Preferring Nothing to Christ

SHAKEN TOGETHER

Give, and there will be gifts for you: a full measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running over, will be poured into your lap; because the amount you measure out is the amount you will be given back.

I love this text. It opens up a whole world for me. I have spent much of my monastic life as the monastery cellarer and I have learnt the importance of how I measure. In the monastic kitchen you are always making substitutes and adjustments. There have been times when I haven’t been quite sure that there was enough to go round. It has pretty much always worked out and no one has gone hungry.

St Benedict urges the cellarer to be mindful that the food provision must be adequate for the needs of the community. The cellarer is to divide the portion of bread allotted to each monk so that it lasts through the day. This is good and loving common sense. But when it comes to love, this is not something that is to be measured and weighed out to the last gram. The love that St Benedict’s monks are to show is to be the ‘warmest love’, ‘selfless’, ‘humble and sincere.’ (Ch 72) This really is the love that is ‘pressed down and shaken together’.

The Gospel challenge for me today is to be the one who gives first and to make my full measure run over.

Where is Christ calling you to give a full measure this Lent?

(Luke 6:36-38, Monday, Second Week of Lent)

REPENT

The time has come and the kingdom of heaven is close at hand. REPENT, and believe the Good News.

The evangelist Mark is the most concise of the Gospel writers. In just four verses Jesus is baptised, goes into the wilderness and then emerges to begin his public ministry. There is an air of urgency and a sense that time is short.

Jesus emerges from his baptism and wilderness experience with a message that is uncompromising. His cry of ‘Repent’ is for deep and radical change where hearts are to be turned away from all that would hinder their love for God. Jesus echoes John the Baptist, who in turn echoed the Old Testament prophets who proclaimed the great day of reckoning, the Day of the Lord. With imagery of warfare and cataclysm the Old Testament prophets warn of a time when God will come to right all wrongs.

As the Gospel unfolds Jesus will show us by the way he lives, teaches and loves what it means to repent and to change our hearts. Lent can be a time when we take stock and look at the places in our lives where our hearts have become stuck and seem unable to turn. The Scriptures are there to guide us and to challenge us.

How is God calling you to a change of heart this Lent?

(Mark 1:12-15, First Sunday in Lent)

QUIVER.

He made my mouth like a sharp sword, he hid me in the shadow of his hand. He made me into a sharpened arrow and concealed me in his QUIVER.

During the course of Lent and Holy Week we read from the parts of Isaiah which are known as the Servant Songs. The identity of the servant isn’t clear. Some say that it could be Isaiah himself, others Israel and others Cyrus, the Persian King whom God will use to liberate Israel. This uncertainty gives us a certain freedom when we come to interpret the text. When the Church uses these texts in Lent and Holy week we can hear them as foreshadowing Jesus. Handel’s Messiah has done much to plant this understanding in our collective biblical memory.

Isaiah 49 speaks powerfully of the servant’s preparation for service. The servant spends time concealed, away from the public gaze. We can imagine this as an intense time of testing and strengthening. His mouth is being made like a sharp sword and his whole being a sharpened arrow that is honed to perfection. The hidden years which Jesus spent in Galilee prepare him for his public ministry. We can imagine this as protected time where family life and ordinary tasks all contribute to who he is.

Lockdown gave some of us a sense of concealment. For some it meant flourishing but for many it drained rather than built up.

How do you hear this text today? Do you have a sense of God concealing you and preparing you for something this Lent?

(Isaiah 49:1-6, Tuesday, Holy Week)

Now on the first day of Unleavened Bread the disciples came to Jesus to say, ‘Where do you want us to make the preparations for you to eat the passover?’ ‘Go to so-and-so in the city’ he replied ‘and say to him, “The Master says: My time is near. It is at your house that I am keeping PASSOVER with my disciples.”

The shared memory and dynamic of the Passover is something which frames the Liturgy of the Word during Lent. Through the Old Testament readings we are invited to embark on the demanding wilderness journey with our Biblical ancestors, to feel again the hunger and confusion in the desert and to experience the triumphal passage through the Red Sea. In the New Testament readings we walk alongside Jesus who is making resolutely for Jerusalem where he will eat his last Passover meal and then pass over from death to life.

In the semi-nomadic culture of the Ancient Near East there was a springtime ritual known as ‘pesach’ (Passover). When the dry season began the shepherds needed to find water and new pasture for their flocks. The journey was dangerous. They performed a sacrifice as a means of protection and then shared a meal. The journey was necessary for the wellbeing of their flock because staying in the winter pasture could mean losing some of their flock. The ritual meal bonded the group together and this strengthened them for the journey.

Meals bind us together. The bonds that develop when food is shared have a special quality. The connections which are made with others during a meal cannot really be planned. The rituals involved in any meal provide the framework for this connection.

Lent invites us to look again at the meals we share and how God speaks to us through them. Which meals will you share this week?

(Matthew 26: 14-25, Wednesday of Holy Week)

OBEY

Although he was son,
he learned to OBEY through suffering.

We sing this text as an antiphon at Vespers during Lent in our monastic liturgy. In fact, as soon as I start to read it the tune begins playing in my head. It is very much one of the sounds of Lent in the monastery.

In the context of the Letter to the Hebrews Jesus is presented as the ideal High Priest, one who bears our burdens and intercedes for us with the Father. Jesus has a unique status. New Testament scholar, Marie Isaacs, helpfully suggests that ‘His suffering is neither punitive nor corrective but an act of filial obedience.’

St Benedict would recognise this idea of filial obedience. His Rule is writ through with the many ways in which obedience is to be cultivated in the monastery. In Chapter 5, On Obedience, St Benedict is clear that love is both the motivation and goal of obedience: ‘It is love that impels them to pursue everlasting life, therefore, they are eager to take the narrow road…’

It’s easy for Obedience to be seen as something that can limit our potential rather than expand it. Christ is our surest model of the life-giving nature of true obedience. The place that suffering plays within this is will be different for each one of us.

How has Christ called you to walk the path of obedience this Lent?

(Hebrews 5:7-9, Fifth Sunday in Lent)

As soon as Judas had taken the piece of bread he went out. Night had fallen.

These verses always chill me. I imagine a sultry night, heavy with expectation and fear. But the very next lines in the text shift the focus sharply ‘now has the Son of man been glorified’. There is no portrayal of a victim here. Jesus is in control. God’s glory is to be revealed through suffering.

Now has the Son of Man been glorified,
and in him God has been glorified.
If God has been glorified in him,
God will in turn glorify him in himself,
and will glorify him very soon.

In John’s Gospel we enter a very different literary world from that of the Synoptics. Words and themes are layered with meaning and weave in an out of the flow of the narrative. Light and darkness, day and night function on a symbolic level. Nicodemus comes at night to see Jesus. He is frightened and his visit needs the cover of darkness. In contrast, the Samaritan woman meets Jesus at midday, the hour of illumination. Judas’ betrayal also needs the cover of darkness.

At the highpoint of the liturgical year in the celebration of the Easter Vigil the Church uses light and darkness to tell the story of our salvation. Gathered in darkness around the paschal fire, we wait expectantly for that first proclamation ‘Christ Our Light’. Then when we sing the Exultet we will repeat several times ‘this is the night’.

This is the night,
when once you led our forebears, Israel’s children,
from slavery in Egypt
and made them pass dry-shod through the Red Sea.

For Judas, his choice to go out into the night changes the course of his life forever.
When we gather at night to celebrate the Easter Vigil we renew our choice to put our full trust in God, who through his Son, changes night to day and darkness to light.

Judas stood at a threshold, he made a choice.
Have there been threshold moments for you this Lent?

(John 13:21-33,36-38, Tuesday, Holy Week)

MILK

The Lord brought us out of Egypt with mighty hand and outstretched arm, with great terror, and with signs and wonders. He brought us here and has given us this country, a country flowing with MILK and honey.

References to a land ‘flowing with milk and honey’ appear 20 times in the Old Testament. It’s an easily recognised shorthand for both the guarantee and quality of God’s provision. The writers of Deuteronomy put this speech on the lips of Moses just before the people enter the Promised Land. It functions as encouragement to the Israelites whose path hasn’t been easy.

From our vantage point we can hear the phrase as a metaphor or as the promise of actual foodstuffs that would be available to the Israelites. In order for a land to flow with milk you need good pasture and healthy livestock and for an abundant supply of honey you need healthy and varied plant life and bees. If you have a guarantee of these then your physical needs will be more than well met. I love this shorthand.

It’s always heartening to me that this promise of physical nourishment is given as an encouragement. One of the things that I have learnt in the monastery is the importance of balancing physical and spiritual nourishment. Looking forward to something nice and enjoying it when it comes is every bit as important as the cycle of prayer. God provides.

How has God provided you with ‘milk and honey’ this Lent?

(Deuteronomy 26:4-10, First Sunday of Lent)

LAW

Do not imagine that I have come to abolish the LAW or the Prophets. I have come not to abolish but to complete them. I tell you solemnly, till heaven and earth disappear, not one dot, not one little stroke, shall disappear from the Law until its purpose is achieved.

Laws and their keeping or breaking have been very prominent in our news over the past few years. As I write the Post Office Inquiry is taking place. To be wrongly accused ranks amongst one of the most egregious things that can happen to a person. The very ground is pulled from under you. The very law that was meant to protect you has condemned you.

Understanding law in its Biblical usage requires us to take a step back from some our usual frames of reference. Everything that we say about law in its Biblical usage is about love and relationship. Biblical law was a gift to the Israelites and its keeping a safeguard and a support. In an extended meditation on law in Psalm 118 many helpful images are used. The Psalmist asks to be guided in the way of God’s commands because there is ‘my delight.’ The law is more precious than earthly treasures: ‘The law from your mouth means more to me than silver and gold.’ The keeping of the Law is also sweeter than honey: ‘Your promise is sweeter to my taste than honey in the mouth.’

The hearers of Matthew’s Gospel brought this whole thought world to the words of Jesus. For Matthew, Jesus is in full continuity with the Old Testament tradition. Matthew portrays Jesus as the new Moses. In his being and in his teaching Jesus embodies the centrality of love in the keeping of the Law. As always, Jesus is challenging his hearers to move beneath the surface of a law and to keep it with the rigour of love.

Keeping and teaching the Law is ranked very highly by Jesus. He says that those who do it will be ‘considered great in the Kingdom of heaven.’ This is not an invitation to the elite, but to every person who truly seeks God.

How do you hear Jesus’ words? What might it mean for you to ‘keep and teach the Law’ this Lent?

(Matthew 5:17-19, Wednesday, Third Week of Lent)

KNOCK

Ask and it shall be given to you; search, and you will find; KNOCK and the door will be opened to you.

Asking, searching and knocking are all aspects of our life of prayer. Asking God for our own needs and the needs of others is something we learn from an early age. It is, of course, not without its problems. We don’t always get what we ask for. Later in life we learn that our prayer may be answered in a way that we haven’t anticipated.

The searching element of prayer is something which unfolds and deepens throughout our lives. We might find ourselves searching for a way through a difficult situation, or searching for our path in life. The search never ends.

And sometimes our prayer takes us to a place where we arrive at a door and we need to knock. It’s all relational. We reach out and knock and trust that a door will be opened. It takes courage to knock on a door. We may have been walking past a door for years and been afraid to knock. Or we may have told ourselves over and over again that there is no point in knocking because it’s unlikely that it will be answered. Lent gives us the chance to revisit those doors and to gather the courage to knock.

Are there doors on which you would like to knock this Lent?

(Matthew 7:7-12, Thursday after First Sunday of Lent)

The next day the crowds who had come up for the festival heard that Jesus was on his way to JERUSALEM.

In the Biblical imagination Jerusalem holds a place that no other city can. As salvation history unfolds God’s people hold fast to the promise that they are chosen and that God will be with them. When they wander in the wilderness the Ark of the Covenant is the guarantee of God’s promise and presence. After many twists and turns in their fortunes, the anointing of David as King, makes God’s promise of a dynasty secure. David chooses Jerusalem as his base and with great ceremony brings the Ark to Jerusalem. In time, the Ark of the Covenant, once housed in a tent, will be housed in the splendour of the Jerusalem Temple. All Israel’s hope and longing is held in every stone and sacred vessel of the Temple. The Temple with its rhythm of worship and careful ordering of all that takes place is now the guarantee of God’s presence.

In New Testament times Jerusalem and its Temple are at the very heart of life. New Testament scholar, Tom Wright explains it like this:

The Temple was the beating heart of Judaism. It wasn’t just, as it were, a church on a street corner. It was the centre of worship and music, of politics and society, of national celebration and mourning. It was also the place where you would find more animals (alive and dead) than anywhere else. But, towering above all these, it was of course the place where Israel’s God, YHWH, had promised to live in the midst of his people. It was the focal point of the nation, and of the national way of life.

Deuteronomy instructs all males to make a pilgrimage three times a year to Jerusalem to celebrate the festivals of Unleavened Bread, Weeks, and Booths. The journey is as important as the celebration of the festival.

During Lent when we read the Gospel stories of Jesus making his way to Jerusalem, we as readers sense the mounting tension. This place of holiness and guarantee of God’s presence is now to be the place of a once and for all sacrifice, where love will be made visible. Jerusalem, the Beloved city, now witnesses the death of the Beloved Son.

What sense have you had of your own pilgrimage this Lent? How has God spoken to you?

(John 12:12-16, Palm Sunday)