknowledges what he has done and, mirabile dictu, he recognizes the deeper spiritual meaning of all sin. “I have sinned against the Lord.” This will feature as the strong teaching of Psalm 51, attributed to David and sometimes interpreted as David’s confession in relation to the sins of David seen in 2 Samuel. “Against thee only have I sinned, and done that which is evil in thy sight” (Ps. 51.4).

A powerful story powerfully told, the encounter between Nathan and David speaks to the whole of the educational project of the development of character and to the significance of the ethical at King’s-Edgehill.  There is a certain understated beauty in Nathan’s simple words. “You are the man.” In confronting our sins, our failings and our follies, we also confront the overcoming of them; in short, we learn! The story of David is both a mirror and a window, a mirror in which we see ourselves and a window into the truth of God. Such is mercy.

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

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It happened late one afternoon

And so begins the story of the sin of David. A powerful narrative wonderfully told, it ends with the classic understatement, that what “David had done displeased the Lord.” No kidding!

The story of David is the story of a kind of everyman. Just before the March reading break, we saw David as a hero though not simply in the usual characteristics of physical size and strength. The point was the contrast between how “man looks on the outward appearance but God looks on the heart.” We saw what God sees in the heart of David in terms of his courage – literally, what is in the heart – and his insight and commitment to the truth and power of God. It was that which allowed him to stand up against the formidable figure of Goliath, the champion of the Philistines. What is bigger than Goliath’s physical stature was his ego and presumption in defying God as the author of all creation.

But here, too, in the story of David’s sin, we see the heart which God sees, the heart in its darkness and deceit, the heart in its contradiction and denial of its own truth. David shows us, as John Donne concisely says, “the slippery ways into sin.” This, too, is part of our reality, the reality of our sinfulness, of our doing what in some sense we know is wrong. If I were to ask whether anyone here in Chapel has ever done something wrong or has made serious mistakes, we would all have to raise our hands, at least if we are being honest with ourselves. I would have to raise two hands. We deceive ourselves and one another in claiming to be perfect and good, in protesting that we never lie or fudge the truth. This story awakens us to ourselves in the sad but true fact of our sinfulness; not just mistakes but mistakes which we know to be wrong yet have done anyway.

So what happened “late one afternoon”? First, David sees a beautiful woman bathing. He conceives a lust for her in his heart. He inquires and finds out that she is Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the Hittite, a non-Israelite, but a soldier fighting for David. In other words, he knows that she is the wife of a loyal soldier. But here is the first moment of the slippery slope argument about how sin begets sin begets sin. It provides a wonderful commentary on the logic of the Ten Commandments and of the movement and connection between the commandments. It begins “late one afternoon” with the last of the commandments: “thou shalt not covet.” David covets in his heart another man’s wife. The lust of the eyes leads to the lust in his heart to possess another for himself. It leads to adultery. He takes Bathsheba and has sex with her. “Thou shalt not commit adultery.”

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“For he loved him as he loved his own soul” (1 Samuel 20. 17)

One of the disciplines of Lent is the idea of “reading and meditat[ing] upon God’s Holy Word.” It is to that end that we have embarked upon a brief look at parts of the wonderful narrative of the story of David. It belongs to the further idea of “self-examination and repentance” that is part of the spiritual discipline of Lent as it is in other religions traditions as well. In one sense, the Chapel readings in this last week before the March break speak to an ancient question raised by Plotinus. “But we … who are we?” Or to put it in another way, where are our hearts?

In the story of David, we see the heart of David which God sees. But that connects to what we see in one another’s hearts as well as to the project of self-knowing, knowing even as we are known. Thus in the great narrative arc of David’s story, there is the powerful story of the friendship between Jonathan and David. This places the David narrative within the larger spiritual and intellectual traditions of reflection about the power and nature of friendship and to the idea of our friendship with the Good.

It looks back to the Epic of Gilgamesh, to the friendship between Gilgamesh and Enkidu. Enkidu is created to be Gilgamesh’s second self such that Gilgamesh learns to see others not as things to be abused and exploited but as persons to be respected and honoured. The death of Enkidu awakens Gilgamesh to wisdom and to a deeper form of self-awareness. It sets him on the quest for wisdom. Homer’s Iliad presents us with the profound friendship between Patroclus and Achilleus. Aristotle will write in the Nicomachean Ethics about the power of friendship. Later, Cicero will write an important treatise, de Amicitia, Of Friendship, offering the idea that “friendship is nothing else than an accord in all things, human and divine, conjoined with mutual goodwill and affection”. In the early 12th century, Aelred of Rievaulx in northern England wrote his famous de Spirituali Amicitia, On Spiritual Friendship, translating the more familiar phrase “God is love” as “God is friendship”.  Friendship is a gift of God. The friend is “the companion of your soul, to whom you can entrust yourself as to another self,” an echo of the Epic of Gilgamesh. A true friend, he says “sees nothing in his/her friend but their heart”, echoing explicitly the story of Jonathan and David.

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What’s in the heart?

The story of David and Goliath is perhaps somewhat familiar even in our post-Christian world of diminished biblical literacy. It is commonly treated as an image and metaphor for the underdog especially in the sports world but sometimes spills over into politics and international affairs. Already we see the way it is used in terms of the Russian invasion of Ukraine; the big guy, Russia, over and against the little guy, Ukraine. But then those polarities get reversed by those who view things from the perspective of Russia, the little guy against the big Western world under American domination. Yet in all of these conflicting viewpoints, the image of David and Goliath always functions in terms of what is big and physically imposing against what is viewed as small and weak. And while there may be discrepancies of power, it is not always the case that things can be measured simply in such terms.

I am struck by how much the story is almost completely misread. It really follows directly upon what we saw last week about the anointing of David where the strong point is made that “the Lord sees not as man sees; man looks on the outward appearance”, upon matters of strength and number, but “the Lord looks on the heart”. The story of David and Goliath makes exactly the same point.

In the context of a struggle between the Philistines and the Israelites, the giant Goliath challenges the armies of the Lord. He is a giant figure, to be sure, but what is greater than his bulk and strength, we might say, is his ego and arrogance, his presumption and boastfulness. It is not really about the underdog taking on the top dog. It is more about a clash of principles. What defines you? The braggadocio of a Goliath beating his chest or the Lord God of all reality who sees into your heart? The story is not simply about the little guy who takes down the big guy. It is about the spirit of the Lord in the heart of David. He has a hold of something far greater than himself.

The story is not without its amusement, especially with David putting on the armour of Saul and then not being able to move! Instead, he takes up his sling-shot along with five smooth stones. What moves him is at once a kind of courage born of his life as a shepherd protecting the sheep from bear and lion and of a confidence in the truth of God which Goliath has mocked and derided. David goes out against Goliath not “with a spear and a sword and a javelin” but, as he says, “in the  name of the Lord of hosts.” He is armed from within. It is a contest of principles.

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Wisdom in love

Last week in the return to Chapel we read Paul’s powerful hymn to love in First Corinthians 13 and its counterpart in Isaiah’s Song of the Beloved about his vineyard (Is. 5). This week we embark upon a brief consideration of the story of David, one of the greatest narrative moments in antiquity, a story which extends over the books of 1st and 2nd Samuel and into 1st Kings. Central to that narrative arc is the story of David, a story which has a remarkable power of truth and eloquence. “The story of David”, as the literary and Jewish biblical scholar and translator, Robert Alter, notes “is probably the greatest single narrative representation in antiquity of a human life evolving by slow stages through time, shaped and altered by the pressures of political life, public institutions, family, the impulses of body and spirit, the eventual sad decay of the flesh.”

What is it all about? About the truth of our humanity in all its disarray and about the return of our humanity to God. Alter’s observations are complemented by those of the 17th century poet/preacher John Donne. “David”, he says, “shows us the slippery ways into sin and the penitential ways out of sin”; in short, David is a kind of everyman. Yet he is a figure whose story is brilliantly told precisely because of the insights and careful observations of the anonymous narrator into the ambiguities and uncertainties of our humanity, especially about knowledge and power explored by way of Samuel, Saul, David, and others that belong to this outstanding literary narrative.

The dynamic between prophecy and kingship is one of the underlying themes and questions. Samuel is a prophet, one who by definition speaks on behalf of God and has an insight into God’s will for his people.  “A prophet was formerly called a seer”(1 Sam. 9.9); literally, one who sees into the truth of things. Yet Samuel is also moved by self-interest and worldly ambition. He has chosen Saul to be king yet Saul is an uncertain quantity in terms of ambition and knowledge. Saul has been chosen, it seems, more on the basis of outward appearance and assumptions about power; someone whom Samuel thinks he can control.

The story of David begins with his being anointed king by Samuel in place of Saul. The story in its simple eloquence complements Paul’s great hymn to love which ends with the cryptic statement that “now I see through a glass darkly but then face to face; then shall I know even as I am known.” Such is the desire for wisdom in love, to know even as we are known by God. Samuel comes to Bethlehem as directed by God to choose a king from among the eight sons of Jesse. The first to come before him is Eliab whom Samuel wants to anoint, seeing him much as he had seen Saul but, in a brilliant phrase, he is told by God not to look on his appearance, “for the Lord sees not as man sees; man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart”.

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My beloved had a vineyard

Il faut cultiver notre jardin. This famous conclusion to Voltaire’s great work of intellectual satire, ‘Candide’, speaks to us about our relation to the conditions which we face. “To cultivate our garden” really means to do the best you can in the situation in which you find yourself to make things better. Satire seeks amendment; in short to make things better in the realm of morals and manners. The idea of cultivation has to do with civilisation and, particularly with the idea of honouring and respecting nature. Cultivating is about working with nature but without destroying it. In other words, it speaks to the idea of respect and honour towards nature which stands in complete contrast to the culture of exploitation and the destruction of nature in our own times and of ourselves. God “looked for it to yield grapes, but it yielded wild grapes”.

Isaiah’s great love song complements Paul’s great hymn of love in 1st Corinthians. “Let me sing for my beloved a love song concerning his vineyard: My beloved had a vineyard” (Is. 5. 1). The vineyard is an image of creation, and, more particularly, an image of Israel. In other words, we cannot think about creation or nature without thinking about ourselves and about how we engage the world.

The idea of the vineyard offers a positive image about the nature of our labours. Our labour is not simply a curse, bearing “the burden and heat of the day” and working “in the sweat of our face” for bread. Rather it is about respect for three things: for creation itself, for one another as fellow-workers, and for God, the Lord of the vineyard of creation and of ourselves who are made in his image. The image of the vineyard recalls the pageant of creation in Genesis and the place of our humanity in the order of creation. One of the mistaken ideas, promoted by Lynn White’s 1967 paper, ‘The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis’, is that Christianity teaches that “nature has no reason for existence save to serve man”. This is simply not true and obscures the far more interesting development, well documented by Peter Harrison in his ‘The Territories of Science and Religion’ (2015), which chronicles the profound shifts in terminology from natural philosophy’s interest in understanding nature to ‘science’, especially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in its interest in changing nature under the ideology of progress. As Karl Marx put it, the point is not to understand the world but to change it. We are, perhaps, now far more aware of the problems belonging to our technocratic domination and destruction of nature precisely on the basis of that assumption.

That God gives to our humanity “dominion” over the natural world does not mean and cannot mean in the context of Genesis the power to manipulate and destroy, to exploit and use the natural world. It can only mean to act in accord with the Dominus, the Lord, in his care and respect for the goodness of all created things; in short, an honouring of nature as having intrinsic truth and meaning. We cannot not leave a mark on nature; the question is always what kind of mark.

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Charity suffereth long

It is a remarkable passage (1 Cor. 13. 1-13) and worthy of attention. Traditionally read in Chapel during the week of winter carnival, now morphed into ‘spirit week’, it speaks to the true nature of things spiritual that counters the dogmatic forms of technocratic reason in our current culture. In the King James Version, the operative word mentioned explicitly nine times is charity; it is implicitly present eleven more times for a total of twenty times in a passage of thirteen verses. Charity is the English translation of the Latin caritas and of the Greek agape. In contemporary English translations the word is love.

In Greek and Latin, there are a number of different words for love as distinguished by the object loved. As Plato in his treatise on love, The Symposium, observes, love is love of something. It is not simply an object, a thing, but the active desire for the Good in us. Paul contributes wonderfully to this way of thinking. Charity or love here is a theological virtue, a grace which perfects human character. In that sense, it is a higher form of justice. The classical virtues of temperance, courage, and prudence are “nothing worth”, we might say, without justice as the principle of their proper relation. But beyond these four classical virtues which concern the natural person, Paul identifies the three theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity that speak to who we are as spiritual creatures and which transforms the classical virtues into forms of love. Faith has to do with a kind of knowing, the idea that things are knowable; hope concerns our desire for an ultimate good. And charity? It is “the greatest of these three”. Why? Because it unites our knowing and our desiring. It speaks to the ultimate perfection of our souls signalled in the qualities of love which Paul describes.

Charity or love is not simply a human activity but the activity of God’s grace in us. Such is the power of love. It cannot be reduced to a technique, to a set of rules, prescriptions, and proscriptions. It transcends the realm of things contingent and arbitrary and shapes a whole discourse of love in the theology of amor, itself another Latin word for love.

Whenever I ask students (and faculty) about the meaning of charity, I always get the same answer. It is inevitably associated with giving to the poor and needy. This is one of its meanings, to be sure, but only part of its larger meaning as amply shown in Paul’s hymn. Our concern for those in need should be a form of love towards the other but not out of pity or a kind of guilt both of which say more about ourselves and our own self-interest. Charity seeks the good of all. Love is motion towards the other as neighbour not as fearful enemy. It is, in that sense, a higher form of justice. Portia, in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, wisely notes that “mercy seasons justice”, perfects it. Mercy is love. As Thomas Aquinas profoundly argues, “grace does not destroy nature but perfects it”. Charity is the grace of God at work in human souls. It engages the whole person as made in the image of God to whom honour, respect, and dignity are rightly and freely owed.

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Blinded into sight

It is a paradox, to be sure. The light which blinds is the light by which we see more clearly and more fully, albeit always “through a glass darkly” as Paul says in 1st Corinthians (13.12). The light which blinds, as Paul says later in Acts, is “a light from heaven, above the brightness of the sun”(Acts 26.13), something more metaphysical than physical, something more like Plato’s Sun as the child or image of the Good in The Republic.

“I could not see for the glory of that light,” Paul tells the Hebrew people on the stairs of the Temple (Acts 22.11). He speaks to them in Hebrew after having spoken in Greek to the Roman Tribune, Claudius Lysius, who is Latin speaking yet understands Greek, to get permission to speak to his fellow Jews. To add to the complexity of cultures and languages, Lysius initially thought that Paul was an Egyptian somehow connected to the Sicarii, Jewish zealots violently opposed to Roman rule, later known through another kind of linguistic confusion as the Assassins, a 12th century Arabic term in Nizari Ismaili Shia Muslim culture wrongly associated with hashish!

Shakespeare’s play, Macbeth, marks the first use in English of the word, “assassination”. “If th’ assassination could trammel up the consequence”, contain as in a net the results of our actions, we would do whatever we could get away with even if we know it is wrong! Paul’s pursuit of what he thinks is right, the persecution of the followers of Jesus, a sect, brings him into collision with himself. The sufferings of Christ, he discovers, are not opposed to the glory of the Messiah but are contained in each other. The suffering is in the glory and the glory in the suffering.

The biblical scene is one of conflict and confusion and yet out of it comes the beginnings of “something rich and strange” (Shakespeare’s The Tempest) which will become the Christian religion. The story in Acts (21.40ff) belongs to the Christian Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul (Jan. 25th), usually and wrongly taken to signify his conversion from Judaism to Christianity. That is mistaken because Christianity or the Christian religion does not actually exist at this point in any kind of distinct and clear way.

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Did you not know?

Epiphany means manifestation, the making known of what is to be known. The teaching of the Epiphany season in the Christian understanding is about two things: the making known of the essential divinity of Christ and the making known of the divine will and purpose for our humanity. In this way it complements an essential feature of the religions of the world and every educational project worthy of the name. There are things to be known that belong to the wholeness and completeness of our humanity as persons. Such is the idea of philosophy, of learning, as a way of life.

We easily lose sight of this in a world which is fixated and focused on a multitude of specific things such that we can no longer see the whole of which we are a part. This is where the Epiphany season comes into play. It challenges our own incomplete and partial perspectives where we constantly mistake a half-truth (or less) for the whole truth or where we think that because there are different perspectives there is no truth. To say that there is ‘my truth’ and ‘your truth’ is to say there is no truth which is self-contradictory. We forget that all our knowing presupposes the idea that there is something to be known that is in principle for all. The idea of Truth is assumed in all our intellectual endeavours.

Owing to the restrictions of the current worries about COVID-19 in its latest iteration, omicron, Chapel has been suspended. Yet in the virtual assembly with the Junior School this week, I had the opportunity to speak briefly to them. I reminded them of the story which we would have read in Chapel this week about Jesus as a boy of twelve, not altogether unlike them, engaged with the doctors of the law, “hearing them and asking them questions”. It is a wonderful story about teaching and learning. It is serious and freeing especially in the face of things which we cannot change. The challenge is not to collapse into our fears and worries but to find ways to persevere and to carry on in the pursuit of truth, the one thing necessary and something which lies within our control and responsibility. It speaks to our freedom and dignity and reminds us of the strong ethical requirement that with knowledge and its pursuit comes responsibility. Such is growing up and maturing in wisdom.

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