Category: KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

Talitha Cumi

An Aramaic phrase, it means, “little girl, I say unto you, arise”. It is part of an intriguing scene in which Jesus heals and raises to life, a kind of double miracle, as it were, which helps us to understand the radical nature of the Resurrection. A ruler of the Jews, Jairus by name, comes to Jesus seeking the healing of his daughter who is “at the point of death.” Jesus goes with him and “a great crowd followed him and thronged about him.”

Jesus is in the midst. A woman in the crowd who had suffered “a flow of blood for twelve years” and “who had suffered much under many physicians” thinks that “if I touch even his garments, I shall be made well.” She touches his garment and immediately is healed. But the greater interest is in what follows. Jesus wants to know who touched him, even more he wants the woman who was healed to be embraced in his knowing love of our humanity rather than presuming to steal a cure unawares. She comes to him “in fear and trembling and and fell down before him and told him the whole truth.” His response shows us what God seeks for us: our being healed in his knowing love for us. “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.” Only then does he continue on his way to the house of Jairus.

On the way, he is told that she is dead but he comes any way. In the face of the mockery and laughter of the household, he bids her in Aramaic to arise. She is raised up. It is one of three powerful stories where Jesus meets us as mourners and restores to life the dead. Such scenes prepare us and show us something of the radical nature of the Resurrection. It is the only scene, though, which shows our disdain and cynical mockery of the possibility of new life. We laugh and are dead, as it were, to the power of God. This story is meant to counter such behaviour and to awaken us to the wonder of God and to the nature of his will for us.

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Come and have breakfast!

The accounts of the Resurrection in John’s Gospel are most intriguing. They provide much in the way of specific detail. They all turn on the idea of how we come to know and show us that process of a dawning awareness about how we come to see things in a completely new way that illumines the past and sets us in motion.

First, Mary Magdalene comes to the tomb seeking a body and encounters the Risen Christ whom she mistakes as the gardener! She is told by Christ  not to touch but to go and proclaim to the others that “I am ascending to my father and your father, to my God and your God,” words which echo Ruth’s sense of the universality of God as the counter to a merely tribal or personal attachment to a deity or principle. Hence, don’t cling to me, Jesus is saying to her. She is to know him in a new and more universal way that doesn’t negate the personal but enlarges it.

Second, Christ appears behind closed doors and makes himself known to the disciples and especially Thomas, to whom he says “touch and see!” In other words, the mystery of the Resurrection is made known to us in ways that correspond to the different ways of our knowing, ways that honour our individuality and embodied experiences. Peace and forgiveness flow out of the Resurrection of Christ; they are the forms of the Resurrection in us even in the places and circumstances of fear and uncertainty. It is peace and forgiveness now and not by and by.

Third, Christ appears to the disciples on the beach while they are fishing. This last scene is particularly intriguing. It begins with the disciples not recognising Jesus who bids them cast their net on the other side of the boat where they enclose a great number of fishes, indeed, one hundred and fifty three. An awful amount of ink has been spilt in various speculations about the significance of this very precise number. For mathematicians it holds interest as the triangular number of seventeen but what is its symbolic meaning remains unclear. When they do recognise him, he invites them to breakfast; a barbecue on the beach with Jesus. “Come and have breakfast!”

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Resurrection graces

“Christ is Risen Alleluia! Alleluia! The Lord is Risen indeed. Alleluia! Alleluia!” The ancient and great Easter greeting of Christians at Easter says a wee bit more than our more prosaic “Happy Easter” which might just as well mean “may the bunny be with you,” maybe a chocolate bunny? Yet the Christian greeting highlights the main point. It is all about the Resurrection of Jesus Christ and what that means for us.

And while this is specifically a Christian greeting, the idea of resurrection is not unique to Christianity but belongs to late Judaism and to Islam and connects to other philosophical and religious traditions about the immortality of the soul to which the body is now included. In other words, the concept of the resurrection belongs to the long and profound traditions of thought about what it means to be human.

The Resurrection affirms in the strongest possible way human individuality. It affirms in the strongest possible way the body and the physical world. It says that your body is an essential part of who you are, that the body while not everything is also not nothing. There is a cosmic dimension to the Resurrection, too, insofar as it recalls creation itself and pertains to the redemption of the whole world. It is, in short, a new creation, and in the most radical sense of creatio ex nihilo, a making out of the nothingness of sin and evil. The Resurrection is the triumph of life over death, of light over darkness, of good over evil, but only through the most intense realization of the disorders of our lives and world. The Resurrection is radical new life because it grounds our being, our knowing and our loving in the life of God. God alone can make something good even out of our evil. The message of the Resurrection explains its strong sense of joy and hope. As such it is the counter to the despairing and dogmatic nihilisms of our age but without becoming triumphalist and domineering ourselves.

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What mean ye by this service?

The question comes from the Book of Exodus just after the story of the Passover, the story of the Hebrews being spared the death of the first born of man and beast by daubing the lintels of their doors with the blood of the lamb. It is a sign signifying their relation to the God of their deliverance from slavery and bondage. It becomes the defining event for the people of Israel and one which is remembered ritually. The basic Jewish insight about the sovereign will of God as the defining principle of all reality shapes as well the Christian and Islamic understanding. It informs especially Holy Week, the week of the Passion of Christ and our participation in that Passion.

In the traditional Anglican pattern, we immerse ourselves completely in the reading of all four accounts of the Passion beginning on Palm Sunday with Matthew, then on the Monday and Tuesday of Holy Week with Mark, then Luke on Wednesday and Thursday, and John on Good Friday. There is an intensity to these readings because we are in the Passion. We find ourselves in the crowds, among the disciples, and amid the authorities both Jewish and Roman. We are with Peter as weeps recalling the words and the tender look of Christ upon him in his betrayal of Christ. We are with the twelve in the Upper Room on the night in which he was betrayed. As Palm Sunday makes so graphically clear, we are those who shout “Hosanna to the Son of David” only to turn about and cry “Let him be crucified,” “Let him be crucified”! Such are the contradictions within our own souls. We confront ourselves in all of our disorder and disarray in the events of Holy Week.

If we have hearts, they shall be broken, for only so shall we be made whole. Holy Week is one long continuous service. We need to become aware of our brokenness in order to participate in the redemption of our humanity. Only so can we go from “Hosanna” to “Crucify” and then to the great “Alleluias” of Easter. God and God alone can make something good out of our evil. That is the meaning of Holy Week. Our hearts are broken, too, at the sad spectacle of the great Cathedral Church of Notre Dame de Paris on fire and now smoldering in ruins. And yet there is some comfort in the powerful image of the Cross at Notre Dame shining forth amid the smoke and the devastations of the fire, a presence signifying hope and redemption and restoration.

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If I be shaved, I shall lose my strength

April showers come in dazzling white in Nova Scotia! “April is”, as T.S. Eliot observes, “the cruellest month” and he never even visited the Maritimes! But this too shall pass. There are more important things to think about than the vagaries of the weather. In Chapel we have embarked upon the lenten discipline of a study of The Book of Judges.

The story of Samson is a major part of The Book of Judges and contributes to its overarching themes in and through the folkloric character of many of its stories. Samson is the proverbial strong man, the “Rocky” of the Old Testament, as it were, and yet as a judge in Israel, he is not defined primarily or essentially by his strength or by any human quality but by “the Spirit of the Lord”. That is the tension in the story of Samson within the struggles of the conquest of the “promised land”. Yet what looks like tribal conflicts is really about something deeper, about what defines Israel over and against the Philistines. One of the most famous passages is the story of Samson and Delilah.

What is that story about? It is about what truly defines Samson. He is from his birth, as he tells Delilah, a Nazirite. He has been dedicated to God and that dedication is expressed in terms of a set of defining disciplines such as not cutting his hair, not drinking wine nor eating grapes, and avoiding carrion flesh. In other words, he is defined by his relation to God. It is “the Spirit of the Lord” that matters and not his physical strength. What happens if we deny the principle that defines us? What happens if we trust more in our own strength rather than in the Spirit of the Lord who is radically other than the ‘gods’ of the Philistines? The Book of Judges is about those questions which distinguish and define Israel.

And while that theme appears in the context of violence and conflict, the deeper point is that something greater is at work in Israel than just tribal identities. In other words, being defined by God ultimately transcends the tribal. That lesson is part of the long, long journey of Israel’s learning what it means to be the people of the Law. Judges shows us how hard the journey of learning is and yet how necessary. It especially provides a necessary critique of human pride and presumption. In that sense it complements other works from other traditions that also present a self-critique of reason and human presumption.

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I have opened my mouth to the Lord

Discipline. It is a loaded word, one which is freighted with a lot of baggage, and largely viewed negatively. I am sure it makes Mr. Faucher cringe to be thought about as the disciplinarian! But that is to overlook the positive and stronger feature of discipline as something essential to education and maturity. Discipline is really about learning.

In the spiritual traditions of the world’s religions and philosophies, there are those special times which are about a recovery and a renewal of the mind and soul in the ethical principles that belong to ourselves as embodied beings capable of grasping meaning and truth. Such things are about spiritual discipline.

Lent is a time for“self-reflection and repentance”, for “prayer, fasting and self-denial”, for “reading and meditation upon God’s holy Word” (BCP, p. 615). To that end, we have embarked upon a series of reading from The Book of Judges, in part, because it provides a self-critique of human reason and presumption, a necessary check upon ourselves, somewhat akin to Sophocles’ play Oedipus Rex. It offers a critical view of our humanity in its adolescence, we might say. One of its recurring themes is “the people of Israel again did what was evil in the sight of the Lord.” The other recurring theme which also ends the work is the phrase “in those days there was no king in Israel and everyone did as was their wont.” There is the question about how the truth and order of the will of God in the Law are to be mediated to the people of Israel. In a way, The Book of Judges is a reminder, yet again, of the destructive folly of our humanity when left to our own devices. It reveals the necessity of the Law as the overarching set of ethical principles that shape individual and communal behaviour. Judges shows us what happens when we fail to attend to those principles. As such it recalls us to their necessity. It is a profound check on all and every form of humanism which thinks itself to be self-complete.

It is, to be sure, a pretty violent book with a number of pretty disturbing stories including the ugliest and most disturbing story in the whole of the Scriptures, the story of the Levite’s concubine (which we are not reading this year!). The Judges are motley collection of charismatic individuals raised up by God to try to return Israel to God. It is not about their personal qualities; they are all flawed and importantly so. Yet this awareness of the limitations of our humanity in itself is the important lesson. That awareness can only open us to the need for God’s will and grace in our lives.

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Be it unto me

Chapel and classes resumed after the March break on Monday, March 25th, an auspicious occasion in the Christian calendar and yet one with a considerable resonance with other religions and philosophies. One can’t help but observe that it is exactly nine months to Christmas! At once ‘hooray’, and ‘oh, no’, I suppose! It marks the Feast of the Annunciation, the annunciation of the Angel Gabriel to Mary that she is to be the mother of God, the mother of Jesus, a story which we ordinarily hear in Advent and at Christmas. Yet the feast of the Annunciation marks the conception of Christ in the womb of Mary, not by way of biological and sexual intercourse, but intellectually and spiritually and in ways that redeem and sanctify the physical and the natural; hence the significance of the symbolism of nine months to Christmas, to the birth of Christ. “Grace does not destroy nature but perfects it” as Medieval wisdom puts it. Mary plays a significant role in the Christian understanding of Christ and who Christ is for us. As such she is a central figure in the question which all the great religions and philosophies wrestle with, the question about what it means to be human.

Many of you have just returned from various adventures and travels, journeys to far off places and climes, journeys to Africa and Europe and elsewhere, journeys that are global; others of you have travelled in other ways, through books and thoughts, through dreams and the power of imagination. Yet the one important and interesting thing about all the journeys of our lives is that while we talk about getting away from things, the one thing we cannot get away from and the one thing that we always take with us wherever we go and however we go, is ourselves. You. And so there is the critical necessity of thinking about what it means to be a ‘you’, a self. Mary plays a crucial and critical role in that kind of thinking.

We cannot think of Mary without looking back into such figures as Hannah and Miriam in the Old Testament as well as host of other figures and images such as Deborah “who arose as a mother in Israel” and Jael, “most blessed among women”, whom the Song of Deborah in the Book of Judges celebrates, a book which we will be exploring over the next little while. Mary, too, as the mother of Jesus, is present in the Qur’an; she is actually mentioned there more times than in the Christian New Testament. But far from being merely a role model for women, Mary is the great exemplar of what it truly means to be human. She is part of our current quest to think about what it means to be a ‘self’ or whether that is simply an illusion. Perhaps, there is no ‘you’; perhaps, as Yuval Noah Harari suggests, you are merely an “organic algorithm”, and, whatever that means, it means that there is no ‘you’. Your March break journey was, perhaps, merely a fantasy!

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Return to the Lord your God

The words of the prophet Joel signal the whole project of Lent. It is all in the turning of ourselves to God. Such is repentance, “a kind of circling, redire ad principia,  to return to him from whom we have turned away” (Lancelot Andrewes).

What is that turning away? It is sin understood in terms of the separation of ourselves from the truth of our being and knowing and the separation within ourselves in the disconnect between our knowing and our willing; in short, the fatal separation of intellect and will.

Lent seeks the re-integration of our essential being, the re-integration of our knowing and our willing. Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of that project precisely in terms of desire. “Where your treasure is there will your heart be also,” Jesus tells us in Matthew’s Gospel reading for today. What do we desire or cherish or treasure?

Lent is the pilgrimage of love in which love sets our loves in order. “Make me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me,” as the great penitential psalm of Lent puts it (Psalm 51.10). Such seeking is prayer. But it is predicated upon an awareness in ourselves that things are not as they should be or as we would like them to be either about ourselves or about our world and day.

The wonder of Ash Wednesday and Lent lies in the possibilities of the turning, the turning again and again to God. In our world and day, the question of the turning itself is the question for it implies the realization of our own incompleteness. In the folly of the autonomous self we think ourselves to be complete and whole. It is one of the paradoxes, even contradictions of our age which Ash Wednesday wonderfully counters. The Slovenian philosopher, Slovoj Zizek, observes this paradox or contradiction noting that we assume the complete autonomy of ourselves in the freedom to say and do everything and anything, even to change our sexual identities, to assert ourselves as selves, and yet, at the same time, we claim endlessly to be victims of one sort of perceived injustice or another. In other words, we assert our utter autonomy only to assert that we are constrained and limited by others.

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Arise, and go down to the potter’s house

This week we have had two intriguing readings from two of the major prophets, Ezekiel and Jeremiah, the one with the image of eating the scroll of the Lord, the other about being the clay in the hands of the divine potter. These are wonderful images that speak about the nature of the educational project at King’s-Edgehill School. It is about character, about formation, about words taking shape in us and shaping us in turn.

Jeremiah’s famous image of the Potter and the Clay is a profound statement of truth. God is the Potter and we are the clay. He shapes us and not otherwise. It is an understanding that belongs to Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The struggle of our age, perhaps, is to overcome the dogmatic skepticism which would refuse to give to the Potter what belongs to the “rational” clay of our humanity, namely the acknowledgment that we are the creatures whom God has made for himself.

Yet, left by itself, that we are the vessels whom the divine Potter has shaped and made would be an unbearable truth. It would be unbearable because Scripture and experience reveal us to ourselves as broken pots – broken through no fault of the Potter, we must add, but because of ourselves.

At this point the image of the Potter and the Clay deepens into mystery. We are broken pots because we have failed to will the intent of the Maker. Something is required of us. We are not simply passive receptacles of God’s will and purpose – unassuming, inert, and unmoving clay. No. We have to will the shape that the divine Potter wants for each of us. It means taking words and ideas into ourselves and making them part of ourselves. It is about how the divine Word takes shape in us to his glory and for our endless good.

And yet, that you and I are but so many broken pots, would remain an uncomfortable but inescapable truth were it not for the grace and mercy of God. This requires of us a deeper humility, a profounder openness to the Poet/Maker and Shaper of Souls.

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