Upside down and outside-in

“Listen to me, all of you, and understand”. (Mark 7:14)

Mark 7:1-23 (Year B: Trinity+13)

Controversies are never far from us..

More controversy. Why is that religion, like politics, generates controversy? In this week’s passage from Mark (following last Sunday’s dispute over hard teachings of Jesus in John 6) Jesus does not mince his words where the traditions of the elders of his time were concerned.  Even today, some folk attach a lot of importance to appearance, ritual and customs as the doorposts on which religion hangs.  These things offer comfort and come from the wells of ‘tradition’. (In Jesus’ time some of these traditions were oral but authoritative and not necessarily practiced at the time by all Jews).  More than that, adherence to particular customs helps distinguish ‘us’ from ‘them’. If the others drive on the right hand side of the road and use metric measures, well, we do it differently around here. Anyway, it is up to them to change. The habits of a lifetime and the traditions of the ancestors shape deep ravines in our minds and memories. ‘It was always like that here’ and ‘that’s the way it is done here’.

Today, we underestimate the extent of ‘unwritten rules’ in many organisations, families and situations. Let’s call it culture. And culture is important. But, we do not need to be slaves to culture because culture evolves in and out of the experience of human communities.

With sex on the brain..

Notions of what is right and what is pure continue to influence religious debate in our day. Purity may concern notions of what are appropriate and what is not appropriate expressions of sexuality, for example. It may also concern various practices and ways of behaviour beyond sex which continues to preoccupy religious people. In Old Testament times, the notion of purity was very often tied up with not worshiping idols or not partaking in the sacrifices or rituals of others as well as abstaining from various foods as well as keeping away from impure things like persons afflicted with leprosy or dead bodies, etc. (sorry to disappoint but the ancient Hebrews had more than sex on their minds!).

Sometimes, a martian arriving on earth might be forgiven for thinking that the main concern of religious persons – many Christians certainly being no exception – is sex.  In the recent decades more controversies, splits, expulsions, silencings, dissenting publications, resolutions, instructions have been generated by sex and things to do with sex.  At least, nowadays, Christians no longer kill each other over faith and good works. Rather, they squabble over sex, instead. Now, the areas of sexuality, intimacy, commitment, marriage and family are vital parts of human living and it would be altogether astonishing if the bible had nothing to say about these matters and how lives can be formed to bring glory to God and well-being to his people (the two being entirely mutually reinforcing). However, there is more to living and right living than these important areas.  

If one thing is astonishing it is how comparatively little is said or done in the churches nowadays – compared to the tantalising preoccupation with sex – about the great social injustices of our day – environmental destruction, poverty, racism, wars, oppression, denial of fundamental rights (the most recent Encyclical by Pope Francis entitled Laudato Si which discusses the environment goes some of the way to rebalance matters). Of course, churches and Christians are often to the fore in speaking about these wider social and ecological matters and seeking change as well as being to the fore in directly tackling these problems. However, I suggest that there is still an imbalance when it comes to public discourse.

In the gospels we hear about the Pharisees, the scribes and the doctors of the law snooping around and watching to observe and catch out the disciples of Jesus in some infringement of their religious codes. Their focus was on purity, exclusion and censor.  Religion, for them, was about staying on the right side of God by adhering to the traditions, regulations and understandings of the elders. Jesus, in one salvo, dispels their claims and criticisms of the disciples (and himself) by invoking the solid tradition of the prophets and Isaiah in particular who abhorred a religion of formalism and external compliance but lacked the core of compassion, decency and honesty.

It is worth recalling what the passage of Isaiah quoted by Jesus says:

The Lord said: Because these people draw near with their mouths and honour me with their lips, while their hearts are far from me, and their worship of me is a human commandment learned by rote.

Isaiah 29:13

Pretty damning then; pretty damning now? What do you think?

In the upside-down and outside-in world of false religion God is placed at the service of human ideology and notions. This ideology becomes god in a way that mocks the very idea of the living God-who-is-love.  Outer compliance becomes the test of faith and fidelity while the inner heart is ‘full of dead men’s bones’. Later in the gospel of Matthew Jesus tells us (Matt 23:27):

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which on the outside look beautiful, but inside they are full of the bones of the dead and of all kinds of filth.

The things that defile us come from within and Jesus gives a non-exhaustive list of examples (v21-22):

…..fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly…..

In short, what typically fills the Sunday tabloids and popular media! An advertisement for a coffee shop in this part of the world has a sign written from top to bottom of a front window: SEX. There is a much smaller sentence below the word saying ‘now that we have caught your attention come in and have a coffee’. It is sometimes curious to note that many read the scriptures looking for ‘sex’ and when they find it they make it into the one issue on which doctrinal orthodoxy and personal integrity count. Yes, indeed, how we behave in all our facets of our lives and our relationship to others is a vital part of what it means to be a human and a Christian.  But, what about the evils of ‘slander’, ‘murder’ and ‘theft’?  Take slander.  How often are people slandered in conversations – even ordinary every-day conversations. How often we join in especially when it comes to public figures whom we don’t even know or have never met face to face. To refer to someone as a ‘traitor’ or having betrayed a cause or a relationship carries a huge burden of responsibility on our part because we put ourselves in the seat of God. Thankfully God is not anywhere near the merciless judges that we can sometime be – confident in our own correctness and convinced about others on the basis of the most partial of evidence and oblivious to what it might be like to ‘walk in the shoes of another’.

And the criticism by Jesus is for us today...

Down through the ages the very mindset criticised by Jesus has been widespread in the various Christian churches. Under guise of correctness and doctrinal purity, some were hounded, persecuted, excluded, ridiculed, judged and put outside the camp of the saved. Much cruelty was, and is, practiced in the name of religion and, sadly, in the name of Christ.

Costly discipleship..

In a pithy saying attributed to Dietrich Bonhoeffer who was martyred for standing up against Nazism:

Only he who cries out for the Jews may sing Gregorian chants.

The difference between an outside-in mentality and an inside-out is that in the former we are governed by the externals while neglecting those sources of love and unity that lie dormant within the human heart – that place deep within us where reason, feeling and will meet. Like the disciples, we can misunderstand the message initially. The kingdom is not a rule by man-made decrees; nor is it a physical place or time. Rather, it is the continuing in-breaking of the holy spirit of God’s love and truth in our hearts and in our midst.  This has the power to change the way we see and evaluate things so that what we thought was sound religion is, at best, dubious, and what we thought was ‘selling out’ may very well be the thing God is calling his church to do now because the world needs to hear a new song that is fully in harmony with the goodness of creation at the beginning.

It would be all too easy to read this passage of Mark and, indeed, the entire gospels as a confrontation between Jesus, the Messiah, and the old Jewish religion complete with legalism and particularism.  The actual situation is more complex as Christianity emerged from within the Jewish faith. The problem today, as when these gospels were written, is not in the detail of the laws as much as in the order of importance beginning with the simple but overwhelming truth that God is love and on this very same love which requires us to love our neighbour hangs ‘all the law and the prophets’ (Matthew 22:40).

It is significant that Jesus picks the example of family obligation and duty towards parents to illustrate the way in which we can turn God’s compassion upside down. To deny what is necessary to help others especially those in need such as parents who, in Jesus’ time, would have relied particularly heavily on their children and immediate family for support in their declining years was a great injustice. Such attitudes of confused morals persisted in different ways and at different times in the course of Christian history.

For too many people, fear is the guiding force of their religious observance. It is a question of fear of punishment, fear of disgrace, fear of the road not taken and the risk not embraced.

And today we are challenged..

Many are those who imagine that they are safe because they participate more or less frequently in the sacramental life of the church and avoid serious misdemeanours. Still many are others who believe that they are entirely and irrevocably ‘saved’ since they surrendered their all at, say, 2am on Sunday 5^th August 1979.  Behind such situations lies a niggling case of unease. People feel the need to ‘do the right thing’ and remain on the right side of Great Unknown after death.  Mark 7 is for such well-meaning souls. The reality that confronts us in Mark 7 as in Matthew 15 is that it is the heart that counts. What is in the heart is what guides our thoughts and actions and their impact on others.  If our hearts are full of bad things as well as good things we are conflicted and our actions will reflect this. In this case, we are less than credible witnesses to the great light that Jesus shone on all of humanity and still does.

We would do well to listen again and understand (verse 14).

Treasuring words of eternal life

‘Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life.’. (John 6:68)

John 6:56-69 (Year B: Trinity+12)

                                     pic: paulawiseman.com

All of human life is there..

After five Sundays we come to the end of the sixth chapter of the Gospel of St John.   To use a much clichéd term ‘all of human life is there’. Indeed. Hope, puzzlement, joy, wonder, betrayal, confusion, trust.  We can find ourselves in one of the crowd or one of the 12 closest disciples of Jesus or one of the bystanders. The words are challenging. It sounds very much like a meditation from an early Christian community already familiar with a primitive form of the Eucharist or Holy Communion. Whatever the exact circumstances in which this was written and what lies behind it we can trust that, somehow, as with the rest of the scripture it represents God speaking to us today – not by means of some direct transcript or video clip but through the mediation of memory, story and evolving understanding. We are in holy company listening to the living word and this word is at work in our hearts each time we seek to listen and to be open to the word of God.

The Bread of Heaven which Jesus gives is his body. But, this also includes his words because they are full of spirit and life (verse 63).  This can give a new meaning and freshness to the phrase ‘Give us today our daily bread’ in the prayer Our Father.  Our daily bread is the life-giving and spirit-filled word of God that we carry around with us in our heads and in our hearts. This word can shape and make us no matter what has happened before in our lives and what might turn up in the time that remains to us on this earth.

Clinging to the Word

Let’s be practical.  What words make a difference to our lives and those of others? We speak and we listen every day. By some reckonings the average person speaks between 7,000 and 20,000 words a day (with a clear gender difference which may cast light on life expectancy differences!). That’s a lot of words in a lifetime – perhaps half a million or so in a long lifetime. How many of these words that remain to us will be T.H.I.N.K.?

True

Helpful

Inspiring

Necessary

Kind

In the flow of conversation, thinking and moving about, particular words have a strong resonance. And this is all the more obvious when words are put to music. Among some seniors memories of songs and their words can be the last remaining words when other memories fade.  Words are powerful and life-giving. It would not be incorrect to say that we live and move and have our being in words and, for us Christians, in Jesus Christ who is the living word of God and in which all life has its being.

God lives in us through his word.  Elsewhere, scripture tells us that we can live in God and God in us through belief in Jesus and through the practice of love (1 John 3:23-24). A mutual indwelling is possible like the vine and its branches (refer to the passage John 15:5 and No Lone Rangers for a previous blog on this site). Grafted on to the living vine we live, grow, flourish as we are joined to the whole living vine.

John 6 and later controversies

At the end of this important chapter we have encountered Jesus in his word and in his sacramental signs of living bread which is his body. This not an easy teaching to grasp or an easy one to explain and accept as witnessed by the tone of controversy in verses 60-69.  It might be all to convenient to turn this passage into a harbinger of reformation and post-reformation controversies many centuries later. We would be missing the point if we were to focus on a relatively modern controversy about how to explain the mystery of the Lord’s table. At the centre of this discourse is the unity of life, word and living bread. We do not know just how but we believe all the same.

To grasp the meaning of Jesus’ words requires more than academic erudition. It requires an open heart and mind and even a certain type of ‘spiritual intelligence’ or imagination. This is a gift and not everyone has it.  Along life’s path we have choices to make and we are free to walk away or stay. But staying involves its own challenges and pain because to stay faithful means renouncing other options and living with some measure of uncertainty, questioning and struggle.

At the risk of venturing into a disputed area where I am not fully competent there follows a brief ‘scientific’ detour in the next paragraph.

Applied to the case of the eucharist and, especially, some of the controversies that arose in the Christian family some 1,000 to 1,500 years later we need take a leaf from this discourse of John.  The irony is that St Thomas Acquinas borrowed terminology form Aristotelean Greek philosophy to correct certain ‘physical’ interpretations of the eucharist that were threatening at the time. The term used by Acquines was transubstantion (or transsubstantiatio in latin) – the idea that the elements of bread and wine undergo a change into the body and blood of Christ in such manner that we merely see, taste and touch bread and wine but in reality these are no longer bread and wine. Other explanations include ‘consubstantiation’ (Luther – although he didn’t quite use this term). And among the Eastern Catholics the term metousiosis is used (literally means a change in ousios or inner reality in the Greek term).

At this point it is no harm to remind ourselves that (a) Jesus probably spoke in Aramaic to his disciples and listeners while the stories about Jesus and what he said were written down in Greek many decades later, (b) fortunately or unfortunately Jesus did not speak in English – not even 16^th century English as found in the King James version of the Bible, (c) a doctrine about what happens to the physical content and structure of bread and wine is not outlined either in the Gospel of John or anywhere else in the New Testament, (d) to my knowledge the actual term and expression of transubstantiation is not used anywhere in the liturgies of the Roman Catholic or uniate Churches in full communion with Rome just as metousiosis as a term is not used in the Divine Liturgies in the East.

None of this is to deny the significance and usefulness of theological and personal intellectual inquiry about these matters. However, we risk missing the point of John 6 and the entire Gospel by going down the wrong track into mysteries that remain mysteries. The author of ‘In the Imitation of Christ’ probably got just about right some 600 year ago when he warns: ‘Beware of curious and vain examination of this most profound Sacrament, if you do not wish to be plunged into the depths of doubt’ (Book 4).  

And there lies the scandal and the offence among the hearers of Jesus in John 6:60-65 – to accept the challenging words of Jesus which link his spiritual food with his word, his life and that life that we are asked to share with the whole world.

We are broken people for a united world

‘… How can this man give us his flesh to eat?’. (John 6:53)

John 6:51-58 (Year B: Trinity+11)

Johannine shock therapy..

And so the reading of John chapter 6 continues over five Sundays in the middle of ‘Mark’s year’.  A careful and prayerful reading of John 6 can open inexhaustible treasures. Every sentence and every word carries depth and mystery. But it has very practical implications for how we live today. Every now and again Johannine shock is used with references to being born again (John 3:3) or the offer of living water to the Samaritan woman at the well (John 4:7-15) or eating the flesh of the Son of Man.  This shocks and confounds the immediate listeners. And we are to be shocked as well. Lest we lose ourselves in a quiet, detached and care-free zone of contemplation we need to be shocked very now and then. 

In the 1986 film, Mission, set in South America in the 1750s the Jesuit priest, Fr. Gabriel, leads the people forward as he carries the monstrance with the blessed sacrament against a barrage of gun fire from a joint Portuguese-Spanish army. The brutal and violent laceration of the people and the monstrance is a powerful cinematic sign of Christ’s body ripped apart in the poor and the oppressed (after Fr. Gabriel is cut down a little child picks up the monstrance and leads the procession. Only a handful escape into the jungle). Witness, community, persecution, violence, death, scattering, remnant and new life.  Flesh, Bread, Life.

Shock therapy applied today..

One way to apply some shock therapy in modern times is to explore the Eucharistic theme of John 6 in the concrete social reality.  Bishop Frank Weston, an Anglican bishop from Zanzibar in the early decades of the 20^th century declared in the context of an Anglo-Catholic gathering in 1923:

The one thing England needs to learn is that Christ is in and amid matter, God in flesh, God in sacrament.

He went on to say the following:

But I say to you, and I say it with all the earnestness that I have, if you are prepared to fight for the right of adoring Jesus in His Blessed Sacrament, then, when you come out from before your tabernacles, you must walk with Christ, mystically present in you through the streets of this country, and find the same Christ in the peoples of your cities and villages. You cannot claim to worship Jesus in the tabernacle, if you do not pity Jesus in the slums … It is folly – it is madness – to suppose that you can worship Jesus in the Sacraments and Jesus on the throne of glory, when you are sweating him in the souls and bodies of his children.

Such a challenging insight was not novel. Saint Ignatius of Antioch writing in a letter to the Smyrnaeans, not long after the Gospel of John was written down declared: 

Consider how contrary to the mind of God are the heterodox in regard to the grace of God which has come to us. They have no regard for charity, none for the widow, the orphan, the oppressed, none for the man in prison, the hungry or the thirsty. They abstain from the Eucharist and from prayer, because they do not admit that the Eucharist is the flesh of our Saviour Jesus Christ, the flesh which suffered for our sins and which the Father, in His graciousness, raised from the dead.

And writing two centuries later, Saint Basil the Great said:

The bread which you do not use is the bread of the hungry; the garment hanging in your wardrobe is the garment of him who is naked; the shoes that you do not wear are the shoes of the one who is barefoot; the money that you keep locked away is the money of the poor; the acts of charity that you do not perform are so many injustices that you commit.

(I am grateful for all of the above information to Rev Patrick Comerford and his very useful regular blog here).

In short, we do not have the luxury of a worshiping a God detached from the struggles and sufferings of the world around us. We move from sacrament to world and back again because the world is the theatre in which sacramental action happens through us and others. Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Workers Movement wrote in 1935:

It is because we forget the humanity of Christ – present with us today in the Blessed Sacrament just as truly as when he walked with His apostles through the cornfields that Sunday long ago – that we have ignored the material claims of our fellow man during this capitalistic, industrialist era. We have allowed our brothers and sisters, our fellow members in the Mystical Body to be degraded, to endure slavery to a machine, to live in rat-infested holes. This ignoring of the material body of our humanity which Christ ennobled when He took flesh, gives rise to the aversion for religion evidenced by many…

Because Christianity is a ‘materialist’ religion..

Christianity is a materialist religion in the sense that God became material in human flesh and blood and thereby raised up all flesh to God. Moreover, we reach God together and not individually and sacraments are signs on the way pointing us upwards and forward as we touch, see and feel the presence of God. This is the heart of the message of John 6. The detour into chapter 6 of John’s Gospel in the middle of ‘Mark’s year’ has brought out, so far, a number of central Eucharistic themes of the entire story of Jesus (with two more Sundays to go in the company of John including this Sunday):

Abundance and welcome

Longing for you

Peace, bread, life

Back to the reality of bread..

 ‘I am the living bread’ declares Jesus. What does this mean to us today?  Bread is a basic part of our diet and has been down the centuries. With water, bread constitutes a normal element for restoring and fuelling our bodies.  In other words, bread gives and sustains life.  But our lives are sustained by more than mere bread. We live on the strength of love, affirmation, acceptance, challenge and positive relationship. ‘Not on bread alone’ does man live (Matthew 4:4).  However, if we enlarge our imaginations we can understand the words, the music, the conversation and the sights of everyday life as types of daily bread that nourishes our bodies and souls. In that sense the Old Testament prophet, Jeremiah, could speak of God’s Word as bread which can be consumed (Jeremiah 15:16). But, we need to eat in order to understand just as understanding precedes eating. Jesus had to bring the thousands forward from eating bread loaves and fish to eating the living word of God. We have to start somewhere and human hunger is an obvious starting place.

With ‘scandalous’ talk of flesh and blood..

But, Jesus did not just say I am giving you the living bread which is my flesh but he also says that he is giving you his blood. Not only is flesh scandalous to pious 1^st century years but blood is more than scandalous because it signifies the very life of one.  To share in the eucharist is to share in the life of God’s own family while drawing into that family the great unwashed, the confused, the unwelcome and the marginalised.

This is what it means – concretely – to live eucharistically –  in full communion with God as a loving parent and with all of his children who are our brothers and sisters in the family of faith that invites everyone in.

We, too, can be transformed into bread broken for a world that hungers. Here is a short prayer based on a reading of John that I composed some years ago:

In the beginning was the Word

And the World became flesh

And that flesh became bread;

Which has now become us

Broken for a united world

Returning to the source from which it came

Peace, Bread, Life – the forgotten dimension of Sunday

‘… the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.” (John 6:51)

John 6:41-51 (Year B: Trinity+10)

Peace, Bread, Life..

Peace, Bread and Land was the rallying cry of the Bolshevik revolutionaries in Russia almost a hundred years ago. But, the promise of peace, bread and land was not to be in the years and decades that followed, though.  All social upheavals require a combination of simple ideas and the French set the precedent more than a century prior to the Russian revolution with the call to ‘Liberty, Equality and Fraternity’.

If we were to summarise the Gospel message and call to action of Jesus Christ with a Johannine emphasis (in the gospel of John) we might focus on:

• Peace
• Bread
• Life

Peace, Flesh, Life..

And countless witnesses over the centuries have testified to the reality of peace, bread and life for those who have surrendered all to Jesus – not without tribulation, persecution and all the typical sufferings of this life.  The idea of peace crops up many times in the ministry of Jesus as recounted by John. In chapter 6, which is the focus a number of recent Sundays, the words that come to the fore are:

• Bread
• Flesh
• Life

The story of the feeding of 5,000 followed by a long and rich conversation between Jesus and his closest disciples reveals a new understanding of God’s own life shared and continued through his people. At this point many (including the disciples) don’t get the message. They either seek a quick fix and spectacular solution to their immediate needs, or, they take offence at what they are hearing and seeing.

Jesus challenges us to hear again and seek those goods to which the visible, the earthly and the fleshy point. However, always rooted in this earth and reality Jesus and his word is no phantom or non-material substance (John uses the term ‘sarx’ – flesh in ancient Greek and not body as the other evangelists do).  In the course of his ministry he uses materials such as water, bread, wine, oil and flesh to press home the deeper reality of our communion with him and with one another and that the material, of itself, is good.  So, though many might take exception or offence at the use of the word flesh both then and now this manner of speaking has the potential to shock us into a deeper realisation that flesh is good and that in sharing the life of God with others we share - spiritually – in the flesh. My Irish (Gaelic) version of the bible is even more graphic and uses the word ‘feoil’ or meat. No wonder the early Christians had some explaining to do in Rome before being fed to the lions after accusations of cannibalism!

As in so many areas of belief and religious practice, we do well to accept the truth behind what is happening without trying to ‘scientifically’ explain the mechanics of what is happening. We are best to leave that to God. The point of this discourse in chapter 6 and in the liturgical and worshipping life of Christian communities is that God brings us life – right in front of us and within us.  Our mission is to embrace such life and live such life to the full.

Are we really living off the Bread of Life..?

In our lives where are the signs of new life? What does it mean for us today to eat the ‘bread of life’ which comes down from heaven? Where is this life visible in us, others, ourselves? What sort of daily bread do we feed off? Are we genuinely bread for others or do we seek to keep this bread for ourselves? Do we respond to the hunger for bread in our world today? Millions, many of them children, go to bed (or no bed) hungry every night and this doesn’t just happen in far off places and lands. As we write and read these words hundreds if not thousands of refugees are packed into open boats somewhere in the Mediterranean sea.  How does the eucharist connect us to others including those ‘with no bread’?  In our communities, workplaces and homes are we living signs of hope, life and blessing for others more than the opposite?

And what about Sundays..?

Sunday is a good occasion to re-connect with the local community in which we seek bread and life with others.  It seems to me that a Sunday without such communion is less than the full celebration and actualisation of the resurrection. We have missed something if we do not, together with others, break bread – both the living word and the spiritual food of the eucharist –  all in memory and in the current day living out of the Lord’s death and resurrection.

Thank God it’s Friday (TGIF) is a saying on social media. May be we should invoke more the hashtag on twitter which reads #thankgoditssunday ! Why so?  People celebrate Sunday in different ways. 24-hour shopping and Sunday opening has changed the pace of Sunday from a relatively quiet and relaxing day involving, in many cases, Church, visiting and family time together to a less relaxed day with racing to catch up on shopping, washing, ironing and various ‘chores’ before another week begins. And perhaps some social outing or meeting up is managed. Add to this the rise of Sunday morning sports and the picture is complete. Taking time out for a community celebration of the Lord’s resurrection has become a minority activity and that mainly among the very young and the very old. It’s called Sunday demographics.

But, at the heart of Sunday is the idea of a Re-Creation. We need to re-create our minds and bodies through a combination of restful and purposeful activity and a re-opening of the mind to the beauty, goodness and truth all round us.

We may ‘murmur’ because we don’t trust or don’t understanding all this talk about flesh and blood. But, at least we might try to listen and listen again to these so very familiar words of Jesus as reported in chapter 6 of St John’s gospel. Let us be ‘drawn’ as the Father draws us to His Son. And we will be taught wisdom in the secret of our hearts (Psalm 50).