Posts filed under 'Berkeley'
I have to admit that I’m secretly pleased with that picture of Paul getting all discombobulated at being taken for a god—and Hermes indeed because he was the one doing all the talking. Very telling.
All we know of Paul are his words—and we have plenty of them. His own words, the words of people imitating him, or like here words spoken about him, tales told. Makes you wonder if he ever shut up.
So it’s nice to get this glimpse of him from someone else’s angle—in between the words. The frustrated minister—halfway through his spiel when he realises that not a word has gotten through. He may be convinced by his own eloquence but the poor people of Lystra—whom he calls “friends” and “fools” in one headlong breath—well, they hear all the words but what they see is the miracle. And what they see moves them. Gets them moving. And all the words are wasted.
Theology is more words than miracles. We hear a lot more than we see. But what we see usually drowns out the word. We wrestle with texts all year but what we remember are the pictures. Thank God for pictures!
So maybe there’s something for us as another semester bites the dust … what are the pictures lingering with your from the last months. The glimpses between words that have moved you and maybe want to move you still. Bring on the silence!
May 22nd, 2000
“Remain in me or wither.”
Runner number 19933 in today’s Bay To Breakers says that this morning’s gospel gives incontrovertible evidence that Jesus knew all along that he was God. Why? How? Well Jesus says, “I am de vine…” Groan …
Runner 19933 lives in my house and is prone to bad jokes. Luckily for us all, running naked isn’t one of them. But if he were he could have turned to the Chronicle for its essential advice to unclad athletes—exfoliate, exfoliate, exfoliate! This helpful clipping also recommends where to buy your artificial tan, your fake tattoos, and your body paint.
“Abide with me.”
“It just caught my eye,” said the lady who’s just paid $12,500 (or was it 125,000?) to have a teaspoon of her eventual ashes space-rocketed to the moon. All the thrill of space-travel without the preparation. No training required … you just have to have the cash … and be dead. You get to rest forever in utter, exclusive, dusty silence.
“God is greater than our hearts.”
Harris County, Texas, is concerned about the recent overturning of several established rape convictions as a result of DNA testing. How many more wrongfully convicted men are incarcerated? How many more rapists have got away with this horrible crime? That’s not Harris County’s worry. They are going through their warehouses destroying old evidence to save themselves the effort and embarrassment of being caught out locking up the wrong people.
“I am the true vine.”
Scientists who have recently introduced firefly genes into mustard plants have observed that they glow in the dark shortly after being handled gently. Plants, it seems, like being touched. It helps them grow up healthy and not turn out stunted or leggy. The next step they say is to use jellyfish genes so they glow will be brighter.
“If you remain in me you will bear much fruit.”
Apparently, Senator Jessie Helms is on record as describing humanitarian aid to struggling nations as “throwing money down a rat hole.” The annual US donation to Africa, for example, amounts to something like $1.25 per African head.
OK! Forgive me for rambling …The way we show ourselves to the world isn’t everything. But the choices we make do say a whole load about us. And none more than where we choose to stay. Americans have always been a mobile lot. So many of us are immigrants anyway. Resting here after long journeys, whether made in haste or carefully chosen, so we move and move on looking for the right place to settle down, to put down roots.
Roots are ambiguous though. Tearing them up hurts like hell. But let them be shallow and we wither. We need the sap that seeps up through our roots and nourishes heart and soul but who knows what else rises from the soil we are planted in to colour our lives or taint our fruit.
In the past it was only the absurdly rich and powerful who had the choice to shun the soil. The rest of us knew it daily, smeared on the brow or grubby under the fingernails. But these days we can all afford to float a little above the ground. Never touching soil. Buying washed, peeled, and portioned food. Touching our neighbours only when we choose. And finally going to our eternal rest, not under earth, but in the sterile dust of the sky.
But God is a gardener. And a careful one. Knows the value of dirt. Lets nothing go to waste. Achieves with touch and time and tenderness what chemicals and gene-splicing can only imitate. That touch makes us grow. Makes us glow. Not without the pruning shears and not without sometimes being up to our shoulders in …manure.
Who are we? Our DNA is ambiguous as our roots. We share just about 99.9% of it with every other human being. Heck! We share 98% of it with chimpanzees, over half of it with fireflies. But it can single us out as guilty. Or innocent. No matter how much we protest it wasn’t us. No matter how much we fear it was. But God is greater than our fear, greater than whatever condemns us. Greater than the embarrassment we feel at standing alongside the politicians, sharing their genes, knowing we grow in similar soil and would make their compromises our own if we had to.
We are in this together. Not mustard plants in separate pots of sterile growing medium. But branches of one big messy vine rooted in dirt, assailed by pests, yet tended by God, a gardener with a difference. This one shares our DNA, this one knows from the inside all about vines, what it is to grow and wither, what it is to feel the knife, what it is to scent the new rain.
God alone knows how to be human. But given time God can even make us human too.
May 21st, 2000
My life ended that morning. Right about the time he called for something to eat. If you’d asked me I’d have said it ended a few days before when they arrested him. Or, being more honest, when I ran away; ran away and left him and left the others and left my dream of myself behind.
All that was bad enough. Him dead and my life dead. Worse was when the women were saying he wasn’t dead. And then Peter and John. And the others. And then daring myself to begin to believe. But even believing would he want to see me again—coward, fool, traitor.
But then he was with us—doors and walls be damned—and scaring the bejesus out of us. Christ! he has a nerve—creeping up out of nowhere like that and saying “sorry did I startle you?” like it was all a big joke.
I thought by then I’d begun to believe. But seeing him in the flesh—wounds and all—I realised how little I had. God! we must have looked a fright because the grin on his face just grew and grew. “Something wrong guys? Seen a ghost?”
Seeing is not believing. I see dead people! Breathe! And again!
“You got anything to eat? I’m starving!”
There was some leftover fish to push over to him. Hardly hospitable. But he took it and savoured it’s smell and said the blessing and licked his lips and took a mouthful. And a look of such bliss took him. And then the fool near half choked on a bone—bent over coughing, spluttering, red in the face. And I was with him, holding him, pounding him on the back, panicking lest he choke to death. And then my life ended.
Because he was real. He was alive. And as vulnerable as ever and, as ever, beyond restraint. Untouched by crucifixion—no not untouched—but at risk from a fish bone! And I remember the thought welling up—”this changes everything.” But more than that I remember the feel of warm flesh under my hands and him standing straight again and wiping the sweat from his brow and the grin again and his arms around me. And I remember laughing, laughing till my guts hurt and my giddy heart danced.
Later, when we’d all settled down, when we’d all had our fill of holding him, and he’d almost had his fill of holding us, and we’d said too much and not enough. Later, he took bread—the way he’d done a lifetime ago—and he gave God thanks and praise and he broke it and he passed it among us. And we held it and tasted it like we’d never tasted bread before. And looked at him. Tasted him. “This is the bread of new beginnings, my friends. Eat it and never be the same.” Then the cup brimming with the best wine we had. “This is the lifeblood of the promise between us. Drink it and never be sober again.”
“From this moment,” he said, “you are my witnesses. My witnesses.”
He was right. Nothing has been the same since. We have been his witnesses. Standing up for a truth certainly—though even then we all said it differently—but deeper, farther, truer—standing up for an experience—no! more even than that. He let us touch him. And we still feel that touch, that weight, that warmth. And through the ages we have given witness with our own flesh. Death is real—look at our wounds!—but life is realer still. There is always time for a new beginning. Always a cup of life to share. A forgiveness, a fresh start, a promise kept, a word of peace, a gale of laughter.
We have been witnesses and we have handed that on, generation to generation, in wine and wheat—and, yes, in water.
(… baptism follows …)
May 7th, 2000
At the end of the film “Terminator” Arnold Schwarzenegger—part-man, part-machine—is finally dying after being crushed, boiled and baked. Stripped right down to his metal skeleton he utters his last words—”I’ll be back!”
Schwarzenegger was the bad guy, but it’s the same for the good guys. At the end of another film—”Aliens 3″—the anguished hero, Ripley, gives her life to finally rid the universe of an awful alien creature. She is gone for good—or at least she was, for death is no obstacle when Hollywood recognises a cash cow, so back from the grave Ripley came—half alien herself—in a fourth film: Alien Resurrection.
Resurrection is very popular these days. There’s always the possibility of a sequel (or two) to milk some more cash from the movie-going public. Well, it may be a popular theme but it’s not the way to look at what we celebrate here this Easter morning. This is not the sequel. The Resurrection of Jesus is not a repeat performance of his life. This is not “The Nazarene Strikes Back” nor is it “Son of Son of God.” For one thing, sequels are never as good as the original —the hero returns and does all the same things over again with not one element of unpredictability. What we celebrate here is altogether unpredictable: a new life has been born.
But the birth wasn’t easy. If you listen to Mary’s story today you see how difficult. You realise how exhausted she must have been. And, if we ourselves have entered into the story, as we’ve retold it together in our three days of prayer, we will probably feel just as drained. For Mary, and for us, it has been a succession of intense feelings: a last and disturbing meal with a dear but doomed friend, betrayal and arrest, the waiting, the watching, the suffering, the dying, and then yet more waiting by his dead body in the tomb. And now it is all over, all done, all finished, Mary of Magdala is exhausted and distraught. And now, at the open tomb, her weeping is even more desperate than before because it seems they have taken away even the corpse and left her nothing to cling to, or mourn over.
If we have travelled with Mary these days, we have been mourning too—grieving for Jesus but also grieving for all his death evokes in us, all that seems dead in our own lives, all the failed hopes, the lost opportunities and dying dreams. We carry our own tomb with us—within us—and we don’t know why it is empty.
Then the Easter vigil comes and, overnight, darkness is transformed into light and death becomes life. Suddenly he who was dead is not dead, but alive. But, if we have any heart at all that good news is hard news. It takes time to absorb. It can’t just happen with the lighting of a candle. So there Mary is, bewildered, hanging around the tomb, when these two irritating angels say to her “Woman, why are you weeping?” which is a stupid question. Because, of course she’s weeping! Jesus might have moved from death to life but, as yet, Mary hasn’t. It takes time to grieve and time to accept that life is alive. Mary has to be coaxed out of her own tomb. She hears another voice ask the question: “Woman, why are you weeping?” and she doesn’t recognise it—yet. So she tells her story again, cradling the familiar hurt of it. Until that voice, his voice, speaks her name and lets her unclench her fingers from her burden of death, to receive again the gift of herself, tenderly given, and with it a mission, a call, to be an apostle to the apostles, to touch them too with life.
Jesus, the one death could not hold, is back—not to destroy his enemies but to console his friends. We will see this pattern over and over again in the next days and weeks: Jesus comes to meet friends who are hurting, and to do for them exactly what they need to bring them back to life. To the frightened disciples in the upper room he brings Peace; to the couple fleeing to Emmaus, hope; to the friend who cannot believe, faith; and, here, he pours out comfort for the comfortless Mary. Jesus comes as a friend to bring a friend back to life.
Coming back to life takes time, which is why the Church gives us time. The Church counts this whole coming week as one day—Easter day. And after it forty more days of Easter—a whole Lent’s worth—to unwind the way to Calvary and slowly get the message that Jesus is not dead and neither are we.
It may have happened already—it may take some time—but, however it happens, this Easter Jesus will come to each of us as the friend he is, to console us, to share with us his own joy. He knows what stands in the way of our joy and he knows how to get round it. No need is too big for him—or too small—in fact, the Risen Jesus has nothing else to do! Every single Resurrection story we have is a story of consolation—there is not a one of judgement or revenge—not a one. Jesus lives that we might live. And we, as we are brought to joy by his joy, have nothing else to do but befriend the world, and, through our care and consolation, help it out of the tomb.
April 30th, 2000
I think he came back to us …out of embarrassment or a nagging need. Back to Bethany and Martha and Lazarus and me—looking to explain or be forgiven or something—at least at first. After opening the tomb and giving back our brother and then running off like that leaving us no room for thanks, no room for gratitude, no time to ask him what he’d done or what it might cost.
No, just the turmoil and the disbelief and the laughing and the crying. And Martha dancing for joy, and me singing inside, and Lazarus—Lazarus dazed, surrounded by friends afraid to touch and then unable to stop touching, checking their unbelieving eyes. Even one or two less friendly eyes troubled, angry. I can remember it all and remember nothing—like a dream. I didn’t even see Jesus go, him and his companions. Too wrapped up in all the jubilation I was.
But what do you do when it’s over? When the crowd’s gone, picked you clean, and the three of you are, inexplicably, there. Sitting. Wondering. All the aching questions unasked or asked and unanswered.
It seems we weren’t the only ones wondering what it all meant since the passing days saw a price slapped on Jesus’s head. And lies spread. And threats too. Wouldn’t you think they all would be happy for us? Wouldn’t you expect that and not the whispers that a living Lazarus was an embarrassment—and better off dead. And through it all no sign of Jesus—not to explain, nor promise, nor make it all make sense.
With Passover so close the Holy City was packed and alive with rumour. Jesus was going to march on Jerusalem. Jesus was going to destroy the Temple. Jesus was going to show the Romans. Who could stop him now—with the power of life and death his to command? Fools!
Though we wondered too. Was he going to come? Would he risk it? How could he? How could he not?
Then suddenly there he was. At the gate. Our gate. To explain. To promise. To make it make sense. So I hoped.
This he said: “I’m sorry.”
“We were wondering if you’d come? Hoping! Wondering if you’d risk Passover. Will you?”
“I do not know.” And he said little else. Him the great talker, silent, brooding. John told us he’d been like this since the tomb. Moody. Unnaturally quiet. Hiding in the back of beyond, staring out into the desert. As if waiting for something. Turning aside their concern with a distracted shrug. Till the twelve of them thought it was all over. And argued among themselves about what they would do. Go back north? Or walk into likely death at his side?
Then he ups and tells them he must see his friends and here we all are. Around the table. Eating, drinking, trying to ignore his mood. The guys working hard at enjoying Martha’s feast—laughing, fooling—but, I could see, glancing over at him all the time. Him alone in all the hubbub. They all kept their distance. Confused. Afraid to touch. Embarrassed.
I watched him. I’ve been able to read him since first we met. And right now, fear in his eyes. A need not to be alone. To have someone promise to stay by him. Just like Lazarus’s look when death was crawling close. But mixed in him with the horror of choice—stay or go up to him and no other. I could see him searching for his way out. Finding none. And searching again.
It was just then I heard the voice in my heart say: “It’s time.” It was time. He might not know it yet. But I did. I stood and fetched the oil of nard my inner voice had had me save all these years for him. I prayed. I wrapped a towel around my waist. Unbound my hair. And, as the room hushed, knelt before him. Held his eyes, steady, like. Touched his aching feet. “Do you know what I’m going to do for you?” Slowly he nodded.
I took the flask of oil, gave God thanks and praise, broke the seal, and poured the perfume to anoint him for his destiny. And as his tears began to flow I made my promise. “Whatever happens this week, my love, you will not be alone.”
April 24th, 2000
I remember when my father died 20-odd years ago that the hardest part of going on living was the problem other people had knowing what to say to us—my mother and brother and me. Friends and family want to comfort you but don’t quite know how to do it. And I don’t think I was very willing to be comforted back then—I didn’t make it easy for them—but I suspect there is no easy way of being with someone in their grief.
I did learn back then one really bad way of offering support. So many people said, in one way or another, “don’t be sad, it’s God’s will.” That made me so angry then and makes me even angrier now when I hear similar advice. Twenty years ago I guess I got riled up because I didn’t want easy answers—now I hate it because I know it’s not fair to God. It makes God sound like he doesn’t care or even prefers people to be dead than alive, loves death more than life, but if today’s gospel shows anything it shows how much God loves life and is heart-broken by death.
In the middle of all the magic and the miracle there’s a very human story—a buried body, grieving sisters, confused disciples—and above all a Jesus who is full of feeling. He might be saying grand and mysterious things and he might be doing the impossible but in the centre of it all he is showing us just how God faces death—like a friend torn apart by it all. As the story starts and Jesus is at a distance he manages to have his own theories about why God lets people die before their time but as he draws near, draws near to grief, draws near to loss, he is drawn near to the heart of the matter. When broken-hearted Martha meets him on the road and tells him off for letting Lazarus down into death Jesus tries to comfort her with words. But then as the weeping Mary pours out her disappointment words fail him and Jesus starts to get really upset. But its only when he see the tomb and realises that here is his friend dead and gone that he loses it. Tears pour down his cheeks. No more room for soothing words. He cries. He cries and he prays. And he calls Lazarus out of the tomb and into new life.
Out of death and into life. In a way that’s the whole of the Christian story. Our Elect are with us today and that’s why we use this gospel. It holds the promise for them. At the Easter Vigil when they are baptized they will step out of death and into life. That’s an awesome thing to promise them. New life. How can we give them that? Well, Thank God we don’t have to make good on the promise ourselves—Jesus is the one who has called them and will call to them that night and say “Come out! Come out of the tomb.” But the work isn’t all God’s—we have a responsibility as well. Poor Lazarus staggers out of the tomb all tied up in grave clothes and Jesus tells the onlookers to unbind him and let him go. We have that job for our Elect. As a community we can either let them live or conspire to keep them bound up in death. So how do we do that—unbind our friends and let them live? Two ways … at least.
First of all we have to be able to. If we ourselves are all tangled up in our own grave clothes how can we help anyone else to be free? As we walk alongside our friends into Holy Week and towards baptism we need to let ourselves be brought to life too. To take a good look at what has still got us tangled up in death and ask the God who loves life to set us free once again. Maybe our Reconciliation service on Wednesday is a good way to do that.
But apart from being able to help our Elect receive new life we have to want to. Think how much better the world would be—heck think how much better our families would be—if we did even some of the good things we each have the power and ability to do but fail to do because we can’t be bothered or don’t care enough. How does Jesus find the power to raise Lazarus from the dead? I believe he finds it in his gut when it is twisted up in compassion and in his tears when he can’t hold them back. Jesus cared about Lazarus. Loved him. Wanted him to be alive. Hated his death. And took the risk to weep and took the risk to pray and took the risk to call him to life. Do we care that much about life? Do we care that much about our friends here today? Maybe we need to pray to care that much. I hope we can pray for that gift. But it’s a risky gift.
Jesus gives Lazarus his life back but at a terrible price. John’s gospel makes it really clear that raising Lazarus was the last straw for the authorities. After this act of love Jesus has a price on his head, he’s a hunted man, an outlaw. He gave Lazarus his life and will end up giving up his own. That’s how much Jesus cared about Lazarus. He was willing to die for Lazarus’s life. In a way Jesus has made that same bargain for each of us—given his life so that we might have ours—and done it for the same reason. He loves us so much that he can’t stand to see us dead. Our challenge—all of us—is to live our new life in the light of that enormous and terrible gift.
April 9th, 2000
The Law and the Land … that’s the strange linkage that’s forged all through this part of Deuteronomy. The Law and the Land.
The Law is given for the sake of the Land. So that the people might enter the land of promise and live there. The Land is given for the sake of the Law. So that the all the nations might gaze on Israel and marvel that such a Law—and such a God—lives among them.
You get the feeling that it is no arbitrary Law Moses offers them—not just a book of rules—not just what God thought up that day—you get the feeling the Law comes with the Land. God may be the giver, and it may be human hands that carve the stone, but the law rises up from the soil and blows in the breeze down from the hillsides. The law of God and the law of the Land.
Land given and Law given and, between the two, the one God who burned and thundered on the mountain at Sinai. All that divine energy channelled by Law and making the Land live. And the people with the touch of the land under them and crackle of heaven above them the envy of their neighbours who clamour for such a law for themselves, for such a God—drawn near in the Law, into the Land.
That’s the offer Moses makes. Take up the Law and enter the Land and God will live in the midst of you … not just in tabernacle and sacrifice but in waking and sleeping, in herding and tilling, making a living, loving a friend, baking the bread, wiping the dust from your eyes. Land and Law.
Lent. And the voice of our Land has fallen silent these days and we rarely hear it speak with power. All the mystery is gone. All the holy fear. And the nuclear pulse of God’s presence hardly crackles among us either. Maybe in here we still hear the dying echoes … but the deafening roar of divinity seems to have left our land.
When were you last astonished by the bare soil under your soles? When were you last burned by an electric holiness too powerful to contain?
Personally … it’s been a while … … but I hope and I wonder … What would it take for us, once more, to enter the Land and Live?
March 29th, 2000
I was told when I was learning to drive that if I ever got into an accident I should never say sorry, never admit responsibility, never apologise. Just let the insurance companies work it all out. Fine by me!
And do you remember that icon of the seventies, “Love Story”? “Love means never having to say you are sorry.” Great!
Well, a few hours ago the Pope did an unprecedented thing. And by these standards a stupid and loveless thing. He apologised for all the past sins of members of the Catholic Church. Implored God’s pardon for all that Catholic Christians have done through the ages in the name of God to hurt and wound and kill.
A good way, in this Jubilee year, to start Lent you’d think. But not an uncontroversial one. And for we, more humble, Christians that are daily implicated in our own web of complicity and denial the controversy is an instructive one.
First of all the Pope has been criticised by many of his own cardinals: don’t be embarrassing, one argument goes, don’t give ammunition to those who would persecute and abuse Catholics today. Admission of guilt is admission of weakness. And why rake over the past anyway … let it be dead and buried. Another voice from the same direction sounds shocked. How can the One, Holy, True, Apostolic, Catholic, Church be sinful! The Church must be pure, spotless, and holy—above worldly judgement and condemnation. And the wording of the Pope’s plea is indeed careful. Carefully unspecific for one thing. Asking pardon for all those sins yet not quite saying what they might be. Carefully specific, though, in another sense. It’s not the Church asking pardon for itself, God forbid, but for it’s members. The Catholic Church isn’t sinful only Catholics are.
Those are the insider reservations shall we say. The voices of outsiders have been critical for other reasons, berating the Pope for not getting down to cases: Do you apologise for the Crusades? Do you apologise for what your predecessors did or didn’t do when Hitler was annihilating Jews by the trainload? And what good is the Church’s repentance anyway—does it put things right, does it undo damage, does it make any difference at all? And what about present sins—not just the sins of dead people but the sins of the living—Do you ask pardon for them too? Would you risk naming them? Are you ready to change?
“Repent and believe in the gospel,” says Jesus today in a voice still hoarse with desert dust. Repent! He makes it sound easy! But if the Pope struggles with repentance then I guess we shouldn’t be surprised to find it hard either.
By the world’s logic repentance runs the range from risky to stupid. What does it change? The past is past. The dead are dead. So why make yourself vulnerable now? Get over it and get on with life … Live for the future.
But the past isn’t past and the dead aren’t dead and the future shouldn’t be more of the same. The Holy are not the ones who have never sinned but the ones who have sinned a lot but been forgiven more. Heck! Even God needs to remember the mistakes he’s made. Was creation a bad idea? Send a flood. Did the flood fix things up once and for all? Of course not! Put that rainbow in the sky to keep in mind the pact she made with all living things never to destroy them again. Life and death, past and future are what Lent is all about. The flood and the desert. Wild beasts and angels.
What is Lent about? It is about dying. Dying. Our newly signed-up Elect are heading for the waters of baptism at Easter. But the water isn’t to wash them clean, to remove the dirt of sin: the water is to drown them! It’s the only way to follow Jesus—to be put to death in the flesh and brought to life in the spirit. Isn’t there a better way? Nobody in their right mind wants that. Life is too precious. Even Jesus resists it. Has to be driven into the desert by the spirit. No wonder we resist Lent. No wonder the Church resists asking pardon. No wonder the world resists giving it.
John-Paul began the liturgy of repentance today by kneeling before the statue of Mary holding the dead body of Jesus. All the metaphors line up. We always ask pardon of the past. The sins we confess are always doubly dead. Dead because they are out of our reach—we can’t take back the angry word, undo the damage, un-stab the bleeding back. Dead too because we carry them like dead weight across aching shoulders till we can’t stand upright but must stoop and crawl.
Triply tangled with death because stopping to say sorry means turning around to face what is dead inside, and pay the price of life, all of which seems like dying.
So why bother? Why apologise to 2000 years of dead people? Why ask pardon for our own mistakes? Why own up to our complicity in global injustice? Why do Lent at all? Why not just hop on over to Easter morning?
I wish I had a better answer than this. You can stay put and keep your cool but go alone into the desert and you come back companioned by animals and angels. You can keep your feet dry but drown in baptism and you erupt from the waters new born. You can avoid the risk of repentance but just try love and you’ll have to say you’re sorry.
March 12th, 2000
A guy in my parish was talking to me after Mass on Sunday. Not his usual pleasant and upbeat self. Instead just a little embarrassed. A bundle of awkward silences. So, I thought, do I take the hint and go or do I make myself a nuisance? I wanted to know what was going on… Or thought I did … It turns out he’s angry.
Just a simple story: he and his partner—he’s gay—will have been together for nine years next week. Their anniversary is next Tuesday—the day California goes to the polls—and he sees the irony of that because he expects that at the same time he and his partner are celebrating their life together Prop 22 will be getting passed, reminding them both that whatever they have together it mustn’t be compared to marriage. But that’s not what makes him angry. He doesn’t expect any better from the population at large. He’s more realistic than that.
But what does makes him angry is that the Church—the diocese—has paid good money—his money he reckons—to support a proposition that hurts him in the heart. Can’t he expect, he asks me, that the church will be on his side or at least not against him? He doesn’t come to church expecting to be hurt but he is and he’s angry. He’s angry.
Now I don’t like anger. I don’t like it when it’s pointing my way and I don’t do it well myself. But his anger has been dogging me all week and now with today’s readings has gotten me backed in a corner.
Here’s Jesus angry and he’s angry over what’s going on in his church and the anger seems to take away his good judgement. I would prefer he send a courteous letter to the bishop through the proper channels and not go in for such a shameful display of passion. His behaviour disturbs me but, OK, maybe some things are worth getting angry over. Maybe not getting angry is the shameful course. But what disturbs me most isn’t the scuffle in the Temple at all. What gets to the root of my unease is the cursing of that poor fig tree. And not because I’m starting a committee for fig-tree rights but because of a nagging uncertainty: why does Jesus expect fruit when it’s not the season for it? Isn’t it futile? Isn’t it stupid? But, stupid or not, his anger burns and the tree is withered to the root. Withered into a parable that leaves me … wondering. Wondering about the guy at church … is his expectation of welcome among us as stupid as looking for figs at the wrong time of year? Is that the parable of the fig tree? That the last place you should expect justice is in the church, among your own? That’s what’s got me backed into a corner. And here I am … waiting to hear a word from Jesus and praying that when it comes it will be a word of blessing and not a curse. Praying that he’ll forgive me for not being angry enough, praying he’ll hold back his withering anger for just a while longer.
March 3rd, 2000
Close to my hometown in the north of England is a church—St Oswald’s if I remember right—that has a particularly ugly relic: the Holy Hand of Edmund Arrowsmith. It is usually kept in a glass bell jar and, mercifully, covered up with a kind of black glove. But once a month or on special occasions the hand is unveiled and people come from far around to be blessed by it. By this gnarled 450 year old shrivelled fist cut from a martyr. And the people who come cover the whole range from the merely interested to the desperate; from spiritual tourists to the seriously sick and the frantic parents and friends who bring them. Hoping for a cure and hoping for an end to their own guilt at being healthy.
In St Oswald’s it’s a Holy Hand. In Lourdes, France, it’s Holy Water. In Chamayo, New Mexico, it’s Holy Dirt. But two things they all have in common—the people who come in faith, in need, in hope and the crutches they leave behind, the wheelchairs, the oxygen tanks, the white canes, the stretchers. Every shrine has it’s trophies. A lumber room for things no longer needed and finally set aside.
That’s why I worry about the paralytic in the story today. When Jesus heals him he gets up and goes home but he takes his stretcher with him. I wonder why he doesn’t leave it behind. Maybe he’s just being tidy. Maybe he’s just doing as he’s told. But maybe he’s so used to it he can’t let it go. Maybe he wants it around just in case this healing doesn’t take.
But what happens the next morning when he wakes up on that mat and feels the comfortable familiarity of it—does he remember he’s whole and healthy or does he wonder if it were all a dream? Can he get up?
Now there’s a question for all of us, even if we are not looking to be healed from some physical disease. Jesus himself links the healing with forgiveness. Are we ready to be forgiven? Something about sin is like sickness. We each have aspects of the heart that are paralyzed. That can no longer be moved. That circumstance and choice have hardened and let waste away. I’ll bet each of us knows what it is like to be stuck, to be in a rut, going nowhere, to lack the freedom to get and up and walk the way we want to. And we probably have our crutches too, our stretchers, our oxygen masks. The ways we support our habit of paralysis, the beliefs we hold about who we are and what we deserve, about what is possible and what is impossible.
If something about sin is like sickness, something about forgiveness is like healing. Forgiven, we can stand up straight. We can move again. We have new freedom. And we don’t need the stretcher anymore. And there’s the crux. We have to leave behind the mat we’ve been confined to for years because if we take it home with us well pretty soon we’ll be sleeping on it again and letting it define our limits. The freedom that Jesus offers us is an entirely new life. Something completely new. And it requires on our part a forgetting. A wholehearted forgetting.
The central issue of the story as Mark tells it is whether we are willing to let God do something new or whether we insist God stays within the bounds we set. The miracle only happens because some people don’t do the same old thing: the four helpers tear up the roof of Jesus’ house and he, instead of seeing vandalism, he sees faith and instead of keeping someone out he makes them at home—physically, emotionally, socially.
God is willing to do something new because God is willing to set the past aside and when God does that God really does that—without reservation, without maybe, without “we’ll see.” Now are we? Are we ready to leave the past behind and be ourselves forgiven and healed?
Now I’ve been asking that question as though each of us could answer it alone. And sure … ultimately we have to be the ones walking and we have to take up our mat or let it go. But those choices are not ones we can make in isolation. We can be sick in isolation—at it’s worst that’s exactly what sin and sickness both do: separate us from each other. And we can be like the four helpers who let something new happen or we can be like the scribes who resist it for all the best reasons. Do we forgive our kids, forgive our parents, forgive our partners, forgive our friends or would we rather them stay crippled for our own reasons.
It’s pretty reasonable to want a roof over our heads. But sometimes we buy that shelter at the expense of the people we keep outside. So we ought to be challenged at every level by this gospel. Challenged to be like God and let a new wholeness begin inside ourselves. To be like God and let a new wholeness begin in those around us. To be like God and let a new wholeness begin in our community, our city, our church.
Even if it means we, like Jesus, have to live without a roof over our heads.
February 20th, 2000
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