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Why did Jesus leave it to the last minute?

The very first of the first fruits… I wonder whether the slugs will leave me any of them?

This is a reflection on Luke 24:36-53 for Ascension day

I was a very impatient child and always in a rush. My mother would repeatedly say to me ‘more haste, less speed’, and I was covered in so many bumps and bruises from doing things too quickly that my dad worried social services might come round to find out what was going on. That impatient part of me was brought up short by one short phrase in verse 45 of today’s gospel reading.

Luke recounts Jesus’ last interactions with his disciples. He spoke peace over them, encouraged them to have faith and showed them the wounds on his hands and feet. But, for the disciples, the news that Jesus was alive was too good to be true and they struggled to believe. Jesus had to go as far as snacking on a bit of fish to convince them he wasn’t a ghost. These disciples are not exactly what we might consider to be role models of faith. Yet, despite this, v45 tells us that Jesus ‘opened their minds to understand the scriptures’.

I find it fascinating that while Jesus had spent three years with his disciples and had ample time to open their minds, that he didn’t do so until after the trauma of the passion, and just as he is about to leave them. Why did he wait until then? If only Jesus had kick-started this process of revelation much earlier, think how much better prepared the disciples would have been for their subsequent mission, how much pain they could have been spared if they’d known that the crucifixion was only a temporary setback, and how much conflict from theological disagreements could have been avoided over the millennia. It would have given the disciples time to digest the information, ask questions and get everything properly worked out while they could still check the details in person with Jesus.

But these questions of mine are framed within a particular mindset that focuses on learning, achieving and making progress as rapidly as possible; while Jesus had a different purpose in mind. We strive for knowledge and power, look at how we are embracing artificial intelligence, assuming that if just we put our collective brains together we can solve the world’s problems; while Jesus let his disciples walk a path of ambiguity and pain. Our impatient mindset has resulted in something known as the ‘great acceleration’, the rapid and widespread increase in human activity which began around the mid-20th century and is having a devastating impact on the Earth’s natural systems.

The great acceleration is illustrated by a series of exponential graphs – with a shallow gradient until the 1950s, that shifts to a sudden and dramatic increase in recent years – and this holds true for many factors, ranging from the global population and plastic production, to ocean acidification and telecommunications. The impact of our ‘progress at any cost’ mindset on our planet and her inhabitants is catastrophic. We have used our knowledge and discoveries to bring about massive and rapid change, much of it arguably for the good, yet we have done this without wisdom and without insight into the potential unintended consequences.

This is so different from the way that Jesus worked with his disciples. Rather than ensuring they learned, achieved and made progress as rapidly as they possibly could, Jesus let the disciples go though through the drama of the passion before he opened their minds. During the passion, the disciples went on their own journeys of failure, betrayal, loss, grief and confusion. Post-resurrection, their faith and hope were rebuilt slowly, and, rather than being announced with trumpet blasts and choirs of angels, the resurrection itself was met with disbelief and soldiers whose silence could be bought with a few coins. Even as he opened their minds to understand the scriptures, Jesus emphasized his suffering, saying ‘The messiah is to suffer and to rise’ and when He blessed them, he did so by lifting up his wounded hands – a visual reminder of his suffering. This painful process is incompatible with any route to success that our society can imagine.

Jesus’s whole ministry was full of ambiguity, hyperbole and parables, he certainly didn’t teach in straight lines, perhaps partly to avoid us ever being too sure about what he was saying – to keep us humble and teachable? And giving the disciples the understanding they needed at the last possible moment seems entirely in character with this!

Had Jesus opened their minds earlier, these insights might have prevented them from humbly engaging with the message of the Gospel. With the ‘answer’ in their pockets, without having failed so catastrophically themselves, and without then fully engaging with Jesus’s suffering and death, they might have too easily distorted the message from a place of self-satisfaction.

Which is what, I fear, the church has done many times throughout the centuries. From a position of certainty and strength, we have forced Christianity upon others, causing all manner of damage in the process. But failure, humility and grace is a red line throughout the Scriptures. One of our earliest role models, St Paul, is someone who first had to get everything very badly wrong, ruthlessly persecuting the early church, before he was ready to become arguably the most influential Christian of all time – he had that touchstone of his own total failure, coupled with grace given by a God who knows what it is to suffer.

It might also comfort us to know that those who walked with Jesus himself had to go through the threshold of suffering – since Jesus didn’t spare his beloved friends, we shouldn’t expect him to spare us either. Rather than asking why we are suffering as if it were an aberration, might we come to accept it as a normal part of life to be faced and even embraced as the material we have to work with in this moment?

For example, the material my daughter had to work with over the last few years has come in the form of two very difficult bouts of depression. Looked at through the lens of capitalism, this experience was nothing but an unfortunate set-back to her career that rendered her less ‘successful’ and less able to produce, consume and generally keep the system going. However, she was forced to engage with this material to find a way forward, and although she wouldn’t wish depression on anyone and certainly doesn’t ever want to go through it again, the work she had to do to get healthy again has helped her to become more true to who she really is.

There is so much unnecessary suffering in the world that seems to serve no purpose. And just as we struggle to accept the suffering in our own lives, the suffering woven into the very fabric of creation is a great mystery. Consider the parasitoid wasp, who lays its eggs inside the body of a living caterpillar. These hatch and feed on their living host until the day they paralyze it and bore their way out through its skin to escape. Or consider the cuckoo who hatches in other birds’ nests and pushes its rivals out to their deaths. As Tennyson wrote in his poem In Memorandum, Nature is red in tooth and claw.

But St Paul seems very at home with the idea, and frequently links the early church’s experience of persecution and suffering to sharing in Christ’s sufferings as well as in his glory. For St Paul, this is the normal Christian experience; and I would extend that to being the normal human experience. We all share in Christ’s suffering, and he shares in ours – I feel there must be an open wound in the very heart of God.

While God can work through our suffering to bring growth, we must be careful not to go either to the extreme of spiritual bypassing (whereby we avoid our negative feelings by telling ourselves not to get upset because it’s all part of God’s plan) or to the extreme of self-flagellation – life brings suffering enough on its own, we don’t need to add to it. And, of course, Jesus calls us to alleviate suffering wherever we can, to feed the hungry, clothe the poor, and visit those in prison – it is clearly not something to encourage or ignore.

At the end of our gospel passage, Jesus blessed his disciples and left them – at which point they were filled with great joy. There must have been great joy in knowing that God wasn’t demanding perfection through flawless adherence to the law, as they had been taught, but that God welcomes broken, messed-up, failures to join him in the adventure of life. There is great joy in knowing that suffering isn’t something alien to us that we need to resist, but that it is part of what makes us the complex, beautiful people that we are. It creates depth as it hollows us out and makes a space where God is freer to work. There is joy and freedom in realising that the places we considered broken, shameful and ugly are the very places where God works to bring forth beauty, courage, and compassion.

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Intercessory prayer based on Psalm 65

It’s so easy to see the presence of God in the Springtime!

I wrote this prayer based on Psalm 65 – feel free to fill in the gaps!

O God of our salvation, O hope of all the ends of the earth and of the farthest seas

We bring to you our concerns today, knowing that you always hear us when we pray.

Happy are they whom you choose and draw to your courts to dwell there. We shall be satisfied with the blessings of your house, even of your holy temple.

We thank you for our communities of faith, and all the places where you sustain us. We ask for your blessing upon them. We pray for gifts of stamina, resilience, grace and wisdom to those who lead us….

You still the raging of the seas, the roaring of their waves and the clamour of the peoples.

We pray you will still the raging of leaders who do not follow your ways, or care for the people in their charge. We pray for leaders whose hearts are drawn to service and who seek your wisdom. We pray for so many troubled places of the world where the people clamour for peace, for a new desire to work together to find solutions that will last. We pray for … .

Those who dwell at the ends of the earth tremble at your marvels; the gates of the morning and evening sing your praise.

We pray for those in the morning of their lives, for the young people on our hearts…

We pray for those in the evening of their lives, in particular for …

We pray for those who have passed beyond the evening of their life, and for the families and friends of those who they have left behind. We pray for…

You visit the earth and water it; you prepare grain for your people, you soften the ground with showers and bless its increase and crown the year with your goodness.

We pray for those who live in fear of flooding or drought, who cannot depend on the weather. Help us to act in solidarity, treasuring the precious gift of water and striving to minimize our impact on climate change. We long for a world where everyone enjoys the fruits of creation. Give us the imagination and the courage to walk the road that will us lead there.

May the pastures of the wilderness flow with goodness and the hills be girded with joy.

We pray for those who feel they are in the wilderness, who are struggling with their health, fearful for the future, or dealing with other problems. May their wilderness begin to flow with goodness and their lives be filled with joy. We pray for…

May the meadows be clothed with flocks of sheep and the valleys stand so thick with corn that they shall laugh and sing.

We share in the joy of those who are particularly aware of your blessings upon them…

Praise is due to you, O God, in Zion; to you that answer prayer shall vows be paid. With wonders you will answer us in your righteousness

We leave our prayers with you, trusting in your righteousness and readiness to answer us. Help us to notice your wonders and to live in praise of you. In the name of Christ,
Amen.

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But what did Tabitha want?

My neighbour’s cat seeing off an enemy cat on behalf of my (black and white) cat, who now considers turf wars beneath him.

I had a strong reaction to this morning’s reading from Acts 9:36-41. This was the story of Tabitha, a woman who was very active in the church community. ‘Full of good works’, she helped the poor and even made coats and clothes for widows. But then she fell sick and died, at which point Peter, who happened to be in the neighbourhood, was summoned. He prayed for Tabitha and summoned her back to life again.

But is this what Tabitha wanted?

It sounds like she had worked very hard for her church community, perhaps in death she had found rest and peace? Would she really have wanted to come back from that? Were they expecting her to carry on as before? In her death they had lost a valued member of their pastoral care team – is this why Peter brought her back to life again?

Perhaps something to bear in mind if we start to value others for their contribution to our community rather than for who they are, or if we are tempted to use other people for ‘God’s purposes’ rather than supporting them in their journey of faith…

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Death is swallowed up by life

Between my dad’s death and his funeral, I dug a new vegetable plot and wove a fence around it using willow branches I had just pruned away. Dad’s body was placed in a wicker coffin, and this plot reminds me of that. With the coming of Spring, the upright branches have begun to sprout with new life.

I tend to talk about my dad dying rather than passing away because I want to face what happened head on. This was my first direct experience of death and, although it was a great privilege to be with my dad as he died, it was quite confusing. He suffered a heart attack and while I waited for the ambulance I tried to reassure him that I was with him, at the same time as not being sure whether he was still with me.

I witnessed my dad struggle to cling on to this life – but what was going on with that eternal part of him, his ‘being’, for want of a better word? As I read 2 Corinthians 5:1-5 the other morning, I was struck by these words in verse 4: so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. This is an extraordinary image of what happens when we die – our being is somehow engulfed in that greater life that is God. Our very being joins with the ground of all being and we fully realise our unity with God, as we are hidden in Him with Christ. My dad was not religious, and he had good reasons for that, yet the things that were most important to him: justice, integrity, and the equal value of all human beings, are important to God too and, I am sure, continue to bind them together.

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Doubting Thomas

I wrote this nearly a year ago, but have been saving it for now. It’s a reflection on the passage John 20:24-29

I have a confession to make: I’ve never liked this story, in fact I’ve come to realise that I struggle with most of the resurrection stories. I know that might sound like a strange thing to say, especially since the resurrection is central to our faith, but somehow I’ve always found it difficult to navigate the journey between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. The change in mood from distress to joy is too abrupt, I need more time to adjust.

We have this extended period of Lent to prepare ourselves for the awfulness of Jesus’ death on Good Friday. We have been soul-searching, penitent, and self-denying (in theory, at least) for this gravest and most tragic of days. Then on Easter Saturday, I don’t know what to do with myself. I find it hard to journey with the women and the disciples, because while we anticipate the good news, they are in a state of shock and grief. Then, over the course of one night from Easter Saturday to Easter Sunday, the mood totally changes and we are invited to rejoice; it all happens too fast for me.

We need time to recover from difficult experiences; even the best news in the history of the world takes a little time to sink in and heal our wounds. Here I wonder whether the story of Thomas can help us, and I beg your indulgence as I retell his story with a little poetic license.

Let’s try to put ourselves in his place. Thomas had come into Jerusalem with the women and the other disciples, full of hope and expectation, believing that Jesus would victoriously lead the people into the kingdom of God. Granted, Jesus had been rather opaque about the details of how this would work out, preferring to talk about yeast, seeds, coins and sheep rather than coronation ceremonies and forms of government; but a kingdom needs a king and so Thomas would have been expecting Jesus to claim his throne. He had thrown in his lot with Jesus, he had given up his livelihood, left his family, and followed this teacher around the country, believing that his future was inextricably linked with Jesus’ kingdom project.

And then it all went sour.

Firstly, Judas’ betrayal was an enormous blow, not only to Jesus, but to the rest of that tight-knit community. Traitors are particularly destructive, because when people betray our trust, it causes deep wounds, leaving us struggling to trust others again.

Secondly, there was the utter confusion about how Jesus had behaved during the last days of his life. Why had he refused to save himself? How could he establish his kingdom if he wasn’t there to sit on the throne? There were so many occasions where Jesus could have found a way out, as he did when he slipped away from the angry crowd in Nazareth – he could have overpowered the guards, or defended himself against the Sanhedrin, he could easily have charmed Herod and, even at the last, he could have cooperated with Pontius Pilate who clearly wanted to release him.

Thirdly, Thomas had witnessed Jesus being tortured to death in a long, drawn out, brutal way, which must have been incredibly traumatic to see.

And fourthly, on top of all this, Thomas’ hopes, dreams and expectations for the rest of his life had been shattered in one fell swoop. What was he going to do with himself, now that his leader, guide and friend was gone? The roadmap of his life had been ripped up in front of him.

What was there to comfort Thomas at this time? Well, there were the disciples and the women. But from his perspective, they were not dealing well with the grief. It’s a well-known fact that people in deep grief can imagine that they can see or hear their loved one. Instead of facing reality and trying to come to terms with it, as Thomas was, the disciples seemed to be fixating on grief-induced hallucinations, imagining angelic visitations and constructing a narrative to console themselves with – so desperate to believe that the adventure wasn’t all over. Thomas might sound cynical, but remember that the others had seen the resurrected Jesus while he hadn’t.

It was painful for Thomas to see his friends deluding themselves. He kept his thoughts to himself for as long as he could, but eventually he couldn’t contain himself any longer and exploded with the words ‘unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands and put my finger in the mark of the nails, and my hand in his side, I will not believe’. Thomas got to the point of almost giving up on the disciples and returning home, but he joined them for one last meal.

Now this is where I start to have real problems with the story. I feel that the label ‘doubting Thomas’ is terribly unfair. He was feeling very fragile, and let’s remember that he had had a whole extra week of grief compared to the rest of the disciples. Certainly, they too were processing recent events, but at least the disciples had seen Jesus and been given new hope. Thomas was still in the thick of it.

Unfortunately, I think Jesus comes across as not very compassionate, he appears to take poor, wounded Thomas and make a teaching point out of him, almost reprimanding him for his lack of faith. Here, I hope you will forgive me for taking the liberty of locating the narrator of this story at the far end of the table. I am putting the disciple who observes and later recounts this story in a place where he cannot overhear the intimate conversation going on between Thomas and Jesus, he just sees Jesus show Thomas his wounds and fills in the rest himself.

Imagine Thomas’ feelings when he looks up from his bowl of soup and sees Jesus there, sitting opposite, looking at him with love. Shock? Shame? Joy? I like to think of Jesus gently teasing Thomas, insisting on showing him the wounds on his hands and his side. I imagine Jesus coaxing Thomas out of his grief and despair, helping him to start to experience the joy of the resurrection. I imagine them having a big bear hug of great warmth and joy – at which point, I’ll allow Jesus to make his proclamation of blessings for those who believe without seeing, but he does that from of a place of deep affection and compassion for his wounded friend.

So where might this take us?

Firstly, I think it gives us permission to take our time over the resurrection. To let the reality of Christ’s defeat of death dawn on us as slowly as we need it to. New life, the kingdom of God doesn’t all come in an instant. As it takes time for yeast to work through the dough, so God’s work also takes time. Yes, Christ defeated death in an instant, but we experience the effects of that on a longer timescale. Just look at what we are living through now – the multiple challenges that threaten our survival as societies and even as a species. What we don’t hear so much about are the counter-movements, the hopeful communities and projects that are part of that coming kingdom of God. Similarly, in our own lives, healing does come, but it rarely happens overnight, it usually takes time.

Secondly, I think it’s helpful in times of grief and sorrow to know that one of those closest to Jesus also experienced that grief. That he couldn’t be consoled by his comrades’ true, but unhelpful, encouragements. Yes, Jesus is alive, death is conquered, there is new hope – but when we are in that place of suffering these might just feel like empty words; it will take an encounter with Jesus himself to bring us healing. And that is his prerogative, we just need to make ourselves available to Him in prayer.

Thomas’ doubts didn’t exclude him from God’s kingdom, far from it. According to tradition, Thomas went on to found the church in South India, where it is alive and well today. God knows our weakness and our lack of faith; he meets with us in all that and keeps looking at us with love. We can and should bring difficult, confusing, and painful things to him in prayer.

We have five more weeks of Easter, which gives us plenty of time to digest the resurrection stories in the gospels. We have the time we need to adjust to the amazing news that even the worst things we do as human beings cannot overcome the life and love of God. Perhaps as we do this, we can keep in mind the journey that the disciples took. Thomas is an extreme example, because he was left grieving for an extra week, but all of them had been through betrayal, trauma and grief. And yet, after Easter, we come to the birth of the church at Pentecost and then we hear about the life of the early church. God took the disciples from a place of deep brokenness and breathed resurrection life into them. May he do the same with us and our broken world. Amen.

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Do we need Jesus to be perfect?

Snakeshead lilies and daffodils in the Forest of Dean, made famous by the brilliant TV series The Change.

Last week the wonderful Pray as You Go app invited me to reflect on the significance of Jesus’s actions in John 7. By this point in the Gospel narrative Jesus was keeping well away from Judea, since his life was under threat. Despite this, his brothers encouraged him to go to Jerusalem for the festival of Booths, but Jesus point blank refused. Shortly afterwards, he went to the festival after all, but in secret. By the middle of the festival, Jesus stopped hiding and started to teach openly in the temple.

What are we to make of this chain of events? Surely since Jesus was fully God, he must have known that he needed to teach in the temple. And if that were the case, how is it that he appears to have misled or lied to his brothers? Something else must be going on here and the most obvious answer is that we see Jesus changing his mind. We see him working things out as he goes along.

As well as being fully God, Jesus was fully human, and I believe this story is a lovely expression of that humanity. This is not the only example, we also see his humanity in the ‘disobedient’ child hanging around the temple when he should have been on his way home, and in the episode with the Canaanite woman where he learned a thing or two. After all, what is more human than to change our mind? To learn, to grow and to develop?

Which brings me to the question of perfection. If Jesus had been ‘perfect’ he would have known all along that he needed to teach in the temple and would have found a way to do that. Instead, he needed the gentle encouragement of the Spirit to move him from staying in Galilee, to going secretly to Jerusalem, to coming out of hiding. If Jesus needed some help, then so do we, which means that we needn’t be so concerned about making ‘wrong’ decisions. We too can be guided into new directions as the spirit leads and calls us. Fumbling our way forward and taking apparent blind alleys is not failure to adhere to God’s predestined path for our life, but is rather taking steps in a dance into an unformed future; a dance that requires both partners to move together.

And since Jesus wasn’t perfect, God certainly isn’t asking that of us. Instead of striving to ‘get it right’ the whole time, we are called to seek the kingdom of God – a messy, spontaneous, beautiful, ramshackle place that is easy for ‘prostitutes and sinners’ to find a home in – not sterile perfection. Were we ever to attain ‘perfection’ in any area of our lives, then we would have a reached a static point and, since one of the criteria for being alive is the capacity to move, we would effectively have died.

The people most committed to perfection in the Gospel stories were the Pharisees, and Jesus made it clear that they were going down the wrong track. Striving for perfection, and even excellence, can be toxic. Of course, there is a place for expertise, but at this point in history we urgently need people of wisdom and compassion, and such people have rarely led a ‘perfect’ life.

So, Pray As You, here is my reflection, heavily influenced by my own struggle with perfectionism.

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Speaking to the audience

Baby tomato plants!

Mtt 5:31-32
‘It was also said, “Whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce.” But I say to you that anyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of unchastity, causes her to commit adultery; and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.

I was listening to the excellent podcast Nomad the other day, and found myself increasingly uncomfortable with the interviewee’s critique of Jesus’ teaching on divorce and remarriage. At the time, it was very easy for a man to divorce his wife for no particular reason, all he had to do was hand her a certificate of divorce. In that patriarchal society, this practise could be devastating for women, as they would have potentially had to remarry (which wouldn’t have solved the long-term security issue) or take up prostitution to survive. As we might expect, Jesus speaks out against easy divorce for trivial reasons. However, the interviewee was, to say the least, disappointed that the reason Jesus gave for his opposition was that divorce pushed people into adultery rather than because it had negative impacts on women. While I don’t want to make excuses for what Jesus said, I do think it is unwise to read a first century passage with 21st century eyes and expect it to make total sense in our context.

What strikes me is that Jesus was speaking to his audience. This was a people who were deeply concerned about obeying the law, and so I imagine that breaking the seventh commandment (Do not commit adultery) would have hit home much more powerfully than expressing a concern for women’s rights – maybe Jesus was being highly pragmatic in that he found an effective way to advocate for women in a culture that had not yet developed an understanding of the equality of the sexes. A discourse about equal opportunities and women’s empowerment would probably gone over people’s heads, blinding them with the light rather than giving them enough light to guide them forward. I see it as a reflection of the imperfect reality of engaging with people where they are at and moving them incrementally forward.

The Christian faith is amazingly dynamic. We aren’t locked into a religion that was delivered fully baked in the first century, the Holy Spirit has been revealing the ways of God through the ages, moving us forward, sometimes despite ourselves, bringing us to the point of understanding women and men as being of equal value. Were Jesus born in the 21st century, I imagine he would speak to us in a way that we could understand, pragmatically guiding us forward, in an albeit incomplete way, since we seem only able to hear the truth in small doses.

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Is it time for a benevolent dictator?

It’s been a while… but Spring has sprung and it’s time to write again.

Luke 4:1-13 The temptation of Jesus

Over the years, we have had the odd discussion over the dinner table about the best form of government. Given the results of the most recent democratic process across the pond, the question feels even more pertinent – rather than being governed by politicians who inevitably have at least half an eye on how to stay in power, wouldn’t it be better to have a benevolent dictator? Practicalities apart, if there were a totally good person who was wise enough to make the best decisions for everyone – wouldn’t we want them to govern us unchallenged?

The other morning, as I was musing on Luke’s account of the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness, it occurred to me that the second temptation was exactly that: to have authority over the nations, to be a benevolent dictator.

Similarly, the other two temptations seem to be good ideas. Why wouldn’t you want to provide for people’s physical needs by ensuring the food supply? And wouldn’t proving that Jesus was the son of God have prevented a lot of religious conflict, as well as much individual existential angst over the centuries?

Just like the first and third temptations, becoming a benevolent dictator would have been a way to solve humanity’s problems – but perhaps just at a superficial level. The message of the cross seems to be that our deepest need is for God to identify with our pain and suffering, rather than to prevent it.

This perplexing state of affairs leaves us with the responsibility of ensuring that our neighbours have enough to eat, of holding those who govern us to account, and of keeping faith despite the odds, while living peaceably with those who don’t.

Perhaps the desert experience was in part about letting humanity grow up, like a good parent who patiently teaches the child rather than doing the task for them? I easily fall into believing that struggle and pain is something externally imposed upon us that we need to resist or at least endure. It might make more sense to consider it the very work of being human, and that this is why God joined us in it rather than saved us from it.

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Unintended consequences

Nothing from my garden today, but a thing of beauty all the same: sweets from Tunisia!

My reading for this morning was Matthew 2:13-15, 19-23: the obvious question is, what about verses 16 to 18? This is the often-overlooked story of the slaughter of the innocents, which, while it doesn’t fit so nicely with our cosy Christmas vibe, is a powerful example of unintended consequences.

The wise men knew that a king was about to be born and so, within their operational paradigm (kings are born in places of human power), they did the obvious thing and headed straight for King Herod’s palace. This set off a chain of events that resulted in the massacre of all the toddlers and babies under two years old in the greater Bethlehem area.

Had the wise men realised that God’s power doesn’t work like that, that it is made perfect in weakness and is given away in humility to serve others, then they might have avoided the palace and found Jesus some other way. Such a change in the paradigm shift of their thinking could have avoided the tragic unintended consequences.

We are aware of our impending environmental crisis and that we must do something about it, but since we are still functioning within the same paradigm that got us into our current predicament, our ‘solutions’ often seem to end up making things worse. For example, we are aware that petrol-driven cars are problematic, but rather than radically rethinking our mobility and the factors that ‘drive’ it, we have found a solution that allows us to carry on as usual, albeit avoiding fossil fuels. However, one of the problems with electric cars is that their batteries require metals such as cobalt, lithium and rare earth elements, whose extraction comes with grave consequences for the environment and human rights.

Like the three wise men, we (myself most definitely included) need a paradigm shift in our thinking, if we are to avoid the terrible unintended consequences of our otherwise well-meaning actions.

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Embodiment and faith

A fish from my pond that was a victim of fluctuating temperatures.

I wrote this before my father passed away, it was supposed to be a reflection for the 4th Sunday in Advent, on Luke 1:39-56. It has taken on a deeper meaning for me since my father’s death because I have been so distracted that I have struggled to pray or even be silent, but I have managed to calm my body a little through yoga.

I was a very clumsy child, covered in cuts and bruises, dashing from one activity to the next without taking much notice of my body. I still have this tendency, and earlier this summer I cut my hand on a glass while rushing to clear it away. My friend made a big fuss of the blood slowly seeping out of my hand, while I was trying to ignore it. She insisted on getting me a plaster, saying that my bodily integrity really mattered. Her genuine concern for my flesh deeply touched me – I tend to view my body as an unwelcome necessity that carries around the really important parts of me: my mind and my spirit – but I am coming to realise that it is important to integrate all three, and today’s Gospel story can help us with that.

One of the earliest Christian heresies was gnosticism, which considered material existence to be flawed or evil, and got around the incarnation by saying that Christ only temporarily occupied a human body but was not fully one with it. This position is understandable, it’s hard to believe that a messy human body like ours with its conflicting impulses could ever have been one with perfect divinity. But this is a mystery of our faith.

Although gnosticism was rejected as heresy, it, and other philosophies that hold to a strict division between matter and spirit, continues to influence us. This is not helped by Paul’s use of the word sarx which can mean both flesh and sinful human nature, contributing to the impression that the body is inherently sinful and that sins committed with our bodies are much worse than other sorts of sins. But 1 Corinthians 6:19 tells us that our bodies are a temple of the holy spirit.

This encounter between Mary and Elizabeth is remarkable for a number of reasons. For one thing, it is one of those rare instances in scripture where we overhear two named women talking about something other than a man. It is also interesting because of the focus on these women’s pregnant bodies.

In the culture of the time, women’s bodies were deeply problematic. Mary could have been killed if her virginity was even called into question while Elizabeth would have lived as a pariah for failing her one purpose in life: providing her husband with a son. With the news of their respective pregnancies, their lives were turned upside down and their bodies would never be the same.

Incarnation means taking on flesh, and Mary’s body was essential for the enfleshment of Christ; she sheltered him in her womb, fed him through her placenta, and comforted him with the sound of her voice and the movements of her body. But as well as giving her body as a place for God to be made man, Mary’s mind and her spirit were also part of this experience; Mary said yes with every part of her being – she became the mother of God with her body, mind and spirit.

And then there is the second pregnancy in this narrative, Elizabeth’s. An older woman, well-past her sell-by date, who assumed that she’d go to the grave barren, suddenly finds herself pregnant after an angel visits her husband. I wonder how that felt? On the one hand, she must have been overjoyed to become pregnant, the shame of her childlessness finally taken away, but on the other hand it must have been overwhelming to contemplate pregnancy at this late stage of life.

After being visited by the Angel Gabriel and overshadowed by the Holy Spirit, Mary rushes off to visit her relative Elizabeth. When Mary greets Elizabeth, the holy spirit fills her too, and she gushes forth words of blessing. Just note that both these women’s bodies had become the Spirit’s dwelling place, while the official dwelling place of the spirit – the central area of the Jerusalem temple – was strictly off-limits to women.

Elizabeth exclaimed that upon hearing Mary’s voice, the child in her womb leapt for joy. The unborn John already responded to the barely formed Jesus – what a remarkable connection. I wonder what it was like for the four of them during those three months they spent waiting together. I imagine it was a precious, blessed time that resourced both women for what was to come. How hard it must have been for Mary when Elizabeth came to term, and she had to return to Nazareth to face the music over her increasingly visible pregnancy.

Mary could easily have become ashamed of her body, as people made insinuations and assumptions, but the annunciation was unequivocal, and I imagine she held on tight to that during the weeks and months ahead. And, of course, it helped that her fiancé Joseph, with a little angelic help, had decided to believe her story.

At the time, female bodies were considered inferior and frequently ritually unclean. Yet we see the value that God puts on the female body in that he was willing to be incarnated in one. We also see the value that God puts on older women’s bodies, menopausal and otherwise on the scrap heap – he chose one of these bodies to birth John the Baptist, a pivotal figure in the life of Christ and the story of the church. Female bodies, older bodies and by extrapolation all bodies – irrespective of ethnicity, disability, or any other category we might like to think of – are precious to God.

The value of bodies is taken up in the Magnificat, the song of praise that Mary sings in response to Elizabeth’s blessing:

He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty.

The powerful tend to rise to great heights by crushing the bodies of the lowly. In the most blatant expression of power over others, slavery, human bodies are bought and sold as commodities – think of the wealthy elite of the Roman Empire, the enrichment of Colonial Europe at Africa’s expense or modern-day slavery in the form of human trafficking, and bonded and forced labour. In the Magnificat, we see a reversal of fortunes: the powerful are brought down and the lowly are lifted up – the well-fed bodies of the rich are sent away empty, while the hungry bodies of the poor are filled with good things. These vulnerable bodies matter to God and they should matter to us too.

Do we value the bodies of the people who work for us? Cleaners and construction workers, migrant fruit pickers, child labourers on cocoa farms, and the people who mine the conflict minerals in our smartphones? If we care for their bodies, we will take an interest in where the things we buy come from and how they are produced.

Christ’s body was knitted together in Mary’s womb out of atoms most recently incarnated in plants and animals, and before that they were found in soil and minerals. In the incarnation of Christ, all forms of matter are thus sanctified and so all these bodies in their different forms deserve our respect and honour. So when we inevitably take the life from other beings to sustain our own lives, I believe we should do so with respect and gratitude, rather than over-consuming or wasting them.

Christmas is a time of feasting, and this is as it should be – but as we celebrate the incarnation of Christ, let’s be mindful of what our celebrations cost the bodies of other people, plants, and animals and make efforts to reduce that cost.

Christianity has been called a religion of the flesh, and this is most explicit in Christ’s command to eat his flesh and drink his blood at the communion table. Beyond this, it is no accident that our two most important sacraments, baptism and communion, are whole being experiences – with body, mind and spirit agreeing together to turn to God. And think of the comfort we can gain by lighting a candle to pray when words fail us. Our bodies can help us when our minds and spirits are exhausted – a friend of mine who feels this way is building a labyrinth in her garden, so that at least her body can pray as she walks around it.

Christ taking up residence in Mary is an archetype of incarnation – and although it was a one-off event, it also gives a pattern for us to follow. We receive the same call as Mary to incarnate Christ with all of our being: body, mind and spirit. To bring him forth into the world.

I wonder what practise might help us with this? Perhaps at the times when we are most aware of our bodies – when they fail us or when they bring us joy – at those times, perhaps, we might pause and thank God for dwelling in us, and ask him to take up more space in our being.