Our Biblical Blog /'Examined Life'
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Our Biblical Blog /'Examined Life'
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5 EASTER YEAR A – “DO NOT LET YOUR HEART BE TROUBLED”
‘Do not your heart be troubled. Believe in God, in addition believe in me.’ 1 What Jesus opens for us with his return to the Father. ‘What he prepares for the heart.’ · This teaching was said while Jesus and the eleven reclined at table at the upper room. When the disciples were together. - They are troubled: Jesus spoke of leaving his disciples. He asked them to love each other when he would be gone. He also asked them to love one another as he loved them while he was with them. It was all very depressing for these disciples. They did not understand the inwardness of it all. - This situation Jesus meets with the comforting explanation of his departure. · ‘Let not your heart be troubled.’ You should not be stirred up and shaken at the thought of my going away from you. - This is very interesting that the Saviour orders it: ‘Stop letting your heart be troubled!’ because you have no reason to be troubled! - (We have no reason to fear of anything, there is no impossible decision to face for us…) - The departure of Jesus rightly understood is no cause for distress but the very contrary… · Beside this negative command Jesus places a double positive command. ‘Believe in God, in addition believe in me.’ - This is not said meaning a general faith in God < It is said with reference to trust in God and in Jesus as regards the departure of Jesus. · God sent Jesus on his mission and desires his return now that his mission is being completed. Jesus came on this mission, is now completing it, and thus returns to God. [Also, we should imagine, metaphorically speaking, the love between Jesus and his Father. Via this love, the Father ‘is missing him’!] · And this mission, planned and carried out by God and by Jesus, opens heaven for the disciples and for all who believe as they do. In all this, the disciples must keep on trusting God and Jesus. · We have to learn, with the disciples, to trust in Jesus as we believe in God. He is God through his divine nature! He is our God! · This ‘double believe’ do not refer to blind but to intelligent belief. It is a great task which Jesus leaves us with. 1. We are baptised, it is a starting point. 2. We must learn and have to learn about our faith. 3. And just as he prepares heavenly mansions for us in Heaven, we have to understand our faith. · ‘In the Father’s house there are many mansions’, permanent abiding places. - ‘My Father’s house’ lends to the word ‘father’ and ‘our Father, who art in heaven’ a richer meaning. He has a house (oikia), a home, to which ‘household of God’ all his children shall be transferred. - With only a stroke or two Jesus draws a picture which fills us pilgrims, who are still far from home, with both heavenly homesickness and the sure hope of soon reaching our home. 2 Something practical ‘for our heart’ · Today’s gospel also offers a practical teaching. Namely, how God ‘remains with our heart’… How he gives us support to persevere in goodness, choose what is good and say no to evil. - Jesus’ return to the Father is a powerful resource. Whenever our ‘animal soul’ wants to prevail over our ‘godly soul’, God is standing next to our heart and gives us support. Actually, Jesus is whispering to our ‘godly soul’ what he has said in today’s Gospel. That ‘believe in the Father’ and ‘believe in me.’ - The source of our goodness is God, the Father’s house, our heavenly mansions. - In the moments of our request and divine support, our ‘godly soul’ is flowing into the heart. Our decision to draw on God’s goodness generates an intense love in our heart and we will be able to say no to Evil, evil inclinations, and evil deeds. ‘A story about 9 seconds’ The disciple of the rabbi could not get rid of the negative thoughts popping into his mind. He arrives at a winter night. It is cold, he knocks on the rabbi’s door, he sees the movement inside, he hears noises. But nobody answers the door. ‘Please, let me in, it is cold out here… I am disciple after a long journey!’ Nothing happens. Nothing. He is banging, kicking, clapping. Nothing. Next day when the guy shovels the snow away from the walkway and opens the door, asks the visitor. ‘What are you doing here?’ ‘Are you kidding? I was banging your door.’ ‘What brings you here? What is the urgent matter, what happened?’ ‘I am struggling, I have these alien thoughts enter my mind… I cannot get rid of them, so I decided to come and see you.’ ‘I already answered you!’ ‘When? We have not even talked yet?’ ‘No, I gave you my answer. You were ganging on my door all night, were not you? Did I let you in? No. You know why I did not let you in? Because I wanted to teach you a lesson. This is my house, and I will let in whom I please, but I will not let in whom I don’t please.’ ‘This is what you say to the alien thought. This is my house. This is my soul. I will permit those who want to enter If I want them to enter! If I don’t want a thought to enter I will simply not open the door’. We have 2-9 seconds the most to say no! And all in the power of the support which Jesus promised to his disciples.
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‘At the end of every seven years, in the solemnity of the year of release, in the feast of tabernacles, when all Israel is come to appear before the Lord thy God in he place which he shall choose, thou shall read this law before all Israel in their hearing. Gather the people together, men, and women, and children, and thy stranger that is within thy gates, that they may hear, and they may learn, and fear the Lord your God, and observe to do all the words of this law.’
‘At the end of every seven years.’ Religion knows something which no one else do. There is a need to bring healing to ‘history’ itself. During a seven year-period a lot of wounds, sin, and failure can accumulate. If unrevised, the direction of history can easily turn - by the gravity of sin - to fatal directions. Leonard Bernstein’s First Symphony ‘Jeremiah’, powerfully speaks of this heavy burden carried by history. Actually, this burden is carried by our hearts. The second movement of the symphony, ‘Profanation’ powerfully expresses, in the language of music, the wounding weight of this unremoved burden. ‘At the end of every seven years thou shall read this law before all Israel in their hearing.’ Let us respect this rhythm of healing. As a community, as a culture, let us relearn this divine wisdom and medicine, which is so vital. The last movement of ‘Jeremiah’, Lamentation speaks with utmost beauty about this desire in us to fine tune ourselves to the healing rhythm offered by God; ‘at the end of every seven years’. The ending of the movement is like a calm see, history breathing calmly, welcoming the long-awaited arrival of the healing Law. Musical illustration: Leonard Bernstein, Symphony No. 1. 'Jeremiah', lamentation at 14 mins. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zueKARho6s8 It is striking how the two themes, the ‘promised Land’ and Israel’s obligation to ‘pray’, are always mentioned together. The land, where Israel lives, is described in graphic details. In view of this gift, as a reminder, it is not surprising that Israel must remember their liberation from Egypt.
Prayer and our physical world, it is not accidental, are closely related. The land, just as the Covenant, is cultivated also by prayer. It is powerfully shown in what happens when prayer ceases. ‘Wherefore hath the Lord done thus unto this land? What meaneth the heat of great anger? Then men shall say, Because they forsaken the covenant of the Lord God of their fathers, which he made with them when he brought them forth out of the land of Egypt: for they went and served other gods, and worshipped them, gods whom they knew not, and whom he had not given unto them: and the anger of the Lord was kindled against his land.’ There is an important reading of the ‘Land’ – ‘prayer’ relationship. The land was given to Israel so that they should turn bring it into the everlasting Presence of God. The land must be marked and nourished by his Glory (‘light’). Thus, prayer as ‘light’ is the purpose of each Jew. As the habitants of the Land, they have the vocation to transform their actual situations and environment into ‘light’. As Christians, we are given the same task. The ‘Land’, our life situations, needs to be transformed… The potential good, inherent in the Land, must be discerned and separated from evil, bad choices, and negative thoughts. The ‘cultivated’ or transformed Land is indeed returned to God in our thanksgiving. The ‘Kingdom of God’ is this transformed land; transformed through our prayers and Creedal commitment. 'And it shall be, when thou art come in unto the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee for an inheritance and possest it, and dwellest therein: that thou shalt take of the first of all the fruit of the earth, which shalt bring of thy land that the Lord thy God giveth thee, ant shalt put it in a basket, and shalt go unto the place which the Lord thy God shall choose to place his name there’ ‘And now, behold, I have brought the first fruits of the land, when thou, O Lord, hast given me.’
The above ‘exchange’ between God and man is far more significant than the superficial eye would think. This basic rhythm of request for thanksgiving and responding to it is, actually, the source of ‘social healing’. Establishing this relationship with the Sustainer of Life, and cultivating it, generates a healing dynamic in society. This act of worship gives provides the person with a sense of relationships, mutual dependence, and responsibility. The human soul yearns for a self-image; the self-image like this! Through the ability to give thanks for life, we know and have the actual experience that we are not in a permanent flux and a random free-fall in history. Without this knowledge individuals and their culture, quite simply, goes mad. With this dialogue with Life our love has a habitat. And when love feels at home it becomes almost as powerful as his Creator; creative, compassionate, and renewed. (That is why it was so important for the early church to sort out the freer, non-Jewish form of worship for the newly converted Gentiles. A new Europe sprang from this ‘house of loving observance’. ‘And so were the churches established in the faith, and increased in number daily’) Musical engagement. You might like to listen to Telemann, Concerto in F Major. The order, clarity and harmony of the four movements give an illustration of the regenerative and healing power of worship. The human soul, at its core, should be resonated by this joy of security and grounded identity in God's Life. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IU3BI8DZIfI www.youtube.com/watch?v=IU3BI8DZIfI Seeing how tribal and intolerant ‘faith-identities’ are, it is literally a miracle, that the ‘Jewish Church of Jerusalem’ generously opened up its borders to the Gentiles. This is the genius of the Holy Spirit. Owing to this ‘heart of Catholicism’ the Christian church could become Catholic, that is, universal. What we can marvel and celebrate in this decisive moment is not only the ‘geographic universality’ of the church. This is the very moment, recorded in the Bible, when we can gain insight into the ‘Catholic power’ of the Holy Spirit. That is, that in this moment of opening up to the Gentiles, we also celebrate how the Church is ‘Catholic’ throughout all centuries. We celebrate in these passages that the same faith is shared everywhere at present, in past, and the future centuries.
‘For it seemed good to the Holy Ghost, and to us, to lay upon you no greater burden than these necessary things; that ye abstain from meats offered to idols, and from blood, and from things strangled, and from fornication: from which if ye keep yourselves, ye shall do well… So when they were dismissed, they came to Antioch: and whey they had gathered the multitude together, they delivered the epistle: which when they had read, they rejoiced for the consolation.’ The whole chapter is dedicated to the detailed description of celebrating the Jewish Passover – their liberation from Egypt. It is a celebration of God’s work, as he was the sole agent of this deliverance. ‘But at the place which the Lord thy God shall choose to place his name in, there thou shalt sacrifice the Passover at even, at the going down of the sun, ant the season that thou camest fourth out of Egypt.’
This remembrance (long, seven day feasts) heals. It re-centres and renews the person. However, it is not only the individual who needs this renewal. This healing remembrance is equally important for the collective psyche. Without this re-focusing on God as the giver of life, collective consciousness starts malfunctioning. Making our places of worship visible is a vital service to the community. Perhaps, as a modest version of the above ‘statutes of observing the Sabbath’ is to remind society and our neighbours: ‘this is the church’, ‘your liberation happens in it’. Without this remembering and encounter, as a community, a similar blindness falls upon us which is recorded in the Acts. ‘Then Paul said…O full of all subtlety and all mischief, thou child of the devil, thou enemy of all righteousness, wilt thou not cease to pervert the right ways of the Lord? And now, behold, the hand of the Lord is upon thee, and thou shalt be blind, not seeing the sun for a season. And immediately there fell on him a mist and a darkness; and he went about seeking some to lead him by the hand.’ Again, two passages, a pair from Cranmer’s lectionary, which are not ‘user-friendly’, and we cannot pass by unchallenged. The order that ‘ye shall utterly destroy all the places, wherein the nations which ye shall possess served their gods’ sounds harsh. Idol worship must be eliminated because of the danger it poses to Israel’s freshly revealed faith. One can think about it a lot what it requires preserving the orthodoxy of faith. Perhaps, the underlying moral is that it is a harmful naivety to think that faith should not be defended. That is, there is no contrast and collusion between our Creed and the ‘pluralisms’ of culture. The decline in numbers of religious attendance in the CoE (and elsewhere) requires an honest facing of whether we have not succumbed to the spirit (and gods) of the age. ‘Ye shall hew down the graven images of their gods, and destroy the names of them out of that place’. I would like to read these Old Testament lines as an imperative to commit ourselves to the renewal of our faith. I am sure that that the all-time dilemma for Christians, to engage with culture or resist assimilation, will have to be answered soon with utmost honesty.
Yet, the emphasis in our reading is on the transformation that takes place after silencing the alien gods in us. In the wake of this renewed commitment to the Covenant with God stems growth, astounding growth. And this is the encouragement what our communities need in this age of 'post-truth' and 'alternative facts' (a good synonym for post-Christianity!). ‘But when ye go over Jordan, and dwell in the land which the Lord your God giveth you to inherit…so that ye dwell in safety; there shall ye bring all that I command you; your burnt offerings, and your sacrifices, your tithes, and all your choice vows which ye vow unto the Lord: and ye shall rejoice before the Lord your God, ye, and your sons, and your daughters…’ (Let us pause for a moment, when our CoE, and its bishops down to our deaneries, are under the pressure of producing numeric growth. The challenging passage, destroying the altars of alien worship, perhaps, should be read as the need to ground the desired growth in an in-depth spirituality. This is my impression that a quiet and toiling preparation, re-grounding in the Creeds, is needed first, as a precondition of numerical growth. If this ground-work takes place in our parishes, years of work invested into spiritual and creedal renewal – after this foundation is there, comes the agenda of mission, which so much dominates present church policy. /Sometimes it feels like a demanding super-ego./) * Our readings from Acts do both, encourage and challenge us further. It exposes to us the puzzling dynamic of grace. A small minority can catalyse and transform a whole culture! A handful of committed Christians (disciples) could turn inside out a decadent culture. Barnabas is rejoicing in this theoisis or deification. ‘And some of them were men of Cyprus and Cyrene, which, when they were come to Antioch, spake unto the Grecians, preaching the Lord Jesus. And the hand of the Lord was with them: and a great number believed, and turned unto the Lord.’ And Barnabas, sent forth from Jerusalem, ‘had seen the grace of God, was glad, and exhorted them all, that with purpose of heart they would cleave onto the Lord. For he was a good man, and full of the Holy Ghost and of faith: and much people was added unto the Lord….And the disciples were called Christians first in Antioch.’ The challenging dilemma is this. On the one hand, it is a fantastic news that an inspired minority can revert ‘decline’. On the other hand, we should also face our situation with honesty. How does a culture’s blindness and decadence, its sins, affect our individual faith? Is not there a harmful blocking and weakening of individuals’ ability to believe – their openness to life and Meaning? What happens if the ‘moral background radiation’ of a culture does create (negative) conditions for faith? Is not it the situation that our opening passage, as a starting point for renewal, subscribes? It is a time, indeed, for prayer and Biblical discernment. While more and more warships gather around North Korea, while more and more nuclear rocket tests are carried out in the country - we let us contemplate the real counter-force of ultimate divisions. We must be transformed by Divine Light and not by the ‘daily good news’ of our media. Otherwise, we will end up as reincarnations of clinical mistrust. The stake is being marked by grace or by the constantly haunting image of the ‘enemy’.
‘And as Peter talked with him [Cornelius], he went in, and found many that were come together.’ The Jewish Peter enters a ‘forbidden’ house. The Gentiles were separated from the Jewry by Mosaic laws. Here we can contemplate the nature of grace. God’s Presence is always about ‘going in’. ‘You know that it is unlawful thing for a man that is a Jew to keep company, or come unto one of another nation; but God hath shewed me that I should not call any man common or unclean.’ God goes in. God makes us go in. God is about connecting borders. And a joint conversation between Jews and pagans begins. The nature of the Holy Spirit (‘Grace’) is to create a new community. ‘While Peter yet spake these words, the Holy Spirit fell on all them which heard the word. And they of the circumcision which believed were astonished, as many as came with Peter, because that on the Gentiles also was poured out the gift of the Holy Ghost.’ Soon, in the early church, these two groups shall be eating together as one community. Sharing the same sacrificial meal, the Eucharist, which is unprecedented in the logic of their ‘old’ respective traditions. The Baptism of pagans is the most significant event in the life of the nascent Church. In this deed of Peter we can indeed contemplate the connecting nature of grace. In it, we can recognise – and practice - the unity of the human family. Do not let this healing vision be suspended between the weaponry of the ‘two camps’. The question is, which energy explodes first, Divine or human? Activity - Music to look up on youtube: Joseph Haydn, Piano Trio Hob.xv:f1 in F minor ‘‘…They have quickly turned aside out the way which I commanded them; they have made them a molten image.’ The words of the Scripture want to instruct us and heal us. There is never a mere reproach when it addresses us. These lines teach us that the experience of the Sacred provokes in us ‘an opposite act’. When we achieve something good, we humans tend to undermine it. There is something in us which wants to counteract. ‘The molten image’, actually, is when our best qualities are turned inside out, ‘disfigured’. With the ‘two tables of the covenant in our hands’, like Moses, we can see clearly the troubling distance between us and God.
Indeed, there is still something beautiful in our ‘golden torso’. But for the careful eyes, there is more lacking from this beauty than what has actually remained of it. We can visualise how people were fascinated by ‘the golden calf’. But we can also see something grotesque, something life-less in this shiny shape. Let us contemplate this biblical image as the ‘golden reverse’ of our true godly self… as the expression of when the vital element of ‘living grace’ is missing from us: thanksgiving. In other words: openness to God. Today’s readings are a great reminder of how important it is to have a vision of our fulfilled life. This vision, itself is a form of prayer. From this desire for personal fulfillment unfolds the vision of God. ‘For the Lord thy God bringeth thee into a good land, a land of brooks of water, of fountains and depths that spring out of valleys and hills; a land of wheat, and barley, and vines, and fig trees, and pomegranates.’ Thus, the desire, ‘I want to become a better person’ contains the yearning ‘I want to become a better person in God.’ ‘I want to see my God who is the source of my life.’
Christians know that the full dynamic is that our observance of faith creates our flourishing. ‘All the commandments which I command thee this day shall ye observe to do, that ye may live, and multiply, and go in and possess the land which the Lord sware unto your fathers.’ Actually, there is even a step further. Life, in the final outcome, stems from humans’ ability to praise God and thank him. ‘When thou hat eaten and art full, then thou shalt bless the Lord thy God for the good land which he hath given thee.’ The importance of envisioning the Sacred is also raised in Acts. The eunuch man of Ethiopia is reading prophet Isaiah when Philip joins him. It is his pre-existing desire to ‘see God’ which leads to their conversation. In it, Philip explains what the words he read mean. ‘He was led as a sheep to the slaughter; and like a lamb dub before his shearer, so opened he not his mouth….I pray thee, of whom speaketh the prophet this?...Then Philip opened his mouth, and began at the same scripture, and preached unto him Jesus.’ It was this already-there-desire that lead to the Ethiopian’s baptism. ‘And the eunuch said, See, here is water: what doth hinder me to be baptized?’ Again, Kristeva’s question haunts us: do still people have a soul? Do still people have a preliminary vision of the Sacred, however rudimentary it is? Losing this desire and ‘icon’, would be a fatal turning point in the course of human history. Losing the joy what the Eunuch felt would be the loss of everything, the loss of our way. ‘…And he went on his way rejoicing.’ |
Soliloquy
These are verbal Icons, expressions of how the world is seen from Saint Augustine's.. Archives
June 2023
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