Straight from the Heart: Orthodox Bible Study with Father Lawrence

          In the series Firefly (if you haven’t yet found it, do so) there is a quote, “We’ve done the impossible, and that makes us mighty.”  The line is filled with poignancy, since it was uttered in the face of hopeless odds.  In keeping with this quote, I would say that we Christians do the impossible, and that makes our God mighty.

            By “the impossible”, I refer to walking on water.  Christ walked on water, of course—the account is found in Mt. 14: 22f, Mk. 6:45f, and Jn. 6:15f.  In the basic story, Christ walked on the water to come to the aid of His beleaguered and storm-tossed disciples.  The surrounding context reveals their hearts and their anxieties, and fills out the story. 

            They were stretched to the breaking point and beyond.  (St. Mark’s account says that they no leisure even to eat.)  Christ therefore took them to what should have been a lonely and deserted place where they could find their desperately needed rest.  Instead, many saw them going and ran to the place on foot from all the towns, and got there ahead of them, so that when the Lord and His disciples disembarked they saw a tremendous multitude.  St. Matthew numbers the crowd at 5000, not counting women and children.  So, counting women and children, there may have been upwards of 15,000 people waiting for them.  Like the disciples, the multitude also was desperate—desperate for healing, for direction, for hope.  St. Mark describes them as sheep without a shepherd—that is, as vulnerable and starving.  Christ therefore had compassion on them and spent the day teaching and healing them.

          Then, when the Twelve were stretched even past their previous breaking point, a new crisis emerged:  how to feed about 15,000 in such a lonely place.  A hasty conference among the disciples produced a consensus:  the Lord must send them away so that they might descend on the surrounding villages (note the plural—one single village could not feed such a multitude), and find the necessary food.  Otherwise, if they were sent away to their homes fasting, many would faint on the way (especially the children).  It would be a disaster.  They would all be on the six o’clock news, under the headline “Catastrophe in Galilee”.

          To the apostles’ surprise, their Lord did not agree with the common-sense solution.  Instead, He had another one—they could feed them.  Checking their stash of money produced the obvious:  they had not the resources to buy enough food for even a few of them to get a little.  And what food did they have?  Nothing.  A little boy among them had a lunch of five loaves and two fish.  (The Greek word for “fish” is opsarion—not a large trout, but a small sardine.) The Lord was unfazed.  “Have the people sit down”.  Dinner is served. 

        He took the bread and the fish and said the customary Jewish blessing and broke the bread and gave it them.  And again. And again. And again. At length, all received enough to eat, and more.  There was even enough left over that each of the Twelve could fill his basket—Greek kophinos, a kind of Jewish “fanny pack”—with the left-over fragments.  The crowd was electrified.  So much so that they concluded in a kind of Messianic fever that Jesus was indeed the long-expected Prophet, and they were all for taking Him by force and making Him King.

          Another crisis!  The Lord therefore sent His disciples away, having them embark quickly by the sea from which they came, while He “dismissed the crowds”—i.e. defused the situation.  He had to separate Himself from the Twelve so that He could slip away unseen, and ascend the nearby hill to spend the night in prayer to God.

         As one can imagine, the disciples, whose nerves were already well shot, were a wreck.  They were to row across the sea to make for the other side, and there to await their Lord.  But (as the proverb says), anything that can go wrong, will.  A tremendous storm swept down suddenly on the Sea of Galilee, and they could make no headway.  By about 4.00 a.m. or so, they were still struggling against the wind, dead tired, falling asleep, kept awake only by the wind and cold waves slapping their faces.

         Then they saw it.  Coming closer and closer, floating, it seemed, across the water, like a demonic phantom.  They thought it was a ghost (the Greek is phantasma, compare our English “phantasm”—a scarier word at four in the morning), and cried out in terror.

        Here one needs to not think like a lover of tall ships (no “Sea Fever” or John Masefield here), but to think like a Jew.  For the ancient Jews, the sea was a place of demonic evil, so that a thing coming across the storm-driven waves in the wee hours of the dark morning could only be something terrible.  And yet it was not.  In that moment of terror, they heard the most welcome voice in the world—their own sweet Lord, calling out to comfort their hearts, saying, “Take heart, it is I, do not be afraid.”

        The Gospel accounts in Mark and John give the story the obvious conclusion.  They received the Lord into the boat, and the storm ceased, and they immediately reached their destination.  But the account in Matthew adds something more.

         Peter (of course it was Peter) said, “Lord, if it is really You, bid me come to You on the water.”  The Lord simply said, “Come.”  And Peter did.  And least for a bit—he put one foot out of the boat (crazily lurching on the waters), then the other foot.  Then he took a step, and found the water upheld him.  And he began approaching his Lord, the dark figure a few paces away, standing (we may think), with outstretched arms.  Then he took his eyes off the Lord (always a bad move) and looked at the waves whipped by the wind.  Then the storm, which before was simply around him, entered his inner heart as well, and he began to sink.  He cried out, “Lord, save me!” (that’s all it usually takes), and the Lord did.  He plucked him from the watery grave awaiting him and brought him back to the boat, and safety.

       That’s the basic story.  But we need to look a little closer, and with more ancient and Jewish eyes.  It is tempting to think that the miracle consisted only of doing what was physically impossible—of walking on water, instead of sinking under it. For us, water is water, and if the Lord was seen walking on the water of an indoor pool would be basically the same miracle.

            But our Lord did not just walk on water—He walked on the sea.  And for the ancient Jews (unlike dear John Masefield, with his poem Sea Fever) were no lovers of the sea.  The sea was a place of chaos, of restless evil.  The world was created out of water, as God looked on the face of the formless and empty deep (read Gen. 1:2 again) and created form out of formlessness, and fullness out of emptiness.  The water of the sea was a remnant and reminder of the original chaos which God conquered when He created the world.  And they never forgot the terrible time when the primordial waters again overwhelmed the land and swept away all life and order in the Flood in the days of Noah.  God had come to the rescue, and now He was keeping the restless sea at bay.  “Here,” He said, “shall your proud waves be stopped” (Job 38:11).  (There is even an echo of this in the Orthodox prayer for blessing water:  we praise God’s power by exulting that God has put about the sea barriers of sand.)  It is as if the sea is constantly threatening to again overwhelm the earth and cover all with death, undoing the original creation.  And in the new earth, the new creation, there will no longer be any sea (Rev. 21:1).

            Thus, when Christ walked on the sea, He was walking on and trampling down the waters of chaos, of death, of the abyss. He was showing Himself sovereign over the powers of chaos, revealing Himself as the life-giver.  The powers of death and chaos had no authority over Him.

            And here’s the point of Matthew’s peculiar account of Christ walking on the sea—He shares this authority with us.  Remember that Matthew is the same evangelist who speaks of Peter confessing Christ and receiving the keys of the Kingdom (Mt. 1613f).  The point of the passage isn’t Peter—it’s us.  We are Peter.  Like him, we also confess that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God.  To say that Peter has the keys means that the Church has the keys, and can speak with divine authority for God.  Later arguments about the significance of this passage in Mt. 16 for the papacy obscure this basic point:  it’s all about the Church.  Peter is us.

            This is Matthew’s point, his sub-text, in adding that not only did Christ walk on the sea, but that He enabled Peter to walk on the sea as well.  Christ did the impossible—and He empowers us to do the impossible too.  Christ has authority over death—and He shares this authority with us, His Church.  Whoever confesses with lips and heart and life that Jesus is the Son of the living God—this one can do the impossible.  He can walk on water.  He can flout the authority of death.  Chaos and the abyss can never swallow him up.  Like the Lord Christ, he will defy the storms and return with Christ to safety and reach the other side.  Through Christ, we can do the impossible.  And that makes Him mighty, and almighty, and the Lord of all.

            In the beginning (to echo the words opening the Book of Genesis) God created the parish.  That is, when Christ first created and formed His Church, there was only the parish—groups of Christians assembling together in the cities and villages to offer the Eucharist, led by their clergy.  All the Christians lived in the world, but were not of the world, for they had left the world of secular paganism to follow Christ, and now belonged not to the world, but to God and His Kingdom.  At that time, no monasteries existed.

            There existed, of course, men and women in the parishes who had pledged themselves to celibacy (St. Paul commends this course as the better way in 1 Cor. 7), and a group of older women, the widows, who lived a life of singleness, prayer and service (St. Paul gives them guidance in 1 Tim. 5).  But monasticism per se did not yet exist.  All the Christians lived in the world, as part of the local parish.  And nothing in the New Testament writings suggests that this was somehow less than ideal, or that our salvation, healing and theosis could not be adequately undertaken while living in the world as part of a parish.

            Then came Constantine, and with him, the long Byzantine experiment.  Constantine has come in for a lot of flak over the years, much of it unfair.  (See the book The Christianity of Constantine the Great by T.G. Elliott for a more balanced appraisal of the man and his faith.)  And though the Christians of Constantine’s day welcomed him and the measures he took to protect and favour the Church (the Church had almost been obliterated by his predecessor, Diocletian), it is only in long retrospect that we can see that Constantine represented the turning point and the beginning of Byzantium.  (Of the Christians living in Constantine’s day, few thought the good times could last.)  Indeed, under the Emperor Julian (known to Christian history as “Julian the Apostate”), it looked like the good times were not going to last, and that Constantine’s kindness was but a passing flash in the pan.

            Happily, it was not a flash in the pan, and many other Emperors were to imitate the kindness of Constantine.  It was Julian who turned out to be the flash in the pan, and Christian Emperors were to be the norm for the next thousand years.  It was now lastingly safe to be a Christian.

            Perhaps a little too safe.  For it was now not only safe to be a Christian, but increasingly a good career move, and many more men were keen to put the title “Christian” on their resume than deserved the title.  The temptation to become merely nominally Christian appeared for the first time ever, and the Church now contained a number of people with a thin veneer of Christianity over their essentially unconverted hearts.  Such people darkened the church as the bane of a conscientious pastor’s existence, and St. John Chrysostom spent a lot of his preaching time trying to complete their conversion.  One could experience, as Chrysostom and many others lamented, a general lowering of the Church’s spiritual temperature.

            The Church did its best to cope with the new situation, refusing to let its saving standards slip:  it upped the time required of catechumens before they could be received by baptism to at least three years, it spoke of the Eucharist in terms of fear and trembling to scare off those who would receive it too easily and without sufficient piety.  (This approach survives in our present-day prayerbooks:  see the exhortation that one is to recite silently when approaching the chalice:  “Be awed, O man, when you see the deifying Blood.  It is a fire which burns the unworthy…”).  And, not least, the Church concentrated on its monasticism.

            It is not quite true that monasticism was the Church’s response to the inevitable lowering of temperature in the Byzantine era, for St. Anthony the Great left the world for the desert prior to the Peace of Constantine.  Monks existed even before the general temperature started to cool.  But it is true that, with the cooling of parish spirituality, the witness of the monks became ever more important.  So important, in fact, that many people began to equate spirituality with monasticism, and the spirituality of the Church at length came to be monasticized.  If you doubt this, try compiling two lists:  one of canonized saints who were monks and celibates, and another of canonized saints who lived as married men with their wives, and see which list is longer.  It will require a good knowledge of Church history to come up with any names for the second list.  Spirituality had become essentially monastic.

            As anyone can see who has not just emerged like the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus from a long doze, the world is no longer Christian.  As Merlin the magician said, (in C.S. Lewis’s book That Hideous Strength, after emerging from just such a sleep), “No Emperor…this is a cold age in which I have awaked.”  A cold age indeed.  The Byzantine experiment, glorious while it lasted, is long over.  People in North America, the proud home of secularism, no longer darken church doors simply because it produces worldly advantage or looks good on a resume.  Most people who still attend church attend for more interior motives.  I believe this to be increasingly true.  The spiritual temperature of the non-monastic parish is on the rise.

            This means that the laity, the laos tou theou, the People of God, must now reclaim their central role in the Church.  In the beginning, when God created the parish, they occupied that central role.  They were hailed by St. Peter as a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people (1 Pt. 2:9).  Spirituality was lay spirituality, for the laos, as defined above, was all that existed.  Obviously the Church still needs and values its monastics, just as it needed and valued St. Anthony before the long days of Constantine, when the laos was all there was.  But one must no longer think of being in the world as somehow second-best, as if monastic spirituality is the only real spirituality, and those outside the monasteries are somehow condemned to occupy a place which can never achieve holiness.  For holiness has always been about being in Christ, not about being in a monastery.  Monasteries are valuable because they witness, in a concentrated, industrial-strength way, to the common holiness available to all.

            In the beginning, when the churches were first founded, and sprang up like mushrooms all over the Roman world, and the New Testament was being written, it was possible to be holy in the world.  Jesus Christ is the same, yesterday, today and forever:  this holiness in the world remains possible even today.

    I am, a confess, a sucker for any article on Jerusalem and the Holy Land, and I often scour old copies of National Geographic to find them.  One typical photo pictures an old Jew, complete with ear-locks, praying at the “Wailing Wall” and (as the accompanying caption says) “weeping over the lost glories of Jerusalem”. 

   Those glories are indeed well and truly lost:  all that is left of Herod’s glorious Temple is that western wall, and the Temple’s place is taken by a later Islamic structure, the Dome of the Rock.  That Muslim sanctuary has stood in that spot since 691 A.D., and despite the hopes of some Jewish zealots, it looks like it is there to stay.

    I do, of course, have some sympathy with that weeping Jew.  The Temple, while it stood, was one the wonders of the world, and its presence in Jerusalem embodied all the aspirations of world-wide Jewry for national greatness.  Its loss meant that the Jews’ hope for global grandeur was gone.  History had moved on, and left them behind.  All that was left, for those whose heart was set on worldly glory, was to stand at a lonely wall, and weep.

  Jews are not alone in lamenting the relentless march of history, and with it, the inevitable rise and fall of national glory.  The Roman empire (east and west) has gone.   The boundaries of some countries (such as Serbia) were once far in excess of their present lines.  Even the British Empire, (upon which once the sun never set) has suffered the final fall after its long rise.  To be part of the historical process, then, seems to involve acquiescence in this inexorable process rise and fall, and of the levelling of kingdoms and empires.

    That is why, part of Christ’s Good News is His declaration that His own Kingdom is not of this world (Jn. 19:36).  Because it is a heavenly and spiritual Kingdom, the inevitable rise and fall of kingdoms cannot touch it.  This Kingdom, alone among kingdoms, will rise and never fall.  Others may stand at the wailing wall of history, and lament of lost glories of their former hegemony.  We Christians, alone among men, are exempt from such wailing.  Rather, with gratitude we receive a Kingdom which cannot be shaken (Heb. 12:28).  If we do much weeping at our own wailing walls, lamenting lost national glory, perhaps we should reflect more on our true glory--the glory of the unshakable Kingdom of God.
    
    

There is an old bumper-sticker aphorism that reads, "Each day is a gift; that's why we call it 'the present'.  Though corny (most aphorisms on bumper-stickers are), it is nonetheless true.  When we survey each day once it has gone past, we find it contains a number of things, some beautiful (the smell of flowers, the taste of coffee, the sight of a child's smile), some ugly (stupidity in traffic and other people reacting to that stupidity with road rage), and a multitude of other things which lie somewhere in between.  When we close our eyes at night and look forward to tomorrow, we might dismiss the day past as "just another ordinary day", and miss what a gift it truly was.  If that is the way we fall asleep, it is a nightly tragedy.

For suppose that the day past was the last one we would receive, and after we closed our eyes at night in bed we would die in our sleep, and only open our eyes after death, in the Kingdom.  We would then begin to realize how precious that flower was that we passed by so quickly and smelt so briefly, how delicious that last cup of coffee actually tasted, how radiant was the smile on that child.  As G.K. Chesterton said somewhere, Robinson Crusoe came to appreciate all the little things he managed to salvage from the wreck of his ship, because he might not have salvaged them, and he would miss if they were not there.  In the same way, each day is crammed with divine gifts that we would miss if they were not there.

God gives us now a new year, filled with 365 days.  That is, He give us 365 dawns, 365 sunsets, 365 opportunities to smell the flowers, and taste the coffee and bask in the radiance of another's smile.  A true gift indeed.

December 2009

Living in the Land of the Doomed

    The none-too-cheery words of the title may seem a bit unseasonable for a Christmas reflection, but they come from the Book of Wisdom 18:14-15, which is used as a Christmas reading in some lectionary traditions:  “While gentle silence enveloped all things, and night in its swift course was now half gone, Your all-powerful Word leaped from heaven, from the royal throne, into the midst of the land that was doomed”.  The Christmas application of the text (which originally referred to the word of judgment issuing forth against Egypt during the night of the first Passover) spoke of Jesus, the eternal Word of God, coming down from heaven to become incarnate of the Virgin.  And the land into which He came was indeed the land of the doomed, for everything in this world is born to die, and all men cower under the sentence of death.
    It is because of Christmas that we Christians do not cower.  For two thousand years ago, Christ leaped from the royal throne of the Father to share our human nature on earth and to trample down death, removing the sentence of doom and bringing life and eternal joy.  We still live in the land of the doomed, however, and those who do not know Jesus do not know this lasting joy.  Christmas-time is an opportunity for us to share that knowledge and that joy.  The merely secular welcome Christmas as a time of gift-giving and self-indulgence.  The somewhat more reflective may hail it as a time to become misty-eyed about “peace on earth”, and look to our politicians for political solutions.  (I always think of John Lennon crooning “Imagine”, and “Give Peace A Chance”.)  But we know that real peace flows only from hearts reconciled to God—that is, that it flows from the manger and the cross, and the empty tomb.  This is our message for the world—and the reason why, even in the land of the doomed, we can still rejoice in a merry Christmas.

November 2009:

Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ:

As I type this, I am in the throes of a move--the Farleys are moving a mere mile down the road, and we pile into the new place with all our boxes in two days.  And (let me confess) I HATE moving.  That is, I hate change, and in this I suspect I am not alone. 

This is unfortunate, for being a fallen creature, sinful and conflicted and doomed to die, I find that I must change if I am to live.  To stay where I am and as I am, lost in the desert, is to perish.  My only hope of survival involves moving on from the desert where I am and finding that eternal oasis of life, which is the Kingdom of God.  I don't have to move, of course.  If I insist, I can stay exactly where I am--lost in the desert, famished, thirsty, alone, doomed.  But God calls me to move and to change and to live.  He calls me out of the desert of death, into the life-giving oasis of His Presence.  To live means to embrace change and to be constantly on the spiritual move. 

Now that I think of it, that was the primordial lesson given to the Israelites when they left Egypt and travelled through the great and howling desert of the Sinai.  God could have set up a temple somewhere in the wilderness, or in the Promised Land.  But He didn't.  His original provision was not an immovable temple, but a very movable Ark, complete with instructions to the Levites as to how to transport it.  It seems as if He wanted to give His People the message that they were to be a pilgrim people, a people on the move, a people who even in the Promised Land "have no continuing city" (Heb. 13:14). 

So it is that I am doing my best to embrace being on the move--not just from one residence to another, but from this mortal vale of tears to the immortal Kingdom of heaven.  The temptation is to settle down, and to think that this present residence will be home forever.  But here we indeed have no continuing city; we were made for a city which has true and unshakable foundations, whose maker and builder is God (Heb. 11:10).  None of us must get comfortable here, for God will soon move us on--even though we may hate moving.  Moving will be alright.  We can move in peace and joy, for God is moving us to our true home. 

                                          all my love,

                                           Fr. Lawrence