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BE STILL AND KNOW…
by
Robert Kelly SJ
Introduction
‘Be still and know that I am God.’ (Psalm 46:10) Through these words of the Psalmist, God invites us to seek quietness and to become still. He then promises that this stillness will not be an empty experience. It will be a place of encounter. In the stillness he will meet us. Prayer is the name for this encounter. In the meeting-place of prayer he says he will reveal himself to us. He promises we will come to know him. When God says we will know him in the stillness of prayer, he speaks of heart knowledge rather than head knowledge. God does not call us into prayer to offer us information about himself. Rather he wants to reveal his inner self to us as Father, Mother, friend, lover. He invites us into union with himself.
God did not create us and reveal himself to us so that we might study him. He wants us to enjoy him, to taste him and be nourished as persons by his love. The Eastern holy man asks his disciples: "Of what use to you is it to have counted all the mangoes on your tree if you have never tasted one?" Fruit is for tasting and eating, not for counting and analysing. God wants us to experience the joy, warmth and nourishment of his personal love. St. Ignatius, in his book ‘The Spiritual Exercises’, says ‘It is not abundance of knowledge that satisfies the soul but the feeling and savouring of things internally.’ Again the Psalmist says ‘Taste and see that the Lord is good.’ (Psalm 34:8)
The Psalmist makes a very simple demand, ‘Be still.’ This surely must be the briefest treatise on prayer! This instruction from God himself reminds us of a profound truth so easily forgotten by us, that prayer is God’s work rather than ours. God seeks us more that we seek him. He desires our company more than we want to give ourselves to him. We don’t have to work out prayer techniques, read spiritual manuals, consult gurus, practice yoga positions in order to meet God and experience his loving self-communication. It can be good to read of the experience of fellow searchers of God but we must be careful that this study does not become a substitute for prayer. Also we must be on our guard against a subtle kind of discouragement which could come from imagining that these people have reached heights of prayer to which we are not called. We are all called into this meeting place we call prayer, into this intimate union with God.
Prayer is a love encounter between God and each person. It is not a skill, a technique, a performance. We can encourage each other but must not try to copy each other. The love encounter between each person and God is unique. Therefore I must not compare my prayer experience with your prayer experience. It is the experience of a deep personal relationship. Methods can be compared but not the heart of prayer which is personal encounter. God seeks each of us with a personal love. This is the basis of all our confidence in prayer. The meeting place of prayer is our heart. He awaits us there. He invites us to be still, to become aware of his presence and to respond. ‘Make your home in me, as I make mine in you.’ (John: 15:4)
God asks me to ‘be still.’ In prayer time I don’t have to make anything happen. Indeed I am asked to stop trying to make something happen so I can enter into awareness of the miracle of what is happening every second of every day. What is happening? God is within me. Doing what? He is sharing his breath of life with me because he considers me very special. Right now he offers me his peace, his healing power, his love. He asks me to slow down, to become still, to enter into the awareness of this reality to let myself be touched and nourished by this loving presence.
The peace, love and healing power which God offers right now in prayer is more real than all the hassle, anxiety, fear, doubt that torment me just now. But the excitement, pace, glamour and noise of our modern world bombards our person and obscures this deeper reality which gives true meaning and value to our lives. If we are to get in touch with this reality and experience this active healing love, we must seek this God. This will not involve any journey or pilgrimage. Just become still and become aware of God who has made his home in our hearts. Is this experience meant for everybody? Yes, for everybody. Suppose I find it hard to believe in God and am angry with him or am in a state of sin and have pushed him out of my life? Then he respects your freedom. He will not force himself into your house. He will go out and sit on the doorstep of your heart ready to come in if you only glance out of the window towards him. If you pull the curtain to peep out and see if he is still there, he will knock again at the door.
The two persons involved in the love encounter we call prayer are God and myself. Meister Eckhard writing about our search for God offers an insight which I believe could lead us into a more authentic and nourishing experience of prayer. Speaking of our quest for God he writes, ‘The me beyond me seeks the God beyond God.’ Eckhard is saying there is more to you and me than meets the eye and certainly more to God than our picture or image of him. He draws our attention to the wonder and mystery of our deep, true self and the wonder and mystery of the true God. I’m sure that we agree that a personal encounter can only be real and meaningful if the two persons involved come as they are and allow their real true deep selves to meet and interact. When this happens you have a meaningful encounter and you can have love. In this book I would like first to reflect on the self-revelation of God, in Jesus, in some gospel incidents and stories. I hope that a deeper understanding of God’s love revealed in Jesus may increase our desire to become still in prayer and allow God to lead us into deeper heart knowledge of himself.
CHAPTER 1
God Beyond God
The word ‘God’ must be one of the most commonly used words in any language. We whisper it, say it, shout it out loud. We use it to bless and curse. We exclaim it in times of frustration and fear. We sing it reverently in hymn and prayer. What reality lies behind the word? What image, picture, idea does the word suggest to you? It might take us a while to sort out our thoughts and describe what we imagine God to be like. But we have some picture in our mind. This image will be influenced by our upbringing, education, culture and by our experience of life, good or bad. When the mystic Eckhard speaks of the ‘God beyond God’, he is suggesting we should not be satisfied with our images and pictures of God. In saying this he is not blaming us but just reminding us of the greatness of God and inviting us into freedom in our search for God. He is asking us to let go all our small, narrow images of God and let God be God He wants to lead us into celebration of the true God of wonder, beauty, love and joy. I believe the very word ‘God’ can become a kind of cage in which we imprison God. We say the word and immediately feel we know what God is like. It can be a beautiful prayer exercise to go to that cage, open it and set God free to be the true God of love, healing, nourishment and new life. And when we open the door of the cage we find that God does not fly away but comes to my small heart where he longs to make his home.
When we begin to think of God as he really is we run into what seems an insurmountable problem. Saints, theologians and Scripture all warn us that this true God is not only unknown and beyond any description but is even unknowable. The mystics say we can only know what God is not. We cannot know what he is. St. Augustine puts it this way: ‘If you say you know God, then what you say you know is not God.’
Here is a parable from the Annals of the Desert Fathers:
‘One day, a young man recently initiated into the faith went to visit a holy hermit and asked him, ‘Father, what is God?’
The holy man prayed for a moment and told him the following parable: two friends were seated at table drinking milk. One of them was blind from birth. The other one who could see, commented on the whiteness of the milk. Then the blind one asked him, ‘What is white?’
His friend thought for a while and answered, ‘White is the colour of a swan.’
But the blind one asked again, ‘And what is a swan?’
His friend replied that a swan was a very big and beautiful bird with a large and curved neck.
Again the blind man asked, ‘And what is a curve?’
Just then his friend took his hand and made it touch the border of the table, which was round. At the same time he said, ‘A curve is the shape of the table which you are touching.’
The face of the blind man lit up and he told his friend, ‘Thank you for explaining it to me. Now I know what is white.’
You and I are as far from understanding the true God as that blind man was from knowing the meaning and reality of ‘white’. Is this not discouraging for those seeking God in prayer? On the contrary. The day we believe this truth and live it out we can be liberated from all small and narrow images of God and can look forward to prayer with great wonder and joy. The awareness that God is infinite mystery beyond human understanding does not make prayer forbidding or impossible but leads us into authentic relationship with this God. Accepting that we cannot know, describe or measure God with our human intelligence is the greatest act of worship and adoration and can be the most beautiful and liberating thing we can say about God. If we say we cannot fit the waters of the mighty Kariba, say, into a teacup, we are simply acknowledging a fact and rejoicing in the greatness of the lake. When we acknowledge that the wonder, beauty and love of God surpass our teacup understanding and at the same time believe that this same God wants to reveal himself to our hearts, then we can find those hearts beating with new joy.
‘Be still and know that I am God.’ These words invite us into prayer with a new and exciting sense of expectation and wonder. This God beyond God says to men, ‘When you seek me you shall find me. When you seek me with all your heart, I will let you find me. It is Yahweh who speaks.’ (Jer. 29:13-14). The author of ‘The Cloud of Unknowing’ agrees: ‘By love he can be caught, but by thinking, never.’* God is mystery. Mystery is not a mind-puzzle, but an idea too difficult for our human intelligence. Mystery is revelation to the heart of a love and beauty that can never be exhausted. In prayer we must cease to make God an object of the mind to be understood and see him as the mystery of Love to be explored, tasted, enjoyed, celebrated. We don’t try to understand the rose, the sunset, the sea. We enjoy them. To let God be such a God we will have to grow out of our many early childish ideas of him.
Recently when I was on home leave from Zambia I paid a visit with my sister to the midlands town in Ireland where we have lived all our early years. We took a memory walk through our home town and we both experienced similar emotional reactions. The chief of these was that the town seemed to have grown small. Distances which had seem great to us as children now seemed very short. The walk from the family home to school or church which to us long ago seemed a great journey was now a matter of five or six minutes. Places where we played hide-and-seek, rounders and other games which to childish eyes and imagination had seemed so vast, now appeared to have shrunk so much that we wondered where one could have hidden or had enough space to play. When we are very young, the physical world about us seems vast. As we grow older, the physical reality seems to contract.
I then reflected on another reality around and within us, not physical but spiritual, the unseen world of God and of our inner self and our relationship with God. Here I detected some kind of opposite development. As I grew older this spiritual world which in my youth was small and narrow was now changing, growing larger, expanding into a wonderful new world full of mystery. My small idea of God and of myself was giving way to the greater reality of the true God and the true self. This has taken some time! But it was worth waiting for. . . . This particular change was brought home to me on that memory walk in my home town. As we entered the parish churchyard my sister reminded me that one Sunday morning as she and I entered this very yard, she confided to me that she had swallowed some drops of water when washing her teeth and she asked me if she could receive Holy Communion. I asked her what I had said, and to my horror was told that I was very definite that she had broken the communion fast and could not receive. So much for the theologian of fifteen years and his small God!
It took me years to discover that my home town was not as great and vast as I had thought it was when I was a child. It has taken even more years for me to realise that my God is not as small and narrow as I had imagined him to be in those days. Some may want to put the blame on a legalistic Church which in earlier days put the emphasis on a God of law and punishment. But the Church, like its members, is also weak and often fails. However, God is always with his family, the Church, offering his Holy Spirit to heal and renew. But many of us fear change and long for security. Observance of law seems to offer security. But Jesus put life and love at the centre not observance of laws. The Holy Spirit invites us into the adventure of letting God be God. At Vatican II many Church leaders of deep spirituality and great vision criticised weaknesses in the Church. But they did so with love and a new chapter opened in the pilgrimage of God’s people. Let us today thank God for Vatican II. Let us not waste time in regret over the past but look into our own hearts and see how we are responding right now in seeking the true God, the God who first seeks us in love.
Growth is always going on. We all need to be continually shocked out of our presumption that we can understand God. Many still carry within them an image of God formed in childhood. As we leave childhood behind, we grow into a more mature understanding of love, of ourselves, of relationships and the world about us. And we notice our world seems to grow smaller as our horizons of knowledge and experience are pushed back. But for many years there is little corresponding growth in our ideas about God and our relationship with him. Many still worship from a distance the small God of childhood days. Our idea of prayer always flows out of our ideas of God. Perhaps many saw prayer only as ‘asking’ things from God, and then judged the reality of the prayer when they got what they asked for. Only then did we say God ‘heard’ my prayer. I‘m reminded of the prayer of a young lad which appeared in a book of children’s letters to God. It ran as follows:
Dear God,
I wrote you before. Do you remember?
I did all I promised but you never sent the
horse yet. What about it?Yours Lewis.
Happily there are many today who are discovering and experiencing the true God of love who hears and notices our every heartbeat, our every wish, dream, fear, hope because he is closer to us than we are to ourselves and loves us with an everlasting love. And many are finding that the closer they come in prayer to finding this God beyond God, the closer they come to finding their true self. The truer our picture of God, the truer will be our undersanding of our own self. When you think about it, that should not surprise us since we are created in his image and likeness.
CHAPTER 2
God Laughs and Cries
‘Our God is not one of the gods.’ (Tillich). There are no gods but only God. There is no family of divine beings, vastly superior to us, inhabiting the outer or inner world beyond death, who influences our lives. There is no such God. In prayer we call Abraham ‘our father in faith’. Abraham was called to a totally new religious faith, to a belief in one God only. He is not one among other, even among all he has created. He is source, ground and origin of all being. He is eternal, infinite mystery. God is not another, not even ‘the other’ but just simple other. And even as we speak like this we must be careful not to fall back into the old trap of thinking – ‘Ah, now we know something.’ For us, the word ‘other’ suggests different, separation, distance, but in fact God can be none of these. He is not far away. He cannot be separate from us. If he was, we would cease to be. Precisely because he is God he is inexpressibly near to us, closer to us than we are to ourselves.
These paradoxes and apparent contradictions we apply to God should not upset us but rather delight and liberate us and open us to wonder and true worship. We cannot even apply the word ‘different’ to him incautiously for revelations tell us we are made in his image and likeness. Here is deep wonder. The Bible tells us that God forbade his people to make any image of himself. He did so because he knew us well. Becoming familiar with images we might begin to think we in some way knew him and indeed they could come between us and himself – and even keep him at a safe distance - whereas he wants to reveal himself to us and wants union with us. But then we find that the God who forbade images himself broke his own law. He creates man and woman in his own likeness. (Gen. 1:27) So we share in his life and mystery and it is no wonder that we seek him. We are drawn to him as the river is pulled to the mighty ocean. Augustine’s insight is ever fresh, ‘O, beauty ever ancient, ever new, You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless till they rest in You.’
We must be continually reminded that we cannot understand God with our minds or describe him in words. There is always a danger that we identify God with the words we use in talking about him. We imprison God in words. Carlo Martini says we want to enmesh God in the nets of our minds. We say the word and instinctively feel we know what God is like. We must tear all nets and let God go free, let him be God in our lives and in our world. As we let him go free, we will find we become more free to praise him and rejoice in his love and beauty. We must be aware of the temptation to transfer to God our own limited understanding of reality. Words like good, true, beautiful, free, close – all have associations of limit for us. We instinctively transfer these limitations to God. We invert the divine order and make God in our image and likeness. This is inevitable but we must constantly remind ourselves there is no limitation in God. Sometimes we try to solve this problem by saying, ‘Well, his love, his forgiveness is like ours but to an infinite degree.’ But this is not so. His love is not like ours. It is totally other. And what does the word infinite mean for us? We cannot imagine the reality it suggests. We think of length, space or bulk and try to imagine them going on and on with end. We have to speak of God but let us rejoice that our words don’t describe him but always point past themselves. What can we say? Nothing, we can only rejoice in wonder and delight and throw ourselves into his arms and celebrate.
When the Samaritan woman at the well of Jacob realised that Jesus was a very special prophet she put this question to him: ‘Our fathers worshipped on this mountain, while you say that Jerusalem is the place where we ought to worship.’
(John 4:20) Jesus answered her thus, ‘Believe me, woman, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem, true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth.’ (John 4:21-23) Jesus is not criticising holy places or pilgrimages but is reminding her and us that God must not be tied to such nor indeed to any place, person or object. There is no more of God in Lourdes than in our own kitchen. God is not more present in a church than in a factory. There is not more of God in a great saint than in the most degraded sinner. In the year 63 BC the Romans conquered Palestine. The Roman commander, Pompey, led his troops into Jerusalem and captured the temple. Then to the horror of pious Jews, he fought his way to the heart of the temple and entered the Holy of Holies. To his amazement Pompey found only a small empty room. His dreams of finding silver and gold and rich images of the Jewish gods were dashed. The Holy of Holies was empty of precious images but full of the Glory of God.
When I am in touch with the real God, the God beyond God, I will be open to the infinite variety and freshness of his Being. I can constantly be surprised and recreated by his activity and the revelation of his beauty, truth, love, healing and compassion. I will clap my hands in wonder and sing a new song as he makes all things new. Scripture constantly speaks of him as the one who always does a new thing. ‘Now I am making the whole of creation new.’ (Rev. 21: 5). In Isaiah he says:
‘No need to recall the past,
no need to think about what was done before.
See I am doing a new deed,
even now it comes to light, can you not see it?’(Is.43:18-19)
And in Lamentations we find this beautiful reflection:
‘The favours of Yahweh are not all past,
his kindnesses are not exhausted;
every morning they are renewed;
great is his faithfulness.’(Lam.3:22-23)
Do we not often recall a past blessing and hope God will do the same for us again? He will not. He is not that poor. He does not repeat favours. He is God. He does not copy or duplicate yesterday’s favours. Each day is a new day, a new gift of love. Each day his gifts come to us with love like freshly picked roses with the dew still on them. God does not parcel up his gifts or leave them ready to be sent to us by some heavenly Post Office. Each new day he comes personally with a new smile and new love. This encounter, this prayer today is not a repeat of yesterday. It is fresh amazing grace. He is God, so any miracle of love can happen. The words of scripture today have new meaning, life, power for me today in my new mood and need. The prophet Isaiah refers to this new thing God is doing and associates it with joy and gladness.
‘For now I create new
heavens and a new earth, and the
past will not be remembered and will come no more to men’s
minds. Be glad and rejoice for ever and ever for what I am creating,
Because I now create Jerusalem ‘Joy’ and her people ‘Gladness’. I shall
rejoice over Jerusalem and exult in my people.’
(Is. 65:17-19)
God speaks of joy and gladness. Must this not also involve humour and laughter? I love to imagine God laughing. Surely this God who made us a people who smile and laugh and enjoy a good joke must be a God who also smiles and laughs? Brian Keenan in his book ‘An Evil Cradling’ tells how he and his companion, John McCarthy coped with their terrible experience of loneliness and isolation during their long captivity in a dark prison cell in Lebanon. They invented all kinds of games and activities to preserve their sanity. He writes:
‘We would imitate different characters as we played, or more frequently we would create characters out of our imagination. With these characters we entertained ourselves for many hours. Through them we brought other people into the cell to be with us, to talk to us or to make us laugh. In that laughter we discovered something of what life really is. We were convinced by the conditions we were kept in and the lives that we managed to lead that if there was a God, that God was, above all else, a comedian. In humour, sometimes hysterical, sometimes calculated, often childish, life was returned to us.’
In humour life was returned to us. This is a profound reflection. Let us ask, ‘Why are we able to laugh?’ The answer surely must be, ‘Because God laughs and we are made in his image.’ Keenan and his friend say they were saved by laughter and became convinced God must be a comedian. We are told a new baby will not smile until the mother smiles at it. The Psalmist invites us to smile at God and says we shall not be ashamed, which I presume means that God will smile back at us. (Psalm 34: 5)
What makes us laugh? It is often a deep current of joy caused by looking at others playing and enjoying themselves, especially children. When God looks at his children enjoying his beautiful world, surely he must be smiling. We often laugh at the unexpected, the incongruities of life. It’s hard to keep a straight face when we hear a good joke and when some comedians deliberately play dumb and do not laugh at the obviously funny, we laugh at their straight faces. Many jokes poke fun at our inflated sense of our own dignity. This laughter is healthy and prevents us taking our lives too seriously. Jesus had a very serious mission in life but I find it easier to imagine Jesus laughing than to imagine the over-serious Pharisees doubling up in laughter.
We could also profitably ask ourselves, ‘Why are we able to cry?’ Again I believe the answer must be, ‘Because God cries and we are made in his image.’ Why would God cry? Because he is a Lover and love is always vulnerable. We could say he has so much to give us and we don’t seem very interested. Jesus wept over Jerusalem for that reason. Or we could say that God desires our happiness and fulfilment, but we keep hurting and wounding ourselves and others and seeking our happiness away from him. We can laugh and cry because God first laughs and cries. Above all we can love because God first loves us. Let us come to this God in prayer and just be with him. There will be days when we shall laugh together. Other days we shall have cause to weep together. But all days I will know, whether there be laughter or tears, that my God is there, sharing his love and life with me. Let me put no limit to that love. It is as great as God himself.
CHAPTER 3
God is Love
One of Christ’s closest friends and co-workers was John who wrote the fourth Gospel. He shares his image of God with us in these words, ‘God is love.’ (John 4:8) If the word ‘God’ is one of our most commonly used words we have to say the word ‘love’ is even more in common use. And again we have to question ourselves as to what images and pictures come to mind when we use this word. What reality lies behind the word ‘love’ for each of us? There is the love of friendship, love of mother for baby, love of husband and wife, love of sport, music, nature, love of country, sexual expression of love, love which moves a person to sacrifice life itself. Again I believe it might take us some minutes to describe our image of the reality behind the word. But all of us deep down know that we desire. We want to love and be loved. We know love is happiness, love is life. Now John says, ‘God is love.’ He does not say God has love but God is love.
For many years I did not think God was love. Awe, anxiety – even fear – were more common emotions excited by the mention of God. I believe that God created me and put me on this earth to test me. If I passed the test I would be rewarded with ‘heaven’. My ideas of this heaven were vague and childish. Even today I have to pray a lot to get anywhere near the reality behind the word heaven. If I failed the test I should be sent to hell. Sad to say, my ideas of hell were much more vivid and graphic than my ideas of heaven. To qualify for heaven I had to pass the Ten Commandments Test. Now I have been a schoolteacher for many years and have often had to prepare students for serious tests. Together we would try to spot likely questions which might appear on the paper. Knowing a question in advance is a great advantage in a test. But knowing I would be examined in the Ten Commandments was no help at all! They were too tough and I constantly failed to observe them. I was bound to fail in the finals and so fear and not love was the dominant emotion in my religious life. Yet at the same time I was commanded to love this God with my whole heart and soul.
I now believe it is possible to love God very much, but only because I am certain that this God truly loves me in all my failure. Again we must get behind the familiar words ’love’ and ‘God’. When I was reflecting on these matters a family tragedy in England was receiving much publicity. A mother gave birth to a baby girl in a large maternity hospital in Nottingham. Four hours after the birth, as she cradled the baby in her arms, a nurse walked in and asked for the baby to take it for an injection. Instead of taking the baby for any treatment the ‘nurse’ walked out of the hospital with the child. In her desperate desire for a child she impersonated a nurse and kidnapped the baby. The kidnap story made headlines in the papers and on TV and millions were deeply touched by the grief of the parents. After fifteen days the baby was found safe and returned to the mother. The TV cameras were not allowed in to film the reunion. It was too personal, special, intimate. A senior doctor who was involved said simply, ‘It was a privilege to be there.’ I ask you to reflect in prayer on this scene and to imagine the mother’s feelings. And then I ask you to make an act of faith that this love is only a pale reflection and image of the love God has for you. The God we are talking about, the only God is the one who gave this mother such power of love. The same God says to you and me:
Does a woman forget her baby at the breast.
or fail to cherish the son of her womb?
Yet even if these forget,
I will never forget you.
(Isaiah 49:15)
You and I are not made by God to be tested here on earth. Heaven is not a reward for keeping laws and rules and passing a morality test. Hell is not a place of punishment ‘made’ by God to punish failures. God is love and acts only out of love. God’s love is unconditional. It is gift not reward. It is easy to say these things but not easy to believe them and live out of them. God’s love for you or me is not offered as a reward for being good. It has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with what we do but everything to do with what we are. And what are we? We are his:
Do not be afraid, for I have redeemed you;
I have called you by your name,
You are mine.(Isaiah 43:1)
God’s love is like the feeling that tore the heart of that woman whose baby was kidnapped, like the powerful life-giving force that was hers when the nurse handed her the baby after delivery then the crucifying pain when, a few hours later, she heard the baby was kidnapped then joy beyond our words to describe it that gave her life new meaning, when fifteen days later the baby was again in her arms. Such is God’s relationship to us. Such is his love. Hell is not a place. Hell is not a fire. Hell is rejected love and God suffers in it as much as we do if we reject him. Many have rejected God. Many have refused to believe and have lived without him. I cannot believe that are lost as we say. I believe they did not reject the true God, the God beyond God. And I believe God’s love, the love beyond love, can find them no matter where they stray.
The unconditional love of God is at the heart and centre of our religion, our faith. Again let us go behind the common words to the reality they point to. What does ‘religion’, ‘faith’, ‘church’ mean for us? For many it means laws, structure, church membership, teachings. All of these have their place but not the central place. At the centre is God’s love. This love brought us into existence and gave us our deepest meaning. The life God shared with us was meant to grow and blossom here on earth and to ripen to fullness in eternity. Dogmas, laws, structures are on the periphery. They have meaning only when they flow out from a centre which is love. Jesus did not come to found a new religion called Christianity. He tells us clearly why he came:
I have come
So that they may have life
And have it to the full.(John 10:10)
Jesus came to lead us into meaning which is the experience and sharing of love. Without love we cannot grow and become what God wants us to be. Without love life has no meaning. When Jesus was asked where or how we could find this new life, he answered simply, ‘I am the way and the life.’ (John 14:6) The life Jesus offers is nothing less than coming to know him and having a personal relationship of love with him. This new life flowers out of knowing God. In his prayer to the Father at the Last Supper, Jesus says. ‘And eternal life is this: to know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.’ (John 17:3)
Cardinal Suenens in his book ‘Memories and Hopes’, writes ‘Christians must rediscover Jesus Christ. They must meet him – or better still – allow themselves to be met by him.’ Through his reflections he continually stresses that this meeting involves experiencing Christ. He points out that this lived experience corresponds to one of the most typical aspirations for modern consciousness, which in this respect echoes that of biblical believers. ‘For the children of Israel to know God was to experience God.’ This is heart knowledge and is the fruit of prayer rather than intellectual study. For this and nothing less we are created. Mgr. George Leonard in his delightful book, ‘Here and Now’, writes: ‘We,the redeemed, have been given life for one reason only, to be loved and to love.’ God created us, to change around the words of the old Penny Catechism, so that he might know us, love us, serve us and be happy with us forever in heaven.’ God wants us to know him and to grow in his love. The noise of our world can easily drown out God’s voice and so he invites us, ‘Be still and know that I am God.’
CHAPTER 4
Me beyond Me
Who is the ‘me beyond me’? This is the real me, the me who comes from the mind, heart and love of God. It is the me made in the image and likeness of God, the God who is wonder, mystery, beauty, love. Since I am made in the image of God who is mystery, it is no wonder that I too am mysterious. I must not be surprised if I am at times a puzzle to myself. Also if God is infinite beauty and eternal life, it is no surprise that I, made in his image, have dreams. It is no wonder that I am never fully satisfied with anything, that I often feel frustrated and never properly fulfilled and that I have deep, deep yearnings for a joy and happiness which are beyond the threat of time and change. But as well as moments of frustration I have moments of joy, wonder, ecstasy. These moments may be infrequent and brief but they are true and in such moments I know or guess who I am and at the same time have some awareness of who God is. And I feel that God and I are inseparable.
Such experiences of joy may come when I stop and stand and look upon a flower, a snowdrop in winter, a daffodil in spring, a rose in summer. They may come as I stand on the seashore or on a cliff and wonder at the sea. They are experienced by a mother and father receiving their new-born baby into their first embrace. They can arise out of a moment of awareness of beauty as I enjoy a favourite piece of music, of art, of poetry. They may be awakened by a favourite comedian and in the laughter I just know I am made for joy. They come to many in the stillness of prayer. They are awakened when I see someone respond with total unselfishness to another person’s need. In such grace moments I meet the me beyond me and the God beyond God in whose image I am made.
In these moments of awareness of beauty, love, joy, goodness I experience a deep peace, a sure sense of being at home. I do not feel a stranger in the presence of such experiences. I realise there is close intimate affinity between me and goodness, love, beauty, joy. It is not a question of wishful thinking or an impossible dream. The reason that I do not feel a stranger is that I share the very life of God who is the source of all this wonder. Let us notice further that all this beauty and joy is gift, pure gift. I have not brought it to be. I have not earned it. It is given to me. Our faith says it is given because I am loved. My very existence is the first of all the gifts and is the promise of all to come, here and hereafter. All is given out of love and I am the object of that love. Here is the deepest meaning of faith, religion, God. Sadly we have turned it all around and made it a question of being worthy. But it has nothing to do with worthiness, absolutely nothing. We are loved because we are and heaven is ours because we are God’s children.
We are always wondering are we good enough to please God and win Heaven. But this very God made us good. In the account of creation in the book of Genesis we are told that all that exists came from God’s hand and that God loved what he made. When he created the woman and the man he was especially pleased and saw his work was ‘very good’. (Gen. 1:31) The trouble is we heard so much about original sin that we have forgotten the deeper reality of our original goodness. Fr. Rohr in his book ‘Simplicity’ says very well, ‘We have to find out who we were all along in God before we did anything right or wrong.’ We do not and cannot deny that we do wrong, that we find it hard to love as Jesus asked us. We are given God’s love that we may share it. We are all sadly aware how we fail many times a day to share love with each other. But we will never succeed unless we first realise how much we are loved. True love for one another will not be born out of fear of displeasing God. We will find it hard to forgive unless we realise how totally we are forgiven. That’s why Jesus came. He came to restore and recreate us in love and to invite us to love as he loved. This is the great challenge facing us each day. When we fail we must turn to Jesus for forgiveness, healing and power to keep trying, to become more like him. If I keep close to him in a relationship of personal love nourished by prayer he will empower me.
It is nearly impossible for us to imagine God’s kind of loving and even more difficult for us to believe that we are the recipients of such love. Yet this is the ultimate deep truth and meaning of life. Why is it so difficult for us to believe that we are loved for what we are, and not for what we do? Why does it seem so difficult to accept joyfully unconditional love? One reason is that God’s love was mostly presented as a reward for observance of his law. Another perhaps more serious reason is that we are all very conscious of our human weakness and failure to love. There are dark areas of guilt and self-hatred in all of us. We are far more aware of our sinful state and our experience of failure and disappointment with ourselves that we are of our deeper graced condition. The me beyond me is seldom noticed by the eye. The externals of my condition are more obvious than my hidden good self. It needs little or no reflection to become aware of my human frailty, my fears, guilt, failure, anger, selfishness. I notice these all too easily and if I forget them there will always be people who will remind me! Here we must be honest. Only the truth can save us. We cannot deny reality. So we humbly admit our human weakness and sin. But there is the deeper reality still, God’s presence at our very centre accepting us, healing us, and loving us. Here is a helpful word from Juliana of Norwich: ‘To behold the sinful self is a matter of truth but it is not the highest truth which is to behold God. We are preciously kept in one love.’
The poet Yeats says, ‘The Vision is always finer than the View.’ The view is on the surface and is seen with the eye. The vision is deeper and is seen with the heart. We have views of ourselves and other. Often these are very inaccurate but even when true we imprison ourselves and others in our present situation. God sees the vision and sets us free for growth. God knows what we truly are and can become. He sees the possibilities for growth. Growth involves death of course. The seed must die or it will remain alone. We must die to the false self, the surface self so that our true beauty can be revealed, our true self, the me beyond me. Jesus always saw the Vision and so we read that most extraordinary sentence in the Gospel, ‘The tax collectors and the sinners, meanwhile, were all seeking his company.’ (Luke 15:1). These unlikely people were attractd to Jesus because he was opening their eyes to the vision of their true selves. Jesus told them that their sins were not the whole truth about themselves. The Pharisees were much more shortsighted. They saw only the view and condemned what they saw. They demanded perfection before someone could be accepted by them or God. So the sinner was outcast and could not celebrate. In waiting for perfection they missed celebrating what was present. Jesus drew attention not to sin but to the deep true self made in God’s image. He invited them to accept love and celebrate with him. He knew the great secret that love heals and enables growth and that love is offered to us not because we achieve but because we are his children.
Because of God’s understanding love even our sin and failure can be an occasion of grace and new life. God does not reject us but comes even closer when we fail because we need him more. Unfortunately society and even religion often tend to promote a destructive guilt complex when we fail. Some years back I was corresponding with a young Zambian lady studying in a university in Europe. Her first letters were full of joy and hope. Then a very long silence was followed by a very sad letter. Briefly she had contracted AIDS, was already quite sick, had been expelled from the university and country where she was studying and was ashamed to return home. These were the early days of AIDS when there were false and exaggerated ideas about how AIDS could be picked up. Her long letter finished with this sad sentence: ‘I see Father that you are something and I am just nothing.’ She saw herself as Nothing; She had the stigma of AIDS, was very sick, already had an ugly body rash, could not finish her studies and was estranged from her family. She saw me as ‘something’: I had a respected profession, was healthy, doing useful work etc. She was noticing only the view and missing the vision. After prayer I wrote back: ‘What you say is true that you are nothing and I am something. But it’s only half the truth. It is equally true that you are something and I am nothing. Each of us is nothing. We are created from nothing. We did not make ourselves and everything we have we have received. But it is even more true that each of us is something incredibly precious and beautiful, made in the image of our Creator who is in love with us. We are so previous Jesus died for us and would die again for us. Turn to him, tell him you believe this and accept his healing love.’
One morning as I was leaving Kitwe Hospital a lady from the parish asked me if I would give herself and her friend a lift home. Her friend was walking behind carrying a small baby. We walked to the car together and I asked the woman with the baby what was the child’s problem. She smiled and said there was no problem. She had just delivered the baby a few hours earlier! I was invited to see the little miracle and marvel at the wonder of such a tiny new life. The pride, joy, light and love on the woman’s face gave me some idea of unconditional love. I wonder what that mother would have thought or said if I had asked her why she loved this baby or if I had said, "How can you offer such adoring love to a small child who can do nothing for you?" We would not dare think, much less ask the mother such a stupid question. Yet we seem to attribute less love to God who gives such love to that mother.
CHAPTER 5
Prayer is Encounter
In prayer I don’t have to make something happen. I am invited to become still and become aware of what is happening all the time, namely that God is within me, seeking me, revealing himself to me. He reveals the meaning of my life. A reflection from Thomas Merton helps me greatly here.
‘In seeking to know God we must forget the familiar subject-object relationship which characterises our ordinary acts of knowing. Instead we know him in so far as we become aware of ourselves as known through and through by him. We ‘possess’ him in proportion as we realise ourselves to be possesed by him in the inmost depth of our being. Meditation or prayer of the heart is the active effort we make to keep our hearts open so that we may be enlightened by him and be filled with this realisation of our true relationship to him.’ (Contemplative Prayer).
We all seek meaning in life. We feel it is connected with success, image, possessions. We must be somebody, we must achieve. We compare ourselves with others. We become overbusy, worried, anxious. Most of us feel we have not made it, cannot make it and so end up not liking ourselves. We run from stillness, afraid to meet our self. But this is to run from reality. I must return to stillness where God can talk to me and tell me my meaning and who I really am. I don’t have to dress up for the meeting, just come as I am and let God embrace me as he embraced the prodigal boy, tired and dirty from his journey.
The God who is love awaits me in the place of prayer which is my own heart. In stillness I enter this holy place to meet him. St. Paul reminds us we are the temple of God (1 Cor.3:16). It’s hard for us to accept we are holy. But so we are. I don’t say we are always good or devout or churchgoers but we are holy because we are part of God. In the holy places of my heart I meet God and he meets me. Prayer is a word for this meeting, this being together. It is a meeting of friends, of lovers. It is encounter, not a religious duty. God wants this meeting and looks forward to it. Can I make time with him, just that, to be with him? The saintly Curé of Ars, St. John Vianney, tells how each evening, as he prayed in the village church, a farm labourer on his way back from work would enter and spend a long time before the Blessed Sacrament. One evening the Saint waited for the man to come out from the church and asked him, ‘What do you do in your prayer time in the church?’ The man answered simply, ‘I just look at him and he looks at me.’ Prayer is simply being with God.
In the stories from the Fathers of the Desert this short dialogue is recorded and leads us to wonder at the mystery of God present to us:
Disciple: Is the path to God easy or difficult?
Master: It is neither.
Disciple: How can that be?
Master: Because it isn’t there.
Disciple: Then how does one travel to God?
Master: One does not travel. This is a journey without distance. Stop travelling and you arrive.
I ask, how do you imagine this presence of God in and to you? Don’t answer quickly. We have already said that God is wonder and mystery and will always be infinitely more wonderful that we can imagine. This is true of all his activities and apply to the way he is present in us. We speak of people being present with and to each other. They offer advice, consolation and help or just listen to each other. Many of us are not good at listening to others with our hearts. Our attention is often fragmented and we find it hard to give total attention. But God is totally present to each of us, listening deeply, understanding and consoling. Maybe we think of God present as an object in its container, say a necklace in its box. But if the necklace were removed, the box remains. But if God left me I would cease to be. God does not watch me from a distance. He is intimately close in a way we cannot imagine. I remember Fr. de Mello in a retreat telling us, ‘God and I are not one. That would be heresy. But God and I are not two. This would be another heresy.’ St. Paul preaching in Athens reminds his listeners, ‘In God we live and move and exist.’ (Acts 17:28)
Sometimes we may think of God as present in us in a kind of material way as if he were inside me, in my body as it were. But God is present not in my body but in the deepest reality of my self. He is present in those deep places in me which I seldom visit because I live so much on the surface and seldom meet my real self. He is in those deeper places where I fear to go because I don’t understand those depths in myself, ‘Why did I say that? What made me do that? Why did I react so angrily or foolishly?’ And God is present in those even darker deeper regions of my self where I have thought of evil and dallied with evil; places where I have memory of evil I did and hate myself, places where I have supressed memory of evil done to me which leads me to hate the one responsible and rejoice in the thought of revenge. God is present in those deep, dark and fearsome places. Do we not say in our creed that God descended into hell? I don’t understand what that article of the creed means but I am certain it refers to a journey of love. Yes, God is present to all of me, the dark and bright places and it is not the presence of an observer or onlooker, much less of a judge. He is present as lover, healer, saviour. He holds me, he embraces me and whispers, ‘Don’t be afraid. It’s alright. I understand. Let me be here with you. Accept my light, my healing, my love.’
Is this still prayer easy or hard? It is both. It is easy because no skills are needed but just the desire to be with God and the determination to set aside some time. It is hard because during the time of prayer I will, despite best intentions, constantly lose the awareness of God. After some moments of joyful recollection my mind will get distracted. The distraction may be triggered off by some noise outside or by some unbidden memory within. I will find myself talking to all kinds of people and become involved in all kinds of situations. Then I will ‘return’ to the Lord’s presence but soon may wander again or feel sleepy or dry. No matter how often we are assured by spiritual guides we will feel this kind of prayer is useless and a waste of time and it would be better to read a good book or do some work for God. An even deeper temptation may enter and we may see this dryness and distraction as a punishment for our sins. This can lead us to conclude that this kind of prayer is not for us. I myself have been trying for many years to be faithful to this prayer and humbly wish to say my own prayer as I describe above. But I am more certain than ever that God wants me to be with him. To give it up would for me not be a sign of humility but rather of pride because I don’t want to seem a failure. I want consolation and a sense of succeeding by my own efforts. But more and more I am seeing prayer time as God’s gift to me and not my gift to God. I see it as an amazing gift and privilege and believe if I keep it up despite distractions and dryness, God is keeping and will keep his promise to show himself to me. I place all my hope not on my own effort but on his promise.
Prayer is a great act of faith. It is worship and adoration of the Mystery of God. It is sacrifice in the strict sense, an offering to God. I sacrifice my time, myself. Let us understand this well. When I say ‘sacrifice’ I do not mean that I now choose to do something difficult and hard for my sensual nature, like giving up sweet things for Lent or like bodily fasting to atone for sin. We speak here of something deeper, more beautiful, more mysterious. The sacrifice is to ‘make sacred’, as the bread and wine are sacrificed at Eucharist and made Holy, made sacred. In prayer it is our time that is sacrificed, offered and made holy. I offer God this time as a sacrifice, as a pure gift joyfully given. This is in fact the highest and most perfect use of my time. Each day God breathes me into life. Each day with its span of time is God’s gift to me. Each moment is gift, is a moment of love. Now I recognise the wonder of this gift of love and I take some of that time and offer it back to him with wonder, praise and thanksgiving. Even if the piece of prayer time is dry and distracting it is now sacred and holy and a beautiful offering in God’s sight. To say I offer time is only another way of saying I offer myself. We speak of time as if it were a separate reality apart from me. In fact if I say I am giving some time to God, it is my self I am giving at those moments. Bread and wine do not change externally when they are consecrated at Eucharist, but they become a deep new mysterious reality. So on the surface, at prayer, I am the same sleepy distracted person but in reality I am a most pleasing and holy offering to God.
Prayer then can be called sacrifice and sacrifice should be a love offering. It is sacrifice, not in the sense of going against my nature but in doing that which responds to the deepest need of nature, my human created nature, and expression of my most basic desire to give praise, thanksgiving and worship to my creator. This is my primary intention, desire and activity in prayer. As truly as in olden days ancient or pagan peoples gathered round a rough stone altar in the open air and offered back to their gods meat and fruit in sacrifice, and their worship and thanks for life and nourishment, so truly do I now become aware of my God and his daily gifts of time and love and joyfully, humbly offer back to him some of that gift in thanksgiving. As truly as any believing community today in a modern church, is united with God as they gather around the altar to offer bread and wine and in that way offer adoration and thanks, so truly do I in prayer offer the sacrifice of my time and my self and my desire to be united with God. In all ritual sacrifice the offerings and gifts were immolated, burnt, destroyed as a sign they were being handed back to the God from whom we came. So in prayer I hand over completely and totally my time and self and leave the rest to God. At times he will touch me and I will know that I am known by name and loved. Often there will be no such experience but I will know in faith that nothing else I do today will be more meaningful and beautiful than this prayer which will come from my heart.
CHAPTER 6
Love is Risk
In his first homily in Nazareth Jesus said he had come to set captives free. We could say God was one of those captives. Jesus came to set God free, to open the cage in which we imprison God. He comes to reveal the truth about God and that truth in turn will set us free, free from fear and open to love which casts out fear. The God of infinite mystery is unknowable to our minds but this same God has chosen to reveal himself to us, to reveal himself to our hearts and seek our love. This self-revelation is made in Jesus. If we ask what God is like, how does God see himself, the answer is Jesus. We have no words to describe God but God has one word to express himself. It is Jesus, the word made flesh. Jesus is very conscious of this mission, to reveal God the Father to us. He boldly says, ‘To have seen me is to have seen the Father’ (John 14:9) and ‘If you know me, you know my Father too’ (John 14:6). He says no one knows the Father except the Son and he rejoices to make the Father known. (Luke 10:21-22)
But then comes the terrible twist in this story of God’s self-revelation in Jesus. Instead of rejoicing in this amazing grace, the world takes God’s word and throws it back in his face. Jesus is rejected. How could this happen? If Jesus is the answer to our questions about God, if he is the end of our search for meaning, if he is Light and Truth, how can he be rejected? How could this story with such a promising theme end on the killing field of calvary. How could God’s clearest revelation be rejected and nailed up for mockery on a cross. The answer to these questions has great relevance for us who believe we can meet God in the stillness of prayer. The answer is the most frightening endorsement of our earlier observations on that sin of pride which leads us to believe that we know what God is like or should be like. If anyone reveals a different God from our image of what he should be like, we will not accept him. We enter prayer hoping to meet the true God. Are we open to let God reveal himself as he truly is? Are we ready to wait on that revelation? Do we not often have to wait on people before we come to know them? We must be ready for surprises. We must call on God’s spirit to help us. Paul assures us we shall be given this ‘Spirit’ who reaches the depths of everything, even the depths of God. (1 Cor. 2:10-11)
The enemies of Jesus challenged him to show them a sign that he was who he claimed to be. ‘The Pharisees and Sadducees came and to test him they asked him if he would show them a sign from heaven.’ (Matt.16:1) This was a proud boast that they knew what God was like. They are saying, ‘Show us the kind of sign we expect. We will recognise it was authentic because we know what God should be like.’ This kind of arrogance is shown again on Calvary. They shout up at Christ, ‘Come down and we will believe.’ (Mark 15:32) They demand a display of power. They say, ‘Show us your power. Rescue yourself, save yourself from pain. God should not, cannot suffer. Bad things should not happen to good people. Come down and we will believe. If you cannot, we will not believe.’ But if he comes down he cannot reveal the true God who gives his life in love for us. He cannot come down precisely because he is God. They and we have much to learn about God. What a lesson for us here. Those who reject Jesus are the leaders of organised religion. Rahner says well: ‘Organised religion tends to organise God.’ God will not be acceptable to many people unless he conforms to their small image of him. In prayer let us wait for God. Let us be open as he reveals himself to us and let us ask him to melt us and mould us into his image of love.
On Calvary Jesus reveals the very heart of God. Can we look and see and understand with our hearts? Here is what God is like and he will not change. He will be himself. They want him to take charge on Calvary. They want him to be master of the situation. But he has come to be servant, our servant of love because he knows that in fact bad things do happen to good people. He knows there is much injustice and pain due to the sin of human heart. He has come to face this. Also he knows that mostly sin generates sin. Evil and sin are handed down in families from parents to children. Children suffer from the sins of parents and often copy parents or seek refuge and comfort from their wounds in later sin, often not knowing why they act as they do. Children are not born with racial prejudice but learn it from adults. Sin is also passed on in nations as one generation seeks revenge for the betrayals, wars, tortures inflicted by a certain group or by another nation. What can God do? See what he does on Calvary. He absorbs the sin and evil. He will not pass it on. He will not seek revenge. ‘Father forgive them for they know what they do.’ He is giving us God’s word that love can overcome evil and sin, that love is stronger than death. It is this God we will meet in the stillness of prayer where he wants to share this power with us so that we share it with one another and help to save the world. Thomas Merton writes on true pacifism. ‘God’s non-violence is incomprehensible if it is thought to be a means of achieving unity rather than as the fruit of inner unity already achieved.’ This inner unity is a fruit of time spent with Jesus in prayer.
Jesus reveals God 0n Calvary. ‘Be still and know that I am God.’ This verse from the Psalm is also the first line of a well-known song. The second line of the song contains a very good insight. ‘I am the Lord that healeth thee.’ The God we meet in prayer reveals himself as a healer not only of sin but of all life’s wounds. He is the Servant God. He kneels before you and me as he knelt before the apostles at the Last Supper. He kneels to heal our wounds with the most powerful medicine, his love. What does this medicine cost? To you and me, nothing. But it cost him his life’s blood, a price he paid joyfully as it was a love offering. If he is going to heal me, I must show him my wound. I must describe my sickness. This I can do openly and honestly in the stillness of prayer. Perhaps our pain can often be linked to worry and fear. Many suffer from anxiety and worry which they find hard to describe to a friend. They envy others who appear to have no fear and worry. This pain they say is like a knot in the chest. Jesus does not want us to suffer in this way. In prayer we can ask him to loosen and untie the ugly knot. Imagine him doing just that, untying the knot. His hands move gently and patiently. Hear him speak, ‘Easy now – this is very tight. . .’ You become aware you are totally accepted as you are. There is no reproaching or putting blame on anyone, only his great desire to bring you peace. Accept his healing touch.
Jesus is the King of Love on Calvary. If we see him in this way we may better understand a key expression which he used in all his teaching and preaching. Jesus constantly spoke of ‘the Kingdom of God’. A proper understanding of this expression will help us greatly in all our Christian life and especially in our prayer. I share with you my own faulty understanding of this expression in my early years as a priest. I imagined the kingdom of God as a place God ruled as a king and where all who lived there were obedient to all of God’s laws. The kingdom could be identified by the perfect sinless lives of all its members. I personally, as a Christian, was called to enter this place of perfection and as a priest, my work was to promote and spread this kingdom, to lead more and more people to God and his law then follow it and win salvation. Notice the emphasis was on my activity making me worthy of the kingdom and its blessings. The wonderful truth is that the kingdom is not a place but activity, and it is God’s activity not mine. God is present in our world, a mixture of good and bad, but he is not sitting on a throne awaiting our worship and obedience. He is a working God, a servant God and his activity is love. The wonderful joyful thing to notice is that the Kingdom of God is not my doing, not my activity. It is God at work in me and in his world. What have I to do? Jesus says, ‘Believe the good news’. It is ‘news’, something new is happening among us that we have not originated. It is life-giving and promotes hope and new life growth. I don’t make it happen just as I cannot make a seed grow. I can remove obstacles to growth but the growth itself comes from God. Prayer must be a place of growth. We are there in touch with this active, loving, serving God and his life flows into us as surely as the life of the vine flows into the branch.
‘In your minds you must be the same as Christ Jesus. His state was divine, yet he did not cling to his equality with God but emptied himself to assume the condition of a slave and became as men are, and being as all men are, he was humbler yet, even to accepting death, death on a cross.’ (Philippians 2:5-7)
Jesus comes to set God free from our poor narrow images of him. He reveals a God who is king but a very different kind of king from our traditional ideas of kingship. He does not stand on his dignity as king. He is concerned only for the peace, happiness and welfare of his people. He empties himself of all honours and prestige and becomes the servant of his people. This of course involves a terrible risk. True love can never force a love response from the other. It can only invite love and then wait. Kierkegaard, the Danish Protestant theologian, has a famous short parable in which he dramatises the risk God took in the Incarnation. He deliberately leaves his story unfinished. Each of us has to write our own ending to the parable:
Once there was a king who loved a humble maiden. This king was so powerful and well established that he could not marry her without being forced to give up his throne. If he were to marry her, the king knew that he would make her forever grateful. It occurred to him though that something would be wanting in her happiness. She would always admire him and thank him, but she would not be able to love him, for the inequality between them would be too great and she would never be able to forget her humble origin and her debt of gratitude.
So, he decided upon another way. Instead of making her Queen, he would renounce the kingship. He would become a commoner and then offer her his love. In doing this he realised he was taking a great risk. He was doing something that would perhaps be foolish in the eyes of most people in his kingdom, perhaps even in her eyes. He would lose the kingship and he might also be rejected by her, especially if she were disappointed at not becoming queen.
Yet he decided to take the risk. It was better, he believed, to risk everything in order to make love possible.
CHAPTER 7
Looking at Jesus
‘To have seen me is to have seen the Father.’ (John 14:9) If Jesus is how God knows and expresses himself and we agree we cannot ‘understand’ God, then we should be prepared for surprises when we look at Jesus. Also we must be prepared to catch ourselves out trying to make Jesus fit our preconceived image of God rather than allowing him to reveal to us the wonder and beauty of God. We have seen how this resisting attitude when carried to the extreme ended in the rejection of Jesus by those who would not believe because he did not fit their image of Messiah. ‘This man is blaspheming.’ (Matt 9:3) I do not say we will always understand Jesus or never question his revelation of God. We are speaking of a faith response. Faith accepts that at times we will be very puzzled, will question, even doubt, but we will continue to trust and believe and follow because God is love and in our deepest self we know this love is the meaning of our lives.
It is consoling to notice in the gospels how those closest to Jesus were at times very puzzled and even questioned Jesus. When Mary and Joseph went up to Jerusalem to celebrate the boy’s first visit to the temple since he was a baby, Jesus stayed behind in the big city. At the end of a long search he is found, Mary complains, ‘My child, why have you done this to us?’ (Luke 2:48) When Jesus gave an enigmatic answer we are told Mary just did not understand (Luke 2:50) Jesus described John the Baptist as the greatest prophet ever born. Yet when Jesus asked John to baptise him in the Jordan, John was utterly confused and wanted to refuse. With difficulty Jesus persuades him to agree. (Matt.3:14) Peter was chosen by Jesus himself to be leader of the new community. But when Jesus confides to Peter that he expects persecution, Peter lectures Jesus, ‘Heaven preserve you, Lord, this must not happen to you!’ (Matt.16:22) Peter’s idea of God will need some refining and it will be a painful, humbling experience. Martha and Mary were among Jesus’s closest friends. They inform Jesus that their brother Lazarus is very sick. Jesus comes late and finds Lazarus already dead. What do they say? ‘If you’d been here, Lazarus would not have died.’ (John 11:21) Is there not an echo here of our common cry? ‘If you were really with me, I should not have this suffering’ or ‘Where were you when my child was run over by a lorry?’ Let us be honest: we feel sure a God who is really God would not allow bad things to happen to children. If we were God we would not allow such things to happen. There must be a wisdom deeper than ours, a stronger healing love greater than we can imagine.
The mystery of this God who allows bad things to happen deepens when we find that not only Mary or the Baptist are puzzled and wondering. The most terrible question, the most painful cry of all comes from Jesus himself. The very Son, always so strong and confident sinks so low as to cry out, ‘My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?’ (Matt.27:47) We must wonder, even admire the evangelist for recording this cry. Matthew must have been inspired. Mere human reporting of the story of Jesus would have deleted this word lest it give scandal and be used to prove Jesus could not be God. But the word is there and leads us into the heart of the mystery. There is darkness, but not cold empty darkness. Here in this dark place there is awareness of some light. The horizon is tinged with a slight gentle line of light and when the sun of faith rises we will see beauty and wisdom we could never have expected. We will ‘see’ as God sees. What do I mean?
This terrible questioning cry comes from us, from one of our human race, a true full human person like us. Jesus is brought so low that it seems there is no God – or worse, that there is a God but he does not care. But this member of our human family holds on and finds power to pray a few moments later, ‘Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.’ (Luke 23:46) And he is held in the Father’s arms and received into glory. Jesus is not a divine actor dressed up as a man and giving the inside story on God. It is as man he is showing us what he has come to know and believe about God, his Father and our Father. He is giving his own true human experience of God lived out of his human relationship with God. What is that experience? One of being totally known, heard and loved by Abba despite the bad thing that is happening. And his message is that this is equally true for us. Abba is in love with each of us and will lead us through the bad things into glory. Jesus stakes his young life on this experience and message.
We desperately need this assurance of God’s love. It provides the warmth and light we need to grow as people called to love one another. But many hearts are deprived of this light and warmth by the heavy dark cloud of sin. We feel as if God had withdrawn behind this cloud in anger to leave us in the cold and dark of our human failure and sin. Jesus comes to tell us it is not so. It is we with our small, narrow image of God who have nailed up that cloud and put God on the other side. Jesus comes to tell us that God still loves us with unchanged love. This is the message of the first great act in the drama of his public life, the baptism in the Jordan.
After thirty years in Nazareth, Jesus goes to a pilgrimage place of confessions and penance, to a river called Jordan. He goes as a human pilgrim, identifying himself with all sin and failure. He goes not to preach or baptise but to join the line of sinners wading in for baptism. We must be careful here or else we miss this crucial revelation of God. It is more important we enter the human heart of Jesus as he wades into the Jordan waters. This is no piece of play-acting or pretending. Nor is Jesus in any way programmed to do what he does. He is a totally free person. He is in love with God and has been constantly seeking him in prayer through his Nazareth years. On hearing that John is at the Jordan, he makes the free, human decision to go there and on arrival makes the further decision to join the queue for baptism. If we are puzzled we can be consoled that John the Baptist is also mightily puzzled. Keep remembering that Jesus is one of us. He has seen life. He knows about sin and has been in touch with sinners. He knows that his name was chosen before birth and that it means that he is to save his people from sin. That saving will involve forgiveness but much more. It will bring new life, hope, joy. He is very aware of the hearts of those men and women who crowd Jordan’s banks. It’s a crowd like any crowd of people today who in better moments admit sin and failure and go to some holy place just hoping for a ray of light, a touch of love greater than themselves, a sense of healing and deliverance. With compassion, identification, love, he joins them in the river and bows his head for the touch of the flowing waters.
John overcomes his mystification and pours the waters. With that the heavens are torn open and Abba says, ‘Well done, man, well done, Son. You have done the right thing.' Yes, Jesus the man had read God right. He comes with his sinner brothers and sisters open to be judged and received unconditional love. Thank you, Jesus. Now we know God is on our side. The dark cloud of guilt and fear is rolled away and the warm sunshine of love comes through. Jesus is right. Abba loves him and all the motley crowd in the Jordan. ‘This is my child in whom I am well pleased.’ (Matt. 3:17) This word is not for Jesus alone but for every son and daughter of God at the Jordan, for every person anywhere searching for something better, searching for God.
This decision to join the crowd in the Jordan and accept God’s approval, not only for himself but for all those pilgrims, will lead Jesus to befriend those sinners on every occasion. This will lead to confrontation with religious authority which in turn will lead to rejection and crucifixion. In this sense Jesus will die for our sins. Surely this is the greatest miracle of the gospel, a miracle of good news that we could never have imagined if it were not revealed. In younger days when I thought of God’s greatness and power as revealed by Jesus I thought of the miracles of power over nature and disease and death. In early teaching these did receive all the focus and were offered as proof that Jesus was divine. I see it differently now. Let us notice what we are saying and doing when we speak of miracles. First of all, ‘miracle’ is our word. It is not from God’s vocabulary. We use the word ‘miracle’ to describe something out of the ordinary which we, as it were, ‘allow’ God to do. We examine an event and decide God has gone over a certain line here to do something extraordinary. It’s the old presumption we have spoken about. We have God in a cage. We let him out to do a miracle and then put him back in the cage. We devise a pattern of appropriate behaviour for our God in daily life. Then something unusual happens. We set up a commission to adjudicate on the happening and we define it as ‘miracle’. We seem to be saying, ‘there is more of God here than in the other events of the day or week’. In a sense God does not work miracles. We do, by declaring this or that a miracle. Perhaps the more wonderful truth is that God is working miracles twenty-four hours a day, but we are too blind to see.
When Jesus worked miracles, he was not pressing a miracle button in his make-up to show that he was God. His miracles were essentially related to his humanity and his understanding of God as the Father of love. Jesus accepted totally our human situation. He experienced human vulnerability and weakness but believed in the love of God and the presence of that power to heal hearts and bodies. He let his love of the Father flow through him. He was the person of immense compassion. This strong current of human and divine love was the source of the power that flowed out and touched people. This compassion was the source of his healing and caused miracles to happen. It is this same Jesus, this God we meet in prayer. He has not changed. One day when he was accused of healing on the Sabbath, he answered, ‘My Father goes on working and so do I.’ (John 5:17). God never rests from healing, blessing and renewing. Surely we must be drawn to be with such a God in prayer. And if our eyes are not closed must we not say our very prayer, our being with him intimately is a great miracle - as we would say, a first-class miracle!
CHAPTER 8
A Puzzling Teacher
While we accept that our minds cannot comprehend God, we are also aware that the mind will never cease to search for meaning. We can say God’s revelation to us is a love communication made to the heart, but our mind is also his gift and seeks understanding of its creator. In this seeking, the mind often will just have to give way to wonder. It will have to be humble. But this will not be humiliation because the heart will move the mind and invite it to its highest activity, to accept love. I wonder if this is what faith is? We have seen how some of Jesus’s closest friends failed to understand him at the time but they were deeply in love with him. Let us now look at another gospel character who was greatly puzzled by Jesus. He is full and questions and comes to Jesus for answers.
‘There was one of the Pharisees called Nicodemus, a leading Jew, who came to Jesus by night and said, ‘Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who comes from God, for no one could perform the signs that you do unless God were with him.’ (John 3:1-2)
Nicodemus is a Pharisee, a teacher and a leading Jew. He is a reminder that not all the Pharisees were enemies of Jesus. He is clearly a sincere man. He does not ally himself with the group that was plotting against Jesus. But he is a very puzzled man. He comes to Jesus by night. Perhaps he fears the others. Maybe he just wants time and privacy. Jesus has upset him and his ideas about God. He speaks with respect, ‘Rabbi, you are a teacher from God.’ But Nicodemus has problems and questions. Jesus is so controversial. Jesus is clearly a good man, compassionate to the suffering with a compassion so powerful it conveys healing. But Jesus is also so independent. He questions long-respected customs and traditions and breaks important laws. He works on the Sabbath, God’s day of rest. He does not fast or observe ritual washings. He touches the unclean, the lepers and the dead. He mixes with Samaritans and even has table fellowship with sinners. How can one who behaves thus be from God, and yet Nicodemus believes he must be from God.
Nicodemus comes to Jesus as a teacher. He comes looking for answers to serious theological questions. He approaches Jesus through the mind. This is all right in itself, but Jesus has much more to give. He is teacher but also has come to nourish the heart of Nicodemus and all of us. Jesus seems to like the man and quickly takes him into a totally new area. He invites Nicodemus away from academic questions, from intellectual debate. He reminds Nicodemus that God and his ways are not subject to our questioning. God is not accountable to us and cannot be forced to conform to our narrow presumptions. He cannot be tied to any custom or tradition no matter how sacred. And so Jesus bypasses intellectual debate and answers, ‘I tell you most solemnly, unless a man is born from above, he cannot see the kingdom of God.’ (John 3:3) Jesus moves into the area of life. This is what he has come to bring, a new life, a new sense of meaning. He has not come to bring a creed, a philosophy, a teaching, a set of laws. ‘I have come so that they may have life and have it to the full.’ (John 10:10) He offers a transformation of our existence. It is so new, so radical, he uses the startling image of birth. He offers new life, ‘And eternal life is this: to know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.’ (John 17:3) Be still and know that I am God.
Nicodemus is out of his depth. Let us not blame him. Are we any further on in faith? Do we believe that this is what Jesus means to us? Do we see God offering us life and love or rules and commands? ‘How can a grown man be born? How can he go back into his mother’s womb and be born again?’ (John 3:4) We may smile at such a question from such an intelligent man. Later on Jesus will offer living water to a woman at a wayside well. She too will be startled and interpret him literally and ask for this water so she won’t have to come any more to draw water from the well. Jesus uses startling images to around his listeners but he has not come to offer words or images. He has come to give life itself. He seeks to put us in touch with reality, the ultimate basic reality of God’s creative love at work every single moment in every person. He has come to make us aware of this love and invite us to accept it. It is a great gift. It is not something we can earn by keeping laws or becoming worthy of it by living a good life. Jesus is not a moral reformer urging us to do better. He comes as Saviour offering healing and life and it is as gratuitous as the first life quickening in the womb. It is for every person. It is for Pharisee, Samaritan woman, Roman soldier, leper, prostitute, demonian, thief on a cross and it is for now, right now for me as I read. What must I do? Surrender, say ‘yes’, accept. Jesus is deadly serious. He dies hoping, trusting even, you and I will accept.
Jesus invites Nicodemus to be born again, to receive new life. What is this life? It is God’s love for us, the love which is visible in Jesus. In Jesus, God is revealing himself as never before, breaking many of our old respectable images of him. Nicodemus cannot imagine how a true messenger of God would eat and drink with sinners. He is teaching us that God sees past the sins of each person made in his image and likeness. God in Jesus reveals himself as Saviour more than teacher. He saves us from self-hatred, from feeling unloved and unlovable. Thus he saves individuals and communities. We cannot truly and unselfishly love one another till we are certain God loves each of us with total unconditional love.
‘Rabbi, you are a teacher.’ Yes, Nicodemus is right. Jesus is a teacher, the greatest teacher ever. Jesus the teacher is not just handing on what he learned from another teacher, no passing on the doctrines of another Rabbi. He is not passing on second-hand book knowledge. He shares truth itself, ‘I am the Truth.’ (John 14:6) He speaks deep, arresting, puzzling words, ‘The first will be last’, ‘If you want to live, you must die’. He tells stories with outlandish exaggeration about a prodigal father, an extravagant employer who forgives huge debts, a foolish shepherd who leaves a whole flock of sheep to search for a stray. They say he spoke with authority, not like one imposing a teaching but as its very author. He claims to speak out of experience, of what he says he has seen God doing. Other prophets put ‘Amen’ at the end of their prophecy to indicate it was from God. Jesus introduces his statements, ‘Amen, amen’. All this knowledge he shares not so much as intellectual food for the mind but rather as nourishment for the heart, the spirit, the whole person. If he is listened to, believed and accepted, then the listeners become not more knowledgeable but more alive. Well might they say ‘There has never been anybody who has spoken like him.’ (John 7:46) His words touch their very deepest self and there is an echo from that deep place which says, ‘This is Truth, we are made for this.’
Nicodemus calls Jesus a teacher and he is right. But his is much more. Jesus is a saviour. We people need a teacher to give us the truth about God and the meaning of life. But even more we need a Saviour. Our real problem is not ignorance but weakness, hurt, sin, pain, guilt, fear. If ignorance and lack of knowledge were our problem, a teacher would do. But our problem is more profound. We want happiness and love but they elude us. We have desires which are mostly frustrated. People disappoint and betray us and often we betray our own deeper, better self. We make resolutions. We want to be better, to try harder but again and again we fall back into old ways. We know we should be better and want to be better but we fail. As one person recently said to me, ‘I feel full of rottenness and also feel powerless to do anything about it.’ Yes, we do need a saviour: we need healing. We need new life and hope. Above all we need love. Jesus comes as that saviour. He offers unconditional love. He has so much more to offer than Nicodemus realises. Are we any more desiring and trusting than Nicodemus? Do we want to understand God? Are we ready joyfully to surrender and accept the gift of new life of unconditional love that Jesus offers?
As Jesus speaks with Nicodemus, he describes the gift he has for him as ‘eternal life’ (John 3:16) This beautiful expression is unfortunately easily misunderstood. It is often seen as something in the future, a reward that will be given after death when we have lived a good life. But the eternal life Jesus speaks of is gift not reward and it is offered right now in this very moment of awareness. It is we who are in a time sequence. God is not. Let us not drag him into it. God is Being, Reality, Life, Love and he is Now. In one moment he gives the grace of years. In one flash he can totally renew, recreate, give amazing grace, bring deepest life to birth. I will be physically the same but in the same moment be totally renewed, be born again. This new life has nothing to do with time or measurement. It is not something that is given after death and goes on forever. It has to do with the quality of our life. It is the kind of life God has, the kind of life Jesus has. It is offered to us now before death if we accept Jesus and his love. It cannot be killed by gun, spear or sickness. And so Jesus can say, ‘I tell you solemnly whoever keeps my word will never see death.’ (John 8:51)
‘Rabbi, you are a teacher.’ Yes, but the greatest sermons he preached were deeds of healing love rather than fine words. We could say his first great sermon was in the Jordan river where he identified with broken, sinful humanity while his last great sermon was given from the pulpit on the cross where he suffered cruel torment as a result of this choice at the Jordan. His Calvary sermon said simply, ‘See how much you mean to me.’ We seem to be deaf to his fine words but how can we be so blind to such love? If only we could surrender and accept we could experience a new life, what Jesus calls new birth. This surrender, this acceptance is what we call grace, gift, the amazing grace we sing of. It is a sense of being found. It is not so much that I find but a realisation of being found. It does not mean that there is any sudden and dramatic change in lifestyle or that old compulsions and temptations disappear, or that I will have all the answers. But things are not the same anymore. There is a new vision of life, a new sense of meaning. I am aware that I am know by name and am accepted as I am.
CHAPTER 9
An Unlikely Couple
In prayer I meet the God beyond God, the true God and not some small idol that I have made. How can I be sure what the trust God is like? I must continually look at Jesus who is God’s own revelation of himself. I must look at Jesus especially in the way he related to individual persons. We reflected on his meeting with Nicodemus and saw Jesus offering nothing less than new life. Let us now consider another person who like Nicodemus had the privilege of a long chat with Jesus. Nicodemus came by night seeking Jesus. This person meets Jesus in the middle of the day by a wayside well. She is a Samaritan woman. For Nicodemus it would have been impossible to sit near this woman and converse with her. In his eyes she is a heretic. But God’s ways are not the ways of Nicodemus or of you and me. And so God in Jesus sits with her and they have a long chat and end up best of friends.
As we look at Jesus and this woman chatting by the well, we have to admit they are a most unlikely pair to be together. Indeed normally they should never meet at all. They are from different tribes. They have a different religion and are even traditional enemies. Jesus is a foreigner here. Samaria is not home ground for the Jews. Many pious Jews would cross and recross the Jordan to avoid walking on foreign Samaritan soil. The woman comes out from the nearby town to draw water. Then to her surprise the man speaks to her and even asks a favour. It is midday. He has been on the road and is thirsty. He asks for a drink and she expresses her surprise, ‘What? You are a Jew and you ask me, a Samaritan, for a drink?’ (John 4:9) Jews and Samaritans, we are told, would not even use the same cups and bowls.
When we start to take God seriously and as a consequence begin to take prayer seriously, we may experience moments when suddenly it will all seem most unlikely, most ludicrous. Can it really be true that I in all my poverty, weakness, sin, lukewarmness can sit in family conversation with God, the infinite Mystery and experience him conversing with me, listening, touching, loving me? I might reply by saying that this very thought reveals once again our deep-seated misconceptions about God. The ‘god’ I am imagining when I voice this doubt is the false god we must smash. The God who sits with me in prayer is the only God, the God who is in love with me who hears, touches, heals in mysterious ways no words can describe. I say that could be an answer to the doubt we have just expressed. Another answer, infinitely better, is God’s own answer, Jesus. We are looking at him now with this woman at the well. I believe he was waiting for her at the well. We speak of our search for God. The more amazing truth is that God seeks us. But we are shy of him and so he waits. But there is always a day, a night, a moment in time when we meet. It may be a moment of pain, a moment of disgust with ourselves, even a moment when we shout at him and say, ‘Could you not have prevented this? You don’t care!’ Or it may be a moment of deep joy when something our heart has hoped for happens and we realise he rejoices with us. Often it will be something quiet, ordinary and commonplace but we will be aware that we are not alone, that in fact we are in the presence of God and are known to him by name. We notice in this encounter at the well that Jesus is the first to speak. He breaks the silence and speaks to the woman. He does so because he knows she will not dare to speak to him. If he does not speak to her, she will not speak to him. She sees him not only as a stranger but even as an enemy. How many fear to speak to God? They see him not only as a stranger but as a judge, a spy watching to catch them out when they break the law. They see him as a judge with all kinds of punishments prepared for life’s failures. The only words some can manage to address to God are a curse blaming him for their suffering and fear.
The God that is feared, blamed and cursed by many is not the true God. There is no such God. There is only the God of Jesus revealed in this scene. This God says to each of us what he says to this woman.
‘If you only knew what God is offering and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink’, you would have been the one to ask, and he would have given you living water. (John 4:10)
Why not give God a chance to reveal his true identity in Jesus? Why not come as we are and express our surprise that he should want to sit and chat with us and indeed that he should seem to need some help from us?
The woman at the well is herself. She does not immediately give the stranger a drink. She expresses surprise he should ask. We are not told that she gave him a drink. I believe she did. The fact that the conversation continued or so long and so amicably and that at the end the woman runs back to call out other Samaritans to meet Jesus suggest an openness and goodness in this woman. We could say she is a good Samaritan. Later in his preaching Jesus will tell a story to illustrate the basic goodness and concerned of the human person. He will choose a Samaritan as model of the caring person who befriends a Jew who got into difficulties with thieves on the road. Could it be he got the inspiration for that character from this woman helping this Jew in difficulties with thirst by the roadside? In one of his miracles Jesus cures ten lepers and we are told the only one who returned to give thanks was a Samaritan. It seems Samaritans were not as bad as they were painted. Fortunately the true God looks beyond the paintwork and sees the deeper goodness of the human heart. When we are in the presence of the true God, we will become aware that we are known as we are underneath all the labels put on us by others and underneath all the masks and disguises we wear. He sees past all our fancy dress to the hidden self he created and loves. I have no doubt that this woman gave Jesus a drink and would have shared a bun or a scone if she had had any refreshment with her.
When the woman expressed surprise that Jesus should speak to her, he said ‘If only you knew who you are talking to and the gift he has for you.’ When Jesus said, ‘If only you knew who you are talking to,’ I imagine the woman saying to herself, ‘And if you only knew who you are talking to! I am not your respectable housewife. Did you not see I came out alone to the well? The better women of the town won’t be seen with the likes of me. I and my latest affair are current gossip in town. If you knew my story and the mess my life is in, I doubt if you would want to continue chatting with me. It would not help your reputation! There are some in the town who would think me bad enough even to pick up a Jew. No offence, Sir, but you know what I mean.’
Recall another gospel scene when Jesus is at a meal in the house of Simon the Pharisee. There is a moment of high drama when a woman of sinful repute gatecrashes. We can imagine horrified Pharisees gathering their cloaks lest she touch the hem of their garments. Maybe some who were less scrupulous about what woman they accepted favours from had a different terror in their hearts! But this woman has eyes for one man only, the man we now call God. She moves to Jesus, kneels, weeps tears of joy over his feet, dries the tears with the long tresses of her hair and covers his feet with kisses. And she anoints his feet with a precious ointment. Let us notice the reaction of Simon the host, ‘If this man were a prophet, he would know who this woman is that is touching him and what a bad name she has.’ (Luke 7:39) Simon betrays his idea of God and if we are honest, our idea too. We feel God would not associate with such a woman, much less accept signs of affection. We feel God could not be at ease with the woman at the well or with me as we sit in prayer. Jesus is saying, ‘You have got God all wrong. Please let me reveal him to you.’ The wonderful truth is that Jesus knows what kind of woman this is and what kind of person I am and still he really wants to be with us. He believes in us more than we believe in ourself. He will never give up on us. Why not give him a chance?
Jesus has come to break down all barriers and division among us and restore the unity of the human family. He is at home with Pharisee and Samaritan, with Jew and Roman, with sinner and saint. He sees the Vision not the view. Each person is a unique child of God. He comes to reveal our identity and tell us all are welcome in our Father’s house. There are no outcasts or rejects. Jesus did not come to screen humanity and choose those for heaven. God’s heaven is not a reward for being good. It is home and God wants us all there at the great final homecoming celebrations. Jesus comes to help us all find our way home.
Shortly after my ordination to priesthood in Dublin I had an experience which suggested this truth to me in a rather homely situation. I was sent to celebrate Sunday Mass in a tiny rural church in the mountains south of Dublin. Newly ordained I was still a bit nervous about Sunday Mass in a new parish. I vested in the small sacristy and watched the large old-fashioned clock waiting for 8 o’clock to strike. I soon realised that the clock was largely irrelevant and the sacristan, an amply country matron, would decide when Mass would begin. She kept looking into the little church building which would hold forty to sixty people. I realised she must know every family in the parish and would know who should be at Mass. Finally she had one last look and seemed satisfied that all were in. I was able to move when she motioned me to wait. She walked over, put the hand of the clock at 8 o’clock and with an angelic smile, nodded, and I moved out to celebrate. There was no danger about being unpunctual in that church! I have since thought about that experience and feel now that the final end of all will be something like that. Jesus knows us all and keeps an eye on the heavenly threshold. Only when we are all safely in will he nod to Abba and God will then say, ‘Time’s up. Let the celebration begin!’
CHAPTER 10
The Seventh Man
Because of sad and bad experiences in life many people feel that they are failures. Some have suffered in human relationships that have not worked out and have broken down with much pain. They will admit at least to themselves that they are part of the reason for the failure. Their personal human weakness contributed its own share. As a result they lose faith in their own self and feel unlovable. They also feel they are stuck with their past. Oscar Wilde puts it succinctly, ‘No man is rich enough to buy back his past.’ I think of this Samaritan woman who came to the well. I think of her at her home that morning before she went out to draw water. She gathers her rope and water jar and sets out alone for the well. If she were in a reflective mood she would surely resonate with such thoughts. She must have felt a failure. She must have thought no one could really care for her and that there was little hope for the future. She did not know that someone was waiting for her. He could be the seventh man in her life, but with one mighty difference: he was also God.
We continue our observations of Jesus and this woman chatting at the well. Jesus speaks of the gift of living water and she asks for some. Then comes a beautiful and gentle exchange in the conversation. Jesus wants to show this new friend that in fact he knows her story with all its pain, weakness and failure and that he still enjoys being with her and still wants to give her the gift he had spoken of earlier. So, rather suddenly, he changes the conversation and says, ‘Go and call your husband and come back here.’ (John 4:16). What does the woman say? Does she say, ‘My husband is dead’? No. Does she say, ‘My husband has gone to Lusaka.’? No. She says simply, ‘I have no husband.’ (John 4:17) Is this true? Yes and no. She has had five husbands but is presently with a man who is not her husband. How does Jesus respond? Does he lecture her or embarrass her? Does he accuse her of being a loose, sinful woman? No. He praises her for telling the truth! It was only a small bit of truth but it’s enough for Jesus.
‘He said to her, ‘You are right to say, "I have no husband", for although you have had five, the one you have now is not your husband. You spoke the truth there.’ (John 4:18)
I wonder was he smiling when he said that?
Notice how gently Jesus related to her. She is not overcome with shame and guilt when this holy man speaks of her failure. There is no trace of such. She answers simply, ‘I see you are a prophet, Sir.’ (v.20) Love can tell us of our sin and failure and we are not crushed or ashamed. It is never God’s way to embarrass us, to make us feel mean, ugly, evil, unlovable. He heals. God comes in Jesus to reveal our inner beauty, our own true deepest self. God is not blind to our sin but he always sees more. He can hold our hand, look into our eyes, tell us our sin and at the same moment we know we are accepted, forgiven, healed and loved. In that moment our sin has no more reality. ‘Love keeps no records of wrong.’ (1 Cor.13:5) There are no files in heaven.
Past forgiven sin i