Hope and Glory

Easter is the most important feast of the Christian year, but the Churches have yet to agree where it belongs on the calendar. Perhaps this somewhat ludicrous difference is a kind of prophetic blessing. The ‘postponement’ of Easter on certain Church calendars reminds us that Christians can live with at least some differences. Our household postponed its own Easter celebrations – those which involve hunting for chocolate across several acres of soggy terrain, eating quantities of Easter cake with homemade marzipan (so much better than the shop stuff), and lamb not done the traditional way, for once, but spiced and slow cooked Ottolenghi style. We postponed all this because we had church commitments, as did our friends who came to stay with us.

Having taken the Good Friday service, and with Easter Sunday yet to come, I was particularly glad of the emotional space provided by Holy Saturday. Holy Saturday provides a chance to find our equilibrium in the context of the emotional swing which hurls us from Good Friday to Easter Sunday. Holy Saturday provides time to prepare for Easter Sunday without having to shop and cook at the same time. The preparation on Holy Saturday corresponds to the Jewish Sabbath, so we can also think of the women who had earlier prepared spices with which to anoint the body of the Lord once the Sabbath had passed. We need a Sabbath rest between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, not just to shop, cook and prepare the egg hunt, but to make sense of where the Church and our society stands in this ‘in between time’, in relation to the Easter event itself.

The Saturday space, between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, allows us to think of the world in the light of how all things will be when Christ comes again. I have long felt that Holy Saturday is better suited for ‘end time’ reflection than the Sundays preceding Advent. There is a sense of Christ’s absence about it which invites thought about how he will return ‘in glory to judge the living and the dead’, as the Christian creed puts it. This sense of absence is important. It gives us time to bring the suffering and dying of Christ into the light of his rising again and, in so doing, try to make sense of the world through the prism of these events.

Tradition holds that on Holy Saturday Christ descended into hell. While his descent might also be construed in his words of desolation and abandonment spoken from the Cross, he also descended into hell later, as the creeds declare, in order to grasp poor, despairing Judas by the hand and to offer him the kiss of peace in return for his kiss of betrayal. The hope offered to us by God in Jesus would not be hope if it did not travel beyond the reaches of despair.

While we were having supper on one of the evenings when are friends were with us, conversation turned to politics. We were generally agreed about one thing, and that is that the world is a pretty grim place and that it is hard to see where it will all end. Various end time scenarios were postulated, but that was about as far as the conversation was going to take us, until our youngest guest (aged 11) took us to task. What, she asked, did we think we were about? Had we nothing better to offer her generation than a generalised imminent doom scenario? What was she supposed to make of such talk?

Our young guest was far too intelligent to be fobbed off with an abrupt change of subject, or with being told not to worry her pretty head about such things, as if all would be well in the end. So we had to pick up where we had left off and posit something like believable hope. The conversation did not last much longer, but it did invite us to consider in our own minds how such hope, or the lack of it, relates to the kind of despair which Jesus experienced on the Cross and from which he later rescued Adam (the symbol of our humanity) and Judas.

The hope offered to the world in the risen Christ is not like any other kind of hope. It does not depend on vague belief in God, or on vague belief in anything. It is not a straw to be clutched at. Hope lives in the worst imaginable scenarios, past, present and future, and in any degree of despair in the life of any one human being. It is the hope of glory.

Glory pertains only to God. All other forms of glory, and the seductive and temporal power which they bring, are a poor imitation of the glory which pertains to God alone. The delusional desire for this counterfeit glory, and the seductive nature of power itself, accounts for the scarcity of true leadership in the world and in the Church of today. But hope sustains the human spirit because it proceeds from the glory of the ongoing life of the risen Christ. This is the Christ who speaks into the empty politics of the world and of the Church, as he spoke to the grieving woman who had brought spices with which to anoint the body of the one she loved, and found an empty tomb. 

Passiontide 2016 - Seeing you

Betrayal is anachronistic. It is all about lies, and yet at the heart of the moment lies a kind of truth. Whatever form betrayal takes, the person being betrayed experiences something like shame – naked exposure, perhaps. In the moment of betrayal that person is defenceless, without ‘cover’ of any kind. They look and feel foolish because they have trusted. It is their own trust which makes them feel defenceless and ashamed as much as the act of betrayal itself.

The one betraying, whatever their reason for doing so, must justify the lies involved and the pain caused by more lies. They must justify it to themselves, so that the betrayal seems in some way ‘necessary’ and therefore not of their choosing. ‘I had to do it’ they will say. ‘I had no choice’. Apart from justifying the moment, or the act, they must maintain their integrity, at least to themselves by distancing themselves from any direct responsibility for the damage they have done, and thereby exonerating themselves from being held in any way accountable for it.

All of this is the stuff of politics, of international relations, of the life of the Church and of our own experiences of betrayal, as victim or perpetrator. One could say that it is a universal principle, but it is also complex. Take, for example, corruption or betrayal in institutions whose integrity we need to take for granted, we need to trust; the fiddling of party election expenses (and in some countries the election process itself), police pay-offs for saying nothing in the context of organised crime relating to the grooming of young people for sex, the treatment of people held in police custody (especially if they are black), the power games and personal betrayals (both public and private) of government, sexual exploitation and cover up by the institutional Church along with the countless glossed over betrayals of loyal and faithful clergy who have served it in good faith, often for years.

Betrayal leaves us dealing with truths we would perhaps rather not face because in the moment of betrayal we see ourselves and others differently. Two such moments occur within a very short space of time in the final hours of the life of Jesus. Neither came as a surprise, but that did not make the betrayal easier to bear. The first took place in a garden at night where one of his own friends shopped him to the religious police. His friend identified him with a kiss.

Betrayal so often comes masquerading as love. ‘I did this or said that because I love you.’ Or ‘I behaved in that way, but you know I really love you.’ Both are lies, of course. We do not harm others because we love them, no matter how justifiable the action may seem to be at the time. We do not abuse trust by exposing another to pain.

Judas was trying to force Jesus’s hand politically. He was prepared to take the risk of his suffering (which Judas may have imagined would somehow be averted at the last minute) to turn Jesus into what he ‘should’ have been. It was about control and manipulation. The control or manipulation of others, especially those who trust us, is always betrayal. In the moment of the kiss Judas knows that Jesus also knows the truth of the situation, and the truth about Judas. He has known it for a long time in allowing Judas to be what he was, a pilferer of the common purse who had his priorities all wrong. 

Then there was the incident in the courtyard later that night, or possibly early the next morning. Peter, nicknamed ‘the rock’, the one who could be trusted, denies ever having known his closest friend. This moment, held in the meeting of their eyes as the cockerel crowed for the third time, also held every lie that has ever been told for the sake of saving one’s own life or reputation at the expense of the life or reputation of another.

The two moments I have just described are seminal. They are the soil in which the reversal of all betrayals germinates and takes root. Both reveal divine love at its source. They also reveal what that love looks and feels like. It looks like vulnerability and trust. In these two moments Jesus invites us not to look away, not to hide from our betrayals, or from the lies we have lived with for years, but to look quietly and bravely into his eyes, not asking for anything, but simply allowing ourselves to be seen. The rest will follow.

Passiontide 2016 - The point

Having got this far without whatever it is we have decided to forgo these past few weeks, we may now realise that we didn’t need it all that much in the first place. We may no longer even like it, as I discovered ten years ago with sugar on grapefruit.

Two things emerge from this; first, that with the exception of serious addiction, getting a grip on a habit or familiar comfort food isn’t that arduous an undertaking, once we get used to the idea, and, second, that not having it has bought us a certain freedom. The freedom comes in two shapes. We will be free in respect to resuming the habit or food (come Easter day) but it will not have mastery over us, and we will be free to choose what we really want – which may only amount to some other comfort food or habit to replace the one we gave up for Lent.

The trouble with this kind of freedom is that it deceives us into yet another variation on the guilt theme; if it was that easy to give up chocolate, why did we not do something much more demanding and difficult (as well as giving up chocolate)? Herein lies another great deception. We are deceived into thinking that nothing we have done in the way of self control, or even of prayer, adds up to anything and that we are as rotten as we ever were on the morning of Ash Wednesday, and will ever remain so. From this follows the question "So what’s the point?" The answer to this question is quite simple: There isn’t a ‘point’. Lent does not have a quantifiable point. It is not about achieving goals. Rather, it is about a different kind of freedom, freedom bestowed in failure and non-achievement.

By now, we may just begin to realise that whatever has been ‘achieved’ with regard to habits and food foregone during Lent, has done nothing to make us nicer or more holy people. This suggests that the most we can expect of Lent is coming to terms with who and what we really are. Having done this, we will begin to realise that the purpose of Lent lies in freeing us into a place where we can ask ourselves, without fear or shame, what it is we really want.

As we move towards Holy Week we begin to allow this life-determining question to be framed, or held, by the tortured Christ stumbling towards the place of his execution. Who is he? And what does he want? What makes him do it? What is the point?

Again, there is no ‘point’, except that the event of his death, and this particular moment of stumbling agony, is also God’s answer to our own question. It is God’s total identification with our failed efforts and distorted perceptions of ourselves. Some of these have been imposed by other people and all of them invariably lead to more ill perceived ‘failure’, so we are left with the reality of an endless cycle of failure and self recrimination. It is the shape of our life.

So what do we really want? Our inability to even consider this question, let alone try to answer it, can lead to the hopelessness which only addiction can assuage, addiction to work, to violent or dysfunctional relationships, to youth and beauty. For the time being, these addictions counter despair, the despair which comes with being in captivity to material things like achievement, or to a self-created persona, and to all kinds of falsehood. These have mastery over us. They also embody the chronic loneliness from which we hide through addiction and ‘comfort’ food.

So the ‘point’ for Jesus lies in meeting us in the secrecy of our loneliness and of our various ways of being in denial about who we are and what we really want. He stumbles along with us in all these states of mind and heart, including whatever our despair tempts us to do in any one moment. Whatever we try to do or become during Lent only serves as a reminder of this central truth. 

Lent 2016 - Not in control

As I walk the fields around my house on this clear, cold and stunningly beautiful afternoon, I am reminded that God promises to those who love him something like the joy I am experiencing. I also know, as I watch the doggish joy of our Labradoodle who is hurtling towards the bushes at the far end of the field, where squirrels are bound to be, that this joy is universal. Somehow, the dog, in his doggishness, experiences the joy implicit in the promise made to those who love God; ‘what no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the human heart conceived’ (1Cor.2:9)

I also know that others walking these fields may have quite different feelings, feelings which have nothing to do with joy. This knowledge concerns me, because the situation seems unfair. Loving God is, after all, a gift in itself, and God, we are told, does not have favourites. So how is it that some can soar to such heights of joy in the seeming ordinariness of walking a dog while others may remain indifferent to the moment, or are simply burdened by sadness? I have known such sadness myself when walking the fields, sadness attributable to life, the state of the world, or to nothing in particular. I have tried to be joyful in these moments and failed. Mindful of the suffering of millions, I have also tried to be less joyful in those other moments. Again, I have failed.

All of this pertains to the way we think about Lent. Is Lent a season which permits joy? Or is it one for moderating our response to the blessings of life? Many of us tend to do the latter for much of the time, because we like to be taken seriously and serious people do not run down hills exulting in the joy of the moment.

I think there is something almost blasphemous in refusing joy, and in the idea that joy is somehow unseemly in Lent, because joy is of God himself. To be joyful is to allow ourselves to be taken out of the emotional straight jacket we wear for much of the time so that our constricted selves can be blessed by the love of God. To refuse such moments amounts to telling God that we know what is best for us better than God does.  Such knowledge, and the will to implement it, amounts to what used to be known as pride, another of the cardinal sins, for which see a previous blog post.

Pride is about control, the control of other people or animals, and the unforgiving self control which tells us that we can manage our own salvation. The salvation offered to us by God in Christ consists in the freedom to be joyful. It is almost a condition for salvation itself. We are to ‘rejoice in the Lord always’ (Phil.4:4). Rejoicing in the Lord will inevitably involve loss of control, or the surrendering of what we think will make others, including God, take us seriously.

Here, there is a paradox. It lies in the Cross, which was the most serious event in all time but which consisted in God allowing himself to be shamed, to be not taken seriously. In the Cross and in its shame, we are taken seriously as the flawed and fragile human beings that we really are, human beings who believe that their fragility and imperfection can be strengthened or remedied through the kind of self control which makes us resistant to forgiveness.

The need to control stems from the fear of being forgiven. Forgiveness brings freedom from old ways of thinking about life, about other human beings and about God. It frees us into new and wide open spaces, in which we see the world and creation in a new way. It is a cause for joy. 

Lent 2016 - Exposing the lie

It’s an idea we’re going to have to get used to. Donald Trump may yet become President of the United States of America, which is still the most powerful nation on earth. How might this come about? There is no simple answer, and I am no political pundit, but one thing seems clear; that the fomenting of hatred gets you a long way in politics. 

Source: The Guardian

The guile it takes to foment hatred serves as both trowel and weapon, useful as a means of turning over the blackest, and often richest, soil of emotions in the human heart, and as the deadliest of all weapons, the guile which is also known as duplicity, or deceit. Guile, or duplicity, covers up a multitude of evils, most notably those which used to be known as the seven deadly sins.

Thinking about the politics of America, which claims in its own constitution to be ‘one  nation under God’, the rhetoric swirls around as the presidential primaries get under way, and we detect its heavy religious undertones. The tool of religion, whose purpose is to ‘turn over’, or convert, human hearts and so open them to the transforming work of love, becomes the weapon of xenophobic fear and ultimately of hatred itself, hatred which is spawned in human hearts through pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath and sloth – the seven deadly sins. In and through any or all of these, using the tools of duplicity and deceit, the demon of hatred urges a nation on into the night. Perhaps it is time we all thought more carefully about our politics.

When it comes to duplicity, politics and religion are easily confused. They merge in the shadows of those outmoded deadly sins. Take lust, for example. Lust has more to do with power than it does with sex, although the two often go together. Lust for power is not always immediately recognisable because it is easily disguised by personal charisma or by flattery, both pandering to the lowest common moral denominator.

Evil is of its very nature duplicitous. In terms of politics, evil can be disguised quite effectively, either as what is good for the nation (because those who are infatuated with one man’s charisma are encouraged to believe that it is they who represent the nation in its purest state), or, on the other, as an ideal which they both want and deserve. Once these two untruths have been firmly established, nobody should be allowed to question the means or the motives for promoting them. But occasionally the terrifying truth slips out, as it did when someone recently asked what it will feel like to know that Donald Trump has it in his power to press the nuclear button.

Either way, fear seems, once again, to rule the day. But this too is part of the great deception. The period which Christians observe prior to celebrating the Resurrection of Jesus Christ is also a time for exposing deception. Exposing deception begins with ourselves. The season of Lent is a season for reflecting on unquestioned attitudes which we may not even know we have, attitudes to race, gender, power and the unconscious assumption that somehow ‘might is right’.

Our private assumptions and our most secret prejudices combine to make the sum total of a nation. So Lent is an opportunity to review, and perhaps repent of, our politics. By doing this personally we also do it as a nation, knowing that ‘all have sinned’ in this area at one time or another. As nations we have all fallen short of the loving purposes of God, and as nations we are invited to be open to the transforming work of his grace – and to the new life we share in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Lent 2016 - The reason for the season

Resilience and self-reliance have long been a British characteristic. Faced with adversity, we pull ourselves up by our boot strings and get on with things. Consistent with this national trait it is reasonable to suppose that many of us think of Lent as a season for self improvement in which God is only marginally involved. Generations have been shaped by the idea that when it comes to facing life’s difficulties, and to self improvement, ‘God helps those who help themselves’. So they can think of Lent as a chance to pick up those New Year's resolutions, that fell by the wayside towards the end of January, with increased determination.

But what makes Lent difficult is that, unlike New Year’s resolutions which almost always aim at self improvement, Lent can very quickly seem purposeless. A couple of days after Ash Wednesday we find ourselves wondering what point there can be in giving up chocolate or wine.

This is one of the ways in which the season corresponds so closely to the forty days spent by Christ in the wilderness where he was tempted by Satan, however we choose to imagine that particular figure. The real temptation lay in purpose, or the lack of it. What was the point? Did Jesus believe in himself enough to go through with this gruelling exercise, let alone the suffering which was to come? Would it not be just as useful, more useful perhaps, if he appealed to people directly by raising his celebrity profile as quickly as possible? Did he even really believe the fantasies he’d created for himself? “If  you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from the nearest tall building and his angels will come to your rescue before you even hit the ground, then they’ll believe you” says the tempter, which was true of course.  But it misses the point.

The temptation was not to doubt himself, or even to doubt God, but to doubt that God’s purpose would be worked out and fully revealed in him through suffering. But does the same apply to our own self imposed discipline during Lent? Here we already run into difficulties. If we equate God’s purpose purely with suffering and privation, and our own suffering as something to be got through in order to win God’s approval, Lent becomes little more than an endurance test . But Lenten self discipline is not that kind of test. The purpose of Lent is not to succeed or achieve higher personal standards through some kind of minor privation. It is to accept failure and our need for grace.

Part of the purpose of Lent is to remind us that if there is anything resembling purpose in human suffering, it is bound up with the purpose of God’s Son choosing to ‘empty’ himself, a literal translation of the greek word used in Paul’s letter to the Philippian church. Christ chose to empty himself of his divine freedom, but not of his divinity, in order to bind himself, like a slave, to human suffering and the consequences of human greed and selfishness. The mystery of suffering, or its ‘purpose’ becomes part of God’s purpose in Jesus Christ, a purpose which is still being worked out in the world today. The outworking of God’s purpose through suffering and what we call sin means that all human relationships are transformed in the minute a person or nation recognises and seeks the grace which comes with forgiveness. With forgiveness comes reconciliation and the beginning of a new creation.

The new creation begins with reconciliation with God, leading to ultimate reconciliation among people and nations. This may sound overly optimistic until we remember that reconciliation depends on all parties to any dispute wanting it enough to be truthful with themselves and with each other about whatever suffering has been caused and the part they have played in it. In other words, there has to be a willingness to say the word ‘sorry’. Reconciliation can only take place when this word has been spoken.

Before we dismiss this idea as impossible, a good Lenten discipline might be to take five minutes of the day to be truly still in the face of this life determining truth. Being still means being open to God so that God, in the nakedness of the suffering Christ, can look at us. In doing this, we see ourselves as he sees us, beginning with where we have wronged or been wronged by others. This is not simply a matter of  going over the past, waiting for anger, guilt or doubt to surface and then quickly burying the whole painful business until the same time tomorrow. It is a matter of allowing transformative grace to penetrate the deepest and darkest parts of our hearts and memories and waiting for God’s purpose to be worked in us in this moment of truth.

If we can spare another five minutes, we might try to imagine the unimaginable, in other words to pray the unthinkable; that all the parties who are contributing to the devastating destruction being wrought at present in Syria would pause and be still in a similar way – and allow the mercy of God into their hearts and minds, so transforming the lives of millions of innocent suffering human beings.

Lent 2016 - Confronting Fear

I read in Saturday’s Guardian that a woman who had tripped and fallen while crossing a road was ignored by two passing cars, before being run over and killed by a bus whose driver had not noticed her lying there. Did all three of these drivers perhaps half notice the woman, but for fear of getting involved (the legal and practical ramifications of doing so would have been considerable) simply pass on by? Selfish individualism, as the Guardian article suggests, runs on the fear of getting involved.

Selfish individualism is no new thing, as the story of the good Samaritan also reminds us, but what does not immediately register with the reader of that story is the acute loneliness of the two who pass by on the other side. We get a sense of this loneliness in the incident which took place on a city street in the UK only a few days ago. The drivers of the cars and bus, like the religious experts in the gospel story, seem disconnected from other people’s humanity, and perhaps even from their own.

The selfish person almost always ends up being the loneliest and the most alienated, as we often see with some of the elderly people in care homes whose families seldom visit them, not because they do not care about their relative, but because their love has been absorbed, sponge-like, over many years by a self obsessed and often fearful individual.

The loneliness of the self obsessed individual could also become the plight of the selfish nation. The selfish nation only thinks short-term and takes what it can from the wider family, the family of nations. In certain contexts its short-term thinking has been compounded by the  fear of what might happen to the nation if it started to risk itself for the sake of the powerless. The plight of the selfish nation returns us to the plight of the selfish individual who is too timid or self obsessed to be pro-active about taking in refugees, for example.

It seems strange that all of this fear is often confused with religion, or with the lack of it. Lack of religion is sometimes seen, by those who do not understand what religion is about, as lack of moral fibre, or a version of the same. But one cannot help suspecting that, for them, the real problem with religion is that it involves passion. Dispassionate morality, or virtue, is easier on the conscience; suffering and need become someone else’s problem. Who knows where passionate love for a loving God might take them?

This being said, the critics of religion have a point. Religious people are often blind to their own self obsession and the threats which it poses when it is cloaked by religious individualism. Religious individualism feeds on the same fear as any other kind of individualism. It feeds on the fear of those whose religion is strange to us, with the result that we feel we must protect ourselves from whatever we think they might do to us.

One way around this problem would be to take advantage of the most powerful resource which all people of faith have at their disposal – prayer. Prayer takes one of two forms. It is the intimate conversation which the human being has with the creator God who is loved and trusted by the one doing the praying. Prayer also involves desiring the highest good for all human beings, beginning with those whose religion is different from our own.

Christians are about to enter the holy season of Lent. I think many Christians would greatly value the prayers of Muslims for our highest good. Many of us will be praying for them during the coming weeks. Here are two prayers which Christians say together on the Sunday before Lent begins.

Lord, who has taught us that all our doings without charity are nothing worth, send thy Holy Spirit, and pour into our hearts that most excellent gift of charity, the very bond of peace and of all virtues, without which whosoever lives is counted dead before thee; grant this for thine only Son Jesus Christ’s sake. Amen.

Merciful Lord, grant, we pray, to your faithful people pardon and peace: that they may be cleansed from all their sins and serve you with a quiet mind; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

I hope that those who read this blog will continue to say these prayers throughout the coming weeks for all Muslims of good faith, as well as for themselves, and that Muslims will join us in saying them for us in a spirit which is true to their religion: