Category Archives: Jesus

What Happens in Bethlehem Doesn’t Stay in Bethlehem

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Sandro Botticelli, The Virgin adoring the sleeping Christ Child (c. 1485), Scotland National Gallery, Edinburgh.

What on earth happened last night—at that little stable on the edge of town? It was all so strange, so unbelievable. Some of us are still sleeping it off. Some of us didn’t get any sleep at all, or maybe we were asleep the whole time and it was all just a dream. 

There was a really bright star, and then the sky started singing: Gloria in excelsis Deo! It was angels, someone said. I don’t know about that, but it was so beautiful, as if music were being invented for the very first time. 

And suddenly, we all started running, don’t ask me why, until we came to this cave––it was a stable with a cow and a couple of donkeys––and in the back there was a woman lying down on some hay, and a man kneeling beside her. And between them there was a little baby, just a few hours old, I’d say. What a place to begin your life! They must have been pretty desperate to end up there. Maybe they were refugees. Or undocumented. I don’t know. But they didn’t look scared or out of place. They seemed to belong there. And you know, I had the feeling that I belonged there too. We all did. 

I can’t really explain it, but I got this feeling that everything in my life before that had just been waiting around for this moment, as if after a long and pointless journey I had finally come home. 

And I know it sounds weird, but I swear that little baby looked right at me, as if he knew who I was––or who I was going to be, because when I left that stable I knew––I knew!––that my life was never going to be the same. Pretty crazy, right? I kind of hope it was just a dream, because if it’s not—where is all this going to take me?

That’s how I imagine the morning after speech of a Bethlehem shepherd. Intoxicated by wonder, struggling to make sense of it, and feeling both curious and anxious about what happens now, after this wondrous birth. What happens to me, to you, to the whole wide world? A change is gonna come, yes it will. Yes it will, because what happens in Bethlehem doesn’t stay in Bethlehem. It goes home with us, it gets in our blood, it becomes part of our story. Nothing in the world will ever be the same again. Nothing in our lives will ever be the same again. 

And that is why, on the morning after, we listen to St. John’s grand prologue to the Fourth Gospel. Its cosmic perspective on the birth of Christ reminds us how vast and consequential was that humble birth in a lowly stable. 

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. . . And this divine Word became flesh and lived among us. (John 1:1-14)

In other words, God was not content to remain purely within the essence of the divine self. God desired to go beyond the inner life of the divine, to enter the confines and contingencies of time and space and history, to become incarnate as the mortal subject of a human life and experience the human condition from the inside. The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us.

What a fantastic thought: God wants to be with us—not just love us at a distance but to be intimate with us, in communion with us, participating in our humanity while enabling us to participate in divinity, because Incarnation means that divinity and humanity are now and forever inextricably joined.  Joy to the world, the Lord is come … let every heart prepare him room.

But perhaps we have some doubts about our capacity to receive such a guest. A 17th-century poet named Matthew Hale worried about this in a poem called “Christmas Day” (1659):

                           I have a room
‘Tis poor, but ‘tis my best, if thou wilt come
Within so small a cell, where I would fain [willingly]
Mine and the world’s Redeemer entertain; 

[He’s speaking about his heart here as the place he might entertain the world’s Redeemer;
Then he describes sweeping up the dust and cleaning up the mess, just as we would if we expected a houseguest. The poet will even try to wash this “room”—with his own penitent tears:]

And when ‘tis swept and washed, I then will go,
And with Thy leave, I’ll fetch some flowers that grow
In Thine own garden, [these flowers being faith and love];
With those I’ll dress it up …

yet when my best
Is done, the room’s [still] not fit for such a Guest. 

[Well, if we can’t make our lives and our souls fit dwellings to house the divine, who can? God. God can make us fit, the poet says:]

            Thy presence, Lord, alone
Will make [an oxen] stall a court, a cratch [manger] a throne.  

These days, it’s not very easy to believe that humanity is a fit habitation for the God of love and the Prince of Peace. It’s a sign of our sad times that Christmas got cancelled in Bethlehem this year. The war, you know. No liturgies in the Church of the Nativity, no pilgrims crowding Manger Square. They say Bethlehem is like a ghost town now. 

Posted on the Internet during the 2023 Gaza invasion (source unknown).

Sixty years ago, the Catholic contemplative Thomas Merton, who was not blind to the atrocities committed in his own time, could still say that we “exist solely for this, to be the place God has chosen for the divine Presence. The real value of our own self is the sign of God in our being, the signature of God upon our being.” [i] The Word indelibly inscribed on our own hearts and souls!

Some—theologians, poets, mystics—go even further, insisting that the Word becoming flesh means that the whole world is “charged with the grandeur of God.” [ii]  Maximus the Confessor, perhaps the greatest Byzantine theologian, put it this way in the 7th century: 

“For having hidden Himself for us in the inner principles of existent things, [God] is correspondingly spelled out by each visible thing as if by letters. [The Divine] is wholly present in all together in the fullest possible way and completely in each individually, whole and undiminished.”  [iii]

Contemporary songwriter Peter Mayer makes this point more simply: 

When I was a boy in Sunday school, we would learn about the time 
that Moses split the sea in two,
And Jesus made the water wine.
And I remember feeling sad miracles don’t happen still.
But now I keep track ‘cause everything’s a miracle:
Everything, everything, everything’s a miracle.…

This morning outside I stood and saw a little red-winged bird
Shining like a burning bush, singing like a scripture verse: 
It made me want to bow my head …
‘cause everything is holy now.
Everything, everything, everything is holy now. [iv]

In other words, what happens in Bethlehem doesn’t stay in Bethlehem.
It wants to happen everywhere.

We might call this the Bethlehem effect—discovering the Word made “flesh” in the concrete stuff of our world, our stories, our very lives. The great Christian poet of the 4th century, Ephrem the Syrian, describes the Bethlehem effect in one of his poems. He begins by proclaiming his Christmas joy:

Blessed be the Child Who today delights Bethlehem.
Blessed be the Newborn Who today made humanity young again.

[Then he describes the effect this holy birth wants to have on us:] 

On this day of the Humble One let us be neither proud nor haughty.
On this day of forgiveness let us not avenge offenses.
On this day of rejoicing let us not share sorrows.
On this sweet day let us not be vehement.
On this calm day let us not be quick-tempered.
On this day on which God came into the presence of sinners, 
let not the righteous look down on any sinner.
On this day on which the Lord of all came among servants, 
let the powerful bow down to the powerless.
On this day when the Rich One was made poor for our sake, 
let the rich share their table with the poor. [v]

On that holy night in Bethlehem, our human nature was lifted up when God chose to be one of us, to live and die as one of us. And we in turn may now share in the divine life. We are still works in progress no doubt, but we are bound for glory. St. Paul put this so beautifully: “All of us,” he said, “all of us, with our unveiled faces like mirrors reflecting the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the image that we reflect in brighter and brighter glory” (II Cor. 3:18).

Another ancient theologian said it this way: “As they who behold the light are within the light and partake of its brightness, so they who behold God are within God, partaking of God’s brightness.” [vi]

They who behold the light are within the light and partake of its brightness. That’s the Christmas miracle! Our pale mirrors are made to contain the most impossible brilliance. And even when we turn away from the Light, the Light comes looking for us. No matter how shadowy the paths we have taken, the Light will find us, and fill us with divine radiance. That is our destiny, says the Child in the manger. To walk around “shining like the sun.” [vii]

 However … Before we get too carried away with our glorious destiny, listen to a line from the Victorian poet Mary Elizabeth Coleridge. When she imagines coming to the stable, and seeing the babe in the manger, she says:

The safety of the world was lying there.
And the world’s danger. [viii]

The babe in the manger is the world’s danger? What does she mean? I think she is saying that giving our lives to the Holy One will change everything. It will change who we are, what we care about, and how we live. In other words, participation in the divine life (which is the only way to become fully human) is not just a matter of “walking around shining like the sun.” 

It also means letting go of certain cherished things and taking up our cross. The story of the Incarnation is more than the beautiful new-born child away in the manger. The child will become a man, and he is going to ask some difficult things of us someday. 

Leonardo da Vinci, Adoration of the Magi (1481-2).

I don’t want to go very far down that road on Christmas Day. The twelve days of Christmas are a time for celebration and feasting, carols and good cheer, light hearts and extravagant hopes, joy and wonder, and lots of love. But I do want to share a poem by Luci Shaw, a Christian writer now in her 90s. She reminds us that the lovely babe of Bethlehem is going to grow up, and that we’re going to have to grow up with him.

One time of the year
the new-born child
is everywhere,
planted in madonnas’ arms
hay mows, stables
in palaces or farms,
or quaintly, under snowed gables,
gothic angular or baroque plump,
naked or elaborately swathed,
encircled by Della Robia wreaths,
garnished with whimsical
partridges and pears,
drummers and drums,
lit by oversize stars,
partnered with lambs,
peace doves, sugar plums,
bells, plastic camels in sets of three
as if these were what we need
for eternity.

But Jesus the Man is not to be seen.
We are too wary, these days,
of beards and sandalled feet.

Yet if we celebrate, let it be
that He
has invaded our lives with purpose,
striding over our picturesque traditions,
our shallow sentiment,
overturning our cash registers,
wielding His peace like a sword,
rescuing us into reality
demanding much more
than the milk and the softness
and the mother’s warmth
of the baby in the storefront creche,
(only the [grown] Man would ask
all, of each of us)
reaching out
always, urgently, with strong
effective love
(only the [grown] Man would give
his life and live
again for love of us).

Oh come, let us adore him—
Christ—the Lord. [ix]

Okay, I can’t leave you there, not on Christmas Day. So let me end on a note of wonder, with a poem by G. K. Chesterton. It was sung at this year’s Christmas Eve Lessons and Carols at Kings College, Cambridge. [x]

The Christ-child lay on Mary’s lap,
His hair was like a light.
(O weary, weary were the world,
But here is all aright.)

The Christ-child lay on Mary’s breast,
His hair was like a star.
(O stern and cunning are the kings,
But here the true hearts are.)

The Christ-child lay on Mary’s heart,
His hair was like a fire.
(O weary, weary is the world,
But here the world’s desire.)

The Christ-child stood at Mary’s knee,
His hair was like a crown.
And all the flowers looked up at Him,
And all the stars looked down.

Church of St. Mary the Virgin on Holy Island, Northumbria.

This sermon was preached at St. Barnabas Episcopal Church on Bainbridge Island, Washington, on Christmas Day, 2023.

[i] Thomas Merton, “A Letter on the Contemplative Life” (August 1967), in Lawrence S. Cunningham, ed., Thomas Merton: Spiritual Master—The Essential Writings (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1992), 425.

[ii] Gerard Manley Hopkins, “God’s Grandeur.” 

[iii] Maximus the Confessor (c. 580-662). Quoted in Nikolaos Loudovikos, A Eucharistic Ontology: Maximus the Confessor’s Eschatological Ontology of Being as a Dialogical Reciprocity (Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Press, 2010), 125.

[iv] Peter Mayer, “Holy Now.”

[v] Ephrem the Syrian (c. 306-379), Hymns on the Nativity (trans. Kathleen E. McVey, Paulist Press, 1989), adapted from a citation in Wendy M. Wright, The Vigil: Keeping Watch in the Season of Christ’s Coming, Nashville, TN: Upper Room Books, 1992), 95-96. 

[vi] Irenaeus (c. 130-202), Against Heresies, IV.20.

[vii] The phrase is from Thomas Merton’s famous revelatory experience at the corner of Fourth & Walnut in Louisville in March 1958. “And if only everybody else could realize this! [the dignity of humanity conferred by the Incarnation]. But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.”

[viii] Mary Elizabeth Coleridge (1861-1907), “Salus Mundi.”  She was the great-grandniece of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. 

[ix] Luci Shaw, “It is as if infancy were the whole of incarnation,” quoted in Sarah Arthur, ed., Light Upon Light: A Literary Guide to Prayer for Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany (Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press, 2014), 125-126.

[x] G. K. Chesterton, “A Christmas Carol,” was sung in a lovely setting by John Rutter on the 2023 Lessons and Carols from Kings College, Cambridge, during the annual live BBC broadcast with which I begin every Christmas Eve at 7 a.m. Pacific Time.

August 6: Light Eternal or Light Infernal?

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The Transfiguration of Christ (Sr. Abraham, Ethiopian community in Jerusalem, 1990)

I spent only one year in a world without nuclear weapons. My first birthday fell on July 16, 1945, the day of the initial atomic bomb test in New Mexico. A few weeks later, my country used the bomb to extinguish countless human lives on the Feast of the Transfiguration. With Transfiguration falling on a Sunday as Oppenheimer is playing in the theaters, a few comments are in order.

In an interpretive retelling of the Transfiguration by a 17th-century Anglican bishop, Moses and Elijah discuss the paradoxical mixture of evil and glory that permeates the Way of the Cross:

A strange opportunity … when [Jesus’] face shone like the sun, to tell him it must be blubbered and spat upon;… and whilst he was Transfigured on the Mount, to tell him how he must be Disfigured on the Cross! [i]

In the twentieth century, that paradox was tragically deepened when we dropped the atomic bomb at Hiroshima on the Feast of the Transfiguration. Two kinds of light, diabolic and divine, contending forever after for the soul of this world. Whose world is it, anyway? To which light do we belong? To which light do we pledge our allegiance?

In his novel Underworld, Don DeLillo chillingly mixes and confuses the primal images of divine and diabolical light when a nun, swept out of her conscious self into the informational totality of the Internet, has a visionary experience on a website devoted to the H-bomb:

She sees the flash, the thermal pulse . . . . She stands in the flash and feels the power. She sees the spray plume. She sees the fireball climbing, the superheated sphere of burning gas that can blind a person with its beauty, its dripping christblood colors, solar golds and red. She sees the shock wave and hears the high winds and feels the power of false faith, the faith of paranoia, then the mushroom cloud spreads around her, the pulverized mass of radioactive debris, eight miles high, ten miles, twenty, with skirted stem and platinum cap.

The jewels roll out of her eyes and she sees God . . . . 

No, wait, sorry. It is a Soviet bomb she sees . . . . [ii]

Seattle Times, July 16, 1995 (50th anniversary of the first atomic bomb).

I’ve not yet seen Oppenheimer, the film about the creator of the atomic bomb. But I was struck by this paragraph in a review by Adam Mullins-Khatib:

“Oppenheimer … is a searing portrait of a man plagued by visions of a world that can’t be seen, a theoretical world composed of the literal particles of his ideas. Driven by an unyielding need to bring his visions to light, J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) struggles with the notion of bringing theory into practice … It’s a film about the creation of something not before seen and the consequences this entails.” [iii]

Something not before seen and the consequences this entails. That could describe both the coming of Christ and the invention of the Bomb: each brought into the world something not before seen, manifested in a moment of blinding brilliance. And each has had enormous consequences which are still very much with us. But only one of them is the Light eternal, pure brightness of the everlasting Love who loves us. 

To paraphrase the divine Voice in Deuteronomy 30:19, 

This day I set before you life and death, blessing and curse, 
the light eternal and the light infernal. 
Choose life. 
Or else. 

In 1944, one year before Hiroshima, Orthodox theologian Vladimir Lossky, wrote these words: 

“We live in a world of suffering, a world broken and disintegrated, in which Christ’s Transfiguration uncovers reality and reveals to our skeptical minds a new humanity that has either entered into the light of the Risen One or is still called to do so … [W]e need to put on a robe of light, the apparel of those who live without fear, since they have already conquered death and the multiple anxieties associated with it.” [iv]

In this troubled and darkened age, that is exactly how the friends of God must live. 

Let us put on the robe of light, 
and live without fear.

.

[i] Bishop Hall Joseph Hall, Contemplations upon the principal passages of the Old and New Testaments, 1612-28, found on Google Books, p. 383.

[ii] Don DeLillo, Underworld (New York: Scribner, 1997), 825-6.

[iii] Adam Mullins-Khatib, Chicago Reader, July 26, 2003: https://chicagoreader.com/film/review-oppenheimer/

[iv] Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2002, Originally published in French in 1944)), 151, 244.

Whose World Is It?—Rethinking the Problem of Evil

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The Last Judgment (detail), Tympanum of the Abbey of Sainte-Foy, Conques, France (c. 1107).

God isn’t the prime mover of every natural catastrophe and human ill; inexplicable tragedies are never a so-called act of God. Life is more complicated than that; so is the universe; so is God. 

— Gary Commins

Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died (John 11:21).

In Son of Man, a 2006 film retelling the Jesus story in a 21st-century African country, Jesus and Satan are sitting side by side atop a tall sand dune. After putting up with the three temptations, an exasperated Jesus turns suddenly toward his adversary and gives him a hard shove. As Satan tumbles down the dune, Jesus shouts after him, “This is my world!” But Satan is unbowed. When he reaches the bottom, he picks himself up, dusts himself off, and cries up to Jesus, “NO! THIS IS MY WORLD.” The film cuts to the country’s ongoing civil war, where a mass shooting of schoolchildren proves Satan’ point. 

One night last week, a drunken man was shooting a gun in his front yard—reportedly a form of recreation in his Texas neighborhood. But his next-door neighbor had a baby who was trying to sleep. He asked the shooter to stop. The shooter refused. Instead, he fetched a deadlier weapon—an assault rifle—took it into his neighbor’s house, and slaughtered five people, including a nine-year-old boy. The police found a few survivors—children shielded beneath the bodies of their mothers—uninjured, but covered with maternal blood.  

Such unspeakable evil has become a regular occurrence in my country. Mass shootings are setting a record pace this year. Twenty years ago, there were 200 million guns in America. Now there are 400 million. Twenty years ago, assault rifles were 2% of the market. Now they are 25%[i] The man who pulled the trigger in Texas is not alone in his guilt. He is joined by the gunmakers who make themselves rich from the carnage, the right-wing lawmakers who fetishize guns to get votes, the cable propagandists who stoke fear, rage and hate, and a dysfunctional society incapable of exorcising its legion of demons.

The Last Judgment (detail), Tympanum of the Abbey of Sainte-Foy, Conques, France (c. 1107).

I have written about our capacity for denial in “The Murderous Hypocrisy of ‘Thoughts and Prayers.’” If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us (I John 1:8). Or as a modern theologian puts it, “It is only when our capacity for evil has been rendered explicit that we have a realistic basis for understanding that transformation or metanoia, that healing, which constitutes our salvation.” [ii]

Zooey Zephyr, a representative in the Montana state legislature, recently provided a perfect image of the cognitive dissonance inherent in pious self-deception. She was speaking against a Republican anti-trans bill which she believes will increase suicide among the young; but her words could apply to every political misuse of “thoughts and prayers”: “If you vote yes on this bill and yes on these amendments, I hope the next time there’s an invocation when you bow your heads in prayer, you see the blood on your hands.” [iii]

The Republican majority, like Pilate washing his hands of innocent blood, voted to silence Zephyr. They expelled her from the house. It’s easy to mock their fear of truth-telling, but when we look at our own hands, what do we see? 

Evil is woven not only into the fabric of the world, but into each and every soul. In Terrence Malick’s great (anti)war movie, The Thin Red Line, we are shown the violence and death of a terrible battle, but the realistic sounds of gunfire, grenades and human screams are muted beneath the elegiac music of Charles Ives’ “The Unanswered Question,” as though we are watching human evil through an impartial God’s tear-stained eyes. Then we hear the voice-over questions of an American soldier, seeking to penetrate the surface of the visible: 

“This great evil, where does it come from? How does it still enter the world? What seed, what root did it grow from? Who’s doing this, who’s killing us, robbing us of life and light, mocking us with the sight of what we might have known? Does our ruin benefit the earth? Is this darkness in you too?” [iv]

Who’s doing this? Who’s killing us? Is this darkness in you, too? The problem of evil is not only an unanswered question; it is unanswerable as well. In his valuable and insightful new book, Evil and the Problem of Jesus, Episcopal priest and theologian Gary Commins invites us to set aside the philosophical conundrums, engaging evil not as a theoretical puzzle but as a practical challenge.  

Since ancient times, the existence of evil has raised unsettling questions about the nature of God. If God is good, why is so much evil allowed to happen? Is God indifferent to our suffering, or somehow powerless to eliminate it? Can divine purpose ever justify evil, turning it to the good? Or must we conclude that a good God, or any God at all, is a logical impossibility, given the prevalence and persistence of evil?

Theodicy is the philosophical or theological attempt to reconcile the goodness of God with the existence of evil. It has produced a vast amount of profound intellectual reflection over the centuries. But Commins, drawing on his own pastoral experience, calls the whole enterprise into question. It’s not just that a rational explanation for evil offers little real comfort to its victims (Who wants to hear “It’s God’s will” at a funeral?). It also strips both God and evil of their complexity. The sources of evil are multifarious and impossible to trace with precision. And the activity of God within our temporal, finite existence is not a unilateral and unfettered exercise of power. The self-emptying God chooses to work within incarnational limits. The vulnerable babe in the manger grows up to die on a cross, and in between does what he can to address evil, not always successfully. 

“Traditional Western theodicy,” says Commins, “jams billions of people, or the planet, millions of millennia, and the infinite intricacy of subatomic matter into a solitary, simplistic enigma of God-and-evil. By tapering all its energy into one worn-out query, it diverts us away from more illuminating questions. Not only does it boil down a myriad of meanings into one conundrum of divine power or love. It concentrates on what is, in all likelihood, the least fruitful of many mysteries.” [v]

Instead of defending God’s honor or solving the ancient enigma of good and evil, we should accept the sheer givenness of “a wild, wondrous, chaotic creation [we] can’t comprehend or control.” [vi]  Instead of wondering why the world is so, we should devote our energies to the divine project of making it better. 

“The causes of evil and suffering are personal, social, structural, and cosmic: human delusions, collective misbehaviors, institutional grandiosity, and spiritual malice .… Until the End, suffering and evil will neither cease nor desist—they are inherent in creation and intensified by social ills; we can decrease them by aligning ourselves with God’s will.” [vii]

We may never understand why the world must be an unstable mixture “of storms and stillness, gloom and brightness,” where “suffering, evil, and chaos commingle with glory, love, and joy.”[viii]  But it’s the world we’ve got, and what we really need to figure out is how to live in it.

And for that, Commins says, we must turn to Jesus, who shows us “what it means to be human.” If we seek a Christian understanding of God’s response to evil, we should start not with metaphysics, but with the gospel.

“Jesus never waxes philosophical. Rather than offering an ‘explanation’ for evil, he gives his followers ‘a charge and a benediction’: the charge to stand in solidarity with the oppressed, the benediction to empower his followers to resist evil.” [ix]

“Nowhere does Jesus construct a system of ethics or author a theology of evil. In broad terms, what we can do to undo evil is clear—act on his words, treat all as equals, seek the kingdom, go and do likewise, repent, follow, forgive, and love—but unless we face the evils within us, we won’t have a positive influence on the world around us and, even then, nothing is a sure thing.” [x]

At the same time that Jesus is showing us how to be fully human, he is revealing who God is and what God does. Jesus’ own responses to evil are “epiphanies into God’s relationship with evil.… what Jesus does in time, God does in eternity; the ways Jesus responds to evil in his lifetime—confronting, undoing, and erasing it; bending, circling, and transforming it—are ways God always engages evil.” [xi]

No metaphysical speculation needed. Just keep an eye on Jesus, and the Way will show itself. In a beautifully succinct summation of this Way, Commins says that “Jesus embodies compassion, challenges judgments, reverses fates, levels inequalities, frees from demons, forgives sins, tells truths, and plants seeds of shalom.” [xii]

So whose world is it, after all? We wonder every time we watch the news. But ultimately, it’s a question to be answered not within our minds, but in the activity of our lives. As the song says, “It may be the devil or it may be the Lord, but you’re gonna have to serve somebody.”[xiii]

The late German theologian Dorothee Soelle (1929-2003) found this paradigm of Christian discipleship perfectly expressed in The Brothers Karamazov, where Ivan and his younger brother Alyosha are earnestly discussing theodicy. Both agree that no long-range divine purpose could ever justify the torture of children in the here and now. Where the brothers differ is in their personal response to evil. Ivan blames and rejects a God who consents to the immense sufferings of history. But Alyosha, notes Soelle, does not shake his fist at heaven. He is too busy attending to the needs of earth, just like the God who became one of us.

“[Alyosha] directs his attention not to the power above but to the sufferers. He puts himself beside them. He bears their pain with them. He listens with agony as Ivan introduces examples of suffering he had assembled against the compassion of God … He is silent, he shares the suffering, he embraces the others.” [xiv]

Compassion’s embrace: from Alexander Sokurov’s “Lc. 15:11-32” (Prodigal Son installation,Venice Biennale 2019). Sculptures by Vladimir Brodarsky & Katya Pilnikova.

Photographs by the author. For more on the Tympanum at Conques, including a video of what the original painted colors might have been: https://www.tourisme-conques.fr/en/en-conques/the-tympanum

[i] These statistics were cited in a televised interview with Fred Guttenberg, speaking about the new book he has co-authored with Thomas Gabor: American Carnage: Shattering the Myths That Fuel Gun Violence. 

[ii] Kenneth Surin, Theology and the Problem of Evil (Oxford & New York: Basil Blackwell Ltd., 1986), 157.

[iii] https://apnews.com/article/montana-trans-lawmaker-silenced-zooey-zephyr-d398d442537a595bf96d90be90862772

[iv] The Thin Red Line (1998), adapted by Terrence Malick from James Jones’ 1962 novel. 

[v] Gary Commins, Evil and the Problem of Jesus (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2023), 14. Full disclosure: Gary is an old friend. We meet up periodically in Eugene for national track & field championships, but never discuss evil during the meets. His new book not only offers a fresh and timely take on a central theological question, it does so through an illuminating method of reading Scripture and tradition in general.

[vi] Commins, 68.

[vii] Ibid., 194.

[viii] Ibid., 155, 194.

[ix] Ibid., 41. The quoted phrases are from Susan R. Garrett’s article, “Christ and the Present Evil Age,” Interpretation 57 (2003), 370-383.

[x] Ibid., 129-130.

[xi] Ibid., 159.

[xii] Ibid., 149.

[xiii] Bob Dylan, “Gotta Serve Somebody,” on Slow Train Coming (1979). 

[xiv] Dorothee Soelle, Suffering (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1975), 175.

Extravagant Sacrifice: A Holy Week Reflection

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Jan van Scorel (c. 1530)

Mary took a pound of costly perfume made out of pure nard, anointed Jesus’s feet, and wiped them with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. But Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples (the one who was about to betray him) said, “Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?” — John 12:3-5  

Judas raises a troubling question for everyone who is not destitute. As long as there is human need, how dare we spend our money on anything else? And Jesus’ answer—“The poor are always with you”—might seem equally troubling, if taken to accept economic inequality as inevitable. But Jesus was never complacent about the status quo. In both word and deed he lifted up the lowly—the ones either ignored or shamed by their culture—declaring them worthy of blessing and honor. As Jesus himself put it, he came to bring good news to the poor: Injustice has no future. God’s kingdom of loving interdependence is at hand. 

Here’s how I read this text: “You can help the destitute any time you want, Judas. If your concern is sincere, they’ll still be around after I’m gone. But I won’t be. So don’t be so quick to judge this woman. If you could only understand what’s going on here, it would save your life.”

So what is going on here? A woman, Mary of Bethany, whose brother Lazarus had recently been rescued from death by Jesus, pours very expensive oil over the feet of her Lord, and then wipes those feet with her hair. It’s an extravagant gesture of devotion, gratitude and love. The oil, worth a year’s wages for a common laborer, may have cost Mary most of her wealth, while letting down her hair to do the work of a towel was, in that culture, a shocking display of abasement and vulnerability. In other words, she was offering all that she had and all that she was to honor Jesus. 

This act, both sensory and symbolic, overflowed with meanings. Anointing with oil was a way to mark the special vocation and identity of authoritative figures, whether powerful rulers or holy persons. It consecrates them as chosen and set apart. The title of “Messiah” or “Christ” means “the anointed one.” It was revolutionary to have a woman be the one to anoint Jesus as priest and ruler, but so was the kingdom he came to manifest and embody. 

Anointing was also part of the culture’s preparation of a body for burial. Performed in the week before Jesus’ death, Mary’s gesture inaugurates the sequence of sacrificial acts culminating with her Lord’s burial in the stone-cold tomb. The feet she anoints will walk the Way of the Cross for the salvation of the world. This was his chosen destiny. 

The story’s third meaning is in its foreshadowing of the foot-washing, when Jesus, on the night before he died, knelt at the feet of his friends to perform the work of a servant, surrendering his power for love’s sake. He was teaching by showing: This is how we must be with one another. This is exactly how God is with us. Just a few days before Jesus taught this explicit lesson at the Last Supper, Mary of Bethany had performed it instinctively, offering all she had, holding nothing back. 

At the time, the disciples did not grasp the full significance of Mary’s act. Nor did Mary herself. How could they? As we like to say about Holy Week, the journey is how we know. The disciples had to follow Jesus all the way to the cross—and beyond—before they could begin to understand—through memory and reflection—what it was all about. 

One of the strongest triggers for memory is our sense of smell. When John’s gospel tells us that “the house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume,” it sounds like a vivid personal memory. Recalling the fragrance, the disciples could revisit that moment to absorb all the meanings which had escaped them at the time. 

As we make our own personal and communal journey through Holy Week, may we too immerse ourselves extravagantly in the sensory images and sounds of the Passion narratives and rituals, allowing them, by our faithful participation, to take us deeper and deeper into the Paschal Mystery of dying and rising in Christ. 

As for Judas’ sour complaint, Sydney Carter’s Passion carol, “Said Judas to Mary,” nicely disposes of its false premise of either/or. Devotion to Jesus and loving service to “the least” of God’s family are not opposed. They are inseparable:

Said Jesus to Mary, “Your love is so deep, 
 today you may do as you will. 
Tomorrow, you say, I am going away, 
but my body I leave with you still.”

“The poor of the world are my body,” he said,
“to the end of the world they shall be.
The bread and the blankets you give to the poor
 you’ll know you have given to me.”

Here is a lovely rendition of Carter’s Holy Week carol sung by Fiona Dunn:


Celebrating the Holy Name on New Year’s Day

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To the Name that brings Salvation
Honour, worship, laud we pay.

— John Mason Neale

Aelfric of Eynsham, an Anglo-Saxon monk around the turn of the first millennium, thought January 1 a poor choice for New Year’s Day because it lacked the inherent significance worthy of time’s annual renewal. The birthday of Jesus on December 25, or late March, when the land starts to wake from Winter’s sleep, seemed more propitious, and were each widely observed in the Middle Ages as the year’s true beginning. In the Church calendar, the year began in late autumn, on the First Sunday of Advent. In Britain, the First of January did not become the officially accepted New Year’s Day until 1752.

As Eleanor Parker explains in Winters in the World, her charming study of early English understandings of the seasons, monastic writers like Aelfric “wanted to read and interpret the natural world, to learn to recognize the meaning God had planted in it. They saw time and the seasons, from the very first day of the world, as carefully arranged by God with method and purpose—so they believed it should be possible to organize the calendar not according to the randomness of custom and inherited tradition, but in a way that reflected that divine plan.” [i]

But January 1 did mark a singular event in the life of Jesus. As the octave, or eighth day of Christmas, it was the date of the Christ Child’s circumcision, based on Luke’s description of the timing (“When the eighth day came …”— Luke 2:21). The Feast of the Circumcision was celebrated in Spain and Gaul as early as the 6thcentury, but Rome, reluctant to associate with the chaotic excess of popular New Year celebrations, waited until the 11th century to adopt the feast. While modernity has found the circumcision of Jesus a peculiar choice for liturgical celebration (it was finally suppressed in the Roman Catholic calendar revisions of 1969), the Middle Ages saw significance in the first shedding of the Savior’s sacred blood. It not only proved his fully vulnerable humanity; it also foreshadowed the sacrificial offering of Calvary. 

St. Paul’s spiritualization of the physical ritual, making it an interior, metaphorical image of severing ourselves from the old body of death (“circumcision of the heart”—Romans 2:29), helped perpetuate the liturgical observance beyond the Middle Ages, but our own era has found more profitable meaning in the other thing that happened on the octave of the Nativity: Jesus got his name. 

When the eighth day had come and the child was to be circumcised, they gave him the name Jesus, the name the angel had given him before his conception (Luke 2:21).

The Feast of the Holy Name of Jesus is celebrated on various dates in early January, but the Episcopal calendar, following Luke’s account, puts it properly on New Year’s Day. And while many of us usually spend January 1 watching the Rose Parade and bowl games instead of keeping the sacred feast, whenever the year begins on a Sunday, the secular traditions are transferred to January 2, leaving Episcopalians free to gather on January 1 to observe Holy Name.

Although the Hebrew name “Yeshua” (“Iesus” in the 4th-century Latin Bible, becoming “Jesus” in the 17th-century Geneva Bible) was fairly common in 1st-century Palestine, it was given special weight by divine authority (both Mary and Joseph were told by God’s messenger, “You must name him Jesus.”) And its literal meaning, “Yahweh is salvation,” became fully embodied and expressed in the life, death and resurrection of the son of Mary. Jesus is the one who saves.   

St. Paul defined Christians as “those who in every place call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ” (I Cor. 1:2). The whole New Testament attributed great power to the name of Jesus. The first Christians prayed in his name (John 14:14), baptized in his name (Romans 6:3), and healed in his name (Acts 3:6). The Prologue to the Fourth Gospel declares that “to all that received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God” (John 1:12). And in Paul’s famous tribute in Philippians, no other name can compare:

Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him a name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Philippians 2: 9-11),

Medieval theologians sang exuberant praises of the Holy Name. St. Bernard wrote: “The name Jesus is food. Are you not strengthened every time you recall it? What else builds up the spirit of the one pondering it as this name does? What so refreshed the tired heart, strengthens the virtues, fosters chaste loves?” Richard of St. Victor said that “Jesus is a sweet name, a name of delight, a name that comforts the sinner, a name of blessed hope. Therefore Jesus, be to me Jesus!” And Peter of Ravenna equated the name with the effects of salvation: “You shall call his name Jesus—the name that gave sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, walking to the lame, speech to the mute, life to the dead; and the power of this name drove all the might of the devil from the bodies of the possessed.” [ii]

Eastern Christianity developed a repetitive recitation of the Holy Name into the transformative practice of centering prayer.[iii] And countless hymn writers have hailed “the power of Jesus’ name.” 

John Newton (1725-1807), author of “Amazing Grace,” celebrated the Holy Name’s healing power:

How sweet the name of Jesus sounds
In a believer’s ear!
It soothes his sorrows, heals his wounds,
And drives away his fear.[iv]

Even at our end, he believed, “the music of thy name” will “refresh my soul in death.” An expanded list of the Name’s effects was given by John Mason Neale (1818-1866):

Name of gladness, Name of pleasure,
By the tongue ineffable,
Name of sweetness passing measure,
To the ear delectable.

‘Tis our safeguard and our treasure,
‘Tis our help ‘gainst sin and hell.
‘Tis the Name for adoration,
‘Tis the Name of victory;

‘Tis the Name for meditation
In the vale of misery:
‘Tis the Name for veneration
By the Citizens on high.

‘Tis the Name that whoso preaches
Finds its music in his ear:
‘Tis the Name that whoso teaches
Finds more sweet than honey’s cheer …[v]

Such praises of the Holy Name do not mistake its invocation as a magic charm detached from any concrete meaning. When we say “Jesus” with prayerful, sacred attention, we call up a vast array of transformative forces, from the salvific events of the gospels to the abiding energies of divine presence. As a young Palestinian woman put it to me once, in her imperfect but brilliantly accurate English: 

“Jesus is a big word. You can never come to the end of it.”

Episcopal theologian William Porcher Dubose (1836-1918) made the same point this way:

“Jesus Christ is to me, not a name, or a memory or tradition, nor an idea or sentiment, nor a personification, but a living and personal reality, presence, and power. He is God for me, to me, in me, and myself in God … And ‘in His name’ means ‘in Him,’ and ‘in Him’ means ‘in his death and resurrection.’” [vi]

The attempt to grasp the reality represented by the Holy Name is vividly imagined by Charles Wesley (1707-1788) in the figure of Jacob wrestling with the Divine stranger whose name he struggles to know:

Come, O thou Traveller unknown,
Whom still I hold, but cannot see! …

I need not tell thee who I am,
My misery or sin declare;
Thyself hast called me by my name,
Look on thy hands, and read it there.

But who, I ask thee, who art thou?
Tell me thy name, and tell me now.…

Art thou the Man that died for me?
The secret of thy love unfold:
Wrestling, I will not let thee go
Till I thy name, thy nature know.…

The wrestling with the nameless Transcendent continues, and even though its ungraspable essence departs with the dawn, there is a personal, relatable presence that remains, and can be named. 

I know thee, Savior, who thou art—
Jesus, the feeble sinner’s friend.
Nor wilt thou with the night depart,
But stay, and love me to the end …

And in this abiding, enfolding presence, the poet discovers yet another name behind (within?) the name of Jesus. It is the Holy Name above all others:

Thy nature, and thy name, is LOVE. [vii]

[i] Eleanor Parker, Winters in the World: A Journey Through the Anglo-Saxon Year (London: Reaktion Books, 2022), 76.

[ii] The quotations are cited in the 13th-century collection by Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend, Volume 1, trans. William Granger Ryan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 73.

[iii] The “Jesus Prayer” (Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me) is often synchronized in its repetitions with a pattern of slow, deep breathing. 

[iv] John Newton, “The Name of Jesus.”

[v] John Mason Neale, “The Name of Jesus.”

[vi] Wiliam Porcher Dubose, The Reason of Life (London 1911), cited in Love’s Redeeming Work: The Anglican Quest for Holiness, eds. Geoffrey Rowell, Kenneth Stevenson, & Rowan Williams (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 493.

[vii] Charles Wesley, “Wrestling Jacob.” The original biblical story is in Genesis 32:24-33.

You Gonna Have to Serve Somebody: Thoughts on Christ the King

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The Enthronement of Christ (Bamberg Apocalypse, early 11th century).

The extremists in American politics say that God is on their side, but such statements are lacking in content. Their “God” is not really expected to supply any concrete assistance, such as plagues or angelic legions, to carry them to victory. “God-on-our-side” language is just a dramatic way to say that “we are right and you are evil.” 

However, a new video ad is selling the startling idea that God has indeed, in these latter days, directly intervened in history by anointing a human messiah to enforce divine will through political power. Over God’s-eye aerial views of land and sea, we hear a caricature of Charlton Heston recite a text with biblical cadences and a lot of reverb:

“And on the 8th day, God looked down on his planned paradise, and said, ‘I need a protector.’ So God made a fighter.… God said, ‘I need someone to be strong, advocate truth in the midst of hysteria, someone who challenges conventional wisdom, and isn’t afraid to defend what he knows to be right and just.… someone who will take the arrows, stand firm in the face of unrelenting attacks.’” 

As we hear these words, photographic images of the Chosen One fill the screen. The new messiah is revealed to be—wait for it—Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida! I knew he had presidential ambitions, but now he’s in the running for the Antichrist! Are there really enough rubes out there to fall for the old false messiah gag? [i]

About 60 years ago a southern preacher named Clarence Jordan liked to ask his fellow Christians: “What’s the biggest lie told in America today?” He’d let that sink in for a bit, and then he’d say, “The biggest lie told in America today is: ‘Jesus is Lord.’”

In other words, if you say “Jesus is Lord” and foster racism, you’re a liar. If you say “Jesus is Lord” and support white supremacy, you’re a liar. If you say “Jesus is Lord” and foment bigotry and hate, you’re a liar. If you say “Jesus is Lord” and afflict the vulnerable, you’re a liar. If you say “Jesus is Lord” and do harm to your fellow beings, you’re a liar. 

Someone recently posted a short video on the internet depicting Jesus as the incarnation of our worst politics. It shows Jesus teaching his disciples in a variety of settings: 

“I was hungry, and you gave me something to eat. I was thirsty, and you gave me something to drink. And behold: Now I’m all lazy and entitled. You shouldn’t have done that.”

“What is a man profited, if he gains the whole world, but loses his own soul? A lot! He has profited a lot. One soul for the whole world, that is an amazing deal!” [ii]

Sad to say, some people would prefer the anti-Jesus who does nothing but reflect their own pitiful values. In any case, as the song says, “You gonna have to serve somebody: Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord, but you gonna have to serve somebody.” [iii]

So who’s it going to be?
Whom do we serve?
Who—or what—rules our life?
To whom do we belong?
To what do we surrender?

In a culture of hyper-individualism, the idea of submission to a larger reality, a greater good, goes against the grain. But we are all governed by something, maybe even a whole crazy stampeding herd of somethings, pulling us here, driving us there. Whether we are conscious of it or not, there are voices, inside us and outside us, which direct and rule our hearts in every moment.

A hundred years ago, Scottish theologian P. T. Forsyth suggested that “The first duty of every soul is not to find its freedom, but its Master.” And then he added: “If within us we find nothing over us, we succumb to what is around us.” [iv]  When that is the case, there is no shortage of impulses, passions, ambitions, ideologies, agendas and distractions to swallow us up and sweep us away.

On the last Sunday of the Christian year, the Feast of Christ the King, we pledge allegiance to the Divine Love that governs the universe. As Frederick Denison Maurice, nineteenth-century Anglican priest and social reformer, reminds us, the reign of Christ extends into every province of our common life: 

When we say, ‘Thy kingdom come,’ we desire that the King of kings and Lord of lords will reign over our spirits and souls and bodies, which [belong to God]… We pray for the extinction of all tyranny…; [we pray] for the exposure and destruction of corruptions inward and outward; [we pray] for truth in all departments of government, art, science; [we pray] for the true dignity of professions [and labor]; [we pray] for right dealings in the commonest transactions of trade; [we pray] for blessings that shall be felt in every [dwelling].[v]

“Crown him Lord of all,” we sing at the Feast of Christ the King. But the gospel for the day does not show us a mighty ruler, but only a naked man nailed to a tree. Soldiers mock the pathetic absurdity of his “kingship.” The sign above his head—“King of the Jews”—is a mocking irony. His only apparent subject is the dying thief hanging next to him. “Jesus,” he gasps, “remember me when you come into your kingdom.” [vi]

Some kingdom!
Some king!

Does Christ’s kingdom exist only in the future? Or is it somehow breaking into the here and now, even in the killing fields of history, where you need the faith of a dying thief to see it? 

The question we began with—whose world is it?—is, alas, undecidable within the flux of history. You can’t choose on the basis of the evidence, because for the time being the evidence is mixed, like the wheat and the tares.

But you can decide who’s got the better story—Jesus or Satan.
And you can choose which story you want to belong to:
The story which overflows with life, 
or the one that ends in death.

Your choice.

[i] You can see the video here: https://youtu.be/U9oTBA-MvZk

[ii] The “GOP Jesus” video, produced by Friend Dog Studios, is here: https://youtu.be/SZ2L-R8NgrA

[iii] Bob Dylan, “Gotta Serve Somebody,” on Slow Train Coming (1979).

[iv] Quoted in Leander E. Keck, Who is Jesus? History in the Perfect Tense (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2000), 164, 167.

[v] Goeffrey Rowel, Kenneth Stevenson, Rowan Williams, eds., Love’s Redeeming Work: The Anglican Quest for Holiness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 416.

[vi] Luke 23:33-43.

Crossing the Great Divide: A Homily on Dives and Lazarus

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Skylight (1732) for the high altar of the cathedral in Toledo, Spain .

Only a tramp was Lazarus’ sad fate
He who lay down by the rich man’s gate
To beg for some crumbs from the rich man to eat
But he left him to die like a tramp on the street

— Grady and Hazel Cole, 1939

Jesus was a great storyteller. He knew how to use a good story not just to make a point, but to change lives. But today’s story isn’t quite like any other parable. It’s the only one where a character is given a name. The poor man is called Lazarus, a variant of Eleazar, which means “God helps.” The rich man is unidentified in Scripture, but tradition has given him the name Dives. That’s Latin for “rich guy,” so readers of the Latin Bible began to treat it as his proper name.

This is also the only gospel parable about the afterlife.[i] Most scholars suspect it to be a version of a popular Egyptian folk tale widely told the in the first century. The fact that it makes it into Luke’s gospel suggests that Jesus liked the story well enough to use it in his own preaching.

It’s easy to see why people loved the story in a time when economic inequality was as appalling as it is in America today, where the 3 richest billionaires have more money between them than the bottom 50%. In first-century Palestine, the rich had scooped up most of the land and money, leaving tenant farmers with pretty much nothing of their own, while those who hired out as laborers got only starvation wages. So the idea of a great reversal of fortune was an appealing and consoling image. 

The reversal theme certainly resonated with St. Luke, whose gospel, more than any other, expresses a “preferential option for the poor.” [ii]  We hear this in Mary’s Magnificat: “He has cast down the mighty from their thrones, and has lifted up the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty.” And we hear it in the Beatitudes: “Blessed are you poor, for yours is the kingdom of heaven.”

A twelfth-century Italian bishop, Bruno di Segni, said of this parable, “These words are most necessary both for the rich and for the poor, because they bring fear to the former and consolation to the latter.” [iii] In Herman Melville’s 19th-century novel Redburn, his protagonist invokes the parable when he cries, “Tell me, oh Bible, that story of Lazarus again, that I may find comfort in my heart for the poor and forlorn.” [iv]    

We all love reversal stories, where the bad get their comeuppance and the lowly are given a happy ending. I have to confess that I myself would take pleasure in a story where, say, the governor of Florida is tricked into boarding an airplane, only to find himself dropped in the middle of a burning desert, with nothing but the desperate hope that a passing migrant might appear with a canteen of water. “Oh Señor, have mercy on me! I beg you, give me a drop of your water to cool my tongue!”

So is Jesus telling a reversal story in the parable of Dives and Lazarus? Or is he doing something else? The Bible certainly can be critical of wealth’s dark side. We’ve heard plenty of that in today’s readings:

Woe to those who are at ease in Zion, 
and for those who are complacent on the mount of Samaria…
Woe to those who lie on beds of ivory, 
and sprawl on their couches,
stuffing themselves with lamb and veal, 
singing idle songs and drinking wine by the bowlful,
who anoint themselves with the finest oils,
but are not grieved over the ruin of Joseph. (Amos 6: 1, 4-6)

And St. Paul, in his first letter to Timothy, warns that “those who want to be rich fall into temptation and are trapped by many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, and in their eagerness to be rich some have wandered away from faith and pierced themselves with many pains.” (I Timothy 6:9-10)

But while the parable presents a strong contrast between situations of extreme wealth and extreme poverty, between high social status and low social status, between easy pleasure and terrible suffering, the point is not about changing places, or even about trying to reduce the contrast to some extent—a little less for the rich, a little more for the poor. This parable isn’t about making the game fairer, but about changing the game entirely. 

Right now, in our time, our country, the game is so much about individual winning. The lucky ones win the lottery, invent the Internet, crush the competition, or throw more touchdowns than interceptions. The rest must fend for themselves. Dog eat dog. There have been notable attempts to counter the personal, social, and environmental damage of our careless individualism, but in the absence of a more widely supported vision of the common good, it continues to be an uphill battle. Can we order our lives and our society to be more in accord with divine intention? We’d better. As W. H. Auden put it on the eve of World War II, “We must love one another or die.” [v]

We all enjoy the hymn, “All things bright and beautiful,” celebrating the wonderful world God has made: “Each little flower that opens, each little bird that sings,” and so on. But one verse—thankfully scrubbed from our hymnal—celebrates an archaic social order as divinely ordained:

The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
He made them, high or lowly,
And ordered their estate.

In the kingdom of God, the economy of God, such sundering of neighbor from neighbor is definitely not bright and beautiful. We all belong to one another; we are all intended to share God’s gifts in just measure. To forget this is to choose death and hell. 

Kathleen Hill, an American writer, lived in Nigeria when the traditional cooperative social ethic was being eroded by the lingering effects of colonial rule. She tells of a driver who sped by a hit-and-run victim lying on the side of the road. He didn’t stop because he was afraid that if he put the wounded man into his car, he’d get bloodstains on his new seat covers. “He’d felt no need to apologize,” Hill said, “no need to feel ashamed. It was a culture of money that was growing in Nigeria, a new emphasis on personal wealth.… [N]ow, without the play of traditional values that had connected one person to another, there seemed no limits to self-interest, to the tendency to regard someone else exclusively in the light of one’s own personal imperatives.” [vi]

Where there are no limits to self-interest, no one is my neighbor. Dives feasts inside his mansion, while Lazarus starves on the street. And never the twain shall meet. I think that Jesus would say that Dives was in hell from the start. He didn’t have to die to get there. 

But is this state of separation and disconnection the way things must always remain, now and forever, Amen? Is there any chance for the twain to meet? I think the key to this parable is the gate. The rich man is on one side; Lazarus is on the other. In the story, the gate never opens. In fact, its role as a barrier eventually translates into an uncrossable chasm in eternity.

Narciso Tome’s dramatic skylight seems to visualize a glimpse of heaven from a dark abyss,
like Dives’ view of Abraham and Lazarus across the great chasm.

In the parable, Dives in hell is able to see, across that chasm, Lazarus at ease in the bosom of Abraham. But the gap between them is uncrossable. If only he had opened his gate and experienced Lazarus as a fellow child of God—not just a tramp on the street—there would be no uncrossable chasm between them now. He wouldn’t be stuck in the lonely hell of self-interest and self-isolation. It turns out that the closed gate keeping Lazarus out has also been keeping the rich man in. Even after death he remains in the prison he built for himself, behind the locked gate preventing the communion for which every person is made. 

New Testament scholar Bernard Brandon Scott says this about the gate: “In this parable the rich man fails by not making contact.… The gate is not just an entrance to the house but the passageway to the other.… In any given interpersonal or social relationship there is a gate that discloses the ultimate depths of human existence. Those who miss that gate may, like the rich man, find themselves crying in vain for a drop of cooling water.” [vii]  

“I came that you might have life,” Jesus said, “and that you may have it more abundantly” (John 10:10). So is there abundant life in the rich man’s future? Can the chasm ever be bridged by repentance and mercy? Ebenezer Scrooge, after being shown what a mess he was making of his own future, put this question to the final spirit in A Christmas Carol,: 

“Are these the shadows of the things that Will be, or are they shadows of things that May be, only? Men’s courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead. But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change. Say it is thus with what you show me.” [viii]

Can there be a different outcome to the story of Dives and Lazarus? A couple of poets have explored interesting options. James Kier Baxter (1926-1972) of New Zealand concentrates on Dives, who is far worse off than Lazarus even before he departs this life:

Two men lived on the same street
But they were poles apart
For Lazarus had crippled bones
But Dives a crippled heart

In an intriguing twist, Baxter leaves Lazarus on earth and puts Dives in the Divine Presence. ‘My poor blind crippled son, [God] said, / ‘Sit here beneath My Throne.” And instead of eternity in Hades, Dives is given a chance to change his life: 

‘Go back and learn from Lazarus
To walk on My highway
Until your crippled soul shall stand
And bear the light of day,
And you and Lazarus are one
In holy poverty.’ [ix]

Canadian William Wilfred Campbell (1860-1918) focused his poem on Lazarus, giving him a voice he never had in the original parable. While enjoying the bliss of the afterlife, Lazarus is suddenly troubled by a “piercing cry of one in agony, / That reaches me here in heaven.” It’s the rich man’s anguished plea from hell, drowning out the more amiable sounds of heaven.

So calleth it ever upward unto me
It creepeth in through heaven’s golden doors;
It echoes all along the sapphire floors;
Like smoke of sacrifice, it soars and soars;
It fills the vastness of eternity.…

No more I hear the beat of heavenly wings,
The seraph chanting in my rest-tuned ear;
I only know a cry, a prayer, a tear,
That rises from the depths up to me here;
A soul that to me suppliant leans and clings.

O, Father Abram, thou must bid me go
Into the spaces of the deep abyss;
Where far from us and our God-given bliss,
Do dwell those souls that have done Christ amiss;
For through my rest I hear that upward woe.

Lazarus can’t ignore the sinner’s plea, nor does he want to. In a replication of both the Incarnation and the Harrowing of Hell, he begs “Father Abram” to let him descend to the uttermost depths on a mission of redemptive love. The journey is immense, and when the poem ends Lazarus is still on the downward way, with cries of pain ahead, shouts of glory behind. As he traverses the infinite gap between heaven and hell, we suspect this outward motion of self-diffusive love will go on and on, until that day when the tears are wiped from every eye and “God is all in all” (I Corinthians 15:28).  

Hellward he moved like radiant star shot out
From heaven’s blue with rain of gold at even…
Hellward he sank, followed by radiant rout…

‘Tis ages now long-gone since he went out,
Christ-urged, love-driven, across the jasper walls,
But hellward still he ever floats and falls,
And ever nearer come those anguished calls;
And far behind he hears a glorious shout. [x]

It’s a striking image: Love perpetually reaching for the hopeless and the lost, opening every gate, overcoming every obstacle that separates us from God. However, in the original parable, the rich man’s repentance is not off to a promising start. In his cry from hell, Dives doesn’t deign to speak to Lazarus at all. Instead, he asks Abraham, a personage he considers of equal status, to treat Lazarus like a common servant. “Have him dip a finger into cool water and come to me, so he can drip it onto my tongue.” Even in his agony, the rich man’s arrogant self-interest is unabated. 

In Luke’s gospel, this parable always ends the same way, no matter how many times we read it. Dives will stay stuck in the prison of his own making for as long as the story is told. If we want a new ending, we must write it with our own lives and times, as we push through the gate into a deeper union, a more loving communion with our fellow creatures. This is not only radically personal work, it is also the collective endeavor of Church and society. In a time when the common good and neighborly love are in acute peril, love and mercy ceaselessly call us to choose the better way. 

This homily was written for the Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost at St. Barnabas Episcopal Church, Bainbridge Island, Washington.

[i] Matthew 25: 31-46 (The sheep and the goats) is also about the afterlife, but many scholars say it does not fit the definition of a parable. 

[ii] The term was popularized by Liberation theologians and activists in Latin America in the 1960s as a key element of Catholic social teaching.

[iii] Cited in Stephen L. Wailes, Medieval Allegories of Jesus’ Parables (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), 255.

[iv] Herman Melville, Redburn (1849), ch. 37.

[v] W. H. Auden, “September 1, 1939.”

[vi] Kathleen Hill, She Read to Us in the Late Afternoons (Encino, CA: Delphinium Books, 2017), 57.

[vii] Bernard Brandon Scott, Hear Then the Parable: A Commentary on the Parables of Jesus (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989), 159.

[viii] Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (18­­43), Stave IV. 

[ix] James Kier Baxter, “Ballad of Dives and Lazarus,” in Divine Inspiration: The Life of Jesus in World Poetry, eds. Robert Atwan, George Dardess, & Peggy Rosenthal (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 260-261.

[x] William Wilfred Campbell, “Lazarus.” For complete text: https://www.poetryexplorer.net/poem.php?id=10045686

America in the Ditch: The Good Samaritan Revisited

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Balthasar van Cortbemde, The Good Samaritan (1647).

Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:29-37) is usually heard as a reminder to care for the needs of others, including strangers or even enemies. That’s why some hospitals have taken their name from the protagonist. I myself was born in the Episcopal Hospital of the Good Samaritan in Los Angeles and, four days before my 22nd birthday, my father died in the Intensive Care Unit of the same “Good Sam.” So this parable carries some special meanings for me.

We all hope to be like the Good Samaritan, but the late Doug Adams, an extraordinary friend and professor of Religion and Art at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, proposed an alternative reading of the parable. Instead of asking us to identify with the Good Samaritan, he wondered, what if Jesus wants us to identify with the man in the ditch?

The Samaritan is the person with all the power in the situation. He has a donkey, oil and wine, enough extra clothing to make bandages, the strength to lift the wounded man onto the donkey, and money to pay for the man’s medical care. He gives, most admirably, out of his own abundance. 

But the naked, beaten, half-dead man in the ditch has no power. He has no capacity or ability to help himself. He is entirely dependent on the kindness of strangers. And who is the one who stops to help him? Not the priest, not the Levite, not one of his own kind, but a Samaritan. For a Jew, including everyone in Jesus’s original audience, a Samaritan was a bad person, a despised enemy. 

Now you don’t need to understand the history of the cultural and religious enmity between Jews and Samaritans to grasp Jesus’ point here. Think of anyone of whom you disapprove, or someone you have a difficult history with. If you are lying helpless in the ditch, you don’t get to be selective about your rescuer. You have to accept their help, even if they happen to be your worst enemy. And that would mean you’d have to change your mind about them and, like it or not, be in relation with them.

Remember the question that prompted Jesus to tell this parable: “Who is my neighbor?” And the answer turns out to be: Everybody! In God’s alternative version of reality (which the gospels call the Kingdom), everyone—even my enemy—is my neighbor.

When I first heard Doug talk about this parable, it was during the first Gulf War. “Imagine you are lying helpless in that ditch,” he said, “and down the road comes Saddam Hussein. When he sees you, he bends down, offers his hand and says, “Can I help you out of the ditch, brother?”

Today we might substitute Vladimir Putin for the Samaritan to experience the same radical discomfort that Jesus’ first listeners must have felt when they heard the parable. Or suppose the person in the ditch is a white supremacist, and the Samaritan is a person of color? What if the victim is homophobic, and the rescuer is gay? What if a misogynist is the helpless one, and a woman comes by? What if it’s a Progressive in that ditch, and along comes a Proud Boy? 

Do you find any of these scenarios unsettling? Parables are meant to be hard. They are meant to break us open.

And as I listen to this parable in the Year of Our Lord 2022, it strikes me that America itself is in the ditch, wounded by its sins, torn by its conflicts, half-dead from innumerable unaddressed ills. White supremacists and so-called “Christian” nationalists seek a cure in the subjugation or even the elimination of those they consider to be “other”—that is, those who are “not our kind,” whether that be people of color, the LGBTQ community, empowered women, Muslims, Central American refugees, nonwhite immigrants, or whomever. That way lies madness and death.

If we are ever to be delivered from the ditch of our own national folly and sin, we desperately need the help of the “other”—the ones whose race, religion, class, gender and life experiences are different from our own. We need to listen to their voices, their perspectives, their pain, their anger, their sorrows, their hopes, their dreams. We need not only to learn from them and be taught by them; we need to receive their stories into our hearts. Otherwise, we’re just going to stay stuck in that ditch. 

Keep Your Eyes on the Prize: Following Jesus in the Worst of Times

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Caravaggio, The Calling of St. Matthew (1599-1600)

Any number of things can happen when we encounter Jesus. We might be comforted—or we might be uncomfortable. We might be healed—or we might be wounded. We might be instructed—or we might be turned upside down. Jesus is a difference maker. For better or worse, he comes to interrupt—and disrupt—our lives. 

Sometimes Jesus speaks to our heart. Sometimes he speaks to our mind. But every time, he speaks to our will, as he puts the crucial question: 

Will you come and follow me if I but call your name?
Will you go where you don’t know and never be the same?
Will you let my love be shown?
Will you let my Name be known?
Will you let my life be grown in you and you in me? [i]

We can always say no, of course. Many people have; many people do. Or we may profess our unreadiness or our inadequacy. “Are you kidding me?” said Moses at the Burning Bush. “Who am I to go and talk to Pharoah? I am slow of speech and slow of tongue.” In the same way, the prophet Jeremiah also resisted his call: “No way, Lord! Don’t ask me to be a prophet. I don’t know how to speak. I’m only a child.” God has heard all the excuses, but the Divine Intention is not easily dissuaded. “Just do it,” God says.

When Jesus tries to recruit a few followers in Luke 9:51-62, he hears plenty of excuses. “Lord, let me first go home and bury my father,” says one. This sounds reasonable enough, if he’s talking about a corpse back at the house that needs some prompt attention. But this line can also be understood to mean, “I can’t go anywhere as long as my parents are still living. Family obligations come first.”

Another makes a similar excuse: “I will follow you, Lord, but first I must go home to take my leave. I need to get permission from my family before I can come with you. And that may take some time.”

I don’t think Luke’s gospel is telling us to walk out of important relationships. Rather, it is prompting us to ask ourselves: What is so important in my life that I need its permission before I can follow Jesus? My true master might be something as big as the security of having somewhere comfortable to lay my head at night, or as trivial as my habitual routines. I’d love to follow you, Jesus, but let me check my calendar first. 

The excuses in Luke’s passage suggest a world of expectations, obligations, and best-laid plans that prevent us from running away to join the Jesus circus. Today we may enjoy far more social mobility than a first-century Middle-Easterner, but we each have our own version of situations and circumstances that delay and distract us. Some things just won’t let us go. It might be something lingering from our past, like unhealed anger or grief. Or it might be a present concern, like a steady income, emotional needs, or personal ambition.

Jesus says: If you want to follow me, nothing can have more authority over you than the will of God. As for the things that hold you back, just let them go. Let the dead bury the dead. It’s time to move on, deeper and deeper into God. Seek ye first the kingdom of God. And once you’ve put your hand to the gospel plow, don’t look back. Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on!

The call to be a follower of Jesus may arrive unexpectedly. It may seem inconvenient, or even impossible. But as the saints all tell us, it’s what we are made for. To borrow a line from songwriter Bob Franke, 

I can’t really say it’s the thing I do best, 
but it’s the best thing that I do. [ii]

True vocation is not so much surrender to an outside force as it is the recognition of an internal capacity. In his book, Let Your Life Speak, Parker Palmer makes this point beautifully. “Vocation does not come from a voice ‘out there’ calling me to be something I am not,” he writes. “It comes from a voice ‘in here’ calling me to be the person I was born to be, to fulfill the original selfhood given me at birth by God.”

“Vocation does not come from willfulness. It comes from listening. I must listen to my life and try to understand what it is truly about—quite apart from what I would like it to be about.… The word vocation … is rooted in the Latin for “voice.” Vocation does not mean a goal that I pursue. It means a calling that I hear. Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am.” [iii]

When Jesus calls me, it is, as it were, “my life telling me who I am.” And Jesus has many voices. You may hear him in the Scriptures or the liturgy, or when you enter the prayerful state of “absolute unmixed attention.”[iv] He will speak through the need of your neighbor, or in your deepest longing. His voice may come as dissatisfaction with the old, or as the intuition of fresh possibility. It may proceed from the mouth of friend and stranger. It may thunder like the transcendent Other, or whisper like the intimate inward presence who has known you all your life.

However Jesus may call us, what happens if we say yes? How do we put our hands to the plow, keep our eyes on the prize, and not look back? When we decide to follow Jesus, when we consent to lose our old lives in the Paschal Mystery of dying and rising, we are born again into a new way of being. No turning back, no turning back. But what will that new being look like? How will we be different? How will we make a difference?

St. Paul gives us a good list to start with in his letter to the Galatians (5:1, 13-25). Everything that binds, enslaves, and weighs you down, forget it. Instead of indulging yourselves, start loving one another. Say goodbye to enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy and licentiousness. Practice love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Let the Spirit dance in you. 

Paul’s advice seems radically countercultural in an America so sickened by hatred, division, malice, and fear—a contagion which has spread to a degree unimaginable just five years ago. As Judge Michael Luttig recently lamented in his testimony before the January 6th Select Committee, “In the moral, catatonic stupor America finds itself in today, it is only disagreement we seek, and the more virulent that disagreement, the better.” [v]

In such a country, such a world, such a time, what is a disciple to do? Well, there’s no easy answer, no single method or path. We must figure it out as we go, the way the saints of old did amid crumbling empires, or as Dietrich Bonhoeffer did in 1930s Germany, or as Martin Luther King did in a Birmingham jail. It will certainly require steadfast faith and boundless love, but perhaps it is courageous hope we will need most of all. 

In the worst of times, hope is the engine of persistence and the antidote for despair. Never forget: God makes a way where there is no way, and as God’s friends we are called to shine with that truth every day, “planting the seeds of resurrection amid the blind sufferings of history.” [vi]

[i] “The Summons,” a song from the Iona Community in Scotland (GIA Publications, 1987).

[ii] Bob Franke, “Boomerang Pancakes” (Telephone Pole Music, 1986).

[iii] Parker J. Palmer, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000), 10, 4.

[iv] The phrase is from Simone Weil.

[v] Michael Luttig, testimony before the January 6 Select Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives, June 16, 2022.

[vi] I believe I got this quote from an Orthodox theologian, but I can no longer trace the source. 

This post is adapted from a homily for the Third Sunday after Pentecost, 2022.

The Importance of Tables—A Maundy Thursday Reflection

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The Last Supper, Cloister of Moissac (12th century).

If this were the last night of your life, what would you do?
On his last night, Jesus gathered at table with his friends.

Jesus loved tables. He spent a lot of time sitting at tables.
At a table, Jesus ate and drank with sinners,
so that you and I would know we are always welcome at God’s feast.
At a table a woman became a teacher to the apostles
when she anointed Jesus with oil.
At a table Jesus presented a startling image of God
as slave and servant of all, when he washed his disciples’ feet.
At a table our Lord gave us, in bread and wine,
the means of tasting his sweetness forever.

I think Jesus liked tables because they are places of intimacy.
Everyone is close together—
it’s a place to let your guard down.
Jesus probably did more teaching quietly around a table
than he did shouting from boats or mountaintops to vast multitudes.

And I don’t think Jesus just walked into a room
and started telling people about God.
I think he sat down with them, and learned their names,
and listened to their stories.
And after a while, they would open up to him,
sharing their broken dreams and broken hearts,
their longings and their demons.
And it was there, responding to their particular stories,
that he would bring God to them, casting out their demons,
unbinding them with forgiveness,
empowering them to stand up and walk through that open door into God’s story,
proclaiming them—even the most prodigal sinner—the beloved children of God.

Tables also got Jesus into deep trouble.
In the Temple of Jerusalem, he overturned the tables of the old paradigm,
the tables of the smug and comfortable religionists
who can’t see the fault lines running through their ecclesiastical constructions
and their lifeless pieties.
He overturned the tables where some are in and some are out,
where some are welcome and some are not.

“This isn’t what God wants!” said the carpenter from Nazareth,
and he made a new table,
a table where all divisions and discriminations are put aside,

where enemies are embraced,
where outcasts and fools are honored as our wisest teachers,
where the abundant life of God’s future is as close
as the food you see before you tonight.

The world was not ready to sit at such a table –
the world didn’t even want to know there was such a table.
So it stretched its maker upon another piece of wood,
hoping to bury the dream before it could infect the general population.

But the table survived, and we sit round it tonight.
How costly and precious it is!
Gathered around Christ’s table,
we will do simple things—wash feet, share a meal, tell stories.

And as we do, we will begin,
as St. Augustine says,
to say Amen to the mystery we have become.

The Footwashing, Cloister of St. Trophime, Arles (12th century).