It moves.  It moves not.
It is far, yet It is near:
It is within this whole universe,
And yet It is without it.

Those who see all beings in the Self,
And the Self in all beings
Will never shrink from It.

When once one understands that in oneself
The Self’s become all beings,
When once one’s seen the unity,
What room is there for sorrow?  What room for perplexity?

(Isa Upanishad, verses 5 – 7)

These words were written between 1200 and 800BCE – centuries before St John’s Gospel.

Tranquility

Last week I came across a copy of R C Zaehner’s translations of Hindu scriptures, bought it and have since been discovering all sort of gems, like this stanza (The Bhagavad-Gita, 4:39):

A man of faith, intent on wisdom,
His senses all restrained, will wisdom win;
And, wisdom won, he’ll come right soon
To perfect peace.

This is almost completely paralleled in the Bible, in the lovely text, “Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on thee” (Isaiah 26:3). The nearest equivalent I can find in the Arberry transcription of the Holy Qu’ran is “And God summons to the Abode of Peace, and He guides whomsoever He will to a straight path… “(Sura 10:25).

To complete a quartet of such insights, let us end with a slightly different perspective, a Stoic text written by an emperor:

“Nowhere can a man find a quieter or more untroubled retreat than in his own soul”  (Marcus Aurelius  Meditations 4:3)

The church in the slums

These days, there seem to be growing calls to exclude organised religion from the public space, as it is excluded in explicitly secular polities such as Cuba or France.  In the US, the debate about school prayer and displaying the Ten Commandments never really goes away. In the UK, the question will come to the front of our thinking when we see, later this year, who is to be the next Archbishop of Canterbury, and how many bishops will still have seats in a reformed House of Lords. Every separate country has its own notions of how far the predominant faith can be visible in the agora, and this has always been the case.

Church and culture

Time was when the Roman Catholic church reckoned that, in this, it could have its cake and eat it too.   Pope John Paul II thought nothing of ordering priests out of democratic office while at the same time telling bishops to intervene decisively in democratic processes such as the contraception debate.  The same duality chacterised much of the long reign of Pius IX and his condemnation of modern civilisation in the encyclical Quanta cura (1864) in particular.

This was the era in which the church ‘forbade’ Italian Catholics to vote.  But by the end of the first decade of the 20th century there were voices from within the church calling for new ways of engagement with the world, and activity and witness in the public arena.

One of these voices belonged to Romolo Murri (1870-1944), a priest-journalist with advanced ideas about such engagement.  Some of those ideas were touched on by the following paragraphs from his book Il cristianesimo e la religione di domani (Rome, 1905?  p64).  With acknowledgements and thanks to the Project Gutenberg, and conceding that the language might well strike us as being convoluted and nebulous, I give here first the original text in Italian, with my translation of it, checked by D, after:

Noi possiamo con fondamento supporre che per la maggior parte degli uomini le esigenze religiose continueranno ad essere motivo di socialità e di collaborazione in un determinato gruppo di fedeli; e possiamo trovare nel rito e nella disciplina di quella o di questa chiesa cristiana simboli e gesti i quali, ricondotti al loro originario significato o spiritualizzati con un contenuto nuovo, giovino ancora per molti secoli ad esprimere il pensiero od i sentimenti religiosi di una parte dell’umanità.

E possiamo anche ritenere—le esperienze religiose più vive degli ultimi tempi lo mostrano—che, con il diminuire della forza del vincolo creato dall’ortodossia, aumenti invece l’efficacia di un altro vincolo: la

cooperazione nel compimento pratico del bene; specialmente se sulla beneficenza individuale e dispersa prevarranno le forme di educazione, di assistenza sociale e di previdenza che ci sono divenute familiari in questi ultimi tempi ed altre che potranno essere escogitate.

Può darsi che le Chiese si trasformino in gruppi di servizi sociali. Può darsi che le grandi manifestazioni popolari di culto assumano una forma sempre meno ecclesiastica; che il sacerdozio diventi, come in talune Chiese è divenuto, libera designazione di fedeli a funzioni di educazione e di assistenza pratica…

In tutti questi vari processi, che ho brevemente indicati, un fatto apparisce costante: la sempre minore importanza di elementi

particolaristici e storici; la sempre maggiore importanza di elementi universalistici e pratici.

È necessario fare infinite riserve nel parlare dei prossimi futuri processi dello spirito e dell’associazione religiosa; ma possiamo prevedere, al confine dei tempi, una religione veramente umana ed universale che sia il culto della vita, e di ciò che della vita umana esprime le originarie e più profonde aspirazioni e tende al massimo

della intensità spirituale; della vita divina, della massima somma di valori assoluti realizzantesi nel massimo sforzo di coscienze gelosamente educate a questa tensione e intenzione spirituale; e che, ogni opera della vita diventando così religiosa, per il significato e per il fine, la religione cessi di essere un aspetto ed un ramo speciale delle organizzazioni e delle attività umane, per abbracciarle tutte, spirito che vivifica.

A religion of life

We have grounds for supposing that for most of the human race religious needs will continue to be impelled by the brotherhood of man and by working together within any given grouping of the faithful.  In the ritual and discipline of any Christian community whatsoever we can find symbolism and acts which, once they are restored to their original significance and reconsecrated with new meaning, acquire benefits for centuries to come as expressions of the thinking and religious sentiments of a part of humanity.

We can also assume that, as demonstrated by the more vivid of the religious experiences of recent times, whilst the shackles forged by orthodoxy lose their force, so by contrast the effects of quite another harness increase.  Co-operation in achieving good in practical terms is growing, especially when individual generosity and sharing out prevails in the various forms of education, of social assistance, and in the sort of provision to which we have become accustomed in recent times, and there are yet other things we can consider as relevant.

It may be that the church can transform itself through blocks of social services provision.  In this way, too, the great much-loved outward appearances of the faith can take on a form that is decreasingly ecclesiastical, and the clergy become, as the church will have become, faith-validated contributors to education and practical assistance. ..

In all the various processes summarised here, one fact appears to be a constant: the ever-decreasing importance of particular historical factors and the ever-increasing importance of more universal and practical ones.

Whilst we need to have the greatest care in speaking of future processes in the spirit as well as in the structure of religion, we can look forward, in the fullness of time, to a genuinely human and universal faith which will be, as it were, the religion of life.  In that sense, it will be expressing the most original and most profound aspirations of human life, extending to spiritual intensity at its utmost.  It will proclaim the divine life of absolute values supremely brought together and enacted in the greatest possible force of conscience, stringently brought forth in both this tension and spiritual intention.  This in turn entails all of life’s works becoming religious in terms of their significance, to the end that religion ceases to be merely an aspect and special branch of human organisations and activities and comes to embrace everything in that spirit which gives and animates life itself.

From priest to politician

For this and for other writings, Murri was suspended from the priesthood in 1907 and, for the crime of getting elected to the legislature as a Radical, excommunicated in 1909.  He was a progenitor of the Christian Democratic movement which took power in Italy only after his death in 1944.

He did not live to see, therefore, many of his ideas included 17 years later in a truly great papal document, John XXIII’s encyclical Mater et Magister (1961), which showed how wise and how attentive to the position of the church in society today our spiritual leadership can be.

Over the years the church has come to realise that the degree to which it makes itself known, and takes action, in the public realm of modern democratic societies has to be finely adjusted to suit each one.  What is acceptable in one country will not be in another.  We have had enough of, for example, bishops in the Balkans approving anti-Muslim violence; enough of the constant drumbeat, in our own culture, against faith schools; the list is endless.

The balance is delicate, but it has to be made, and made right in each case.  We have a gospel to proclaim, as the hymn puts it: we have been at work in society, often its lowest depths, since St Stephen’s ministry, and will continue to be so, but we also have the wisdom of the serpent.  We know how far we can go.

John XXIII visiting prisoners

Scripture

Change is a constant, we like to say.  Everything changes over time, even religion.  But not everyone agrees.  One of the great fault-lines in both Christianity and Judaism lies between those who have no problem with the idea that religions evolve and those others who emphatically disagree.  The two sides often misunderstand each other and so, fuelled by category error, the debate becomes ever more heated and less clear.

This non-meeting of minds is most obvious at present in at least three parts of the faith arena: the idea that “God” changes, the so-called clash between religion and science, and the immutable finality and eternity of scripture.  Let’s look at the third of these.  In this posting, I want to think aloud about scripture, our attitudes to it and the way it causes or governs our responses to often relentless change.

The Holy Bible

For the Protestant, scripture is supremely sacred.  This is partly because it has not been attained without struggle: much of the rationale for the Reformation was the consequence of our realisation that the Church was keeping the Bible from us.  For a period we were not even allowed to read it in our own tongue: “In 1407 all existing versions of the Bible in English were officially banned by the English church hierarchy, and no replacement was sanctioned until Henry VIII’s reformation in the 1530s.” (Diarmaid MacCulloch  A history of Christianity.  Allen Lane London, 2005 p569).  Whatever we gleaned from it in Latin was mediated by the Church exclusively for its own purposes.  It was not ours.

This experience bred resentment.  It ensured that when the vernacular Bible became freely available it gained an extra patina of holiness and guarantee of truth, free from any untrustworthy construction the elites might try and put upon it. The unmediated text grew in power as the people’s accession to new freedoms of thought and belief developed and the idea of direct, personal interaction with God became a vivid reality for many, particularly in the heroic phase of American history.

“We cannot alter scriptures”

Nowhere is this more emphatically stated than by Calvinism. An undated sheet of notes for ministers on “Understanding the Bible” gives the references the preacher should cite on this topic, including: “The Scriptures contain all that we need to know and obey God’s will for us: scriptures enable us to “be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work” (II Timothy 3:16-17); scriptures teach us all we need to know for “life and godliness” (II Peter 1:2-3); God’s system of faith will not be revealed again; it was “once and for all delivered” (Jude 1:3); we cannot alter scriptures; otherwise, God will curse us (Galatians 1:6-9; Revelation 22:18-19); we must speak only as God has spoken (I Peter 4:11); we must not “go beyond” the teaching of Jesus (II John 1:9).

For those who accept these assertions unreservedly, it follows that nothing can be allowed to modulate or qualify, let alone replace, the Bible.  Not only is it God’s word; it is God’s final word.  To discount it in any way risks grievous sin and eternal punishment.

For those in the Christian community who regard this as axiomatic, no matter what the consequences, the meaning of the Bible is clear and immutable.  It cannot be changed. If that means accepting, for example, that the punishment for working on the Sabbath is death (Exodus 35:2), then so be it.  If scripture is seen as privileged over the democratic civil law, the Bible ‘wins’.  To this way of thinking, the Bible must always ‘win’.

Tradition and threat

The Roman Catholic Church appears to agree with all this.  But careful reading of what it actually says on the subject shows how it crafts and deploys a useful get-out clause.

It wants tradition – that which has been authoritatively revealed since the Bible was written – to be given its proper due also.  It does this by claiming that, far from being a rival to scripture, tradition is in effect a companion for it.  Together they function as co-equal components of a wider revelation: “the Church, to whom the transmission and interpretation of Revelation is entrusted, does not derive her certainty about all revealed truths from the holy Scriptures alone. Both Scripture and Tradition must be accepted and honoured with equal sentiments of devotion and reverence.” (Catechism of the Catholic Church Sect I Ch 2 Art 2, II:82).

We can assume that this assertion is not acceptable even to most mainline Protestant denominations.  But it offers a neat way of opening the door to subtle reinterpretations of what scripture appears to be saying:  in other words, the opportunity for change.  This is precisely what scripture fundamentalists fear the most, for who can say where such reinterpretations might lead, undermining the very foundations, as they see it, of Bible-based belief and all that they hold dear?

Let go fear

Many who think like this are likely thereby to be channelling their fear of change: any change.  This does not exclude the Pope.  There are many others who, unlike him and for various reasons have never been empowered to endure, handle, accept and even instigate change.  They have fewer defences than we would do against what they think of as change as threat.  For them, lacking knowledge of the context in which the scriptures were first written, and the Biblical revelations first proclaimed, any change in the religious arena must seem to be particularly menacing.

This invites our compassion.  Without being condescending, it is up to the rest of us to make sure that any response we might use to handle change does not damage those who have fewer defences against this shock of the new. A former Master of the Dominican Order makes the obvious corollary well: “Fear never serves the pursuit of truth. It is the task of our guardians of orthodoxy to ensure that panic never suppresses reflection, to have the courage to stop premature condemnation, to ensure that we take the time that we need.” (Timothy Radcliffe OP  What is the point of being a Christian?  London, 2009  p189).

Context

All this has been covered by Karen Armstrong, Richard Holloway and Marcus Borg – to name but three – in their many books on this sort of perspective.  They identify the deeper problem:  that the changes that inflect and redirect our lives are inescapable.  Once they have appeared and taken hold, there is no going back.  The experiences they bring cannot be unlearned.

Once you see that a woman can be prime minister, for instance, you cannot validly hold that such a thing is categorically impossible.  You can argue against women priests, but the very fact that such an issue is even imaginable, let alone discussed, shows that some sort of change in your belief system, welcome or not, has already taken place.  The issue need never arise again.

Benedict XVI

In a critical analysis of the attacks on post-modern relativism frequently heard from Pope Benedict XVI, Paul Collins concedes that great texts like the Bible or Shakespeare “transcend their context and shine across the ages. The post-modernist attempt to reduce those texts entirely to their time, period and the individual subjectivity of their author is nonsense,” but goes on, “but so is the failure to deny the past its own context….What is needed is some healthy historical sense, some feeling for context and process.  Nothing exists outside of historical context: all dogmas, teachings and texts belong somewhere in the process and evolution of human experience and knowledge.” (Paul Collins  God’s new man: the election of Benedict XVI and the legacy of John Paul II  London, 2005  p165)

Here, surely, is where both the Pope and the inerrancy tendency are wrong.  Both sides, as we might say, have form.  Both are determined to get back to a purer form of their religion, shorn of all accretions.  This attitude, seeing contextual change as an intruder, amounts to collective denial of the obvious.  Scripture and tradition cannot be proselytized without some acknowledgement of history and context.  Both of these factors are riddled with the effects of change.

This sometimes seems more obviously recognised by the sort of people one meets in ordinary life than is the case with church leaders such as Benedict XVI and his much-praised predecessor.  That must be because ‘ordinary people’ encounter reality more deeply and more frequently than prelates and church activists.  It must have been a shock to Catholics throughout the democratic world, 75 years after the First Amendment, to hear an earlier Pope, Pius IX, describe the idea “that liberty of conscience and worship is each man’s personal right, which ought to be legally proclaimed and asserted in every rightly constituted society” as an “insanity” and “most injurious babbling.” Quanta Cura (1864), sect 3.

As long as people see it as genuinely moral – an important caveat – no scriptural sanction can withstand the ever-evolving Zeitgeist for long. It is in our own interests to accept this, secure in the knowledge that reinterpretation and restatement of the deposit of faith are not necessarily changing it as such.

A way forward

The clearest example of this disparity of perspective between the leader and the led is that of contraception.  Pope Paul VI was gifted a compassionate yet realistic road map out of the church’s increasingly untenable stance on the matter, but chose – or was pressured by the curia – not to use it.  His 1968 encyclical on the matter, Humanae Vitae, must be one of the most futile declarations in history.  Rightly or wrongly, history is on the side of birth control.  It is also on the side of greater inclusivity, better treatment of the marginalised and poverty-stricken amongst us and more boldness in speaking truth to power.

So it turns out that all this matters.  People who use biblical texts to insist upon the unbelievable, or shore up assertions which the rest of us find offensive, do no favours to scripture.  In fact, they damage its reputation.  The retrospection of the current pope and the behaviour of so-called Christians on the wilder shores of the reformed faith, both ostensibly Bible-based, must make many people reckon that if this is Christianity they want no part of it.

Though explicable, that position is not a very valid one.  In the words of my old teacher, “the disinclination to think about Christianity, the ignorance about it and the feeling that it is irrelevant are not very different from the closed minds of the narrower of biblical fundamentalists.” J S Bezzant  In: Objections to Christian belief; ed A Vidler et al   London, 1963 p81).

Change is usually disruptive.  That, after all, is the point of it.  But in religion it has at least three great virtues.

First, it recalibrates the church vis-a-vis the community.  It prevents the one drifting away too much from the other.  If that means explaining scripture in ways that are readily understood in, if not always accepted by, society as it is now, then it may be counted as a benefit to the faith.  Whatever we may think of the Alpha Course, it has obviously had this good effect.

Second, change teaches us.  What we thought we knew may be disclosed as no longer valid.  Surely it is better to be grounded in this more authentic and accessible faith than not to be so.  We function as Christians better through having learned what is true in what we read, and what is no longer valid, even if the Bible appears to insist on it (the acceptability of slavery, for example).

Third, change opens up opportunities for us to develop and achieve.  We may give scripture and tradition our loyalty while understanding that it is no blasphemy for us to recognise that when we ‘change it’ we are amending our current version of it.  We can never hope to have a complete and unassailable idea of what the Bible and the deposit of faith actually mean.  We can, however, go out into the world and show forth the glory that is their core message, knowing that when change comes to us, as come it must, we are so securely rooted in our common humanity that we have no fear of being destabilised by anything written in the distant, different past.

Blaise Pascal

Except for the usual famous quotations, none of the writings of the great French philosopher, mathematician and born-again Christian apologist Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) has ever come to my notice until now.  On a whim, I’ve bought a copy of his Pensées and have been dipping into it at random, coming up with gems like this (French first, then my attempt at a very free translation into English):

Il n’y a que trois sortes de personnes: les uns qui servent Dieu l’ayant trouvé, les autres qui s’emploient à le chercher
ne l’ayant trouvé, les autres qui vivent sans le chercher ni l’avoir trouvé.  Les premiers sont raisonnables et heureux, les derniers sont fous et malheureux.  Ceux du milieu sont malheureux et raisonnables. Pensées 12:160

There are only three sorts of people:  those who having found God serve Him; others who set out to look for Him but have not found Him; and the rest who live their lives not having looked for Him, let alone found Him.  The people in the first group are sane and happy, and those in the last group are crazy and unhappy.  Those in the middle are unhappy and sane.

No doubt the great man had in mind the question the Bible asks, “Canst thou by searching find out God?”  Job 11:7

What is Easter?

Others have their own perspectives.  For the churchgoer, it’s the priests’ continual assertions that Easter is more important for the Christian than Christmas is.  The Resurrection outweighs the Incarnation.  I have written about this unconvincing, counter-intuitive reasoning before.  For the agnostic, the idea of resurrection from the dead fits neatly into the church’s version of that well-known Alice in Wonderland category, believing six impossible things before breakfast.  For the Sea of Faith people, there is no life after death in the conventional form.  For the atheist, the whole idea is not only ridiculous but carries with it additional freight of meaning that demonstrates how weird Christianity really is.  For the average citizen, the question is: why are all the big supermarkets closed today?  What is Easter?

The Bible is not always helpful on any of this.  St Matthew’s attempt to show physical resurrection happening after Jesus’ reappearance is scary, unconvincing and risible: “And, behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom; and the earth did quake, and the rocks rent; And the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose, and came out of the graves after his resurrection, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many.”(Matt 27:52-53).  This sounds like special pleading.  Various other Gospel details, such as the strange young man in the opened empty tomb (Mark 16:5), and culminating in the doubts of St Thomas, smack of desperation in the cause of asserting that this tale is all true. True, it might be, but in interesting ways.

The truth

There seem to two ways of looking at this.  One is the question: what actually happened?  What are we to believe?  The basic problem here as always is western Christianity’s post-enlightenment longing for hyperrealism and familiarity with science.  There has to be evidence.  Things have to be ‘real.’  The story of Christ’s resurrection purports to report something that actually happened.  So what are the facts?  Can we believe them?

The second potential way into the mystery is through perceiving Christianity’s preoccupation with death.  The church is determined to state how important the resurrection was in what is does about death.  Following St Paul, we are to marvel that death no longer has a hold on us: “For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead.” 1 Corinthians 15:21  Adam’s original sin incurred death for him and all his descendants: “Brought death into the world, with all our woe,and loss of Eden.” (Paradise Lost, Book 1:1).  Jesus’ death and resurrection means that shackle has been broken.  Now we will live forever.  I’m not sure that many in the so-called developed world ‘get this’ any more, mostly because the very idea of life after death is now problematic for us.

At first sight each of the two approaches is meant to support the other.  The gospel facts, needlessly embroidered to the extent that they are counter-productive, are chosen to validate the very idea of becoming undead; the physical evidence is there, so Jesus has done it; so shall we all, with God’s grace.  The eschatology demands that we pay attention to the detail, because it is so significant, let alone objectively true.  If Christ is risen we have got a whole new deal.  The story must be real because it would be intolerable if it were not.

Christ is risen

This is a quandary, but the answer to it is there all the time, if we have the strength and imagination to see it.  The disciples eventually found it, once the penny had dropped for them.  Christ had indeed risen from the dead – in them, and afterwards, so many more of us – in the form of confirmation that we no longer have to accept that evil, violence and death have ‘won’.

We can believe this, and its tremendous message, without having to resort to magic and credulity, and believing in tearing open the fabric of the natural order, as the Archbishop of Canterbury seems to be arguing in his Easter sermon this year.  It is much more profound and real than that.

I cannot do better than wind up here and quote from one of a host of preachers down the ages.  In the words of my old teacher Geoffrey Lampe, in 1965, in The Resurrection: a dialogue, “for Paul and all those others before him Jesus became a living reality, and, for ever after, that was the one thing that really mattered for them.  That is the Easter story. Forget, if you will, the picture, beloved of the old artists, of a body, holding a flag of triumph, stepping out of a grave. That suggests a corpse come back to life on this physical plane. If that were what the idea of Christ’s resurrection means, then it were better forgotten. Such a Christ is dead. He remains buried. The real Christ is not a revived corpse. He lives in the fullness of God’s life. He is the life, the truth, the way, for us. He lives for us and in us.”

Happy Easter

Hanslope Church

Every year at about this time, Easter, the media strike up the band with some old favourites:  the church is dying, it’s irrelevant to people’s lives and concerns, churches are empty, clergy mouth platitudes or are too wet.  It’s a seductive old tune.  But is it true?

Casting my mind back 20 – 30 years, I recall a time when the following things were true for the church in England: cold and empty churches; the services still held in 1662 language, with silly Victorian hymns; Anglican participants in an ecumenical gathering being told that they could not share in the Catholic’s recitation of the Lord’s Prayer; all priests were male and the idea of there ever being a non-white  bishop, let alone archbishop, preposterous; the Dean of Winchester – one of the last to be seen dressed in gaiters – saying that there was a Christian case for nuclear weapons; narrow-minded interpretations of salvation and threats of damnation; an air of hopelessness and decay.

Now we have increasing numbers: standing room only in Catholic churches in West London as Polish residents flock to mass; a galaxy of Afro-Caribbean churches seemingly in every town; the present Archbishop of York from Uganda; the next Archbishop of Canterbury being chosen by the church, not the government; a canon of St Pauls Cathedral warning the police not to break up the protestors camping on its steps; the other archbishop cutting up his dog-collar on TV;  church schools oversubscribed; services in contemporary language; women priests, though not yet bishops; Thought for the Day regularly explaining Hinduism; the spread of purpose-built mosques; the television series Rev; the crucifixion re-enacted in cities in the UK; to my certain knowledge, at least one gay bishop in England and a gay Dean (what of it?); the New Atheism failing to find traction in our community so far.

Tonight we go and share the Easter Mass with our fellow congregants in a country church (pictured), and see that there are more of them than 20 years ago, and of all ages.  Our mass will be participatory, and moving.

No, I don’t think the church is fading.  It’s actually being reborn.  That’s a good feeling to have at Easter, when we celebrate renewal and resurrection into new life.  God bless us all.

Happy Easter

Bergen-Belsen, 1945

Now, at the beginning of Holy Week, it is difficult to imagine science fiction shedding any light on what Christians believe is about to happen.  The Passion and the Crucifixion are in a different category, full of various layers of meaning, none of which seems to have any direct relevance to what science writers might depict.  But I remember reading a short story, years ago, that makes such a connection, and powerfully, and opens the door to an uncomfortable truth, about who is crucified and by whom.

Wikipedia has traced the story: “in Garry Kilworth‘s story Let’s go to Golgotha (1975 – published in a collection of the same name), tourists from the future can book on a time-traveling “Crucifixion Tour”. Before setting out, they are strictly warned that they must not do anything to disrupt history. Specifically, when the crowd is asked whether Jesus or Barabbas should be spared, they must all join the call “Give us Barabbas!”. (A priest absolves them from any guilt for so doing). However, when the moment comes, the protagonist suddenly realizes that the crowd condemning Jesus to the cross is composed entirely of tourists from the future, and that no actual Jewish Jerusalemites of 33 A.D. are present at all…”

Were you there?

I haven’t read the story for years, but I have never forgotten it.  It makes the point that all who ‘watch’ the Crucifixion – by listening to the Passion narrative, for example – and meditate on the figure of Jesus on the cross (“When I behold the wondrous cross…”, “O sacred head sore wounded…”, “Were you there when they crucified my Lord…”) are to some degree involved in the unfolding tragedy, whether or not we want to be.  And of course we don’t: “We hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised and we esteemed him not” (Isaiah 53:3).  We wish it were otherwise, but we know that there is nothing we can do to alter the verdict of the Jerusalem mob, transmitted through Pontius Pilate.

We can deny that we are part of that mob, and we are certainly not time-travelling, history-altering tourists.  We are present at the Crucifixion in spirit, and in spirit we mourn that it has to happen; that is all.  But of course it isn’t.  George MacLeod of the Iona Community signalled why not when he wrote that if Jesus were to be crucified in our day and age, it would be on a municipal rubbish dump and the sign nailed to the cross would be in English, in Zulu and in Afrikaans.

The fact is that we can spurn the morally ambiguous opportunity to be present at the original Crucifixion as much as we like, but we are undeniably there nevertheless.  We are there as doleful witnesses to our willingness to accept that the Crucifixion happens every day.  The Passion narrative itself is a treasury of all those things that feature in our chronic unwillingness to make this a better world – interrogation, misunderstandings, spite, betrayal, mob violence, torture, unthinking evil.  The killing of God is the seal on all this sin.

Lord, when did we…?

It is there in the crimes against humanity we read about with a shudder but do nothing to prevent; in the uncaring tolerance we extend to famine and poverty and disease around the world; in our failure to do the right thing in our own society, for the community’s good; in the death of a child killed by her or his family.  “Through negligence, through weakness, through our own deliberate fault…”, we confess.

In these ways we are involved; to the extent that we so often miss the chance to do the right thing, through moral laziness, we stand at the foot of the cross metaphorically, unwillingly looking up at him with dread.  Summoned to be there, we become aware that we have no morally authentic excuse to be absent.  Heavy with the knowledge that we could be, in however slight a way, complicit in what is going on at this rubbish dump now, we come to acknowledge that there is in that mob at Golgotha, a place set aside for each one of us.

We don’t have to book a once in a lifetime time-travel trip; we’re there already, because in some way or other we crucify God every day.  We do so because we feel able to.  The Crucifixion is the divine enactment of our recognition that this is so, the drama that we cannot bear to watch because we made it happen, and we know that it is true.

He is here

For the last word in this, I repeat what I blogged in September 2010.  Elie Wiesel spells out the principal implication for us in all its horror.  In Buna concentration camp near Auschwitz, suspected saboteurs, amongst them a boy, are hanged and the prisoners are compelled to witness this:

“Then came the march past the victims. The two men were no longer alive. Their tongues were hanging out, swollen and bluish. But the third rope was still moving: the child, too light, was still breathing… And so he remained for more than half an hour, lingering between life and death, writhing before our eyes.

And we were forced to look at him at close range.  He was still alive when I passed him. His tongue was still red, his eyes not yet extinguished.  Behind me, I heard the same man asking:”For God’s sake, where is God?”

And from within me, I heard a voice answer: “Where is He?  This is where – hanging here from this gallows…”

That night, the soup tasted of corpses.”  Night ch4, p62

Beggars in Samarkand, 1905 (via Wikipedia)

“Samarcan is a great and noble city towards the north-west, inhabited by both Christians and Saracens, who are subject to the Great Kaan’s nephew, Caidou by name; he is, however, at bitter enmity with the Kaan.  I will tell you of a great marvel that happened at this city.

It is not a great while ago that Sigatay, own brother to the Great Kaan, who was Lord of this country and of many an one besides, became a Christian.  The Christians rejoiced greatly at this, and they built a great church in the city, in honour of John the Baptist; and by his name the church was called. And they took a very fine stone which belonged to the Saracens, and placed it as the pedestal of a column in the middle of the church, supporting the roof.

It came to pass, however, that Sigatay died. Now the Saracens were full of rancour about that stone that had been theirs, and which had been set up in the church of the Christians; and when they saw that the Prince was dead, they said one to another that now was the time to get back their stone, by fair means or by foul. And that they might well do, for they were ten times as many as the Christians. So they gat together and went to the church and said that the stone they must and would have.

The Christians acknowledged that it was theirs indeed, but offered to pay a large sum of money and so be quit. Howbeit, the others replied that they never would give up the stone for anything in the world. And words ran so high that the Prince heard thereof, and ordered the Christians either to arrange to satisfy the Saracens, if it might be, with money, or to give up the stone. And he allowed them three days to do either the one thing or the other.

What shall I tell you? Well, the Saracens would on no account agree to leave the stone where it was, and this out of pure despite to the Christians, for they knew well enough that if the stone were stirred the church would come down by the run. So the Christians were in great trouble and wist not what to do. But they did do the best thing possible; they besought Jesus Christ that he would consider their case, so that the holy church should not come to destruction, nor the name of its Patron Saint, John the Baptist, be tarnished by its ruin.

And so when the day fixed by the Prince came round, they went to the church betimes in the morning, and lo, they found the stone removed from under the column; the foot of the column was without support, and yet it bore the load as stoutly as before! Between the foot of the column and the ground there was a space of three palms. So the Saracens had away their stone, and mighty little joy withal. It was a glorious miracle, nay, it is so, for the column still so standeth, and will stand as long as God pleaseth.

Now let us quit this and continue our journey.”

Marco Polo  Travels; trans and ed H Yule (1903) and H Cordier (1920).  Vol 1: ch 34

With acknowledgement to Project Gutenberg.

Sura 42 is, for this Christian at least, difficult to understand until you get the the very last phrase in the final verse.  In the Arberry interpretation, said to be the best in English,  this phrase comes as a blessing:

“Surely, unto God all things come home” (Sura 42:50).

To Christian ears, this sounds similar to Jesus’ promise in the Gospels, which the Prophet (PBUH) must surely have known:

“Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.” (Matthew 25:34)

in turn, reminiscent of the 23rd Psalm: “and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”  So the concept is familiar to each of the three Peoples of the Book.

Others share it, sometimes from a different perspective, as in this canto from Gitanjali by Rabindranath Tagore:

“Death, thy servant, is at my door. He has crossed the unknown sea and brought thy call to my home.

The night is dark and my heart is fearful—yet I will take up the lamp, open my gates and bow to him my welcome. It is thy messenger who stands at my door.

I will worship him placing at his feet the treasure of my heart.

He will go back with his errand done, leaving a dark shadow on my morning; and in my desolate home only my forlorn self will remain as my last offering to thee.”