Living Wittily

Four Gospels, One Jesus, and the Question That Won't Go Away? Who, Exactly, Is Jesus?

There's a lot of work being done currently on the Four Gospels in the New Testament. Why four gospels and not five, or three or more? Then there's the question of four gospels telling the same story but with differences of style and content, a variety of emphases and changes in the narrative flow, conflicting chronology and major omissions and additions. But they are each examples of what came to be called a Gospel. Not biographies, or anthologies, more than history and more than theology but with both as powerful streams in the literary genre we now call Gospels. All four are a telling of the story of Jesus of Nazareth, and in the telling each is an interpretationof who Jesus was, and is, for those who heard and followed him, and for those who encountered him whether as supporters, as opponents and as enemies.

Amongst the great British scholars of the 20th Century, the Methodist Vincent Taylor was a leading mediator of responsible historical criticism of the Gospels, and used the relatively new discipline of Form Criticism in his own Gospel studies. His commentary on the Gospel of Mark was for decades a defining voice in the exegesis of Mark's Gospel, and though now dated it remains a magisterial close reading of the text. Seven hundred pages, 500 of them in double column and small print bear witness to an exhaustive and exhausting treatment in the days before word prcoessing. It is a triumph of New Testament scholarship, superceded only by the passage of time, changing methodologies of study and analysis, torrents of new information about the social and cultural context of the Greco-Roman world, advances in linguistics and in the research tools available from online primary sources, to lexical and semantic databases, not to mention the entire industry of publishing in biblical studies. 

And for all our advances, are we any closer to understanding, comprehending, pinning down, encapsulating explaining in any provisional let alone final way, who Jesus is for us today? What was and is the meaning of that life lived in such obscurity, ending in such ignomy, and that after-life which has gone on and on for two millenia as historical challenge and intellectual scandal. An early essay by Taylor is as true, wise and intellectually wondering now as it was 70 years ago when he wrote it. Here is one telling extract, written as a prose poem:

We ask who He is and He gives us no answer.

Enigmatic as in the days of His flesh,

he is enigmatic still to the questing mind.

But He so works in history and life that,

after He has left us “in suspense”,

we come to know of a surety who He is.

He makes Himself known in His deeds,

in the breaking of bread,

in the cross,

in prayer and worship.

He is what He does.

His secret cannot be read:

it must be found.

(Vincent Taylor, "Unsolved NT Problems: The Messianic Secret." Expository Times, 59 (1948), 151. Quoted in David Garland, A Theology of Mark's Gospel. p.25.)

Enig 

Denise Levertov, Julian of Norwich and that Blessed Hazelnut.

Late in her life Denise Levertov discovered Julian of Norwich, and found in her a deep source of healing wisdom, immense and optimistic love for her fellow humans and patience with the world and with the eternal love and purpose of the Creator. A small suite of poems weave some of the themes most resonant with where Levertov was in her own life journey.

Her conversion to Christianity was neither routine nor typical. As a poet who deiberately wrote in prophetic and political mode about the injustices, cruelties and violence scarring the world she was never going to be be content to toe any credal or ecclesial line that was drawn in the wrong place on the sand. In the early years of environmental concern she picked up on the threats to the future of the earth and to the future of humanity and wrote about the exploitations of nature, the militaristic mindset of conquest, dominance and greed. 

Positively she was passionate about peace, and  no more passionate about peace than about its negatives, war, inflicted suffering, systemic injustice, racism and the avoidable poverty of countries stripped of resources and labour to feed the markets and appetites of the rich powerful nations. Levertov was a poet, a prophet and a political activist whose poetry was protest against abuse of power, truth telling to the deliberately deaf and moral resistance to the market assumptions that flatten the hopes of the majority of the world's people.

So when she came to read and write about Julian, she discovered a theologically wise and and spiritually resilient guide who had looked the Black Death in the face and clung nevertheless to her faith in the Divine Love.

And that brief parable of the hazelnut - Levertov considered that image, held the hazelnut against the vast night sky, the complexity of existence, the  ludicrous insignificance of humanity in a universe exploding outwards and away from all that we know, and nodded her agreement with Julian. The reesult is this poem. 

The Showings: Lady Julian of Norwich 1342-1416

Julian, there are vast gaps we call black holes,
unable to picture what’s both dense and vacant;

and there’s the dizzying multiplication of all
language can name or fail to name, unutterable
swarming of molecules. All Pascal
imagined he could not stretch his mind to imagine
is known to exceed his dread.

And there’s the earth of our daily history,
its memories, its present filled with the grain
of one particular scrap of carpentered wood we happen
to be next to, its waking light on one especial leaf,
this word or that, a tune in this key not another,
beat of our hearts now, good or bad,
dying or being born, eroded, vanishing–

And you ask us to turn our gaze
inside out, and see
a little thing, the size of a hazelnut, and believe
it is our world? Ask us to see it lying
in God’s pierced palm? That it encompasses
every awareness our minds contain? All Time?
All limitless space given form in this
medieval enigma?
                             Yes, this is indeed 

what you ask, sharing
the mystery you were shown: all that is made:
a little thing, the size of a hazelnut, held safe
in God’s pierced palm.

Books - an everyday miracle of extraordinary significance for our humanity.

I was once asked to be after dinner speaker at a church dinner. Specifically, would I give a light hearted speech about books and reading. They knew I am a bibliophile, that I read books, enjoy handling books, love the concept and the artefact "book". They're right. I marvel at the ingenuity of letters, words, sentences, paragraphs and the human achievement that is writing a spoken language giving permanent visible communication of what is going on in the human mind. The human gifts of story, poetry, philosophy, science, and the technological cleverness of printing words and images, and then, and then the thing itself; the literary continuum of words and images impressed on paper, gathered into order, bound together as pages, chapters and volumes. A book is an everyday miracle of extraordinary significance for human culture and flourishing.

But I didn't speak much about that at all. Over the years I've read more books than I cann count. One a week on average wouldn't be an exaggeration, and only occasionally several or even two in one week. I'm a slow reader but persistent; I believe in both the long haul at the desk and the regular small increments of half hours and hours conscientiously attended to with book in hand.So if my guess of one a week is right and I started reading at 5 that would be 60 times 52 making around 3,100 books give or take. So how to choose which books to talk about? Or which writers? Or what subjects might be of general interest?

Some of them were read and forgotten long ago; some were read long ago and never forgotten. Some I could never be without, some, but not many, I wish I hadn't read at all. I have always had a library of books around me which isn't a fixed collection. Books have come and gone; many have stayed because I want to know them better, spend more time in their company, read them, refer to them, even handle them and remember the pleasure and at times the itellectual joy of what was learned and discovered and opened up by the words read and the thoughts born through reading this particular book, at that special time, for that specific purpose - and finding that the best books don't always meet our expectations. They change them, expand them, ambush our curiosity, pull the rug from our complacent assumptions, change our way of looking at the world, and call in question our ways of thinking and understanding ourselves.

I decided that some of the books that have left their deepest imprint on me were written by writers with the most memorably different names. It was an after dinner talk and couldn't go on too long so it needed to be more than the droning enthusiasm of someone who really needs to get out more. But they had asked me, a preacher and theologian, to talk about books. Well let's meet that one head on.

I chose several writers and their books that once encountered have stayed with me as books I now would not want to be without, and which I would now not want not to have read. And as both a challenge and a way of avoiding predictability I had set the condition that the author's name should be memorably different! Here's the list of books I spoke about within the maximum time of 20 minutes - a quote from each, some context, and why they have become important companions on my journey.

The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint Exupery

Markings, Dag Hammarskjöld

Selected Letters, Baron Friedrich Von Hugel

My Name is Asher Lev Chaim Potok

The Gospel According to John, Rudolph Schnackenburg

The Prophets, Abraham Joshua Heschel

For the avoidance of doubt, the library / study in the picture is my dream place - until then, happy in my wee room surrounded by books!

 

Dag Hammarskjöld 4: Memento Mori, Memento Vitae: The Divined Possibility of Life Lived Godwards

Reading Dag Hammarskjöld can sometimes be like putting on a thick jacket, hat and gloves and walking out into a winter landscape. He was himself a keen mountaineer and lover of winter mountain landscapes. His stern, austere view of life and duty and destiny brings a bracing chill to his view of his own life and indeed his understanding of each human life lived responsibly. There is in Markings a constant thread of memento mori and at the start of 1951 the first line of his diary is a concentrated focus on the urgency of life responsibility: "night is drawing nigh". The allusion is to a famous Swedish hymn, which in turn echoes the biblical urgency of time passing and eternity not far off, "the hour is coming when no one can work".

One of Hammarskjöld's poems plays with the seriousness of life, and the moral imperative of using the gift of life responsibly by living in the reality of existence and not in the illusion of our own importance:

Lean fare, austere forms,

Brief delight, few words.

Low down in cool space

One star --

The morning star.

In the pale light of sparseness

lives the Real Thing

And we are real.

Those are the lines of a man unafraid to look life and death in the face, but not with Stoic indifference; on the contrary, with a defiance that is on the side of life, reality, responsible human action geared towards mercy, justice and the righting of what can be righted, and the confronting of wrong as a matter of principle. Any adequate reading of Hammarskjöld's biography makes it clear he was a man of inner granite. His own search was for an for integrity, life purpose and human achievement worthy of the sacrifice it takes to surrender in obedience to God. For there is no doubt that by 1951 Hammarskjöld had come to see and to hear the call of "the Real Thing", that which constitutes and sustains the reality and ultimate significance of all else.

Hammarskjöld's sense of vocation, discovered purpose, and awareness of the personal cost that might shatter the person he thought he was, had been in my mind for several days as I made my way again through Markings, guided this time by the Swedish theologian Gustav Aulen's book on Hammarskjöld. Life and death, achievement and sacrifice, obedience and cost, vocation and surrendered freedom: Markings is laced with those inner questionings that are inevitable when coming to terms with the unavoidable but at times excruciating tensions within which we are at times called to live. In one of those brief entries we wish we could place in exact context, Hammarskjöld in ironic mode: "He received - nothing. But for that he paid more than others for their treasures." This is not so much a complaint by Hammarskjöld; it looks back to his long meditation on Jesus in the upper room, the One who was "absolutely faithful to a divined possibility..."

"a young man adamant in his commitment, who walks the road of possibility to the end without self-pity or demand for sympathy fulfilling the destiny he has chosen - even sacrificing  affection and fellowship when the others are unready to follow him - into a new fellowship." (69)

And there again is the agonising dichotomy - "the destiny he has chosen" - because Hammarskjold had come to see in Jesus, "the young man adamant in his commitment", one who was destined and called and who chose the way of obedience to that call. Any serious Christian commitment must reckon with that same sense that life is gift, and its purpose the giving of that gift in service to the lives of others.

In the pale light of sparseness

lives the Real Thing

And we are real.

Christian life is an adamant commitment to the Real Thing, for only so can it be true that "we are real", and this life is the reality within which we are realised, fulfilled and consummated within the purposes of God. All of this I've been thinking about off and on as I've been reading Hammarskjold, and of course doing other things. Like going out into this real world and living, enjoying, working, looking, but still thinking.

At the very edge of the Forest of Birse is a defiant old Rowan tree. Much of it is now dead wood, but there they are, red berries on the surviving branches still doing what life does. Still there after all those winters, its berries gifts and seeds for the future. Against a blue sky, and in late summer heat, it is both memento mori and memento vitae.

This old blasted tree stopped me in my tracks; at that precise point the word that fitted exactly what I was seeing was "defiant". It was one of those moments when what is already in the mind intersects with what is now seen in the world outside the mind. Our duty to live the gift of life; the truth, so hard at times, that life is not forever, that "night is drawing nigh."

But as well as that the miracle and mystery of continuing fruitfulness right up to the end, that out of life lived sacrificially and gratefully come the seeds of further life. And then the great grace that could never be imagined far less expected as deserved. Life lived towards God, seeking in our weaknesses and failures, our hopes and joys, our loves and griefs, by that same grace praying to be "faithful to a divined possibility"; and the graced promise that such a life bears fruits that can never be counted, calculated or gainsaid, but which are harvested and gathered into the eternal mercies of God as the "divined possibilities" of our lives.

Give us peace with Thee

     Peace with men and women

     Peace with ourselves

And free us from all fear.

Dag Hammarskjöld: Man of Prayer and Man for the World

The Aberdeen Press and Journal circulates all over Scotland but its highest uptake is in the North East, where there are two editions - Aberdeenshire, and Aberdeen City. It continues a long journalistic tradition of the paper by publishing a weekly Saturday Sermon from a rota of people from various Christian persepectives. I am an occasional contributor, have been now for 25 years. The total word count for each sermon is 275 give or take a very few; I enjoy the challenge of aiming for such a modest length and still hoping to say something worth the reading.

This was yesterday's offering, included here because I am on a Dag Hammarksköld roll just now. I am reading about and thinking through the unavoidable complexities of global politics, diplomatic leadership and a faith commitment demanding self-sacrifice, integrity and a weight of personal responsibility that cannot be shifted elsewhere. Here is yesterday's Saturday Sermon:

In the 1950’s the name Dag Hammarskjöld had global recognition. He was the first Secretary General of the United Nations, from 1953 till his death in a plane crash in 1961. He was on a peace-making mission to the Belgian Congo. After his death a small handwritten notebook with hundreds of short entries was found at his bedside. It was published as Markings. It revealed a man of deep faith and integrity struggling to hold together Christian values and political realities in a world divided by the Cold War and multiple conflicts in Africa and Asia.

“In our era”, he wrote, “the road to holiness necessarily runs through the world of action.” He realised over 50 years ago that in a complicated, dangerous and God-loved world Christians must be engaged in justice, peace-making, and hope building. In Markings he wrote brief prayers like this: “So shall the world be created each morning anew, forgiven –in Thee, by Thee.” There is a hopefulness and a lack of cynicism in Hammarskjöld’s words that are refreshing in our own age of Tweets and political self-promotion.

This man who prayed “to love life and men [and women] as God loves them”, this man committed to building peace and hope amongst nations, wrote this prayer nearer the end of his life, at the height of his influence and responsibilities: “For all that has been – Thank You. For all that is to come – YES”. The combination of gratitude and hope vibrating through that brief cry to God point to the core values that can energise and focus Christian living and action today. Gratitude and hope are essential drivers of a Church believing its own good news of grace, forgiveness and new life .

Dag Hammarskjöld 2) Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing.

The younger Dag Hammarskjöld wrote in his diary with that disconcerting mixture of self-confidence and self-criticism which are prerequisites of an honest self-awareness. When the Apostle Paul urged the Roman Christians not to "Think of yourselves more highly than you ought, but that each consider yourself with sober judgement" he was asking a hard thing. 

And when Calvin began his Institutes of the Christian Religion with the following words he was likewise aware of how hard unfiltered self-awareness truly is:"Nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves."

Hammarskjöld is part of that same long tradition of Christian thought and realism about the human condition, and the elusiveness of self-understanding. If we do not take time to know and understand ourselves there is little chance we will know and understand the world and our place in it, or God and his purpose for us, or for the world. 

So whatever Hammarskjöld writes in Markings, it is an essential hermeneutical key that he is writing about himself to himself; and this is not an exercise in solipsistic thought experiments, it is Hammmarskjöld exploring the inner landscape of his mind, emotions and will, seeking to map his whole inner life. That is why he can write with such stern self-rebuke:

"How can you expect to keep your powers of hearing when you never want to listen? That God should have time for you, you seem to take as much for granted as that you cannot have time for him." (12)

What makes Markings a valuable book of spiritual direction and constructive psychological self-questioning is the way entries such as the above meet head on one of the recurring complaints of those who wish they were more spiritual, more authentic and more disciplined in their spirituality. C S Lewis once complained in a lecture about 'poor little talkative Christianity', and in doing so identified a form of praying that is all about words, talk, the selfish one sidedness that if unchallenged is the ruin of a relatioship. I think that is the force of Hammarskjöld's self corrective about never wanting to listen; the flip side of that is always wanting to be talking!

This connects and fits precisely with what Hammarskjöld wrote around the same time, in his late 30's and as Chairman of a major Bank. It is fascinating to ask what was going on in the life and mind of a man who as a banker was asking deep existential questions about who he is, what he is for, what if any purpose his own life might have, or indeed what purposeful power might be operating outside his life, calling him to self-knowledge, self-giving and ultimately self-sacrifice. Here is what he wrote, while still a bank Chairman:

The more faithfully you listen to the voice within you, the better you will hear what is sounding outside. And only he who listens can speak. Is this the starting point of the road towards the union of your two dreams - to be allowed in clarity of mind to mirror life and in purity of heart to mold it? (13)

By the time Hammarskjöld was appointed Secretary General of the United Nations he had come to a mature and austere view of sacrifice as the fundamental value of human aspiration and achievement. Just before his death in 1961 he confided a late entry in Markings: "But at some moment I did answer Yes to Someone - or Something - and from that hour I was certain that existence is meaningful and that therefore my life, in self-surrender, had a goal."

Here is the clarity of mind and purity of heart for which he strove, intellectually and emotionally. Like Kierkegaard, one of his favourite authors he had learned that "Purity of heart is to will one thing." And in his own words acknowledged that repeatedly in the later entries in Markings:

Ready at any moment to gather everything

Into one simple sacrifice. (xiii)

Simple does not mean straightforward, easy or uncomplicated; it means singular, focused, the union of heart and mind to life's purpose. That moment when he "said Yes to Someone" was his personal Caesarea Philippi, the ultimate moment of self-knowing and self-surrender to what God had called him to do, and that to which in saying Yes, he would be saying no to all other options. Few of us can aspire to that kind of clarity of mind, singularity of purpose, concentration of energy, and sacrifice of personal ambition. The irony in Hammarskjöld's case is that this was a very ambitious man, who had somehow encountered a truth and a power that reconfigured ambition to an obedience to that which was greater than himself. And at that point we are back with the theology of Paul and his call that those who are followers of Jesus and bearers of his cross should "present their bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God which is their reasonable service."

 

Dag Hammarskjöld: 1. Recovering the Moral Burden Inherent in Political Action.

Writing the Saturday Sermon for our North East paper The Press and Journal, and chasing a quotation to its source,  I picked up Dag Hammarsköld's book Markings. I've read this book off and on since I first came across a reference to it in a slim book by Mark Gibbard, Twentieth Century Men of Prayer. I bought a Faber pbk and read it through in a sitting. And my mind was as uncomfortable as an overloaded digestive system. It isn't a book to devour, but to sample; it isn't fast food for the soul, more a health food to be eaten slowly, and in small increments. This is a writer who is unpredictable in tone, theologically subversive, either interrogative or imperative in mood, at times enigmatic and perplexing, at other times inspirational, energising mind and heart alternatively, and occasionally simultaneously.

Markings is the English translation by W H Auden of a diary written in Swedish by a man of immense intellectual vision and global diplomatic reputation. Hammarskjöld was the first Secretary General of the United Nations, a man of profound and at times anguished Christian faith, a quiet and private person who confided his self-doubts, prayers, and his hopes and visions for humanity to his diary. He wrote in brief poems, sharply observed epigraphs, meditations no more than a paragraph long, zen like riddles and one liners and frequent quotations and references from the Psalms. One or two entries at a time is enough to be going on with, so that the book is best read the way it was found after Hammarskjöld's death, at the bedside; or failing that, on a seat with a coffee or tea, and five minutes to listen and think in the company of a remarkable man.

Reading Markings again I hear that same stern voice calling for integrity of thought and action, and articulating a near stoic acceptance of human life as a gift laden with responsibility. But Hammarskjöld was no mere moralist, and no under-resourced humanist facing courageously an indifferent universe. Markings is a gathering of his best ore, wide seams glittering with the gold of a faith that had grasped forgiveness, experienced grace, surrendered to vocation, and envisioned peace as a purpose worth living and dying for. Indeed to die for what one believes in is the proof that we believed it in the first place. "Never. - for the sake of peace and quiet, deny your own experience or convictions."

This is a man who understood sacrifice, and the Gospel truth of the seed that must die or it will forever be merely that, - a seed, an unfulfilled promise, a locked up promise never realised. That stern voice again: " Pray that your loneliness may spur you into finding something to live for, great enough to die for." Remember these words were written for his eyes only, in a diary that went everywhere with him. These were words addressed to himself. And here is the zen like puzzle that he sets himself, and afterwards, those of us who read these remarkable pages:

What makes loneliness an anguish

Is not that I have no one to share my burden,

But this:

I have only my own burden to bear.

I cannot help but love a man talking to himself with such searing honesty about himself, and at the same time, looking beyond himself to a burdened world, and feeling personally the weight of that suffering and and a sense of responsibility for all that weighs down human lives. These are the words of a global diplomat, a man of huge prestige in his time, and he takes time to write in his diary words that unlock the secret places of one who saw himself as a peace maker and a hope builder in a world divided by the Cold War and riven by post colonial conflicts in Africa and Asia. That he died in a plane crash while on a peace mission to the then Belgian Congo is one of those ironies that adds even greater mystery to a man who lived at a level of political and ethical vision, rare in his day, and verging on extinction in our own media ridden politics of the 21st Century. "In our era the road to holiness necessarily passes through the world of action." That is one of his most anthologised lines. He lived and died living out of that conviction.

(The quotations are from page 84-5 of my edition, published by Knopf 1964)