Refractions

This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you. If “the world” in this text means the collection of creatures and habitats – critters, rocks, waters, trees and soils – that constitute our earth, then what we have here is in one sense quite familiar – Christian denial of the goodness of the material world.  Its roots are more Greek than Hebrew, more Plato than Jesus of Nazareth, but its grip on Christian imagination over the centuries has been fierce and relentless. But what if “the world” means something else?  What if it means a collection of habits that condition how we understand the world and ourselves in the world?  Is there a collection of habits so pervasive and convincing that they shape, even determine, what world we see and inhabit?  Like the default settings on computers, which are in play behind the scenes unless and until we choose to...

He is the Way. Follow Him through the Land of Unlikeness, You will see rare beasts and have unique adventures. He is he Truth. Seek Him in the Kingdom of Anxiety, You will come to a great city that has expected your return for years. He is the Life. Love Him in the World of the Flesh, And at your marriage all its occasions shall dance for joy.   These three stanzas from W.H. Auden’s For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio have been a prominent landmark in my soulscape for almost exactly thirty years. I read them first in the late spring of 1981. Deborah’s wedding gift to me in 1983 was to cross-stitch these nine lines of poetry and put them in a frame. And over the years, the words have themselves become a frame – a way of reading part of John 14, one of the series of “I am” illuminations that characterize the Fourth Gospel. The places through and in which we follow, seek and love Jesus are, I think, just the ones that Auden identifies. In the Land of Unlikeness, through ...

“The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”   John 10.10 It’s important to know who’s at the gate. Everything depends on it. Abundant life or no life at all. Of course, it also all depends on who gets to define what life is, or as Michael Ignatieff recently put it, on who controls the narrative. In the 1999 film, The Matrix, Thomas Anderson, a computer programmer with a hacker alter ego named Neo, awakens to discover that the life he thinks he has been living has been generated by a computer program called “the Matrix”. He has spent his entire life so far as one of millions of bodies whose sole purpose is to generate heat to energize the machines who have taken over the world. The machines control the narrative and make people believe they are actually living the life the Matrix projects into their minds. When Neo is rescued from the body farm and awakened to reality, he discovers what many of us discover at on...

Why are Cleopas and his companion heading for Emmaus?   Are they beckoned by the promise of home, or driven by the fear of violence and death in Jerusalem? They are clearly disciples of the Galilean rabbi whose teaching and practice led to his execution. It would not be unreasonable for them to imagine that some part of the violence that landed on him might land on them as well.   And if it is fear that drives them, the astounding witness of the women that they repeat to the stranger on the road has not yet sunk in. Because the resurrection is, among other things, a compelling invitation to repent of the authority of fear in our lives, authority that we have granted.   The resurrection unmasks that of which we have been so afraid – the power of death – as, in the end, empty, an empty tomb, a broken bondage.   The resurrection does not obliterate the cost of our living as soft bodies in a hard world. It does, however, disclose the limit of death’s power.   It ...

We can easily become so focused on Thomas that we miss everything else in the story. I’m thinking in particular about the very early part of this week’s gospel – “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.”   The continuing ministry of Jesus will include these apostles (the word means “sent ones”). And they are sent “as the Father sent me”; that is to say, the terms of their engagement with the world on behalf of the Father are the same as they were for Jesus. Teach and heal, cast out demons, confront the illusion of inevitability that holds hope hostage, unmask the privilege and power that sustain an elite, and attend with compassion to those who are left out and lost. The cost of this engagement will also follow the trajectory of Jesus’ life. Like him, they will spend their lives . So it makes perfect sense that before Jesus tells them about this engagement in God’s mission, he reminds them that he has the necessary authority to invite them into this hard and holy way. He sho...