Rest a while

We need to risk God’s mercy more. The place of justice and truth should never be ignored, but we must risk letting the infinite, unbounded, unconditional, undeserved mercy of God flow free. The mercy of God is as accessible as the nearest water tap, and so we, like Isaiah, must proclaim a mercy that has no price tag: “Come, come without money and without virtue, come everyone, drink freely of God’s mercy!”

What holds us back? Why are we so hesitant in proclaiming God’s inexhaustible, prodigal, indiscriminate mercy?

Partly our motives are good, noble even. Concern for truth, justice, orthodoxy, morality, proper public form, proper sacramental preparation, fear of scandal, and concern for the ecclesial community that needs to absorb and carry the effect of sin, these are not unimportant things. Love needs always to be tempered by truth, even as truth must ever be moderated by love. However, sometimes our motives are less noble and the hesitancy arises out of timidity, fear, jealousy, and legalism – the self-righteousness of the Pharisees or the bitter jealousy of the older brother of the prodigal son. No cheap grace is to be dispensed on our watch! God’s mercy, as Jesus revealed it, embraces indiscriminately, the bad with the good, the undeserving with the deserving, the uninitiated with the initiated. One of the truly startling insights that Jesus gave us is that the mercy of God cannot not go out to everyone. It is always free, undeserved, unconditional, universal in embrace, reaching beyond all religion, custom, rubric, political correctness, mandatory program, ideology, and even beyond sin itself.

The illustration I have found helpful over the years when contemplating the mercy of God, is that of a waterfall – the water somehow keeps tumbling over! This image is of Niagara Falls. The Falls span the border between the province of Ontario in Canada and the state of New York in the United States. Go near them and you will get wet – get near to God and you will be shown mercy!

In the third book of JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy there is a scene that captures something of the joy experienced by the disciples when the resurrected Jesus appeared to them.

The realm of the Dark Lord, Sauron has been destroyed, and against all hope the world has been saved, at least for the time being.

Frodo, the hobbit, and his faithful servant and friend, Samwise, have also been saved. Sam wakes up, smells wonderful perfumes and sees Gandalf, the wizard he thought was dead. Sam gasps,

“Gandalf! I thought you were dead! But then I thought I was dead myself. Is everything sad going to come untrue?” “A great Shadow has departed,” said Gandalf, and then he laughed, and the sound was like music, or like water in a parched land; and as he listened the thought came to Sam that he had not heard laughter, the pure sound of merriment, for days upon days without count. It fell upon his ears like the echo of all the joys he had ever known. But he himself burst into tears. Then, as sweet rain will pass down a wind of spring and the sun will shine out the clearer, his tear ceased, and his laughter welled up, and laughing he sprang from his bed.

“How do you feel?” he cried. “Well, I don’t know how to say it. I feel, I feel” – he waved his arms in the air – “I feel like the spring after winter, and the sun on the leaves; and like trumpets and harps and all the songs I have ever heard!”

Initially, the resurrection didn’t make a big splash. It was not some spectacular event that exploded into the world as the highlight on the evening news. It had the same dynamics as the incarnation itself: After he rose from the dead, Jesus was seen by some, but not by others; understood by some, but not by others. Some got his meaning, and it changed their lives, others were indifferent to him, and still others understood what had happened, hardened their hearts against it, and tried to destroy its truth.

Notice how these parallels, almost perfectly, what happened at the birth of Jesus: The baby was real, not a ghost, but he was seen by some, but not by others and the event was understood by some but not by others. Some got its meaning, and it changed their lives, others were indifferent and their lives went on as before, while still others (like Herod) sensed its meaning but hardened their hearts against it and tried to destroy the child.

Why the difference? What makes some see the resurrection while others do not? What lets some understand the mystery and embrace it, while others are left in indifference or hatred?

The 12thC theologian, Hugo of St. Victor used to say: Love is the eye! When we look at anything through the eyes of love, we see correctly, understand, and properly appropriate its mystery. The reverse is also true. When we look at anything through eyes that are jaded, cynical, jealous, or bitter, we will not see correctly, will not understand, and will not properly appropriate its mystery.

We see this in how the Gospel of John describes the events of Easter Sunday. Jesus has risen, but first of all, only the person who is driven by love, Mary Magdala, goes out in search of him. The others remain as they are, locked inside their own worlds. But love seeks out its beloved and Mary Magdala goes out, spices in hand, wanting at least to embalm his dead body. She finds his grave empty and runs back to Peter and the beloved disciple and tells them the tomb is empty. The two race off together, towards the tomb, but the disciple whom Jesus loved out-runs Peter and gets to the tomb first, but he doesn’t enter, he waits for Peter (authority) to go in first.

Peter enters the empty tomb, sees the linens that had covered the body of Jesus, but does not understand. Then the beloved disciple, love, enters. He sees and he does understand. Love grasps the mystery. Love is the eye. It is what lets us see and understand the resurrection.

Like the pebble falling into a still pond, so to does the resurrection of Jesus effect its works.

I have written and stated on many occasions, “you cannot die nicely, or tidily nailed to a cross.” That is why the Romans used crucifixion as a means of inflicting the death penalty. If you are wearing a cross on a chain around your neck, or maybe pinned to your clothing; maybe you have one hanging on a bedroom or lounge wall. Have a close look – many worn round the neck have no figure, and many we hang on our wall and in our churches, while embodied, the body is of a dead Jesus, not a dying Jesus. Our profession of faith proclaims. “dying you destroyed our death”; it was Jesus dying on the Cross that effected this, not Jesus dead!  You cannot die nicely through crucifixion – and that is precisely why the Romans chose the method. Golgotha was a rubbish dump and with Jewish strict laws on purity, what better place to set up crucifixion pylons.  Jesus was stripped naked, again a huge insult to Jewish rules of purity – a grown man naked in public was reprehensible. Both actions, on their own, would have deterred family and close friends from gathering – the intention being that the person died in gruesome agony alone. I remember the brilliant lines of W.B.Yeats at the end of his poem ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’:

I must lie down where all the ladders start. In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart

The artwork I have chosen is by the Russian realist painter Nikolai Ge (1831 – 1894). A copy hangs in Museum d’Orsay in Paris. The first version of the canvas was written in 1892,  and the viewer is confronted with oppressive and hopeless emotions. Probably it is difficult to underestimate the hopelessness and complete despair of the last moments of the life of Jesus and his death, which, would have been unbearably painful. Nothing can be done when the body is nailed to the cross and hangs on it. Paying attention to the face, one can see how the death throes distorted the face and a death painful cry came from the mouth.  Note, as symbolically and indifferently depicted, apparently one of the “executioners”, that in the background, having done their work, simply indifferently went about his business.

The work was considered shocking and near-blasphemous and Tsar Alexander ordered it to be withdrawn from the 22nd exhibition of the Itinerants where it was shown for the first time.

The poem is by the priest/poet Malcolm Guite, titled “Jesus Dies on the Cross

The dark nails pierce him and the sky turns black
We watch him as he labours to draw breath
He takes our breath away to give it back,
Return it to it’s birth through his slow death.
We hear him struggle breathing through the pain
Who once breathed out his spirit on the deep,
Who formed us when he mixed the dust with rain
And drew us into consciousness from sleep.
His spirit and his life he breathes in all
Mantles his world in his one atmosphere
And now he comes to breathe beneath the pall
Of our pollutions, draw our injured air
To cleanse it and renew. His final breath
Breathes us, and bears us through the gates of death