20 20 Vision

Here is a letter from an Irish mother. If you are Irish, don’t be offended. I have an Irish mother.

Dear Son, it begins, just a few lines to let you know I'm still alive, but I'll write slowly because I know you can't read fast.

You wouldn’t know the house now… we've moved.

Your Father has a new job with 700 men under him… he cuts grass at the cemetery.

The new house has a washing machine, which I broke by putting in 12 shirts and pulling the chain.

Congratulations are due, your sister Colleen has had a baby. I haven't found out if it's a boy or girl yet, so I am not sure if you are an uncle or an aunt.

And I’m so sorry to tell you son, but Uncle Mick drowned last week in a vat of Whisky at the distillery in Dublin. His mates tried to save him, but he fought them all off very bravely.

We couldn’t get hold of you for the cremation, but it took us four days to put the fire out.

I was quite ill, so I’ve been to see the doctor. He put a glass tube in my mouth and told me not to talk for five minutes. Your Father is now trying to buy it from him.

It only rained twice this week, firstly for four days, and then for three.

Love as always, Mother.
P.S. I was going to send you some money, but I'd already sealed the envelope.

It’s not an Irish mother in Matthew 20 20, its a Jewish one, the mother of the sons of Zebedee, and she is ambitious for them.

This particular mother makes a dramatic appeal to power, and she’s not the first to do so in the Bible. But it is the wrong power. Bathsheba appeared before King David on behalf of wise Solomon, a faithful Canaanite begged Jesus to heal her sick daughter, but this time, the ambitious Mother of James and John, we are told, wanted them to have special kingdom status, one at either side of Jesus.

If you think about it though, by the time this gospel was written, Jesus had already been crucified. One robber on his right, and another robber on his left.

So people would have had the memory of his crucifixion in mind. It had already destroyed their teacher, their holy man, their leader, and their hope. Jesus’ mother had watched him nailed up like a criminal, losing his bodily functions, crows threatening to peck at him. Military and religious authority had struck fear into his follower’s hearts.

And once his followers had scattered, how did Christianity even begin?

I want to suggest we have first marginalised, and then lost touch with that paradigm-shattering event which put hope and joy back into his followers hearts, despite more torture threats.

Fast-forward to the 19th century, as it might help to consider a paradigm-shattering event a bit closer to our own time-frame, first, and then go back to the resurrection.

When Charles Darwin presented his views on evolution by natural selection, this was a paradigm shattering event. So challenging was it for religious people, the Bishop of Oxford Sam Wilberforce tried to ridicule the idea in public debate, in front of 700 people and reporters.

Like many people, the Bishop just couldn’t accept he was related to monkeys. He was out of his depth.

He ended by inferring that evolutionist Thomas Huxley had an ape for a parent. He resorted to mocking his opponent Huxley by asking him whether he was descended from an ape on his grandfather’s side or on his grandmother’s side. Whereupon Huxley reportedly whispered to his neighbour: “The Lord has delivered him into my hands.”

People actually fainted as Huxley rose up to reply that he would much rather be descended from an ape than from a Bishop.

But this was 150 years ago, and already it is hard for us to imagine just how world changing it was for them. We just take it for granted now. How then could we not take for granted a 2,000 year old event?

The first Jesus movement went to their executions rather than renounce the resurrection. They refused to deny their experience and salute Roman rulers. The hard fact is, a fighter couldn’t even be baptised.

By worldly terms, Christians were powerless. They weren’t just pacifist, but regularly liable to public torture. When Constantine changed all that by adopting the faith for his empire, worldly power became more acceptable. And it was at this point that ascetic Christians like Anthony moved into the desert instead.

Last week I interviewed the Director of Mission and Public Affairs for the Church of England, Malcolm Brown, who himself said Christianity had long over identified with worldly power. Once this happens, I suggest, it is much harder to find and accept that a present spiritual reality could be the cause of Jesus’ dead physical body dematerialising and then re-materialising. The resurrection is a wholly different power.

Because if the primary stuff of life is economic or physical power, or even natural power, we are lost. If you’ve ever seen a dead body, you’ll know how natural processes still go on there, but the real stuff of life is profoundly and startlingly absent.

So I want to try to uncover a different power, by offering us a new exegesis of the resurrection. Twenty years ago, a Christian who studied anthropology and psychology was looking for reports of resurrection experiences outside the Christian tradition.

When he found them, in Bunpo, Buddhist, Daoist and Tamil cultures in China Tibet and India, he despatched a Roman Catholic Canon and Priest, Fr Francis Tiso, to investigate. Ten years ago, three people were interviewed on tape claiming to be eye witnesses to their own monastic masters dying and then dematerialising. These witnesses included Westerners, who said the atoms in the master’s bodies had dissolved after their death, and their bodies had disappeared, and had later re-appeared in the form of light energy. They didn’t call it the resurrection body, but the light body, or the rainbow body.

Now, I know this idea may detract from the uniqueness of Jesus the only Son of God, and if so, remember how in the Bible Enoch and Elijah are also recorded mysteriously leaving the world with their bodies. And no-one found Moses body, but apocryphal literature has him ascending to heaven. Not to mention Mary in the Roman Catholic tradition.

If you prefer scientific over Biblical and religious language, we already know matter can and does behave like energy, and light is a source of energy.

So, if these anthropological resurrection reports are true, could physical matter changing into light and giving off heat also explain some of our archaeological evidence?

It might, for example, explain why a burial cloth, the shroud of Turin, contains a 3D shaped image of a crucified man believed to be Jesus, not etched in paint or pigment like a middle age forgery on linen, but in blood and scorch marks, which create a photographic negative, as if a bleeding body quickly gave off tremendous energy in the tomb.

The one thing all four gospels agree about the resurrection is that a tomb was empty.

Maybe the idea that light is the basis and the source of reality sounds mad, but if so, I suggest that Darwin’s idea that apes are the basis of men also sounded mad. And if true, the light body would be a far more paradigm shattering truth than evolution was.

If it sounds unworldly, remember it is not the kind of power the gospel says was sought by the Mother of James and John. It is the kind of power sought by St Anthony and 4th century ascetic Christians in the Egyptian desert after an empire legalised the faith.

Isaiah once said: “Your dead will come back to life, your corpses will rise again. Wake up and sing, dwellers in the dust.”

Isaiah didn’t call it resurrection, but if the physical is secondary to light, then all our power relations based on force status and wealth are inevitably subverted. And then it makes perfect sense that the scattered disciples who first got the Jesus movement off the ground after his resurrection are joyous, despite their many persecutions.

I leave us words from chapters 1 and 4 the letter of James, the brother of Jesus.

“The rich man will disappear like a wild flower once the sun is up … make no mistake, my dear friends. Every perfect gift comes from above, from the Father who created the lights of heaven. With him, there is no variation, no passing play of shadows. A pure and faultless religion in the sight of God the Father is to keep oneself untarnished by the world ... What is your life after all? You are no more than a mist, seen for a little while and then disappearing.”

In the name of God, Father Son and Holy Spirit, Amen. +

Star stuff not shop stuff

A chic, expensive London restaurant is so well attended it is booked up a year in advance. A man is refused a seat and shouts at the headwaiter: “Do you know who I am? Do you know who I am? Do you know who I am!”

So the headwaiter spots a psychiatrist on his way out and says: "Will you please tell this gentleman who he is?"

In John 6 63 Jesus says the spirit gives life, but the flesh is useless.

The spirit prompts the question: “Who am I?’

Stars exploded to create our flesh. Consider how every atom in your body came from the nuclear furnace of an exploding star. The atoms in your left hand may be from a different star than the atoms in your right hand, or from the same star as those in your neighbour’s hand.

John’s gospel suggests we are not meant to separate our spirit from the Father’s - the Reality giving us all our life. “That they may be one as we are one,” prays Jesus.

But we promote consumer stuff over creation stuff.

In North America alone, only one per cent of the total material consumption from shops is still in use six months after it has been bought.

While creation stuff dies and rises, consumer stuff is designed to be quickly obsolete. Adverts say we’re not good enough without more of it. We destroy the planet to keep the consumption going.

As someone said: “We borrow what we can’t pay back to buy stuff we don’t need to impress people we don’t like.”

Until the system crashes, again.

After WWII the US retail analyst Victor Leboux declared that consumption must be made a way of life.

His words were: “We must convert the buying and use of goods into rituals that we pursue. We must find our spiritual and ego satisfaction in consumption.”

And the Chair of President Eisenhower’s council of advisors on the US economy declared that its ultimate purpose was to produce more consumer goods.

Not health or wisdom or community, but more products.

A Basque proverb advises us otherwise: “Mountains don’t need mountains, but humans need humans”.

So, back to creation stuff. Each second, not even as long as it takes to breathe in once, as many blood cells will die and be born in your body as London has inhabitants.

You don’t know how it works, but it works without you controlling or consuming it. You can’t give instructions to the 35 million digestive glands in your stomach to digest even one strawberry in an expensive restaurant.

You are fearfully and wonderfully made, as Psalm 139 says.

The maps in shopping centres add: “You are here”.

But you are also embodied, as Jesus was, and in your better moments, you belong to an all-embracing presence. Failure to live these blissful moments alienates you from God.

A seven-year-old recently asked me who made me. “Who made you?” he said. “God” I replied. “Who made God?” he responded. “No-one” I said. “Then how did God make you?” he said.

Laboriously is the answer.

John 16 12 says: “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.”

We are alienated from the divine in and beyond us. But when the heart breaks, truth beyond us can break in.

“Sin” a word connected with “asunder,” it is a rift. It is alienation, a feeling that our bond of belonging in God is gone, so we buy, borrow control or consume happiness.

Jesus is gone, so without God the Holy Spirit, death is a vastness too frightening for project self. But we either actively receive death or we are killed by it. We can’t make it or buy it. But we can let go of smallness.

Tumble in the expansive truth that we belong in infinite greatness and love does not come from a limited source.

If we put a fingernail against the night sky, there are a million galaxies just in the little space it obscures.

And in John 16 15 Jesus says: “The spirit will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you.”

The Happiest Fish

‘You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth who was crucified. He has been raised; go tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.’

That’s all very well for them, but how will we see him?

This is not the kind of seeing which sees words in the Bible.

It is the seeing of what they point to, a shared aliveness behind patterns in the cosmos. Seeing expressed in spiral galaxies above us when we walk on the beach, spiral shells on that same beach which we walk on, spiral fingerprints on our hands holding them, and spiral dna helix inside the flesh.

This is the kind of seeing the Eastern Church calls Gnosis.

It is self-knowledge, and there’s a wonderful Chinese story about it.

When Chuang Tzu and Hui Tzu were crossing Hao River by the dam, Chuang said: “See how free the fishes leap and dart. That is their happiness.”

As they walked Hui replied: “Since you are not a fish, how do you KNOW what makes fishes happy?”

Chuang said: “Since you are not I, how can you possibly KNOW that I do not know what makes fishes happy.”

Hui argued: “But if I, not being you, cannot know what you know, it follows that you, not being a fish, cannot know what THEY know.”

Chaung said: “OK, then let us get back to your original question. You asked me, HOW I know what makes fishes happy. From the terms of your question you know already THAT I know what makes fishes happy.”

“I know the joy of fishes in the river THROUGH MY OWN JOY, as I go walking along the same river.”

I know the joy of fishes in the river through my own joy.

This unity is the seeing of a shared aliveness, and is related to Christ’s risen life.

The Gospel of John starts: ‘In the beginning was the word,’ and it goes on, ‘the word became flesh and dwelt among us.’

John does not mean a literal word, he means what the word ‘word’ is pointing to.

The Greek for this word was Logos.

‘In the beginning was the Logos,’ he wrote, and he went on, ‘the Logos became flesh and dwelt among us.’

Logos is translated word in English, but it points to a shared aliveness.

Logos is the expression of unity behind nature’s patterns.

Coined by Greek philosopher Heraclitus six centuries before Jesus, it suggests the pattern, the first principle, the knowledge, the unity in the world hidden from our view and the key to self-knowledge.

It is shared aliveness balancing conflicting opposites.

The Eden myth tells us a truth - humans are intended for this pure awareness, with no mental distraction, an innocent union with God, a harmony with creation. We are intended to dwell in grace, the uncreated energy of God, and participate in divine life.

We are intended to possess God’s energy, but if we misuse our will and became separated and spiritually dead, our awareness becomes fragmented, we fall under the illusion of self-sufficiency, and we fear death.

Whereas in God we can act spontaneously, without striving and self-interest, in desiring created things instead, we are lost to shared aliveness and divine life.

When the New Testament is translated from it's original Greek into Chinese, the Logos is rendered as DAO. In the beginning was the Dao, it says, and it goes on to say, the Dao dwelt among us.

Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu was writing about Dao at about the same time Heraclitus was writing about Logos, six centuries before Jesus.

The Dao is the path of heaven, the uncreated cause, the way that creates and balances the strife of opposites by not contending. It is also a pattern of shared aliveness.

The Dao and the Logos are one symbol.

Chinese sage Lao Tzu taught his own Eden myth as a return to the way, when people were closer to heaven and nature, the golden age when man was in a pure state.

Immeasurable indeed were the ancients, he said, subtle, unfathomable and penetrating, in pristeen simplicity like an un-carved block. Rising above compulsive thinking and desire for created things, the sage has no fixed will. The man of the highest virtue is like water, wrote Lao Tzu.

In intuitive perception, he meant, you use your uncreated light to return to unified consciousness, a shared aliveness.

We human beings can know this through intuition, but it was revealed to us humans in the flesh, and dwelt among us, through Jesus.

St John had known Jesus on earth and lain on Jesus’ breast. So his gospel represented the highest grace and truth a person could know through the flesh.

Today we share Jesus’ risen life when we cultivate his grace in our own person, and it becomes real. One might say when we walk on living water. Seeing the risen Jesus means returning to this experience Jesus once returned to us. This shared aliveness.

Shared aliveness is a knowing prior to all things, like the Dao, just as the Logos is in the beginning, the first cause. Because God is not a thing.

Nor is God is someone else, if we experience a return to selfless attention and shared aliveness.

Touching God wherever we touch reality, we are Jesus’ risen life.

We go behind thoughts.

We live what the words point to, the aliveness we all share, whether we like sharing it or not. It is a fact we share it.

Jesus says Love your neighbour as Being yourself.

This is our existential ‘yes’ to belonging to God. Our most exhilarating knowing comes not from thinking, but from the awareness of shared aliveness.

In this we are not separate, we are the risen One.

Not I, but Christ in me.