Emerging from our grave

Lent 5A 26^th March 2023

[John 11:1-48]

What makes green shoots spring from the stump of a felled tree? What gives courage and energy to a person trying to save a drowning child? Is this the same force that empowers one born with serious disabilities to be joyful despite them, and play a full part in society? We give the name life to the mysterious force behind all these phenomena, but not even the most learned philosophers or scientists have been able to define what life is.

Human life is made up of relationships, and in John’s gospel, the story of Lazarus being brought back to life includes the deep friendship and love between Jesus, Lazarus and his two sisters. The gospel writer remarks: “Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus….”, and reminds us that earlier, Mary had unashamedly shown her love for Jesus by intimately anointing his feet at a public dinner.

Mary and Martha had sent a message to Jesus: “The one you love is ill”. When Jesus, after delaying for several days, eventually arrived at their village, Martha and Mary felt close enough to Jesus for each of them to rebuke him: “If you had been here, my brother would not have died!” But Jesus had told his followers – as he had earlier explained about the man born blind – that Lazarus’ sickness would show people God’s glory. The same can be said of any sickness or tragic event that blocks or diminishes the life-force within us. If it sounds either too pious, or unfeelingly callous, to say that our suffering “gives glory to God” this is only because we don’t yet understand that God’s glory is our glory too. Our body-mind unity can break down in many ways. When it inevitably does, we might shrink in fear, or even despair, until we can accept that such apparent failure is an ordinary part of our life. We are greatly helped to accept such temporary failures in the context of our wider gift: that we exist at all, as living beings who can love and be loved.

For the life that we take for granted has much deeper dimensions. The early Christian communities for whom John’s gospel was written knew that Jesus had passed through death some decades before. They would have been much encouraged to hear this story about Jesus power to raise the dead man, even though Lazarus was only resuscitated and would soon have to face death again.

The faith of Christians does not depend on whether or not the story of the raising of Lazarus happened literally as described. They know from the gospels that even in his brief lifetime Jesus was in profound contact with the Transcendent Creator, and they find good news in Jesus words to his friend Martha: “I am the resurrection and the life”.

From such traditional stories, everyone can learn that the goal of our twenty- or thirty-thousand days of life is to discover that we are invited into the same friendship with the now-transcendent Jesus that his three friends enjoy. Jesus announced that this is our future, when he promised that if we centre our life around love: “…my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them”. (John 14:23)

There is little point in trying to define life: we are immersed in it. But it is our privilege to know that it comes from the living God, who also cannot be defined; and that even the grave is no obstacle to our life’s next mysterious stage.

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Vision and divisions

Sunday Lent 4A 19^th March 2023

[John 9:1-41]

[Getty Images]

Light is completely different from darkness. The mythical creation story in Genesis explains this division by imagining God’s first words as “Let there be light”. This hinted at the Big Bang, which physicists say produced all the fuel that later formed a trillion galaxies, including our sun.

Some people never see the sun, being born blind. Many come to accept that condition as their normal, and would not wish to change it, but sighted people can use their eyes to see many more divisions among things: different colours, shapes, faces: countless aspects of beauty. And whether or not we have healthy eyes, there are higher levels of difference that we need to “see” if we are to become mature and find happiness: we need to see the truth about what we are. We need wisdom.

When early Christians learned about Christ and accepted baptism they described this as “enlightenment”. John’s gospel was written for a Christian community about sixty years after Jesus’ death. It included this story of Jesus healing a man born blind, to teach about baptism. Jesus healed the man without being asked, for the Holy One always makes the first loving move. God gives us our existence without consulting us!

The disciples had been asking Jesus why this unfortunate man had been born blind, quoting traditional explanations: that the man’s parents must have sinned, or even – bizarre thought – that the man himself had sinned before his birth. Jesus cut through these errors. He had come to free us from any idea that God punishes us or is vengeful, as the Old Testament often taught and which many Christians, sadly, still accept. Jesus told them: “He was born blind so that that the works of God may be revealed in him”. This does not mean that God uses us as laboratory rats, to demonstrate God’s mercy; that would be worse than the older view. No: because our wonderful material world is limited in every dimension, everything eventually breaks down, and death is our doorway to our next stage of growing. When we are crushed by age or failing health, or see our loved ones suffering and dying, these events can open us to find the bigger dimension, the reality of God’s Infinite Love.

Much of our suffering is caused by divisions arising from people’s greed, anger or fear… including our own. This leads to bullying, violence and war… and grave damage to our whole planet. But we can become free of all these when we discover that Infinite Love lives within us, and desires “to gather up everything under Christ as head”. (Ephesians 1:10) Like many people, I can attest that: “the works of God” have been revealed for me in severe illness, which enabled me to grow stronger in faith and love and lead me to thank God more deeply for the gift of existence.

But this story of the blind man also shows how divisions can spring up between us because some people cannot see, or stubbornly deny, what others have been privileged to discover before them. The pharisees attacked the healed man, saying that he was “steeped in sin from birth”. They made his parents fear being expelled from the synagogue. They denied that Jesus had healed the man, doubting that the man had been blind; or if he had been healed, it should not have been done on the sabbath! Eventually they made Jesus the ultimate outcast and murdered him outside the city. All this encouraged John’s first-century community of Jewish Christians, who were being excommunicated from synagogues for accepting Jesus as Messiah.

Such divisions still happen in our church today. Some persons in authority insist that laws are more important than people’s need to be healed. They even condemn Pope Francis for teaching compassion and living the gospel. These painful “clerical errors” can be seen as necessary stages in our growth as a church community, for true vision and wisdom is to experience Christ as present within ourselves and everyone else, not just to talk about him in “orthodox” ways. Much less is it wisdom to insist on liturgical practices developed by clerics, as if they are more important than obeying Jesus by forgiving and serving people.

If we, like those fictional pharisees, persist in refusing to see the beautiful vision Jesus offers, we will remain in darkness. The New Testament writers warn – with typical exaggeration – that this sin can never be forgiven. (Mark 3:29, John 15:22, 1 John 5:16) Overcoming it, struggling together to see the truth, is surely a slow and difficult process.

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Meeting the Holy

Lent; Sunday 3 – 12^th March 2023

[John 4:5-42]

That Samaritan woman had good reason to be astonished. At midday she had gone out as usual to the well, to fill her water jar. The other village women came out in early morning or at sunset, but she avoided them, because they would not speak to her. It was the divorces – which had not been her choice – and the other men. But that’s another story.

It seemed like an ordinary day, but then this Jewish traveller came up to the well. He was hot and tired, and asked her for a drink. She had never spoken to a Jewish man before, but this one was friendly and started a conversation. He soon showed that he knew about her husbands. She saw that he was some kind of prophet, and when he told her that he was the long-awaited Messiah, she could believe him. She dropped her jar and hurried back back into the village, calling out her news to everyone.

That Samaritan woman had not just learned a theological truth. She had met someone who accepted her, as she was, with all her shame, and showed her that God accepted her, as she was. To know that she was loved, truly, set her gloriously free.

Does our Catholic church today always do what Jesus did for that woman? Sadly, it doesn’t. A priest who died recently in Sydney had asked that Deirdre Browne’s hymn Come as you are be played at his funeral. However the presiding archbishop refused to allow it to be sung. Why not? Some Catholics have expressed doubts about its “orthodoxy”. Could they and the archbishop have been troubled by the lines:

Come as you are, that’s how I love you…

Or perhaps:

Nothing can change the love that I bear you…

Each time you fail to live by my promise
Why do you think I’d love you the less?

Do those who would censor this hymn think that if we have sinned, as we often do, God does not love us until we have confessed to a priest? This would be serious confusion about the God that Jesus has shown us. How could Infinite Love ever cease to love what it has made?

We need to think deeply before we presume to censor what others are saying, whether in ordinary speech or in poetry. Thomas Bowdler’s sister, in the 19^th century, removed from her edition of Shakespeare all the words that could not be spoken aloud in a family setting. Perhaps this could be justified by the desire to “protect children”, but the same argument can hardly be used today to justify publishing bowdlerised editions of Roald Dahl and even Enid Blyton. Don’t children need to hear and learn about real life, so as to prepare to live in it?

In 2020 the USA Catholic bishops published a list of hymns that should not be used in liturgy. Astonishingly, their list included the much-loved God Beyond All Names, The Lord of the Dance, St Francis’ Canticle of the Sun, All Are Welcome, City of God and Table of Plenty. How can bishops presume to dictate to other mature followers of Christ, many of whom have more artistic talent than the bishops, what words we may use to thank and praise The Holy One? Their invasion of others’ natural rights showed similar arrogance to that small group of men who in 2011 imposed on every member of our church a Mass translation in second-rate English.

How many Plenary Councils must pass, before we can question the right claimed by a few to force us into this kind of crippling uniformity, by using the totalitarian structures that have been allowed to develop in our church-institution?

How far this has taken us from Jesus’ promise to that Samaritan woman that we need to worship God “in spirit and in truth”?

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Transfiguration: A deeper glimpse of reality

5th March 2023

Three of the gospels describe this scene of Jesus being “transfigured” on a mountain top. Matthew uses it as one more example to portray Jesus as the new Moses. Matthew had already described how King Herod sought to kill Jesus as a baby, as Pharaoh had sought to kill Moses; and had shown him as coming out of exile in Egypt, as Moses had, leading the Hebrew people. Just as Moses had done on Mt Sinai, Jesus had expounded the New Law in his Sermon on the Mount. Here again, having gone up the mountain with a select group, as Moses had done, Jesus encounters God as a voice from a cloud, and like Moses, Jesus’ face then shone so brightly that it was impossible to look at him.

What are we to make of this? Ancient writers often compared the hero they were writing about, with famous figures, real or mythical. This makes some critics exclaim: “Ahah! So the gospels are all myths, imagined, invented!” But this is no more logical a conclusion than it would be to compare a woman of today who killed her children in post-natal depression, to Medea in Euripedes play, and conclude that this made the modern crime imaginary or mythical too.

If we know even a little about modern physics – which even physicists do not understand – we know that matter is not the solid stuff that our senses tell us it is. Each of the billions of atoms that make up a piece of metal or the human body, is composed mostly of electrons, electrical energy that is constantly changing, surrounding the “core” of each atom – which is also energy in other forms. Compared to the electrons in an atom, this core is as big as “a fly in a cathedral”, to use the classical comparison. So we are mostly – if not totally – waves of electrical energy, behaving in many different ways. For us Westerners, our thinking distorted by the materialism of the “Enlightenment” to believe that inert matter is all that there is, this raises questions about what matter really is, and how it relates to mind or consciousness, especially the Infinite Divine Consciousness that must be the origin of us all.

So if what we call matter is convertible with energy, actually is energy, as is proven in every nuclear explosion, perhaps bodies can be transfigured, and – to look at another gospel scene – multitudes can be fed from a few loaves and fish. Perhaps too, a deeply spiritual person might go up a mountain and be “transfigured”. This gospel story might be literally true, even while the gospel writer likens Jesus to Moses, the ancient hero and liberator of his people.

In trying to “explain” the Transfiguration, it is easy to lose sight of the context in which it takes place. Jesus had just told his followers that their way to liberation and personal fulfilment is by accepting the loss of everything material and their outer self, their ego; to be figuratively crucified. The heavenly voice then calls on the three witnesses to “listen to him”. As they come down from the mountain, they are told not to try to describe this event until Jesus has endured total loss, and passed through death.

The story of the Transfiguration is used twice in the church’s liturgy: on this second Sunday of Lent, and in a special feast on August 6^th. Was it an accident, or something known by the Infinite Consciousness, which must be aware of everything and every event, that the first time a nuclear explosion was used to turn human bodies – in Hiroshima – into dust and light, was on the 6^th of August, 1945?

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