Andrew Marr's Blog

Thanksgiving Day is an occasion to reflect on gratitude and what it means to us. It raises questions such as: Am I thankful for what I have received? Am I not thankful because I wanted more? Should I be more grateful for what I have? All good questions.

In Deuteronomy, the Israelis are instructed to bring the first fruits to where God will have a dwelling place (the Temple ) in gratitude both for the deliverance from the Egyptians at the Red Sea and for the produce of the land which Yahweh has given them. (Deut. 26: 1-11) They are also reminded of their frailty as former aliens so that, in their gratitude, they will be generous to others in need. This is an ideal vision of gratitude for what God has done for us.

In Philippians, Paul urges his congregation to make their requests known to God with prayer “and thanksgiving.” (Phil. 4: 6) That is, we thank God with anticipation before we have received what we ask for. The implication is that we are to be thankful for what we receive, even if it isn’t everything we asked for, and possibly nothing at all of what we wanted. That is, we are to be thankful to God, trusting that God does give us what we most truly and deeply need, which might not be what we think we need, at least not at the time. Most of us find ourselves grateful later on for some of the things we asked for that God did not grant us.

In John’s Gospel, in the aftermath of Jesus feeding the multitude in the wilderness, (Jn. 6: 25-35) several dynamics of thanksgiving, and the lack thereof, come into play. The people want more, but more what? Are they grateful or greedy? Jesus perceives that they just want more bread; what they received was not enough. He urges them to see the feeding as a Sign, a Sign being an act with a deeper meaning than the surface action. “Do not work for the food that perishes but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you.” (Jn. 6: 26) The people themselves then refer to the manna their ancestors received during the desert journey. This inadvertently gives Jesus an opening for explaining the depth of the Sign. The bread came from Heaven as a gift of God. But this allusion to the manna in the desert also recalls the ingratitude of their ancestors, who complained about the manna. Will the people Jesus is talking to end up complaining with ingratitude as well?

At first, it seems that maybe they will receive the sound teaching. When Jesus says “For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.,” (Jn. 6: 33) the people ask him to give them this bread always. But when Jesus responds to this request by declaring that he himself is the Bread of Life, they complain bitterly, because they do not see how a man they think they know, a man from nearby Nazareth, can be the Bread of Life who will sustain them in anything at all, let alone Eternal Life. So, we don’t see from the people in this Gospel story a very good example of gratitude.

Being modest in what we ask for is a good ingredient in a recipe for gratitude. If less is enough to make us thankful, chances are we will be thankful more often than not. But the quality of what we want has even more to do with thankfulness. If we want Jesus Himself, the Bread from Heaven, then we will receive what we ask for and we will be grateful. We don’t need quite so many material goods if we are more interested in receiving Jesus, and we are more likely to be generous as Jesus is generous. This is the way to “ the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding.” (Phil. 4: 7)

I like to think I know who the good guys are and who the bad ones. It’s a practical skill that helps one get along in life. When one meets a stranger, one way to find out if this stranger is good or bad is to note who the stranger thinks is good and who is not. If the stranger likes the people I like and hates the people I hate, chances are the stranger is good. But if the stranger offers friendship to a bad person, I write off the stranger.

In Jericho, at the time Jesus came to town with his disciples on the way to Jerusalem, (Lk. 19: 1–10) everybody knew that Zacchaeus was a bad guy. The ridiculous figure he made of himself by climbing a sycamore tree to gawk at the stranger come to town just proved the point. So it came as quite a shock when Jesus called out to the bad guy and said he needed to stay at his house. I know I grumble if somebody commends somebody I don’t like, so I can sympathize with the people of Jericho when they grumble at the stranger’s lack of discernment.

Now one might think the people of Jericho were envious of Zacchaeus, because Jesus had singled him out to go to his house. Although there is no indication that anybody in Jericho wanted to invite the stranger and his followers to their home, perhaps the fact that the bad guy, Zacchaeus, had shown a strong desire to entertain the stranger, suddenly made the stranger desirable. Or, more likely, they coveted the commendation that Zacchaeus had received without wanting to take on the burden of hospitality. Or did they want to have anything to do with him? This stranger had shown that he has bad taste in people.

At this point, we could each ask of ourselves: would I like to have Jesus come into my home? Into my life? We become much more conscious of what our home is like when company comes. We also become much more conscious of what kind of people we are when somebody comes to see us. We want to make both our homes and ourselves presentable in a way that we might not bother to do if nobody comes calling. So what would it be like to have Jesus into my home?

When Jesus was walking the earth and was limited in time and space, there was only one house he could have visited at a time. Today, we know that Jesus has no such spatial limitation. He can come into the home, into the life, of everybody on the planet and every other planet that has intelligent life. So there is no zero sum game when it comes to Jesus.

But do we really want Jesus with us? Imagine Jesus being with us every minute, every second of the day. This would make us constantly aware of Jesus, something Benedict in his Rule admonishes his monks to be. How do we behave if Jesus is with us, closely with us? Does it make a difference in how we conduct our lives? In the case of Zacchaeus, it made a very big difference. But what about us? Or, if we think about it, would we rather that Jesus pass us by and visit somebody else?

There is also the problem of the company Jesus keeps. Maybe we can put up with Zacchaeus because we see him being a good guy. But what about the people on our lists of bad guys? How do we feel if somebody we thought was bad shows good qualities of kindness and generosity? Are we edified, or disappointed that we have to cross the name off the list? The problem is that if Jesus comes into our lives, we get all the other people Jesus associates with as well. Are we ready to cope with that?

Most of us believe in gratitude. But in the story of Jesus healing the ten lepers, only one of the healed lepers turned back to thank Jesus for what he had done. (Lk. 17: 11–19) If gratitude is so simple, why did nine out of ten not show it? Maybe gratitude isn’t as easy as we think. If we recall our childhood, expressing gratitude was not a spontaneous act, even though we were happy to receive nice things. As soon as we began to talk, our parents would ask us over and over again: “What do you say?” when given a present. So, what is the difficulty with gratitude?

Sometimes the problem is that we simply aren’t grateful for what we received. Most of us have childhood memories of receiving an ugly sweater or a toy three years beneath our current level from and aunt or uncle or grandparent. In such cases, we’re taught to care about the feelings of these people and, more important, to be grateful for the love they showed by giving us something. In Robertson Davies’ Deptford Trilogy, a man deprived as a child of any generosity, said that a book of Shakespeare plays that he never read was his most prized possession because it was the first time anybody had given him anything. It is also true that some people give in manipulative ways, which does not inspire gratitude. But this does not get at why we have trouble expressing gratitude when it is due.

The thing about receiving from others is that it shows our dependence on them. Children, of course, are totally dependent creatures, in need all the time for everything. I wonder if this has something to do with the difficulty of learning to say the magic words” “thank you.” If we are receiving gifts all the time, a gift is nothing special; it’s just part of the order of things. There is also a certain amount of frustration about being dependent all the time which gets in the way of feeling gratitude for what we are given.

But are we who are adults any better at gratitude, since we aren’t so dependent? My seminary professor of ascetical theology told us that thanksgiving was the hardest fundamental kind of prayer for most of us. It’s easy to pray for something but not so easy to give thanks for receiving it. Why is this, if we aren’t so dependent all the time as children are? Well, actually we are dependent on others for many things because of our human limitations. Most fundamentally, we are dependent on God. After all, each of us exists because of God’s creative energy that made our existence possible. On top of that, God redeemed us through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. How often do we get to the nubs of this dependence and thank God for it? Maybe, like children, we take it all for granted. Of course being grateful for redemption involves realizing our need for redemption in the first place, which is humiliating. And what about what we earn in money and social capital? St. Thomas Aquinas argued, contrary to Luther and Calvin, that humans can earn merit, but he said that the ability to earn merit is a gift from God, which puts him close to Luther and Calvin after all. So, like children, we are dependent all the time for everything. It takes humility to accept this.

As monks, those of us in the community of St. Gregory’s Abbey live a life of complete dependence, putting us into the position where gratitude has to be as much an ongoing facet of life as dependence. I think back on how often, during the intercessory prayers, Fr. Anthony would give thanks for his monastic vocation. I, too, feel this same gratitude, and it occurs to me that the monastic vocation is a gift from God, but also a gift of our supporters. Among other services, such as our guest ministry, is the importance of offering deep and continuous prayer for all people. It occurs to me that if giving thanks is so difficult, then continuous prayer for everyone needs also to be continuous thanksgiving.

There is much puzzlement about the parable of the mid-manager who is dismissed from his office. (Lk. 16: 1–9) Not least is the question as to whether we should called him “the Dishonest Manger,” as does the NRSV, or the “unjust manager” as many other English translations have it. The Greek word here is adikaios. This is in the dikaios word group which normally is translated as “justice “ or “righteousness.” Here, it is preceded by the alpha privative so that literally it means a manager without justice or righteousness. Dishonest mangers do have that lack, but since the word dikaios occurs frequently in the New Testament meaning justice and/or righteousness, I think it is preferable to say that the is manager unrighteous rather than dishonest. The unjust Judge who would only do justice for the widow when pestered by the widow was also described by the word adikaios, which is clearly best translated as “unjust.” (Lk. 18: 6) There is a significant difference in the two English terms and since this parable is very opaque, we can use all the clarity we can get. This understanding of the word gains more credence when we note that the unrighteous manager is not accused of embezzlement but of squandering the property of the rich man who had hired him. There is also the matter of the rich man acting on hearsay without apparently doing any independent investigation.

The unrighteous manager’s inner dialogue is realistic and pragmatic. He is quite clear about the ulterior motive behind his scheme of lowering the debts of his former boss’s clients: that these people will welcome him into their homes for what he has done for them. It appears that the unrighteous manger is cheating his former master, but it is possible that he was receiving a commission on the notes and was deducting what would have been his share. That the former master chuckles over what his fired employee has done suggests that he had not suffered further loss over these transactions. It’s hard to see how the Kingdom of God can be like this sort of moral muddle, and Jesus does not, in fact, say the Kingdom of God is like this. So what does a parable like this have to do with the Kingdom of God?

The parable suggests that handling money is intrinsically problematic, and the greedier one is, the more problematic it is. Both the rich man and the people who owe the rich man material goods come across as wanting best value for their money. Almost all of us do that and that is why this parable mirrors our involvement with money and other material goods. Calling the wealth “unjust” rather than “dishonest” better captures the systemic injustice of the world’s economic system. The unrighteous manger is the only one in the parable who acts generously even if that is only under duress: unless the “squandering” of the rich man’s property involved being generous with the goods he was responsible for. Given recent events, I can’t help but think of the refusal of some politicians to “squander” money on helping those most in need of assistance.

Indeed, Jesus shifts the focus from handling money in this world to the relationship between how generous we are with money in terms of our eternal destiny: “And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone they may welcome you into the eternal homes.” (Lk. 16: 9) Jesus then goes on with a few other comments, the most pertinent being “No slave can serve two masters, for a slave will either hate the one and love the other or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.” (:Lk. 16: 13) The rich man and the clients who owe the rich man goods are caught in serving wealth, while the unrighteous manager seems to have freed himself from it to some extent. By mirroring the morally chaotic life of pursuing wealth, Jesus alerts us to the need to escape this rat race by aiming for “the eternal homes.” So where is the Kingdom of God? It isn’t here unless we all practice the generosity of the unrighteous steward which disrupts the system he was living in up to the time he was fired.

It is often said that we learn a lot about a person by how a person takes adversity. Some become embittered while some show amazing patience. In the story in today’s Gospel (Lk. 13: 10-17) we have a woman who was been crippled by a spirit for eighteen years. If that isn’t adversity, nothing is. How patient has this woman been? One important clue is that the woman was present at the synagogue. In spite of her pain and handicap, she was participating in the worship of Israel. Even if she had help from others, she had made quite an effort to be there. The leader of the synagogue seems to be a healthy, vigorous man. If he is suffering in any way, it doesn’t show. Jesus is also there. He soon suffers abuse from the leader of the synagogue, but it is later in the story of Jesus that we learn how deeply he endures suffering. Also present are The People. If the eighteen years the woman has been crippled is an illusion to the eighteen years Israel suffered under Eglon before they were delivered by Ehud (Judges 3:12-25) then the crippled woman stands for all of The People suffering in the present time under the rule of Rome and the Jewish leaders.

We also learn a lot about a person by how that person reacts to the suffering of another. The leader of the synagogue shows not the slightest sympathy to the crippled woman, while Jesus shows such a profound sympathy the he goes up to her and heals her, knowing that the leader of the synagogue was sure to berate him for what he had done. This is the kind of act by which Jesus deflected the suffering of another to himself, the kind of act that would lead to the cross.

Yet another way we learn a lot about a person is by how that person reacts to the good fortune of another. The formerly crippled woman rejoices, another sign that she had taken adversity well. An embittered person might not have rejoiced so strongly. The leader of the synagogue creates a very bad impression on that score. At least this isn’t a case of a person who gloats over the misfortunes of others and is upset over their good fortune as a result. What is chilling , though, is that the man’s sense of values gets in the way of human sympathy and an ability to rejoice in the woman’s healing. The leader of the synagogue has a vision of the perfect sabbath, something that could be and actually is a good thing. The sabbath is a gift of God, a day of rest where one abstains from work because even God renounced God’s creative work so as to simply rest. But this vision has become corrupted in to a notion that one cannot accept a wondrous gift of healing that happened on that day. A sad irony of all this is that Jesus doesn’t seem to have done any work beyond laying hands on the crippled woman. The counter example of untying a donkey to bring it to water takes more effort.

This story, then, invites us to examine our values and how we use them. The leader in the synagogue has good values but he uses them wrongly. The sign that he uses his values wrongly is his inability (unwillingness?) to rejoice in the healing of the crippled woman. What Jesus shows us in this story is that each individual person is important and no value should be allowed to override this significance. Every crippled person is Israel and every healed person is a cause for all Israel to rejoice. The leader of the synagogue seemed to be a healthy person, but while all of The People were rejoicing, he alone showed himself to be severely crippled by a spirit. Can this cripple allow Jesus to touch him on the sabbath and cure him? Can we take the healing of this crippled woman as a sign for the healing of all of us, all of Israel?

The brief story of Jesus visiting Martha and Mary, when Martha serves Jesus and Mary sits at his feet, listening to him, (Lk. 10: 38-42) has been interpreted as contrasting the active and contemplative lives since the early church. The contrast between Martha being so frantically active and Mary so still a listener firmly calls for attention. In any case, the relationship between activity and contemplation is one with which Christians have struggled since the Early Church. Although the Desert monastics embraced an ardent contemplative lifestyle, there are stories about the need for Martha, such as the amusing story of a visitor to a monastery who said he would not help with the work because he had, like Mary, chosen the better part, but was upset when he wasn’t called to dinner.

On the face of it, though, the contrast of action and contemplation doesn’t seem to be an issue for Luke or the other Gospel writers, which raises the question of whether or not the use of this story for evaluating the relationship between action and contemplation might be a bit anachronistic, even if congruent to the story. So I thought about what the story might have met to Luke–-but came up empty. I couldn’t think of any other meaning than the traditional one, which raises the question of whether it is so anachronistic after all.

First, I reflected on the pace of each of the four Gospels. Mark, considered the earliest, is very fast paced, breathlessly narrating the healing miracles and overwhelming the reader (or listener) with the power of Jesus’ ministry. Matthew and Luke slow the pace considerably, mainly by including long episodes of Jesus’ teaching, teachings that require reflection to begin taking them in. Although Luke’s pace is roughly the same as Matthew’s, it is instructive that he stresses more the times Jesus went off alone to pray, suggesting that Jesus had to balance his active life with contemplation. John, most likely the latest Gospel, is much the most contemplative Gospel as it unfolds at a very slow pace and suggests deeper meanings to the events in the narration. Such a progression suggests a growing awareness of those who developed the Gospel traditions of the need to contemplate the meaning of Jesus’ life that culminated in the shocks of the crucifixion and Resurrection, as well as absorbing the teachings which seem to have puzzled Jesus’ closest followers at the time. So, the traditional interpretation of this brief story doesn’t seem anachronistic after all.

When we look at the opening chapter of the Epistle to the Colossians, we encounter profoundly contemplative insights on the part of Paul, or whoever else might have written the epistle. (I favor Pauline authorship, but if somebody else shared the same contemplative insights as Paul demonstrated in his undoubted epistles, that attests all the more to the contemplative development of the early church.) Paul connects Jesus, whom he encountered on the Road to Damascus, to the Creator of the world, (Col. 1: 15–17) perhaps sensing the same creative activity on the part of God in Genesis as in the re-creation Paul experienced when Jesus called him out. This same Jesus is also the head of the Church, (Col. 1: 18) the specific group of humans who have responded to Jesus as Paul has. All this convinces Paul that the fullness of God dwells within Jesus. (Col. 1: 19) Most important, Paul realizes that Jesus’ reconciliation with him, who had formerly been hostile to Jesus, is part of a general reconciliation Jesus has made with all people, a reconciliation made not through the military, political, and cultural force of the Pax Romana, but the Peace of Christ who suffered at the hands of the Roman Empire. (Col. 1: 20) The very persecution Paul engaged in was flipped to a reconciliation by the suffering of Jesus. In this dense passage, we see the fruits of profound contemplation, a sitting at the feet of Jesus in quiet prayer. This gives us all the more reason to believe that Luke, probably writing two or three decades later than Paul, was passing on a caution traced back to Jesus that the action required by charity, such as in the Parable of the Good Samaritan that directly precedes this story of Mary and Martha, and the need to proclaim the Kingdom of God, be grounded in quiet contemplation of what the Kingdom ix really about.

In Genesis, we have the incident when Abraham and Sarah welcome three men who turn out to be angels. (Gen. 18: 1–10) Although there is much activity, we don’t see the frantic movements of Martha, and certainly not a trace of the resentment on Martha’s part. Starting with the Early Church, there has been a tendency to interpret the angels as the Holy Trinity come to visit the patriarch and matriarch. That interpretation really is anachronistic, but Paul’s proclamation that “the mystery that has been hidden throughout the ages and generations but has now been revealed to his saints” (Col. 1: 26) suggests that some interpretations of scripture will transcend time. The well-known icon of the Trinity by Andrei Rublev, inspired by this scene, leads us into the deep contemplation, not only of the hospitality of Martha, Sarah, and Abraham, but also of the hospitality of Mary who invited Jesus deeply into her heart. Such a presence of God within us can never be taken away from us and will remain with us for all eternity.

Migration is one of the major themes in the Bible. Abraham was called out of Ur of the Chaldees and Isaac and Jacob were constantly on the move. In Deuteronomy, Moses gives a retrospective account of their migration from Egypt to the Promised Land of Canaan that they are about to enter. In contradistinction to the Egyptians, Moses insists that the God who lead them out of Egypt demands good treatment to helpless people, especially the widow and the orphan, and the stranger, since they were strangers in Egypt. (Deut. 10: 19) Later, there we are migrations of the Jewish people at the hands of power politics that lead to the Babylonian Exile and the Return from Exile under the rule of Cyrus. With the prophets’ conviction that God was at the root of these movements, there is the suggestion that God, rather than any particular piece of land, is their true home. The author of Hebrews reviews all of the biblical migrations to teach us that, no matter how much we may think we feel “at home” in this world, this world is not our true homeland but that God has prepared a better homeland, “a heavenly one.” (Heb. 11: 16) Hardly surprising since the Son of Man had no place to lay his head. (Mt. 8: 20) If everybody’s true Homeland is a heavenly one, then there is no land on earth where anyone should be considered a stranger and treated the way the Egyptians, the Assyrians or the Babylonians treated the Jews. (Or the ways the Jews treated the Canaanites when they entered the Promised Land.) From these considerations, it follows that we should love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us, as Jesus teaches us in Matthew. (Mt. 5: 44) After all, if we are all aliens, then nobody is an alien, and there is no reason for anybody to be an enemy.

On Independence Day in the U.S., one may be prompted to use these reflections for guidance as to how our nation should conduct itself. That is, we should be welcoming to people seeking entry into our country, nurture the vulnerable, and do what we can to cultivate good relations with other countries. Bad governance by these guidelines would be to pursue a policy of enmity, either against people within the country or with other countries, or both. Usually the two go together, as the more enemies one finds, the more enemies one finds. Such governance is a disquieting escalation that will have no end until, like the serpent Ouroboros, we devour our own tail. After all, hatred of others tends to be rooted in hatred of self. Ouroboros is considered a symbol of infinity, but it is the infinity of the closed circle, and thus a vicious cycle. Such closed circles represent the policies of most sovereignties since the foundation of the world, with Egypt, Assyria,. Babylon, and Rome being biblical examples. It is the infinity of God, the maker of Heaven and Earth, who specifically commands the Israelites to open their circle, and with Jesus, this true infinity becomes a human being who breaks the circle we keep trying to close again. So it is that closed-circle rulers such as in Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Rome, and the Jewish leaders of Jerusalem crucify Jesus, only to have the Risen Victim open to us the way to an open system for all time, if and when we will have it.

With a political observance such as Independence Day, it is tempting to keep the focus on what the government should do, making ourselves armchair coaches with no responsibility–America’s favorite blood sport–but it is all the more important to realize that when political leaders show a need for enemies, they need for us to need enemies ourselves. When we put the matter this way, we begin to see how difficult these teachings are for ourselves. We ourselves tend to find excuses to consider some people to be aliens and others to be enemies. Life seems to lose its meaning without them. But if we have it in us to envision a country living by biblical principles, living as migrants wandering towards a heavenly homeland, then we need to open the closed system of enmity and open ourselves to the Holy Spirit who lovingly tears down these barriers. If we want a loving, peaceful country, we have to be peaceful, loving selves. That would be a cause for celebration.

Corpus Christi is an odd feast. Almost all of the other feasts celebrate an event in the life of Jesus or the life of a saint. Corpus Christi is focused on the doctrine and devotion to the Eucharist. Only the Feast of the Trinity has a similar focus insofar as it celebrates a doctrine fundamental to Christianity. The trouble with celebrating either feast as primarily doctrinal is that doctrines in themselves seem lifeless. Who besides mathematicians can get excited about the paradoxes of one and three, and who but scholastic theologians can get excited about what the Real Presence in bread and wine is all about?

The Trinity, of course is not a doctrine, and it isn’t really a mathematical puzzle for that matter. The Trinity is a story of creation and redemption and sanctification. Not that each person of the Trinity is confined to one of those roles. All three Persons do all three and much, much more. The sacrament of the Eucharist also celebrates a story, the same story that is told about the Trinity. (See Trinity as Story and Song.) The Institution of the Eucharist, Jesus’ Last Supper with his disciples, is one important incident in the story of Jesus coming to earth as a helpless child, living a life of a human vulnerable to whatever other humans choose to do to him, dying on a cross when that is what humans chose to do, rising from the dead, and being seated at the right hand of the Father in the heavenly places. We have celebrated this story one step at a time, starting with the expectations of Advent all the way through to the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. Trinity Sunday puts the whole story together in one big celebration and then Corpus Christ does the same from a different angle.

St. Thomas Aquinas said that God relates to God’s creatures according to their mode of reality. In the case of humans, this means that God relates to us, material creatures that we are, through the material world in time and in history. The Eucharistic rite takes place in time. It incorporates past times, most particularly the times when Jesus suffered and died and then rose again, but also the time when the Israelites were delivered from the Egyptians at the Red Sea, an event recalled at the Passover for the Jews. The Eucharistic rite also takes place in the present moment when it is celebrated. Whatever events on both local and world fronts are incorporated into the celebration and offered to God. Moreover, God’s promises for the future when all will be made one in Christ are present as well. That’s a lot of time and history to be contained in a piece of bread and a sip of wine.

Discussions of real presence and dolling the sacrament up in a monstrance for Benediction both have some danger of reifying the Body and Blood of Christ. However, use of one’s intelligence to perceive some intelligibility in the holy Mysteries is part of what it means to be an embodied human being. This is salutary as long as one is willing to allow what intelligibility that emerges to remain surrounded by mystery. Dressing up to celebrate is another facet of our embodied way of living. It is the kind of celebration we engage in to honor people we love and respect. The important thing to realize is that we are eating and drinking some powerful stories when we partake of the bread and wine, and we are celebrating these same stories deep in our hearts as we pray before the dressed-up sacrament. These stories of deliverance from slavery and the suffering of the Prince of Peace inform the way we prayerfully incorporate contemporary events and they prepare us for how we should live out our stories as parts of the greater stories embodied in the sacrament. These same stories have prompted many liturgical theologians to stress the importance of social concerns and outreach as necessary outcomes of the Eucharistic celebration.

There is a human expression about eating our words. The implication is that our words come back to haunt us in some way. It is perhaps worth thinking about whether or not what we say is worth consuming for others, let alone ourselves. In any case, eating the words of Jesus is profound nourishment, nourishment to eternal life. When we receive the bread and wine at the altar and consume it, we are swallowing the story of Christ hook, line, and sinker. By swallowing this story, we live our own life stories within the life story given us by the Word made Flesh.

With the celebrations of Christmas and Easter and, to some extent, Pentecost, the celebration of Ascension seems to get lost in the shuffle, something of an afterthought if it is thought about at all. Part of the trouble is that it isn’t all that easy to get an idea of what the Ascension is all about, so we wonder: What ‘s the big deal? We celebrated Jesus’s birth at Christmas and his rising from the dead at Easter. What more do we need? Isn’t the Resurrection enough? According to Luke and John the answer is: No.

A other part of the trouble is that the Ascension is a downer with Jesus leaving his disciples. The first aria in J.S. Bach’s Ascension Oratorio is a long lament over Jesus’ departure. Hardly a cause for celebration. If Jesus loves us enough to come to earth and spend time with us, why would Jesus leave us?

Distance as well as closeness, however, typifies our relationship with God. It is put succinctly in the Psalm verse: “For though the Lord is high, he regards the lowly.” (Ps. 138: 6) In theological terms, God is radically transcendent, but also radically imminent. God’s immediate presence wouldn’t be all that awesome if God were not transcendent as well, and a god who remains aloof from humans doesn’t exactly catch the heart of humans. Moreover, God’s distance gives human space to live by decisions humans make while God’s closeness offers guidance to those who are open to it.

Luke describes a forty day period during which Jesus talks about the Kingdom of God and the forgiveness of sins. Most importantly, Jesus opens up the scriptures to the disciples by explaining why it was “necessary” that he suffer and rise from the dead. (As Luke and the other Gospel writers make clear, the “necessity” is human, not divine.) All of these are good thing, such good things that it is puzzling why Jesus would leave rather than continue with them. So what was the problem?

On the road to Emmaus, Cleopas and his companion told Jesus (while not recognizing him) that they had hoped he would “redeem Israel.” (Lk. 24: 21) In opening the scriptures to these two companions, Jesus shifted their lost hope to the need for Jesus to die and rise again. But after opening the scriptures for another forty days, Jesus was still asked: “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” (Acts 1: 6) At this point, it was clear that, as long as Jesus was with the disciples, they would be distracted from his opening the scriptures to them. The temptation to triangle Jesus into their human agenda seems to have been irresistible as long as Jesus was physically present. Only if Jesus left them would they have the space to let the scriptures be opened to them so that they could understand the need for Jesus to have died and risen again. Jesus’ leaving also left the disciples as vulnerable to other humans as Jesus himself was while on earth, putting them, and us, in the position of suffering at their hands..

A second reason for the need for Jesus to ascend after a relatively brief time after his Resurrection builds on the first reason but also reinstates the dialectic of transcendence and imminence that had been temporarily compromised by Jesus’ Incarnate presence on earth. In John, Jesus says that only if he goes away can he send the Paraclete to guide them in all truth. In Luke, Jesus promises the disciples that the Holy Spirit will soon come if they wait in Jerusalem. Sure enough, ten days later, the Holy Spirit comes in tongues of fire, giving the disciples the gift of tongues so that they can communicate with other peoples. More importantly, the Holy Spirit guides the disciples into understanding the scriptures that Jesus had opened up for them so that not only did they finally understand that Jesus had to die and rise again, they were inspired to preach this truth along with proclaiming the forgiveness of sins.

In Ephesians, Paul proclaims the reality of the crucified, risen, and ascended Lord, seated at God’s right hand “in the heavenly places.” (Eph. 1: 20) Jesus may be exalted, with “all things under his feet,” but this exalted Jesus remains the crucified Lord who had to die before being so highly exalted. That is, we are not under the rule of a powerful deity, we are under the rule of the crucified one who rose with total forgiveness of those who tortured and killed him. It is this crucified, risen and ascended Lord who appeared to Stephen when he was being stoned for preaching what the Holy Spirit had inspired him to preach, and it was the exalted Jesus who filled Stephen with the same forgiveness of his persecutors. The ascended Lord may be infinitely up on high, but this same Lord sends the Holy Spirit deep into our hearts with the same apostolic message of forgiveness he gave to the disciples.

When I read Mircea Eliade as a college student, one of the first things I learned from him was the importance of sacred space, of a designated space being the center of the world. The designation might seem arbitrary in that it could be any space, sort of like Winnie-the-Pooh and Christopher Robin planting a pole in the ground and proclaiming it the North Pole. But once a space was designated as sacred, it truly was sacred ground and treated as such. Although the sacred space could be anywhere to begin with, there is a tendency to see certain landscapes, such as tall mountains and luminous lakes, as more likely to be considered holy space than others.

The early humans who designated sacred space didn’t have any notion of confining God to a certain spot. They instinctively knew that God is everywhere, but they also felt the need to focus. Solomon shares the same insight in his prayer at the dedication of the Temple in Jerusalem when he says: “But will God indeed dwell on the earth? Even heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you, much less this house that I have built! “ (1 Kings 8: 27) Although the Israelites knew that God is everywhere, the temple was a focal point for Jewish piety. The Psalmist exulted in dwelling in the temple with God and longed for it desperately when torn away from it when taken into exile. I have the same sort of experience with the churches I worshiped in while growing up and with the Abbey Church where I have worshiped for more years than I can count. During the Eucharist, I keep getting the sense that the Abbey Church has become the center of the world as the bread and wine is consecrated. Not that the abbey is the only center of the world. There are countless more. As a practical matter, it is much easier to appreciate the fact that God is everywhere and act accordingly when a particular place is entered at a specific time to focus on God. By practicing decorum and reverence in a designated place, we are more apt to practice decorum, and reverence elsewhere.

Stemming from the insight of early humans and Solomon that the Temple cannot contain God are the various prophetic critiques of misuses of the temple for personal advantage of one sort or another. Jeremiah, for example, warned against trusting in words such as “This is the temple of the Lord! The temple of the Lord! The temple of the Lord.” (Jer. 7: 4) Hosea insisted that God preferred mercy to burnt offerings. (Hos. 6: 6) Jesus’ act of driving out the money changers was a climax of such prophecies. In Matthew’s version of this story, Jesus then heals the blind and the lame, (Mt. 21: 14) suggesting that such healing is much more in line of what the temple is for than changing money to keep the sacrifices going. Matthew’s placing of these acts of healing seem out of context, but they allude to an odd incident when David attacked the Jebusites and took the city. The defenders taunted David by saying that even the blind and the lame would be able to stop him. (2 Sam. 5: 6) David was believed to hate the blind and the lame as a result of the taunt, but it is more likely that David hated the able-bodied defenders who taunted him. One could say that Jesus was fulfilling David’s conquest of Jerusalem by healing the blind and the lame. In the end, nobody is going to stop Jesus.

John adds that Jesus implied that he himself is the Temple when he said that if the Temple is destroyed, he can rebuild it in three days. (Jn. 2: 19) St. Paul and St. Peter famously extended the human temple to everybody. St. Paul said that each of us is God’s temple, (1 Cor. 6: 10) and St. Peter said we are all living stones “built into a spiritual house.” (1 Pet. 2: 5) Jesus was a particular person who lived on earth at a particular time and place, but he has extended his sanctity as a temple to each of us, not least the blind and lame whom he cured in the temple. In his climactic teaching in Matthew, Jesus said that what we do and don’t do for the “least” of people is done, or not done, to him. (Mt. 25) Peter adds depth to this teaching by reminding us that Jesus was the stone rejected by the builders which has become the cornerstone. (1 Peter. 2: 7) God continues to build God’s house, God’s temple with stones rejected by those who would build human culture.

Just as sacred space can be, and is, anywhere and everywhere, everybody can be, and in fact is, a temple of God. We should treat ourselves and each other accordingly with decorum and reverence.