Janet Morley called her book of poetry for Lent and Holy Week, “The Heart’s Time,” and it truly is.  Lent and this Holy Week especially invite us to concentrate on what our heart really longs for, needs, desires and craves.  At the very deepest part of ourselves we long for love and belonging, and at the very deepest part of that deep place we know the love we so urgently seek is more than we can find in another human being.

Holy Week is especially the time for the heart but it is so easy to let it pass by without receiving even a little of what it has to offer.  Over and over again I see people bypassing the cross of Good Friday and moving to the jollity of Easter Day – and I say “jollity” rather than joy because you don’t get what Easter Day is really about without Good Friday – you don’t get the joy of new life in Christ, which is more than anything, the knowledge that God loves you right to the bottom of that deep down place – unless you see that love fully exposed on the cross.

Of course, it is totally understandable, to want to avoid the cross and its horrors.  We all know the temptation to turn away from bad news stories in the media, particularly those which are full of suffering.  The cross is utterly horrific.  No one denies that.  But the extraordinary thing about Christ crucified is that as you gaze on the figure you are taken to another level, a deeper level.  You go past the outside and see the point of the whole thing.  The cross connects heaven and earth in its vertical line.  The arms of Jesus stretched out on the horizontal beams embrace all the earth.  Jesus himself is the faithful human one who never turns away from God, who never turns away from us.  He allows us for the first and only time to see what it might mean to be truly human, as God intended us to be; in perfect loving and trusting relation to him; resting in his care for us.

Jesus is raised on the cross and we are invited to gaze on him to see that which only the heart can see, love made perfect, love that tells us who God is, love that at last rescues us from fear and separation, love that forgives us because it can do no other.

All this – and so much more – is missed, if we only want the jollity of Easter Day.

This is being written on April 6th, the fifth Sunday of Lent and the beginning of Passiontide. The gospel this morning was the raising of Lazarus and this story, according to some theologians, is where the “tide” really turns against Jesus. John’s gospel which can be divided into two parts. The first part is the one about the Signs that Jesus performed. The second is about Christ’s “Glory,” a word John uses all the time to talk of the Passion: Jesus’ arrest, torture, crucifixion and death. For John the glory of God’s love in Christ shows forth through these terrible events:

For God so loved the world…”

The raising of Lazarus is the last of Jesus’ Signs but also the event that determines the religious authorities to have him killed, rather than the remarks he makes about the temple, according to John. What happens, other than the most extraordinary event that would make you think they would turn to Jesus (the raising of Lazarus) to bring them to this pitch of fear and hatred?

There is some evidence in the text that there is a breakdown in attitude within the religious authorities themselves. At the end of the set gospel we read this,

Many of the Jews therefore, who had come with Mary and had seen what Jesus did, believed in him. (John 11:45)

When John writes “the Jews” this is his shorthand for the antagonistic Jewish authorities, the Pharisees, Sadducees and Priests – those who stood for the status quo and were against Jesus from the start. Before this incident with Lazarus there is a sense of a united front amongst the authorities, but here we read that some start to believe in him. If our gospel reading had gone on a little further we would have read:

But some of them went to the Pharisees and told them what he had done. 47 So the chief priests and the Pharisees called a meeting of the council…Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, said to them…“50 You do not understand that it is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed.”

The greatest fear when it comes to power is when those who we thought were on our side and thought as we did, change sides. Our position is crumbling. The authorities had begun by ridiculing Jesus. As his influence grew so did their smear campaigns and their intellectual attack. Now, afraid as they see even their friends succumbing to his influence and the terrible threat of Roman reaction, they are determined Jesus must be eliminated.

We may not think we are prone to such reactions but perhaps we should look at ourselves more closely; look at the way you feel about your culture, your belief system and your politics. Who threatens you? Who would you like simply not to be around so that you could be a little more comfortable inside your skin; a little less disturbed? And where does our pre-conditioned prejudice stop us from seeing and hearing the truth.

On retreat last week I was reminded of how important waiting is. It is not at all something that we are used to or good at in our world today. As someone pointed out one of our new gods is called “Instant;” another is called “Distraction” – the need to be entertained in every moment. Neither of these gods sits comfortably with waiting. There is a kind of courtesy involved in waiting. We wait for or wait on someone or something until they are ready. Waiting demands patience. It demands that we hand over power to the other. It lives by the old adage that the best things in life are worth waiting for.

What do we have to wait for? First thing, upon waking and best done gazing out the window, cup of tea in hand, we wait for the spirit of the day to make itself known. As we pause and gaze, resisting the temptation to switch on the radio or hurry up and get dressed, we allow God’s presence to be felt. You can’t force this. You have to wait. But the reward is that already the day has depth and meaning. Even if this is the only pausing we do all day it will change the taste of the day.

Leaving the house the temptation is to be full of what we are going towards, our journey to work, or what we have to do. We can be completely oblivious to life outside our heads. We are also living entirely in the future and not in the present moment at all. So the invitation as you open the front door and step out is to pause and again wait on the day. Let it come to you; let it greet you in the weather you step into: the physical feelings of warmth or cold on your skin, the sounds of birdsong, breeze, rain, traffic. Smell the smells: everything from tarmac to sweet smells of grass or box hedge to coffee or curry! Observe the trees; notice the ones coming into bud. Be aware of the people. Look at the sky, at the buildings, at the birds in the trees. And then just pause again. In those moments of being and waiting the day tenderly gives itself to you.

In everything we do we are invited to be patient and to wait so that the other may come to us. So we wait on a painting we are looking at until it begins to “speak” to us. We read a piece of scripture or a poem slowly and sometimes more than once and then just sit with it until something communicates itself to us. In conversation we wait for the other person to share without hurrying into our agenda. If the conversation gets deep we allow the silences. With a small child or animal we wait until they feel confident enough to come towards us. We respect their space and needs.

We can get into the habit of pausing during the day and allowing all the richness outside ourselves if we practice it. The more we practice just stopping and waiting for a few moments, the more habitual it becomes and the more alive we feel. It probably starts though with that waiting first thing in the morning. A new day full of its own life and I am allowed to be part of it, thanks be to God.

Temptation is one of those subjects that comes to mind in Lent, especially when we are feeling the temptation to eat or drink something we have given up during this forty day period. Do you ever give in? I sometimes do, after I have made a good case for it in my head!”

We are told that Jesus was “tempted in every way as we are, but without sin.” The gospel writer might appear to be telling us that Jesus never gave in to temptation. But, as someone once said, this doesn’t mean that it was easy for Jesus. Anyone of us who has ever really been tempted and has struggled against it, knows it can be very hard. Perhaps it is most hard when everyone around you is doing whatever it is you are holding out against and teases you or jeers at you for not joining in. Perhaps it is even more difficult when you are not absolutely sure you are right. The point is that the one who is tempted in every way as we are but doesn’t give in, knows more about temptation, not less. Those of us who give in quickly and easily know very little about it, because we give into it so easily. So Jesus knew more about temptation than the average human being, not less.

Reading the story of the Temptations in the Wilderness one could get the idea that this episode was a one-off and that Jesus was not sorely tempted again until the night before his death when praying in the Garden of Gethsemane. But most human beings are assailed again and again by the same temptations. Under stress or strain many of us succumb. What if Jesus was also tempted when tired or under particular stress or strain?

When Jesus realized that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, he withdrew again to the mountain by himself. (John 6: 1-15)

This verse is from the story of the feeding of the 5,000. Unlike its counterparts in the other gospels, John mentions the time of year: it is Passover. Some believe that this is John’s “Last Supper” as that event is not mentioned in this gospel. The bread that comes from an amount so small feeds thousands, keeps them alive and well. Christ’s sacrificial death is the Bread of Life and will feed millions and give everlasting life. But what of the last verse of this particular event, v 15.

We are told that Jesus withdraws when he realises that the crowd are about to make him king. In the Wilderness all the temptations are fundamentally about winning power, through feeding people, force or magic tricks. He turns away from all three because they will not win peoples’ hearts and minds to God’s way of love. In the story of the Feeding of the 5,000, Jesus, whilst not turning stones into bread most certainly multiplies loaves so that all are fed- and then suddenly the crowd want to make him king: the temptation to power.

Jesus withdraws to be by himself. Is he running away again from the temptation to be popular, relevant and powerful? It doesn’t matter if he is because he is running where we should all run, back to the real source of life, back to his true self, and away from what the world would have him be, back home to his Father-God. Or is Jesus simply seeking to be alone and refreshed by the Holy Spirit; back on balance, centred, quiet and still?

Re-turning to God is what we all need to do when tempted. It is also what we also need to do when we have simply had a long, hard day and there have been just too many demands on us. Pulled outside of ourselves and fragmented we return to the Father in prayer and we become ourselves again, back on balance.

One of my Lenten disciplines this year is to read all four gospels during the 40 days of Lent. This may sound a hefty task to take on but in reality it is about 10 minutes a day. The plan I am using is the “Biblegateway” one and you can access it through the internet. You even get one day a week rest day – the Sabbath – Sunday!

It is really good to read a chunk of the bible through every day and many of us do so through reading plans or the daily office but to get a run at the gospels is a real gift. I am experiencing two contrasting things. First, a sense of familiarity and comfort from words I have lived with most of my life (certainly my adult life) and secondly surprise as I see things I have never noticed before. So the familiar is full of the unfamiliar. The God of Surprises keeps tapping me on the shoulder.

One such moment happened last week when I was reading Matthew 12 and the story of the disciples picking the ears of corn to eat as they walked through a field on the Sabbath, “because they were hungry.” The ever watchful Pharisees immediately jumped on the event complaining to Jesus that his disciples were breaking the Sabbath law about work (not about eating someone else’s wheat, you notice!) In verse 7, Jesus replies,

But if you had known what this means, “I desire mercy and not sacrifice”, you would not have condemned the guiltless. 8For the Son of Man is lord of the Sabbath.’

The words that jumped out at me were, “you would not have condemned the guiltless.” I had never really seen them before with such clarity. I know how often I condemn the guiltless in my thoughts, if not in my words and actions. If there is someone whom I am having difficulty with I am just as likely as the Pharisees to search for something that I see as wrong in the other person and jump on that, condemning people who may well be truly guiltless, but if they are not who deserve a little more understanding and compassion from me then I am willing to give them.

The chapter continues with two more illustrations of the Pharisees condemning Jesus who is guiltless. The first is when he heals the man with the withered hand, again condemned because this act of mercy is on the Sabbath; the second when he heals a blind-mute man. On that occasion Jesus is accused of being able to do what he does do through an association with Beelzebub, the devil!

The chapter is a vivid indictment of the human inclination to condemn the guiltless, not only personally but within society as well. In the UK we have always been very good at blaming people who are poor for being poor, for example, instead of really looking at the root causes of poverty and addressing them. Some of our media make matters worse by talking of people on benefits as “scroungers” whereas we know that many people are working in low paid jobs, are elderly or disabled. And this is just one example of our condemning the guiltless or at least not treating them with mercy.

I wonder what Jesus would say to us?

The Pentecostal church used the local parish church for its services on a Sunday afternoon. The local vicar used to see the husband and wife ministry team come out after their service, often three hours long, looking bright and happy.  Often she would say to him,

“We have seen the glory today, vicar.  We have seen the glory!”

Sometimes the wife said, “Have you ever seen the glory, vicar?”

To which the vicar would reply, in a typically understated English and Anglican manner, “Well…yes…um…good for you…”  (I heard this story from the vicar so I am neither maligning him nor the Church of England.)

One day the vicar happened to see the lady minister before the service began.  It was a grey and miserable day, the sort of day when the dampness gets into your bones and into your spirits; yet she looked as content and ever.  The vicar couldn’t help asking her why she was so cheerful on such a grey and miserable day; after all she hadn’t yet had the tonic which her worship was to her.  She hadn’t seen the glory.

“Ah, yes, Vicar,” was her reply, “But I am going to see the glory.  I see the glory every day.”

Every day this woman got up and went out into the world expecting to see and looking for the glory of God, and because she was expectant and because she looked, she saw it.  Yesterday we had the story of the Transfiguration as our gospel reading.  We also had part of Peter’s second letter in which he says,

You will do well to be attentive to this as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts.  (2 Peter 1:19b)

The disciples gazed on Jesus in his glory and Peter, remembering this invites us to do the same in our daily life.  We are invited to gaze at Jesus in scripture, and the glory of God in creation, through poetry, music, art – whatever brings us into a state where we are attending to that which gives life in all its fullness.  In time the day will dawn in us, too, and the morning star of love and delight will rise in our hearts.

We can all see the glory with practice.  We can all see the glory because it is there.  We just have to expect it.

Anyone who is a fan of the Narnia stories by C S Lewis, knows that the central character, Aslan, is a lion – but he is not “a tame lion.”  I don’t know what a tame lion might look like but as a child I saw caged lions in zoos and others in a circus trained to do tricks that go against their nature.

Perhaps our history as Christians shows us over and over again as people who have tried to “tame” our faith so that we could live comfortably with it or cage it in order to control it and thus not face its reality.  All that has happened is that we have made it look insipid.  People fall away from the Christian faith and turn elsewhere to find something that will take them to the heart of their need, acknowledged but not always understood.  So we get young men (and women), some of whom have grown up in Christian families, choosing to become terrorists.

A quotation was given to us this week by one of our retreat conductors at Launde Abbey.  I am paraphrasing but he said, “The destruction of the Twin Towers in 9-11 was as evil a things as you could get, but it was breath-taking in its imagination.  The only way to overcome such evil is not to go to war against it but to try to out-imagine it.”

Lately, after having been a life-long Christian, I am really beginning to “get” just how radical is the message of Jesus Christ, when it comes to “out-imagining.”  Turning the other cheek, loving your enemies, doing good to those who hurt you may sound like the first lesson in how to be a doormat.  But history shows that when people have done this, i.e. practiced passive resistance, as in the Salt Marches in India under Gandhi or the work of the African American Civil Rights Movement under Martin Luther King, the world has been changed.  The most powerful witness to this is the very man who inspired Gandhi and King, Jesus Christ, who sought forgiveness for those who were executing him even as they drove the nails into his hands and feet.  He changed the whole world and the course of history forever.

For this radical change to happen however, there has to be a double journey.  That of the individual on the inside and that of the community coming together with the same vision.  It has all gone horribly wrong in history when the work of forgiveness has not gone on inside individuals first.  If I do not turn to God in prayer first and face my old nagging wounds, my bitterness and my resentment that come up again and again; if I do not strive against my own darkness and find the light of Christ and his compassion and forgiveness, I will not be able to be part of God’s solution, his radical re-imagining of the world.  If I take a shortcut and just act out these things with others on the outside without the inner work of prayer, I may end up doing what has so often been done in the past with good intentions, become part of a movement that sets out to change the world for the good but ends up enslaving and destroying everything that gets in the way of my faith, my ideas.

Christ is our model.  He stated that he could do nothing without his Father and often went off alone to be with him in prayer.  Why would we imagine that we could be Christian people without the same practice?

The gospel reading on Sunday was Matthew 5:21-37, part of the much beloved Sermon on the Mount.  Only this bit is not so loved.  It is the part where Jesus quotes the Jewish law and then adds “but I say to you.”  What he then goes on to say seems even tougher than the original law!   For those people who want their Jesus to be a lovely, anything goes, throwback to the 1960s hippy era or a modern individualist claiming the right to do anything he wants, this reading can be a bit of a shock.  The instinct is to bypass it.

There is a way of approaching scripture that I have found very helpful.  There are four stages:

You ask, “How did the original audience understand this?”  This is important because the culture in which Jesus lived was hugely different to ours and we need to comprehend when Jesus is speaking to the cultural wrongs of the day (like the treatment of women) and when he is speaking to a spiritual understanding we all share.

Then we ask, “How do we hear this now?”  Again this is very important because otherwise we may go for a fundamentalist reading of scripture.  A good example of this is v.31 when Jesus speaks against divorce.  In Jesus’ time a man could divorce a woman simply by giving her a bill of divorcement.  The woman had no legal rights in law and no property.  Any husband could turn his wife out and she would be destitute.  Jesus, as always, is speaking for justice and mercy for those who were powerless in his society.  I would not read v. 31 as a blanket rule against divorce except for adultery.  In our culture we accept that there are various situations in which it is really damaging for a couple to go on living together.

The third stage of reading is to ask yourself, “Is there any metaphorical reading of this passage?”  Of course, there often is in Jesus’ teaching.  Last week Jesus talked of his followers as being “salt” and “yeast” in the world.  But there may also be other metaphorical readings that are more subtle: for example, St John’s use of “dark” and “light” in his gospel.

The fourth stage is to ask, “What is this passage saying to me today?”  This is very important because scripture is God’s love letter to us.  The word of God speaks to us directly in our daily needs and anxieties, in our longings and desires, in our life-long journey.  This question can lead you directly into prayer.

Matthew 5: 21-37 is a very important passage because it reminds us to look behind the law that God gave to the Jewish people to ask, what was the reason for the law in the first place?  It was that the people be blest in the land that God was giving them (Deut 30:16).  It was to help them live well in community.  Jesus reminds his original audience and us as well that keeping the law of God is not just a tick-box exercise but about really caring for others.  We do this when keeping the law is not just about our actions on the outside but about the purity of our intentions on the inside.  That is why Jesus says we must try not even to be angry with one another or call a person a fool; why we must not have erotic fantasies about another person’s spouse even if we think we have no intention of doing anything about it – it demeans the object of the fantasy, undermines relationships and is potentially dangerous.

Earlier in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness” (Matt 5:6).  Think of what it is to be really hungry and thirsty.  This is what Jesus is calling us to be, people who care that much for others. Of course we fail – we all fail to live up to such high standards – but when we fail we simply pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and start all over again!

 

A little while ago I bought a holiday read at an airport.  It was called “The Time Keeper” and was by Mitch Albom, who also wrote the bestseller, “Tuesdays with Morey.”  In my opinion it was a fairly lightweight book until it got to the final chapters where it posed a frightening scenario of the future.  I do not want to give the whole plot away except to say that the people of the future had so lost touch with their feelings that they watched ‘films’ of memories of past people to put them in touch with something – anything –  to do with feeling.

Is this ‘out of touch-ness’ with our feelings a new phenomenon?  I do not think so.  But I do think it may be getting worse.  We live in the most distracted culture and distracted time in our history.  The distraction is self-chosen to a certain extent, but also addictive.  The distraction is created by the busyness and complexity of our lives which we counter-balance and get relief from through entertainment.  So we play with ipod and ipads on journeys, when out for a walk or exercising.  Listen to radios when driving.  Walk into our houses and switch on our large flat-screen television, stream our film or chosen programme or play computer games.  There is constant entertainment, constant noise and constant avoidance.  And I know how tempting it is.  If I have had a tiring and demanding day all I want to do is collapse on the sofa and watch mindless television – like moving wallpaper.

The problem with living our lives like this is that we know, all of us know on a certain level, that our lives lack meaning.  We may not voice this to ourselves in words but the shallowness and emptiness that we feel is articulated in other ways which may lead to even more damaging distraction and avoidance.  But as I have insinuated earlier, I think this has always been a problem we humans have had: if not as badly as we have it now.

Socrates famously said, “An unexamined life is not worth living.”  St Ignatius took this a stage further when he gave us the prayer exercise called the Examin or Examen.  Some call it the Examin of Conscience but I prefer the other title, Examen of Consciousness.  For St Ignatius, the creator of the famous Spiritual Exercises, the Examen was the most important form of prayer you could and should do.

I am only going to write of the first half of the exercise now.  Briefly, in the Examen, we sit quietly and go back over our day in our minds to see where we have “been.”  We ask where have been the positive moments in my day, when we felt suddenly alive to something, close to someone or something, moments of joy, moments of surprise, moments where we turned to God – all those times of waking up and feeling connection.  As we recall these moments we are often surprised by seeing something consciously for the first time.  At one level we must have been aware but it had not risen to our consciousness.  The result during this time of “recollection in tranquillity” is that we often see and feel things more deeply.  Our hearts are warmed and we feel gratitude.  Praise and thanksgiving rise spontaneously in our hearts.

Sometimes a whole experience from the day can be turned upside down.  Something that had at the time appeared mundane and tedious suddenly shows itself to have been acutely important, life giving and affirming.

In order to experience our real feelings, to see our days and to feel a life-giving response to all that each moment brings, we have to give ourselves these moments of recollection.  The most important thing I have noticed is that when I do this exercise, even if I have been tired and hard-pressed beforehand, I am no longer weary and usually I feel at peace.  It is not only important, it is essential that we examine our lives.

 

“Lord Jesus Christ, Your light shines within us.

Let not my doubts or my darkness speak to me.

Lord Jesus Christ, your light shines within us.

Let my heart always welcome your love.”

Dread; there are mornings for many people when the first emotion they become aware of on waking is dread; a sense of darkness.  Those who know this feeling find it hard to ‘get their head round’, for want of a better expression.  It is difficult to understand where the feeling comes from or to describe it.  It is harder still to find a concrete reason for it; it is just present.  For people used to the language of faith it can feel like guilt and separation from God.  Others might go so far as to call it depression, but it is not that, at least not medically speaking.

This feeling of dread is very common and often alluded to by the great spiritual writers of the distant and not so distant past.  Thomas Merton writes of it, for example, often.  It is commonly experienced as people grow older and the things that used to give their lives meaning and purpose either fall away or shift in character.  It is also experienced when we dare to be truly on our own without our usual protective scaffolding of business and entertainment.  No one who has been on an 8 Day Individual Guided Silent Retreat will have escaped the experience of dread, if they have done it properly (i.e. without trying to escape themselves.)  Sometimes people will feel that they have lost God and therefore lost their faith, particularly if they have no wise person to talk things through with.  Sometimes people will blame the Church for letting them down in some way.

We do not need to be afraid of this experience of “dread”.  It is very well documented in Christian writing and rather than being something which is taking us away from God or is a sign of a breakdown of faith, it can be a sign of movement towards God.  It can be part of the Dark Night of the Soul which happens when we undergo change in our lives and the old way of seeing God and walking with him no longer works.  This is a sign that God is moving us along.  Dread can be the very real awareness that although I am not actually purposefully missing the mark with God, I am resistant to him, feel myself as separate to him even though part of me wants just the opposite.  We are divided people – divided against ourselves in our longing for and resistance to God.

What can we do when dread hits us?  First, know that it is normal (unless it persists as a great blackness and then perhaps we need to go to the doctor – but the feeling of spiritual dread passes).  We come to Christ in prayer acknowledging ourselves as the weak and divided people we are, wanting him and not wanting him, and we just wait on him.  And we find someone to talk to who understands the Christian journey.

Finally, try singing; it always lifts the heart.  The words of the Taizé song at the top of this page say it all.