A parent recently told me how she described the builders working on her house as “that bunch of cowboys!”. But the next morning her young son bounded out and greeted them with “How are you Cowboys!?”
And so she told them their boots must have reminded him of cowboy boots. For young children, the truth doesn’t need re-defining.
My young son asks me where God is, and I say “everywhere”. He asks why he can’t see God. I say God is invisible. He asks why, so I say God makes everything which is visible.
‘Oh come ouuuut God!’ he starts calling into the air.
SEEDY TALK?
In saying too much, we can create more problems than we solve. The philosopher Krishnamurti once said that the day you teach a child the name of a bird, the child will never see the bird again. Perhaps.
But, in overdefining God, we can miss him altogether. It is said about the priest Abba Agatho that for three years he carried a pebble around in his mouth until he learned to be silent.
Of course, we rightly put our trust in Jesus Christ, but in the gospels, he very rarely gives a straight answer to a straight question. Have you noticed that? He speaks in riddles and parables.
And so we should know there is a type of God talk which addresses the collapse of our human thought and language in the face of the infinite. It is called apophatic theology. It acknowledges that while God is, God is also inexpressible. Everything we say is more unlike him that it is like him.
God is not really just like a mustard seed.
But in using a mustard seed to point us to the kingdom of heaven, Jesus is not trying to say we can plant it in our garden and eat it later. Gospel parables are not intended literally. Rather he is telling us it has enormous potential, despite seeming insignificant or even imperceptible. So if we can allow it to grow it in our life, it becomes not only a new life, but the very source of all life.
Jesus said: "The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his field. Though it is the smallest of all your seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and perch in its branches."
A tiny seed within our own awareness can become big enough to support the very birds of the air. Not because heaven is an aviary, but because his spiritual dimension growing through us supports far more than us alone.
FLAT EARTH
Remember, in the world-view of Old Testament writers, heaven is the dome of the sky, the place from which God views the flat earth beneath him. While our world is a rotating globe orbiting the sun, and everything we see is expanding into space.
Jesus also tells us the kingdom belongs to children. But what’s so special about children that it is theirs? They have no political, military or economic power. There it is. Power is not really ours, and children are well aware of this. Everything is open to them, until their awareness fades.
Concepts can fade too - the Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner once asked us to imagine a world so secularized that the word ‘God’ is no longer even in the dictionary.
Even in this type of world we would still be embraced by a fundamental mystery, still facing that most basic human question: “Why is there something, rather than nothing?”
So even though we could try it for fun, I don’t think that updating Jesus’ parables about the kingdom of heaven for our time would really help us regain lost awareness.
Maybe: “The fifth dimension is like downloading free computer software which allows a person to talk live to brand new friends all across the world.”
Or perhaps: “the realm of the truth is like a freeview box given to a person to add to his television set - suddenly five channels became fifteen.”
REPUBLIC OF HEAVEN
Or since Christians don’t necessarily live in countries with kingdoms anymore we could even try: “the republic of ultimate reality is like receiving driving lessons which allow you to discover unimaginably beautiful parts of the continent which you never even knew existed.”
Perhaps instead of yeast working through flour we could pick a parable about brewing the spirit, or giving birth to the Son. The point would be the same, and it is this -
Buried in the mix of an organic process of life is a mystery ingredient. This presence, this flavour in the recipe, can change the entire dish. Jesus referred intimately to the presence as Abba, and we say ‘Our Father’.
Zoologists such as David Hay have classified spiritual knowledge in three ways - an awareness of the here and now, an awareness of mystery, and an awareness of value. None of this depends upon religious terminology. But if the earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it, and if the Lord moves in mysterious ways, we really shouldn’t be surprised to find his presence behind both religious and secular language.
Please, for example, just take a quiet moment to notice all the different colours you can see ... feel the weight of your body on the seat … your clothes on your skin the taste in your mouth … see how many different sounds you can pick up … and listen to the silence they arise from and pass back into.
NOW THEN
The 18th century French Jesuit Jean Pierre de Caussade referred to the sacrament of the present moment as that sacrament most clearly and directly in the presence of God.
But the treasure in this field is buried by dwelling on the past, regretting our errors, enjoying our memories, imagining, planning, fearing and hoping. We can endure trials with hope, and look to the future with faith, but if we can stay in the present as it is being created, they become secondary. St Paul suggests as much in 1 Corinthians 13 when he writes that Love is greater than both hope and faith.
Jesus said: "The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had, and bought that field.”
That field is our very field of consciousness, and the One living God is not alive because he still survives as an idea in our society, but because he is the source and ground of all human ideas, the mind itself.
"Have you understood all these things?" Jesus Christ asked his disciples. Those who do understand, he said, will bring new treasures out of old traditions. When he spoke Jesus was not stuck in the past, and what had happened thousands of years ago was not the point then, just as it also isn’t the point now.
NO TIME FOR TERROR
As Albert Einstein once said when expressing his sympathy to a suddenly bereaved colleague of his; “for us faithful physicists, time is an illusion, even though it is a persistent illusion.”
Finally, Jesus said: "The kingdom of heaven is like a net that was let down into the lake and caught all kinds of fish. When it was full, the fishermen pulled it up on the shore. Then they sat down and collected the good fish in baskets, but threw the bad away. This is how it will be at the end of the age. The angels will come and separate the wicked from the righteous and throw them into the fiery furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”
I don’t believe in trying to scare people into the kingdom, and so I suspect that the fear of God is the beginning of psychosis, and not of wisdom. But this fear of God is not like the fear of a rottweiler, it is more the awe of being, and it is true humility in the face of mystery. Whatever is behind birth and death and everything in between them is not ours to control, and so to weigh and measure the Kingdom, rather than simply to enter it, is to fail to see its greatness.
DNA has shown us we share a common ancestor biologically, but we also share one spiritual ground. There are not two creators, and so if Jesus Christ is God, then he is all embracing. So in that case, exactly why is he talking about separating the wicked from the righteous at the end of the age?
BEING ONESELF
I suspect he knows that in the end, we human beings all need to ask ourselves what matters most. Saints and sinners differ in what they think and what they do, but not in what they are.
We are all sorts of creatures, but where we are in God’s economy determines what we experience. Each of us is free to either reject the presence and power in this eternal moment, and to suffer purifying self-judgement, or to accept it, and enter liberating grace.
So Christ described the kingdom of the uncreated Originator as joyous, like a child who finds simple abandon playing in a puddle.
In heaven, everything is being re-evaluated, and so to enter this state is wise.
Why? Because it is the difference between really being lived and merely being alive.
No comments:
Post a Comment