Category: Reflection

Posted on

Does the fruit of the tree of life have grubs in it?

This year, my fig tree is producing lots of fruit. Unfortunately for me, the birds in my garden also have a taste for figs and so I have taken to picking the fruit before it is fully ripe, since the birds swiftly demolish any that I miss. Even then, about half the figs I harvest contain a grub or two who have eaten their way through a good part of the flesh.

And so, as I was reading the words of my daily prayer for Sunday morning: Come and shelter under the tree of life, enjoy the cool shade and taste its fruit my mind went straight to my fig tree. In my imagination, I picked a ripe fruit and settled myself down on a shady chair – but I stopped myself short, did I dare take a big bite? What if it were full of grubs? Could the fruit of the tree of life have grubs in? Surely not, since heaven, where the tree of life is found, is perfect! Surely there is no place in paradise for grubs, slugs, nettles and everything else that causes me trouble?!

Of course, this is a philosophical question, it being highly unlikely that the afterlife will resemble life on Earth, and perhaps I shouldn’t make so much of symbols anyway, particularly apocalyptic ones? But it did strike me that perhaps at least some of the fruit of the tree of life would contain grubs. The insects they will grow into have a role to play in the ecosystem, just like the birds who enjoy their figs as much as I do.

It’s interesting to notice that I can come to terms with sharing the fruit of the tree of life with the grubs and the birds, while sharing the figs from my own tree is much more problematic. I think that, since I planted and tended the tree, I see them as my figs, that I have an exclusive right to them.

It looks like the problem here might be my selfishness and anthropocentrism! Maybe heaven, the kingdom of God, is where I can share my figs with the birds and the insects without begrudging them their share, after all:

The wolf shall live with the lamb,
the leopard shall lie down with the kid,
the calf and the lion and the fatling together,
and a little child shall lead them.

Isaiah 11:6

Posted on

1 Corinthians 2:9-16

My daughter finds deep symbolism in the stressed-looking mother opossum carrying her babies around, and felt the need to express this in clay 😉

I was pondering 1 Corinthians 2:9-16 on a train journey a few weeks ago – it’s rather dense text, and so my imagination took a bit of a leap. I’d like to share with you where I ended up. Once again, I wish I were an artist, because these verses conjure up a beautiful image that I struggle to describe in words.

Verse 10 talks about the Spirit who searches everything, even the depths of God, and so we start with the Holy Spirit reaching into the heart of God the Father.
Then in verse 11, we read that the human spirit, deep within us, knows what is truly human – our spirit reaches deep into our hearts.
Verse 12 tells us that we have received the Spirit that is from God, this makes a connection between our heart and the heart of God. The Holy Spirit joins with the spirit of our inner being, bringing us and God into union.

I imagine the Holy Spirit as a sort of dynamic loop of light flowing from the heart of God into our hearts, bringing love and peace. Once inside, the Spirit searches out our inmost being (Psalm 139:1-6), and then flows out of our bodies, bringing all we are living with into the heart of God the Father, where Christ is. This is an unbroken flow of the Spirit between our heart and the heart of God.

This action of the Holy Spirit changes our hearts and changes our minds, to the point that Paul dares to write in verse 16 that ‘we have the mind of Christ’. I am comforted by this intimate image of the love of God the Father being brought into my heart by the Holy Spirit, and that the troubles of my heart are then carried up to Christ in God, who understands me and transforms me.

Posted on

It’s high time I wrote something about compost.

My compost heap has gradually been working on me. I no longer pull out the pervasive weeds that invade my vegetable beds in frustration, rather these days I do it with gratitude, as they will soon be transformed into food for my plants in the warm, dark womb of the heap.

This morning I decided that it was time to cut down the stinging nettles standing guard around it. Since the neighbours have kindly consented to donating their kitchen scraps to my garden project, I thought I ought to at least make the area reasonably accessible. As I was stuffing the felled nettles into the top of the heap, I noticed a seedling that had grown at the bottom – probably a courgette or a pumpkin – and it made me smile.

Compost can also be a metaphor for life. Everything that happens to us, good or bad, can be put on the inner compost heap, broken down over time with reflection and prayer, and then be transformed into something new and life-giving. We have to trust this slow but steady process, perhaps that’s what the words I was reading in the letter of James this morning were talking about?

Posted on

Colossians 3:1-11

Limax maximus: slugs are my enemies, but this is a fabulous specimen, and, after all, we are called to love our enemies!

I was struck the other morning by the mysterious words at the beginning of chapter 3 of the letter to the Colossians. I had a sense of our inner beings being drawn out of a state of turmoil and darkness (3:1 you have been raised with Christ) into a place of warmth, light and safety (3:3 hidden with Christ in God).

Traditionally when we’ve thought of being ‘raised with Christ’ we’ve mostly talked about being forgiven our sins, about guilt and sacrifice, but as I read it, it feels like being raised up out of the consequences of sin – what has been done to us and how in our weakness and pain we have reacted – in an act of profound healing.

I had a good childhood, with a stable home and parents that loved me. But being a highly sensitive person, I took the inevitable knocks of life very hard. I became a very anxious child and suffered with inexplicable stomach aches that I now understand as an expression of my built-up stress. This later appeared in various forms such as free-floating anxiety and teeth-grinding. I tried to ‘leave it at the foot of the cross’ and ‘just trust God’, but it wasn’t until my mid-thirties that I realised I had to do my part and stop turning things over in my mind; viewing them from every conceivable angle in a compulsive attempt to solve the problem was only making things worse. Trusting God meant properly letting go, and with that came great relief.

I made a conscious step of faith aged 12, which I see as the beginning of my healing, of my being raised with Christ. If I were an artist, I would draw a figure in the bottom left-hand corner of the page drowning in a murky quagmire, or entangled in a forbidding thorny forest, unable to escape from their anxiety and distress. Then in the top right-hand corner there is an area of pure light where God is, out of which reach the hands of Christ to grab hold of the suffering person and pull them into the light. The person’s true self is also made of light, and that becomes visible as they are raised up out of their distress.

Then I would draw another picture, this time of God the Father holding the figure together with Christ at the centre of a warm embrace. It is a place of utter peace, love and rest, of light and wholeness… and there is room for everyone in the all-encompassing arms of God (3:11 there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all!)

My experience is that the move from being in the quagmire to being aware of our safety in the arms of God does not take place overnight. As with every relationship, it develops in stages and continues to grow. Verse 10 says [you] have clothed yourselves with the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its creator. This present, active process started, at least as I understand it, at the age of 12, and since then my faith in God has been growing and changing in a surprising (and very non-linear) journey of discovery, and there is still so much more to learn!

Posted on

God is a woman baker

Fenugreek seeds

The following is a reflection on Matthew 13:33 that I gave in May 2023, inspired by the work of Robert Farrar Capon on the parables of Jesus.

About 20 years ago, I bought this book about the parables of Jesus. Since then, it has been sitting on my shelf, periodically inviting me to return to it: I know it is full of great wisdom, but it is hard to understand and even harder to explain to anyone else. I find that rather ironic, as the parables themselves can be like that. Rather than giving us doctrines set in stone for all time, Jesus gave us parables that are wide open to interpretation. So, when I saw the Gospel for today, I thought it was high time I made an attempt to share with you some of the wisdom hidden in this rather challenging book.

Oh, and just to add one more layer of complexity, today’s parables are about the kingdom of God. Jesus talked a lot about the kingdom of God, but never really defined it; here he gives us five images to consider: a mustard seed, some yeast, treasure, a pearl and a drag-net. I’m going to look at just one of these images to see if we can shed any light on what Jesus meant: the parable of the yeast.

As I read it to you again, just notice what image comes to your mind: ‘The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened.’ What image does that conjure up in your mind? I see a rather domestic picture of a woman at home in her kitchen kneading a modest ball of dough ready for the family meal.

My husband bought a bread machine about a year ago. In typical fashion, I chastised him for the unnecessary purchase, but then, of course, I am the one who has ended up using it, so I can say with some authority that it takes 400g of flour to make our usual loaf.

The woman in the parable used three measures of flour, which doesn’t sound like very much, until we go back to the original Greek, where we discover that the word for measure is ‘sata’ and that three sata is a little over a bushel of flour – which, in today’s money, is 21kg of flour. Let that sink in, 21 kilograms. That’s enough to make 52 loaves of bread.

This is such a large quantity of flour, that we could understand it to represent the world, in fact it’s so disproportionately huge, that perhaps it represents the whole of creation?

Can you imagine trying to deal with enough dough for 52 loaves of bread by hand? It’s hard enough work kneading the dough for a single loaf, hence the aforementioned bread machine, but the mixing, the kneading, the handling of such an enormous quantity of sticky, heavy dough is a job for an industrial machine, not an individual person.

So, what might this tell us about the woman in the parable? Well, she has very strong arms and is extremely determined – despite the challenges of handling such an enormous quantity of dough, she gets the job done. This woman is far removed from the domestic goddess I had originally imagined!

What a fantastic image of God!

Not only is this one of those few female pictures of God hidden in the Scriptures, but it is a powerful one. God as a woman baker has a job to do and she is doing it with gusto. She has taken on a project that is not easy; the parallel between the unwieldy lump of dough and the current state of the world is obvious.

But back to the kingdom and what this parable can tell us about it.

Firstly, the kingdom has always been there. No competent baker would add yeast part way through the process, it’s mixed in right at the beginning. Similarly, God’s kingdom has been at work ever since the very beginning of creation, right from the big bang. The kingdom didn’t start when the Word became flesh in Jesus, but in the person of Jesus, God showed us his face and told us his name and sent us out to share that good news with everyone.

Secondly, the kingdom is everywhere. The yeast isn’t reserved for a special portion of the flour, it’s mixed into the whole. The kingdom of God is seeded throughout the whole of creation, not just in the church or so-called Christian nations. God has done amazing things through the church and the world would be much poorer without it. As well as nurturing the spiritual growth of individuals, the church has a rich artistic and cultural heritage, and in many places it is a lifeline for struggling communities, and I could go on.

However, it is also true that God’s kingdom has not been limited to the activities of the church. Just as the yeast leavens the whole dough, God is also at work in the wider world – think of the wisdom of Buddhism or of indigenous communities, the creativity found in cultures very different to our own, and the amazing knowledge and insights gained by peoples all over the world. What is more, not infrequently, the church has been dragged kicking and screaming into the kingdom that God has already been advancing in the world; just as an example, we are rightly shocked that women didn’t get the federal vote until 1971 in Switzerland, yet in the Church of England, women had to wait until 1992 to be ordained priests, and 2015 to be ordained bishops!

Thirdly, just as the yeast cannot be separated from the flour, so God’s kingdom cannot be separated from the world. Which takes us back to the very end of our other reading this morning from the letter to the Romans.

For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Nothing can separate us from the love of God – it might not always feel that way, but God’s love is as inseparable from his creatures as the yeast is from the dough.

Fourthly and finally, the kingdom is mysterious. The Greek verb translated as ‘mixed’ in this parable actually means to hide: the woman hides the yeast in the flour. Once it’s in the dough, yeast is invisible to our eyes, but it is there quietly doing its work, slowly but surely leavening the whole batch. Similarly, we cannot ‘see’ the kingdom, or even define it, but we can see its effects: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them (Mtt 11:5). God has hidden the kingdom in the world, he is transforming creation before our very eyes even though we cannot always see it.

We live in a time of great change, and our instinctive reaction is often fear. We see the decline of the church in the West and, understandably, lament. Is the yeast still leavening the dough?

Perhaps theologian Phyllis Tickle has something helpful to say about this. She points out that about every 500 years, the church goes through what she describes as a giant ‘rummage sale’ – what she means is that it cleans its house, which is a difficult process, but that something new emerges.

These ‘rummage sales’ are linked to what is going on in the wider culture and she cites the following events, each following on from the one before after about 500 years: we start with the incarnation of Christ, then the emergence of monasticism as the church went underground at the collapse of the Roman Empire, next the Great Schism that separated the church into the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox branches, and most recently the Reformation. We are now 500 years on from that, and the time is ripe for great change in the church again.

We don’t know what will come next, but we don’t need to be afraid: the yeast of the kingdom is slowly but surely continuing its work.

So where does this leave us? It seems to me that the overarching message is to patiently trust God. To trust him in that holy ambiguity that our chaplain talked about last week. He has been at work in the whole world since the very beginning, is at work now, and will continue his work until it is finished. We needn’t despair, because although it is often a mystery to us, the kingdom is growing. It isn’t something we can drive and still less something that we are responsible for, rather we are invited to join in with it. And I know that you are already joining in the work of the kingdom in many ways, through your friendships, families, work, voluntary activities and much more, both through the church and elsewhere. So I encourage us to keep I up the good work and be open to whatever else God might be calling us to do.

One last thought about this parable; the dough is indigestible in its current form, and it won’t be edible until the yeast has finished its work and the loaf has been baked. So too, our world is indigestible in its current form, there are so many things about it that outage and upset us, that cause us pain. Despite the unwieldy, almost impossible task, the woman baker of our parable got the whole dough leavened. Let us trust that God will similarly transform the whole world through the work of His mysterious kingdom.

Posted on

Can we call a truce with nature?

Slugs 1 - 0 Inner Gardener

I am often tempted to idealise nature. However, after a recent trip to the forest I realised that I had brought a passenger home with me, a tick that was potentially bearing encephalitis, which got me thinking about the perfectly good reasons that set us on the path to our current alienation from the more-than-human world. Here are some musings.

Untamed nature has always tried to destroy us – think wild animals, pests and diseases. She doesn’t give up food for us to eat easily. We have had to tame her, to become gardeners, to clear the weeds and manage the fertility of the soil, to make a safe space to feed ourselves and to rest. It has been a constant battle against slugs and aphids, ergot and blight. But we mostly subsisted.

Revolutions agricultural and industrial raised many of us out of the mire into a, by many measures, far better standard of living. But they were also apocalypses of a kind, destroying ecologies, damaging mental health, and making us into cogs in a machine.

But even that wasn’t enough. We pushed on, wanting to protect ourselves entirely from the forces of nature. We further mechanised and digitalized. Those of us who could hid ourselves away in semi-sterile boxes, while the rest of humanity and the more-than-human world paid the price for our comfort. But nature keeps coming for us in dry rot and black mould, in vermin and viruses, in coughs, cancer and cholera.

We can’t escape our vulnerable flesh. Even though we have forgotten it, we are a part of nature, nature that is designed for balance, for birth, death and resurrection. Resurrection of our organic flesh means composting, as our bodies decay and feed the worms, the atoms that compose our bodies are brought back into the cycle of life. We resist the call of the compost bin before it is ‘our time’ – but who decides when that is?

Can we call a truce with nature? In any case, she won’t leave our efforts untouched, but keeps showing herself, as weeds breaking through cracked concrete, lichen on fences and sodden moss on untrod tarmac.

If you found this helpful, I highly recommend that you read Window Poems by Wendel Berry

Posted on

A foreign woman educates Jesus

This reflection on Matthew 15:21-28 was inspired by feminist readings of the story of Jesus’ encounter with the Canaanite woman. Unfortunately, I can’t find the exact reference I used.

I think that most of us are used to talking about Jesus as fully God and fully human, but in practice I think we are much more comfortable focussing on his divinity than his humanity. Our passage today reveals something about the limitations Jesus lived with because he was a human being, while the star of the story is unquestionably the Canaanite woman. She is such an extraordinary character that, I think, she deserves to be up there on the list of the most influential women in the Bible; yet when I did a Google search for Biblical heroines, I didn’t find her name on the list of ‘20 Amazing Women in the Bible to Learn From and Admire’, or the ‘19 Powerful Women in the Bible to Inspire You’ or even ‘Heroines and Harlots: 20 Biblical Women Who Impacted Their World’. I did, finally, find her mentioned in a modest website in a quiet corner of the internet named ‘9 Anonymous Heroines of the Bible’. So, what is it about her that I have been so impressed with? Let’s take a look at the story to find out. Jesus had travelled to the gentile region of Tyre and Sidon, he had escaped into foreign territory to try and get some rest from the demands of the crowds and the threats of the religious establishment and, perhaps, to prepare the disciples for what lay ahead. But there was to be no rest for Jesus. The Canaanite woman had a daughter in a desperate situation, diagnosed with the techniques of the day as being possessed by a demon. We don’t know what the symptoms were, but these days we might have understood her as having epilepsy or a mental health problem. My own experience of having a child with serious depression leaves me with great compassion for this woman, we were lucky to have access to a brilliant psychotherapist and anti-depressants that turned the situation around, but I still felt a lot of fear at times, and anxiety and helplessness. The Canaanite woman had no help and, in addition, her daughter would have been stigmatized because people believed she was possessed. It is no wonder, then, that when a miracle-working itinerant preacher was rumoured to be on his way into town that she went out in search of him. She would do whatever it took to get her daughter the help she needed. But she faced a number of obstacles in getting access to Jesus. She was a gentile, which was bad enough, but she was also a Canaanite. This was more problematic, as the Canaanites were the ancient inhabitants of the Promised Land, the archetypal enemies who had been stripped of access to the land when the Hebrews moved in from the desert. This detail points to the fact that this woman was similarly denied access to Israel’s resources, this time in the form of their messiah. In addition, she was a woman in a time when women were typically dominated by men, and it must have been intimidating for her to be faced with the 12 hostile men surrounding Jesus. But her love for her daughter and her sense of desperation led her to the point that she was willing to shout at a stranger in the street. As we will see, she uses every resource available to her to get access to Jesus’ power. To start off with, she leads with her voice, begging for mercy in her painful situation with a cry from the heart. Jesus didn’t respond at all, which is extremely troubling. But the woman wasn’t put off by this, she wasn’t going to take no for an answer and so she kept yelling at him. I am quite sure that the disciples told her to go away, but since Jesus himself hadn’t told her to leave, she still had hope. She continued to call out to Jesus until the disciples couldn’t take it any longer and urged him to get rid of her, but his mind seemed to be elsewhere. At first, I wondered whether he was just too exhausted or distracted to respond? But then it occurred to me that perhaps he didn’t know what to say? Perhaps he was thinking out loud as he said his next words: ‘I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.’ The minute he started to engage with her question, she used her next resource – her body. She physically moved herself in front of Jesus preventing him from walking forward. Many commentators point out that she was kneeling in front of him in a position of submission and worship, and although this may be true, I see it as a position of strength. It is quite an assertive and potentially risky thing for a lone woman to block the path of 13 men – but her gamble pays off. She asks again for Jesus’ help. She’s audacious and persistent. She’s fearless, or at least her love for her daughter overcomes any fear about what might happen to her own body. Jesus’ response was not very encouraging, to say the least: ‘It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs’. As was current practise at the time, he likened her and her people to dogs, and although he uses the word for a domesticated pet rather than a rabies-infested stray, it doesn’t get us away from the problem that even the most beloved pooch is in no way remotely equal to its human master. He’s saying that she and her people aren’t invited to the heavenly banquet. Again, I choose to interpret this as Jesus externally processing the challenge set before him. This insult would have floored most people, but she doesn’t waste time feeling insulted, our heroine remains undeterred and resorts to her final resource: her intellectual creativity. She responds with the clever riposte ‘Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table. It’s such a great image, I can just imagine the dogs under the table excitedly running after anything that falls to the ground and devouring it, while above the table, the meal is being picked at by fussy children who aren’t at all convinced by this new dish that they are being offered. With this masterstroke, she took Jesus on at his own game, this Jesus who was so good at repartee and verbal jousting was bested by a gentile woman. And it wasn’t just intellectual sparring, she managed to change his mind. This is the only instance we read of where Jesus was educated by someone, and that someone was a woman, a woman who should not properly have been speaking to him at all. I wonder how Jesus felt about this encounter. I hope he enjoyed it. How did it feel for him to lose the argument and realise that he had to change his mind? What is clear, is that he recognized truth when he heard it. Jesus healed her daughter and commended her for her faith, her great faith; she was noisy, disruptive, creative and persistent: faith isn’t always neat and tidy, it can mean yelling in the street and breaking the rules. Our Canaanite heroine is the focus of the story; Jesus was reluctantly dragged into it and his thinking was transformed in the process. She was God’s agent for change in Jesus when it came to his understanding of bringing the gospel to the Gentiles. The Canaanite woman’s persistence not only made her daughter whole; it also showed Jesus a broader perspective to his ministry. I don’t think we need to feel threatened by the idea what Jesus changed his mind. What was the point of the narrative of Jesus being tempted in the desert, if not to show us that he struggled with how he was going to live out his calling? Just as he developed physically and emotionally as he grew to maturity, he must also have grown spiritually, e.g., there must have been a point when he realised that his relationship to God the Father was different to everyone else’s. Most memorably in the garden of Gethsemane we see him struggling with the path that he knew God had called him to take. In this encounter, Jesus shows us that it is OK for our understanding of the faith to develop during our life. We cannot expect our beliefs to remain entirely static and we needn’t be afraid of that change. As we are confronted with new evidence and new experiences, we adapt our understanding and that’s healthy! God can hold us in that process. I suspect that our heroine has been a little sidelined because, at face value, this story doesn’t show Jesus in a great light, what with referring to a whole people group as dogs. The idea that Jesus could change his mind is also potentially disturbing, especially since this happened through a foreign woman who didn’t know how to behave in public! Since we haven’t really known what to do with that, we’ve looked for other explanations for what happened that day. I’ve heard people say that Jesus was testing his disciples to see how they would react, and others say that he was teaching the woman about persistence in prayer. But I think our heroine is such a pivotal figure that she should be right near the top of the list of ‘20 Amazing Women in the Bible to Learn From and Admire’, and of the ‘19 Powerful Women in the Bible to Inspire You’ and most importantly in ‘Heroines and Harlots: 20 Biblical Women Who Impacted Their World’. May God give us some of the courage and creativity of this passionate, determined woman.

Posted on

What’s really going on?

I wrote this reflection on Revelation 12:1-6 at the beginning of the year, inspired by the work of J. Denny Weaver in his excellent book The Non-Violent Atonement. When I was looking for images to accompany this, I remember being struck by how the woman was generally portrayed as being very serene. I don’t remember dealing with the ‘agony of giving birth’ in that way, and can’t imagine that being chased by a dragon would have made it any easier…

We are still in the season of Epiphany this Sunday, a time in which we seek insight and revelation about the nature of God. In that spirit, I would like to tell you about an experience of insight and revelation that I have had. Every time I go into a certain department store in my nearest town, I am assaulted by displays of brand-new consumer goods that nobody needs, beautifully presented and begging to be bought. Once I fight my way past the glitz to the escalators at the back, I always catch the distinctive smell of the bins. That stench of decaying waste seems so entirely appropriate given the conspicuous consumption that this store promotes: the more we buy, the more there is to throw away one day. The fossil fuel consumed to produce all this stuff and the working conditions of many people involved in its production each damage the earth and her inhabitants. It’s like that smell from the bins lifts the lid on what’s really going on. Each time I notice it, the dark side of consumerism comes to mind: scratch the veneer of beauty, affluence, and luxury and we discover extraction, decay, and oppression. Now I don’t want to single out this shop in particular, but I mention this experience because I find it so striking. I have chosen to speak on the lectionary reading from the book of Revelation this morning, a book which is also known as the “Apocalypse of John.” Now, in popular culture, the word Apocalypse has come to mean the end of the world, or something so catastrophic that it feels like the end of the world. But in fact, apocalypse comes from a Greek word which literally means to pull the lid off something. Rather like the smell of the bins that lifts the lid off the glitz to show the underbelly of consumerism, John uses bizarre imagery and a confusing, sometimes terrifying, storyline to lift the lid off reality as usually understood to show us its true nature. He isn’t describing a parallel universe, but uses these images to reveal a spiritual dimension that we don’t normally perceive. If we restrict ourselves to a plain reading of history, we see Jesus as a wandering prophet and miracle worker who promised much, even the kingdom of God, but who delivered little; goodness, he was even executed as a common criminal. But if we lift the lid off surface appearances, as John does, and look for the cosmic dimension of his life, we see the Christ, the victorious lamb of God, the Alpha and the Omega, the bright morning star! And what about those who followed Him? Well, they were scapegoated by Nero for the great fire of Rome, dressed up in animal skins to be torn to pieces by dogs, and used as living torches to light the games and chariot races in Nero’s gardens; these Christians must have looked like complete failures, the most piteous of people. But in chapter 7, John reveals them to be white-robed martyrs, washed in the blood of the lamb whom God guides to springs of the water of life. In writing this book, John shows that perceived reality differs from transcendent reality, reality beyond the range of normal human experience. Anabaptsist scholar J Denny Weaver argues that John wrote this book to encourage his fellow Christians through times of hardship, to trust in the lamb that was slain and yet who lives, to believe in the power of the resurrection to ultimately defeat evil, and to be patient in the meantime. While he does talk of future hope, John uses apocalyptic imagery to lift the lid off events in the recent past to reveal the spiritual reality, to encourage the Church to see beyond the struggles they were facing and to hope and trust that God would ultimately bring justice and peace. However, I do realise that not everyone reads Revelation this way. Others see in it prophesy about the end times and seek to match the various symbols and events with present day phenomena. Taken to an extreme, this gives rise to such things as the The Rapture Index, which describes itself as a Dow Jones Industrial Average of end time activity. It has a point system with 45 categories, including occult activity, ecumenism, and the price of oil. Its all-time high of 189 points was on October 10, 2016, and, in case you are interested, after a it of a dip, we are back up at that value today. The book of Revelation is so wide open to interpretation that we need to be cautious in our reading of it – especially because of how such interpretations can motivate and influence people. The major theme is the resurrection of Christ, that he is victorious and that ultimately all things will be well. We are on safe ground if we can keep that as our lens for interpretation. Today’s reading presents us with an image of a majestic woman crowned with 12 stars, in the agony of childbirth, clothed with the sun, and with the moon under her feet. Poised close by, ready to devour her newborn, is a grotesque, flame-coloured dragon with 7 heads, 10 horns, and 7 diadems. Fortunately, as soon as the child is born, he is snatched away to the throne of God. So what might all this mean? The first clue is that the child will rule the nations with a rod of iron, referring to Psalm 2: the child is the Messiah. The birth and snatching away to the throne of God, refers to the birth, death and resurrection of Christ. In describing the woman, John combined various signs of divinity and beauty. She is clothed with the sun, as God is in Psalm 104. She is associated with the sun and the moon, as is the beloved in chapter 6 of the Song of Solomon. She is crowned with 12 stars, as pagan goddesses of the time were crowned with the 12 signs of the zodiac. These 12 stars also remind us of the 12 tribes of Israel. The woman represents Israel, the people of God from whom the Messiah comes, and she also represents God’s people, the church, which is pursued by Satan, the dragon. Dragons were familiar symbols in ancient thought. Babylonian mythology had a gleaming red dragon of chaos who was defeated by the god of light and order, and we see echos of this in mentions of Leviathan and Behemoth in the OT. More particularly, the 7-headed dragon seems to represent the Roman empire, whose capital was built on 7 hills, while the 7 diadems and 10 horns correspond to the reigns of the 7 Roman emperors from Tiberius, who reigned when Jesus was crucified, plus the three men who ruled for 18 months after Nero, but who couldn’t establish themselves. The rule of Rome and her emperors over and against the Church, was the earthly manifestation of the cosmic conflict between the rule of Satan and the rule of God. Another manifestation of this conflict between the kingdom of God and the powers of this world is Herod’s massacre of the innocents, a story which we also read about in this season of Epiphany. In our text for today, the child is snatched straight up to the throne of God as soon as he is born. John goes straight from Christ’s birth to his resurrection, missing out his life, not because it is unimportant, but because his focus is on the exalted and victorious Christ. This image from Revelation Ch 12 lifts the lid off the historical confrontation between Jesus and the Church, and the Roman empire to show its cosmic dimension and its ultimate significance. As the small and struggling church contemplated the might of Rome, the temptation was to despair. However, in those who recognise their own brokenness and perceive the resurrection of Christ, the reign of God has already triumphed. With this image, John also reminds his readers about the true, demonic, nature of empire, in case they are tempted to collude with it. But what help is this for us now? If we try to lift the lid and look beyond what is happening around us, what do we see? I think it is obvious that we are entering a period of enormous change. We are starting to see the effects of the climate and other environmental crises, political systems are coming under increasing strain, ethical norms are being abandoned, and conflict is growing nationally and internationally. The reign of human sin and arrogance appears to be leading us towards destruction, but, with the resurrection of Christ, the future reign of God has already begun in human history. While we still wait for the fullness of God’s reign, a piece of that future exists now: we see an increasing desire to reconnect with the rest of nature, to address historical wrongs, and to find new ways to live in peace. Will we choose to give up and let the dragon have free reign? Or will we join forces with God, even when our efforts to care for each other and everything else that lives on this planet seem insufficient and insignificant? John’s approach gives us a way to see the bigger picture, to find hope, even when things seem entirely hopeless. May God help us to lift the lid as John did, so that we can live in hope and share that hope with others.
Posted on

Beloved clay jars

This is a reflection on two of the lectionary readings for ‘Proper 4’: Psalm 139 and 2 Corinthians 4:5-12. With inspiration from Richard Rohr’s Falling Upward.

At the beginning of last year, my better half and I spent three months in a large city in Northern India. This was an extraordinary experience of the sights, sounds and smells of a very different way of life to what we had been used to in quiet, orderly, rural Switzerland. A particularly strong memory was of a trip I took with some work colleagues to visit a field hospital in a remote village. On the way there, in the dead of night, we took a pit-stop for a cup of something hot. Now, I like my tea weak with very little milk, no sugar, and generally not messed about with. The chai I was given was strong, milky, spicy and unbearably sweet; but the most memorable thing about it was the strong taste of mud! This chai was served in small, unglazed, clay cups, which dissolved slightly imparting an unmistakeable flavour to the tea. These clay cups are disposable, they are formed from the clay of the ground, baked, used once, and then thrown back to the ground. It was to these basic and functional clay vessels that my mind turned when I read our passage from 2 Corinthians today.

Some members of the church in Corinth had been arguing that Paul had suffered too much to be a genuine apostle, and so he partly wrote this letter to emphasize that God was using Paul’s suffering to reveal God’s glory. Paul describes himself as a slave to the church for the sake of God’s glory and that he was nothing but a clay jar. He goes on to say that that we all have this treasure of God’s glory in the clay jars of our lives. Paul’s attitude appears extremely self-effacing.

But let’s pause our thoughts about the clay jars for now and go on to look at today’s Psalm. We had a truncated version read to us, and I do recommend that you read the full text, as it is a beautiful description of God’s intimate love for each one of us. It talks of how God pursues us, searches us out wherever we are, hems us in, and won’t let us go. Of how he knows us, how he watched over us being knitted together in the womb. How we are precious and valuable, unconditionally loved from before even the first amino acids of our nascent being were joined together.

At first glance, these two images appear to be in conflict. How can we be, at one and the same time, both so precious and so mundane? Do our lives matter in themselves, or are we just a vehicle to be used by God?

On further reflection, I think we can hold these two images in tension, but we need to give them different emphases at different points in our lives. Franciscan theologian Richard Rohr talks about the two halves of life. The first half of life is all about building up our ego, succeeding in our projects, discovering who we are and becoming confident in that. This sounds rather like the nurturing emphasis of Psalm 139. He calls it ‘building the container’ and sees it is a necessary part of spiritual development. But at some point, there comes a crisis – a moment of great failure or loss, or even of great love – that breaks through the ego we have built up and brings us to a new place of awareness. Here we start to see that the point of the container of our lives is to hold something bigger, so we can start to let go of our ego and let God be God in us without needing to succeed, achieve or prove a point. This second half of life sounds rather like Paul’s jars of clay, when we know that the jar isn’t the important thing – it’s all about the treasure within.

But this does come with a health warning. We need to come to 2 Cor 4 from a position of security, value and love. If we skip over Psalm 139, we miss out on the first half of life work of building up a healthy personhood. If we try to go straight to the clay jar, we risk ending up seeing ourselves as worthless, unimportant and even unlovable. We will have problems with setting healthy boundaries and caring for ourselves as much as we care for other people. But if we can put these two pictures together, we end up being so deeply secure in the unconditional love of God that we are free to let go of our own desire for approval, admiration or affirmation. We are liberated to be clay jars full of the treasure of God’s glory as a gift to the world.

There is so much to say about this image of clay jars. I hope it isn’t stretching things too far to compare the Indian teacups flavouring the tea with the way that each of us makes God visible in a slightly different way. We are not uniform, passive containers, who could easily be replaced by anyone else; each one of us expresses something unique of the nature of God, and as Psalm 139 tells us, and unlike the Indian teacups, each one of us has been made with great care and attention. And yet, the cup isn’t the point, it’s the tea that matters. Genesis tells us that Adam was made from the earth and the funeral service reminds us that to the earth our bodies will return. Like the clay teacups, we are formed out of the earth for a while, designed to hold something precious and then destined to return to the earth.

Clay jars are not particularly beautiful, and even as we grow emotionally and spiritually, our weakness and failures remain obvious to the people close to us, and hopefully also to ourselves. The paradox of our own failings and the glory of God coexisting within us is the reality of human existence. We all bear wounds, and God uses these to form us for our path in life. We see this in the life of Paul, who went from being arch-persecutor of the fledgling church to its greatest evangelist; God took someone with enormous zeal for what he misguidedly thought was the truth and redirected it for good. Perhaps the extreme nature of his personality well-suited Paul to the life of adventure, danger and suffering that bore the fruit of much of the New Testament and the expansion of the early church.

But we get indications here and there that Paul was not an easy character to deal with. There were conflicts with Barnabus and with Peter that perhaps could have been dealt with better, and he can sometimes come across as taking himself a bit too seriously. Really this shouldn’t surprise us, we all have a shadow side we need to face up to; for our shadow becomes problematic when we pretend it isn’t there, and it can come out in ugly ways, as in the various scandals that have rocked Christian churches in recent times.

God said ‘Let light shine out of darkness’ and indeed, light is most obvious when it illuminates a dark place. The light of Christ is shining in our hearts, we can see it in each other, even when we can’t see it in ourselves, and, in the strange economy of God, it coexists with the very things that make us difficult to live with! Elsewhere in this letter (12:9) Paul writes that God told him ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness’; we can’t generate the light, we can only receive it, and that’s actually easier when we are vulnerable, wounded, and aware of our flaws, these are the places where God can most easily get in and do his work.

But this transformation isn’t for our benefit. Paul reminds us where to put our focus ‘For we do not proclaim ourselves; we proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord and ourselves as your slaves for Jesus’ sake.’ We are not to promote ourselves, or even our precious church community; our focus is to be on Christ. As a church community our purpose is to glorify, worship, and reveal Christ to the world.

Our church is like one of Paul’s clay jars; I invite you to prayerfully consider how you might contribute to strengthening it – not for its own sake, but for the sake of the treasure it holds for the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. Amen.

Posted on

Jairus and the haemorrhaging woman

This is a reflection on Luke 8:40-56, with thanks to Ched Myers for his work in Binding the Strong Man and to Richard Rohr for his understanding of the ‘one great suffering’.

I wonder if any of you saw the sci-fi film Inception that was released in 2010? It starred Leonardo DiCaprio as a professional thief who specialized in conning secrets from his victims by infiltrating their dreams. Without going into too much detail, let me summarise by saying that he implanted a dream into a businessman to manipulate him into making a decision, and what’s more, he actually implanted three dreams, one inside the other.

Now I don’t want to suggest that the gospel writer Mark wrote science fiction, but he did use a similar literary technique to get our attention in the gospel reading today: he placed the story of the haemorrhaging woman inside the story of Jairus’ daughter.

The technical term for this is ‘intercalation’: the outer story gives the context for interpreting the inner story. There’s another example in chapter 11, where Jesus cursed a fig tree because it had no fruit. He then cleansed the temple of the money changers and afterwards returned to the fig tree, which by then had withered. The message seems to be that temple was like a fig tree which has leaves but no fruit, that is, the temple and its practises had become barren.

This intercalation signals that the two healings in today’s gospel reading are to be read in tandem, that they comment on each other. What is more, the number 12 is mentioned twice, which should ring some bells for us, think 12 tribes of Israel and 12 disciples, and there are two daughters both of whom were very sick.

Let’s first have a look at the two main characters – Jairus and the haemorrhaging woman.

Jairus was a leader of the synagogue, he would have been in charge of running things – not in a priestly role, but more like a CEO, allocating duties and ensuring they were carried out properly. He would have been one of the most important and respected men in the community.

The haemorrhaging woman was in a sharply contrasting situation, her 12-year flow of blood had been financially debilitating, as she had spent all her money on ineffective doctors, it must have been physically exhausting, as well as practically difficult to deal with. What is more, her condition rendered her permanently unclean so she wouldn’t have been allowed near the synagogue. She was an outcast on the very edge of society.

Jairus was a powerful man in a patriarchal society, while the woman was right at the opposite end of the social spectrum, just look at the differences in the way they behave:

  • Jairus falls at Jesus’ feet, which was the proper way to grant honour before asking a favour, while the woman furtively steals her healing from behind and under the cover of the crowd.
  • Jairus is named, is the head of his family and social group, and he advocates for his daughter, while the woman is nameless and alone.
  • Jairus talks directly to Jesus as his social equal; while the woman talks only to herself in obscurity.

At that time, a woman’s “success” was dependent on her ability to marry and have children. The haemorrhaging woman failed in this duty and was therefore without honour. The Purity Code mandated that menstruating women be quarantined, and so it was highly inappropriate for her to be out in public – much less grabbing a “holy man”! But Mark ignores this scandal in order to focus instead on the way she had been bankrupted by profiteering physicians who had exploited her without healing her.

And yet, it’s not appropriate to see her as merely a victim. By being out in public and touching Jesus while she was ritually unclean, she intentionally challenges the social boundaries set up against her. She stood up for herself by going out and seeking healing in a transgressive way, and Jesus commends her for it, for her ‘faith’.

The moment she touches Jesus, the power dynamics of the story start to be reversed. For starters, rather than contaminating Jesus with her impurity, the woman is healed.

Then, when Jesus senses that power has gone out of him, he stops to inquire what has happened; he is concerned with the individual human being who has sought out his help. Never mind that she is one of the crowd, the anonymous mass of impoverished people that always seem to be following him around, this person is important enough for him to interrupt his journey to Jairus’ house. In typical fashion, the disciples cannot understand why he takes this detour while there is the urgent request of a powerful person to attend to. But Jesus insists on knowing who touched him.

Emerging from the margins of the story to center stage, it is the woman’s turn to fall in front of Jesus, implying that she is now on equal par with Jairus. Finding her voice, “she told him the whole truth”— she does this in fear and trembling, but Jesus speaks peace over her and acknowledges her rightful status as “daughter” in the family of Israel.

Just as Jesus calls the woman daughter, servants come to say that Jairus’ daughter is dead. It seems that by spending time on this woman, Jesus has let Jairus down. But Jesus is not phased by this and exhorts Jairus to believe… the intercalation of the two stories implies that Jesus is instructing this leader of the synagogue to learn about faith from an outcast woman!  Here, faith means trusting the person of Jesus, rather than the circumstances of the situation.

The scene at Jairus’ house must have been quite dramatic. Mourning rituals of the time involved the beating of breasts, tearing of hair, and rending of garments. There was to be no work or activity for 3 days, no joy, and no reading of the scriptures apart from the none-too cheery books of Job, Jeremiah and Lamentations. When Jesus insists that the girl is only sleeping, this mourning turns to derision. Jesus throws out the onlookers and raises the girl back to life.

The people gathered around the girl were astonished, a reaction that only happens one other time in the gospel of Mark, at Jesus‘ resurrection, in both cases the word used is ekstasis. The double use of this rare word ekstasis encourages us to see a link between the two events, but more on that later.

At his point, Mark mentions that the girl was 12 years old – she had lived affluently for 12 years, and was on the verge of menstruation. In contrast, the bleeding woman had suffered for 12 years, permanently infertile. This special number, also symbolizes the twelve tribes of Israel; within the “family” of Israel, these “daughters” represent the advantaged and the impoverished.

Inequality within society is not only unjust, it is also dangerous. High levels of income inequality are linked to economic instability, financial crisis, debt, inflation and violent crime; the effects are also psychological, including diminishing trust, an eroded sense of community and growing political apathy. People in less equal societies are less likely to engage in social or civic activities, and less likely to say they’re happy.

Jesus’ healing journey had to take a detour to listen to the pain of the excluded and disadvantaged woman. Only when the outcast woman was restored to “daughterhood” could the daughter of the synagogue also be restored to life. The kingdom that Jesus came to bring is for the good of everyone, and only when the inequalities in our societies are addressed, will the whole of society prosper.

While it’s reassuring to know that Christ’s kingdom will ultimately bring an end to injustice, what about all the injustices and all the other suffering happening in the meantime? What about our own personal sufferings, in whatever form they take, what might this story have to say about that?

People deal with pain and suffering in different ways. Some tend to blame others or even God. Others deny or repress their feelings behind a stiff upper lip. Others are able to express their painful feelings in healthy ways and to find some sort of peace. This story points us towards yet another way of approaching suffering.

Mark places the woman’s story of suffering inside the story of Jairus’ daughter’s death and new life. This whole incident in placed within the larger narrative of the gospel of Mark – the narrative of Jesus’ suffering, death and resurrection. Like the woman, Jesus became outcast, cursed by the crucifixion, and like the girl he rose from death – remember that word ekstasis? On the cross he held their suffering and shared in it.

In Christ, God chose to become human and stand in solidarity with us in our brokenness, and he invites us to come to him in our times of suffering and struggle and place our story inside his bigger story too.

I hardly need to tell you that suffering is an important part of the human experience, and we struggle and strain against it. Many pages have been written to try to understand how a good God can allow so much pain and suffering, without any easy answer.

But what we do know is that on the cross Christ embraced both our suffering and the whole world’s suffering. In Christ, our suffering connects us, in some small way, with the one great suffering of the rest of the world.

Perhaps we can find some consolation in holding our pain in solidarity with others, trusting in Christ who held it all on the cross, holds it now in the heart of the Godhead and is transforming it into resurrection.