maggi dawn

The Tortured Christ - Guido Rocha

In the meditations of Holy Week, it works better for us if we take the journey a step at a time. Sometimes I have seen the impact of Good Friday snatched away by rushing too quickly to the promise of resurrection; equally it lessens the outrageous, unimaginable joy of Sunday if we dampen it down by returning too soon to the Cross. There is a time for everything; a time for joy and a time for sadness.

Today we remember the awful suffering and crucifixion of Jesus. He stood for life and love and justice and faith, upsetting convention and exposing hypocrisy, until the world couldn't stand it and tried to stamp it out of him. The Early Fathers saw this death as God tricking the Devil; the Devil would have him dead, and failed to understand that the son of God cannot remain dead for long. 

In one of the most heart-rending images of the cross, Brazilian sculptor Guido Rocha portrays the fact that Jesus really suffered through his torture. It calls us to assess soberly what kind of Christianity we are prepared to take on - a comfortable, conventional, respectable faith? Or one of radical action that will really cost us something too?

Rocha's sculpture also calls to mind the fact that Jesus endured real, vile torture to the point of death. As we remember Jesus, let's also pray with compassion, and act in courage on behalf of those who are victims of torture somewhere in the world today. How? You have to find out. But when we look at religious imagery like this, it lacks something to say in our prayers that we wish we could take Jesus down from the cross and end his suffering, but not to do the same for those who suffer today. That's not just a "social gospel" - it's the call of jesus himself, when he said, "I was hungry, and you gave Me something to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave Me something to drink; I was a stranger, and you invited Me in; naked, and you clothed Me; I was sick, and you visited Me; I was in prison, and you came to Me...  'Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did this even to the least of my brothers or sisters, you did it to Me.'

Geza Vermes on The Resurrection

The Resurrection is the final instalment of Geza Vermes's Jesus trilogy, which began with The Passion and The Nativity. Vermes again adopts his trademark forensic textual analysis to separate fact from myth: "I wanted to explain exactly what the New Testament does tell us about the resurrection. People usually rely on others to interpret the gospels for them and St Paul's assertion of the physical resurrection has become a cornerstone of Christianity for many people. If Jesus didn't rise from the dead, then faith is rubbish.

"Yet if you look at what Jesus actually said, then you get a different picture. If he did talk about the resurrection, he forgot to write it down; so it's more likely he didn't. And if he did, then why did his resurrection come as such a surprise to the apostles? No one said, 'Of course, Jesus said it would be like this' when his tomb was found to be empty; even Mary Magdalene assumed that someone must have moved the body. Nobody's reactions correspond to the expectation of a resurrection."

Vermes goes on to argue that subsequent sightings of Jesus are best understood as visions in which the apostles felt his charisma working as it had done when he was alive. "Jesus had promised to be with them and he was," he argues. "It's a resurrection of the spirit in the hearts of believers. The idea of an afterlife predates the Christian era and the preaching of eternal life is well attested; a physical resurrection is not essential to a belief in spiritual survival."

from an interview in The Guardian - read the rest here

Tenebrae

A couple of years back we did a kind of "Alternative" Tenebrae service here at Robinson. Andy and Hannah Goodliff came over and joined us for that. This weekend they did a Tenebrae of their own, adapting our basic idea and adding some fresh ideas of their own. Looks great. Go here for their version

Holy Week

I've read a few things in the last week or so concerning the journey of Jesus towards Jerusalem and his Passion.

Moot is a community and a blog that I follow regularly, as I know some of the guys there. I played a tiny part in getting Moot started by acting as Patron, and they have done some fab and creative things over the last few years. Ian Mobsby has a new book appearing shortly, which looks v. interesting.

But the thing that particularly inspired me this week was this short talk on Martha, Lary and Lazarus, from Phil. (Go to Moot and click for the MP3)

peter's denial

I'm presenting the Daily Service on Tuesday. The subject is Peter's denial. Lovely music.  Tune in and listen - Radio 4 Long Wave, 9.45 am, Tuesday 3rd April. Or check in later from anywhere in the world to the BBC website to Listen Again.

I love you just the way you are

Three lovely stories from Milton Brasher Cunnigham: don't eat alone: incidental affirmation.

when God vanishes (ii)

Bart Ehrman, author of 'Misquoting Jesus,' is an agnostic who was formerly a "born again" evangelical believer. The story of how he lost his faith is recorded in the Washington Post. I have a great deal of sympathy with his story.  I was once a "born again" believer, and it was in part the recognition of endless intellectual dishonesty, both in biblical interpretation and in church practice, that led me to re-conceive my own faith. For me, though, the end result (so far at any rate) has not been the loss of faith, but a radical reconstruction of it. If, like Ehrman, my faith had depended on the inerrancy of the "original texts" of the Bible, I guess I would have lost my faith too. But the truth is that our faith is not solely based in the Bible, and its inaccuracies and inconsistencies have in any case been known about and lived with for a very long time indeed. Coleridge wrote engagingly in 1824 that reading the Bible as if it were a book, and not a divinely imparted magic text, could only enhance its capacity to connect real human beings with God.

When I lost my naive faith, I had the good fortune of coming to land in a place where the Bible is taken in the context of reason and "tradition" (by which I mean the history and practice of the Church, not "traditionalism"), and consequently the inaccuracies, mistakes, inconsistencies and unknowns of the Biblical record do not necessitate an abandonment of faith.

It intrigues me why people continue working, in a negative way, against a faith they have lost. Where does the energy come from? And what kind of a mission is it to spend your life disproving something? Once you've disproved something, surely there are more interesting projects to move on to?

All the same, I sympathise with people like Ehrman who do lose their faith, because I've walked close to that line myself, and see close-up the crisis that ensues when someone who has carved out their life around a profession that goes hand in hand with a belief system that subsequently crumbles. I'm reminded of the middle-aged Priest in David Hare's Racing Demon, who was faced similarly with the crisis of what to do, as a career priest, when the core of faith seems to vanish.

The article about Ehrman borrows John Updike's description of a loss of faith:

Where does it go, this belief in things not seen?  Let's look at "In the Beauty of the Lilies." This is John Updike's novel of the fictional Rev. Clarence Arthur Wilmot, a Presbyterian minister, and his loss of faith. Wilmot, beset by doubt one afternoon in the rectory, "felt the last particles of his faith leave him. The sensation was distinct -- a visceral surrender, a set of dark sparkling bubbles escaping upward . . . there was no God, nor should there be."

I wonder whehter things might have turned out differently for Ehrman had he, like his wife and friend, emerged from a tradition that balanced the Bible with other core elements of faith?

when God vanishes

"Why is it called Good Friday?" asked my son. "It's not good at all, it's really bad."

The shops are full of eggs and chickens and sunshine and cheer. But Good Friday and Holy Saturday are the most sombre days in the whole Church calendar, recalling the death and disappearance of God.  Not much there to celebrate or feel happy about.

For those who enjoy a degree of certainty in their faith, maybe Good Friday and Holy Saturday don't really "bite" - they are more about anticipation than devastation. But those of us who live with a fragemented faith, a faith that has had too many holes punctured in it, too much damage ever to recover a naive certainty, there is something reassuring about the rise and fall of the Church seasons. It's a relief to be honest, to acknowledge the disappearance of God and the uncertainty of the outcome. 

That's not to say that there is no hope of the resurrection. But that hope doesn't forestall the depth of blackness that can descend even upon people of faith. And the recollection that the Easter faith was born in the darkness is, perhaps, a reason to hold on and not to give up.

clergy Easter

In my current post, I don't do any Easter services at College. We do Christmas services at Robinson, but the rest of the year our quiet and busy times don't coincide with the rest of the Church - our "big" and stressful seasons come in summer and autumn. Given that exam season is only a few weeks off, I am not complaining about this - Holy Week/Easter serves as the calm before the storm. There's a sense of dislocation about it, all the same - both as a Christian, aware that we go quiet when everyone else is  intensely focussed on the central festival of the Church year, and as a member of the clergy, having experienced in two previous posts that the "norm" for the clergy is that this is a madly busy week , so jam packed with services and events and preparations for services that the approach of Easter is more likely to invoke dread than joy.  In addition, Holy Week also marks the beginning of the wedding season, which if you are in charge of a "pretty" church means stress season. In my first post (very pretty indeed) we used to have two or three weddings every Saturday from Easter to the end of the summer.

I'm saying prayers for my many clergy friends today - praying that they will find time to breathe in between things, praying that they will feel something of the joy of Easter when it arrives, and praying that the promise of a few days' break next week will sustain them through one of the hardest weeks of their year.

(It occurs to me as I write that "member of the clergy" is not altogether satisfying as a phrase - it's gained currency now that "clergyman" is no longer applicable as a generic term, but "member of" might suggest an exclusivity of its own. "Clergyperson" is awful. Words or phrases like this have to be short and easy to use, not PC-clumsy. But they also need to say what they mean, if at all possible...  Hmmmm. Need to ponder for a better word or phrase. )

Angry Monday

Today is the day when Jesus turned over the tables in the Temple. Outraged by injustice and commercialisation masquerading as religion, he seems to have found that peaceful demonstration didn't meet the occasion - he just went and trashed the place.

There's a great scene in Jesus of Montreal where the leading character trashes a TV studio where actors are being exploited. He throws hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of cameras and equipment to the ground, in order to make his point. Not exactly a silent, peaceful demonstration - more an act of criminal violence.

I can't easily draw the conclusion that we should go out and commit acts of crminal violence in the name of Jesus.  But I do think we should register the level of anger and social unacceptability that was going on here.

Holy week is sometimes guilty of painting Jesus in pastels. "Holy" doesn't mean wet and wimpish. Meek? Mild? As if...