The best is yet to come

 ‘Let us also go, that we may die with him …..’ (John 11:16)

John 11:1-45 (Year A: Fifth Sunday of Lent Sunday 3^rd April 2017)

We choose a thousand things a day: to get up at a particular time and not another, to continue living and working where we are, to know and love another today and every day, to eat salad and not to eat salad, to sign up for social media or not to sign up, to cultivate positive frames of mind or not.  Some choices are hardly choices at all given our circumstances and commitments. Other choices are less given and, perhaps, we may be faced with major life-changing choices that cause us to pause and consider.  Then again, there are choices we freely make without hardly being aware of these as free choices.  We chose to take the stairs in the train station every morning instead of the escalator (or the opposite) and we never think about those sorts of very every-day and routine actions.

The raising of Lazarus (or Eleazar in Hebrew, the meaning of which is ‘God has helped’) is the final and seventh ‘Sign’ in the Gospel of John. This long Lenten Sunday reading from John is completely unique among the Gospels – as is much of the long discourses found in John as well as four of the seven signs of which this is one.  Because this story is unique to the fourth Gospel doesn’t mean that ‘it didn’t happen’.  We don’t know. What we do know is that the story is founded in the truth of the love and power of Jesus to raise people to new life not in some esoteric spiritual and metaphorical sense but, also, in a very concrete and ‘this worldly’ sense.  This can make for uncomfortable hearing and reading to the post-enlightenment rational mind. While it would be nonsensical to treat these long discourses found in John (or, indeed, all of the many sayings of Jesus scattered across all four canonical Gospels) as direct transcripts of what was said (for one thing, as far as know, Jesus did not speak in English let alone the authorised English found in the King James version of the Bible). Things can get lost in translation and the historical and lived experience of the communities in which stories about Jesus circulated in the first century shapes what is emphasised, retained or left behind.  We do well to remember that the evangelist closes his gospel (at least the copy version we have received) as follows (21:24-25):

This is the disciple who is testifying to these things and has written them, and we know that his testimony is true. But there are also many other things that Jesus did; if every one of them were written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.

Not everything was written down and what was written down is not fully ‘history’ in the contemporary empirical sense. This is why we need to read the scriptures ‘on our knees’ so to speak. That is with an open and inquiring mind, a prayerful heart and a humble disposition respecting the wisdom and experience of our brother and sister disciples who we went before us. Meeting the Word of God in the scriptures is a living as well as a lived experience. The really important part of this encounter is not the analysis of what was said or is said but, rather, the transformation from death to life and from life to death.  We enter the tomb with Jesus and find new life where we least expect it.  In our daily Lenten dying we sow seeds of new Easter life.  The best is yet to come.  Believe it.

As one sent only for today

 ‘… We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day…..’ (John 9:4)

John 9:1-41 (Year A: Fourth Sunday of Lent Sunday 26^th March 2017)

What? A blind man presents himself to Jesus in the presence of his disciples.  Who sinned? Who was to blame?  You see (pardon the pun), the condition like poverty must have been someone’s fault. And to such a condition may be added plenty of other conditions known to modern humanity from divorce to expulsions and exclusions. Who was to blame? There must be someone to blame.  It didn’t just happen: it had a cause in the bad behaviour of someone or their parents.  If we are honest with ourselves we might even spot traces of such warped thinking in our own minds.

There are none so blind as those who refuse to see is a well-known saying.   The worst type of spiritual blindness is that whereby we cannot see what others plainly see about us. Yet, what others see may be a distortion or, even, untrue.  Perception is a slippery surface. The ‘Johari Window’ conceptualised by Luft and Ingham is used to distinguish

1. What we know about ourselves and what others know
2. What we know about ourselves but others do not know
3. What others know about us but we do not know
4. What is unknown to us and others at the same time.

The last piece of the window is particularly significant. What are the intra-personal and inter-personal ‘unknown unknowns’?  Only God can show us if are open to such a discovery. The ‘unknown unknowns’ that nobody can see might include some or all of the following:

• A hidden capacity and talent that has remained submerged and unknown for decades
• An unknown illness or underlying condition
• An unknown fear, resistance or phobia about something
• A framework of thinking and assuming that is well formed but out of sync with the truth and goodness within us
• And much more besides.

Isn’t the human soul a mystery! And isn’t life a tragedy when the heights of scientific discovery, poetic skill and love were never uncovered, known, put to use or realised for the good of others?  How many lives have either been cut short or stultified over eons of times?

The story of the healing of a blind man speaks to us today.  ‘As long as it is day’ suggests two things: today is the only certainty we have and our opportunity to walk in the light any day including tomorrow is therefore time bound.  Sometimes, religious folks worry about the ‘day after today’ as in ‘life after death’. They might be advised to take Jesus’s example and attend to ‘life before death’ and live in the Light that Jesus offers us in the here and now. That way death will lead to life, blindness to sight and the ‘night will be as clear as the day’.

Each of us has a part to play in this world. We are sent for a purpose. And we are called back for a purpose. All is revealed in the fullness of time. In the meantime, we only have today – the light of today. Let us do the works God has given us to do today and leave this world a more beautiful, a more compassionate, a more just place.

Hard borders and high walls

 ‘… If you knew the gift of God …..’ (John 4:10)

John 4:5-42 (Year A: Third Sunday of Lent Sunday 19^th March 2017)

Typical of Lent as we draw closer to The Great Feast of Easter the tone and length of Sunday gospel reading become heavier and longer.   Enter John this Sunday.  Jesus crosses a ‘frictionless and seamless border’ as he left Judea and started back to Galilee going through Samaria. 

(It might be akin to someone travelling from Donegal to Dublin and passing through County Tyrone.  You have to do that to get to the south unless you go around a long way that hours to your journey.)

Now we are sitting near a well in a place called Sychar. It is a special place of religious significance. It is in the middle of the day. A traveller stops there for rest and for some of that precious cool water.  ‘Give me a drink’ says the traveller.  That was fairly direct and concise!  The conversation opens up. There is a play on words with deep, deep significance like the well of Jacob.  Jesus reveals himself as an unusual Jew. He is speaking in a public place to a woman and a Samaritan woman at that (‘They were astonished that he was speaking with a woman’ - v. 7).  Now, Samaritans were a somewhat different breed to the Jews but not that different as not to share Jacob as their common ancestor and the first five books of what we know as the Bible as authoritative scripture. In other words, they were very much outside the pale as far as Jews were concerned but they were frustratingly near enough in theology, expectation and ethnic roots. Does any of this even sound remotely familiar to an observer of religious-political-ethnic identity on the island of Ireland?

What do I thirst for?

When Jesus said to the Samaritan woman ‘Give me a drink’ he was about to prompt a discussion that lead from the ordinary and immediate thirst for water to a deeper, spiritual and lasting thirst for new life. On the latter point, it is us – the Samaritan woman and everyone no matter what tribe or creed or colour or orientation – who thirst. We thirst to be understood. We thirst to be set free of the images and representations that others may try to incarcerate us (or that we try to apply to ourselves If we only knew that it is that God is offering us beyond and underneath the conversations and actions of others including those who hurt us or mistreat us or who are different to us and do not belong to our ‘tribe’ (or ‘identity’ to use a more sociological term).

The conversation at the well leads to a realisation on the part of the Samaritan that she is speaking to someone extraordinary. She returns to her family and tribe and something has started. Other outsiders from this Samaritan tribe seek out this unusual Jew.  They invite him to stay in their town and Jesus ‘stayed there for two days’.  We have no further details but we may assume that, according to John, at least, there were some interesting conversations happening over 48 hours or so.  They knew, also, that they had encountered something wonderful and precious for ‘many more believed because of his word’ (v. 41). 

They said to the woman, ‘It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the Saviour of the world. (v. 42). 

There are many strands to this story from the 4^th chapter of John but we should not miss that point that Jesus is, here, signalling a new departure from the religious culture he grew up in.  He is reaching out to other tribes and ‘religions’

Talking and hanging out with the ‘wrong’ people

Talking to people who are very different by reason of background, orientation, status or outlook in life says something about us. Not infrequently to be seen talking and associating with the wrong people – people who do not belong to ‘us’ or who come from the opposite or even enemy side in whatever stance, struggle or contestation ‘we’ are part of – attracts negative comment. Taken to its extreme, expulsion or marginalisation may be the price of ‘talking to the other side’ or sharing in their feasts. Hard borders and high walls run deep in our societies and in our hearts. The physical and visible borders and walls are not even as significant as those invisible ones that separate us from each other. This is where enmity and strife oirginate.

The unfortunate aspect of many human associations and belongings is that such belonging can be exclusive, excluding and sectarian. We are right; they are wrong. Justice and truth is on our side; wickedness, folly and betrayal is on the other.

Even today, many who claim to follow Jesus operate like as if they are part of a doctrinally pure, liturgically valid-only and error-excluding self-contained island. The One True Island with the drawbridges pulled up and everyone safe and cosy on the inside.  Sharing the Table of our Master’s Word let alone his Bread is seen as betrayal of first principles. One must ask what principles and whose principles?

Honesty with ourselves

For the week that is this we might reflect on the very first line of the ‘Confessions’ of the spiritual patron of our island:

I, Patrick, a sinner, a most simple countryman, the least of all the faithful and most contemptible to man

(see also 1 Timothy 1:15).

Perhaps a ruthlessly honest appraisal of where one is at is the best antidote to sectarianism, superiority, presumption and exclusion.

We would do well to aim to live by the Wesleyian maxim of ‘friends of all; enemies of none’ even if it is not possible to fulfil this at all times and with all peoples. It is worth the try.

Entering into a deep and respectful dialogue with the other is an exercise of compassion as much to ourselves as to the other. It liberates us from our preconceived notions and set assumptions. In this way, truth, beauty and goodness may have a chance of emerging in our encounters and conversations.