Living Wittily

Thomas Merton Explains 21st Century Dystopian Politics.

And here, in wise words from half a century ago, is what is wrong with our politics and the rise of opinionated inerrancy.

"We are living under a tyranny of untruth which confirms itself in power and establishes more and more total control over people in proportion as they convince themselves they are resisting error.
Our submission to plausible and useful lies involves us in greater and more obvious contradictions, and to hide these from ourselves we need greater and ever less plausible lies.

The basic falsehood is the lie that we are totally dedicated to the truth, and that we can remain dedicated to the truth in a manner that is at the same time honest and exclusive: that we have the monopoly of all truth, just as our adversary of the moment has the monopoly of all error." (Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, p. 56)

 

Review: John. A Commentary. Marianne Meye Thompson

John. A Commentary. (New Testament Library) Marianne Meye Thompson, (Louisville: WJK, 2015) 532 pp.

There are more commentaries on the Gospel of John than any one of us needs to study it, at whatever point of entry we choose. I have a shelf full of 12 commentaries and about 20 monographs, and that excludes books I've borrowed from libraries over the years. And I am still intrigued by fresh work, new scholarship and all the undiscovered country of this familiar, strange, demanding and perplexingly profound book. Despite all the early scholarly ink and papyrus, the plethora of academic paper and print, the ocean of digital, electronic and online resources, the Fourth Gospel continues to speak deeply and clearly to those who read John's Gospel itself with uncomplicated faith and readiness to listen.

Marianne Thompson’s commentary was published in 2015. It is readable, learned, thoughtful, written by an author who writes for church as well as academy, and does so out of her own confessional commitment to the Christian faith. That makes her no less a scholar with a critical mind, reverent and respectful of the text and therefore not prepared to short change this Gospel by foreclosing on problems, avoiding questions or claiming more interpretive authority than the evidence allows.

Marianne Meye Thomson has worked on this commentary for 17 years, which is a large chunk of her professional life. In an interview held at Fuller Theological Seminary where she is Professor of New Testament, she spoke openly about the joys, demands and disciplines of writing a commentary. Sometimes those who write commentaries are criticised for not covering all the issues of background, social context, textual developments and pre-history, rhetorical strategy, theology and reception history, while also interacting with the waterfall of monographs and other commentaries. In her interview Thompson conceded there would be those in the academy discontented that the commentary is not a vade mecum of recent scholarship; but her aim is to write for students and pastor-preachers while also making a contribution that other Johannine scholars will appreciate.

Her approach is succinctly stated: "I have not endeavoured to reconstruct or pass judgement on the historicity of events, words or accounts in John. John;s Gospel is assuredly a selective, interpreted account of some of the things that Jesus said and did; it presents Jesus and his works and words to be the life giving deeds of the one God of Israel for all the world. The goal of the commentary is to illumine the witness of that narrative. (p.23)

This clarification is important, ensuring the reader is aware of the author's stated purposes and intentional omissions. Thompson makes no attempt to carry on a multi-sided dialogue with all the secondary exegetical and historical literature. She seldom engages in prolonged discussion with other commentators except where they add further interpretive clarity to the text in hand. Footnotes are rich in additional information and comment, and are the more valuable for being limited in number, reserved for the more important matters. That said, there are approximately 1100 footnotes, and she spoke ruefully of the large file of footnotes cut from the text to keep the volume within the publisher's word count! Some of us would like to see and follow those scholarly footprints! 

There are nine Excurses and each is a richly textured essays on crucial theological and historical issues in John, as for example the signs, the I am' sayings, faith and discipleship, and the one she confesses she struggled with most, "The Jews" in the Gospel of John. Reading the excurses is a mini course on Johannine theology and history. The Excursus on the woman taken in adultery is an exemplary piece of textual criticism in which the pericope is not seen as original, but is nevertheless expounded in an exercise of canonical exegesis. A 23 page Bibliography, and around 82 pages of indices enhance the usefulness of the volume, pointing the reader to further resources and gathering page references to a host of subjects as they are treated throughout the commentary. 

The water into wine pericope is a favourite of mine, and one I have preached on several times and studied and returned to ever since C K Barrett and Raymond Brown showed me what could be done by digging into the Old Testament texts and establishing bridges between John's storytelling and the Jewish and Greco-Roman world out of which such writing came. Her exegesis is laced with cross references to the OT and other Second Temple literature, is written in lucid and imaginative prose with an eye to the theological payload, so that she brings a freshness and, on occasion, a surprising light to bear on an already well worked text. Likewise her understanding of the story of the Temple cleansing is to respect John's chronology in placing it at the start of Jesus ministry, but also to acknowledge the Synoptic account may be the more historically plausible. Rather than seek to harmonise, she works at explaining what John was about, and why the Temple cleansing sets off foundation shaking Christological reverberations. These are two examples of her approach.

I had occasion to preach on John 14.7-11, a typical passage of Johannine theology suggestive of long rumination on the meaning of the Word made flesh, and how the one who was close to the heart of God is the only one who can make God known: "He who has seen me has seen the Father" is a statement that takes the reader to the highest ridges of Johannine Christology, and containing ideas far seeing in their suggestion of a nascent Trinitarianism. Thompson shirks none of the hard questions in exploring the identity of Jesus the Son and his relationship to God the Father. In a couple of paragraphs she unravels John's meanings with the clarity of a scholar who previously published two substantial monographs on God in John's Gospel. She is a reliable guide and a good commentator on the theological landscape of John.

The NTL commentary series is intended to be medium sized, mid range and deal with paragraphs and flow of thought rather than treating the text in the more atomistic, comprehensive and detailed analyses of larger scholarly commentaries, such as Keener, Michaels and from a previous generation Brown and Schnackenburg. This is a commentary which sits alongside its nearest competitors Lincoln, Beasley Murray, Ridderbos, Moloney, and Carson. I would compare it in quality, freshness and usefulness to Gail O'Days fine work in the New Interpreter's Bible, but with a substantial update in the scholarly interaction.

In her practice of exegesis Thompson has little interest in competing or arguing with other writers for the sake of showing her control of the field. Of course she is often in conversation with other scholars, and there is wide and deep learning informing this volume. Her concentration, however, is on the meaning of John's narrative and witness, which is unbroken throughout as she opens up the message of the Word made flesh, dwelling amongst humanity, and displaying the glory of God. The pivotal verse for her is "In him was life and the life was the light of all people."

Her own translation (a feature of this series) is supported by textual notes, and in working at it she was aiming for idiomatic English, but staying as close to the actual text as possible. She is both modest and sensible in acknowledging that just as John had to select, choose and omit material, she had to do the same in order to keep the commentary within the parameters of the series. In doing so she has produced a commentary that will be of genuine usefulness and stimulus for preachers and students. Scholars will likewise encounter a commentary that has deep roots in both learning and faith, and which offers an engaged and energetic wrestling with this complex, infuriating, comforting, disturbing but intentionally tendentious text. 

Thompson is cautious in the use of criticism but honest about wrestling with the text; ready to offer new conclusions but rarely speculative; her writing is readable, which is to say I am reading it through over several weeks, and at times have been drawn to read on further to follow the flow of a well written exegetical narrative. I've waited eagerly for this book since Thompson was announced as its author. This book was worth the wait. The time taken has resulted in a mature, lucid, authoritative commentary, qualitatively different because the writer has demonstrably lived with, and within, this text.

Peacemaking as a Necessary Life-Skill

Below is the text of the Saturday Sermon published today in the Aberdeen Press and Journal. I've done this now for over 25 years. The word count has to be 175 words maximum. It's a good discipline!

................... 

“I don’t know what the world’s coming to.” I remember older people saying that when I was growing up! Now I find myself wondering along the same lines. The world seems to be a conflicted place; globalised, polarised and destabilised. Our own country is experiencing depths of division that are putting families, communities and friendships under such strains, that they threaten the common good of shared and caring communal life.

“Blessed are the peacemakers”. Jesus knew about the more challenging life skills. Wherever we are there are situations going wrong. People get angry, words are said, resentments are verbalised on social media, alliances are formed and though we might not use the word, enemies are made.

Christians serious about following Jesus work hard at being peacemakers, servants of reconciliation, exemplars of forgiveness. Wherever we are, home, office, the checkout, the car park, our default disposition is peacemaker. In places of conflicted hurt we dismantle walls and build bridges:

• by persistent, patient actions of peace,

• by resilient, responsive acts of reconciliation,

• by gentle, gracious words of goodness,

• by faith-filled, faithful prayers of friendship,

• by holy, hopeful gestures of  healing.

Creating the Space Where Questions Can Become Prayers.

The other day I had an appointment that needed a clear head. So I went to the head clearing clinic down at the beach. I hadn't taken my camera, but I had my phone which does the job pretty well. A turbulent sea, a whole tribe of turnstones, (over here on the migration trail), and an amazing sky did the job fine.

I've often wondered about what it means to "clear the head", and whether prayer is a way of doing that. If what is meant is a recovery of focus, a centring of attention, a reboot of the inner hard drive, then yes, prayer does that.

So is a walk on the beach a form of prayer? I think it can be, though for me it usually takes the form of looking for God on the horizon of the landscape, or seascape, of my life. Walking along the beach, or standing watching, and listening to the rhythm of waves breaking and rushing towards me, I find strangely comforting and comporting. Comforting in that the horizon is open and promises new possibilities beyond them; comporting because the rhythms of heartbeat and waves begin to synchronise, producing a sense of being part of something beyond my own inner world of preoccupations, anxieties, sadness and grief.

It is almost a year since Aileen, our loved and lovely daughter, died. Many a time now I've walked this beach with the same questions. Much of life is now lived in the interrogative mood, and for a parent searching for a lost child, they come with the same regular rhythms of waves breaking at my feet: why? what if? how?

I know my deepest questions are unanswerable. But that doesn't excuse or reduce the urgency of their being asked. So walking the beach is often now an exercise in scanning the horizons of the life I now have, and whatever futures are now possible; and it is a place where, whatever the questions, I feel keenly the love and the memories of a daughter who was God's gift to our world. 

There are moments when the sound of the waves breaking is followed by the gentler sound of water-flow and a brief near-silence, before the next wave breaks. Sometimes, somewhere, hidden in those near-silences, and before the next wave breaks, there is space for questions to become prayers which may not have any answer other than that your love and loss are known, and held in the heart of God. Most times, that is answer enough.

No experience in life has more profoundly changed the way I think about prayer, God, love, faith and hope than Aileen's death and the sense of incompleteness there will always be without her. Yes, life goes on. But it is life diminished, reduced in possibility, and requiring to be lived with gratitude tempered by grief. That is not a complaint. It is a recognition, that much of the journey is behind me, and there are still horizons ahead. Walking on the beach, remembering the past with thankfulness tinged with sorrow, and looking at the horizons in front of me, the heart is comforted, the head comported, and prayer happens.   

Seeing the World with God on the Horizon

I first came across the name Abraham Joshua Heschel while reading early books by Walter Brueggemann. It was Heschel's work on the prophets he cited. It's a remarkable exposition of the Hebrew mind in prophetic mode, when the world is looked at with God on the horizon, and through the lens of trust, even if at times that trust was expressed in defiance. After that I went looking for other volumes by this philosopher Rabbi and found myself absorbed into a mindset that can best be described as reason within the limits of faith. This was Jewish faith in love with a world that exists by the gift of God, and in which every human being is a guest expected to behave with courtesy, gratitude and wonder.

Indeed one of Heschel's recurring chords is made up of notes like wonder, amazement and awe. I have read few writers whose words carry within them such freighted ideas of holiness, mystery and the sense of God's immediacy. His best work was written in the 1950's and 60's, two decades of turmoil, change, excitement, danger and expanding possibilities for human hope or harm. A post war and post Holocaust world; a world of atomic weapons and an arms race, an iron curtain, a space race, and a cold war; Korean and Vietnam wars, and civil rights movements; growing affluence and the birth of the consumer society. They were years of radical change, technological development and an increasing sense of moral peril as human technical capacity outstripped human moral maturtity.  

Heschel was convinced that hope lay in human co-operation, mutual respect and help across racial, religious and national borders, an enhanced awareness of how to contain human capacity for conflict born out of fear, greed or lust for power. He had fled Europe and survived when many of his family and those who lived as his neighbours perished in the Holocaust. He never forgot the dehumanising rhetoric, demonising political ideologies, developed systems of bureaucracy and administration which were used as webs and nets to capture and exterminate his people. Carbon copies, index cards, ledgers of figures, updated address lists, birth and marriage certificates - good office management at the service of a murderous regime

Yet Heschel betrays no nurtured enmities nor cherished bitterness. He lived looking forward hopeful but not naive, passionate about justice and peace, and his view of the world clarified and deepened by his immersion in the Torah, and in the literature of his people. He was a deeply religious man. If that sounds obvious, then let him describe what that implies in his own words:

"A religious man is a person who holds God and man in one thought at one time, at all times, who suffers in himself harms done to others, whose great passion is compassion, whose greatest strength is love and defiance of despair." 

When I'm looking for a refresher course on compassion I go to Heschel; if I forget what holiness looks like and acts like, I read Heschel; If I look at the mess of the world, globalised, polarised and  destabilised, I ponder words like those above and pray to be the kind of person he describes, and that last clause, "whose greatest strength is love and defiance of despair." I can happily make that a mission statement for life lived well.  

"Call to gratitude as one of the default dispositions of the heart and the mind..."

Two of my favourite pastimes - walking on the beach and writing Haiku. The two came together a few years ago after I picked up several shells. I'm not sure what it is that so fascinates about beach walking, but there's a combination of curiosity and unpredictability that often compels me to walk with head down. 

Stones shaped by the motion of millions of waves; shells which used to be home for creatures now long gone; wood seasoned and smoothed by the actions of sand and water; fragments of pottery and glass worn and polished and now discarded for the pleasure of the finder. Such are the gifts of the sea.

That parable about the farmer ploughing a field and hitting a box that has treasure inside. Now and again I've felt a similar lurch of excitement on finding just this object, here, now. My mother often said to me when I was a child, "You're easy pleased." I guess I was, and am, because I've always valued and taken pleasure in things that weren't expensive, some of them items which have little value, if by that is meant commercial worth or sale-ability. 

Take these three shells. I don't have them now. They were picked up years ago and disappeared some time after. At the time, they made me stop and pay attention. These shells were handled, examined, enjoyed for the small if transient masterpieces that nature scatters everywhere.

The Haiku are neither exhaustive description nor clever semantic game playing. They are statements of admiration, and gratitude for the brief pleasure of contemplative seeing, which is like a low key but patient kind of wondering at the ubiquitous beauty at our feet. As a Christian, such ubiquitous beauty nudges mind and imagination to the thought of God's creative purposes and overflowing love for all that God makes. And that is theology in a seashell.

More recently I collected another handful of shells, which for now sit on my window ledge. Again I wrote a Haiku to distil my response to these lovely but discarded creations.

Calcified dwellings;
sadness, of homeless creatures,
and creatureless homes.

What prompted the sadness of those lines? I had been thinking of the rhythms and cycles of the natural world, such as the ebb and flow of life, the come and go of the seasons, the dependence of growth and new life on seeds sown in soil made fertile by the death of the very plants which produced the seeds.

So not unqualified sadness, more a poignant reminder of the fragility and transience that is the life we live. And therefore a reminder too, of the call to gratitude as one of the default dispositions of the heart and the mind. Life is more precious than we realise. Is it a new kind of besetting sin to be part of a culture so preoccupied with living, so relentlessly fixated on the cost of living, so often helpless to control the pace of living, that life itself slips through our fingers, like sand?

Ages ago, so it seems, T S Eliot asked the question more pointedly in The Rock, one of The Four Quartets. "Where is the life we have lost in living?" Walking along the beach can be for me, a time of inner recalibration of mind and heart. Those small discarded objects, with their strange allure and serendipitous appearance at my feet, dare me to slow down, and think, and wonder, and find time for thankfulness and to relearn the importance of patient wonder.   

  

 

"And all manner of thing shall be well." Expanding Understanding of Inexhaustible Truth

For four months I have been working on a tapestry designed around the Revelations of Divine Love, by Julian of Norwich; in particular her vision of 'the little thing, the size of a hazelnut'. Here is the passage:

“And in this he showed me a little thing, the size of a hazelnut, lying in the palm of my hand, as it seemed. And it was as round as any ball. I looked upon it with the eye of my understanding, and thought, ‘What may this be?’ And it was answered generally thus, ‘It is all that is made.’

I marvelled how it might last, for I thought it might suddenly have fallen to nothing for littleness. And I was answered in my understanding: It lasts and ever shall, for God loves it. And so have all things their beginning by the love of God.

In this little thing I saw three properties. The first is that God made it. The second that God loves it. And the third, that God keeps it.”

Of course Julian is best known for her theology of hope, in words that have become so popular they are in danger of becoming a cliche: "And all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well." But that theological hopefulness was never for Julian a misleading optimism about the reality of evil, and the human experiences of darkness, such as grief, suffering, loneliness, guilt, fear, and encroaching despair at the brokenness of the world. 

That future orientation towards a renewed creation in which all would be made well, was imagined and energised in a soul that had pondered for years on her visions of the Divine Love, which poured from the wounds of the crucified Christ. Julian's interpretation of the hazelnut, which to her seemed so vulnerable, precarious and fragile and with what seemed a tenuous hold on existence, took its form and confidence from her growing conviction of the eternal Love which creates, sustains and brings to purposed fulfilment all that God has made.

The tapestry images play with images of hazelnut, our planet and the ever expanding realities of "all that is made". The size of the hazelnut, the earth and the sun is the same, because in the Love of God significance is not in size or importance, but in the relationship of Creator to creation.

The work grew out of the text above, and was enriched over the months by regular reading of The Revelations. The eventual pattern evolved, and the lines and colours were trial and error, and occasionally I unpicked some parts which didn't work, seemed wrong, and needed to be reworked. As to the overall concept, one friend captured much of what was being attempted when she wrote, in response to the finished work, "the fluidity of line and shape feel right for Julian, who is never a straight edge person."

The decision to make the earth the same size as the hazelnut, and to frame them separately within the landscape, was made early on. I was playing with the idea of  her hand-held hazelnut, "round as any ball", and the round earth, indeed all that exists, being held in the hand of the Creator. The sun is the same size and the light emanates to the farthest reaches; it also shines brightest behind the hazelnut - a theme important in my own theology, "The light shines in the darkness and the darkness comprehendeth it not."

The blue ribbon has several layers of significance. Julian makes much of Mary, as one who brings together the humanity and divinity of Jesus; and her colour is blue. Across the landscape of "all that is" flows "the river of the waters of life", the life-giving energy of the God who will make all things well. In Medieval iconography blue is the colour of divine majesty, and in the crucified Christ majesty and meekness coalesce in the redemptive love that is revealed to Julian. That majestic love is edged in red, a colour that signifies sacrifice. 

Each will find their own meanings within the work. It's hard for me as the artist to reduce to words and explanation what is a work of creative and visual exegesis, using colours, techniques, materials and stitches which are both deeply personal choice, and creatively purposeful improvisation. It is a prayer in stitches, an exegesis in colour and form, a tapestry of a text in which theological truth, mystical vision and spiritual experience distil into Revelations of Divine Love. 

But one further thought. Julian has no interest in speculative mysticism cut loose from Christian orthodox doctrine. Oh yes, she pushes the boundaries to their limits, but when she writes of the love of God, her ideas are deeply embedded in orthodox Christology, coloured through and through by a richly embroidered atonement theology. Themes of creation, fall and redemption are woven throughout her work, and the central image of the Cross and the crucified Christ constrain her theological speculations, and results in a mind that is restlessly curious, yet patiently contemplative, and therefore produces a work that did not fit existing categories of ecclesial teaching.

Julian's Revelations are at one and the same time, securely orthodox but with deep and well nourished roots capable of subverting the foundations of some of those fixed boundaries; not to diminish the Gospel, but to expand understanding of inexhaustible truth. Some of that creative subversion may also be hinted at in the finished tapestry.