Category: KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

They understood none of these things.

“Behold,” Jesus says in the Gospel which sets us upon the spiritual pilgrimage of Lent, “we go up to Jerusalem.” Wednesday was Ash Wednesday and marks the formal beginning of the forty days of Lent, a time of renewal and reflection, of repentance, and of prayer and study of the Holy Scriptures. Dust and ashes are strong reminders of our being created from the dust of the ground and of the necessity of repentance which is our turning back to God in whom we find the truth and dignity and freedom of our humanity, knowing even as we are known in the divine love.

Something of the meaning of Lent is set before us in the Gospel reading from Luke about going up to Jerusalem, read along with Paul’s powerful hymn of love. It is really all about the divine love setting our human loves in order.

Jerusalem is more than just a place on a map, more than a historic city caught up in a long, long sequence of the endless conflicts of empires and cultures. It is important for Judaism anciently and at present in the state of Israel politically. It has been a place of conflict and conquest during the Crusades, thus indicating its significance religiously for Jews and Christians and Muslims. It remains an important place geopolitically in terms of the tensions that belong to the international global order. But beyond those things, Jerusalem holds a special symbolic meaning as the image of heaven, heavenly Jerusalem, we might say. It is an image of the community of our humanity’s highest good. Yet, as the Gospel passage read in Chapel makes clear, to go to Jerusalem means the hard lessons of sin and evil out of which comes the wonder and the glory of love.

Jesus tells the disciples exactly what going up to Jerusalem means. It means the awful things of his Passion. He speaks of his death and resurrection. But “they understood none of these things.” It is a profound statement that relates directly to the educational project. Things are taught but not always immediately learned or known. Yet our awareness of our not knowing is a crucial feature of our coming to know, especially concerning the things that matter most. To know that we don’t know, as Socrates famously taught, is the condition for our pursuit of knowing. Not the despair of learning but the passionate desire to know, what Plato calls the eros of knowing.

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Joseph and his brothers

The story of Joseph and his brothers ends the Book of Genesis on the poignant and moving idea of reconciliation. It is in that sense a wonderful illustration of what the poet George Herbert calls “the two vast and spacious things” which are most needed to be pondered and known, “sin and love.”

Joseph, as we saw last week, was hated by his brothers because he was the favourite son of their father, the problem of sibling rivalry, on the one hand, and the limitations of human love, on the other hand. How to love our children in ways that respect each in their own particularity? How to avoid the temptation to quantify our loves, our likes and our dislikes, about who loves who more than others? Do we need to let the love of one for another consume us with resentment and envy? Yet it so often does when love becomes a matter of competing for attention either on the part of children or for that matter, of parents, as in Shakespeare’s tragedy, King Lear. “Which of you,” he says, using the royal ‘we’, to his three daughters, Goneril, Regan and Cordelia, “shall we say doth love us most, that we our largest bounty may extend?”

Joseph, who was not killed by his brothers despite their intent, was thrown into a waterless pit, his coat taken by his brothers and smeared with the blood of a lamb to deceive their father, Jacob, about his death. Unbeknownst to them, he is sold into slavery in Egypt where he rises after various adventures to a position of authority in Pharaoh’s government where he stores up food in anticipation of a period of famine. Years later during the time of famine, his brothers came to Egypt seeking food. Joseph sees them but they do not know him. What will happen in that encounter? Will it be an occasion for Joseph’s revenge on them for their evil intent?

Marilynne Robinson notes that the Book of Genesis “is framed by two stories of remarkable forgiveness, of Cain by the Lord, and of his ten brothers by Joseph.” Cain who killed Abel is protected from being killed himself. Out of his lineage will come Enoch and Jubal, the one who will, like Elijah, be taken up into heaven, and the other, who is the father of musical instruments. While the concept of a life for a life, an eye for an eye, a kind of measured revenge as a form of human justice, appears in Genesis, it is constantly questioned. As Robinson nicely puts it, “Whoever kills a man will be killed by a man. Adam kills Adam for killing Adam, an image of God destroys an image of God for having destroyed an image of God,” suggesting that this is “the fundamental absurdity even of punishment limited by strict equivalence.” It is a human way of looking at things which contrasts with the sense of divine restraint that operates in so much of Genesis and which qualifies the simplistic view of divine retribution. Even the story of the flood ends not with the complete annihilation of the human world which has so abused creation but with a renewal of creation and the setting of bounds to human behaviour in the form of covenant and law. In this sense, Genesis as a whole acts as a check on revenge and violence.

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Two vast and spacious things

The Book of Genesis is a rich theological text. It is foundational for the scriptural and philosophical traditions of Judaism and Christianity especially. It is not a scientific treatise nor a collection of fables and myths haphazardly thrown together. It is theology, a commentary on the overarching justice or righteousness of God in creation and human experience despite the repeated and constant failings of our humanity. As the theologian and novelist Marilynne Robinson notes it is really “a theodicy, a meditation on the problem of evil” that “acknowledge[s] in a meaningful way the darkest aspects of the reality we experience” and undertakes to “reconcile them with the goodness of God and Being itself against which the darkness of our world stands out so sharply.”

Much of Genesis is the story of sibling rivalry, a story of brothers. There is the story of Abraham and Lot, the story of Isaac and Ishmael, of the sisters Leah and Rachel, of Jacob and Esau, all of which ultimately culminate in the story of Joseph and his brothers. The tensions and divisions that these stories present are the setting through which God’s goodness and will, his purpose and patience, are glimpsed and known. It is all the grace of providence at work in and through our sins and failings. The first story after the fall of our humanity from Paradise is the story of Cain and Abel, the first murder. The last story of Joseph and his brothers, so beautifully and movingly told, is about forgiveness and reconciliation. Ultimately, it is the overcoming of the resentments and envy, and even violence that are so often a feature of sibling rivalry.

Joseph is the youngest son and the so-called favourite of his father, Jacob, of which the coat given to him by his father is the constant reminder, it seems. This excites the hatred of his brothers towards him especially when he tells them his dreams which they think proclaim his superiority over his older brothers. They conspire to kill him and throw him into one of the pits in the wilderness near Shechem and to tell their father that a wild beast has devoured him. Only Reuben intervenes to prevent them from killing him, planning to “rescue him out of their hand, to restore him to his father,” as the text puts it.

Joseph is left in an empty and waterless pit only to be found by Midianite traders who sell him to the Ishmaelites, in one version, or to an Egyptian officer of Pharaoh, Potiphar, in another. In any event, he is not killed but instead rises to prominence in Egypt through an intriguing set of events related again to his dreams which are really about prophetic insight.

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A Love Song for all times

“Let me sing for my beloved a love song.” St. Augustine long ago spoke about the Scriptures as “letters from home,” a lovely image. They are ‘love letters,’ we might say, writings that speak to us about the love of God who seeks the perfection of our broken and disordered loves. That is signaled in the Scriptures as a whole and rather pointedly in a number of texts that are explicit about the underlying theological idea of God’s love for our humanity in the face of the disorders and disarray of our world and our hearts. In that sense, the love letters of Scripture encourage a spirit of inquiry and self-criticism that act as a check upon our self-righteousness or pride and our self-obsessions and the divisions and animosities which they so often occasion.

In Chapel, the readings and reflections have often revolved around the love of God and the love of neighbour, what is known as “the Summary of the Law,” to illustrate the way in which the divine love shapes, orders, and re-orders our human loves. That theme is clearly present in Paul’s great ‘Hymn of Love’ in 1st Corinthians but in many other texts as well. Isaiah 5, verses 1 to 7, is a beautiful love song which convicts our consciences in order to awaken us to the divine love which Paul celebrates in his paean of praise to charity, the love that binds our humanity together as a body, a community of love. As John says in a passage frequently heard in Chapel, “God is love and he that abideth in love abides in God and God in him.” This consolidates and concentrates the overarching theme of the Scriptures overall.

Speaking in the first person, Isaiah says, “Let me sing for my beloved a love song concerning his vineyard.” God here is ‘the Beloved’. What or who is “his vineyard”? It is us as God’s creation. “My beloved,” he says, “had a vineyard.” He goes on, speaking now in the third person, to describe God in relation to his vineyard. “He [God] digged and cleared it of stones, and planted it with choice vines; he [God] built a watchtower in the midst of it, and hewed out a wine vat in it.” It is a lovely image of God as the gardener or vinedresser of creation. “He looked for it to yield grapes, but it yielded wild grapes.” Ah! Trouble in paradise, in the vineyard, it seems!

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Light in the dark, Love in the ruins

Not the same thing as love in ruins! Sunday just past was Candlemas. Whatever one makes of groundhogs and their shadows, Candlemas marks a significant transition of the year in a number of different registers: astronomically, historically, socially and religiously. It is the meeting, hypapante to use its Greek title, a coming together of Law and Prophecy, of the Old Testament and the New, a meeting of ancient Simeon and aged Anna the Prophetess and the very young, of the infant Christ and his young mother, Mary, in short, of men and women and a child. A meeting in the Temple in Jerusalem.

The full title itself joins together the practices of Eastern Orthodox and Western Christianity. The former marks that day as the Feast of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple, forty days after Christmas; the latter as the Feast of the Purification of St. Mary the Virgin; in short, a joint festival of Mary and Jesus. Since the fifth century, it has been observed with lighted candles, and, hence, the more convenient moniker, Candlemas. It was a 17th century Anglican Bishop, John Cosin who joined the titles in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, the mother Prayer Book of the Anglican Communion.

Candlemas looks backward to Christmas and ahead to Holy Week and Easter. As such it marks the transition from light to life. Astronomically, February 2nd is one of the cross-quarter days in between Christmas Day, Dec 25th, and Lady Day, the Annunciation, March 25th. It falls roughly half-way between the winter solstice (December 21st) and the spring or vernal equinox (March 20th). Already we have seen some of the quantum leaps in sunlight and the lengthening of the days.

Yet the themes of Light and Life meet in the greater wonder of Love. Christmas in the Christian understanding never loses sight of Christ’s sacrifice and thus to the underlying principle of the divine love which seeks the ultimate good of our humanity, even in the face of the disorders, chaos, and evils of our hearts and our world.

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Something rich and strange

“Be still and know that I am God,” the psalmist says (Ps. 46. 11). It speaks to the life of the School in the recognition of the need to be still and quiet within ourselves in order to begin to think reflectively. Such is Chapel. Quiet moments that are not about this and that in the busyness of our daily lives, not about the competing concerns that stir up emotions and excite distress and discord, but a time of contemplation and quiet about the universal aspects of our humanity.

We have been considering, in the context of ‘epiphany,’ the idea of ‘complementary universalities’ as opposed to conflicting or ‘competing universalities’. One example is the universality of suffering common to the human condition in one way or another but differently addressed by the various world religions and in the competing social and therapeutic ideologies of contemporary culture. We have tried to connect “the gift of myrrh,” in the classic Epiphany story of the Magi-Kings, with Jesus in the Temple making known to us that he “must be about [his] Father’s business,” and with the first miracle, “the beginning of signs” which turns upon his “hour,” an explicit reference to his passion and death out of which comes resurrection and life. All three speak to the radical meaning of ‘epiphany’ as the making known of the essential divinity of Christ and the idea of God’s will and purpose for our humanity. God seeks the ultimate good for our humanity which is not found simply in the circumstances and actions of our lives but in our being found in God’s all embracing will manifest as love. This way of looking at things has parallels with other religions and philosophical traditions.

Diotima, the fictional female philosopher in Plato’s Symposium, argues that “the object of [our] love,” meaning our desires, “is that [we] should have the good” and to “have it forever.” “Love,” she says, “is the desire to have the good forever.” Good here is not simply something subjective and personal. It concerns the good of all within which we find the good of ourselves. But how to attain that ideal? That is another question and one which the Epiphany stories undertake to show by way of the motion of God towards us that complements our desires for something universal. Epiphany is miracle, the miracle of life itself in God who is the source and end of all life. In the Christian view, this focuses on Christ. “In him was life; and the life was the light of everyone.”

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Epiphany is miracle

We can, perhaps, learn a lot from heresies. Heresies claim partial truths as absolute. That entails a choice. The meaning of the Greek word, hairesis or heresy is choice, choosing a particular perspective or position as absolute to the exclusion of all else. But choice implies the priority of subjective opinion over considered and corporate reflection. How then do we learn from heresies? Because, at the very least, they point to the questions that are most important and thus contribute to the process of thinking things through more completely and more comprehensively. There is usually, if not always, something partly right in positions that are later called heretical because they are too limited or partial; in short, incomplete and inadequate.

Cultural relativism denies the very idea of heresy because it assumes that all perspectives are equally true and, consequently, that there really is no truth. The idea of heresy is heresy! Everything is relative, it is absolutely asserted. We might note the paradox of contradiction and the dogmatism inherent in the claim.

The earliest ‘heresies’ in the emergence of Christianity were Marcionism and Docetism. Marcion was a 2nd century thinker who saw the idea of God in the Old Testament as irreconcilable with the idea of God in the New Testament, opposing justice and goodness absolutely. This led Marcion to get rid of most of the Hebrew Scriptures or Old Testament and, for that matter, huge chunks of the New Testament, keeping only what suited his interests, namely Paul’s Epistles and parts of Luke’s Gospel. What is revealing in Marcion’s perspective is the refusal (or inability) to reconcile the testaments in the manner which was already at work in establishing the Canon of Scripture. In a way, his rejection forced the emerging Church to think more deeply about the unity of the Scriptures in and through their diversity of expression. In our times, the same tendency is inherent in the phenomenon of ‘cancellation culture,’ a kind of intolerance through the negation and proscription of ideas, persons, and texts.

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Transformed by the renewing of your mind

It is a wonderful phrase from Paul’s Letter to the Romans: “Be not conformed to this world; but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind.” It complements Luke’s story of Jesus as a boy of twelve being “found in the temple, sitting in the midst of the doctors, both hearing them and, and asking questions,” read in Chapel this week. These passages are traditionally read on The First Sunday after Epiphany and highlight the epiphany theme.

They reveal what belongs to the educational project, namely, the manifestation or making known of the things of God which complement, correct, perfect, and certainly challenge the things of our humanity; in short, epiphany (or education!) as transformative. Paul is suggesting the deeper meaning of the quest of the Magi-Kings who make the long hard journey to Bethlehem seeking the truth of God. They are transformed by what they see and adore, changed into something better we might say. As T.S. Eliot intuited, they are “no longer at ease” in their former places.

Being conformed to this world contrasts with being transformed by the renewing of our minds. The idea of renewal suggests something that has been lost and is to be recovered, a deeper sense of what belongs to the truth of our humanity. The Magi-Kings found Jesus in Bethlehem. Here, in the only story of the boyhood of Jesus in the Scriptures, he is found in the Temple engaged with the doctors of the Law. What does it mean? What is the epiphany here for us that just might signal a change for us? As Augustine says, “we shall be changed into something better” – in melius renovabimur.

There is something universal in that sensibility. We seek for something more and better than what belongs to our worldly pursuits which ultimately cannot satisfy the restlessness of our hearts because the goods of this world pass away. “Our hearts are restless,” Augustine famously says, “until they find their rest in thee,” in our abiding in God’s eternal love. It launches his Confessions which is about the universal journey of the soul and its conversion to the abiding truth of God. But only because of two things that complement one another: our seeking or desiring and the epiphany of God to us.

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Epiphany – The Gift of the Magi

Epiphany means manifestation, the idea of making things known. Such a concept speaks directly to the meaning of schools as places of learning because of what is made manifest, what is made known to students and teachers alike. Epiphany speaks to an essential feature of our humanity as intellectual and spiritual beings who, in some sense or another “by nature desire to know,” as Aristotle put it. No doubt that is true though only to one degree or another in terms of how much one desires to know.

Epiphany is also the term used for one of the more familiar features of the Christmas story. It is the term used for the coming of the Magi-Kings to Bethlehem, the proverbial ‘wise-men.’ The story has caught the imagination of artists and thinkers down throughout the ages. Yet the story, like so much of the Christmas story, is rather sparse on details. It is, however, rich in symbol and significance which is very much a feature of learning through what is made manifest and taught. A star, it seems, led the Magi-Kings, though we easily forget that Matthew, who alone gives us this story, tells us that it is Herod who actually sends them to Bethlehem. He is hardly in favour of the idea of a King arising in his territory. His fear will lead to one of the most disturbing and yet most significant stories in the Christmas mystery, the slaughter of the Holy Innocents.

Who are the Magi-Kings? How many come? We know very little about them, neither their names nor their number. Holy Imagination will go to work to fill in the gaps and give them names and cultural identities. We assume there were three simply on the basis of the three gifts which they bring to the child Christ. The most we can say is that they ‘came from away’ – the proverbial ‘come-from-aways’ – and the proverbial ‘Johnny-come-latelies,’ too. They are not from Israel but from Anatolia, whether what we call Turkey in Asia Minor or perhaps even Persia. The point is that they are Gentiles – a term that simply refers to those from outside of Israel. Their coming means symbolically that Christmas is omni populo, for all people. This speaks to the universality of the Christian story.

Other religions and philosophies also convey a sense of things universal, things which are for all and not just for some. There is, it seems to me, a wonderful creative tension between the universal and the particular as well as the idea that we come to the former through the latter. Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddah, for instance, comes to learn about the universality of human suffering, dukkah, out of which develops the various forms of Buddhism and the idea that suffering arises from our desires. This leads to the idea of the non-self; no self, no desires, no suffering. There is no you, in this view. That is very different from the assumptions about the self in western cultures.

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Where shall wisdom be found?

Job’s words speak wonderfully to the whole meaning of the Advent season. They embrace and comprehend the other two readings in Chapel this week from the Prophet Micah and from the first Chapter of John’s Gospel. Our School Prayer begins with these words: “Almighty God, of whose only gift cometh wisdom and understanding”. As I write this I am listening to William Boyce’s lovely motet on this passage. The main point of the passage goes to the very nature of religious philosophy. All wisdom is of God.

The Genesis stories of creation and the fall provide the foundational and formative features of classical spirituality. There is nothing outside of the Word and Will of God, no reality not comprehended by God’s speaking all things into being and as such upholding them in their truth and meaning. This is why the tradition of the early Church theologians in preaching on the work of the six days to those preparing for Holy Baptism is so crucial; there are sermons and treatises from both eastern and western thinkers and a host of later commentaries on Genesis. Everything is embraced in the loving wisdom of God including the wilderness, the wilderness that is really us in our turning away from paradise. We are the wilderness but Paradise is always there. We cannot unmake it or make it for ourselves. It is folly to think that we can, though there is no end to the utopian attempts to do so over many, many centuries, including our own . But to know ourselves in the wilderness is to be recalled to paradise yet only “to know the place for the first time”, as T.S. Eliot put it in Little Gidding, Four Quartets. And that means that it is no longer simply a beginning but our end in God.

Advent season is one of the loveliest seasons of the Christian year. It signals the profound theme of God coming to us in Word and Light and, ultimately, in the Christian understanding as “the Word made flesh”, Jesus Christ, true God and true man. God’s Word comes in Law and Prophecy and Gospel. That word comes as love, the love which is the fulfilling of the Law not its extinguishment. Love is its perfection that marks the shift from the wilderness, the place of law, to the paradise of love. Advent presents us with a whole host of images about our lives as “strangers and pilgrims” in the wilderness and in the via, the way, to our patria, the homeland of spirit, of paradise. It offers the vision and hope of wilderness transformed into paradise.

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